April 20: "Quatrain," Music, "Tacet"

Billy Collins sees music everywhere . . . 

Quatrain

by:  Billy Collins

When a woman

in a low-cut blouse

walked by,

the grocer in the doorway

raised his eyebrows

revealing the four lines in his forehead.

Music has always been a big part of my life.  I remember my mom playing Doris Day as she cooked in the kitchen.  Falling asleep to soundtracks of South Pacific and Oklahoma.  Cruising with my brother in his van, listening to "Bungle in the Jungle."  Church music.  Disco.  Country.  Broadway.  Classical.  Punk.  Pop.  Acid.  I listened to them all.  Perhaps that's why poetry seems like breath to me.

It has been a quiet day.  The most excitement I had was walking to church to play the pipe organ for Mass.  I took my puppy for a few walks, too.  And, for some reason, I thought about my sister, Rose, a lot.

Most of my faithful disciples know Rose had Down syndrome.  And she loved music, too.  She couldn't really carry a tune, but she could move and dance like Chita Rivera.  All day long, I've been hearing Rose's voice and laugh.  This morning, when I took my dog for her first spin around the backyard, the lilac bushes along the property line were full of birds singing in the bright sunshine.  That made me think of Rose, as well.

She's been gone for a couple years now, but she's still present somehow, like an old tune that reminds me the world can be really beautiful.

Saint Marty misses his sister's offkey voice.

Tacet

by:  Martin Achatz

Birds in the lilac bushes

this morning reminded me

of my sister's eyes right

before she died:  

               

               as if she

was surprised by her silent

heart and lungs, her spirit

still perched for a few seconds

in the branches of her body

before taking flight.

December 7: "This Morning," Tough Day, Advent Blessing

Mary Oliver experiences an everyday miracle . . . 

This Morning

by:  Mary Oliver

This morning the redbirds' eggs

have hatched and already the chicks

are chirping for food.  They don't

know where it's coming from, they

just keep shouting, "More!  More!"

As for anything else, they haven't

had a single thought.  Their eyes

haven't yet opened, they know nothing

about the sky that's waiting.  Or

the thousands, the millions of trees.

They don't even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple 

neighborhood event, a miracle is

taking place.

It has been a tough day for reasons I will not get into.  Just tough.  I woke up in a good mood and got through most of the morning before things went to shit.  Again, I'm not going to explain what went wrong.  Suffice to say, by about 5 p.m., I was ready for a massage or nap or strong drink.  Or all three.

Mary Oliver is really good at looking around and finding miracles in marsh and mud, pine tree and stones.  In today's poem, it's newly hatched redbirds, their insistent cries for more and more food, the promise of trees and flight in their fragile bodies.  Their newness is a miracle.  Their hunger and need--miracles.  

In the Christian calendar, we are about one week into the Advent season, that time in the church year that is defined by waiting and anticipation.  Preparing for the miracle of Christmas Day.  I almost prefer the buildup to the big day--these four weeks to focus on tiny, almost imperceptible moments of grace.  Miracle moments, if you will.  It could be the cheerful "thank you" of a bell ringer at Walmart, when you drop some coins in the bucket.  It could be watching your Secret Santa person at work opening her anonymous presents.  Or it could be throwing a ball for your puppy to catch, how she looks at you with the anticipation of a kindergartner on Christmas morning.

Tonight was one of those miracle moments for me.  My wife and I performed in an Advent program at the Catholic church I've been attending since I was a kid.  (I graduated from passive pew-sitter to active pipe organist when I was about 17-years-old.)  Lots of beautiful music.  Inspiring readings.  I read one of my Christmas poems, and my wife sang "Stille Nacht."  And, possibly for the first time this year, I felt that old excitement for the holidays.  That joyful anticipation.  

I love the Christmas season.  Always have.  I host a podcast called Lit for Christmas.  I usually put my tree up right around Halloween every year.  My fondest memories of childhood revolve around Thanksgivings and Christmases.  My sister, Rose, staring at the beautiful lights strung up in the house, the ornaments in the branches of the tree, my mother's manger scene.  My sister, Sally, was the same way.  She went full-on Santa at this time of the year, shopping and wrapping and baking and planning.

