The Little Train (Cosy Sheridan)

My blogging modus operandi is scribbling thoughts into a Word document throughout the course of the day, and then sitting down about this time each evening (11 p.m.-ish) to compose and then upload.  I am learning that one of the signs of grief is brain fog, which "happens because your body interprets grief as trauma and begins to shut down to protect itself."  I can assure that it is real.

I had what I felt was a good amount of content and context but, when I clicked on the tab 30 minutes or so ago, it all seems to have disappeared.  F*ck.  

So, I will attempt tomorrow to recreate what I had so painstakingly recorded but, in the meantime, one of the points I did remember is that I have always been one of those people that comes across as clear-headed, focused, and strong of will.  Whenever the kids had some sort of an emergency (Rob's broken arm when he was only eighteen months old... Sarah's jellyfish sting when she was in high school... Eric's hospitalization for pneumothorax/partially collapsed lung in his 20s)... I just handled it and, when the crisis had resolved, I allowed myself to fall apart (just like Glenn Close in The Big Chill).  I haven't really had the opportunity to do that yet, because there is So. Much. That. Needs. Attending. To... 🤯

I meant to write last night that Sarah, Rob, and Duyen are all doing what they can, on so many levels, to lessen the load.  And today our family had a second walkthrough (just me and Chico the first time) at the venue we're using for E's Celebration of Life, then picked up pre-ordered Pub Subs on the way back to Sarah's, where we got quite a lot accomplished in planning the Order of Service.  Have I said yet that the event is Saturday, October 14?  Many family and friends are coming into town for the whole weekend, but you can bet that when Monday, October 16 rolls around, I will be in full-on Let Go Let Grief Mode:  showering, screaming, and sleeping.  No Apologies.  It. Will. Happen.

And thanks to Maggie Smith (the poet, not the actress) for the heads-up to this brutiful (TM Glennon) article, which knocked the wind out of me.  

The loss of Orli is a phantom limb that wakes me in the night or, sometimes, lies dormant with me for hours; I never know which will happen.

SONG:  The Little Train by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK:  The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper, George Hauman and Doris Hauman (Illustrators)

POEM:  How to forget by Susan Denning

Ashes are meant for cigarettes,

for doused campfires.

When I can’t remember how I got

to the middle, I start over.

When I walk by the cemetery

I stare straight ahead. Do I have

a pure heart? It doesn’t matter.

My love of opposites got me this far—

clouds and dirt. They both carry the past,

but clouds do it in a way

that makes me want to follow.

Today my favorite words are glove and live.

Gloves are meant for breathing hands,

for keeping the world at bay. Look at me

on the assembly line, keeping all the parts

straight. The hem of my coat is singed,

but I sing anyway. I haven’t failed at being human,

if being human means breaking

what you mended and mending it again.

I don’t imagine I’ll be carried up

into the sky. Someone will walk

over me. On the soles of someone’s sneakers,

I’ll see the world again. I’ll love it a little harder.

QUOTE:  “And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.” ~ Iain Thomas

Roadfood (Cosy Sheridan)

Illustration by Julia Dufossé

I read this in the NYT Morning (formerly The Daily Briefing) week before last, and had to share!  It speaks for itself... 😍

I Recommend Eating Chips By Sam Anderson

Jan. 13, 2021

Oh, hello, nice to see you, have a seat — let’s stress-eat some chips together. Let’s turn ourselves, briefly, into dusty-​fingered junk-food receptacles. This will force us to stop looking, for a few minutes, at the bramble of tabs we’ve had open on our internet browsers for all these awful months: the articles we’ve been too frazzled to read about the TV shows we’ve been meaning to watch; the useless products we keep almost impulse-​buying; the sports highlights and classic films that we digest in 12-second bursts every four days; that little cartoon diagram of how to best lay out your fruit orchards in Animal Crossing. Eating these chips will rescue us, above all, from the very worst things on our screens, the cursed news of the outside world — escalating numbers, civic decay, gangs of elderly men behaving like children.

Please, sit down. I’ve got a whole bag of Cool Ranch Doritos here: electric blue, plump as a winter seed, bursting with imminent joy. I found it up in the cupboard over the fridge, where by some miracle my family had yet to discover it — it had slipped sideways behind the protein powder, back near the leftover Halloween candy — so now I’m sitting here all alone at the kitchen counter, about to sail off into the salty seas of decadent gluttony. The next few minutes of my life, at least, are going to be great.

Join me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering — strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief! We are the first humans to see these chips since they left the factory who knows when. They have been waiting for us, embalmed in preservatives, like a pharaoh in his dark tomb. These chips might have even been produced in the former world, in the time before the plague, when people gathered in sports stadiums, filled concert halls, touched one another’s faces, high-fived, passed around bottles and joints and phones and cash. But now they have been born into this world, into our doomed timeline, and they have absolutely no idea.

