During these in-between days when the uproar of Christmas has subsided and the obligations of the new year have not yet begun, I sit in my reading chair enjoying the embrace of a rainy day.  Thoughts send me to my books—the quite organized collection I created when Bill lent his carpentry skills to a pair of beautiful built-in bookcases.  

I pull down The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers Build Faith by my friend Bill Tammeus.  I want to read that again, so it goes in the stack beside my chair.  I also hunt in my newly alphabetized poetry collections for the first book of poetry I ever bought for myself.  There it is:  a small blue paperback of the Collected Lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I bought it when I was in high school for sixty cents. Although Millay was out of fashion among poetry critics at that time, she is possibly the “mother” of my poetry soul. I love these poems still, and I think she is now having a posthumous comeback among the literati. Is that important?  

Well, it’s important to know that as a poet I can’t pay much attention to “critics.”  Granted, getting published in print over the past few decades has been a challenge, because the almighty Editor is always the first hurdle.  When your poetical work isn’t on trend, your voice can scarcely find a way out.  As it happens, my forever friend, the poet Gail White, and I found our own way. It was thirty years ago this year—1988—when we collaborated on and self-published what is known as a “chapbook” (a small paperback collection) of her poems together with mine, side-by-side on comparable subjects, eg. cat poems, poems on Biblical subjects, poems on hope vs. cynicism.  We titled it Sibyl and Sphinx.  Who is the Sibyl, who the Sphinx?  Still not decided.  The book is a rare treasure, with only a few copies afloat in the universe.   

At that time, my poetry publications were few and far between.  In the deepest and truest spirit of friendship, Gail wrote a poem encouraging me to keep at it.  You’ll find it below.  In the forty years and more we’ve been corresponding, we’ve both written and published a great many poems in so-called little magazines you’ve never heard of.  Since the internet became a thing, online magazines provide an excellent new forum for all kinds of voices.  Because my name is somewhat unusual, you can find my work via your browser or amazon. Gail White?  Not so easily.  But do try. Along with Millay, Gail White has always been an inspiration to me.  

Thirty years?  The twinkling of an eye!  The point of life is being you, the only one of you there is. It doesn’t last long.  And you probably won’t know what you do that makes the best difference.  

For Barbara
(on the publication of her poems)
 
A paradox:  paper, quick
to crumple, easy to burn
perishable as grass,
makes the best wings for a journey.
 
Adrift in your floating ark,
with all your beasts around you, 
send out a paper dove: 
it will rescue someone from drowning
 
perhaps, and return to you
with a branch when the tide falls lower.
And your paper coach will come
to the princess alone in her tower.
 
Poets can laugh like gods
at the rich, the wise, and the proper.
The wealth of the world weighs light
against our sheaves of paper.
 
For we turn from weapons to laws
when the useless wars are over,
and the print on a single page
gives the bride to her lover.
 
 
Gail White
Sibyl and Sphinx(Rockhill Press 1988)

Confusion. Indecision. Frustration. Irritation. I’m definitely seeing signs of my emergence as a curmudgeon. (Yes, women can be curmudgeons.) The series of reactions just noted often occurs when I go into a store to buy something simple. Coffee—by the pound or by the cup. Cough medicine. Toothpaste. Frozen broccoli. Or, in the most recent event, ballpoint pens. In each case, I have no fixed expectation or preference of what I want. I would be happy with a serviceable generic, store brand, or bargain selection. I just want to grab and go. But no. Modern marketing turns it into perplexity. Like this…

In the office supply store, I find the section dedicated to writing instruments. Hundreds of styles of ballpoint pens are on display. There are pens for every persuasion: retractable pens with pocket clips; rollerball pens with a special kind of ink; pens in all colors; pens with cushioned grips; pens packaged by the ones and twos and sixes; pens with points fine and medium; pens for every purpose. Who knew a person needed to be so fussy about a ballpoint pen?

But what kind of ballpoint pen is difficult to find? A plain old throw-away ballpoint pen. The kind you rummage for in your kitchen drawer. The kind that disappears into thin air, even though you were absolutely sure you bought a hundred of them last week. The regular old ballpoint pen with the missing cap that gets lost forever in the bottom of your purse.

