August 12 Photograph, Memory, Michael David Madonick, "Because the Deer Have Come to Rest," Adventures of Stickman

Nothing monumental transpired.  Niceties were exchanged.  Polite conversation.  What could be said?  Gomez's continuing struggles were evident in the expression and manner, in the very setting.  He did show Ives the shelf filled with the books that Ives had sent him years ago and spoke appreciatively of what he had done.  He was proud of his education and hard work, but what with times being difficult, money was hard to come by.  He sometimes looked down at the floor.  As for Ives, he left a parting gift for Daniel Gomez to open later, a photograph of his son, Robert, at seventeen.

Danny Gomez is the man who, as a teenager, murdered Ives' son, Robert.  Over the years, while Gomez was in prison, Ives sent him letters and books and presents.  At the end of the novel, Ives agrees to meet Gomez, as a gesture of healing.  Forgiveness.  At the end of the meeting, Ives gives Gomez that picture of Robert, young and full of promise.  I don't think Ives is trying to be cruel.  Quite the opposite.  Ives is entrusting to Danny his most precious possession:  the memory of his beloved son.

Tonight, I sat down with my siblings to discuss the details of my sister's funeral.  It wasn't an easy meeting.  Each person had very specific ideas of how our sister's life should be celebrated.  One sister, adamant:  "She does NOT want to be buried."  Another sister, just as adamant:  "I want a TRADITIONAL Catholic prayer on the back of her Mass card."  A third sister, triply adamant:  "I DON'T want that song at the Mass."  It was like arranging a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine.  Several times, the talks broke down, but, in the end, we hammered out a deal.  And tomorrow evening, I will go to the funeral home to make the arrangements.

I understand why emotions were running so high.  We all want our particular memories to be honored.  I have memories of my sister singing in the church choir.  That's why I'm being so stubborn about picking out the hymns and music.  That was something I shared with my sister.  Something that sort of binds us together in my mind.

Memory is a tricky thing.  Mike Madonick captures its slippery nature in the poem below.  Memory, he writes, "will not hold."  It morphs over time.  Mellows.  Becomes fuzzy around the edges.  In a few years, maybe my recollection of the meeting I had tonight with my sisters will change.  Perhaps, thinking back, I'll remember it with laughter.  One of my sisters mentioned a company that turns a loved one's cremains into a sculpture.  My response:  "That's a little creepy.  Well, I'm just gonna dust off Sally now."

Tonight, however, Saint Marty feels like he's been through a hostage negotiation, with everybody trying to save their particular memories.

Because the Deer Have Come to Rest

by:  Michael David Madonick

The big snow stayed on the ground and rabbits,
for two weeks, tore at the trees, a high watermark,

that years from now we'll point at, say to someone
who cannot help but listen, a grandchild maybe, a

new neighbor, See here, that was the storm of '99,
the snow stayed for almost a month and the rabbits

ate the bark.  I'll forget the wind and maybe the three
starlings that fell asleep on the edge of the chimney

and came down the furnace like pubescent dreamers
into the heat.  I'll probably forget the fact the house

got so cold the windows and the door frames arched
with ice and that the dog, though not old enough to

fairly complain, balked at her morning walks.  I'll
forget the deadly fear of watching my son, when

the snow started to melt, stand straight under a three-
foot icicle that formed from the roof drain and he took

like some drunk sword-swallower the drops of water
that looked completely benign.  I'll forget a lot about

the snow because that is what the snow does, it's
a damper, a tarp, the cheesecloth over the headstone.

But when it all started to melt, when the weird weather
came, in its fog and thunder, and lightning behind it, when

the dog went pulling on her chain from the door because
a rabbit stood stunned on our green front lawn:  I'll remember

my wife, who has seen everything, who knows the names
of wildflowers and the odd colors of light that disperse

like magic or pain through sleepless stained glass--I'll
remember my wife standing at our kitchen window looking out

into the field whose white-caps of snow were giving
to green.  I'll remember her, her mouth wide open, like

some child at a circus seeing more than she could take in,
I'll remember asking her what she saw and that she said,

The deer are lying down, I've never seen that before.  I'll
remember that and that the worst of the snow, and the

starlings, and the dog, and my son under the icicle came
on the day my father was born and it was three months

since he died.  I'll remember that there are things that
happen dead in the woods and that only in strange

weather will be given to sight.

