Still Here

Step by step and breath and by breath

It’s a trail of doubt.

-       Danny Schmidt, Know Thy Place

Stubbornness is underrated as a survival skill. I was too stubborn to die recently. I don’t want to die here. I may not know my place, but I know this isn't it.

I’ve always been better at knowing what my place is not. I know it by heart, but also by seasonal allergies to pollen-producing flowers that know So Cal’s climate is not their place. Such floras however, are very comfortable after 20 inches of winter rain here in this corner of Zone 9. The pollen on the skylight is thicker than ash from a nearby wildfire. It looks like yellow snow. My nose hasn’t stopped running since things started blooming.

Examples: Forsythia that I haven’t seen since I was in my 20s. Lilacs so profuse that people trim them with hedge clippers to keep the blooms from pulling the branches into sidewalks. The plum and cherry trees lining the streets leave puddles of lovely pink and white snow blowing in the curbs. Camellias drop their rusty fist-sized flowers that gradually dry and turn a pink-brown color to complement the puddles of cherry blossoms. My flowering quince bloomed itself out before I could cut any blooms. I think that’s dogwood blooming now. There is lily of the valley beneath my font porch. M’s red azaleas are shouting down the softer pink ones. I saw a ceanothus  so covered with blooms that I barely recognized it, having only seen thirsty southern-Californian relatives struggling to be a pale imitation of a syringa.

Lilacs remind me of K who would buy me a bunch every March from up the mountain in Alpine. In my opinion, every perfume ever made from lilacs has failed. Even the essential oil is too sweet and cloying. But the fragrance of a real lilac is something that evokes the purest innocence of childhood. I have no doubt that the first time I smelled a lilac, it was in the hand of my mother and it smelled like love.

I’m going to another place. I’m going sometime in the next two or three months. I’m reinventing myself. Again. 

Before I leave here, I’m having another heart ablation, a few expensive microdermabrasion treatments from an aesthetician, and I’m stocking up on my medications in preparation for yet another adventure in switching health insurance which is related to but slightly more important than finding another health care provider and totally more intimidating. I’ll  also get another haircut before I leave this hip urban town.

I ran out of an important prescription for a few days but finally managed to set up a mail order prescription plan that enables me to never again enter the doors of the Rite Aid down the street where it took an average – not hyperbole: a freaking AVERAGE  - of 3 trips to the pharmacy to refill each of my five prescriptions. That means for the one time I got a prescription on the first try, I gave up on another one after the 4th try. A more incompetent pharmacy would be hard to find, even with my luck. When I couldn’t get my blood-thinning stroke-preventing meds recently (4 tries), I went home and contacted my prescription plan provider and they walked me through the mail order enrollment process. It took one 30 minute call to be saved from Rite Aid and certain death by another stroke.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying the smell of fresh lilacs picked from the bush in the tiny communal garden between my house and the mailbox. I have to go outside and plant two tiny mail-order lilacs in the front yard.  Then I will get mail and pick fresh lilacs and smell them while I drink my decaf latte and have homemade corn chowder for lunch.

Then, when the Spring flowers are done, I will move to a new latitude and longitude.  I can always come back next Spring. I’ll bring Benadryl and stock up on legal medications while I’m in town. Maybe get a haircut.

Expect Surprise

But I'm here to tell you this


That the sky is yours to kiss


So go and lift your lips and raise your eyes 


And expect surprise

And know thy place, and know thy part 


Know it by name, know it by face, and know it by heart 


And don't look down, cause that's all been seen 


Step by step and breath by breath 


It's a trail of dreams

-       Danny Schmidt, Know Thy Place

You don’t have to pretend to be one thing when you’re another. Even if they ask, nobody hears what you really say. Me too. Hell, I often don’t hear what I say to myself, so how can I listen to you?

“I couldn’t be sorrier, I can’t tell you how sorry I am” can mean I can’t tell you this but I’m not sorry at all. “It doesn’t get any better than this” can mean it only gets worse from here. “Never better” in response to how are you can mean never any better. When talking about how much you care about your lover, “Every breath you take” imparts the sour whiff of a stalker.

I know someone who died of colon cancer – never able to get rid of poison that was killing her, keeping it locked tight inside. I knew somebody who died of heart failure – from a broken heart. I knew someone who died of kidney cancer – he was able to piss his poison out on his loved ones until he wasn’t. The last year of his life his poison had no place to go. He spent a year emptying a catheter until he couldn’t. His loved one had to empty his bloody catheter for him. I have decided that dying of anger is a total pain in the neck.

So, while telling someone to expect surprise may be intended as an affirmation, a hope of better things to come unexpectedly, don’t forget the dark shadow of unpleasant surprise that has nothing pleasant about it. You might as well say expect disappointment, betrayal, and a slow, painful and undignified death because they are at least as likely as winning the lottery.

Fortunately, platitudes suffice in most of our dealings with each other. Which is just as well when or if you think of it because we are each so wrapped up in our own place following the trail of our own private dreams. A wise woman recently told me, “Fucking renarration, man. It messes us all up.” A.E. Houseman, that poetic pessimist, wrote:

The thoughts of others

Were light and fleeting

Like lovers meeting

Or luck or fame.

My thoughts were of trouble

And mine were steady

So I was ready

When trouble came.

Expect surprise, everyone. If you don’t like it, just re-pave the trail of your dreams.