In Cases Like This

In Cases Like This

"It's cases like this that remind firearm owners about the importance of gun safety and making sure their children understand they should never touch firearms without their parents' permission."

The case referenced (Seattle Times, Oct. 26) is that of a four-year-old boy (not in Seattle but in Kitsap County) accidentally shooting his mother with a shotgun. Yes, I said four - not fourteen, but four. 

How could a four-year-old even hold a shotgun, you might wonder? Well, he wasn't holding it. And it wasn't loaded when he walked up to it. This little boy placed a round of live ammunition in the gun, whose bolt was already "pulled back and locked open" while it lay on his parents bed, ostensibly "under a blanket." 

The boy "slipped a shell" into the gun and "pulled the trigger." 

How did he come to have a shell? According to the police: "the boy's 25-year-old father had, at some point, given his son a shell to handle because he was curious about firearms and ammunition."

Really? He was curious? Well, it's good for children to be curious, isn't it? That's how they learn. And we should encourage healthy curiosity. Most of us don't encourage it by giving children live ammo to play with, or maybe that's just me - and everyone I know. To be clear, my former husband and his family were hunters. His was a lifetime NRA hunting family. I'm a vegetarian pacifist, but I really do believe the best we all can do is to live according to our own conscience. And I lived with it because my in-laws were also conscientious and clear about gun safety. My children's father kept his guns locked in cases, not lying around, and ammunition was locked in a separate case from the guns.  

The Sheriff's Office spokesman was quoted in the Seattle Times article as saying no arrests are expected but that if prosecutors decide to file charges it would be "something along the lines of negligence." He noted that the family "has been pretty shaken up by the incident." 

I'm writing with a lot of italics in this piece because what struck me as I read the Seattle Times article was that it matters very much how we say things. How we say things reflects a great deal about how we live and how we treat one another, how we take or don't take responsibility for our actions. And here we have the authorities who are charged with protecting us all giving this Dad a pass in a situation where he clearly and obviously was not only negligent but put his family in harm's way. The authorities might well say they have not given him a pass, that they are taking all appropriate action.  I hope that is true, but their words are not reassuring in this regard. 

At the time the child shot the gun the father was not at home. I imagine that the father did not intend the child to do what he did, but he made it terribly easy for the child to do. Because it's hard to wrap one’s brain around this, I repeat: the gun was on the bed, the child had his live ammo which Daddy had forgotten that he gave him, the bolt was pulled back and locked open. 

"All the kid did was drop the shell in the chamber, touch the bolt release and pull the trigger," the Sheriff's spokesman said. "He had probably seen his dad do it a hundred times."

Fortunately for everyone involved in this case there was a chair between the gun and the mother and the chair took a lot of the impact. The pellet wounds were less severe because of that and she was treated and released from the hospital.

That quote at the top of this page? It's from Dave Workman, who the Seattle Times says is the editor of Gun Week and a nationally recognized firearms authority. Experts are doing such a great job of guiding gun owners about safety issues, aren't they? 

In case you're worried about the little family affected this time, to recap: the 23-year-old mother has pellet wounds in her back, the father is, according to the Sheriff's office and the newspaper's headline, "kicking himself" and I'm guessing the little four-year-old boy is scarred for life. In cases like this, though, that's to be expected. 

Anonymity and Intent

Why be anonymous? I don't get it. I understand the value of stealth, as a friend puts it. He enjoys visiting cities because he can move about in them, among all those people, but still retain his privacy because no one knows him. For instance, he can sit in a coffee shop, undisturbed.

Here's another iteration of anonymity. Someone left an anonymous comment on my blog. It was a useful comment, factual in content and helpful to me because it addressed an error I made. I had relied on a memory which proved faulty and am glad to have the misinformation corrected.

The thing about the written word is that we cannot always catch the tone or subtext of it. However, we often do have an idea of tone and subtext when we know the person whose words we are reading.

In this case the correction seemed to have some attitude embedded. I could almost hear the words "you idiot" attached to the end of each phrase, which may or may  not be an accurate interpretation of tone.

