Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Saturday, February 05, 2005
HOW LONG DO WE ENGAGE?
I'd like to call your attention to an excellent discussion that's going on at Father Jake Stops the World. It's ostensibly about the debate within Christianity over homosexuality, particularly within the Episcopal Church, but the points being raised have much wider application, especially in our American society today: how, and how long, do we engage in debate with those who seem to have no desire to listen to opposing points of view? When we do this, are we "mirroring" the attitudes of our antagonists, and what is that doing to us internally? What models can we use to try to see better the dynamics that are going on, and our own role in them? And, most important to me at least, have we lost sight of our original goals and responsibilities, and if so, how can we get back to them in new and creative ways, perhaps outside the traditional channels? The comment threads have been searching, thoughtful, and very interesting (and that's not a plug for yours truly, who has been weighing in toward the end - I'm merely one of many voices there.)
We were late for our weekly lunch, and all the other residents had already gone into the dining room when I came through the heavy automatic glass doors into the retirement home. My father-in-law was sitting in an armchair, waiting. He smiled, a little faintly, and I immediately began my usual internal assessment – is he paler? weaker? more or less depressed?
“How are you?” I asked, when he didn’t get up. He looked beyond me at the door, and back at me, cocking his head. “How are you?” he asked instead.
“He’s coming,” I said. “He’s just parking the car. I’m fine.” He pushed himself up out of the chair with difficulty. “How are you?” I repeated.
He made a face as if he’d eaten something unpleasant and shook his head. “Not good,” he said. “But I’m here.” He was up by then, and headed laboriously into the dining room, bent-over, leaning on his black-handled cane. He waved the end at me as we rounded the corner, “I’ve reserved our usual table,” and just then J. came up behind him, catching his father’s black shoulder bag in his hand to take to the table.
“Hi Dad!” he said cheerfully.
“Hi!” his father replied, perking up.
We got our lunch at the buffet – chicken and rice soup, plates of salad. It gets harder and harder for my father-in-law to carry the heavy plates of food across the dining room; usually one of us, or one of the staff, gracefully intercept the tipping plate and precarious bowl of soup before there’s an accident. We met him back at the table, where he was already starting in on some chipped beef on toast.
“Ah-ha!” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s one of my favorites. But it’s very fattening.”
“You can afford the calories,” I said, “you’re not eating as much as you used to.”
“I’ve really lost my appetite,” he said, for the umpteenth time. He says whenevr we sit down to eat anything, and it is truly his lament of old age. No one I have ever known in my life enjoyed eating as much as my father-in-law, or managed to put away so much food with such gusto and single-mindedness. It was fun to cook for him, because he’d almost always eat with such pleasure; he was a master of over-indulgence, and then would fast for a day, announcing, “I overindulged, and now I am reducing.”
I don’t know whether it was his medications, or just a digestive system that wore out, but a few years ago he really did lose his appetite. He complained of a metallic taste in his mouth and of food that “didn’t taste”. Part of it was a way of saying that he didn’t like the bland food at the retirement home and missed his wife’s skillful and delicious Middle Eastern cooking. But when we’d bring treats or home-cooked food, it was the same – he was appreciative, but something had changed; the food didn't taste as good, and he didn't want much.
This day he was subdued, not talking much as he concentrated on cutting his toast with the side of a fork held in a weak and shaky hand. His eyes weren’t working well, he said, and the new glasses were “no good, no better than the old ones.” “The doctors say they can’t do anything for my eyes,” he reported. “and then they shrug and say, ‘what do you expect at 95?’” He grinned and waved his fork in the air emphatically, “I tell them 'I want to see!' Oh well.” He went back to his toast. “Forget about it.” I got up to get some tea. “Bring me some yogurt – the kind with fruit at the bottom – and a raisin cookie, please,” he asked.
“So you’re eating this kind of yogurt now?” J. asked.
“Yes. That woman over there” – he gestured with his spoon – “she is my age and she eats yogurt every day and she has tons of energy.” “She has all sorts of food theories,” he added. “She puts together the most inedible combinations of things!” When he finished he pushed his chair back and looked across the table. “In Arabic we say this after we eat…” and he recited two lines. “We ate and we didn’t fill our stomachs.”
He laughed and I laughed with him. “What does that really mean?” I asked.
“It’s just a comment on how the Arab feels about food. We’re never finished eating!”
