On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”
Category: funny how
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bag of bones
Bizarre visit to the local physiotherapist today. For one thing, we speak different languages, and the overlap (in creaking German) was slim. It took us a while to understand each other. At the top of his full-length consulting room mirror was a Post-It note with a downward arrow, which said, “This is what a person who is loved by God looks like.” But we didn’t get to talking about God straightaway. First he had to ask, what is the matter. I summarized the very ill-advised dance improv manoeuvre which originally tore my knee. The physio ran away with my first half sentence, making sketches to explain, building rapidly a diagnosis that showed the problem with my ligaments. “It’s not the ligaments,” I said. I finished my sentence and off he raced again. This happened five times before he grasped what was the matter.
Ok not a good listener, no worries. I told him what I think (after various scans & examinations) is going on and eventually he heard me. “Please take off your jeans.” Then I sat in my t-shirt while he asked me about any previous illnesses, the age of both my parents, was I married, etc. During this time the physiotherapist’s ten-year-old son wandered in and was kissed by his father all over the top of his head. The boy left. I lay down. The physio asked if I would consider giving his son English lessons, “for his pronunciation.” He reached into my knee and began inflicting intense pain, good pain, pain which bore out his relieving theory that there was nothing wrong inside the joint, it is just that the muscle is cramped. “What religion do you have? Are you Catholic?” I blinked. “I don’t have any religion.” He looked grave. “We say, there are two ways to live. The good way. And: the bad way.”
The bad way, it seems to me, involves ceaseless physical pain. Sometimes it wakes me out of my sleep. It’s a small kind of hell. “How’s the knee?” I asked him, pointedly, to bring him to the task. He had stopped massaging and was leaning on the sore leg, gesticulating. The weird thing is that when he stuck with it, his ministrations were lucid and effective. He worked his way into the joint and eased it, more professionally but in the same way as I have been instinctively doing. When he looked me up and down and said thoughtfully, You’re built like a mannequin, he wasn’t being creepy. “Know what I mean? Like a model? Like… an athlete?” (Yes, I said). “And when you were a teenager, clearly you would have been: Wow! Pretty as a picture!” (He flicked his loose hand as though shaking off water, to convey to me how goodlooking I used to be. Yes, I said. And sighed) ~ When he said all of those things, he wasn’t being grisly. It was said benignly: innocently, almost. A simple observation. Never mind the fact that his fingers were under my kneecap and I was lying there in my underwear.
I might have forgotten to mention the skeletons. They were the first thing I noticed, apart from the Post-It on the mirror. Just plastic, educational skeletons – but somehow he stores them in an open-weave kind of hammock, suspended directly above the treatment table. I was gazing at them as he concluded his appearance-based theory of diagnosis: “I think you’re just athletic, and you’re fit and strong, and your muscles would naturally cramp up.” (Makes sense. And *of course* it would have happened a lot more – or is it less – when I was prettier.) He asked me to turn on my stomach. He dug his fingers into my shoulder, which has also been sore. I am stoical about pain but, man, this was pain. I did not cry out. I opened my mouth and rolled my eyes at the row of musculature posters. He dug his fingers in further and I gasped. Then he swooped down so that his head was level with mine on the table, and said in my ear, “Jesus said ~”
Who?! “Jesus said, I am the vine. I am the roots and the trunk. If the branches are cut off from the roots, no grapes can grow.” Finally he let me sit up. The pain in my knee began to ebb, more than it has for months. “You see, Jesus is the only true teacher.”
Like a traffic cop I put up my hand. “Actually, there have been lots of teachers. Plenty of great teachers. And not all of them men. Some are even alive today. The Dalai Lama for example.”
He picked up the clipboard with his sketches of my ligaments and sat down beside me to draw the roots, the vine, and the grapes cut off from the source, apparently believing I’d missed the metaphor. “No other teacher rose from the dead,” he told me. “I get it,” I said. “I understand that this is what you believe. But I don’t believe it.” “What do you believe in, then?” I hardly knew what to say. “I believe in people. I believe in nature and people. I believe people’s hearts are full of love and that we want to be good to one another.”
“If you’re cut off from the vine…” But I stopped him. My knee was throbbing. “Have you not noticed something? All of these teachers say the exact same thing. They say, love. They say, be good to one another, try to understand, treat as you would be treated.” We stood up and he put out his hand to shake mine. “I’m a philosopher at heart,” he said, unexpectedly. Walking me back down the corridor to Reception he asked was the little girl I’d been playing with when he came out to fetch me my daughter. “But you looked so happy together!” He asked about my health insurance and when he worked out I don’t have any, because I am not Swiss, said, “Then give I you this session gratis.” “I think you will find that in a few days,” he said, “all of your pain will have vanished.”