Clearly the office supply store wants you to buy the expensive ones. Fancy ballpoint pens cover an entire wall in the pen section and set up a visual kaleidoscope. Nothing is “plain,” and yet I cannot clearly understand the distinctions among the infinite range of choices. Should I be more discerning? Eventually I track down the 60-for-six-bucks box of pens—they are off to one side, down at shin level. Five minutes later, I return them to the bin because I have accidentally discovered the Clearance section in the store, where I find 60 equally nondescript ballpoint pens for only three bucks. Thrift wins again.

But where was I? The proliferation of choices in everything from ballpoint pens to breakfast cereal makes shopping more of an adventure than I like. Also I fear that the appearance of “new and improved” versions bumps the “old favorites” I look for. Indeed, I remember trying to buy a certain brand of bath soap for my old dad. The yellow bar of Dial soap, the kind he’d been using since WWII, was no longer to be found, and he wasn’t happy about it.

Please don’t give me “new and improved” in a million different ways. Hunting and gathering was never meant to involve so many decisions. I’m just going to quit and go home.

 
THE AISLE NOT TAKEN
 
Two aisles diverged in a CVS,
And sorry I had to stop and guess,
A lonesome shopper, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it appeared I’d find success,
 
Then took the other, as straight a line,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it displayed a likely sign;
Though as for that, these eyes of mine
Could scarcely discern a product name.
 
On shelf after shelf the boxes lay
With every size and every brand
In a vast and colorful array.
Oh! How could I make a choice that day?
My brain cells failed to understand.
 
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Sometime many a headache hence;
Two aisles diverged–bumfuzzled, I–
I took the one to Exit by
And fled from the place in self-defense.
 
 

Barbara Loots
 
Published in Windshift
 

Finding the joy. I’ve decided that’s the main goal of my return to playing the piano. As a girl, from the age of five until I opted out at the age of about fourteen, I took piano lessons. Serious piano lessons. Following in the footsteps—or I might say the fingerprints—of my three-years-older sister, I became the pint-size student of Mrs. Blim, a pint-size teacher who owned two grand pianos that took up the entire living room in her cottage-like home on Wornall Road.

From there, as our family traveled the world via my dad’s military assignments, our mother secured piano teachers for us wherever we were. She must have spent major money, especially during the time my sisters, including the next younger, climbed in the Ford station wagon every Saturday morning to be driven from the North Shore of Long Island into the heart of Manhattan. Our teacher was Jewel Bethany Hughes, a concert pianist who lived in a glamorous brownstone townhouse just off of Fifth Avenue. Later we took lessons in Madrid from another concert pianist, Milli Porta, who spoke no English. We learned to speak piano in Spanish: Albéniz, de Falla, Granados.

One of our early recitals is preserved from about 1957. I’ve had it transcribed over the years from reel-to-reel to cassette tape to CD, if only to be reminded that my sisters and I could really and truly once-upon-a-time play the piano remarkably well.

Why did I stop? Thinking back to those long, dark hours of practicing piano before school in the morning, as our mother insisted, I tend to believe I learned the technique, but never the pleasure. I learned to play the notes, with practiced tenderness, but never with exuberant ease. I learned how, but perhaps never why. It was someone else’s dream. Meanwhile, my true happiness and calling fell to words. My lifelong playground.

But…it’s never too late. My husband, an otter of creativity—-always playfully involved in some productive activity—-liked to play, although we left behind the old clunker of a piano he owned when we moved in together. We sometimes spoke wistfully about that old piano. Eventually I concluded that playing again might be good exercise for my ageing brain cells. So we bought a piano. I signed up for lessons. And the rest is…well, not history yet, but an ongoing story.

Perhaps I’ll never be quite the delightful improviser my husband is, always discovering and exploring on the keyboard. But I might yet master (again) Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Pathétique. I may someday deliver Für Elise with élan. And I will often remember my mother listening hopefully in the wee hours of the morning to countless faulty repetitions of The Happy Farmer. Thanks anyway, Mom.

 
THE METRONOME
 
How she complains against the metronome
let loose to discipline her clever hands.
It changes she insists when accents roam
awkwardly from the measure it demands.
And she, hurrying over the notes she knows
or gingerly laggard at the tricky part,
asserts her independence as she goes
after the heedless rhythms of her heart.
This tension teaches how my will may go
stubborn and reckless while the beat is clear,
halting or quick, precipitate or slow,
despite instruction clicking in my ear,
until at last my little tune is done
and time unmeasured makes all tempos one.
 
Barbara Loots 1981  

This is my second time around with this song.  It’s like asking people to stop smoking crack.  But smoking crack is demonstrably bad for your physical and mental health, while watching tv is merely an enjoyable pastime.  What’s my problem?

