THE WINKING SIGNAL

 39 of #100daychallenge

Memorial. Day. Weekend. It's already here. For reals and truly. I see this with incredulity. Time does seem to go more quickly as you age. 

Speaking of aging, I had a day or two of no knee pain and thus had high hopes that the cortisone injection helped. Today, it is back to the land of pain. Certainly it is not as acute as it was, but the pain is not insubstantial. 

After a bit of rushing around to actually hand in my application to teach, I made it over to instruct the Domineers. This morning found me a bit upended and unfocussed as early on I received the very sad new that KH's mother had passed. KH's mother had had a bad fall on Sunday, enough to break her hip and bruise her face. She had surgery on Tuesday and then had some kind of heart attack. The diagnosis/prognosis was that she would be fine, her arteries looked good and she was headed to rehab/PT, had eaten breakfast when she just died. KH was on her way out the door to see her.

KH's mom and Janet are only a year apart in age, so we have kind of bonded over the aging mother issues. KH's mother's passing really made me feel vulnerable about Janet, not to mention other friends, SC, BB among them have recently lost their female parent. 

Janet feels so invincible. She is doing great in my yoga class. I can see the improvement in her shoulder mobility and she is having somewhat less pain for having done some of the exercises. Other things, she does better than I do. But she is 94. Not just for her, but we have been working on issues of leg strength and balance and boy do they feel it. We have been practicing getting up from the folding chair with a block between the knees without holding on to anything. Very challenging. But gosh, I almost cry when I see how very focussed and earnest they are. I can see the improvement in the diabetic feet from the massage they get with the tennis balls. The swelling and the redness has gone down. And they all oooh and aaah as they enjoy it so much.

Getting any actual yoga/asana training takes more imagination on my part, but I do want them to get used to the concepts, at the very least. Today they started working on forward fold and the rudiments of downward dog. I would like to have them doing push-up at the wall, but there really isn't any adequate wall. I suppose more research on line and in my big ol' yoga book library will help, but, as I said, I didn't have any plan today at all. 

I just leave feeling that there is so much more I have to do and moved that they are trying so very hard. Mixed with some gratitude that I can be of service. 

The Kermit Place Readers met this evening, In Brooklyn there were several who were in person for the first time in months. The general consensus was that we should start on Ulysses. I went to find my copy, only to find that it had disappeared with who knows what else. As we have only two weeks to read the first hundred pages so that we can meet on Bloomsday, I had to track down a local copy. There happened to be one at the Barnes and Noble in Torrance and I happen to be going there tomorrow to take my mom for her eye injection. So that is some kind of serendipity (do). Here are two of the Irish poems I read (not very well).

HOUSE ON A CLIFF

Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors

The winking signal on the waste of sea.

Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind.

Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.

Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors

The strong man pained to find his red blood cools,

While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors

The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.

Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors

The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep.

Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross

Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.

— Louise Macneice, A Hand of Snapshots, Farber and Farber, London

THE BLACK LACE FAN MY MOTHER GAVE ME

It was the first gift he ever gave her,

buying it for five francs in the Galeries

in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.

A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.

They met in cafés. She was always early.1`2qasz He was late. That evening he was later.

They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.

She ordered more coffee. She stood up.

The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.

She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliquéd on silk by hand,

darkly pricked, stitched boldly, quickly.

The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,

clear patience of its element. It is

a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,

even now, an inference of its violation.

The lace is overcast as if the weather

it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty café terrace.

An airless dusk before thunder. A man running

And no way to know what happened then -

none at all - unless you improvise:

The blackbird on this first sultry morning,

in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,

feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing -

the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

— Eavan Boland, Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990, Norton, New York, 1990