Rash Medicine

The Iron Baby piece reminded me of another story about my early childhood my Mom used to tell me. It seems I had a terrible skin rash on my neck and to prevent me from scratching at it, my parents put my arms in splints. Whether this revealed a dark side to my parents or was merely an overly harsh medical practice of the early 50’s, I will never know now. Anyway it seemed that despite my constraints, I managed to be able to eat a graham cracker through various sweaty contortions. I dearly wish I could still twist like that now - maybe I should use graham crackers in my yoga practice.

Iron Baby

At a family reunion, Uncle John told me a story about my childhood that I hadn’t heard before. It was the first time he had ever met me and I was about a year and a half old. It was in California and we were all outside most of the time. My brother was playing with his buddies, a group of neighborhood youngsters who ran free on the block. Confined to my playpen, I was desperate to join them as they moved further and further away. The playpen was one of the old kinds with a hardboard floor divided in half so that it could be folded up and stored. Realizing this, I managed to move the padding aside, lift up the flooring, and by holding onto the sides, walked my way down the street, cage and all, to join the group. To this day I still have that determination - as well as the biceps.

Joyride

I have been spending a lot of time in the past this year, an activity triggered in part by thumbing through old notebooks and in part by my own daughters having moved out of the house. Their new beginnings remind me of my own leaving home, and how I snuggled the past while the future beckoned me on.

- from notes in a 1981 journal -
The weather at the beach that year was beautiful with unusually clear and cool mornings and not a hint of fog. I almost missed those socked in mornings where you wait and wait for the sun to break through, wondering if it will be a nice day for tanning. This day there was a weird cloud wall hugging the coastal hills, as if creating a barrier between the sea people and the desert people – almost like Steven King’s MIST, cutting us off from the rest of the world. On each visit out here from the Midwest, I wanted to pack in as many emotions and experiences as possible, taking them back as prized souvenirs. I have always had trouble with being ‘here’ and ‘there’. I am tethered to my past, cherishing those loving bonds while throwing out new lines in other directions - not to replace the old ties - but to add to them. Is the present merely the instant in which you speculate backwards and forwards - like that moment between inhaling and exhaling, a turning point, a moment of decision, or a limbo between then and when?
As we came in downstairs from our walk, we heard the thud of footsteps above or was it low thunder from those cloud covered hills? Mom was pacing. She was always a busy and engaging person, a mover and shaker. “Come on you deadheads! Let’s get up and go!” And we gladly got up and went, for the trip was usually a joyride. On this day she was distracted, edgy, and irritated - wishing we were all doing something else. She sat down to read, then got up and moved a lamp, sat down, reached for the ash tray, sat back, sat up, put her book down, strode over across the room to the end counter and dug through a tray of junk, picked up a pen, took it to the kitchen, returned the pen to the tray, went to her chair and sat down and nosily opened her book to read, thus creating an excitement with her actions that she felt was lacking in the room. Maybe she longed to have each minute of our visit as intensely special as I did. Maybe she was also uncomfortable with the in-between state of ‘now’. It hadn’t occurred to her that we were also engaged in ‘activities’, they just fell outside the boundaries of her definition of the word. It must have annoyed her to see my Dad just sitting there in his chair, to her, ‘doing nothing’, when in his mind, he was probably running laps. What we were doing was watching the surfers out on the ocean. There they floated, their eyes on the shapes of incoming swells. Maybe just sitting there astride their boards on the undulating surface, so in tune with the rhythms of the sea was the real joyride.