too late

This is a picture of my uncle, Ron Hill, who died yesterday, two months shy of 100 years old. Ron was a very kind and sensitive person who was a force for the cause of blind people in the maritimes.

At age 7, he was having his jacket sewn by his mother when the Harbour at Halifax was subject a massive explosion: a ship loaded with explosives collided with another. Although the family lived at 5 Uniacke Street, just a few feet from the water, the explosion was not near enough to destroy their home. One of his older brothers, who was late for his job in the harbour, was not killed, nor was his father, a marine engineer who was home with the 'flu. He told this story recently in The Halifax Chronicle Herald.

At the age of 17, Ron was hit in the eye by a hockey stick. He lost that eye, and later an infection formed, spread to the other eye, and he lost it too. He never let his blindness be an obstacle to travel or achievement. He was well loved.

"fluffy" and "low gravity"

Yesterday ( December 14) and the day before, I posted a couple of poems as reactions to a substantial snowfall. In /"fluffy", I expressed a grumpy revulsion, and in "low gravity" I took the contrary position.

I think northerners have this love/hate relationship with snow, each of us occupying an ambivalence with considerable scope since snow plays such a definite part in our geographical existence. The only way to avoid it is to stay indoors or to flee to warmer climates; the only way to embrace it is to get out and wallow in it on skis or inside warm clothing.

The only way I can take a convincing stand on contrary positions is to convince myself that I really agree with it. I think of this mental activity as somewhat similar to the actor who is faced with playing an unsympathetic villain--and actors love playing the villain. In virtually every case, the actor has later said that the way to approach it is to believe the character is right.

That is the situation I got into when I took contrary positions on snow. Except that I have to confess I had the advantage of feeling that way on successive days, so that I didn't have to convince myself of anything. When I wrote "fluffy", I was feeling sorry for myself because I could see the snow falling all day, and knew I was going to have to go our and deal with it eventually: it was filling my driveway.

I arose at 5:30 the next morning because we had a TV technician scheduled to arrive sometime between 8 am and 5 pm the next day (Don't you love that? If you miss the appointment, you have to start over.) The shoveling, although pretty exhausting (after all, I am in my seventies) was not insurmountable, and I got it done in forty-five minutes, had a shower, and got about my day. The TV tech arrived, discovered the problem was simple, solved it immediately, then revealed I had taught him some thirty years ago, and we had a wonderful batch reminiscence, followed by the Olympic Torch relay passing in front of my house (which had spurred his early arrival so he could get his truck in and out.) By that time, I was in a pretty good mood, so that when I wrote "low gravity", it was quite natural to come up with a double plus feel-good poem.

On posting 1000 poems

Yesterday I posted my 1000th original poem in my blog, wordcurrents, where, except for a hiatus of fourteen months, I have posted a new poem every day since February 2006.

Not every poem is a "keeper" (as anglers say), but I am pleased with most of them. You may wish to drop by and comment.

In the space of a month, over 2000 visitors read wordcurrents. You can see where they are from by clicking on the link at the end of this sentence, and typing "30" in the "Time" slot: wordcurrents' Visitors' Map. If you hover your cursor over any of the orange dots, the name of the location comes up.

I started this project to jolt myself out of a seven year writer's block. I had always known that I needed a deadline to work, and an editor to create the pressure. In this case, the deadline was the promise to post a new poem every day, and the editor was each reader/subscriber. And it worked. This has been my own personal NaPoWriMo project, except that the time span is open-ended. I have discovered that the experience has really established sold links between the synapses I need to work in order to tap into my right brain.

Here's a preview of the map, in case you're shy about loading the link:

Poetry and the right brain

Poetry presents a rare point of view to the world: the poet presents the world as filtered through the right side of the brain. I think this is an interesting way of determining what is the essential element that qualifies a collection of words to be considered a poem. I note that writers often place words into what looks like verse, but does not strike me as a poem because it is all left brain observation--in essence, pragmatic fact.

This point was brought home to me in an interview on CBC Radio One today (December 6, 2009). In it, Dr. Taylor described how, in the hospital after her stroke, which cut off her access to the left side of her brain for a time, she can recall not having any facts: she did not recognize her mother: her mother's name is Gigi; when she heard Gigi was coming to visit her, she wondered what a Gigi was. When her mother arrived, and cuddled her, she thought, delighted, "Ah, so this is what a Gigi is!" Her mother, arriving to see her twenty-seven year old daughter curled up in a fetal position in the hospital bed, instinctively realized that she needed to be held.

As I listened to the broadcast, I realized that What I do when I write poetry is to filter reality through the right side of my brain. I also realized that this is what makes poetry unique and significant for human experience: while most writing is filtered through the left side of the brain exclusively, it is poetry that takes language through the other, more intuitive route.

As one of the participants in the Zeugma Poetry Forum recently said in a thread: you may have to trick your ego (in essence, your chosiste left brain).

I think this is an idea worth exploring.

Podcast of Mary Hynes's interview with Dr. Taylor is the Tapestry program of December 6, 2009: Interview with Jill Bolt Taylor

Dr. Taylor has also written a book: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

"prescription"

On the Dr. Oz Show the other day, Dr. Oz was talking about coffee addiction. One of the points he made in passing was that it takes the body twenty-eight days to detoxify itself after you stop taking the addictive substance.

After two and a half years of use, I have been off the Temazepam that was prescribed by the sleep clinic doctor, for eleven days. Except for really sore places and severe muscle cramps that may or may not be related, I am doing well. My brain is coming back along with my memory and, I think, my creative ability.

Just to bring you up to speed in case you missed it, I went to my family doctor on October 17 to renew the prescription for my sleeping pills. The above mentioned Temazepam was prescribed in the spring of 2007 to help me sleep while wearing my CPAP mask for my sleep apnea. When he saw what I was taking, he became somewhat upset, and told me I couldn't take that because aside from the fact that it is quite addictive, it has a significant side effect for people over sixty 50 significantly decreasing mental ability and memory, in effect mimicking dementia.

I have to tell you that my wife and I had discussed the possibility that I was exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, as I was having great difficulty remembering things, and becoming stymied by software programming problems that used to be easy for me, and most important, my duplicate bridge scores were going down precipitously.

I celebrate the release from this strange situation in "prescription", which you can see by clicking on the above title. It's not quite over, as I still have seventeen days ago, according to Dr. Oz.

easy

I wrote this poem after meeting my cousin, (let's call her Mary) whom many years ago, my sister and I babysat many times, back when we did not know she was our cousin, once removed. A little over twenty years ago, Mary found her biological mother, my first cousin, who acknowledged her but blocked Mary's contact with her children (Mary's half-sisters and half-brothers) and the rest of the family. Mary finally discovered where I live, but was afraid to contact me until she saw my picture in a magazine and decided to call. Mary lives about an hour and a half away. The story is more convoluted that this, but in deference to her mother's wishes I am blurring things. You may not sympathize with her mother's obstinacy, but it is rooted in the attitudes of the 1940s, when marriage out of wedlock was serious business that made Mary one of the "Butterbox Babies". That scandal has been the subject of at least one book.

Mary has children who know her story, as does my branch of the family, now. She is a witty, accomplished woman with sons and daughters, all of whom are married and have their own children. But she has this ache to know her mother's family. I am so pleased to be a chink in the wall to her family. Welcome home, Mary.

"The Colours of the Day"

I took this photo today after I finished raking. This is part of what I was talking about in the poem.