This ain’t a song for the brokenhearted
No silent prayer for the faith departed
And I ain’t gonna be just a face in the crowd
You’re gonna hear my voice when I shout it out loud

It’s my life
It’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just wanna live while I’m alive

Bon Jovi

I just wanna live while I’m alive.

There’s a lone tomato growing into its later moments — in my backyard — and I swear it’s singing Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life, swaying to a soulful desert breeze, a little Bic lighter marking time to the moment.

And where am I?  Where have I been all these days and weeks?

Pretty much not living while I’m alive.  Jon Bon Jovi would be ashamed of me.

I’ve been lying on Greta Garbo’s fainting couch with a sour mood heavier than all the days of one’s life.  Living out the lines of her Camille with the back of my hand placed over my forehead, regret and anguish spilling into my heart, whispering that famous retort, “You who are so young–where can you have learned all you know about women like me?”

I’ve certainly not been rocking it out like that brave late-into-the-fall tomato in my yard.

And why all this broken sadness?  All this regret and madness?

I’ll get to that later.

Right now I want to talk about what any of us would do if we had only five — FIVE — days in which to do our life’s work.  What’s our five-day bucket list?  Here are the rules:  We’re healthy and strong enough, like teenager-strong, to do anything we physically want.  We’re amazingly smart enough to accomplish anything we can think of.  We’re football stars and movie stars and rock stars and geek stars.  We’re able to do whatever good or evil we wish … but we only have five days in which to do it.  Our list can be extensive or it can be exclusively singular.   We can do ANYTHING we want.

So GO!  What would you do?

Here’s my list:

1. Haul my heavy backside off the couch and go do something to make myself sweat at the gym.  Not just a little sweat, but pouring down my temples and into my eyes sweat until my legs no longer work and my arms are noodles and I break apart and fall into a million little depressionless shards of get-up-and-go.
2. Find a woman (maybe in the grocery line) who’s hair looks like mine — you know, hair that looks like those little fuzzy baby chicken feathers that stick up from the head because there aren’t enough of them left to curl or style or hide all that sticky scalp — and strike up a conversation with that beautiful woman simply because I love her bravery so much I can’t stand it.
3. Walk into the church I no longer attend because of its narrow minded bigotry and fall on my knees because of sadness for its frailty and its desperate need for little women like me to pray for its sad heart.
4. Take back number 3 and pray for tolerance because I need it first.
5. Dye what’s left of my hair a wild and sensuous blond because that’s how I’d like to go out — a wild and woolly blond!
6. Go sky diving —  Hah!  Just kidding.
7. Spend my entire week’s food budget on a family that could use healthiness and something better than donated Velveeta and Wonder Bread.  If Mr. Backyard Tomato Rock Star is ready, he’ll have a new purpose in life too.
8. Take Wilson to visit our beautiful little ladies and gentlemen at the skilled nursing facility — and spend so much time with them that the staff will think we’re patients too.
9. Sit quietly with another hurting woman, hold her hand, cry with her, heal with her.
10. Go sky diving — Nope!  Still not a chance on God’s green earth that will I jump from a perfectly good airplane.

I could go on, but ten things is a good enough start with only five days in which to accomplish my premise.

So, what’s on your list?  Please don’t tell me you’re going sky diving.  ANYTHING but sky diving.  May I suggest spelunking?  That would be lovely.  I like caves.  Nice, cool, I-need-a-sweater caves.

So, back up to the middle of this bloggy thing … and the question of why I’ve been so saddened lately.  Let’s just say, if I do even half of the things on my list, I’ll be happy, happy, happy.  And the couch will no longer have my impression stamped into its leather every day, and Notre Dame will win every game from this day forward.

I’m going to miss all my little ladies.

For each lady hair that falls from my head, she leaves a frightening space where no hair dares take her place.  There, there and there.  She’s gone, never to return.

I see so many women now with thinning hair.  Like me.  It’s inexplicable.  Are we all gifted with so many brains that our hair falls out from the sheer heat of our genius?  I doubt it.

