Renewal & A Poem of Loving for Good Friends

Thank you Susie Cameron. Because of your brilliant villanelle from several weeks ago, I've been playing with that very constrained form and feeling safe and warm in its grip - this is the first of two.

RENEWAL

A life entwined in pains that are long past

A hugging terror grips my clouded mind

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

Afraid to speak my eyes avoid the mast

Where captain of my ship yells life is kind

A life entwined in pains that are long past

My frightened heart beats hard and much too fast

Always I feel like I’m so far behind

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

Why does the part inside feel so miscast?

My role in life will it I ever find?

A life entwined in pains that are long past

I wake up from a dream and am aghast

Your heart’s locked in a drawer a deaf girl signed

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

Open the drawer for risk I am now tasked

It’s time, I say, my life is not defined

A life entwined in pains that are long past

Thinning clouds hint this fiction will not last

A POEM OF LOVING FOR GOOD FRIENDS

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

With histories that time’s heart always cheers

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

Through incidents that could have fostered hate

Forgiving hearts were bound by many years

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

Births and deaths all wandered through the gate

Familial bonds were sealed by flowing tears

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

They traveled far and not each found a mate

Loneliness through connections disappears

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

Old secrets lurk beneath and sometimes bate

And pain and anger’s head it sometimes rears

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

When old friends will show up with wine so late

The pain and anger fades along with fears

A friendship bound by laughter and by fate

For Loue, Emma, Georgie and Miss Kate

Closing Time

by Susan Cameron

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
-- from "Closing Time" by Semisonic


Please excuse me for not leading off with a quote from Plutarch or Nietzsche; I have a head full of pop music lyrics, and the one above is a favorite.

That line has a particular resonance for me lately because of the accelerating pace of endings in my life and the lives of my friends. Three of us have had mothers die this past year, which is sad; but all three were difficult people who made life difficult for those around them, and their dying was not only inevitable, but in many ways a relief.

I did feel a pang in my chest when I opened my stationery box, saw that I was out of note cards, and realized it didn't matter -- I only mailed them to my mother, and she wasn't there any more. The twinge passed quickly, because I knew death was the friend who took my mother by the hand and left her Alzheimer's behind. I like to imagine death escorting her to a lounge in the afterlife filled with kindred spirits, all pretty and thirtyish again, drinking highballs, smoking Salems, laughing with each other and flirting with the piano player.

There's no soft way to point out that her death did not alter the fabric of my life, as cold as that sounds. There were two thousand miles insulating me from the day-to-day grind of dealing with her and caring for her. But, since I did apparently inherit some sort of caretaker gene, I spent an increasing and inordinate amount of time watching over and caring for a dear old friend who slid into dementia over the past year or two. It was time to call his adult children, and they turned him over to health care professionals. There are pangs at the finality of closing files and tidying up the last loose ends, but the sadness I feel at my buddy's predicament doesn't change the fact that I've got big swaths of my own time back.

And there it is: new beginnings coming from endings. My cat died months ago; now I've got my buddy's wonderful dog. I sold my business; now we have time to go traveling in our truck and camper. Tomorrow's my last day teaching Longevity Stick exercises; next week I'll start sending my elderly students postcards from the road, and they'll enjoy that too. Something is finished, and there is end-of-an-era wistfulness; but another thing begins, filling the space that had to empty out to make room for it.

Carly Simon had a huge hit, "Anticipation," as I was graduating from high school. The truth of the chorus, "These are the good old days," made me catch my breath as I stood in the doorway between one phase of life and another. But I think I'll give Green Day the last word:


Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go
So make the best of this test, and don't ask why
It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.
-- from "Good Riddance" (Time of your Life), by Green Day

Copyright 2011, Susan Cameron

Attrition

by Susan Cameron

Sharon stared out her front window at the house across the street. Its bushes were pruned, its grass was perfect, its fresh coat of paint gleamed softly in the sun, and it had a dignified For Sale sign posted on the lawn. The short iron fence surrounding the front courtyard entry was decked out in clean white paint, as were the bars across all the windows. Those bars gave its ownership away -- it was a single woman’s house. But the woman who owned it was no longer single, and her new man didn’t want to live there.

Above and behind the new roof rose the huge arc of the old satellite dish, installed in the back yard when TV satellite dishes were the latest technology. She smiled as she remembered how proud Ron had been of that NASA-sized dish, how much he’d loved his TV. Genial Ron, laughing with her ex, Jim, about nothing in particular, raising the Corona beer bottle to his lips, blurry blue Playboy bunny tattoo on his forearm, chunky gold bracelet sliding on his wrist, sipping his beer, always laughing. Years later, she and Jim had boarded the boat that took Ron’s ashes into Newport Bay. His widow Cynthia had hysterics in the arms of her bewildered family. Mascara ran off her false eyelashes as she clung to the container holding Ron’s ashes, screaming “No, I can’t let you go!” as the boat heaved at anchor and the green-faced mourners tried not to do the same. So many years Ron had been gone. Jim, too.

Now Cynthia was going. Ron’s life insurance had been substantial, and Cynthia had her own pension and social security money as well. It had been more than enough to pay for plastic surgery and antidepressants, more than enough to attract inappropriate men who weren’t the least bit fazed by her panic attacks and neediness. Sharon stared at the empty house and silently wished her ex-neighbor well in her new life.