Sure, I feel left out sometimes when I can’t quote lines from the latest episode of the latest fantasy about clashing barbarians or fictional politics.  Perhaps I betray my curmudgeon tendencies, because I didn’t even have tv until I was seven years old (and then it was Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy).   Perhaps I’m just a wee bit resentful that Cable—where all the “good” programs reside–costs a lot of money.

Nevertheless, we don’t subscribe to cable.  We don’t watch tv.  We don’t know what’s going on out there in the land of pharmaceutical ads, reality shows, Fox News, and seriously important sporting events.  Well, yes, we do get Ohio State football from time to time on the regular feed through the antenna.  I mean, what’s really important??  But the Super Bowl happens without a party at our house.

I try not to talk about this a lot.  It smacks of judgment and self-righteousness.  Guilty!  Also, perhaps it is just a teeny bit hypocritical:  we get our share of stories from online news subscriptions, Netflix, amazon prime, and (me) Facebook feeds.  Are these screen sources easier to control than sustaining resistance to the siren song of the DVR? I don’t know, as I have never figured out how to do DVR. What am I? Luddite. Troglodyte. (I’m proud of you if you know what these labels mean.)

During the recent political season, we hear about the bazillions of dollars poured into campaigns by “special interests.”  What did most of those dollars buy?  TV time. People’s brains on crack.  No use complaining about the purchase of office holders and their legislative votes, when it is the blurts of tv advertising that captivate and hornswoggle the voters at home.

STOP.  WATCHING.  TV.

Take control of your time, your brain, your home. Let advertisers of all kinds waste their money, not yours.

TV is crack.  But you can kick it.  Yes, you can.

Decades ago, I was a volunteer trainer at my church for a group of folks who wanted to learn how to be intentional caregivers for others in the midst of life challenges. I attended weeks of training for trainers. I studied data about subjects from divorce to job loss to infertility. I read pages and pages about the “grief process” and confidentiality and the limits of our role as non-professional helpers. In the end, only one subject really mattered. It was the hardest one to practice. It was the skill that nobody ever masters, including me. That is: Listening.

In my lifetime, one of my chief joys has been correspondence. As a transient in a military family, I was always leaving places and people behind. Letters sometimes helped retain a few of those ties. As an exchange student at age seventeen, I was transported half-a-planet away from my family long before internet or any other form of instant worldwide communication (including telephone) was available. Letters helped me keep breathing. As an adult, I connected via poetry with a friend who is my “pen pal” to this day, some four decades along. Unfortunately, our reams of written words have devolved to emails that disappear into the ether. But we write. We write. And by way of writing, we listen.

Letters, journals, and poetry are ways of listening, to others and to yourself. Sometimes I pour out thoughts unedited. Sometimes I pause to examine what I’ve written for truth and kindness. Sometimes I just want to sound clever. But in between all the words I deliver, I also want to hear what others have to say. I’m listening. The written word provides time and space to listen in a time when sitting down with a friend, or connecting with a stranger, over a cup of coffee seems like an impossible luxury. However, I hope I keep improving as a listener in person, too.

At the museum where I am a Docent, the skill of listening tops the list. Museum goers of any age don’t much care to hear a lecture about what I “know” about art. They want to question, to share what they know or think, to encounter a good listener. Wouldn’t you? Conversation is an art, and art is a conversation. Most of it is about listening.

Decades ago, I wrote a little poem. It was published in The Lyric in 1978. Now it sounds a bit wistful. Is there still time to listen? To the earth? To each other? Let’s try.

IT IS THE TIME TO LISTEN
 
It is the time to listen. Things
Have begun to speak again
More wonderful than music, more
Articulate than men:
The animals who question
And stones that mourn.
Oh, who will translate for us these
Green tongues of corn?
 
Barbara Loots

Tra-la! Tra-la!  The sun seems to be coming up.  Again.

I noted in the morning paper the obituary for Margaret Watkins.  She was almost 102 and had lived a brilliant life, including a degree from Stanford at the age of 20 in 1937.  I would like to have known her longer and better. However, for once, I did not have to kick myself for total neglect, as I had actually been to visit her in the infirmary only two days before she died.  She was serene and smiling and gave no hint of the possibility that she was on her Final Approach.  Personally, I believe she decided it was time, and closed her mind, and left.  I’d like to do that.