While reciting my poem tonight at church, listening to my wife sing, I experienced, for a few minutes, all of those feelings again.  It was a miracle.

And Saint Marty was blessed.

January 20: Christ Knows, My Sister Rose, "Fear Not"

Santiago waits for the fish . . . 

"Come on," the old man said aloud. "Make another turn. Just smell them. Aren't they lovely? Eat them good now and then there is the tuna. Hard and cold and lovely. Don't be shy, fish. Eat them."

He waited with the line between his thumb and his finger, watching it and the other lines at the same time for the fish might have swum up or down. Then came the same delicate pulling touch again.

"He'll take it," the old man said aloud. "God help him to take it."

He did not take it though. He was gone and the old man felt nothing.

"He can't have gone," he said. "Christ knows he can't have gone. He's making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and he remembers something of it."

Then he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy.

"It was only his turn," he said. "He'll take it."

There is something about waiting for an event to happen.  A birthday or wedding.  A fish nibbling on a hook.  Christmas.  Time both stands still and rushes forward at the same moment.  One second can seem like a winter thaw, a slow-motion drip.  One month can seem like bee sting, fast and painful.  

My day has been like this, both frozen and a stampede.  I received a phone call at 5 a.m. from my sister, telling us that we needed to come to the hospital as soon as possible.  Our sister, Rose, was not doing well.  Here comes the first slow motion stampede, where every minute seemed like an expedition to summit Everest.  Slow and precarious.

After we arrived at the ICU, the rest of the morning was sort of a blur of BiPap machine, x-ray, and blood tests.  In the end, it was determined that, basically, her body was tired of fighting for every breath.  One lung had collapsed, and the other had pneumonia.  She had MRSA and was fighting sepsis.  So, Rose was put on oxygen and, after about an hour, at 9:01 a.m., just when my daughter arrived and took Rose's hand in hers to say goodbye, my sister took one last quiet breath and was gone.

Ice Age seconds passed as I waited to see if her chest would rise again.  She remained still and peaceful.

I like to think that Rose is playing cards with my mother right now.  Or that she's sharing a Diet Coke with my sister Sally.  I like to think that Rose has entered a place where time simply doesn't matter or exist.  Seconds are eons, and eons are moments spent in the arms of people who love you.

Saint Marty is a little heartbroken tonight.

A poem for my sister Rose . . . 

Fear Not

by: Martin Achatz

My sister Rose spoke with the Virgin
One night when lightning laced
The sky and thunder rolled
Like a wailing ambulance.
Rose, with black hair, eyes dark
As baker's chocolate. Rose, who listened
To the rain drill the ground, felt terror
In her chest, blooming like a mushroom.
Rose, with Down's Syndrome,
Her speech thick,
Weighing on her tongue like rust.

She knew nothing of atmospheres,
Weather fronts, lightning that traveled
From the ground to the heavens
Like a white hot soul. She knew
Nothing of raining frogs,
Hailstones the size of peach pits.
Hers was a child's fear, as simple
As shadow in a closet.
When she knelt at the foot of her bed,
Folded small fingers,
Her prayers opened like sunflowers
In the still air.

Mother found Rose that night,
Speaking with the darkness.
She looked like moonlight, her words
Agates, smooth, round, polished.
Rose, imperfect since birth,
Slower than summer heat,
Filled the room with light.

Anne came upon her daughter
Like that, too, Mary in the dark,
Her childhood fears sitting
On the windowsill like empty bowls
Waiting for rain.

Mary spread her arms,
Wrapped them around the angel,
Pressing her mouth to his neck.
She tasted lightning and shadow
On his bright skin, swallowed them,
Felt them take root
In her belly. She opened
Her robe, guided his lips
To her boy chest,
Motherhood swelling
In her rose nipple.

May 17-18: Hottest Place, Anticipation and Gratification, My Sister Rose

Merton learns something about being a novice . . . 

It was too far from town to go down to Communion every morning—I had to hitch-hike down. And that was one reason why I asked one of my friends, Father Joseph, a friar who had come to St. Bonaventure’s from New York to teach summer school, if I could not come down there for a couple of weeks. 

