My First

My friend Bakeem reminded me of my first poetry love with a Facebook post today.

When I was four years old, my great-grandmother gave me my first book of poetry- When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne. I still own it to this day. When you open the cover of the book, there is part of a faded date stamp on the left side. 14 May in red, from when I would play librarian as a little girl. Great- Grandmother Lu-Lu's fancy script takes up the first half of the right side:

Jessica Ann Finney Christmas - 1975

from

Great Grandpa &

Great Grandmother

Oh, how I traced those swirls and loops as a little girl! They encompassed a rather old-fashioned sense of femininity for me, made me envision tea parties and fancy hats with feathers and fine china. 

My idea of proper tea attire then

My idea now ;)

In later years the simplicity of the inscription and the word choice amplified a lot of who my great grandparents were. "Great Grandpa," the first William of three generations of "Billy B's", was a silly, fun man from what I can recall. I remember him taking out his false teeth and chasing me with them. When I think of him there is warmth and laughter. There is a family joke about him waiting for cars on the road before turning onto a road- if there was a car in sight, he would wait. It drove everyone crazy, everyone but me. I remember his funeral, my first, as a mildly sad but mostly confusing affair. Somehow I knew the basics of cremation and that he was going to be cremated. I had visions of his body being pushed into a coffin-shaped, grey metal furnace. It seemed neat and tidy to me rather than gruesome.

Grandma, Great-Grandma, Mom, and little alien me

"Great Grandmother" was much more formal in script and in person. She had a proud stature and always seemed well put together to me. She had a bedroom full of fancy jewelry, famed soft, silver hair, stories of moving west as a girl in the early 1900's, and was the keeper of the family Croissant Roll recipe. She had a stubborn streak that fed a rift between her and my mother that lasted their entire relationship. I'm still not sure what the rift was about, but I remember the tension between them and mom once told me how her Grandma never did like her much. My great-grandparents lived in Arkansas with their Daschund, Heidi, who I spent most of my time with when visiting them.  The drive there always upset my stomach because of all of the ups and downs on the road to their house, and my dad's tendency to drive like Starsky & Hutch. On sunny days, we would all walk down the little woodsy road their house rested on to what I thought of as the beach. It was actually a small lake where the local kids would go swim. Or, I would pass time talking to the raccoons that Great Grandma fed while laying in the hammock in their back yard. All of my memories of those times are fuzzy and soft, like looking through a camera lens into a sunny field.

So, that is a very rough sketch of the people that introduced poetry into my life in a significant way. This book has been through 38 years with me. It has a faded liquid ring on its cover from where some drink, probably iced tea, sat on it at one point. Its cover is a bit frayed at the edges, but its sketches and poems are intact. I remember getting lost in both. The drawings by Ernest H. Shepard at first appear to be just simple line drawings, but the more you examine them, the more you notice how tightly drawn they are. Very contained drawings despite the curls and whimsy. A lot of dark shading with vague faces. They convey emotion and atmosphere through movement and posture- the disarray of hair, the swoosh of a skirt, the angle of a tilt of the head. They leave just enough to the imagination to invite you in without you realizing it. It was so easy to put myself in those pictures as a child.

This picture, in particular, was always a favorite. Even as a little girl I would allow myself to daydream within this little square of a picture. The color and sound would fill in as I put myself in place of that boy. I could hear the birds and the wind and the surf, feel the grass and dirt prick at my skin, this was my happy place. 

The first poem I fell in love with was "Spring Morning" from this book:

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow-
Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Where am I going? The clouds sail by,

The colorized version of the picture that
accompanies the poem in the book

Little ones, baby ones, over the sky.
Where am I going? The shadows pass,
Little ones, baby ones, over the grass.

If you were a cloud, and sailed up there,
You'd sail on water as blue as air,
And you'd see me here in the fields and say:        

"Doesn't the sky look green today?"

Where am I going? The high rooks call:
"It's awful fun to be born at all."
Where am I going? The ring-doves coo:
"We do have beautiful things to do."

If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You'd say to the wind when it took you away:
"That's where I wanted to go today!"