That is the great virtue of chips: They are here for us to eat them. So that is what we will do. I will put the first chip, now, into my mouth. I will set it delicately on my tongue like a communion wafer. Instantly, the flavor snaps against my taste buds — that earthy, cheesy tang — flashing like a firecracker, lighting up the whole wet cave of my mouth and radiating out, further, to fill my whole head, my whole being. These chemicals are transcendent, Proustian, as powerful as any drug: They trigger nodes of memory that stretch back years, decades, back to old Super Bowls and family reunions, back to the outside world that I am trying to forget. Another chip. Another chip.

What is the comfort of junk food? Why do we experience these very empty calories with such passionate sensual absorption? It is a question that predates the pandemic, of course, and probably has a prosaic answer — some proprietary formula hidden under fluorescent lights in a flavor laboratory in New Jersey. But even minor questions take on outsize importance these days. A pandemic, it turns out, produces a curious paradox: It not only creates a shrieking worldwide drama of existential dread — it also puts relentless pressure on the most mundane aspects of our everyday lives. For nearly a year now, many of us have been locked in a controlled environment, a closed lab of selfhood: the Quarantine Institute of Applied Subjectivity. Our homes have become biodomes designed to study the fragile ecosystems of Us. All our neuroses and addictions and habits are under the microscope. Willpower, productivity, resilience, despair. We have turned into scientists of ourselves. And so I watch myself eating chips.

The chips don’t have to be chips, of course; they could be anything you binge in order to self-soothe. Maybe you do jigsaw puzzles instead of answering work email. Maybe you trade options all day on Robinhood. Maybe you walk counterclockwise around your home, over and over, tightening all the screws on every fixture. Maybe you read Twitter.

For me, a bag of chips is a way to defeat time. It brings temporary infinity: a feeling that it will never end. A chip. A chip. A chip. Another chip. The chips come like ocean waves, like human breaths, serial but unique, each part of a huge eternal rhythm but also its own precious discovery.

I hate to say this, to risk breaking the spell, but I have just noticed that my arm is reaching deeper and deeper into the Doritos bag. What used to be just my fingertips turned into my whole wrist, and now, although it seems as if it’s been only five seconds, my whole forearm is disappearing into the bag. It appears that I have eaten one half of an entire bag of chips. Three-quarters, if we are being honest. Well, seven-eighths. The remaining chips are very small, just fragments, resplendent with flavor dust. I believe we have reached the point, in fact, where it would be shameful to leave only what’s left. So we keep going. We must keep going. A chip. A chip. A chip. Keep going. A chip. If we stop, it will end, but if we keep going, it might last forever.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for The Times Magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2021, Page 18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Eating Chips

NR:  The Story of a Million Years by David Huddle

SONG:  Roadfood by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK:  Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip by Dirk Burhans

POEM:  Hope by Trevor Hewett

Two of them, sharing a green park bench,

their heads bent, talking and eating chips;

one gorging, one pecking like a small bird

and dabbing her lips

with a tissue. One, seventy, glasses, white hair,

and one, in a Blackburn shirt, is eight:

the future talking to the past

about love and hate

and discussing, earnestly, right and wrong

and setting themselves the occasional poser,

like a couple of Oxbridge philosophy dons

debating Spinoza.

This is hope: one recalling how things might have been,

and one seeing how they could be -

both of them seeing what still might be sought

and neither seeing why not.

QUOTE:  "A lot of my snacks are healthy. I love things like hummus, carrots, and celery, but I will never give up potato chips." ~ Holly Marie Combs

The Little Train (Cosy Sheridan)

I found the following on the blog of a friend and it most certainly hit home with me - I've been in such flux lately. Since J's death, my sweet little 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. part-time job is still full-time (9 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.) - my life is always a mad scramble... but even more so lately, as the obligations I took on when my schedule seemed able to handle now feel overwhelming. Seems like my life is a series of meetings these days, and I've lost track of what I love - I don't believe I'm doing justice to family and friends, not to mention myself (where is my leisure time?!?). I have no one to blame but myself, and I've vowed to become pro-active about re-taking charge of my life - I've targeted two areas of responsibility I should (and can) "scrape off my plate", and now it's just a matter of doing so, effectively and graciously.

I need focus and perspective and calm (oh my) - I think I can... I think I can... I think I can...