Maybe we all drank milk from the same cow.  The same infected cow?  Improbable.

Maybe we each ate something.  Or it was in the water.  Or the air.

The air!

Now, that is possible.  The air.  The Air!  When I was a child, I remember tests of nuclear thingys were conducted.  In Nevada, I think.   All I remember is that when the bell rang, I was always told to get under my desk and be scared of communists.  I do recall reading that the winds distributed stuff everywhere.  Maybe the cows ate the grass that was watered by the fallout that was seeded by the clouds that took up the gas that was baked by the hen that scolded the ant that outlived the grasshopper – and now all the little ladies are dying off our heads.

All I know is that I see so many women in Arizona with their scalps on promenade.  We’re losing our hair.  By the droves, we’re losing it.  Maybe I only notice it here because Phoenix is too hot to wear a concealing wig.  (Personally, I’m into baseball hats.)  Whatever the cause, we’re losing it.

We’re blasted losing it.

I can hear the men laughing.  Join the club.  The Hair Club.  Um, guys, we don’t want to join your club.  We want our crowning glories to remain.  Women don’t want to look manly and handsome.  Maybe you don’t understand.  Our hair is falling out … plink, plink, plink.  Women are not supposed to be bald.

I’m going to the wig store in the mall tomorrow.  I’m going to sit in the barber shop chair and tears are going to fall from my eyes as I reach up to remove my baseball cap.

It seems I’m now one of the  little old bald women who’s lost all the beautiful ladies from the top of her head and no one has an answer for this malady except a very hot and itchy wig made from someone else’s hair.

But — Bless you, Someone Else, who grew some hair to weave in a wig to sit on the head of a bald woman you’ll never know that was destroyed by the air that was watered by the clouds that grew the wheat that was harvested by the hen and baked into bread that was  … that was …  Well, just, Bless you.

I think I’ll be a blonde again.

My ears wake me.  Or maybe it’s the stars.  At 1:34 a.m. — always 1:34 a.m. — like some kind of Twilight Zone moment.  I guess my ears collude with stars that twist across the sky, wanting me to notice all that whispers and whooshes, gurgles, bumps and whirs during that mysterious time of night.

Dan’s soft breathing into his CPAP air machine is always first to gain my attention.  The CPAP gives off a continuous, soft whoosh, but underneath is Dan’s even softer breath.  I always listen for the breath.  In.  Out.  Breathe, Dan, Breathe.  Good.

Overhead, the ceiling fan makes another kind of rhythmic whisper against the air it creates.  All night, I pull on my covers or throw them off — pull them on, throw them off — in a kind of blanket dance that only my failing internal temperature gauge understands.

Just outside our room, a refrigerator whirs and clicks its way through the night.  Each on-cycle lasts about a half-hour’s worth of whirring and clicking before it quiets itself for … oh, about a nanosecond.

The dogs dream their doggie dreams with legs running sideways on the carpet, whimpers and whines puffing from their cheeks.  They quiet when they’ve caught their dream-quarry or escaped the chasing beast.

Dan turns in bed, now always accompanied by a whoosh and a breath.

A toilet burps.

I hear another hair fall from my head and follow the sound of it skittering across my pillow.

Somewhere near 3:35 a.m. a dog turns and sighs.  Always 3:35 a.m.  Two hours and one minute of listening to the sounds of night.  Of sleeping others and the blips and dings that occur during that stretch of time.  At 3:36 a.m.,  I roll over, causing a sluice of sheets to cascade around my ears.

At last, the house holds me safe and I fall back asleep — amidst the sound of a constant night, a starry, starry swirling night.

Among a certain group, cage fighting is all the rage.  The gorier, the better.  The cagier, the better.  Not so much here at the Bloggybirdery.  We enjoy our no-drama days, our gentle nights of mostly PG-fare television.  It helps us sleep better, dream kinder, wake sweeter.

Okay, so we’re boring.

But what happens when two drama avoiding adults and two set-in-their ways dogs decide to toss a cat in the midst of all this colloquial nicety?