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow-

Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

A. A. Milne

If little girls can have mantras, this was mine. The "What does it matter where people go?" line always gave me a sense of freedom and wonder. A mix of, we are so tiny in this place and, live and let live settled deep and permanent within me due in large part to those words. Words have always been real to me. I remember knowing that Aslan was real. Maybe not here and now, but somewhere he watched over Narnia with a mane I could tangle myself up in. I knew that the bears were waiting on the London streets for some kid to step on a line so they could have a tasty meal of innocence. I believed that all of the characters I read about were around, maybe just beyond sight, but very real and waiting for us to notice them. This is probably a direct result of being an only child.

hahahaha Oh, Alfred.

I don't know how many hours I have spent with this book over the years, but I am sure it has added up to weeks of my life. I bring it out every now and then to see if it is still relevant. It is. Always. My family is mostly gone, so I've gotten detached from my childhood in a lot of ways. It feels like that was someone else, like watching a movie rather than something I participated in. I don't have a ton of physical things from my past, so this book is a way for me to get back in touch with that sense of grounding, of roots, a hard and fast connection to the memories. Sometimes I don't think that's important, but then that discounts the experiences and people that shaped me. I don't need to live there anymore, but it's nice to be reminded of how I became a poet, what influenced me and shaped me to be this person that loves language and playing with it, where some of my ridiculousness  and wanderlust comes from. Plus, I am a sucker for nostalgia at my core. I just know not to get trapped in it, now.

'Cause nothing can compare
to the Brandi Bear

So that is my rambling, incoherent blog about the first poem and poetry book I fell in love with. I posted it on Debbi's Girl because the family connection seemed to fit. Also, I let a lot of what I wrote stand because of something my daughter said at Christmas, about not feeling a lot of connection to our family, and how she liked to hear stories about family members, so this is in big part for her. Love love love love love love love to the Brandi Bear.

Beautiful day

You'd love today.  It's beautiful out- I've spent the day working on writing, photography, and I'm going to paint if time allows.  Mom, Luther, Grandpa, Dad, yep, you'd all love today.

Rain came yesterday and washed the sweat from our backs.
Renewal permeates the air, moves through bones
and quietly reconstructs lives.
Dishes clatter in a kitchen across the alley,
laughter wanders from their window to ours
and brings comfort with it:
pots and pans and silverware clattering on plates
mean someone's in the kitchen- the center of home-
there's someone tending to the core of where we leave
and return to every day. 
The house is quiet except for music
songs you've never heard that I sing again and again.
If I could borrow just one of your voices for a minute,
I could do the music justice,
after all, that's what this whole crazy thing's about, isn't it?
Doing the music around us justice?
It's too bad my voice cracks and ambles awkwardly through
melodies and rhythms.
I need to apologize to the neighbors-
the windows are open and I'm singing
and the traffic just isn't loud enough.

Sometimes I write like this,
it looks like a poem but is really just me rambling-
there's something comforting in the
breaking
of lines for me.
Maybe it's a physical representation of my disjointed
thought process.
Maybe it's my fear
of committment.
Oh wait, I don't have that. So maybe it's my fear of run-on sentences.
Anyway, you'd love today.  If you were here we'd laugh at stupid things
and some of us would dance while others drank and philosophized.
We'd discuss all the taboo subjects and turn them into notes on the treble clef,
I'd paint them on the computer screen and you'd take turns rearranging them
in your throats.
Let's have a party.
A ghost party, it is the month of Halloween.  C'mon, you don't even need costumes!
BYOB Bring your own boos/booze
God, I miss you sometimes.
It's beautiful here today.

Death and Stuff

When you have a chronic illness you notice death more.  You fight it daily in tiny ways.  "Sorry, can't have a beer with ya, my medicine....," "I'll pass on that donut," "I have to find some shade, I react badly to the heat...."