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with tweezers
Last time I was in Switzerland I said to my host, It’s so pretty! It’s like an endless reel of picture postcards, seamlessly unrolling.
Yes, she said. And if I’m not on my knees in the garden on a Sunday morning, pulling up daisies with a pair of tweezers: my neighbours won’t speak to me.
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mouth bandit
Some days I really miss my cat. She is grey & downy and is a right little snuggleupagus. She’s also a kind of miracle cat because she got lost one night, this was in inner Melbourne, and stayed lost for five months until one day someone rang in response to one of my posters, saying, I think your cat is living in our backyard. She had survived as a street cat and was thin but unharmed. Whilst not living in alleyways she likes to harvest unattended hair elastics from the desks of working poets and will carry them about in her mouth for hours, tirelessly playing fetch…. like a little dog. I love her but we always had two separate piles: mine (to hold my hair back) and hers (a bit manky from being scuffled and chewed).
One thing I love about cats is their ambition. I would see her crouched at the foot of a wall, every fibre bristling with concentration as she sighted up a browsing mosquito or a shadow under the ceiling. “I can take that, I can totally take it!” And yet they seem to have no other desire than to laze. Most important of all is: be comfortable. Always be comfortable.
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braincloud
An acquaintance of mine was teasing after he inadvertently tapped into the ideas fountain and could not make it stop. We had brunch and he mentioned some frustrations he has been having with his business. I threw out about a dozen ideas to start with and then four dozen more whilst spooning up yoghurt and fruit. You know how one idea leads to the other. We finished our drinks and went out into the street where I turned to face him, still talking. “OR… you could try this, and that… Have you thought about trying it this other way?” ‘Well, mmm….’ “Another way to look at it would be…”
Finally he put his hands on my shoulders to make it stop. “You know, it seems to be very brainstormy around here today. Must be a lot of brainclouds about. Now I am going to walk off in that direction and in a few minutes, I’ll be back.”
So he went off to unlock his bicycle and left me there, standing with my mouth open in the pouring brain, in that chilly kind of sunshine with the icy wind that qualifies as Northern European spring; getting wet.
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a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last
I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? I never correct my friend because every time I hear “this cost me almost fifty bugs” it makes me so happy.
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following a stick
My arms are full of scratches from traveling among the trees along the river. It’s interesting how so much of what we see is due to attention. A woman passed behind me as I was crouched in a mossy hollow this morning, poking the water with a stick, and until she was almost on top of me I did not see or hear her, though I could hear in her voice she’d seen me. A dozen stick-lengths away, on the water, passed a long pointed boat filled with army recruits. They were wearing bright orange life jackets and looked like ducklings. By remaining quiet and focusing on my bent stick, dragged by the green current, I stayed hidden though my white t-shirt and dirty orange sneakers must have been in plain view. I used to think of mindfulness as awareness of everything. Now it seems more like acceptance, and focus. There will often be a train clattering over the high arched bridge. There will often be an opal drake, steering absently in the water as though floating on his back. And presumably every leaf, every petal of the shower of gold blossoms overhanging the narrow path has its own sensation of the feeble sunlight trickling through the branches.
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running man
As I walked, a man in brief, flared jogging shorts came running towards me. I decided I would look at him the way men sometimes look at women. I gazed at his ankles and shapely calves. I gazed at his thighs. I gazed into his face until he had to look back at me. He looked shy and compliant. The river roared and his neat hooves thundered. We both were blushing.
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symmetrical heaven-trees
Supermarkets turn me into a raging misanthrope. I am never more judgmental than when dodging slow-moving families in the aisles. Artificial food substitutes reach out like glistening fruit arranged on extremely symmetrical trees. There’s the couple towing two listless children who have not one fresh product in their cart. There’s the urge to tap them on the shoulder and plead, You’re not feeding that stuff to your kids, are you? There’s the inclination (all too often indulged) to bail up ladies choosing toilet paper and ask, Have you ever thought of trying the recycled? Because, you know… this stuff is made from trees. (Last time I tried this, she listened politely before saying, ah, but it’s so scratchy, I like soft. “I’m sensitive.” I gave her a smile that was more like a snarl: “Maybe it’s softer. After all, it’s been Pulped Twice.”) There’s the corrosive stench of ‘cleaning’ products pervading the laundry aisle. And through it all there’s the dreary easy-listening music that’s somehow so painful to hear. Once you start hearing the lyrics, it’s a whole world of confusion and grief. If you DO get caught between the moon and New York City, where are you exactly? Are you on some extremely high-flying jumbo jet? Or have you died, and is this what purgatory smells like? And do they really play my favourite song in heaven all night long? Or does it just feel that way.
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sardines
Chic girl in the sunny gardens by the duck pond, at an outdoor cafe where we had lunch, cutting her toenails at the table while her companions ate their bowls of sardines.