"Since flesh can't stay, we keep the breath aloft. Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along." --Erica Jong

Monday, May 15, 2006

Rewind!


Today is my sixty-seventh birthday! Go backward sixty-three years to the day of my 4th birthday party. Find my cousin Jerry to my right, and my friends Vivian and Billy to my left. My friend Diane cried, and so is not in the picture. I was very concerned. (Inside, I am still four-years-old. Still concerned. Where are you now, Diane?)

Now I know that it's ALL about change. Susan Griffin, in A Chorus of Stones said "The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief." I think sometimes I am supposed to be about four, read to, sung to, rocked to sleep in the wicker rocker on the front porch to the crossing of searchlights, wearing my small, thin body, without this unfamiliar heaviness, these strange wrinkles, this loose flesh.
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2 comments:

slickdpdx said...

Who pushed the fast-forward button?Happy Birthday!

Pixletwin said...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY... I love this page of yours, by the way.

About Me

My photo
1. In dreams I am often young and thin with long blond hair. 2. In real life I am no longer young, or thin, or blonde. 3. My back hurts. 4. I hate to sleep alone. (Fortunately I don't have to!) 5. My great grandfather had 2 wives at once. 6. I wish I had more self-discipline. (I was once fired from a teaching position in a private school because they said I was "too unstructured and undisciplined." --Who, me??? Naaaahhh....) 7. I do not blame my parents for this. Once, at a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told me my little boy was "spacey." We ALL are, I told her. The whole fan damily is spacey. She thought I was kidding. I wasn't. 8. I used to travel with a theater reperatory company. My parents weren't happy about this. 9. My mother was afraid that I would run off and paint flowers on my cheeks and live in a commune, and grow vegetables. I once smoked pot. ONE TIME. 10. I don't drink or smoke. (Or swear, much. Well, I drink milk, and water, and orange juice, and stuff. Cocoa. I love Pepsi.) 11. Most of my friends are invisible. 12. I am a poet and a writer. All of my writing on these pages is copyrighted. Borrowing (without acknowledgment) is a sin.