Bill is in the next room negotiating the purchase of 14,000 lbs. of native rock.  The wall building project will commence next week.  This is a garden wall that we hope will delight the neighborhood and exclude no one.

Yesterday we attended a walk-through of the soon-to-be-opened Napoleon Exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, hosted with commentary by the museum curator. Room after room of splendor overwhelms the senses and the imagination.  In the light of today’s politics, I have to say that Napoleon wins for PR strategy and charisma.

He gets credit for boosting employment and the economy by reviving the Gobelin tapestry production, Sevres porcelain manufacturing, and other industries supporting the extravaganza of court life in his many palaces throughout Europe.  And to think he came and went (officially) in only a couple of decades, counting his rise through the military ranks.  1799-1815 (second exile to St. Helena) is the official scope of the exhibition. In the final room, a stark profile of Napoleon in death (which looks like a Gorey drawing) floats upon a moving projection of the surface of the ocean.  Haunting indeed.

The exhibition will be on view through March 2019. Worldly glory comes and goes.

Meanwhile, I would like to remind today’s young of a classic admonition. Next to my keyboard, I have a little prayer card with a picture of Saint Teresa of Avila on one side and these famous words on the other:

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
all things are passing away.
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
Whoever has God
lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

Patience may obtain all things, but don’t forget to VOTE.  And don’t give power to anyone who claims that they “have God” in a box of their own devising.

Eventually the microbes will reclaim the planet.  Meanwhile, be as happy as you can.

Love your friends. Love your enemies.  Love yourself.  And try to embrace a Spirit who is beyond “all things.”

I fell asleep last night composing my Stand-Up Comic routine regarding the panties on the patio. As we departed for a gathering last night at a local dive, Bill handed me a pair of rain-damp panties he had picked up on the sidewalk to the garage. Are these yours?

Ladies, has this ever happened to you? At night, getting ready for bed, you strip off whatever pants or jeans you’re wearing, along with the panties you had on, and drop them wherever. Next morning, in the dark, you put on a clean pair of panties, and then…the same pants you had on the day before. Sometime during the day, the used panties you left inside the pants work their way down the leg until, yes, they drop out the bottom wherever you happen to be.

Luckily in this case it was on our back patio. Could have been the grocery store. “Um…ma’am…are those yours?” pointing to the panties in the coffee aisle. Could have been at church. Usher hands note to pastor in the pulpit. “Would the person who dropped her panties in the narthex please claim them from the usher after the service.” Or in the art museum. “What do you think the artist is trying to tell us with this pair of real panties casually dropped on the floor?” The scenarios could be endlessly humiliating. Compromising. Hilarious!

Moral: Never leave your panties in your pants. Unless of course you are actually wearing them.

And that is your antidote to the dire headlines of the day.

Bob says,

You’re not really going to post that, are you?

One of my resources for a rich experience of life is the community at Second Presbyterian Church. You can check us out Here. There’s a lot going on there in the way of outreach, creativity, spiritual exploration and encouragement, and, truth be told, good eating. Occasionally, Jesus was into giving people something to eat, right? In fact, that was part of the text of a message brought to us recently by Rev. Charlene Han Powell, a senior pastor at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. You can see a video of her sermon at the link above. As I thought about her message, related to an experience of hers with a magic performance in New York, I remembered a poem I wrote a long time ago. It was published in 1988 in a small collection of poems put together with my friend and fellow poet Gail White called Sibyl and Sphinx.

STRIKING THE BALANCE
 
Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.—Tom Robbins
 
By day and by night
I have weighed my wants, my needs, my God
on the scale of meaning and magic
imperfectly balanced. A bird
or the song of a bird, a leaf
or the shadow of a leaf could
sway it. Certainty’s an arc
with unknown limits. What horizon finally
will settle and satisfy it? What touch
steady the swing of the light?
 

It appears that I’ve been pondering the idea of “magic” as a yearning of the human spirit for a quite awhile. This isn’t the first time I’ve been astonished, really, by what I “knew” before I knew I knew it. If poetry could be considered (and I do so consider it) prophetic, it is because its message comes from a deep place that speaks through as well as to the writer. It is a form of truth, and yes, magic.

As I’ve read one after another the recent books of Professor Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century) I continue to ponder the direction of human evolution on this planet, especially the mystery of the human Mind. We know what the brain is and what it does. We have yet to discover what Mind is, when and how consciousness in humanity came about, and where it is taking us. As always, whatever I think, the stories I tell and the stories I discover in poetry, lead me to yearn for connection and relationship among the living species of the earth, especially the human.