I'm already mortified when I realize I've said something that's not accurate. And my friends know that I'm quick to own my mistakes, so it's difficult to imagine a friend commenting anonymously. Yet in this case it's most likely to be one of my Facebook friends who left the comment as it came very soon after I posted the blog to my Facebook page - odder still, as we are not anonymous on Facebook. 

In any case, it's okay to be a smart ass. Some of my best friends are smart asses. But I take their criticism better when I'm looking them in the eye. And as I said, I could be misreading the intent because of the fact that the writer didn't identify himself.

Critical comments are helpful to me, as this one was, and I do appreciate them. Some things are hard to say, to be sure. But this comment should not have been hard for anyone who knows me to say publicly or privately. 

I've changed the blog so it only accepts comments from people with names. I've never sent an anonymous letter to the editor, though sometimes that might have felt the safer thing to do. An anonymous comment on a personal blog? If the intent is good, what's the anonymity about? If the intent was to embarrass or shame, be honest enough to own it.

Deciding

Summer of 2001 I moved to PT. I didn't know anyone in the town, just my son's future in-laws who live about 20 minutes out. The job of unpacking, moving too much stuff into a smaller house, figuring out how to make home alone in a new place, was exciting and daunting. One evening as I stood in the garage breaking down boxes, the blush of sunset in the sky got my attention. I threw down the box-cutter, closed the door and started walking the mile and a half to North Beach.

I was just in time to walk down to the water and watch the sun set over Vancouver Island. There I stood, shivering, since I hadn't yet learned how chilly it is at the beach in the evening. Soon as the sun set, I turned to start the walk home, chanting silently "sweater, sweater, sweater. Next time: sweater sweater sweater" and hugging my goose-fleshed arms.

There was an enigmatic-looking man standing at the edge of the beach and as I passed he said "Don't you think it's a little declasse to leave 15 seconds after the sun sets?" Smiling, I shook his hand and we introduced ourselves. Small town. He knew I was new. I acknowledged that I was. Then he said this: Well, you're going to have to decide what kind of artist you are, since you live in Port Townsend now. I thought for a second and said "I'm a writer. Nice to meet you." Then I refused his offer of a ride and set off walking home.

As I walked, I thought about what I'd said. I'm a writer. I thought of how Dr. Emmel had encouraged her writing students to do that. "Do you write every day? Then own it."  I am a singer, a photographer, an actor, too. But the thing I can't not do is write. The fact that I haven't sent anything out to publishers feels delegitimizing, but I keep at it. I think of Mary Oliver writing for 25 years, seriously, before trying to get published. Patience. I keep at it, working at a daily practice.

Variety of experience certainly gives a person more to write about. It's fine to have other interests. But now, nine years after that evening on the beach, I'm still not sending stuff out and I feel more than a little foolish. The business of making myself the best I can be is unfinished at a time when the life I have ahead of me is scarily shorter. I am feeling the pinch of time.

But I do remember, that one day when a stranger on the beach asked me to choose, I did. What I have to do now is get up every day, choose again, and do what needs to be done.

Another Day in Paradise

Walking with Shadow at the end of a busy day  - just a quick spin around the dirt path behind the school and a walk through the fairgrounds was my plan. But right away we came across an off-leash dog, Stormy by name, sweet by nature. I unhooked Shadow and the two trotted towards one another, did a bit of circling and sniffing, then continued on to greet each others' women. The other gal doesn't live in the neighborhood year-round but shows up in summer to stay at her sister's for a while. Delighted to see Shadow, she seemed amazed at how fit the dog is.  "She's not even limping anymore!"  This past year of consistent daily walks, increasing our distance, has been good for us both. Shadow trotted off, signaling time to continue our walk, and I caught up and leashed her. Another perfect afternoon was passing too quickly.

Then we were walking through the fields at the fairgrounds, another woman walking towards us. She was carrying a couple of canvas shopping bags in one hand and what looked like an empty glass pie dish in the other. I recognized her as a local artist who I've met a few times and called out:

"Foraging for pie?"
"What?" she queried back.
"Are you foraging for pie? Because I don't think you'll find any out here - doesn't hurt to try."
"Whaaaaaaat?" she said, thoroughly puzzled.
"Oh!" said I, "that's not a pie plate after all. Sorry - I was being silly."
"Wondered what you knew," she said "because I was just having pie, but no, this dish had poppyseed cake in it."