Fur.  That’s what you get.  A whole lot of whizzing fur chasing up and down the stairs.  Flying in and out and all around.  A small-footed wad of fur sliding under the bed just in time to escape the teeth of some big-footed fur thing.  Large fur barking at small fur.  Small fur hissing at giant fur.  Furless people yelling NO, NO at furred things.  Furred things blind, deaf and dumb to those furless things hollering at them.

What you get is ultimate cage fighting, DancingBirds style.

You get Whip It! with an audacious cat named Laverne who’s faster than a tattooed toughie on roller skates.

You get Drama with a capital D.

But alas, the high excitement of a good roller derby match turned out to be more than we could handle.  Laverne, for all her bravery in the face of giant barking dogs, packed her game duffel and went back to her former home.

Her other “mommy” missed her and wanted her back.

It would seem that Laverne has that effect.  Crazy-making when she’s around … but when she’s gone, she’s missed like mad.  We miss her now, but the good news is that we’ll still get to see her whenever we wish … and all that roller derby gear can be put away for another day.

I first saw this amazing home on the website of my friend and extraordinary poet, Drew Myron. (Please visit her lovely poetic journeys here.)

According to the Poem House’s website, these enigmatic and provocative words were planned for erasure some time during September.

The home is a delicious late Victorian house in the town of St. Helena, California in the Napa Valley.  Built in 1892, Oakland visual and media artist Jeff Goodby recently covered the house with words, set in a typeface designed in the 1760s by John Baskerville.

The effect is a combination of Harry Potter and Andy Warhol and has challenged the meaning of home and book alike.

I don’t know if the words have been painted over by now.  Perhaps the home’s appearance has once again resumed that of any other Victorian that populates the Napa region of California.  Perhaps new words have been painted over the old.  I don’t know.  However its current state, it’s nonetheless notable that the home once was covered in words of meaning — words that might indicate story and poem and how houses become homes by the activity inside, rather than from the unique architecture of its wood and bones.

Our house is unremarkable on the outside.  It’s neat.  Clean.  Nothing stands out as extraordinary or unique.  In fact, if we were to add something remarkable, our homeowners’ association would slap us with a cease and desist letter faster than we could retrieve it from our mailbox.  Each of our cookie-cutter, stick and stucco houses are supposed to be look-alike and nondescript.   Still, wouldn’t it be interesting if houses could illustrate on the outside what their occupants are like on the inside? What if words simply and magically appeared on the outside of a house because of what was happening inside?

What would the words on your house say?

I hope my house would select words something like, Delicious, Smile, Generous, Hope, Tolerance,  Love.  But then, my house might have a different interpretation of this morning’s coffee and newspaper-fest; the way we carried on about today’s Ops Ed pieces; the quick kiss in the hallway as Dan and I passed, each preoccupied with our own thoughts; the tap-tap of my keyboard as I type this while wondering what my house would type … as I type this … as the house types that.

I think there’s a story here.  A magical, mystical wonderful story.

Let me become two or three again. Let me have dictionaries in my toes and let my tongue become a spoon.

Let none of us forget the poetry of our roots.

P.S. If you can’t see the video above, you can find it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJ3FP8aDjY&feature=player_embedded

For months, I’ve lamented over all things broken, fractured, lost and never-to-be-found again.  Today made up for every woebegone moment I’ve recently experienced.

This afternoon, for the first time — EVER — I planted a vegetable garden.  Well, except for that one unfortunate time years ago when I tried a summer garden, planting cantaloupe and watermelon side-by-side, and yielding what could only be called cantermeons or waterloupes, depending upon the size of the melon and your naming preference.  But I digress.

