Category: Blog

13May

Dreams

shutterstock_262600493Photo by agsandrew

Published May 13, 2016

Amazing things, to be sure. Four months after my mother died, I woke up from a dream that had one notable sequence: I walked into her house and saw her sitting in a chair, smiling and talking with someone. She looked happy, and I went over to her, elated, and told her how incredibly good it was to see her. She seemed surprised, as if she didn’t know the reason.

It was the first dream I’d had about her after her death, although she’d made her presence known to me in other ways. In the dream, I quickly explained why it was a surprise and a joy to see her. The whole thing seemed to be a foreign concept to her. Interesting.

This reminded me of the dream that a friend of mine had years after her sister drowned. My friend encountered her sister, alive, in the dream and said, “But you’re dead!” Her sister’s reply: “I know! Isn’t that crazy?”

That might not be an exact transcript, but it speaks to the spirit of the dream as related to me.

In my dream, my mother’s smile was beautiful, and calming to see.

Her birthday is next week, and as usually happens around that time, I will probably write something about her. The 10th anniversary of her death is less than two months away. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say then.

And maybe more visits with her in my dreams. They’ve been filled with swirling colors and powerful, provocative themes. It would not surprise me if they soon featured a friendly, reassuring face.

24Sep

Hurricanes Rita, Katrina and the unofficial death toll

RitaPublished September 24, 2015

Ten years ago today, Hurricane Rita made landfall along the Louisiana-Texas border. Coming less than a month after Katrina’s surge across the Louisiana-Mississippi border, Rita scared millions across the Gulf Coast as it developed into the fourth-most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico. Lessons learned from Katrina prompted mass evacuation of Houston and other cities as Rita approached, saving lives. Katrina’s official death toll is just short of 2,000 people; Rita’s is slightly more than 100. In the collective memory of America and the rest of the world, Rita is the forgotten hurricane of 2005.

Not so in my family. Like many others in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, we lost someone whose terminal illness in the months after the storms was part of the unofficial death toll from the deadly hurricane season of 2005.

My oldest sister and her family live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, 30 miles north of the Gulf, 35 miles east of the Texas state line. They live directly behind the house that was my mother’s home during the summer of 2005. I was living in Baton Rouge, about two hours’ drive east of Lake Charles, where I was born and raised. Affected by Katrina mostly in terms measured in lost power and lost sleep, I had settled into what was the new normal in Baton Rouge: taking alternate routes on surface streets every day because of the crush of people who relocated to Louisiana’s capital from the New Orleans area after post-Katrina flooding.

When it was obvious that Rita, a Category 5 hurricane at its most powerful, was not expected to hit Baton Rouge, we decided that my family’s best evacuation option was to head my way. For two weeks, my two-bedroom apartment was home to me, my mother, my sister, her husband, their two children (a daughter and a son), a dog and a hermit crab (my nephew’s). Tight quarters, for sure, but nothing like the many situations after Katrina in which 20 or more people crowded into a home or an apartment.

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29Aug

This is the sound of wind

Published August 29, 2015

How strange to wake up to this sound just outside my window on Aug. 29, 2015. Ten years ago, I woke from a restless sleep before dawn as the outer bands of Hurricane Katrina reached my apartment, about an hour’s drive from downtown New Orleans.

The electricity went out, and it would stay off beyond the next few sleepless days and nights. As the wind rushed through the trees that were as close to my bedroom window as these are to my sliding-glass patio door today, it was accompanied by rain. Not so right now. Here in the Pacific Northwest, amid a relentless drought, our forecast called for rain today and next week, but as I look outside, I see thirsty leaves holding on to their branches and their green as they await what the gray sky seems to promise. It is not the verdant green of trees nourished by south Louisiana rains, or challenged by a major hurricane, and I swear I can hear the difference as the wind cuts through the brittle branches.

(Updating to add that I’ve discovered we had a thunderstorm hours before I awoke. It dumped more rain than we’d had since early June, but the ground and trees soaked it up so quickly, they still seemed drought-stricken by the time I opened the curtains.)

As the largest wildfire in Washington state history rages a few hours away from me, and much of the West Coast deals with problems associated with ongoing severe drought, there is other news of nature’s power. I’m reading reports of trees falling and injuring people this morning during a triathlon at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Runners in Hood to Coast arrived in Seaside amid sideways rain and wind so powerful, organizers scrapped the usual tent city for safety reasons. There are reports of residents without electricity in Oregon. I don’t know if I want to know what else could be happening in the region.

(Another update: Reports of high wind gusts followed: 85 mph on the southern coast of Washington state, 90 mph in Oceanside, Ore., and 43 mph at Portland International Airport, eclipsing the record August wind gust of 39 mph set in 1953. Our 37 mph high wind gust probably occurred around the time I stumbled out of bed to find out what was going on outside. They tell me this was a once-in-30-years storm, a freak occurrence for August, or even if it had been September.)