Seeing that I was going to enter the Order in August, it was not hard to persuade the Guardian to let me come down and stay in the big, dilapidated room in the gymnasium that was occupied by three or four poor students and seminarians who had odd jobs around the place as telephone operators and garage hands, for the summer. 

At that time all the clerics from the different houses of studies in the Province came to St. Bonaventure’s for the summer, and I suppose they are doing it again, now that the war is over. So in those weeks I really began to enter into Franciscan life, and get some taste of it as it is led in this country and to know some of its pleasant and cheerful and easy-going informality. 

Summer school had not yet started, and the clerics had plenty of time to sit around on the steps of the library and gymnasium and tell me stories about how it had been with them in the novitiate. I began to get a picture of a life that was, in their estimation, somewhat severe, but was full of its own lighter moments. 

St. Anthony’s monastery, they said, was the hottest place they had ever seen, in the summer time, and the chapel was stuffy, and was filled with a sickening smell of wax from all the burning candles. Then there was a certain amount of work to be done. You had to scrub floors and wash dishes and work in the garden. But then you got some time to yourself and there was recreation too. I got dark hints of humiliations that were to be expected, here and there, but they all agreed that the novice master was a good sort of a fellow, and they liked him. They told me I would too.

Merton is in the thrall of the idea of being a novice in a monastery.  He hasn't had to deal with the day-to-dayness of being part of a religious order, so even mundane details like burning wax and dirty dishes and floors hold a certain excitement for him.  Everything is polished with newness and hope, that feeling you get looking at a pile of unopened Christmas gifts or sitting in a brand new car.  It's all about possibility.

Here I sit on the cusp of summer.  Outside my office window at the library, trees are flushed with green.  All day, I watched people shambling, ambling, loping by in shorts and tees as I worked.  The temperature at 3 p.m. topped out at around 81 degrees.  I actually contemplated walking up the street to get an ice cream cone about mid-afternoon.  I held on to that thought for several hours.  Because, in my experience, anticipation is much better than gratification.

In my childhood, the build-up to Christmas was huge.  This was in the days before streaming services and VCRs, when you had to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas or Santa Claus is Coming to Town or How the Grinch Stole Christmas on its broadcast date and time.  If you missed the scheduled airing, you had to wait another 365 days for the chance of seeing the program again.  So, even Christmas television specials stoked the fire of longing.  And that was the best part of the whole season--the wishing and wanting and dreaming.

Now, it is next to impossible to sustain that kind of anticipation indefinitely.  Eventually, Christmas arrives or you board the plane for Hawaii or you go pick up your new pair of glasses.  Then, you are confronted by reality.  You get a biography of Alfred Nobel instead of the Nobel Prize in Literature for Christmas.  A hurricane hits Waikiki the day you arrive and causes a two-week electrical blackout.  Your new glasses make you look like Truman Capote after a three-week bender.

Yesterday morning, after a long weekend of rehearsing and performing for a live recording of a radio show, I FELT like Truman Capote after a three-week bender.  I.  Was.  T.  I.  R.  E.  D.  I had no wishes or wants or dreams, aside from five more hours of sleep and/or a hefty amount of caffeine.  I was anticipating a pretty rough day.  

About ten in the morning, I received a text, informing me that my sister, Rose, was rushed by ambulance to the hospital for a possible stroke.  Two sentences, and all of my exhaustion burned off like a comet screaming through Earth's atmosphere.  And what was left was a day of worry, more texts, prayer, and more worry.  I went from wishing, wanting, and dreaming for additional hours of sleep to wishing, wanting, and dreaming that my sister was alright.

In short, the universe gave me a reality check.

Longtime disciples of Saint Marty know that Rose is my older sister (by two years).  She has Down Syndrome and is in the later stages of Alzheimer's.  For the last year, she's been suffering from seizures, which, according to doctors, is an expected symptom of the disease.  There's not a whole lot to be done, except to medicate and hope it works.

I went from anticipating a day of complete and utter tiredness yesterday to a day of anticipating a phone call telling my my sister was on life support.  And a LOT of people sending up healing thoughts and prayers to the universe, Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, the Force, whatever.

By the late afternoon, Rose had opened her eyes.  By evening, she was eating mashed potatoes, pudding, and ice cream, washing it all down with chocolate milk.