I was looking out our dining room window this morning, counting rooftops and watching the streets stretch and yawn as they came to life, and recalled the movie we watched last night, Astronaut Farmer.  One of the underlying ideas in the movie is how tiny we are, how insignificant, and as I watched a red minivan crawl up the hill on E Street I realized that if I were to die, whoever that was in that soccer-mom's-steed wouldn't have any idea...and wouldn't care to.  My death wouldn't matter to millions and millions of people.  This didn't come to me as a morose, woe is me kind of thought; it was a realistic, statistical bit of trivia for me to ponder. Instead of leaving me with a helpless feeling, it sparked my thought process and led me down several winding paths of ideas and observations.

One was this idea of fighting death on an everyday basis.  As I was looking out the window watching Golden Hill's morning routine unfold, I was practicing my own: pulling pills from bottles and taking them one by one.  One half-pill for my blood sugar, one half-pill for anti-anxiety, two pills for blood pressure, one for cholesterol, a vitamin for nutrition, an iron pill for anemia and energy, and an L-Lysene to counter any viral anythings that might be floating around.  This is another slow battle against death that I wage each day.

Another path led me, as always, to Mom.  You can slow Diabetes down, but rarely can you reverse it entirely, or stop it from eventually catching up to you.  My mother had Type 1 Diabetes (I have Type 2), and always talked about feeling like an 20 year-old trapped in an 80 year-old's body. At 39, I'm getting just a small taste of what she truly meant by that. For her, fighting death wasn't just a daily routine, it was the the driving force behind each breath- she was much more aware of it on a conscious level than I am.  She was told at the age of 14 that she would be lucky to make it to forty.  Later in life, doctors often said she was alive due to sheer will.  She died at forty-seven.

 And thinking of Mom, I always think of her sense of humor- which led me to Terry Pratchett's character of Death in his Discworld series.  It is probably the most appealing portrayal of death I've encountered and I often find myself hoping he's onto something.  Pratchett's Death has always made me grin- here is this big mystery, this idea I have struggled with for years, this macabre vagueness we are all headed straight for...and he speaks in all caps, has this nice mix of innocence and wisdom, and is as mystified by humans and this "life" thing we lead as we are mystified by him.  There are times he just doesn't get us, and times he offers brilliant insights into human character and what we're all about.  And I think that's the crux of why I like this idea of death so much.  It's so, so human.  I can grasp it.  I can totally see Death and mom hanging out, dusting the hourglasses in Death's house while discussing their latest gripe with the Auditors of Reality.  I think mom and Death's granddaughter, Susan, would get along particularly well.

 So all of these trails of thought just tend to branch off into more trails.  They become a never-ending network of images and words that I envision like a mess of veins forming a circulatory system roaming around my mind.  They just keep circling around and around and end up back at the beginning, which leads to more offshoots and explorations.  There is rarely any conclusion, any set end that I can grasp and claim as final. 

This doesn't make me sad like it used to, or angry. I have come to accept it on some level, and grown curious about the enigma of death.  We may not know what exactly we're fighting against every day, but then who wants to battle the familiar day in and day out?  What kind of fight would it be without a challenge?

Strange Girl

Remember when you said you didn't recognize me- how for just a second, you were taken by the stranger leaning on the wall outside your hospital room?  You told me you wondered what her life was like, why she was on the 9th floor of Good Samaritan Hospital, and if she was happy or not.  I never answered those questions, just laughed and said I'd be careful not to wear my hair in a pony tail anymore.

My life is nothing special.  I get up at 5:30 weekday mornings, drive my husband to work, then myself.  I work 2-6 hours for a financial and insurance broker as a personal assistant.  I get off work and either walk the beach, hike the canyons, or pick my son up and run errands. Sometimes we go to the beach to read and laugh a lot.  Then I (we) pick my husband up and head home.  Some nights we go out to watch or perform music and poetry, but recently most nights are spent at home.  We write, watch Hulu or Netflix, cook together, read together, goof off on our computers, have long conversations and try to go to bed early if we can.

I have a lot of people in my life that I love like family, and an extended family that is fragmented and mostly silent.  I spent twenty years in Arizona and have a lot of people that have become brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, uncles, children and aunts to me.  Most of them are artists of some sort.  We spend holidays together.  We argue with and compete against each other.  We support and encourage one another.  We drunk dial each other and cuss each other out.  We bring each other hangover remedies and forgiveness in the morning.  We lend each other money when we need it most.  We "forget" to get paid back.  We write together.  We perform together.  We laugh together.  We travel together.  We love each other.

