All too familiar scents greet me as we get led to the classroom where she is to teach, of floor cleaner, of books and paper, of turf outside the window from the sports field, though it is the scent of chalk and perform that drags me back to that classroom long ago, and makes me react now as I did then, making me put my camera in front of me as I had my book back then, so acute I ache now the way I did, making me take a seat in the furthest corner to keep from being called on and exposed, chalk and perform, though her smell today different subtly from the one I remember, sweeter, softer, making me dizzy as I breathe, not quite a magic elixir yet just as potent, caused not by what she does, but what she is, and I force myself to study her and the cat she sketches on the black board (which is not even black) to keep from speculation on anything else, her scent soon dominating even the thick scents of cologne, the rough and read men wear here.
We didn’t get to see music during our annual post-Thanksgiving
trip to Asbury Park, even though we booked a room in a motel in case we could.
But just before our leaving for the north again today, we
got to see whales and dolphins, a startling bit of magic that is usually
preserved for our Victorian Week trip to Cape May.
This was particularly apt since it came at a moment when I
was looking for a particular part of the beach where my poet friend (as
described in my journals from a decade ago, using the word “friend” liberally)
and finding it just as the massive head of the whale broke the surface just
beyond one of the rock. Scores of people crowded the rail to see the rare phenomena
– rare for this time of year when the water gets so cold.
For me, dolphins and whales are magical creatures and seeing
them always comes at a time when I am searching for something or trying to come
to terms with some issue in my life, a lot like angels whose appearance bodes a
positive change in my life.
Back in October 2012 during a trip to Cape May, I ached to
see them as an omen of better fortunes after an incredibly rough year, and a
massive school of them appeared at the last possible moment before I was
scheduled to return north, hundreds of them at a time when I was pondering all
the stupid mistakes I had made over the summer, and when I was thinking in
particular about that poet – the same poet I was thinking of today when the
whale appeared for the first time along with yet another school of dolphins,
the whale’s head rising completely out of the water just when I was looking at
the pole around which the poet had been dancing a month ago, as if that dance
and the whale’s appearance were connected, just the way I believe the dolphins
appearing a decade ago were connected to her, if not a sign of forgiveness,
then some gesture of forgiveness issued by the universal being that oversees
our lives, these beasts of the sea engaged in a dance that is both delegate and
beautiful.
As a decade ago, once I saw the whale I continued to stare,
and saw the scores of dolphins, as well, although I could not predict just
where they would appear in order to snap a picture. The whale was more
predictable, issuing a spout of water before rising to the surface again,
although it was its back I saw most, curved and wet, glittering with the
sunlight and it submerged again – even then, I barely had time to focus the
camera because it vanished again, catching only a bit of the spout and the dark
black back via video briefly.
I know all this sound like something out of the X-Files, but
I believe it, need to believe it and in believing come to find comfort where
otherwise I might find none.
These are the angels in our lives; we are our own demons,
needing salvation, desperate for absolution, and like the ancient Odysseus who
has always been a hero in my life, we search for those signs that tells us we
have won favor or forgiveness from the Gods, and seeing this now, as I did back
in Cape May all those years ago, I’m convinced the Gods look on me with favor,
or at least with pity and compassion.
the whale leaped up from the water in the place where she previously danced for her mother on the sand a month or so later, and yet magical just the same, whale and dolphins rising up out of the sea at the precise moment I thought of her, seeing the pole around which she pranced as if a ritual to deliberately evoke there spirits I have come to treasure, and unexpected witness here, this far north when I ached to see them again as I had long ago and far away, then as now, thinking of her, as if she, the sea and its creatures were always connected
She must have been terrified going into surgery after more
than two years of bad tests, a dark cloud hanging over her head, if not doom,
then the end of a hopeful way of life. What could have been if… etc.
It’s no wonder she’s so exuberant after things turned out
less severe than she had anticipated, attributing her cure to what some people might
have considered a quack cure – much like the cure Steve McQueen went to Mexico
to find and failed.
This comes at a time when the man she hoped to share her
life with was not available, although to their credit, her family stood with
her, a test of faith she might never have expected after such a confused upbringing
as she’d had.
What thoughts ran though her head when they attached the IV
and rolled her bed into the operating room remains a mystery, though this
disease grew inside of her during several of the most painful years of her
life, corresponding to her leaving her job in New York and throughout her
conflict with me. This was just one more heavy burden put onto her shoulders
when she clearly needed strength to deal with the disease.
And now, somehow, she’s managed to escape most of it, like
finding a safety net strung out below the roof of her building, waiting to
catch her if and when she falls.
Not all is perfect, yet clearly better.
While she has not yet the man she wants, she isn’t likely to
pass away.
She can once more look to the future and build a life once
more, looking to use her talents and to find the yellow brick road to
fulfilling her dreams.
It’s like waking from a nightmare she did not know was a
nightmare until she woke, when she found she’s back in Kansas after all.
This latest passion started late in May – apparently when
she discovered she would have to undergo surgery – which apparently took place
in July.