I wasn’t going to write anything on this anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. My plan was to spend as much time as possible in quiet reflection about the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, and the hours, days, weeks, months and years that followed in Louisiana. That’s still the plan, although my quiet time comes with a soundtrack, an eerie reminder of that Monday morning 10 years ago today.

This is the sound of wind.


30May

Movie Quote Stuck in My Head: ‘Harvey’

Published May 30, 2015

James Stewart is the protagonist in “Harvey,” the 1950 film in which our man Elwood P. Dowd’s best friend is a 6-foot-3½ invisible rabbit, a pooka. This causes concern in Elwood’s family. Is it the booze? Is he crazy?

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13May

‘Mad Men,’ the smell of diesel, and where the bus takes us

madmenbusscene

Published May 13, 2015

As “Mad Men” fans await the series finale Sunday, I’ve reflected on seven seasons’ worth of powerful moments. After the dust has settled following the final episode, I’ll have more to say about a lightning-bolt moment for me in “Severance,” the eighth episode of Season 7, but today I wanted to flash back to a scene from the 10th episode, “The Forecast.”

After taking Sally and her friends to dinner, Don drops them off at the Greyhound bus station. As soon as the images in this screen shot appeared on my TV, I was floored by immediately being able to smell the scene, diesel fuel and all. This was unexpected, and it derailed my seamless viewing of the show so much that I had to play back everything from that scene forward once I regained my sense of the present. In that moment, I’d been transported back to every Greyhound bus I’d ever ridden on, and every bus station, in some sort of visually provoked compressed composite memory.

Or did one particular bus ride or depot become exhumed, rushing to the fore from some deep trench in my mind’s archives because of that visual stimulation? I didn’t know.

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10May

Regarding Mom

momolderPublished May 10, 2015

Today is Mother’s Day, the ninth since my mom died. She’s in my thoughts often, but especially in May. Her birthday is eight days away as I write this, and as the weather gets warmer every year around this time, I’m reminded of 2006, when she left home for the hospital in April and never went back home. She died that July.

It’s easy on sad days to get drawn into remembering the end, but it’s heartwarming and a comfort when I remember funny stories (she had a sneaky kind of humor, and sarcasm), or I recall the details of moments perhaps a bit out of character (or so it seemed at the time).

One night when I was young, as she was preparing to cook dinner, she dropped a pot or pan on the floor, and — unaware that I had come into the room, behind her — she blurted out a single word in frustration. Then, realizing I was there, she said more softly, “I mean ‘shoot.’ ”

So that’s what she meant

After my father died, my mom didn’t date, and as far as I know, she never seriously considered it. If she ever commented on a man’s attractiveness, I don’t remember it. “Handsome” would have been the extent of it, I suppose. So I was tickled when, about a decade after my dad’s death, I visited my mom as she was watching “Pretty Woman” on television, and there was a mention of sharp-dressed Richard Gere. “He looks very mature,” my mom said, perhaps comparing his appearance to how he looked earlier in his career, such as in “An Officer and a Gentleman.” (Sidebar: My mother said “mature” with a hard “t” rather than pronouncing it “machure.” She also liked to say “sharp” in reference to a man’s attire, especially if she had bought me an item of clothing and thought it looked nice on me.)

I’m not sure how long it took me to realize it, but it dawned on me that “he looks very mature” was the closest my mom could come to saying, “Oh, he’s hot.”

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07May

The upside to how much trouble I’m having pruning my thoughts and words

underconstruction

Photo by Sergieiev

Published May 7, 2015

There are several formidable challenges in my writing and editing life right now. One that’s surely on display here, despite my best efforts, is the difficulty I am having editing my thoughts as I work to put them into words.

When I decided to start blogging again, which led to the creation of this site (which will eventually feature much more than a blog), I promised myself the blog would not be a place where I felt the need to make sure the writing was always “tight.” But even given the relaxed editing standards I’ve allowed myself here in the early stages, I see how bloated my first drafts have been. That’s one of the dangers of not having written regularly in a few years, and of not having an editor. My writing has lost muscle tone, and I always had the tendency to be a bit wordy anyway. It’s clear to me this will be one of the biggest challenges as I continue writing different types of pieces.

But one aspect of it I’m starting to love is what I realized not long ago: It’s a byproduct of the way my mind is exploding lately, how by questioning much of what I’ve taken for granted, I’ve started seeing the world in many different ways. If the worst thing that happens because of that is my writing loses some of its sinew for now, I can live with the trade-off. The upside is too encouraging for me to worry about that too much at this part of the process.

It’s a work in progress, as is this website. As am I.

04May

Everyone should have someone say this to them

Published May 4, 2015

From time to time, tweets disappear, leaving behind their ghost.

(This was one of my favorites from nearly a decade ago. Here in late 2023 as I rediscovered it, I am glad it’s here.)

As originally formatted, I think, it displayed as:

Those broken parts
You hide from others
Show me

I am glad it’s here. I am glad to have reconnected with it.