fromthemouthofmoi

Snapshots In Transit A Bus I am on a bus going up First Avenue in New York City. I'm reading a book. I can hear, without looking around, that someone is sniffling up what sound like a lot of snot. I continue to read and the sniffling becomes regular, and begins to sound as though buckets might be needed. This goes on for about ten minutes. I look around to see who is generating such a factory of mucous when I notice that other riders have already spotted the culprit. It is a young man, late 20's, in a white T-shirt and khaki pants. His nose is a full blown scarlet coloured gin blossom. He looks as if he has had a cold since birth. His chest is concave and he is a healthy shade of paste. Just the way he looks causes those nearby to erupt in titters. The tittering, I have to assume, embarrasses him, and I imagine he interprets the laughter as a suggestion from strangers that he blow his nose rather than sniffle. So out he pulls a handkerchief with the dimensions of a twin-siz...

I spoke to you yesterday for another two hours. My feelings went from upset, to calm, from loving, to: please, someone make an appointment with a neurologist and find a better cardiologist. I go to sleep waking frequently from the heat. Arlo begins his howl, begging for release of some kind at 4am. He is right on schedule. Never missing the times he has instinctively set up to punctuate the life he lives. I didn't have enough time with you. I've returned still unsettled. We are not done yet. I'm having a difficult time separating me from you. Maybe it is not me from you but rather we are in this thing together. All things are a form of life. I wake up with William Faulkner's, As I Lay Dying seared on my corneas, which instantly brings me back to Jim Case and his comment about Faulkner and the term stream of consciousness. I take the book off my shelf, thumb it, and place it back. I come to my computer and search the book title's meaning and, voila! A piece is ...

INTRODUCTION I have wanted to write this entry for years; I just never got around to it. When I toyed with it I just felt that I wasn't qualified to write about therapy. Too I felt that had I anything to say I should remain silent because I imagined my path shouldn't be pushed upon or cause influence to others. But I have come to the realization that too many people have no clue what the therapeutic process should look like so I write from a place that shares my own experiences in an attempt to inform those in need. The very real problem with finding a good therapist is that we seek help from a vulnerable, sometimes desperate starting point. We are troubled, depressed, or in some sort of crisis that can leave us blind to details that are crucial to finding a good therapist. So how do you find a therapist when you are not yourself, when you feel as though you are falling apart at the seams, when you're desperate to talk to someone, -- you imagine anyone- And there is n...

If You Knew Ellen Bass What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die. A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned agai...

I feel a level of panic. None of this feels psychotic but what I am going to write may sound psychotic. I just feel shaken, but I feel safe. The panic I think, just hear me out, is that I am dying. That I am preparing to go. Stay with me on this... Back in the late 70's I met a man in New York City whom I shall refer to here as, C. He was visiting from Denmark. We met on a subway platform headed downtown. He approached me to ask for directions and it just so happened that where he wanted to go, I was going too. I was on my way to a party on the Lower East Side but I did not tell him this as I didn't want him to think I was inviting him. I took him to Phoebe’s, a restaurant/bar around the corner from the party to talk with him further. During the conversation, he drew a picture of me and we continued to enjoy one another just spending time talking. At one point I excused myself from the table and went to call the hosts of the party, The McKenna’s, to ask if I might invite...

I have made many quilts in my life. I learned to quilt in Westchester, when I lived in Crompond, New York, just outside of Poughkeepsie. I quilt when I love. In 1997 I made my first quilt for Ericle. That quilt, when I still had a beautiful oak quilting frame, took me over a year to complete. Piecing fabric is actually the easy part. It is the quilting, the hand sewn designs that bind three layers together, which takes the most time. I will not tell you that I am a great quilter at all, but that quilt was asked to be exhibited in the local library for an exhibition of local quilters. The public enjoyed it before Ericle did.  The pattern I used was, Jacob's Ladder Crisscross. Quilts are constructed of squares for the most part and Jacob's Ladder Crisscross constantly fooled my eye, (as well as everyone else), because it is very difficult to see where the square is for that pattern. In the photograph below, I've highlighted the square which gets repeated, because otherwise ...

Years before my dad died I asked him what kind of funeral did he wish to have. He said he wanted to be buried in a pine box. When he died, we got a pine box and had it delivered to the funeral home. It was the kind you had to assemble yourself, and we, all of his children, assembled it together. I noticed that the funeral director looked horrified and upset. He looked so distraught that I pulled him aside and asked him if this was normal in his eyes. He emphatically said: No.  I asked him what other people did -- this being my first funeral where details were on me, -- and asked him to show me what was normally done. He took me to a room filled with caskets that startled me. I felt like I was suddenly in a car showroom being told to step inside the Bentley I hadn't come to buy. None of the caskets were designed for the person expected to go into them. There was no casket for the life spent singing or dancing, painting or reading. Not one casket seemed suitable for those that h...