This might not sound like a miracle to some of my disciples, but, to me, it really was like opening up a present on Christmas and finding an invitation from the Swedish Academy to travel to Stockholm to accept my Nobel Prize.  Or plane tickets to Honolulu.  Or the newest iPhone.  Or a pair of glasses that make me look like George Clooney.  In fact, it was like all of those things combined.

Today, Rose is sitting up in a chair and eating and talking.  She will probably come home tomorrow, according to the doctors.  

In this case, gratification certainly outstripped anticipation.  Rose certainly isn't out of the woods.  She still is in the later stages of Alzheimer's.  When I go to see her after she gets home, she still won't know who I am.  However, she is eating, drinking, laughing, and talking.  

And for that miracle, Saint Marty gives thanks.

January 29: Most Orderly and Peaceful, Many Jobs, Work for a Library

 Merton takes a trip to the library . . . 

When the summer came I sub-let the apartment on Perry Street to Seymour’s wife and went up-state, into the hills behind Olean. Lax’s brother-in-law had a cottage, on top of a hill, from which you could see miles over New York and Pennsylvania—miles of blue hill-tops and wooded ridges, miles of forest smudged here and there, in the dry weeks, with smoke, and gashed open, in the neighboring valley, by the lumbermen. All day and all night the silence of the wood was broken by the coughing of oil-pumps, and when you passed through the trees you could see long metal arms moving back and forth clumsily in the shadows of the glade, because the hills were full of oil. 

So Benjie, Lax’s brother-in-law, gave us this place, and let us live there, trusting more than he should have in our ability to live in a house for more than a week without partially destroying it. 

Lax and I and Rice moved in to the cottage, and looked around for places to put our typewriters. There was one big room with a huge stone fireplace and the works of Rabelais and a table which we presently ruined, feeding ourselves on it with hamburgers and canned beans and untold quarts of milk. There was a porch which looked out over the hills and where we eventually erected a trapeze. It was very pleasant to sit on the step of this porch, and look at the valley in the quiet evening, and play the drums. We had a pair of bongos, a Cuban double-drum, which is played two-handed and gives several different tones, depending where and how you hit it. 

In order to make sure we would have plenty of books, we went down to the library at St. Bonaventure’s College where this time, being baptized, I was no longer scared of the Friars. The librarian was Father Irenaeus, who looked up at us through his glasses and recognized Lax with ingenuous surprise. He always seemed to be surprised and glad to see everybody. Lax introduced us to him: “This is Ed Rice, this is Tom Merton.” 

“Ah! Mr. Rice.... Mr. Myrtle.” Father Irenaeus took us both in, with the eyes of a rather bookish child, and shook hands without embarrassment. 

“Merton,” said Lax, “Tom Merton.” 

“Yes, glad to know you, Mr. Myrtle,” said Father Irenaeus. 

“They were at Columbia too,” said Lax. “Ah, Columbia,” said Father Irenaeus. “I studied at the Columbia Library School,” and then he took us into his own library and with reckless trust abandoned all the shelves to us. It never occurred to him to place any limit upon the appetites of those who seemed to like books. If they wanted books, well, this was a library. He had plenty of books, that was what a library was for. You could take as many as you liked, and keep them until you were through: he was astonishingly free of red tape, this happy little Franciscan. When I got to know the Friars a little better, I found out that this trait was fairly universal. Those who love rigid and methodical systems have their life of penance all cut out for them if they enter the Franciscans, and especially if they become superiors. But as far as I know, Father Irenaeus has never been robbed of his books on a larger scale than any other librarian, and on the whole, the little library at St. Bonaventure’s was always one of the most orderly and peaceful I have ever seen. 

Presently we came out of the stacks with our arms full. 

“May we take all these, Father?” 

“Sure, sure, that’s fine, help yourself.” 

We signed a vague sort of a ticket, and shook hands. 

“Good-bye, Mr. Myrtle,” said the Friar, and stood in the open door and folded his hands as we started down the steps with our spoils. 

I still did not know that I had discovered a place where I was going to find out something about happiness. 

Merton feels at home in the library at St. Bonaventure's.  I think there are two reasons for this.  First, he is surrounded by books, which have always been his best companions throughout his young life.  Second, he is surrounded by Franciscan monks.  Merton, even at this early stage in his faith, finds some kind of inner happiness and peace interacting with religious community life.  Books and monks are the key.