She offered Shadow the dish to lick, saying "Now I won't have to wash it." She said she'd just been at her friend's memorial service and that it was a very good one. Given the direction she was coming from, I asked if it was for Etta. Yes, it was.

Etta is one of the first people I met here. She had a flower farm next to the fairgrounds, a beautiful place. She made bouquets and put them out at the end of her drive in canning jars on a table with an umbrella to shade them. She kept a small, slightly rusted tin there and a sign saying "Bouquets $6." You could put the money in the tin, or there was paper and a pencil if you needed to leave an IOU. Her bouquets were beautiful - sweet peas in spring, then peonies, then a grand variety of blooms and colors through the season. We walked past often to look or to buy.

I'd first met Etta when my son's wedding was drawing near and his future mother-in-law didn't have enough blue flowers in her garden for the arrangements she wanted to make. I walked down her dirt driveway, knocked on her door and asked Etta if she would have many blue flowers in August. She said that she would and, true enough, sold us two big white buckets-full on the wedding day and at a reasonable price, too. Somewhere I have a photo I took of her Gypsy Wagon out by the flower field where I found her that day when I went to pick up the flowers. She told me she kept it there for sleeping in summer.

From time to time after that I'd see her walk across San Juan Ave. to Admiralty Ave. to get a horse she had pastured there. I was sad when I heard this lively woman had died of cancer. But today I learned from her friend that she'd done well at dying. She'd taken charge of how she wanted it to go and her family and friends had been there to help and support her.

Still, this woman and I agreed, it's hard to lose one's contemporaries. We all know we will lose our parents and that's a tough thing. But we don't think about our friends dying. And when they do (as I learned a few years ago when two of my dear ones died in a month) it's a particular kind of loss. Our closest friends know all our secrets and we theirs.  And though Etta and I were not close, it comforted me to hear that she'd gone as well as she could and that her friends were holding the memory of her close.

It's not a half-bad thing when even strangers you touch remember you well. Just yesterday I'd remembered a woman named Judy, stopped at the corner of Admiralty a few years back when I met her on my way to the beach. Her bicycle lay on the ground, helmet still on her head, as she picked and ate thimbleberries. Picked isn't the right word. She, in fact, introduced me to thimbleberries, which I had never heard of, and showed me how they will fall into your hand with almost no encouragement when they're ripe. She's gone now, too, but for memories.

What happened there in the field today, though, was that this other woman and I talked about how much we love living here, how we are steeped in beauty and are always reminding ourselves how lucky we are to be  here. Then she pointed and asked me was that an eagle floating on an updraft above us. It was indeed and we watched it for some time.

Then, as we parted the woman asked me to remind her who I am, how we know each other.

I thought for a second, then remembered.

"I met you first, several years ago, at a Verbal Tease, those monthly readings that used to happen Uptown. You read a piece about how you had lived on a boat and the practical difficulties of that and I liked your work a lot. Also, you stopped one day when I was walking in the rain, to see if I needed a ride. That was awfully nice of you, but I was nearly home and said no thanks."

She smiled and we hugged and went on our way in opposite directions, both carrying and riding the ebb and flow of life in a small town.

Weeding Thoughts, Weeding Words

I'm supposed to be in the garden right now. Yesterday evening I mowed, so the weeds are far more noticeable. And I want to be out there working among the pink tulips, blue wood hyacinth, the blushing rhody, the budding lilacs. I'm a pretty hardy gal but I do not weed in a chilly rain - a warm misty rain, yes - but not this.

So instead, I am writing.  Maybe I should be grateful for the rain since I've just finished a draft of my third poem in two days. The pages of notes I have to write from, notes scribbled while traveling or in church on Sunday morning, to remind me of some thread that seems to be calling for examination and expression, remain untouched. The hands keep typing, though, which feels great.

The animals wonder why our breakfast is delayed and they're starting to prick my leg to nudge me along, but this is what I want to be doing - writing. When the day dawned chilly and wet, Plan B should have been: pay the bills, which have been waiting since last week. But my mind keeps weaving thoughts so I keep writing.