It will all go bad.  I know that.  My memory will not hold, the rabbits
will get slow, my dog will be carried away, and my son will only
remember the ice that falls, the dangers that have come upon him.
But I will know, deeply as the wounded trees--marks are made on a
life, and mine, in '99, because the deer had come to rest.

Adventures of STICKMAN

August 11: Grace and Personailty, Whitewash, Michael David Madonick, "Box Turtle," Adventures of Stickman

Ives did not pursue it then, but would find out later that Carmen, a figure of grace and personality, who was pure dulceria, would have one and then another and then a third debilitating operation, not upon her heart, as Ives had first thought, but upon her breasts and the surrounding lymph nodes.

Carmen Ramirez is an important character in Mr. Ives' Christmas.  She is the wife of Ives' best friend, and, throughout the novel, she remains a figure of supreme patience and understanding and love.  Devoted to her sometimes abusive husband.  Dedicated to her children.  At the end of her life, Carmen is elevated even more, becoming almost saint-like in her suffering and love.

My sister was transported home today.  The hospital bed was supposed to be delivered this afternoon, and the ambulance with my sister arrived about 4:30 p.m.  And now the long process of letting go begins.

I have difficulty when death sort of whitewashes a person's life.  It's natural for family and friends to overlook a loved one's faults and mistakes during the mourning process.  Death is painful, just as life is painful.  I love my sister, but she was not a perfect person.  We had some major disagreements over the years.  Times when we barely spoke to each other.  At points in our relationship, I broke her heart, and she broke mine.  That is the truth.

Yet, we never gave up on each other, even during those difficult times.  I loved her, and I hope she knew that I loved her.  Neither of us were saints.  We simply did the best we could.

Even though I work in the medical field, I intensely dislike hospitals and doctors.  My sister understood this fact about me.  I didn't visit her as much as I should have over the course of her illness.  I used every excuse I could.  Work.  Teaching.  Kids' school programs.  Dance recitals and competitions.  I was a shithead, frozen by my own fears and phobias.  I did the best I could, and now I know it wasn't good enough.  I can't whitewash that.

At this moment, I feel like the box turtle in Mike Madonick's poem below.  Carried into the heavens and then released.  The rocks are going to be hard and painful.

Just call me Marty tonight.  I am no saint.

Box Turtle

by:  Michael David Madonick

It may be that I've got the whole story wrong,
but I've heard that eagles in Argentina have learned,
after the rain forests were burned back, to
catch box turtles that survived the fires by
hiding deep in their rooms, and carry them
to rocky outcroppings, a hundred feet up, and
drop them like bad cartoons until their helmets
crack.  I suppose one should give credit where
credit is due, to the birds that never did such
things before the burning, or to the farmers themselves
who decided to set the trees down so their cattle could
graze more easily.  But I'm more likely to think
about the turtles, to whom altitude is as foreign as
speed, pulled aloft by the claws of some sharp-beaked
angel, its house entire raised like Dorothy's in the
tornado, or the deep heat of a fever, or the deus ex
machina of sporadic holocaust that God has cast us
to.  And then, when the wrench of feathers decides
it is right, RELEASE, an unbungeed free-fall, a
reckless unbraked downhill dive toward the inevitable,
the Diaspora of soup, the shell gone weak against
the stone.  Then, if there is anything left in listening for,
to wait, one might hear the angel come in for
its food.  The oratorious stall of feather that makes a backwash
of air so it can land delicately by the mess, the Humpty
Dumpty that the turtle has now become.  I suppose
one needs to give credit where credit is due--God,
Belief, no less apparent now than ever before.

Adventures of STICKMAN

August 10: Dodo Bird, "Ives" Dip, Michael David Madonick, "Platypus," Adventures of Stickman

My first day back at work was a welcome distraction.  For most of the day, I was able to focus on something besides the oncoming storm in my life.  I had no choice.  There were phones to answer.  Patients to register.  Chocolate to eat.

I've always thought of myself as ill-equipped to deal with crises.  I don't like change, especially change over which I have no control.  I survive, but I'm sort of like a stegosaurus stuck in tar.  I thrash around, trying to escape, and then sort of give in and sink to the bottom.  Become a fossil.

This past weekend, a friend told me that I deal well with change.  "You adapt," she said.  Her statement surprised me.  I'm the guy that sits home on Saturday nights and watches The Lawrence Welk Show on PBS.  I reread books.  Rewatch movies.  In the past two weeks, I have watched the same documentary about writer David McCullough five times.  I find this kind of repetition comforting because I know what's coming.

