it often surprises me how much people want to make others responsible for their choices.

my friend, the one moving from nevada to north carolina is now in arizona. called from the road to say hello. during the conversation, the blog came up. heh.

someone complimented me today. told me i was ‘looking healthier’. wanted to know why or what i was doing. deadpan serious, i replied, ‘i’m eating.’ they laughed as if i were joking. i let them think so because it was easier than trying to explain.

just got off the phone with my daughter. she is once more speaking of coming to live here. i am cautiously optimistic. plans are for august. we shall see. but in this moment, my heart is a happy thing. that is all. for now. addendum: less than 24 hours later, she calls to say she’s changed her mind. i’m beginning to understand this process and why it happens. she’s 19 and the weight of being on her own is sometimes heavy. when it is so, she calls to hear that i’m here and if she needs it, willing to be […]

i gave as lot of thought to how i wanted (or if!) to do this. i thought about it again last night, after letting it simmer for some years and you know what? it needs to be done. so it shall be.

well. at long last, something approximating an official diagnosis. the oddness that saw me four years in a wheelchair and all the doctors stumped has been resolved by a simple test and less than $50. i think about those four years of misery and pain and despair and there’s part of me that wants to be angry for medical incompetence and various related things. in the end, a sigh and a nod… there were lessons worth having that arrived during those four years. i can’t regret finding them, so even this must be released.

he was genius, of course. i knew it from the start. something about the way he said things… no one says things like that unless they understand the futility of meaning.

(recording available: of-dancing-penguins.mp3) i suppose that will seem a silly title. perhaps even a silly happening, once i’ve relayed it, but sometimes i think it takes a bit of silly to really get the message through… and maybe, sometimes, silly isn’t so silly after all. maybe, sometimes, it’s only silly because it takes something silly to make us see it. maybe, sometimes, we’re the silly ones.

starting to get into the groove of this whole middle way thing. caladesi helped, more in its aftermath than in the moment. an oddity of timing, but not bothersome.

i have this friend of a friend, she lives in Milwaukee her husband left her last year, used alcohol as excuse to get away from responsibility, away from the little girls all under age seven, hungry for hugs at first she used to say she wished he’d get sober but then he did, and he still didn’t return i was the one who had to listen to all the angry words, heartbreak and betrayal because she was over 40 not as exciting as the woman who hadn’t spent the last seven years birthing then tending his daughters i listened until […]