in which i consider the end of blogging and other things

I have a friend who is… I can’t say “sick” because she wouldn’t like that. It’s… she’s… I’ve visited her in the hospital twice this week. She may get back online at some point and read this, or she may not. We agree that it’s possible that Internet use has contributed to her body’s dis-ease.

Anyway, I’m trying to talk about me here. I’m tired. I’ve been through a lot. Worrying about my friend, trying to help her and her family, examining my ego’s participation in being helpful, trying to not overtax myself. Hah! What is too much? What is not enough? What is being maudlin? What is real? Do I believe in miracles?

How do I tell my side of the story without compromising her desire for privacy?

Maybe I only tell it to myself.

After visiting her one night, I was filled with this incredibly swollen feeling of love and the beauty of all things and I’m driving home, across the Bay Bridge, and a vision comes to me, of us dancing barefoot in her hospital room, draped in beautiful deep blue shawls, gold sparkly stars raining down all around us. And I cry.

After visiting her last night, I was noticing the beauty of the moon’s reflection on the bay, as I was driving home over that bridge again, and the car swerved a little. Must keep eyes on the road.

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I should be telling stories about Jonah. I should be posting photos. But now I’m experimenting with RAW format pictures that need to be PROCESSED (dear G-d) and are just huge and then I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t post so many photos of him or something. Or maybe I should start a blog that is ONLY about him so the crossover between isn’t he cute, and aren’t I neurotic isn’t so jarring.

These thoughts fold into another thought about blogging, but it’s so already been said by me and others (myself and others? oh cr*p). Now I distracted myself with the question of grammar and forgot what I was going to say. Something something… everybody says this about blogging when they think of quitting and it was…? The keyboard is so satisfying though, this little text box so alluring, the tiny adrenaline surge of clicking publish.

Yee haw.

Did I mention my friend is sick? Man, there’s a lot of stuff I could say about that that someone else has probably said.

I am amazed at these things:

I am amazed at how it throws one into that state of appreciation for all that one has, all that is good. How it frames the jealousies, the dissatisfactions;  highlights their pettiness. And then how one can keep having them anyway. How we’re messy, prickly people. How we don’t get to have that perfect last line and then exit. Fin.

I was talking to another friend tonight who lost her father not that long ago in a prolonged passage from this world to the next. She told me how he had this one piece of music that he wanted to die to. So they would play it over and over. Oh, wait, he’d say, rewind it.

Several times a day he would just decide he was ready to go. Okay, NOW! he’d say. And then a few minutes later, Okay, NOW!

Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me…

For some reason, at some point, I had to memorize that Dickinson poem, and then now I can only remember the first two lines. And then I think of this really smart and kind of jerky guy I know who informed me that all Emily D. poems can be recited to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas and that kind of gets stuck in your head.

Earworm.

I am amazed at how a hospital is such a good place for visiting a person. I mean, not the crappy dry air, the ugly greige walls, the beeping machines. I decided that one machine’s clackety clacking reminded me of crickets, so that turned that around. But the thing about the hospital is that you know where your friend is. You can find this person day or night if you wanted to. They don’t have anywhere else they need to be. And they don’t feel like they have to entertain you. I mean, they do a little, but really, they can’t get up and putter. Not much. They’re not busy doing something else. You call, you come by, you sit, you talk.

Last night we agreed that this is what village life would be like. We’d put our kids to sleep and then on warm nights like these we’d meet in the courtyard for tea after, sitting on lounge chairs within shouting distance of our front porches and nurseries.

I remember a similar feeling when my great aunt was in the hospital, years ago, before several factions of our family splintered and stopped speaking to each other. At any time, day or night, literally, you could find at least one cousin in the lounge on her floor. It was amazing to be able to drop in like that.

Again similar to when I studied abroad in Russia only there it wasn’t the hospital. It was factually how people lived that even at midnight or 3 a.m. and even if they answered the door in their pajamas and had to turn on the lights, they heated up the water for the samovar and put out jam and cookies and tea, or fish and bread and vodka, or fried up blinis, and talked until the sun came up. Okay, one time, a woman we bothered at 7 a.m. said she had to go to work and refused us. But the midnight blinis were at my language teacher’s house. The fish and vodka, a late night visit to the home of a film director who was a friend of another teacher. That was 18 years ago. I don’t know if things have changed.

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 Jonah totally said something cute today that I wanted to blog. Oh, I remember…

We were looking through one of his books about animals, an encyclopedia that has one giant photograph of each animal per 2-page spread.

We opened to the Squirrel page.

I said, What is that?

He said, That looks like some kind of a squirrel.

I said, It is. It’s a red squirrel.

We turned to the next page. A porcupine.

What’s that?

He said, That’s a fine looking porcupine.

…Seriously? No, I did not teach him that, but I suspect his adorably energetic and hip young nanny might have had something to do with it.

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 Jonah loving a cupcake at his friend Zenn’s 2nd birthday party: