Positively Glorious!

I used to work in Portland at the Watershed Management Division of Oregon DEQ. It was probably the best job I’ve ever had– mostly because the people who choose to work at DEQ are, for the most part, amazing. They are the type of people who you can easily work next to for 20 years and at the end of it thing “Wow, where’d all that time go?”

Despite that, I was having a hard time.

A lot of the difficulty was that Jessie and I were living in Hood River– we’d moved there for her job when I was still working on my thesis. That meant that, including the commute to work, I had a 13 hour day. I’d wake up at 5am to leave, and be home about 6pm. That was hard enough, but what added a lot of difficulty to that was the lack of– for a better word– beer. Continue Reading »

Long-time readers will know that I’m a fan of Wordle, the web site that let’s you make word clouds of strings of text. I have a lot of them¹ because they present words outside the context of narrative, which is both disjointed and jarring, while at the same time being fascinating and beautiful. I decided to make a couple based on the writings I did during my Grief series to see how they would look.

There’s nothing really to describe, these graphic visualizations are up to the interpretation of the viewer. The words are places randomly and the size of the words is a function of their frequency of use, so there’s much left up to the viewer to decide upon.

The first is a word cloud of the entire series of posts. The second is a word cloud of just the final poem “Sunday.” The final one is the most poignant for me, since the word “space” appears more prominent than even “grief.” It’s interesting that both of these words and it was space away from my mother that I sought more than anything when she was still alive, and space within grief that allowed me to realize what was lost when she died. Continue Reading »

1. although you wouldn’t know it, since the recent destruction of my blog server screwed up all of my images links [↩]

A couple days ago, my personal server went through a Positively Glorious catastrophe. I was working on the back-end adding a couple more blogs and a mailing list/wiki combination for a friend. When I went back over to my personal website, I didn’t see my blog, but rather aplaceholder page for Bluehost, my shared hosting provider.

My immediate thought was: “Oh shit, what the hell happened?!”

This is the internet equivalent of pulling into your driveway to find that your house is gone and has been replaced by a big, stupid sign that says “Someone should really build a house here.”

Oh shit, what the hell did they do?!

The worst thing about this is that it’s completely my fault. I’d love to blame BlueHost, or the authors of the MySQL database, or the programmers of WordPress, or El Niño, anything! But I can’t. I screwed up.

Oh shit, what the hell did I do?! Continue Reading »

How much meaning do we place into what another person says and does? I don’t really know, but I’m starting to think that the answer is something like “damn near all of it.”

A comment from my thoughtful friend Suzanne got me thinking about how much meaning I attribute to what others, especially my loved ones, say– meanings that are often not there. It’s a problem we all face, and me more than many, since I tend to read meanings into everything and think more than I speak. Still, it’s a problem that is easier to solve in speech, because there’s the opportunity for discourse, a back and forth that can be instant.

It’s a much different thing in writing. Prose, poetry, song. Literature. It’s written with purpose and intention, but it’s read and filled with meaning at some later date– maybe years or centuries– by a completely different person with a complete different history.

I thought someone else said this originally– actually, I’m quite sure that someone else said this, because I’m not so arrogant or stupid as to assume that anything I’d say is something that has never been said before. Still, I thought someone else said this… as in full-on-it’s-a-famous-saying said it. At least,  I thought someone else said something like it. Something that was essentially the same thing. But I can’t find it, so now I’m not sure. Thus, I’ll say it here. Maybe someone will comment and write something like “It was Graham Greene, stupid!”

That wouldn’t surprise me, actually.

People call me stupid all the time.

Anyway, it’s a statement on literature– on words and meaning– and it’s one which I think is, if not wholly true, than at least a holder of a bag full of kernels. I’ll write it here as a short piece, so that I can at least take credit for this particular order of words. Continue Reading »

I’m not sure where we got the idea. I think it’s probably from my Oregon family, because I know my cousins Jackie and Claudia do it, as did their parents. Anyway, wherever we got the idea, it’s become a standard operating procedure for us.

Everytime one of us leaves the house, we wave.