(1) "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things." ~ Edgar Degas

(2) "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." ~ Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

(3) "All of us are crazy good in one way or another." ~ Yiddish saying

(4) "You are either losing your mind -- or gaining your soul." ~ Julia Cameron

SONG: The Little Train by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK: Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much - Revised edition by Anne Wilson Schaef

POEM: understudy by Beverly Rollwagen

She just wants an understudy, a body

double for the days when she does

not feel like appearing in any of the roles

she has assumed and/or been assigned.

She places an ad in the paper. Wanted:

one wife, mother, daughter, neighbor,

friend. Live-in OK. Own car necessary.

No lines to memorize; everything ad-

libbed. No days off.

QUOTE: "To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence." ~ David Whyte

Some Fires (Cosy Sheridan)

SONG: Some Fires by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK: Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

POEM: Burning the Fields by Linda Bierds
1.
In the windless late sunlight of August,
my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back,
the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy
rippled. I watched from a shallow hill
as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck,
galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced
at the fire trench, circled back,
arced again, the flames behind
sketching first a C, then closing to O—a word
or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart,
gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare
beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence,
some cinch-corral she might have known,
the way the walls moved rhythmically,
in and in. And to the crows, manic
on the thermals? A crescent of their planet,
gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter
past the fence line, then settle
on a Hereford's tufted nape,
as if to peck some safer grain, as if
the red-cast back it rode
contained no transformations.
2.
A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there
and there, the russet flood of rabbits.
Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls
began, shrill and wavering, as if
their dormant voice strings
had tightened into threads of glass.
In an instant they were gone—the rabbits,
their voices—over the fire trench,
into the fallows. My father walked
near the burn line, waved up to me, and from
that wave, or the rippled film of heat,
I remembered our porch in an August wind,
how he stepped through the weathered doorway,
his hand outstretched with some
book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered
to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but
as he spoke it atomized before us—
pulp and stem, the pollened tongue,
dreadful in the dancing air.
3.
Scummed and boxcar thin,
six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields.
Inside them, lilies, lilies—
a thousand shades of white, I think.
Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.
Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed
ancestral to me, the fluted heads of
dowagers, their meaty, groping,
silent tongues. They seemed
to form perspective's chain:
cinder, bone, divinity . . .
4.
My father waved. The crows set down.
By evening, our fields took the texture
of freshened clay, a sleek
and water-bloated sheen, although no water
rested there—just heat and ash
united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,
circled closer, the grasses all around me
collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent
I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—
brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown
to echo grass. The soot was warm,
the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,
and as a breeze crossed slowly through,
stems glowed—then ebbed—
consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,
and then a kind of journey.

QUOTE: "Love is the fire of life; it either consumes or purifies."

The Losing Game (Cosy Sheridan)

I shared the following with a friend yesterday:

We all know weight loss is no big secret: eat less, exercise more, voi-f*cking-la! - however, I have had no success with my efforts of the last few years, which has me even more frustrated. I keep saying I want my body back... but I'm not being pro-active enough to make it happen - I must finally take responsibility for the fact I'm an emotional eater... whether things are good or bad, I tend to celebrate my victories or drown my sorrows with food and drink.

It's all so interconnected I can't figure out how to unravel one without pulling the thread of another - then again, maybe that's the trick/key. So... I'm just going to try to concentrate on the word HEALTHY in *all* my life choices (be they meals, lifestyle habits or interpersonal relationships) - if it's not good for me, it doesn't belong in my mouth... :-)

Processed, no - natural, yes. Sedentary, no - active, yes. Hurtful words, no - positive actions, yes. Burning the candle at both ends, no - finding moderation/balance, yes. I will make a point to *ask* myself, with intention, if what I'm about to eat/do/say will delay or further my goal of health - I've already designated a signal to myself to associate with feelings of hunger/emptiness/restlessness... so I can realign my focus and keep on track.

It's *okay* to be hungry, in all senses of the word - what an epiphany...

SONG: The Losing Game by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK: Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment by Geneen Roth

POEM: Barbie Poem by Nerissa Nields

I think that I shall never see
A woman as lovely as Barbie
Barbie, with her ski jump nose
Standing tall on tiny toes
Impossible boobs that will not droop
To conquer Ken, she need not stoop
If she were mortal, she would be
Six foot five and a hundred and three
She's so tall, I could not feel shorter
Small wonder I have an eating disorder
She sleeps in her camper next to my bed
With visions of traveling filling her head
She wishes she could sing like me
But she can't
Her mouth is painted on
And her eyes won't shut
And she never bleeds
And she never cuts
And she cannot read or count or cry
And she'll never age
And she'll never die
And I think that I don't want to be
Staring straight ahead for all eternity

QUOTE: "Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours." ~ Swedish Proverb