--
He can still read for a while, until his eyes get tired and blurry, and some days are better for that than others. My sister-in-law has also been enlarging articles to make it easier for him. When we got back up to his apartment, after lunch, he settled into his chair and told me to go inspect his orchids. “They look great!” I called from the bedroom.
“Take any New Yorkers you can find,” he said.
“Don’t you want them?” I asked.
“No, they bore me,” he said. “I don’t care anymore, and besides, I can’t read them.”
This bothers me more than anything; he’s always wanted to read and to discuss what he’s read. I can’t stand the idea that he’s giving up, so I encourage him. “Come on,” I said, kneeling on the floor picking up magazines where he’d dropped them in front of his chair. “You’ll want to read the latest one, you always find something you like.” I showed him the latest issue, with a Valentine cover.
“I didn’t get that cover – what is it?” he asked. I studied it and read the title. “It’s supposed to be for Valentine’s day. All these people, and the red lines inbetween them are supposed to be Cupid’s arrows – showing that everybody’s attracted to somebody else.”
“Stupid,” he said, and I laughed – he was right.
'What's this? I asked, pointing at a portable radio and tape player on the floor.
"That tape player only cost $10 - can you believe it? Someone I met brought it to me along with some tapes of famous philosphers discussing their ideas. He thought I'd enjoy it, but I didn't want to listen to that." I knew why, and felt sorry for the poor person and his good intentions. "If I had been one of the people on the panel then I'd have been interested," he said. "But why do I want to listen to other people talking about their ideas, if I can't be part of the discussion? I dont' know what that fellow was thinking. He brought it after only meeting me one time, and I haven't heard from him since." Socrates stood silent on the shelf above my father-in-law's chair.
J. had gone down to the basement to see if a small loveseat in his father’s storage area would work in our apartment, after asking permission. “Use anything there that you want!" his father had said. J. came back up, said he thought it would be very good, and sent me down to see for myself. I took the elevator to the basement, and turned the key in the door marked “Residents' Storage.” It was a concrete-floor room filled with chicken wire cages, closed with padlocks, that ran from the floor to the ceiling. Each cage was about four by six feet wide, and they held odds and ends of clothing, outdoor furniture, wrapping paper, cardboard boxes. “Is this how it ends?” I thought. “Are our lives reduced to this – plastic flowers in an old wastebasket?” I felt enormously sad, and after looking at the sofa quickly shut the door and went back up.
“It’s nice,” I announced, “ but I can’t remember it being anywhere in any of your houses!”
“What does it look like?” my father-in-law asked. We described it – the matching chair is in our apartment in Montreal, and was always in my mother-in-law's apartment - but none of us could remember where it had been. Somehow this shared amnesia seemed to cheer him up, and he started talking more volubly. I told him some stories about my parents and my Iranian friend, who had just had a henna party for her women friends that I’d missed. “Really?” he said, wanting to hear more about it. “Don’t do it!” he cautioned. “It doesn’t wash off, you know!”
The bright afternoon sunlight came in strongly through the balcony door, shining on the blooming red amaryllis and wafting the heady scent of paperwhite narcissus toward our noses. “It’s really very nice here,” I said. “Look at your beautiful flowers. And it’s so warm and sunny.”
He smiled and settled back in his chair. “I’m really very happy here,” he said. “I like the apartment, they take very good care of us, and for the most part, people leave me alone to live as I want. And when I go to bed at night, I am so comfortable.” He recited another Arab proverb, eyes shut, smiling to himself. He opened his eyes and translated. “It means, basically, when you can go to bed at night and shut your eyes and not worry, that is true happiness.” He turned and looked at me directly. “That’s one thing I really don’t do. I don’t worry.”
“That would be wonderful!” I said, very sincerely, thinking of my own restless sleep.
“I’m like the Eskimo,” he said.
“What Eskimo?” J. asked.
“It’s a story. There were some white men who traveled to the arctic and they passed an old Eskimo man sitting alone in the cold. When they came back, he was still there, and they said to him, “It’s cold here, don’t you worry?’ And the Eskimo said to them, “What have I got to worry about? I have a wife in the igloo, and plenty of fish!”
The punch-line was so matter-of-fact, so unexpected, and yet so typical of him that we all burst out laughing. “I have a wife in the igloo and plenty of fish!” he repeated, and we were all still laughing as we said goodbye.
I really enjoyed these excellent photographic portraits by the Finnish artist Pekka Turunen. (There was a sub-theme of wood-stacking that ought to appeal to other, northern winter dwellers.) Via Conscientious.
