"Presence" - The 2009 Blogvention

I admit it: I follow blogs. Lots of them. Hundreds maybe. Following blogs is almost an addiction for me: that rush as I find a new artist's blog or design blog that I can get lost in for a few happy hours. Even the fashion blogs are appealing to me lately, more and more, for their beautiful fabrics and designer gowns, though I am still troubled by the gaunt, waifish models on whom the elegant clothes are draped, girls who have become, essentially, coat hangers for the industry.

I love blogs for their photographs and graphics. I love them for their stories and the distinctive voices of the writers.I can spend hours and hours moving from artist's blog to artist's blog. I am stunned and fascinated by what photographers are doing with photography on the digital photography sites. I even read the parts in between the photographs. That is how absurdly addicted I am. Give me anything: from "I Am A Mermaid," to "Modern Country Style," to wild-and-wacky "Jennsylvania," to the Australian blog "Third on the right," to "LifeAfterNormal" and beyond: I can spend happy hours in the company of perfect strangers. Sometimes I click on embedded links in the blogs I follow and they take me out to other sites. Then I'll sign up to follow those blogs too. My inbox is crazy-clogged on Mondays with all the "new posting" notifications that come in now. It's like Christmas every week.

Many of these bloggers have what is known in the blog world as a web presence. By this, I mean they have established a long list of "followers." (Followers are regular readers, like me.) Some of these blogs have hundreds and thousands of followers. Now, that is a presence, my friend; that is a presence. The larger the number of followers you have, the larger your web presence is. So they say.

As for me, I don't have a "web presence." This is true. What I have are 10 or 12 friends and family who read the blog faithfully – and another 10 or 12 who drop in whenever life isn't swamping them. On a good day, a stranger accidentally drops in.

Here's the really great thing about my lack of web presence: these people are about 25 of the greatest readers ANY writer could have. They email. They leave comments. They laugh and they cry – and actually admit they do. A few write back with funny jokes or with funny stories or anecdotes of their own. When I was ill last December and in the hospital, they wrote to me – from wherever they were – to see how I was doing. They sent notes and emailed get-well wishes. They sent secret family recipes for bread pudding because it turns out I thrive on bread pudding when I'm sick. (Okay, so it's all in my mind, that sense of well-being I get from a fine bowl of warm bread pudding.) Another friend sent an email from Hawaii – with a photo of the ocean on it! A few strangers sent good wishes. And one former student sent me some very funny pneumonia haiku he'd written.

As I said before, I don't have a "web presence." I know this because it was confirmed for me recently at the "2009 Blogvention" – an event I dropped in on when I was meandering around in a far city, a little bored, looking for a bit of adventure or mischief. I was desperate enough, by noon, to head down Main Street wanting to linger a while in the little café in the local Barnes & Noble, to sip a frothy latte and flip through good books and magazines. That was my PLAN FOR THE DAY (my PFTD) but on my way, I walked past the city auditorium where an enormous white plastic banner was twisting in the wind and which had purple capital letters painted on it which read: 2009 BLOGVENTION!!!

Those three exclamation points sealed the deal for me. I figured that had to be more exciting than taking the city bus around the town loop all day or sitting respectably in a bookstore and sipping frothed-milk coffees and getting all spooled-up on caffeine. So I climbed the wide front concrete steps and strolled into the auditorium lobby where a young woman sat alone at a long table. Her nametag said, "Darlene" and, below that, "Receptionist."

Darlene was texting someone on her phone's tiny keyboard. From the look on her face, it didn't seem like a pleasant conversation for the person on the other end. Someone was catching hell; I was pretty certain of that.

Darlene types, like so many young people today, with her thumbs, plump over-sized thumbs which moved rapidly over the phone's small keyboard – thus distinguishing herself from other primates – and with each keystroke the long, sculpted false nails of her opposable thumbs clicked and clacked and sometimes snagged on the tiny keys and the ridges around them, making her even angrier than she already was. Darlene was a young woman given to anger: I could see that. She'd frown and push out a great gasp of exasperation as she deleted the error and corrected the sentence or word. When she was done typing, she pushed the "send" button with what my grandmother would've called "a great vengeance."

I stepped toward the registration table in hopes that I would get there before the next texted response could arrive and make her even more fierce and impatient than she already seemed. She spotted me and tucked the phone away in her lap.

"Are you here for the Blogvention?" she asked and I could tell, from the way she asked, she wanted me to be there for anything BUT that. Ask directions. Ask for the time. Anything else.

I nodded but, before I could say that I only wanted to sit in on a few events, not the whole convention, she started rifling through folders and piling paperwork on a clipboard. She found a pen and shoved the whole mess at me. I guess I must have looked confounded because she hesitated and pursed her red lips. She sucked in a loud breath and asked was I planning to attend or not and had I already registered.