"Adapt" is not a verb I'd apply to myself.  When drastic and unwelcome change occurs, I scramble around, trying to find a new routine.  It may take a few days or weeks, but, eventually, I will find a new rut for myself.  I haven't gone the way of the passenger pigeon yet.  But, if I were an endangered species, I probably wouldn't survive because I'd keep returning to my wetlands until they were turned into a parking structure.  And then I'd surrender to extinction.  I'm a dodo bird, not a platypus.

My friend sees something in me that I certainly don't see.

My sister has not been transported home from downstate yet.  She will be coming tomorrow by ambulance.  The hospital bed will be delivered to my parents' house in the morning.  Right now, I feel this uneasy sense of anticipation among my family members who are here.  They aren't quite sure what to expect.  A meteor is approaching.  A new Ice Age.  The topography of their world is about to change drastically.

My job this week will be to prepare.  I plan to contact the local funeral parlor tomorrow to set up an appointment.  I've already talked to a musician friend about music for my sister's funeral Mass.  These are things that need to be done.  And I don't think any other person in my family is thinking clearly enough to do them.

My question for Ives tonight is this:

Am I a platypus or a dodo?

And the answer: 

One of the pamphlets was called The Sweet Summons.  Its cover depicted clouds that were bursting with light, a chorus of gospel singers standing before them--"The Good Light of Eternity" awaiting all, the "sweet summons" that came at the end of life.

I find that answer strangely comforting tonight.  Sweet.  Quiet.  Peaceful.

Maybe Saint Marty will survive the coming apocalypse.

NOTE:  The Poet of the Week is Mike Madonick, who read at the university last year.  I chose him because his poems make me smile.

Platypus

by:  Michael David Madonick

Elegance breeds extinction, or
quite the opposite.  Take the Persian
gazelle, if you will.  All leg and
leap and pirouette, the poor bastard
is as old as the pyramids, its
brains crowded out by its horns.  But
the broadfoot, the duckbill, the
soft woolly thing gone wrong in Tasmania,
uses everything it's got.  The size
twelve shoe it calls a nose is as sensitive
as the crazed Vladimir Horowitz's
imperfect pinkie playing Scarlatti in candlelight
at Carnegie Hall, some tight-stitched
prayer rug under the bench to prevent the
passion from slipping.  The rug-maker
himself, having mastered the masterful math-
ematical deigns, impregnated, for
better or worse, a gesture or real piety, the
mistake he offered to Allah that now
is being pressed like a question by the sharp
thin leg of the piano bench--Horowitz
unconscious in his reverie and trill.  But not
to forget the platypus, who uses
his spatula head, a non-kosher adaptation,
stirring the silt for insects, worms, the
detestable shellfish.  And when it swims, dives, it is
its own invention, adroit, simple, making
all its inchoate parts the envy of the ridiculous
otter.  This is not, after all, the panda, whose
cuteness has brought him to the brink.  It is a Scrabble
word of a name--platypus, implying just what
it is, a kind of canker in evolution, an oddness that
never quite inherits the whole.  Make no mistake,
anything can be anything, but this, just on the short
side of grotesque, attracts as much attention
as it needs and then retreats.  Finally, whose prayer
is perfect anyway?  Yet the platypus is full
of incongruity and pain; it lies in wait, some Ninja
in the backwater, the only mammal
with the horny spur behind its leg, venomous--
so they say.

Adventures of STICKMAN

August 9: Sister Update, Hospice Care, Classic Saint Marty

Sorry for the extended absence, folks.  I got back home from Ann Arbor around 8 p.m. yesterday.  It was a very long weekend.  I'm still pretty tired.

Well, the tumor in my sister's head has shrunk considerably.  However, the tumor cut off blood supply to the thalamus portion of her brain for an extended period of time, causing a stroke.  Also, her right shoulder and arm are constantly quaking.  The doctors think that she may be having seizures.  Her medical team have stopped nutrition, since her intestines are inflamed/infected.  She is receiving antibiotics to clear up her blood infection (sepsis).

All that being said, my sister's prognosis is very bleak.  After a lot of discussion and prayer and more discussion, my other sister (who has medical power of attorney) has decided to bring my sister home under hospice care.  Yesterday, the plan was to have her transferred to a nearby nursing home.  This afternoon, the plan has changed.  She will be coming to my parents' house and will be cared for by my sisters (a plan I don't support and cannot change).