I was at the Nephrology Unit to see you.  I had my hair up because: one, it was summer in Phoenix, AZ.  Two, I had been watching 6 children.  Three: All of the children were under the age of ten.  Four: When I got the call you had been air-evac'd to Phoenix again, it was either put my hair up or tear it out.  I had thought about bringing you flowers, but thought better of it when I remembered how my last attempt at a thoughtful gift combined with humor had blown up in my face.

Flashback to last time I brought you flowers:
I sauntered into pod 9B and found your bed empty.  Kari, your nurse on many occasions and my personal favorite, said, "She's in dialysis."  
I grabbed a pen from the table by your bed and wrote, "We have to stop meeting like this," smiley-face and all, on the complimentary card and tucked it into the flowers. I headed to the dialysis unit and walked up to the nurse's station. 
The man behind the counter looked at me like I was a so, la, ti, and a doe short of a full scale when I plopped down the flowers, grinned and said, "Debbi Finney?  They told me she was in dialysis- they air-evac'd her here earlier," I rolled my eyes and said, "again...she has a hard time staying away from you guys."  He just stared at me as I shrugged my shoulders.  "I'm her daughter."
"You don't know, do you?  She's in a coma."  The letters on the card were suddenly embarrassingly bold. I brought the flowers with me to where you lay more to save face than to comfort anyone.
End flashback.

So flowers were out.  I was waiting outside your room because they were performing one of those mysterious "procedures" behind the flimsy privacy curtains and wouldn't let me into your room until they were finished.  I didn't notice they had left your room because I was lost somewhere in my own head.  My mind juggled thoughts about who would watch the kids while you were here and how long I'd stay tonight with worries about you and your condition, and the ever-present question, "Is she going to die this time?"  I was trapped between routine and panic, or maybe it was that panic was becoming routine.  I was there because I didn't want the last time I saw you to be the last time I saw you.

And to answer your last question, the stranger outside your room is happy.  I moved to the ocean after Dad died.  A combination of things brought me here.  The desert you loved was if not killing me, was at least beating me into submission.  After several bouts of health problems I had become nearly sedentary.  A magic potion of medications turned the sun into my nemesis instead of my savior. And, somewhere deep inside me I think I saw too many people close to me dying.  Everywhere I looked there were reminders of death: heat, dust, bones, thorns...or worse, manufactured life- golf courses and cities where there weren't enough resources to sustain them.  Borrowed time.  Stagnation.  I wanted life.  I wanted green.  I wanted movement.  Maybe moving to San Diego had elements of running away from my life, although it feels like running straight into it.

The kiddles are all grown up and have become amazing people with giving spirits.  My husband and I are silly in love with each other.  I'm no longer stuffing everything into that black knapsack our family prides itself on: silence.  I write, I paint, I sing, I cry, I laugh....a lot....annoyingly so.  So yes, I'm happy, and there is a good chance you wouldn't recognize me at first glance.

So those are your answers.  Now it's my turn.  What the hell did they do to you behind that curtain??

The What and the Why

This is part writing experiment, part blog.  The painting above was done by my Grandma, Dorothy Borchardt, and is of me and my Mom, Debbi Finney.  The picture below is my Mom taking part in my 4th Grade Pioneer Days by providing the music on the banjo and piano. 

Below is the song she wrote for me.  She could never perform it without crying, and now, as a mother myself, I finally understand why.

Sleep, pretty baby, don't you worry at all.
Mom and Dad are beside you, to catch you if you fall.
Bring me joy or bring me tears
bring me sunshine or bring me all of your fears.

Don't forget I will always be there,
and don't forget that I will always care,
so sleep, pretty baby, don't you worry at all.
Mom and Dad are beside you, to catch you if you fall.

When you grow and you are out on your own
don't forget that you can always come home.
For you will always be my own little girl
and no one could ever take your place in my world.

So sleep, pretty baby, don't you worry at all.