Maiden Mother Crone

Last Journal from Indian Harbour Beach

Last night a gibbous moon was shining high over a calm Atlantic Ocean.  Yesterday morning I drove myself to a Hospital off US 1 near Melbourne for blood tests ordered by cardiologist Kothari in FL and pulmonologist Fernandez in Denver.  I’d wanted both docs to get results for all tests, but they get only what each ordered.  I’d like to lose the dizzy, drowsy, weak, exhausted effects from the cardio cocktail. “Doctor’s orders” may not be best. 

A week ago I took myself off Pravastatin to control high cholesterol, which I’ve never had.  Post-heart-attack drugs are prescribed one-size-fits-all need it or not.  Pravastatin made me dopey and so weak and wrung out that I could barely lift and carry my oxygen tank.  For 3-4 nights I took half tabs and then went cold turkey after a chat with a pharmacist at Publix where Lisa and I were grocery shopping last Friday.  Now 3-4 days off the drug, I’m feeling stronger.  I walked down to the beach two evenings needing less oxygen.  After blood tests today, I stopped at Walgreens and pushed my oxygen tank in the cart.  Farewell, zombie-world. 

Lisa, Cheyenne, and Dave came last Thursday for two nights.  We went out for seafood the first night.  On Friday Lisa woke up excited to see the last launch of the space shuttle.  We saw it full blast from the beach.  That afternoon Lisa and Cheyenne baked chocolate chip cookies. Later Lisa made two large spinach quiches—one for dinner and one for me for later.  Both nights we played Pictionary in teams.  Dave and Cheyenne were helpless against the mother/daughter duo that reads each other’s minds.  Oddly enough Cheyenne and I often drew identical clues for our teammate.  After noon Friday, the whirlwind swept out my door.

Doris arrives 1 pm tomorrow from ABQ.  We’ll pack up my stuff in time for 10 am Friday check-out.  We head up I-95 toward Durham, NC and my Evaluation for acceptance at Duke Heart-Lung Transplant Center.  (Send blessings and prayers!)  We return to Orlando for Cheyenne’s Shakespeare performance and more travel.  Doris will fly back to ABQ for Aug.  Lisa’s home will be my Aug. base camp, but I hope to find a space of my own to continue my writing and meditating.  I won’t be accessing email as often until Aug.

With only two days left in this beautiful ocean spot I’m assessing my time.  I’d hoped to do more writing, more walking on beach, more venturing out.  Zombie state prevented it.  Days I could barely peel myself out of my recliner I dozed over reading.  I brought along old journals and files of letters received and copies of letters sent.  My complete log of the horror story at my first teaching job in Joplin gave me exact names, dates, even times of events.  Reading old documents, I learned much about myself and people in my life back then that I’d forgotten. 

I’ve stared at the crashing waves pondering the ebb and flow of those desperate years when I was rushing forward into adventures with outcomes I couldn’t foresee.  The Joplin memoir needs work, but that can wait until Aug.  Lisa and I talked about her Joplin memories, significant changes--going through puberty.  On Sunday I talked with the other most significant person in my life then, who has her own memories of that time.  No time now to begin the Fayetteville years (1968-76) or the central to LN years in Winter Park (1979-93). 

Reading has sustained me.  To stimulate my memoir writing, I re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird but laid it aside as words in my head crowded out reading.  I read The Pleasure of Their Company, Doris Grumbach’s memoir of turning eighty and her gratitude for the brilliant people in her life.  In An Improvised Life, Alan Arkin narrates his life as an actor and reminds us that we are all improvising our lives, so be authentic.

Kathleen Hill’s lyrical novel Still Waters in Niger reads like a memoir.  A woman returns to desert town where she lived 17 years ago.  Her daughter’s working in a clinic, part of the intimate native culture.  The woman tries to understand how she failed her daughter in the past as she observes the warm intimate mother bonds of native women.

Pat G sent me Sinister Wisdom #82 on Lesbian Lives in the 70s in which she has a witty memoir of her clashes with her mother in Boston.  I devoured the issue in a single day, thrilled to read words of old friends and remember the times I’m now writing about when we were filled with hope and joy and struggle creating lesbian nation.

Cheyenne’s been sharing novels she’s enjoyed with me (teen/young adult).  Two weeks ago she brought Moon Riders. “I think you’ll like this, Gram,” she said shyly smiling.  Did I ever enjoy a tale of Amazon warriors who give girls Cheyenne’s age training in the ways of the old women, a tradition under threat by the new religion of Apollo in Troy on the brink of war!  Cassandra joins the moon riders.  They rescue Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s dagger in a mist.  Matriarchy reigns in the nomadic clans that support moon riders.  On Thursday she brought The Hunger Games.  It portrays a dystopian bureaucracy in which teens are selected by lottery to battle to death for the entertainment of viewers—not unlike popular TV so-called reality shows.

I opened a box I thought was all Lesbian Nuns and it turned out to be everything else—a box we’d never opened in NM.  There was Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution inscribed to my mother on Mother’s Day 1978.  Did she read it?   

I mentioned reading Barbara Walker’s brilliant treatise Crone earlier.  Re-reading When God was a Woman by Merlin Stone brought back my awe of discovery 35 years ago.

The prime treasure was an original paperback of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, 1980), inscribed to me by my dear friend Dorothy.  On the title page under Audre’s name, Dorothy has written in her fine artistic pencil “passed to Spirit from her Mother Earth Dec ’92.” Dorothy passed to Spirit 15 years later at Winter Solstice 2007.  I let my grief and healing tears wash over me, feeling a hole in my heart, missing them both.

The book includes the speech I remember Audre giving on the “Lesbians and Literature” panel at MLA, December 1977, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”  Audre rallied us into action.  I carried her poetry in my backpack the next few years, a touchstone to women of power.  I taped “A Litany for Survival” over my desk.