Today I was editing yesterday's work when an ordinary moment, something from about 13 years ago slipped into my head again to haunt me. Now that seems an oxymoron to  me: ordinary/haunting. But, though it's ordinary, it's an image that often comes to mind. Probably because it was sweet, unexpected, made me feel loved. And I crave that a lot - feeling loved. I crave romance; want to be wanted. Who doesn't? But why, of all the experiences in my past, does this one little moment keep coming to mind?

It wasn't a moment that signified the ultimate satisfaction of my wish to be desired and loved. It was an early moment in a two-year love affair, which ultimately left me sad and disappointed. But it was a sweet moment, a real moment. So I began with that and wondered why an ordinary moment can mean so much after years have passed. Then I thought of two more moments, not of the same ilk, but each their own. In the poem I describe each of the three moments. I reflect on each. And there it stops, at six three-line stanzas.

I read it over and wonder if the poem is whole. Is it saying anything? That final writer's question: so what? I don't know yet. It takes time between a draft and knowing if the work is meaningful.

At this particular moment, I think it's time to be grateful and remind myself that I'm weeding and cultivating one thing or another, rain or shine, inside or out...and that even poets need to pay the bills.

The Lucy Chronicles. The Lost Blog.

I found this in my string of copied blog articles on my desktop and don't see it posted on either of my blogs, so for the record, this was written between Oct. 15 and Dec. 16, 2009 the day Lucy died.

Me, Lucy and the sometimes-miracle of steroids

As I wrestle Lucy out from under the bed again, it hits me. She feels good on this drug. A year and a half ago I was ordered to take prednisone for three months because, a. the medical people I turned to for help thought it was the cure for what might ail me and b. when it became obvious that wasn’t the cure, they decided to keep me on it anyway because I was in pain and they thought it might help. It didn’t. I felt like crap. I was dull witted (it later turned out that could have been from B vitamin deficiencies), I was not physically relieved and I began to have the weight gain associated with prednisone use. Now Lucy, a cat, is having all the relief that I did not experience from the drug.

She had an accident in June, most certainly took a tumble in one of her Evil Kneivel style leaps, broke off a fang and split her lower jaw. She got repaired and recovered. For three weeks early in September I noticed her nose running again (the symptom that got us to the doc in June) and I started taking her in to find out what was wrong and get her some help. We saw two vets, in the same office, six times in less than two weeks. The first guy thought our regular vet had maybe missed a piece of tooth in surgery in June and it was infecting her jaw and sinus. The original vet didn’t think so but gave us antibiotics and said everything seemed okay. I persisted in returning because I have known and lived with this cat virtually every day of her now 16 years and I knew something was wrong. We had to find the reason for this recurring infection and treat her.

But no one was getting the urgency of the problem. I tried desperately to describe her struggle to swallow with all the mucous draining down her throat and the bare fact that breathing was becoming a constant struggle for her. Finally I took one of her quarter tablet antibiotics with me and asked the tech to please give her the pill so they could see for themselves how she reacted while trying to swallow. Then maybe they’d get why she was losing weight. I heard Lucy choking in the exam room. The tech stepped out a minute later and asked if they could do xrays. “Yes, please,” I said. Then the vet called me in, deeply sobered and said: “There’s a golf ball sized growth behind her heart, and two smaller ones in front, possibly on the lungs. I have to have a radiologist read it.” He gave her a steroid shot and by that night she was her old happy self, eating a bit and wanting love and attention. That was a Monday.  The report confirmed there was no hope, although specifics could only be learned through surgery and neither of us thought that was a good idea with a 16-year-old cat, especially given that the cancer was so close to her heart. He said to bring her the next day for a super steroid shot that would carry her 1-4 weeks and we would just work to keep her from suffering.