I've worked many jobs in my life.  Plumber's apprentice.  Busboy.  Bookstore clerk and cashier.  Teacher.  Professor.  Pipe organist.  Worship leader.  Janitor.  Health information clerk.  Medical office manager.  I've loved certain things about all of these jobs.  Enjoyed some more than others.

Having this many occupations has been a necessity more than a choice.  You see, I'm a poet.  There aren't too many jobs out there for those of my ilk.  For some reason, nobody wants to pay me to sit in a quiet room all day long and poetize.  Those days probably died with Chaucer.  There aren't any rich patrons out there who want poets on their payroll.  So, therefore, throughout my lifetime, I have always held down many jobs at once.

Now, I work for a library.  And it is amazing.  I am surrounded by books all day long.  I work with people who are concerned about things like making take-home art kits for kids and adults; answering research questions on family genealogy, ordering collections or poetry for the shelves, scheduling musical concerts.  In a lot of ways, librarians are a lot like people in religious communities.  There's a shared sense of purpose.  Everyone is all about knowledge and learning and art and making the world a better place through language and beauty.

So, it has taken me close to 40 years, but I have found a work place that completely coincides with my own passions and interests.  

Nothing is ideal, of course.  I still have daily problems.  Still have to hold down several jobs to pay the bills.  My son is still struggling with school.  My wife, with mental health and addiction issues.  I still have bills that I don't know how I'm going to pay.  My sister Rose went home from the hospital a few days ago, but she still has severe health challenges.

Yet, professionally, I am in a better place than I've ever been.  I like sitting in my library office every day, figuring out how to shed some light into the universe with poetry, music, art, learning.  On Saturday mornings, I get to the library very early.  Usually, I'm the first person in the building.  I climb the stairs to my second-floor office.  I take off my jacket, turn on my computer.  Then I sit down, look out the window, and watch the sunrise.  Darkness giving way to the pink and orange bruise of day.

The world is an amazing place.  Full of small and large miracles.  Poems.  Icicles burning with dawn.  New medications that will hopefully help to control my sister Rose's seizures and prolong her time with us.  Vaccines to combat a worldwide pandemic.  Coworkers to laugh with.  Friends to speak with.  Family to love with.  

Books to read.

Saint Marty is a pretty lucky guy.  He just needs to be reminded every once in a while.

January 24: Communion Two Days in a Row, Bernie Sanders Memes, My Sister Rose

Merton lives the life of an "intellectual" . . . 

The end of January came. I remember, when I took my exams for the M.A., I went to Communion two days in a row, and both days I was very happy, and also I did quite well in the examinations. So after that I thought it was necessary for me to go to Bermuda for a week, and sit in the sun, and go swimming, and ride bicycles along those empty white roads, rediscovering the sights and smells that had belonged to a year of my early childhood. I met a lot of people who liked to ride around all night in a carriage singing: “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah—strumming on the old banjo.” The weather was so good that I came back to New York brown and full of health, with my pocket full of snapshots of the strangers with whom I had been dancing and sailing in yachts. And I was just in time to see Bramachari leave for India, at last, on the Rex. He was sailing with the Cardinals who were off to elect the new Pope. 

Then I went to Greenwich Village and signed a lease for a one-room apartment and started work on my Ph.D. I suppose the apartment on Perry Street was part of the atmosphere appropriate to an intellectual such as I imagined myself to be and, as a matter of fact, I felt much more important in this large room with a bath and fireplace and French windows leading out on to a rickety balcony than I had felt in the little place ten feet wide behind the Columbia Library. Besides, I now had a shiny new telephone all my own which rang with a deep, discreet, murmuring sort of a bell as if to invite me suavely to expensive and sophisticated pursuits. 

I don’t, as a matter of fact, remember anything very important happening over that telephone, except that I used to make dates with a nurse who was stationed in one of the clinics out at the World’s Fair which opened that year on Flushing Meadows. Also, it was the occasion of a series of furiously sarcastic letters to the telephone company because of various kinds of troubles, mechanical and financial. 