It's 8:00 pm and I ought to be just revving up for some writing, but in fact I'm fading...drooping...crashing. We've been working really hard and getting too little sleep, and tonight that's catching up with me. The previous few nights have been both short and restless, or interrupted by long sleepless stretches; last night was sound-er, but still too short.
I've been working over the past week on a big, long-term professional project that's becoming increasingly fascinating and challenging and has brought me into deeper contact with some insightful people. The subject, like much of our work over the past ten years, is the reform of the U.S. health care system, and when you talk to dedicated people who are on the ground level of trying to understand and change a huge, complex, broken system like that, it's very interesting. What surprises me lately is how much the top people in this field remind me of the thoughtful, dedicated religious leaders I've known: they too have given their lives to something they see as being of primary importance, and in the process have gained a pretty sharp perspective on human behavior and human needs, and the role of money in both.
I don't think Mr. Bush sees it the same way. Both Leslee and Ernesto have been writing about their perspectives on health care recently too; if it's any comfort at all, there really are people who are trying to understand the dynamics of the system and create change in many different areas, from health care policy to clinical microsystems, from graduate medical education to patient decision-making, from better use of screening to responsible, informed journalism. They admit, though, that true change is going to take a very long time, and may even depend on a collapse of the system as it now exists.
The inequities that exist within the United States are glaring, but when we look internationally the only word that comes to mind is "shameful". On NPR the other day, there was a glowing report about how AIDS was on the brink of being eliminated as a cause of infant death in the United States. What about an entire, other continent where millions of people are dying, and can't even get access to standard AIDS drugs? What about the numbers of children in the world who die daily from malnutrition and diarrhea? How can we rest on our well-fed laurels for even a moment when this is the situation?
But anyway, I was writing about not writing, wasn't I? Today was our weekly lunch with my father-in-law, and what I really want to do is write about that, with greater attention and clarity than I seem to be able to muster tonight. So unless I'm up for a few hours in the middle of the night, check back tomorrow for the latest installment of his story.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
The drive across south-central New Hampshire to Peterborough is not one I’ve made often. The places I do go – Brattleboro, Vermont, close to the Massachusetts border, or Concord, Manchester and Nashua, New Hampshire, are quickly reached via the two interstate highways that lead out of northern New England toward New York and Boston. But within the mountainous country between the interstates lie forests growing on granite, a few small villages, and a way of life that has all but deserted the places frequented by skiers and tourists.
I left the interstate at North Walpole, passing the tiny one-room post office building, and the red-painted local feed store (“Equine, Livestock, Poultry, Pets) and headed uphill, through snow-filled woods where thin paper birches draw criss-crossing chalk lines against the dark green hemlock. It’s careful, wind-y driving, where one has to watch for deer and ice patches, and the road follows the rocky land rather than being blasted through it. And it’s Frost country, where after a long desolate stretch one comes upon a few houses, a pasture lined with stone walls, an old orchard; and I found myself quoting lines from half-remembered poems.
“I wish Ivy could be here with me, to see what New England is really like,” I thought, until, at the top of the seemingly uninhabited hill, a huge gravel pit suddenly appeared, like a raw grey wound, behind the trees. It reminded me ruefully of the Frost parody: "Whose woods these are I think I know/His house is in the village though/He will not see me stopping here/To chop his woods and shoot his deer…” Frost too had seen more here than the postcards with which his poetry is naively associated; he had his own dark side and saw it reflected in the inhospitable but beautiful land and its taciturn inhabitants.
Nearly twenty years ago, J. and I used to make this drive occasionally to pick up equipment at the home of PC Connection in Marlow, New Hampshire, the next town after Alstead, where, in an isolated community, some enterprising hippies had created one of the first and most successful mail-order computer businesses. It always seemed both incongruous and perfect to pull up to the typical, old, white clapboarded house-plus-shed-plus second shed that was home to the company and leave with a big shiny new computer or printer.
On this day, though, I entered Marlow and left it within the space of a minute or two, and was back in the depths of the forest, driving past the yellow signs warning of “Moose Crossing” or “Drifting Snow”, small green road signs pointing toward “Pitcher Mtn.” or “Ferret Farm Road”, and up to the top of the ridgeline, where the purple mountains suddenly stretched across the horizon beyond a white-blanketed hilltop field and the dark line of the forest at its far edge.
