La Pájaro: Puts the Bird in Birdie

Shattered

A young man I know fell off an outcropping of granite this summer, fell eight vertical feet, fell into a six-week land of cast and crutch and exotic metal pins. Shattered tibia. Surgery. June plans as broken, as painful as his swollen skin. I wanted to sign his cast, the blue sheath that hid the parallel scars, but he refused my pen.

"I don't want any signatures. I just want everyone to leave me alone."

I watched him hustle down my street, good leg out first, gimpy foot behind, dragging, dragging, rubber crutch-tip pressed into uneven brick, blue cast wrap coated with New Mexican clay, his armpits red with fury.

I told my dad about the man, the dirty cast, the way the sun refused to melt his disappointment. I couldn't read my dad's expression. He sat on my desk, in a five-pound box of unsifted crematorium dust.

"Dad."

I sighed, loud and low. My dog shifted her weight from one side to the next with a hollow thump. Her fur vibrated against the wood floor, echoed the song she expelled with one breath, another. 

"Dad. C'mon. Gimme a sign. I just need one sign. One stupid sign. C'mon."

My dad didn't budge. His remains ignored me, ignored my exhaustion, my fingers stiff with forgotten words. He didn't need me, my pleas, my little-girl-lost frown. He sat on the edge of a galactic ocean, his body mingled with beach, with stardust, his mind so astral, so shattered, that any response he gave flew between the atoms of my heart, the quark and string that signaled it to continue, continue, beat, beat, continue.

The young man sat on his front porch, his bad leg extended, as my youngest son and I walked to the cemetery. The cast looked wary, heavy with dirt and anger. He didn't wave as Marty rose his hand in friendship, didn't move. I thought I heard a grunt, the shattered rail of ache against lung.

"It's too hot, Mom."

Marty lifted his baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead. We'd walked two miles, almost three. The cemetery stood just out of reach.

"We're almost there, honey. I've never seen it. C'mon. Have something to drink."

I held out a full bottle of water. My dad's ashes coughed. I felt it, three miles from my desk, felt him assemble and decay. Marty lurched forward, a robot on Mars, tiny robot with bio-skin near meltdown. He sipped.

The cemetery stole my heat, my fatigue. It rolled an acre, two, fifty, fifty acres of homegrown tobacco pain, of buried man, woman, and child. Marty chased a prairie dog, his robot battery satiated, aware. He didn't notice my surprise, didn't know the cemetery didn't look like a cemetery. I lost him to the pinon, to the prairie dog, the sky of stillness and fire. I didn't worry.

The plots didn't lay in elegant rows. They jockeyed for position, each facing the East, facing the rising morning Christ. Tiny iron windmills. Hand-carved river rock. Burned and etched slabs of pine. Dolls. Rosaries. Plastic Marys with deliberately tilted heads. A handmade garden of death, only a few granite headstones in sea of a thousand, only a few memorials of Rich Person Passing.

I knelt to consider a baby's grave.

Our little angel
Maria Romero
9 Days Old
Died June 11, 1987
Rest in Peace

The baby rustled beneath an uneven circle of hand-placed rocks. She danced with my dad, with my heart, with my boy chasing rodent, with the hardened heart of the blue cast owner. I felt my neurons move to catch the wave, the sign, the ink of fury rejected from surface, my surface, my surface of fatigue and sweat. My surface of sweat, overworked sweat. Marty lept into my view, twisted in joy, in prairie dog joy. I couldn't stop the tears.

At yesterday morning's flea market I added a smiley face in Sharpie black to the exposed skin of a scarred leg. The young man's frown shattered. He smiled, the first time in six weeks I saw teeth, saw his open future. My dog smiled too, her haunches spread against dry clay, in her vibrating fur blanket. My dad didn't smile, but the dead don't grin.

********

You can read the little writing lesson that goes along with this story at BlogHer.

Anyone sell books online?

I have an extensive collection of buddhist and gnostic books - many of them quite rare, some of them signed. Other than my authentic (and haunted!) antique pirate chest, they are the only things of value I own. I would like to sell part of my collection. I am wondering if anyone sells books online, perhaps through Amazon or eBay? What is the best venue for selling rare and/or fine books? Should I consider consignment in a knowledgeable store? I really have no clue.

Just to give you an idea of some of the books I would like to sell:

Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, by W.Y. Evans-Wentz. Signed by the author with a personal inscription to a Miss Elsie Allbright, 1958. In excellent, perfect condition with dust jacket and full-color plates.

The Flower Ornament Scripture, translated from the Chinese by Thomas Cleary, three volume set. All volumes have dust jackets and are in excellent condition. Shambhala, 1984.