I’m sure that a number of people around her are questioning
this scheme she’s adopted to cure her cancer, as would I suspect the same had I
not spoken to my friend, who runs Gilda’s Club in Newark, a cancer-survivor’s
help network, who told me other people have used this same method and come up
with a cure.
But a cure? After only a few weeks? That seems a little farfetched.
But the whole affair seems to have hit her hard to the point
where she is posting personal information on her Facebook and other pages, so
over the top for the normally secretive person she is.
The tone of her posting is that of a true believer – someone
who has adopted a new religion completely and unquestioning, just as she seemed
to adopt all RR’s bullshit (at least for a while), suggesting perhaps that at
times, she is gullible, and tends to believe things about other people until
the bubble breaks and she gets crushed, turning bitter.
In this case, she laid out her life over the previous two
years, how she kept coming up with bad pap smears and negative other medical
tests, a cone biopsy, and many months of waiting out the results.
Now, suddenly, the burden of all that has been lifted from
her shoulders and she is sharing the good news.
In the surgery she underwent in July the doctors expected to
remove enough to have disabled her ability to have children, But as it turned
out, they needed to remove less than originally anticipated, and she tested
negative for the cancer.
There was no mention as to whether she would be able to have
children in the future.
She credits the cure to her diving headlong into this new
not-too-sexy nutritional program between when she received the diagnosis in May
and when she went to surgery in July.
She said when she first embarked on this life-saving journey,
she gave up many things, she did not later miss (except for the cheese and
crackers).
With the help of her mother and others, she took up the
routine that might have been seen as torture to others, and she claims after
two months, this resulted in a magical cure.
Now, like all good missionaries, she intends to spread the
word.
She apparently tried to convince our former temporary boss
about it, just prior to his going into chemo to fight the cancer he has.
But as pointed out pervious to this, his wife talked sense
into him, and he decided to follow the more traditional route for his cure.
When I first heard about the cancer, I wondered if the whole
thing was fake, mistakenly thinking maybe she was looking for the same
attention our former temporary boss got when he announced his diagnosis.
GA, the intrepid hometown blogger, assured me this wasn’t
the case, although apparently, our temporary boss apparently originally thought
not to get traditional treatment, based on something our poet said to him.
His wife intervened and he reversed himself.
The most alarming thing about the whole situation is just
how much private information the normally reserved poet revealed, when she
previously issued information on a need to know basis, person to person, rarely
a public announcement.
And yet, here she broadcast the information along with her
plans to deal with it, raising some questions as to why?
Maybe GA was right in that word had already gotten out in
Hometown, and this was her way of heading it off, by telling everybody she was
fighting back against the dread disease.
Her posts already sound like an infomercial, the kind of advertisement
that is supposed to come off as a legitimate story but has all the feel of a
sales pitch.
All this started about the same time our temporary boss made
his announcement, though at first, it wasn’t anything concrete. One post said
she had given up smoking. Another post showed a coffee pot with the tag line: “but
not for drinking.” Still, another post showed her pouring the contents of a
wine bottle down the kitchen sink.
Then, we get several photos that reportedly show her after
some sort of surgery, some of her hand where the IV was inserted, and numerous
photos of the food processor her mother gave her for her birthday. One photo
shows her with plants in the front seat of a new SUV (with no indication to
whom the vehicle belongs, and another photo of her step father sharing one of
his famous dinners (making me wonder if he also served coffee with it.)
The jar poem from about a month ago along with more recent
photos of jars indicates her recent dedication to her new diet.
Living up to that old Shakespeare quote “I think he protests
too much,” makes me wonder how real all this is, even though I’m scared that her
cancer might be as real as our former temporary boss’.
With so few posts talking specifically about her condition,
it is hard to tell – though again, as I have indicated earlier, her final announcement
came on the same weekend as our former temporary boss’ and had it not been for
GA, saying there is some real disease, I might have suspected a scam – only who
in the world would claim to have cancer when they don’t. The feeling I got,
however, is that she is in an absolute panic, afraid for her life – despite all
those nights poised on her roof top debating whether or not to jump. She
clearly wants to stay alive.
Although I have not caught our owner snooping into my
computers recently, I still believe he is trying to pin me down -- as is our
former temporary boss -- to see just who I am talking to
whether it is GA the infamous Hoboken blogger or what I
might be posting about our poet
I am not stupid even at those times when I'm in a deep fog
I have been around technology since the 1980s and know
enough to distrust it
Although you can't always control the electronic trail you
leave you can minimize what information there is
Anything sensitive anything about our poet for instance is
handwritten.