God, what was this mood she was in?

The past kept interjecting itself into her present lately. She’d be walking down the street with her husband Aaron and say things like, “There was a weeping willow tree in the center of that lawn when I moved here, back when it belonged to David and Diana.” Or, “That house was originally Paul and Evelyn’s. I used to play Bunco with Evelyn and her friends.” Or, “My friends used to call this street Van Land. Everybody on the block owned a van when Jim and I moved in – eighteen vans in eighteen driveways.”

Robert and Sarah, Mike and Mary, old Bill on the corner, Patrick and Janey, Chuck and Melanie, the children who’d played Marco Polo in her swimming pool, grown up with kids of their own by now – all gone. Sharon didn’t understand why all the old names and faces were suddenly coming back to her. Some of these people had been her good friends for a while, and some just friendly acquaintances, but they’d all vanished over the years – moved away, divorced and gone, dead and gone. All of this was perfectly normal, of course. She’d felt worse about the removal of the beautiful old overgrown liquidambar trees that had once lined her street than she did about the inevitable attrition of her neighbors. So what was this mood, this ache, this inexplicable nostalgia, if it was even nostalgia at all?

One restless night, while Aaron slept, she quietly stepped into the front yard to look at Venus shining near the crescent moon. Her old Toyota was parked in the driveway, and she sat on the trunk and tilted her head back to drink in the beauty of the sky. When she looked down from the moon and stars at Cynthia’s empty house, it finally struck her.

Cynthia was the last original owner in the neighborhood – except Sharon herself.

She looked back up at Venus and the moon and nodded once, as if they had spoken to her. She stood up, yawned, raised her arms toward the sky and stood on her toes, stretching every muscle in her body. She winced as she took inventory: a twinge in her right hand where she’d long ago cut herself in a kitchen accident, a zing in the left thumb where arthritis had set in; a ligament twanged near her left knee, trashed in a high-impact aerobics class thirty-five years before.

Sharon sighed, looked at Cynthia’s house and turned away. Her knee clicked all the way back to her front door.

copyright 2010, Susan Cameron

An Irreparable Earthquake in the Fabric of Friendship

Since birth I’ve been working on a patchwork quilt of my life. It’s colorful, it’s fun, and I love looking back on it, but it’s even more fun to create the new pieces, the additions, the new experiences that add to my already beautiful quilt. I’ve be doing this for barely over two decades, and hopefully I’ll have lots more years to put this thing together. In some places the stitches are rough and in some places the fabric’s a bit tattered or frayed, but it’s all coming together, and in retrospect, it all looks quite good. I have to admit that there are some lumps sewn in that I figured will need to be aspirated when they get out of hand, meaning too many failed relationships or other things that have me hiding under it rather than constructing further pieces. Perhaps some day I might turn to therapy or spirituality or some other form of mental, emotion, or spiritual dry-cleaning where the whole beautiful mess will be examined and analyzed square by square.

But I don’t know what to do with the square I am currently in the process of constructing. What am I supposed to do when a friend my own age dies? He was only 22. Really 22 and one day when death intruded, taking my friend without permission or rhyme or reason and blotting out the fantasy that I will live forever. But worse, as I looked back at my beautiful quilt I see a gaping hole where he had been, where the times spent, the laughter and the ‘oh my Gods’ used to reside. The fabric, ripped and flapping in the wind looks so raw and I don’t know how to fix it. Those memories – my first kiss, though forced in a playful and fun way, and the dozens of others that he tried to plant on my unsuspecting mouth, long conversations trying to understand this passionate, reckless nut but enjoying his fun loving attitudes and love of life. All my memories are now ghosts that haunt me and force me to question my life. It disturbs my peace of mind and makes me not want to ever sleep again as sleep is just the bedfellow of death. It disturbs me as do lesser questions like why people my age are getting married and having children. Things no longer make sense. Guilt and fear and hopelessness are rearing their unavoidable heads.

I never really thought about it, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever even see him again. I knew that leaving for college three thousand miles away was not just a new beginning, but an ending. Time does tear people away from each other, and that’s not really a sad thing, it’s just part of life. But then we get a call, or read Facebook entries and we think we are dreaming, but we are not. We have, ourselves, crashed at one-hundred miles per hour into the wall we did not see coming. Our tears are bad enough, but the tears of the ones who stayed close, the tears of guys we never thought we’d see cry, those tears dissolve the stitches that held together the pieces of our together past that are now a gaping wound as we search for reasons that we know we will never find. I begin to place a new patch, but that patch will never quite fit properly, and every time I look at it, it will remind me that things I thought were permanent are not, and that people I love or even just enjoy will not be around forever.

Only the Forever stamp is forever. Ten years from now, if I still have those stamps, I can use them when a letter costs a dollar or less or more, but ten years from now I have no idea how many of those colorful and wonderful patches will be shredded or changed irreparably, or even if my own quilt will still exist on this earth. But I don’t have too much time to ponder these things because, life, mice, and midterms intrude – and maybe that’s good.

Inspired by recent events and the lovely no-longer-teens who are in my life and copyrighted 2010 by Nancy Grossman-Samuel