The sun is shining mightily today, after Friday and Saturday were dull and gray with rain. November is so dark and seen as so dreary that whenever the sun shines, it seems like it tries to do it a bit more brightly, just to make up for the inevitable indignities of winter…
11/19
chilly
clear, blue morning
breath, hanging, shivering
clouds holding possibility
of more
It’s strange to realize that I’m old enough for an era to have passed…
When I was really little – almost five – our family moved out of the city to the suburbs, and our new minister was a very kindly, white South African man who always made a fuss over me, pulling my pigtails and demanding to know who I was and what on earth I was doing in his office – the usual weird nonsense adults say to children. Each time we met, he would say he didn’t remember me, or couldn’t possibly say my name, so he would just have to change it. To Jane.
In this year of our lord, 2023, the optics of a white South African man telling a Black child her name is too hard to say, so giving her a simpler name are… quite something. But, in nineteen seventywhat, I was just an amused child, giggling at the newest bit of nonsense an adult handed down to me.
I loved that girl, Jane –
She was simple. Sweet. Pretty.
When she bossed Sally
Or took up with Spot and Dick,
No one mispronounced her,
Misunderstood her, or mistook her
For just an easy read.
I was nineteen, and a social work friend from work asked anxiously, “Hey, do you have time to fill out a questionnaire? I have a friend doing a project…” So many of us were guinea pigs for each other’s projects in school, I thought this wouldn’t be any different… but it turned out to be The Black Women’s Health Study, and all these years later, I’m still part of Boston University’s massive, multi-year study through the Sloane Epidemiology Center, to predict and provide better health outcomes for black women. So much has been uncovered and discovered, and there’s so much information to come. To that end, I filled a vial with saliva this morning…
All for a good cause, I guess.
It’s ridiculous to have a doctor six hours away, but, it’s …how things ended up. When you find a good specialist, you keep them, and so I used to drive to the other end of the state, make a whole weekend of it, see friends in SoCal and then the doctor Monday morning, and back home. Later I sometimes tried to do the drive in a day – possible, but physically sapping. I turned to flying – there and back on the Southwest Airlines cattle car still took four hours out of my day – and sometimes more, with Southwest’s penchant for overbooking everything and cancelling anything. It was actually a relief when the pandemic meant I couldn’t make time-and-expense consuming, draining journeys anymore. And now I haven’t “seen” my specialist in almost four years… yet I “see” him every month like clockwork, via telehealth. As others have said, isn’t it astounding what suddenly wasn’t too hard, ‘specialized’ or costly for disabled people to have when everyone else needed it? So, thanks for that – for a bridge between the world and the house for those who needed it.
we couldn’t think it
we, majority
able, and eager
we didn’t need it.
we cannot consider only you.
we serve everyone, everyone:
collective consideration –
so, for accommodation?
all things being equal,
we have to be fair.
When the pandemic began, I had already started poking around in languages. I took Dutch and French on the Memrise app in 2019, happy to get back in touch with a language I’d already studied, and one of a country dear to me. But I heard about Duolingo, and then the pandemic seemed a good excuse. Now a mere one thousand, eight hundred fourteen days later, I’m still going. Language isn’t easy for me – there are genders, grammar, and numerical systems which just wreck my mind. But, I like giving myself the opportunity to do a hard thing – and maybe fail? So, thanks, for this – the challenge of throwing myself into something I am not typically good at, and doing it anyway.
tell me:
a flash of eyes
a shift of the body –
so many ways that I hear you
speaking
Ah, group texts. I generally loathe them, but the niece, nephews, and younger sibs only communicate that way – email is What The Olds Use. Heh. Because a third of our family is in their teens and twenties, this is how we’re trying making dinner plans for Thanksgiving. To me the tangents and interruptions in group texts make it wholly inefficient for planning anything – but it is hilarious. We cannot accomplish anything without trash talking, and once the poking and teasing begins, it never ends. So, thanks for that – for technology, which makes our collective weirdness just that much more accessible.
Today as I head off early to one of the many “First” churches in America for my Sunday Gig, I imagine the bells we heard on Sundays in our first apartment.
Those first
Sunday mornings
We needed no alarm,
And wakened to carillon
Singing.
I love to wake slowly on the weekend, and listen to the neighborhood rise. One nice thing about this court is that, at least in the autumn and winter, it rises more slowly than in Spring or summertime, when it’s blower and mowers galore. Today there were only birds – and the hush before the symphony.
Today I learned the etymology of the word “Sabbath” comes from the Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew words for the number seven, the word ‘cease’ or rest, and the word Saturday.
Digging
for the root words
‘Sabbath’ holds within it
seven ways to be quiet.
Listen.
Happy Friday, friends.
November’s cold, dark days have been lengthened and brightened by the uptick in rehearsals I have this time of year. Christmas Eve this year is on a Sunday, so my choral load has doubled, plus I somehow got roped into a performance in January (…how did that…happen?). It’s work – it’s a lot of work – to be a musician with dyscalculia. I memorize my part and everyone else’s, so I don’t have to rely on my ability to count. I count note signatures on my fingers. I forget the names of notes – routinely. It’s work. However, I love that music is work that I can do.
Work that we can do is… more important than we might understand. Especially for those of us with learning differences, who have so often had work set before us which we can make neither heads nor tails of, it makes a difference to be able to put our hands to something and see it through – to complete it, using the best of our abilities. To achieve. To succeed.
So, thanks, for that. For accomplishments that perhaps seem small and routine when viewed from outside, but which feed the soul of the hive.
what sweeter music
than hum of satisfaction
as bee flies hiveward
Poetry Friday is brought to you by the letter K, and our hostess, Mrs. E, whose blog has a shockingly clever title. Be well and fly strongly, little bees.
I was a late and uncertain bloomer in many things, and when I finally got crushes, they were… intense. Yeeeeears later, I still remember that today is the birthday of a boy whom I thought was wonderful and perfect. Looking back, he was obviously …not. College junior to my high school, patriarchal and condescending, and probably six kinds of narcissistic. But I worked with him, and was sure he was the pinnacle of personhood. I remember spending forty bucks on a classic SWATCH for him – in the nineties, so considering inflation, that’s $90 now, which is a chunk of change for a kid. I was serious in my admiration for this boy — who wasn’t at all serious about me, and who honestly shouldn’t have accepted such an expensive gift, but what do teens, even older teens, really know, until they make mistakes?
So, thanks for that – for the mistakes that are only monetarily costly. For the course corrections that don’t require stitches and scars. For big, dumb mammals, and for youth, which bumbles its way through life like a bluebottle fly, to make its ramshackle way into adulthood.
burning
bright, the future
beckons in firelight,
illuminated by burning
bridges