At first, I thought it was an “Oregon” thing, because my Oregon family all do it. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, because most people think we’re a bit loopy. Actually, most people think we’re a bit loopy anyway, but they think we’re particularly loopy about the wave. Continue Reading »

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind.
The lost need nothing.
They are ashes and dust, pictures and memories.
They are mistakes and regrets.

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind.
Grief is a space in our living. It is a vessel.
It is a room, empty of all else.
It is a space in the soul, a space we need to breathe.

Grief is not for the lost, it is a space for the left behind.
Grief is a space for us to sit and cry, and to laugh out loud.
It is a space for us to think, a space to remember, a space to learn.
But most of all, it is a space to fill.

Grief is not for the lost, it is a space to fill.
It is a bowl into which we mix the ingredients of a soul.
Regret, mistakes, sadness, pain, anger. Love.
It is a bowl into which we pour ourselves, out of ourselves.

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind.
And into this grief, we pour ourselves, out of ourselves
So that we may see ourselves, within ourselves
and so we may have the space, within ourselves, to love.

Saturday.

What is Saturday?

Saturday is a placeholder. Saturday is a schedule. Saturday is an opening in a schedule.

Saturday is a funeral. Continue Reading »

You step off the plane into a winter of anger and regret. It’s cold in the town of your youth. Much colder than you remember. It’s more grey than you remember. In fact, there’s very little that’s the same as you remember.

The town of your youth is exactly the same.

Your cousin picks you up at the airport and you decide that the innocuous questions that she asks you are just that. You decide that she’s not a spy, sent behind enemy lines to steal tactical information. You decide to believe that she’s just your cousin, and she’s asking questions that anyone would ask. But you know you’re wrong. Even if her questions are innocent, the information will be carried back to the enemy.

No. Stop.

The answers will be taken to your family.

This is not a battle between members of your family. There are no sides. There are no lines. It is not a battle, but the battlefield after a battle that your mother fought with life. There is one death, there are a lot of wounded people who desperately need care, but the battle is over. Continue Reading »

You take the day off on Thursday.

You tell yourself that it’s because you have to prepare yourself for 7 hours in the middle seat of a plane. You tell yourself this, but mostly it’s just because you’re suffocating and need some space to breath. You feel like you’ve been at full throttle for weeks, though it’s only been a few days, and your eyes burn as if you’ve been awake for the entire time.

You wake to the last bits of evening snow melting on the ground in painfully brisk air. Strangely, the sun is shining this morning. The sky, having shrugged off it’s robe of clouds and dread, sports an azure skin that can almost be mistaken for summer, though it’s barely spring, and barely warm enough to leave your scarf behind.

You sit in the silence of the mourning and stare at the back yard for a few moments. One minute, two, fifteen, thirty. Looking out at the lawn you so carefully prepped for winter, the new patio you and your wife built with your own hands. You see tiny, tentative buds on the maple tree that your father-in-law carried on a plane all the way from his backyard because he thought you might like a maple. The first moments of spring hint at their awakening before your eyes, and they become increasingly difficult to see as tears swim before the images.

Crying, you realize what mourning is for. Continue Reading »

You are starting to understand why people need time off to grieve, because the exhaustion you feel this morning is more than you could have imagined. It’s a dark heaviness that pulls you down to a space just a bit beneath the floor. A dark place where bones lay.

Another morning of images. The gray sky, eggs on toast, coffee, a blue robe. Snatches of moments driven by a quiet lover as she tends to everything. You stare at a spot on a piece of paper trying to remember what street you lived on when your mother said that joke and you laughed, connecting for one brief moment. Trying to remember a snapshot of time surrounded by years of isolation and anger.

The sunshine sits beside you and she says something about the homemade bread being a bit hard this time and you start to cry again. We did the best we could on that bread, you think, it’s not perfect, but we did the best we could– we did the best we knew how.

You’re sobbing now, but there are no tears this time– black-hearted people don’t deserve the relief that spills out in tears. There’s just the dark sullenness of a heart made of coal.

A hard heart that hated it’s baker. Continue Reading »