What is it that makes this landscape itself, I wondered. And even that word seems like a misnomer: there is no “scape” to it - or rarely - in the sense of “sweep” or broad vistas; on the contrary, the land is craggy and knarled and closed-in, like an unfriendly fairy-tale forest of unfamiliar yet endlessly repeating themes of dark trees, rocks, snow; you always feel like you’re inside it, not looking at it, except for the rare places where people settled, more than two centuries ago, and a white-steepled church and town hall and a few old houses still nestle like white marbles in the dark-mittened palm of the forest. Is it that, I wondered, those little vestiges of early-settler life, that define this place, with the stone walls running through tall woods that used to be fields? Is it the steamy breath of cows clustered around a water trough? Or the high, forest-rimmed lakes where cold dark water lies in granite basins, and the reed-filled swamps that used to be lakes, and the stands of saplings in swamps on their way to becoming forest?
Not long after moving to New England in the mid 1970s, my then-boyfriend and I were invited to dinner one night in Walpole, by another young couple we’d met in a house rented to nine or ten fuzzy hippies. Jamie and Tom were the gentlest, kindest people imaginable: flower children who dreamed of self-sufficiency and were living as many people did then - on little money and a lot of ingenuity and idealism. That path was perhaps easier in San Francisco than in New Hampshire, in the frozen depths of February. I remember driving that night through these same dark, forbidding woods, up a narrowing dirt road and then another, finding the mailbox with the small sign, leaving our car in pitch-blackness far down the hill, and hiking in carrying a lantern and a stoneware bowl filled with some offering – salad, beans, rice. They lived then in a small one-room cabin, whose light greeted us through the trees from a single window. We tumbled into the warm interior like cattle into a manger, stamping and rubbing; the pot-bellied woodstove took up a good deal of the space, along with the water bottles they had to fill at a spring and lug up to the cabin; a line hung with clothes and jackets; a pile of blankets; a make-shift bed. Jamie had cooked the whole meal on the woodstove – cornbread, probably, and a pot of soup. She had a pet chinchilla, and he had a dog; he did carpentry jobs, she made quilts; they were deeply in love. Like the woods and rocks that surrounded us, in those days it was a theme with slight variations. I remember the warmth of that evening, in the presence of their relationship; I remember being happy, hungry, and then well-fed; it was perhaps one of the last times that life felt simple.
How innocent we were. I thought that as NH 123 finally wound down the other side of the mountains, dropping toward broader, more easily-farmed valleys, like the one where Peterborough is located. Now the fields are giving way to development and there’s evidence of real economic activity. I took it all in reluctantly, still mesmerized by the road I’d traveled. Back in the tiny hill towns, a few people were still living that way -maybe even Jamie and Tom. But I doubted it, and thought of Frost again: “Nothing gold can stay.”
Yesterday I met up, for the first time, with fellow bloggers Lorianne and Ivy in Peterborough, New Hampshire. "I assume we'll know each other...?" one of us asked, by e-mail. Yes, probably. I was the last one to arrive at the busy coffee and gift shop where we'd set our rendezvous, and when I rounded the corner, past the fresh flowers, patchouli-scented candles and chocolate moose lollipops (with peanut butter antlers), there was L.'s familiar face, waving her hands as she talked to I. She looked up and grinned, and the three of us didn't stop talking until we parted several hours later, at dusk, in front of the dark green Peterborough diner where we'd gone for a second round of tea and snacks. It was a fun place to show Ivy - a real American diner, with authentic pea-green tiles and swivel stools, and even a jukebox in the back.
As Lorianne wrote, there's often something magical about meeting people you've gotten to know online; it's no mystery to me why it works for people to meet on the internet, fall in love and get married. Despite never having seen either of these wonderful women in person before, or even talking on the phone, and all of us being surprised about some superficial physical things about each other, it all felt so...familiar. And it was so easy to cut to the chase, and enter into easy convivial conversation about poetry, the writing life, the personal challenges, where we'd been and where we hoped to go. With hundreds of posts read and written, there was no shortage of conversation topics, either: the dog, the trip to Australia, the apartment in Montreal, the marriages, the poetry manuscripts, the residency, the Zen retreats, the dissertation, the book half written...not to mention the other online personalities and relationships that spun back and forth between the three of us like shiny threads. What does surprise me is finding out that I like the people even more than I thought I would, and that none of us have revealed so much that there is nothing of interest left to discover. I would have happily kept talking, if I hadn't had a long drive back home in the dark ahead of me. And I'll happily pick up the conversation again, when the chance arises.