The one I most talked to, over this phone, was Lax. He had a phone which did not even cost him anything, for he was living in the Hotel Taft, tutoring the children of the manager, and having access to an ice-box full of cold chicken at all hours of the day and night. The two principal items of news which he communicated to me, from his point of vantage, were, first, the appearance of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and, second, the election of Pope Pius XII. 

It was one of those first spring mornings when the new, warm sun is full of all kinds of delights, that I heard about the Pope. I had been sitting on the balcony in a pair of blue dungarees, drinking Coca-Cola, and getting the sun. When I say sitting on the balcony, I mean sitting on the good boards and letting my feet dangle through the place where the boards had broken. This was what I did a great deal of the time, in the mornings, that spring: surveying Perry Street from the east, where it ran up short against a block of brick apartments, to the west, where it ended at the river, and you could see the black funnels of the Anchor liners. 

When I wasn’t sitting on this balcony doing nothing, I was in the room, in the deepest armchair, studying the letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his Notebooks and trying to figure out various manuals on prosody and covering little white index cards with notes. For it was my plan to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Hopkins. 

The typewriter that was always open on the desk was sometimes busy when I got a book to review: for I had been doing occasional reviews for the Sunday book sections of the Times and Herald Tribune. But what was better, I sometimes managed to grind out, with labor and anguish, some kind of a poem. 

I had never been able to write verse before I became a Catholic. I had tried, but I had never really succeeded, and it was impossible to keep alive enough ambition to go on trying. I had started once or twice at Oakham, and I had written two or three miserable things at Cambridge. At Columbia, when I thought I was a Red, I got one stupid idea for a poem, about workers working on a dock and bombing planes flying overhead—you know: ominous. When it got on paper it was so silly that not even the magazines on the Fourth Floor would print it. The only other verse I had ever been able to turn out before my Baptism was an occasional line for the Jester. 

Baptism seems to have worked miracles in Merton's life.  Going to Church, studying literature, gives him purpose and energy.  Although he still hasn't fully surrendered himself to God's will, he is still able to accomplish things that his previous hedonistic life never allowed--including writing poems.  Baptism and Communion and Mass bring about a change in Merton, inching him toward the religious life he would later adopt.

Since the Presidential Inauguration last Wednesday, I have noticed a new kind of energy in the air.  A lightness that hasn't existed for about four years.  We, in the United States, have lived through a time characterized by meanness of spirit, absence of compassion, and ignorance of truth.  I have lived through the administrations of nine presidencies, Republicans and Democrats.  I haven't always agreed with the politics or policies of these leaders.  However, I never questioned their basic human decency.

Now, in these first days since President Biden took office, there has been a popular meme of Bernie Sanders dominating social media.  It's Bernie Sanders at the inauguration, in mittens and hat.  Looking like the old, hippy grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner who will speak his mind no matter what.  Confession:  I love Bernie Sanders.  Love the fact that his message has never changed from day one:  he wants a world where everyone is taken care of.  Everyone has healthcare.  Everyone makes a living wage.  Everyone pays their fair share of taxes, with the wealthiest paying the most, as it should be.

Bernie Sanders' presence at the inauguration on Wednesday was a reminder to everyone that there are people in Washington, D. C., and the world, who will fight for what is right and humane, no matter what.

Yesterday, I read a Facebook post about the wave of Bernie memes that has stormed the Internet.  It was written by person named Robin Tala.  Here is a part of what Robin said:

If Biden's inauguration is our relief, then Bernie is our cleaning.  He's basically a giant smudging, clearing the malevolent energy & ushering a new time of recommitment to our values of peace & justice.

. . . 

All this struck a deep chord in our society's psyche & heart space and we all bowed and venerated him [Bernie Sanders] with our love, humor, & joy.

It's so beautiful to witness this collective online ritual of relief, especially when we cannot be together to celebrate in person.

THANK YOU to Bernie Sanders, for being the elder that we need in our culture, the curmudgeonly revolutionary uncle, the warrior for justice, the guardian of our culture's inherent commitment to care & solidarity.

You give us all so much hope & strength to keep on marching for the future we KNOW is possible.