My first semester at Rollins (fall 1979), the poet colleague who planned “Winter Term with the Writers,” asked who I’d like to bring.  We invited Audre who gave a spectacular reading in an African dress and turban that made her look like a goddess.  The reading drew the Black community, women’s community, and poetry community in a beautiful space on Lake Virginia.  Next day I drove Audre to Gainesville and we became friends.  In my letter file, I found one from her dated Sept 8, 1980, with a sly offer to return: “Tell Rollins they need a Black Lesbian Feminist Troublemaker’s visits to keep them juicy!” Audre was definitely juicy.   

Here and now Audre’s words became my spirit reading.  I carried the book to Denver, reading only a few pages at a time, in awe of Audre’s powerful anger:  How do my experiences with cancer fit into the larger tapestry of my work as a Black woman, into the history of all women?  And most of all, how do I fight the despair born of fear and anger and powerlessness which is my greatest internal enemy? Audre’s words struck my core.  I’ve resisted deeper darker feelings rising into consciousness.  Audre’s honesty will help me search my soul.

Yvonne and Joan

Things Go Shopping

Two monkeys on a palm tree

July 6 Journal

            It’s been ten days since I wrote here.  You’ve asked how I’m doing.  Am I walking along the shore as I did here in November and February?  Sadly no.  Previously I was able to make it from my condo to the shore without oxygen by walking very slowly.  Now I need 3-4 liters pulse flow whenever I’m walking, but I’m too weak to carry my oxygen tank very far without sitting down to rest and no place to sit from condo door to elevator and around the building until I reach the steps down to the ocean, so I hadn’t attempted to reach the beach on my own. 

Last Thursday with Lisa carrying the tank and a folding chair for rest stops, we made it all the way.  When Mother Ocean splashed up on my ankles, it felt like the kiss of the goddess.  Tears of joy poured down my face.  For 18 days from my balcony, I’d been admiring changing colors of sky and ocean surface, hearing the roar of surf, tasting and smelling the salty air, but hadn’t felt the touch of waves splashing up my legs or breezes whipping my face and arms.   I had to try it on my own.  Sunday evening and last night I did it alone.

Being so weak, exhausted, dizzy, drowsy has been discouraging.  I emailed my Denver pulmonologist.  Is it inflamed lungs, damaged heart?  No, it’s the drugs they’re pumping in me.  It’s chemical warfare and not failing organs.  Cardiologist can’t decrease anything until I have blood tests next week, and he’s on vacation until July 18.  I venture out with visitors.  Otherwise, I stay in and breathe the ocean from my balcony.

Nurses get my applause this week.  Thanks for valuable and compassionate feedback. I talked with Linda and Marcia at NJH about sorting out my meds, with Mary at pulmonary rehab in ABQ about setbacks and progress, and with Angela in cardiologist Kothari’s office about getting the doc to modify my meds so I can regain strength and mobility.

Lisa, Cheyenne, and her friend Grace came last Wednesday for kids’ night at Friendly’s when Alex the balloon man makes custom-order critters.  He created his magnum opus “two monkeys climbing a palm tree” for Cheyenne and a flamingo for Grace.  On Thursday we went to Publix for groceries. Lisa drops me with oxygen tank at the door, and Cheyenne finds a cart for me to drive.  Cruising the aisles, I’m fine.  I’d never imagined grocery shopping could become such a desirable (and necessary) adventure.  Family left late Thursday afternoon.

On Saturday afternoon, Yvonne and Joan came from Winter Park.  Talking about our lives and the world for hours brought the hermit out of her cave, but  I do enjoy my hermit life.  A sage said, “The gods punish us by answering our prayers.”  I’ve yearned for this silence and solitude to write and read, but then I relish visitors.

In March 1985 Yvonne interviewed me for a feature story on Lesbian Nuns in the Orlando Sentinel, and we became close friends.  When Lisa was giving birth to Cheyenne, Yvonne picked me up at the airport and raced through traffic to Florida Hospital where all doors opened for the mother of the mother. 

Doris is driving back from Missouri today with a friend from college after a family celebration near St Louis.  She’ll drive past Joplin in its current devastation.  I hope she has fun playing tourist back in the land she loves but must leave because of me.  How sad for her!  Five years ago we were moving into our new home with hopes of settling in for decades.  Doris was designing our interior space to display her collection of southwest art, while I was unpacking my library.  We were making new friends, discovering favorite restaurants.

Maybe we never belonged there along with conquistadors and gringo interlopers.  The land belongs to native people who love and care for Mother Earth and wolves, coyotes, jack rabbits, road runners, and rattlesnakes. 

I just finished Leslie Marmon Silko’s memoir The Turquoise Ledge about living on the edge of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona where she befriends all desert creatures, especially rattlesnakes.  She weaves her family history and legacy, growing up on the Laguna Pueblo in NM, with the star people she’s painting.  She grieves the destruction of the landscape by careless greedy developers.  In NM right now fires, barely contained, rage across mountains and pueblos, leaving charred ruins.  How can we less well-adapted species survive?

I’ve been writing the Joplin years (1976-79) of my memoir.  What’s my core quest?   Why did I take on Lesbian Nuns in 1981 when I had no time?  All my life I’ve been searching for sisters.  I have no blood sisters; I invented an imaginary one when I was two—dancing elf on the other side of the mirror.  Later I discovered Girl Scouts, Dominican sisters, women’s studies, feminist theater, and Lesbian Nuns.  In Joplin I created my lesbian feminist self, discovered women’s culture , and forged my Amazon sword when the college where I had my first tenure-track job fired me for writing a lesbian story or for being an uppity woman.  I have a draft ready to share with readers who’ll give me feedback.  Email if you’d like to read this draft.