Figuring Out Life While Aging
O, Boccaccio,
Where are you now?
I need you to take me away from
graphs and maps and the tv’s heavy breathing.
I flee the city but yearn for
its pleasures:
smiles, touches, and fearless
encounters.
I need absorbing stories
and happy endings.
I see the world
through a scrim of
books.
I ride on words woven together,
carrying more freight than
just solitary singles, side by side.
Sentences and paragraphs,
pages and chapters.
books – tap feelings and understandings,
echoing the fingers that tapped letters, words, pages –
and built, shaped my mind.
You, with warp and weft of words, created
this floating, flowing, close-woven
jewelled net-lace I ride on and pull
through the ring of my mind,
accepting joyfully your gifts.
Homes are ceremonial,
ripe with obscure patterns
absentmindedly repeated.
The Dining Room
where eating
is an uncomfortably full altar;
The Living Room
where family mementos and the tv
sacrifice lives;
Even the Kitchen,
recipeless and hurried,
has ghosts,
although its necessary
Partner, (for defecating and self-presentation),
tries to be polite.
So the young
flee and refuse the rituals
that triggered their fears,
So the older
submit to the comfort
of their ceremonies.
I’m decluttering.
Whatever shall I do with your treasures?
They hide
in front of me,
whispering how they worked
to shape who you were.
They distort
who I want to be,
cluttering my hopes
with their commands,
demanding I become
subject to their shaping.
Forgive me: I have accepted
only some of your gifts.
I’ve been working with getting the some of my contacts into a label so I can connect Evite to it for a future party. This led to a couple of important learning experiences.
First, I set up the label and spent over an hour clicking on which contacts I wanted to add. (What can I say – I’m slow, and had some trouble making up my mind.) I was sure there was a way to add all of them at once but previously, I’d added addresses to labels one at a time by dragging them. When I went to hit a button I thought would do that, I lost all of the checks – over an hour’s work gone!
I was surprisingly calm, and left for a scheduled commitment. When I returned home, I went straight to Google and searched for “Add Contacts to Label in gmail” and found instructions, which I read faithfully. Many kept mentioning a button on the “Upper left”. I kept looking. I thought I knew which it was, and started checking off the contacts I wanted again.
Foolishly I spent a bit of time getting a bunch of them checked, then I thought to myself that maybe I should move contacts into the label in bunches, and see if my assumed button actually worked. I didn’t want to spend hours checking all of them off, and once again experiment. I did what I thought the instructions meant, and lost all these checks AGAIN!!!
Lesson 1:
Use only two or three checked contacts to try out what I think is the way to load contacts into a label, so as not to waste a huge amount of time checking off, then losing, a large number of checked contacts AGAIN!
I resumed using Google to search for instructions, trying different wording and orders of words. I continued feeling confused and lost with the text instructions. Tried a couple of possibilities with just two or three contacts checked off. Failed and failed again. (I’m of the Baby Boomer generation and print-oriented.) I tend to avoid YouTube, but when one link on my search included a YouTube site, I gave in and went to it.
Lesson 2:
A video showing the Contacts screen with verbal instructions is INFINITELY EASIER to understand than just text. Next time, I will go first to YouTube To find our how to do something.
So text, possibly written by people who already know how to do it and don’t know how to give clear descriptions for people who don’t already know how to do it, is not very helpful. The text instructions might work for those who already know how to do it and just need reminding. Or so I think.)
However, now I’m happy because I have my contacts whom I want to invite with Evite in their own label in Google Contacts. And I learned to click on the word, “Apply” or “Done” to make sure my work is saved. I also learned how to do a couple of other useful things from the video as well. 😄
Next challenge: how do I get my mate’s contacts, which he has in Apple Contacts, into my Google Contacts label.
for Anthony The words I can’t say Swallow me up, Choke me, As I try to spit them out. They are my truth That I close my eyes to And deny, throttling me. My teeth clamped, My breathing rapid, I gag, Then speak And almost say What I need to hear So i can know What I know.
Late I came to love
what I’d lost,
fled from,
and clung to.
The cloud clotted sky
hangs over the autumn
fields – pale gold, green, and empty –
racing past
the life I built.
Finding the route
to my beginnings, buried
with only stone
stories, I grieve
my losses.
Summer-like open window
Distant hammers, distant highway:
Memories from an old photo album
Sometimes confusion or an unarmed feeling
explodes,
lit by words bursting
into meanings previously hidden in darkness and silence.
Rejoice:
a part of your brain has
new synopses
shaping your
Mind.
Bardo
In some schools of Buddhism, bardo … is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth. – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo
The sun angles wrong on my eyelids;
I resist waking in this strange place.
I feel my father’s room;
The plants gone, the walls striped
Of the photos of the many people he loved,
The chairs and chest huddled together,
The bed barren, the lounge chair empty,
His life in boxes
To be removed.
Learning Living 