My sister, Rose, is still in the hospital.  They've changed her medications, and she has been showing a little improvement.  That is a miracle.  Rose, for me, sort of represents what is good in the world.  She's loving, kind, gentle.  Always happy to see me, even if she can't remember who I am and calls me by my brother's name.  She, like Bernie, is a smudging, as well, clearing out all the meanness, all the darkness of the world.  

And Bernie Sanders would love Rose.  I know this in my heart.  He would want her cared and provided for.  That's what we should all want.  To help everyone, no matter how poor or how sick or how in need.

Saint Marty gives thanks the miracle of Bernie memes tonight.  And his sister Rose.

May 3: Fall Apart Where I'm Standing, Finals Week, Broken Healthcare

Marvin the robot and Arthur and Ford are on their way to meet Zaphod and Trillian (if you've gotten this far into the blog and don't know who these characters are or what novel they're from, abandon hope all ye who enter here) . . .

Vague whistling and humming noises were coming from Ford.  "Well, well, well," he kept saying to himself, "Zaphod Beeblebrox . . ."

Suddenly Marvin stopped, and held up a hand.

"You know what's happened now, of course?"

"No, what?" said Arthur, who didn't want to know.

"We've arrived at another of those doors."

There was a sliding door let into the side of the corridor.  Marvin eyed it suspiciously.

"Well?" said Ford impatiently.  "Do we go through?"

"Do we go through?" mimicked Marvin.  "Yes.  This is the entrance to the bridge.  I was told to take you to the bridge.  Probably the highest demand that will be made on my intellectual capacities today, I shouldn't wonder."

Slowly, with great loathing, he stepped toward the door, like a hunter stalking his prey.  Suddenly it slid open.

"Thank you," it said, "for making a simple door very happy."

Deep in Marvin's thorax gears ground.

"Funny," he intoned funereally, "how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does."

He heaved himself through the door and left Ford and Arthur staring at each other and shrugging their shoulders.  From inside they heard Marvin's voice again.

"I suppose you'll want to see the aliens now," he said.  "Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I'm standing?"

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  I totally get Marvin.  Get his attitude.  Get his sense of humor.  Get his funereal tone.  If I were a robot, I'd be Marvin.

Finals week always drives me to this state.  So much work to do, not enough time to do it.  Then the e-mails from students start rolling in, each one wanting to know grades on papers and final exams.  I understand these student requests.  I, too, was one of those anxious, grade-obsessed students when I was younger.  I wanted to know my grade the day that class ended.

Now, if I were a full-time professor, I would have been holed up in my office at the college, cranking out grades and sucking down caffeine.  Unfortunately, I am a contingent professor.  Therefore, grading is done before I go to my full-time medical office job, on my lunch breaks, and after I'm done working, before I collapse into bed at midnight.  Then I get up at 5 a.m. and do it all over again.  That is the life that I've chosen.

Today, I had plans to grade during my breaks at work, at lunch.  Instead, I got a call mid-morning from one of my sisters.  It seems that Rose, my sister with Down syndrome, had a major seizure this morning in bed.  She was choking, foaming at the mouth.  An ambulance was called.  She was taken to the hospital. 

You can imagine that the rest of the day consisted of texts and more texts and replies to texts and group texts.  I got very little grading done today.  My sister Rose was evaluated at the ER.  Given an MRI.  Scheduled for an EEG.  Put on two anti-seizure medications.  Discharged.  Translation:  they really didn't figure out what has been causing the seizures, just put her on some drugs and sent her home with fingers crossed. 

If I sound a little frustrated, I am.  Here comes the Marvin-side of my personality.  I know healthcare.  I've been working in the field for going on 25 years now.  Never thought that I'd make a career out of it.  Anyway, I know when people in healthcare are passing the buck.  The buck was passed on my sister.  Instead of trying to get to the bottom of her issues, they wanted an empty ER room.  I saw doctors do the same thing with my other sister when she was suffering with lymphoma of the brain for almost a year-and-a-half before she was diagnosed.  By then, it was too late.

I get very frustrated with America's healthcare system.  It's not really about the patient.  Ever.  It's about insurance.  And money.

My sister is at home.  She's acting like her old self.  Perhaps the medication she was prescribed will stop the seizures she's been having.  That is my hope.  And I'm ashamed tonight of being a part of a broken healthcare system.

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