Lucy and I struggled through that night, me sure that each breath might be her last and at some point hoping it would be so she would not suffer anymore. Obviously, Monday’s  steroid shot had worn off. At one point she jumped down from the bed and continued gasping for breath under it. I fell apart, sobbing. Lucy jumped back onto the bed and came next to me again. So many times in my life I have seen cats do that, come to my side when I am crying or sick. I toughened up for her sake and just kept repeating “I’m sorry dear, we’ll get some help as soon as the vet is open.” And I called at 7:30 and asked what was the earliest time one of the offices would open so I could go in, warning them that we were not coming for the steroid shot because I did not want to see her struggling for breath again through another night when that shot wore off. By the time we got to the office I was not sure I should go through with it. Tony let me in and said he’d changed his mind about the shot and would instead give me a good supply of amoxicillin with prednisone in it and I could give that to her twice a day to keep her comfortable. This seemed a good idea. It took until night for her breathing to normalize again after another prednisone shot and I was ready with the pink liquid to keep her levels up so she would not be in distress.

Lucy’s amoxicillin/prednisone cocktail stopped working entirely after about a week. I was, in fact, taking her in to have her put to sleep when the vet remembered the stronger steroid shot (depo something) and that gave her a miracle week of being herself again. However, a week later another depo shot seemed to have no effect at all. That was Thursday a week ago. Last Monday I called and he suggested still another of the depo shots and this time, by Tuesday night, she was feeling better and we’ve had a whole week of comfort and cuddling.

This morning the nose is running again, the sure sign of another downward slide. I think we’ll just keep getting the depo shots until the cancer takes her or the shots no longer give her relief. I’m so grateful to be able to keep her comfortable and she seems to have adjusted to the little intrusions of weekly vet visits and me wiping her nose. She didn’t even run off this morning after I did that. I’m grateful, too, quite selfishly, for this extra time with her feeling well. I was not in a great frame of mind to accept another loss through death. Sharing these days with her, knowing where we’re headed, is helping me work towards acceptance.

Lucy and I have had lots of hours of petting and reading to her on the bed. I can’t know if I’ve got her for an hour more, a day, a week, a month, or six months. I believe she will die sooner rather than later and I remind myself this is about her, not me.

Born feral, Lucy has always been alert and watchful. Yet she’s a gentle, graceful companion who often pricks my skin, ever so lightly, to ask for petting. When I first come to bed she marches around me in circles, sometimes circling the whole body, sometimes just my head, crossing my chest each go ‘round. If I turn over, and boy do I all night long, she adjusts. She generally cuddles into some curve around my hips but lately has nestled a little higher near my chest. Remember that American Indian saying “It’s a good day to die”? Well, maybe so. But it seems to me that each day is another good day to cuddle with Lucy.

Some writers have a muse. I have a mess.

Sometimes when I start a new poem it feels so chaotic that after I sketch the ideas onto paper my head hurts. It's as if I birthed it, physically pulled each line out of my brain. There is no energy left for excitement about the birth. It's more like a crazy, messy conception, the aftermath of an unforeseen passion seeking honest expression, demanding it, refusing to be denied. The wildness of this process, followed by the sudden relief of having begun it, leaves me spent. Yeah, I see that this is all a terrible sex metaphor. Sans the cigarette. Anyway, when a poem begins that way, I have to put it away for a while. When I pick it up again, most often I'm surprised at what's there. Sometimes I barely remember it.  A few times I really have not recognized my own words. This has even happened with what I thought was a finished piece of prose. More than once in my life a teacher read my work aloud in class and I didn't know it was mine. But other times, with these crazy obsessively scribbled notes, it's like finding an old friend and being happy to see the familiar face. And then I'm ready to get to work on it.

I first wrote this note on the back of a page I started a new poem on a week ago. I still cannot go into the paragraphs and lines that are meant to become a poem and see what's there to shape. Just now when I turned the page over and glanced at it, the second I remembered what it was about I had to turn away.

So instead I wrote two new poems today. The first was exploring joy, love and gratitude in a complicated relationship. The second poem was the shadow side of the first. The part I'd left out. Because I have a tendency to do that: to look on the bright side and make that so important that I don't have to see the shadow for a while. But ultimately the shadow will be seen. By me at least. I usually can't look away for very long.

For now I'm calling it a day. Two poems. One with a good start; one out of too much pain to be good yet. And a third, raw still, which I can't look look at for now. And that one is the one - big surprise - that has the most potential. Of that I am certain.