As far as my communications with ga they are very limited
and not electronic.
the few phone calls I have are done on the cell phone
outside the office never using the office phone never using email and never
posting anything online that might be used against me
this said I have made a few mistakes such as that idiotic
move of posting her rooftop photo and worse my ignorance in posting the photo
from her former job and upstate New York with I had not intended
almost all of my poetry and journal stuff about her
including this are hand written and in many cases thought out while driving to
and from the auxiliary office stopping to jot down in my notebook at traffic
lights or if there is a particular moment of inspiration (ha ha) I pull over to
the curb
these pages have become a kind of therapy for me jotting
down my feelings and what I think is going on even when I later fine that what
I first thought was an error
in truth I know very little even after more than a year of
reading poetry and such and so these pages become a kind of exploration into
what I don't know
that said the owner and our former temporary laws are
apparently still on the hunt for clues that do not exist in any computer or on
the Internet and if they check out my blog it is full of innuendo but very
little information
I'm even wary of our poet and what she might read into some
of my more legitimate poems and so I post old poems sometimes or completely go
off subject just to make it clear that there are other writing going on besides
about her
but in truth she is fascinating and perhaps the most
fascinating person I have met since Peggy back in the late 1980s and her poetry
and music is so intriguing, I can't resist it's like peanuts once you've had
one you keep wanting for more
of course, a former temporary boss is so heavy handed in his
exploration of where I am or what I'm doing I almost find it funny a kind of
sideshow that keeps me entertained even though it is extremely risky playing
games with him he has an agenda which it's nothing to do with work but probably
everything to do with our poet
again, this is a supposition and I have no actual fact of
what his motives are or even my owners and so I just play this cat and mouse
game with everybody trying to stay under the radar in order not to be
intimidated or worse fired.
everything of course is twisted up into local politics so
the fact that the owners motives may have nothing to do with her even when I
suspect they might and he needs to support a winning side in hometown in order
to keep his ad revenues up and so any perception that I am somehow working with
his political enemies makes me dangerous and vulnerable when in fact I am
working for no One
unfortunately, I am a curious cat and all curious cats tend
to get themselves in trouble curiosity dragging them into the mix this is
always been my curse and it is my curiosity about her the poet that dragged me
into the middle of this besides other factors such as my own basic motions my
age and other things
but truth be told and despite what my owner and our former
temporary boss may think I have kept my distance deliberately maybe a clever
and elusive as one of her poems put it but remote and despite the fact that I
suspect she thinks I'm still there in the mix I'm not everything has to be from
a distance and always will be
this is not to say that I don't look forward to each of her
new posting and well over them when they come out I do and though I
infrequently check her Facebook page I do from time to time a kind of progress
report to see where things are at but that's the limit and whatever the owner
thinks or are temporary boss that's the my rules of engagement
I am aware of a Time when she will stop posting
poetry and then my only real access to what is going on will be gone and that
is the way of life as George Harrison says, and I often quote All things must pass.
Technically Indian summer doesn't come until after the first freeze.
But we had a deep chill and then near 90 over the last few days. So, this may well have been Indian summer as a new string of showers brings us into the cold. -- not yet snow like that Halloween in 2011 when still leaf laden trees in our back yard cracked and fell leaving a brutal landscape I could not clear till the following spring -- eye surgery leaving me half blind and prohibited from any heavy labor.
it was a vulnerable time, too, partly because I had to travel to surgery alone in the back of a bumpy cab which got lost on the way to the hospital.
I held the resentment against my wife as deeply into spring as the broken tree limbs.
The death of Uncle Pete in early 2012 added to this sense of my mortality and perhaps made me vulnerable to what later happened.
I was 59 going into 60, an age I always thought of as old and suddenly someone admired me, and I went ahead over heels.
Now, after other surgeries associated with old age some of those feelings still linger in me --. the good and bad times, the intensely positive and equally negative things I did or said or thought.
Time has caught up with me, each new decade bringing me closer to that shore for a sailing from which there is no return. I feel my mortality even more actually now as I did then and the chill after Indian summer only makes my bones hurt more, envisioning the black sails of that ship destined to take me away.
She went to the park again yesterday, and most likely, by herself,
although it always difficult to nail something down when she posts a photo of
herself on Facebook.
She could be using a timer to take a picture of herself or
has someone else taking of her.
Nearly all the photos I have seen of her over the last year
have been self portraits -- such as the one she recently posted in her mother’s
kitchen (I surmise that it was her mother’s kitchen since her brother made some
comment under the posting in that regard.)
Outdoors, however, is a mixed bag, such as the one taken of
her eating lunch (most likely from a food truck) while sitting on some rocks (the
background showing a number of residential buildings, none of which I recognize
from around here, although she could be anywhere with anybody, and I’d have no
clue from my vantage point – merely looking at what she posts.)
Work photos are different in that she is often depicted in a
group.
Her most recent two photos, however, clearly show her in a
local park, needing no view of the New York Skyline to recognize which park.
This all seems odd to be that she would be all by herself on
a weekend, perhaps defying my jealousy when I envision her constantly being
with one of her admirers.
She’s changed her hair style, long, jet black with bangs
which make her look younger and incredibly innocent.
She turns 35 this week.
The outdoors highlights her makeup more and does not emphasize
her more attractive features such as her amazing eyes.
But none of these posts are accidental, and I suspect each
photo is a message to someone, perhaps to her late lover with the implication, “See,
what you’ve given up.”Although some
photos seem to be part of self-promotion, and increase the sense that she feels
isolated.
This sense of loneliness seems to support the theme of her recent
poems
I am, of course, puzzled by why she’s not gone farther than
she has, since she has so much talent.
But that is one of the great mysteries of the universe.