Giordano Bruno, His Life and Thought, with annotated translation of his work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, by Dorothea Waley Singer. Henry Shuman, Inc. 1950. Hardcover with dust jacket, excellent condition.

The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged, both volumes, by Waite. Samuel Weiser, Inc. 1973. Hardcover. Very Good (no dog ears, solid spine and cover) condition, but no dust jackets.

Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, hardcover, First Edition, 1935. Very Good (no dog ears, solid spine and cover) condition.

etc, etc, etc. I have roughly 100 books I would like to sell. Ideas? Thanks!

Evaporated

Reflections on Greensburg, Kansas, just 10 months before it left this planet in an unholy whirlwind.

We stopped and took this photo as we entered town.

My youngest son, age 10, screamed as we approached a town park. He pressed the window button, let his words slam against the Kansas highway winds.

"Stop! Mom! Look! Look at the grass!"

I pulled the car into a newly-tarred lot. The park stood still, quiet. My boys ran from the car, dove into the sea of green, let their bodies roll down a short embankment. I plopped down, too, slipped off my flip-flops and let the grass caress my feet.

"Mom! I never saw grass like this! Can we move here?"

10 hugged the earth, pressed his face, stomach, legs into the cool morning dew. The grass pressed back, strong, watered, cultivated to withstand two boys and a mom. We didn't know grass, didn't know anything but New Mexican drought. Our backyard consisted of baked clay, of sun-bleached weeds slowly ground into the fine dust that covered every inch of our town.

"Yeah, it's magic, isn't it?"

I fell on my back. The sun hung low on the horizon, sighed good afternoon, good afternoon. I squinted my eyes. The miles behind us began to disappear, and I chanted silent thanks for my decision to roam the two-lane state roads, the forgotten places, on our way to a family reunion in Illinois.

Davis Park. Camping Allowed.

"Boys! Let's stay here tonight!"

We pitched our pop-up dome tent - the one with the grape juice stain along one bottom edge - under the shade of a steady elm. We shopped the local market for bread, for peanut butter and jelly. My boys stood in line behind me, bought old-fashioned candies like foot-long licorice ropes and Boston Baked Beans with their allowance money. The teenaged cashier took her time, announced each item out loud as she punched soiled keys. She wore her blonde hair long, pulled back with a pink plastic headband over a fresh case of acne, her expanded belly pressing against the cash drawer.

She looks so young. So American. So damn young. I wonder how old she is, what she thinks of her growing baby?

I smiled at her, at her unborn child, and when she gave me six dollars change, I slipped the five dollar bill into her open grimy denim purse. I didn't let her see me.

We rested on that grass for hours. My boys didn't want to see the amazing World's Largest Hand-Dug Well. They didn't even want to see the 1000-pound meteorite, though they live and breath all things Star Trek, all things space. They wanted to feel that grass against sweaty summer legs, wanted to toss our Frisbee, run and dive, run and dive, wanted to eat sandwiches and drink drug-store lemonade out of Dixie Cups, wanted to run under the grass sprinklers when they rose from slumber, wanted to sleep with heads outside the tent, wanted to watch those Kansas stars sing us to sweet grass sleep.

10 found a perfect heart-shaped stone in the grass, slipped it in his pocket, slept with it that night, carried it to his bureau at home, placed it in alignment with his starships, his glass penguin, his first-place artist award. The smallness of that Kansas town, its fresh grass meant that much to him.

My boys talked about that park, that night of American wonder, at least once a week after our vacation, through the frigid pale days of our New Mexico mountain winter when they bundled up in three layers and tossed snowballs against our stucco home.

"Remember the grass, Mom? Remember it?"

My youngest son doesn't know one of his favorite places in the whole world evaporated this weekend. He doesn't know. I don't have it in me to tell him, to tell him the grass was torn from its roots, was torn and whipped against the black sky. I can't yet tell him nothing lasts forever.

Hold that thought!

Birdie will return Monday, February 26th! In the meantime, tell her a secret while she rests up!

Name the cyst!

I don't remember if I blogged about this or not, but last year I had to have a big fat ovarian cyst removed. My sisters named him "Chad." Tomorrow I get another round of hospital fun - the other ovary decided to grow a little treasure. These things run in the family, seems like once each of us hits 40 we get to experience the thrill of laparoscopic surgery. The procedure for removal is no big deal, but of course I plan on milking it for all it's worth.  Think of me, and the as-yet-unnamed wonder, as I get my abdomen pumped full of gas so the mini camera can have a good look around.

So. Shall I ask the nurse to pack him in a jar of ice and sit him on my dresser? I'll be coked up on vicodin tomorrow night, so if you want to ask cheeky questions, now's your big chance!