When we bought our home last May, the previous owners had, while moving out, packed up not only all their clothes and belongings, their pots and their beds, but they also trotted off with the entire kitchen and all the back yard.  The bank kindly rebuilt the missing kitchen, but the back yard was another matter.  That fenced quantity of remaining dirt was OUR dirt to do with what we wanted.  We designed a nice grassy area for the dogs, enlarged the patio and added a nice little sitting area — not that Phoenicians sit outside while their skin melts away from their bodies.  Nevertheless, here’s our small patio where, once the plants grow nice and tall, will take after its intention as our secret garden:

All around, we planted red hibiscus, ficus trees, a naval orange tree, a gorgeous crepe myrtle that enhances our view from the family room, several rose bushes in various colors, an unusual orange-colored bougainvillea and a spectacular Lady Banks rose that hangs over the front fence like a gossiping neighbor.  I don’t know what the old back yard was like.  It doesn’t matter.  We probably would have tweaked it here and there anyway.  Even in Arizona, not all is rock and cactus.  Here’s Wilson on the new patio:

This morning, the only thing standing between me and a completed yard were two raised garden beds, filled with dirt, a drip system at the ready and the anticipation of doing good over the next three months.

Over these past months while I often and miserably whined in my best nasal horse-voice how everything was crashing around my ankles, one lovely friend — most likely an angel in skin — mentioned softly that perhaps all the falling-down stuff was simply a way to help me notice other new and more important additions to my life.  She took my breath away, this skin angel friend.  Of course she was right.

Since our backyard was installed last June, I’ve noticed those two barren planting beds every morning when I opened the blinds in our bedroom.  Every morning since June I’ve felt bad about not sucking it up to brave the heat and at least throw some marigold seeds around in the waiting dirt.

Today I finally planted my garden.  I opened holes in the dirt and asked it to accept my salad of red leaf lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, parsley, lemon sage, fragrant rosemary, spicy basil and one amazingly gorgeous tomato plant.

When I was done and everything was cleaned up, I walked back to the house, an old woman with her first garden; her back suddenly strong, her arms satisfied, her hands fulfilled.  I was also a little girl with her first garden; she was smiling like crazy, checking every few minutes to make certain her vegetables were happy and still standing tall in their new home.

For all my broken mirrors and plumbing and pool equipment and whatnots and thingamajigs that have keeled over and died during these past couple of months, these two small beds filled now with the promise of growth and nourishment have erased everything else because ……

I.  Have.  Made.  Food.

We seem to be in a season of broken things here at the Bloggybirdery.  Yes, poor old DancingBirds is experiencing brokenness.  Shatterings.  Stoppages.  Things that squeak and blurp and fall and stain.

We’re coming apart at the seams.

We just might be experiencing Karma-ization, although for the life of me, I don’t know what Dan, me, Scarlett and Wilson the dogs or Laverne the cat might have done to deserve the Universe’s wrath upon our little selves.  Nevertheless, our moat has been breached.  The dragon who once was happy to keep us safe from any and all interlopers has apparently flown off with some floozy.

Let me enumerate our recent catastrophes, in no particular order of importance of befalling upon our heads:

• Pool pump slurps its last slurp.
• Pool filter falls over in a dead heap.
• Pool heater rears its ugly head like Putin over Palin’s porch.
• Two amazingly gorgeous mirrors arrive … in shards of pointy glass and disappointment.
• Moving the giant fake ficus in the master bedroom reveals a carpet stain the size of Rhode Island.
• New tile grout in the master bath, of which installer insists is sealed against stains, turns black.
• Our beloved renter reveals that people call her Typhoid Mary because everything breaks around her.  I’m just sayin’.
• Two more amazingly gorgeous mirrors arrive … one broken, one shaking in fear that it’s next.
• Glass seems no longer safe in our house as we break two, again amazingly gorgeous, glass rod finials while hanging family room drapes.
• Three toilets decide to bedevil us by running, leaking and stopping-up.
• Two sinks forget how their stoppers work.
• Two adults, two dogs and one cat now cower in fear of what might next break.  Please not the food bowls, we intone.  Anything but the food bowls.

Our encounters with all this silliness will soon end.  I know that.  My theory is that we have seasons of good and seasons when everything falls out of the sky.  This just happens to be our time of falling stars and disappointments.  It will soon end.

In the meantime, I listen to my dear Dan who only notices whether his putt falls into the cup or not.