So…what if the extra-terrestrial life we seem to be in search of is not extra-terrestrial at all, but extra-dimensional? What if there’s a form of being or existence right here with us that we are simply not equipped to detect? Our eyes and ears and other physical senses have evolved to enable us to live in our planetary environment. We have invented instruments to extend our capacity to look deep into the micro-universe and far out into space. Out there, we have become aware of something we call dark energy and dark matter—exerting profound influence on the processes of the universe, but still extremely mysterious.

What if there is a life form of which we may receive occasional glimpses but are for the most part unequipped to know? Are we, as a life form, evolving in the direction of someday connecting with it?

You are here. On Planet Earth. By an accident of evolutionary pressure, you (and I) got born. We have to keep ourselves busy for the seventy or eighty or a hundred years we may hang around, potentially more with improvements in biological management. And that alone, keeping busy in a non-destructive way, might constitute the “meaning of life.” But I wonder, is that extra-dimensional form of being the next leap in human evolution as we gradually–say in six or seven hundred million years–develop the physical means to detect it and perhaps become it? Like the unexplained evolutionary leap that produced consciousness in humans, and language, and culture, surely something more lies ahead.

No single one of us can evolve that fast. But if we are patient, and kind to each other, survivors may become “life as we know it” in quite interesting ways, a new fork in the evolutionary tree producing almost unimaginable beings. Technology in the form of bionics and genetics is working to extend our human capacity right now. But I’m talking about pure biological evolution. I might call it, for lack of a better definition, the spiritual being. I’ve always been interested in the evolutionary perspective of priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He called that being “Omega Man.” Perhaps we should pay attention to the evolutionary clues that have no physical evidence.

When you spend seventy-five days on an island with a lot of books and no internet, you begin to think like this. My favorite book of the many I read during this year’s stay on Dickinson Island in Ontario is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Currently, I’ve launched into his subsequent book Homo Deus. Harari gives me an accessible springboard to further speculation. I might add that the Bearly Used Bookstore in Parry Sound provided an overwhelming physical experience of the human capacity to produce ideas. And words.

Human imagination is a wonderful thing. We do well to note, as Harari explains, that concepts like money, corporations, and religion are merely operational agreements, forms of belief, and perhaps even irrational trust. Why not imagine ourselves, each one, as significant, albeit extremely small, bits of a universe that invites us to participate with every sense we have on the way to more.

On my way home from an errand–walking to the local pharmacy—-I observed, or rather heard, a car riding on a flat tire. Flubba flubba flubba. The driver pulled to the curb. The tire hung in shreds off the rim. I retraced my steps a short distance to check out the situation, knowing that there was a tire place half a block away, but out of sight from where the car was clearly stranded. The passenger got out of the car and inspected the tire with that bemused look all of us have when considering a hopeless situation. I came close enough, told him about the tire place, and watched him walk in that direction. That was the entire extent of my involvement.

But I wonder…what will happen to him next? He was a young black man, wearing a kind of headscarf I don’t even know the name of. From the looks of the car he was riding in, not to mention its emergency, he wasn’t well-off. I hope he found at least temporary help at the tire place. But after that, what?

Perhaps he’s late to work because of the flat tire. Perhaps his boss is unforgiving and fires him on the spot. Losing that paycheck even for a day means he can’t pay for a new tire, groceries, his mom’s medication, the water bill, the rent. Perhaps he should have thought of all that before he dropped out of high school a couple of years ago. But getting an education isn’t the first problem he has today, or the first solution. He’s already lower than the bottom rung. What is “someone” going to do for my brother today?

Did a flat tire ever ruin your life?

 

EVICTION
 
I’m just the guy they send to change the locks.
But what I seen would make your stomach turn.
Dead kittens. Rotten garbage. Baby blocks.
Rooms all charred up with stuff they tried to burn.
One time I even seen a waterfall
come down the stairs, the bathtub falling through
the ceiling. You could say I seen it all.
I wonder what this country’s coming to
when people working just as hard as me
get caught up in some paper-shuffle trick
and end up on the street. I get to be
the one that catches shit. It makes me sick.
I got my job to do. The neighbors stare
like I’m the bad guy, like I didn’t care.
  
Barbara Loots

Published in Light Quarterly Spring 2012
Published in Road Trip