In her current condition, my sister will not live long.  The neurologist estimated two to three weeks.  She will not receive any more chemo, which would probably kill her sooner.  The nutrition will also not be started again, because it would simply cause another infection, which would kill her sooner as well.  She will be kept comfortable and as pain-free as possible. 

If I sound too cold and clinical, I apologize.  I love my sister, and I want what's best for her.  I think she would receive better care in a nursing home setting.  Plus, that would save my mother (who is very confused and struggling) and my sister (who has Down Syndrome) from an incredible amount of stress.  Other members of my family disagree with me.  So be it.  I will have to let go of the anger that I'm feeling at the moment,  It is beyond my control, which is very difficult for me to admit.

As most of my readers know, I don't deal well when my life feels out of control.  At the moment, I feel like I'm on top of a roller coaster, about to plunge down tracks that are shrouded in mist and darkness.  I dislike it when people keep changing the rules of the game that I'm trying to play.  (How's that for mixing metaphors?)

Today's Classic Saint Marty first aired two years ago, when my life was much simpler and more peaceful.  I wonder where I can lay my hands on a time machine.

August 9, 2013:  Hot-Shot in English, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Fairy Tale Friday

..."Just don't do it too good, is all," he said.  "That sunuvabitch Hartzell thinks you're a hot shot in English, and he knows you're my roommate.  So I mean don't stick all the commas and stuff in the right place."

Holden's roommate, Stradlater, is the speaker.  He wants Holden to write an essay for him because he knows Holden is a really good writer.  In fact, English is the only thing Holden's got going for him at the moment.  It's the only thing he's successful at.


I went to a book signing event this afternoon at a local bookstore.  Ostensibly, the signing was to publicize The Way North, the anthology of U. P. writers that was released in early spring.  I went to the event not expecting a whole lot.  The manager of the store, Lee, is an old friend, so I knew I'd have someone to talk to.  Plus, I worked at this particular bookstore for almost nine years as a seller.  It was like returning to an old apartment I lived in while in college; everything sort of the same but a little shinier and smaller.  And, to top it all off, I was with two other writers I've known for a while.  It wasn't a bad couple of hours.  Didn't sell any of my books, though.

However, the other poet at the table with me, Janeen, told me something quite flattering.  At the release party for The Way North in Kalamazoo, Bonnie Jo Campbell, bestselling novelist and finalist for the National Book Award, chose to read my poem from the anthology.  My poem.  "She really loved it," Janeen said, "and she did a great job."

I know it sounds stupid, but knowing that Bonnie Jo Campbell knows my name/read my poem was quite a thrill.  More than a thrill, actually.  I've been riding the wave of that knowledge all evening.  Bonnie Jo Campbell's novel, Once Upon a River, was one of my favorite books last year, and her short story collection, American Salvage, is absolutely stunning.  She's a big fan of Flannery O'Connor, too.  I've been stalking Bonnie's official Web site for quite a few years (anonymously as I don't want to sound creepy).  And now, I know Bonnie Jo Campbell likes my work.

On a side note, I once took a fiction workshop in which Bonnie Jo was a fellow student.  She was obviously bound for bigger, better things even back then.  Plus, she was the nicest person in the class.  So I've been on the outer edges of the Bonnie Jo Campbell universe for a while.

And now, for a fairy tale.

Once upon a time, in a little town named Flannery, a struggling sword-maker named Hubert lived.  Hubert made great swords.  All the local knights came to him for his blades.  The problem was that Hubert couldn't sell enough swords to support his family, so Hubert moonlighted at a local fork factory.  Every night, he worked an eight-hour shift making tines for forks, and he was never allowed to make any over-tine.  (Sorry, I had to do that.)

Hubert studied the work of all the greatest sword-makers in the kingdom.  The greatest sword-maker of all was a woman named Kazoo.  Kazoo's blades were elegant, beautifully carved, and sharper than an arctic wind.  Hubert sent Kazoo fan scrolls every day, but he never received any replies.

One day, however, a bundle was delivered to Hubert's doorstep by a traveling knight.  When Hubert opened the bundle, he found a wondrous sword, carved from silver, its hilt encrusted with precious jade.  It gleamed in the sunlight, and Hubert knew it was an original Kazoo sword.  Kazoo had read his scrolls.  Kazoo knew his name.

Hubert reached down to pick up the sword and mistakenly cut off his left hand.  Hubert's wife found Hubert dead that night, clutching the sword to his chest, a blissful smile on his face.

The moral of this tale:  Always lend a helping hand, but bring a tourniquet.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

She likes me!  She really likes me!