As I do once or twice a week, I find myself upstairs, laptop beneath my hands, DancingBirds.com open to its  “Administrator’s Write Post” screen, a small glass of wine encouraging me to write.  Write something, that glass of wine says.  Anything, my hands urge.  And as I always do, during that once or twice weekly blog-writing event, I pause to think over the days’ occurrences of my tiny life.

May I emphasize that my life is really tiny, so I don’t have large things to write about.

For instance, I noticed today (for the thousandth time) my one kitchen drawer that refuses to stay closed.  The drawer is just opposite my refrigerator, so several times a day I notice it just slightly ajar.  One inch open.

Always one inch.

I reach out and close the drawer.  Then I watch as it slowly opens itself again like a morning flower in a rising sun.  Just one inch.  Always one inch.  I know because I measured it.  It always stands ajar one inch.

I think I love that drawer.

It’s my tiny event.  The thing that reminds me of beauty and perseverance and structural integrity and stubbornness and elegance.  It’s my one true fault in a faultless home, wildly, messily, frantically pushing itself to stand out and be different.  If that drawer could hold a pen, it would be a writer.  A crazy, never-give-up writer who takes up a writing stance every day and doesn’t stop even when people keep pushing him closed.  He simply pushes back that one inch.

That one inch.

One inch closer to the experience of writing a perfect poem.  One inch beyond ordinariness.  One inch away from an agent, an editor, a published novel.  One inch nearer to a winning query, a blazing hot elevator pitch, a book jacket.

I could learn a thing or two from that persistent drawer.  Instead here’s how I am as a writer: messy, failure prone (many), mistakes, brilliance, disappointments, absent from my desk (often), disjointed, successful, unstructured, embarrassed, indecisive, praised, unregulated, betrayed by my own self, buoyed by my friends (many of whom I’m not worthy), frantic, low-down, lifted up by my husband who knows me better than anyone in the world and yet still is my head cheerleader, loyal to my trade, insecure in my craft.

Yet, I’m learning from a drawer.  A god-awful, inanimate drawer who simply won’t take no for an answer.

The funny thing is that since that drawer decided to refuse to give an inch, I’ve accepted the eccentricity of it.  It’s my kitchen Sylvia Plath.  My cherry wood Virginia Woolf.  My John Milton.  My Walt Whitman.  My modern day Sage Cohen, my Jorie Graham.

Now, instead of pushing it closed with an insistent finger, I push it closed with the joyful expectancy that it will yawn open again.

It will open its mouth to sing.

I knew Wilson has always had a soft spot for older people.  Until yesterday, I didn’t know to what extent.  For whatever nervousness I might have had going into our first assignment as a Hospice Pet Therapy Team, Wilson quickly set me at ease.  How like the dog to comfort his master.

The moment we entered the skilled nursing facility, it was like a ripple went through the building.  Wilson was in the house!  He sat.  He shook hands.  He blew kisses.  He let the ladies tussle his hair, the men pat him on the back.

He was a rock star, wagging to the beat of his own brand of Led Zeppelin.  He was Mick Jagger in a fur coat singing 100 Years Ago.

Wilson went from room to room, person to person, carefully sidling up to say hello.  To leave a bit of magic.

During training for Hospice we were taught that dementia patients, even when unresponsive in other ways, often amazingly respond to three things: touch, music and surprisingly, pets.  It’s true.  Everywhere we went, fragile hands with papery skin reached out to touch the dog.  Tightly closed eyes opened even if just for a moment.  Women cooed.  Men sat up a bit straighter.  Small shaking voices talked about their own past dogs.  One man called Wilson by his own long lost dog’s name.  One person declared him a Great Dane and a “fine one at that.”

We’ll be back next Friday.  I have new friends now and Wilson, it would seem, is developing a small following.  Nevertheless, if we left just one person with a tiny smile, if we left just one person’s fingertips alive with the memory of soft fur, if we allowed one person a moment of distraction from what might seem endless confinement, we did a good and generous thing.

Good job, Wilson!  Good job.