"No," I said, before she could thrust another formidable pile of papers at me, "I just want to sit in on one or two events."

She snarled and tore off all the papers she'd just put on the brown clipboard.

"You can get a day pass for the lectures in the main auditorium for $25.00 per day. Is that what you want?"

I nodded. She waited. I waited. She held out her palm. I blinked. She waited.

"Twen-ty-five dol-lars," she repeated, slowly, emphasizing each syllable.

I asked if I could write a check.

"NO. You may NOT write a check. Cash only for day passes."

So I fished out a crispy twenty dollar bill and a rumpled five dollar bill from the bottom of my purse and extended them to her. Carefully. She retrieved a strange-looking pen from a cash box and rubbed it several times over the twenty-dollar bill. Then she held the twenty up in front of her and glared at it. When it was apparent the bill wasn't counterfeit, she tucked it and the rumpled fiver into the beige lock-box and handed me two pieces of paper. The first paper was a list with the main auditorium events and presentations highlighted in green marker. The other was a map of the lobby with the public restrooms, the water fountains, and the words "front lobby" highlighted in the same neon-green marker.

She told me where I was allowed to go and what I could attend and she spoke to me as if I were daft. She emphasized the critical words, as if they were a threat: "You are ONLY allowed to be in the GREEN areas marked on this map. NO classrooms and NO refreshment tables. No ICE WATER or COFFEE or TEA. The PUBLIC water fountains are MARKED."

Darlene stopped then and squinted up at me and said, "And NO cookies when they are put out. They are for blogventioneers who PAID for the FULL weekend."

People were already emerging from the classrooms down the corridor and they walked in groups to the lobby for refreshments. They looked normal. Sort of ordinary. And by "ordinary," I mean they looked local, like others from that part of the country. Almost as if they were all – how shall I say this? – related. And had been for generations and generations. They were dressed in nicely-pressed slacks and pantsuits and skirts. They carried notebooks and portfolios bulging with papers. They wore tags on strings around their necks. And they had that pale, punched-dough, middle-aged look to them that people get after living for many years in a place where strong drink is the main event at every social occasion. They seemed at ease there in the lobby with each other. They knew each others' names. They chatted in groups. They put the delicious-looking cookies into their mouths. They sipped from Styrofoam cups. No one among them bent to drink from the water coolers in the lobby. I was, apparently, the only one who had purchased a day pass. An outsider. An interloper. A cheap, out-of-towner, day-passer interloper. A cheap, out-of-towner, day-passer interloper who was standing by herself, with no cookies in hand, in their town's auditorium lobby.

Darlene cleared her throat and, when she was sure she had my attention again, she handed me a hangtag for my neck: a blank, bright neon-green nametag. When I asked if I should write my name on it like the others who were milling about in the lobby, she just threw a crooked smile in my direction as if to say, Who cares who you are, you green-tagged, day-passer? Then she retrieved the cell phone from her lap and starting reading something that had finally come in. I moved out of range.
~
Blogventioneers. More strange even than the word "conventioneers" – and slightly less respectable. It had the childish, cheesy ring of "Mouseketeers."

Who's the leader of the band that's made for you and me . . . .

Who makes up these awful new words? These bad parodies of words. These miserable, ill-fitting misnomers. Who are those people who butcher the English language and make it over it in their own lousy image? For a moment, I almost convinced myself I was superior to all those others around me in the lobby, those swarming "blogventioneers." I think I was trying hard to convince myself that I had an inside edge, knowing real words as I did, not falling to made-up words like blogvention and blogventioneers.

But clearly, the other attendees who were gathering in front of the cookie trays and talking amiably to each other – these blogventioneers who had paid their fees in full – were more respectable than I was with my green-highlighted maps and my blank neon-green tag. They could have cookies and tea. They could wander down the corridors and hallways. They had their names on their tags, and the names of their blogs.

I'd never felt so out-of-place in my life and, you can trust me when I say that I have felt out of place in many places, in many towns, large and small. But never quite so acutely, so visibly, so miserably out of place as I was just then.

So I tried to look as if I didn't care, as if I weren't out of place and a misfit among them. I hid behind my glasses and studied the list of afternoon lectures coming up. I saw one that was to start in ten minutes.:"The Blogosphere: How to get there fast and be read widely."

Oh dear.

Why hadn't I thought to check the list of events before handing over the fee to Darlene the Miserable? I realized this might have been a bad idea, a worse idea than riding the city bus loop all day or sitting in the bookstore sipping designer coffee and thumbing through magazines. This might be a dull disaster of a day – a disaster I had paid good money to be part of.

I studied the list again. Two more talks would follow this one: "Blogging For Profit" and "Building a Web Presence." Since I could give a rat's backside about making a profit on anything, much less on writing, I decided to sit in the lobby on a far bench, to slouch in the warm sunshine falling through the tall windows. I'd sit there and daydream until the "web presence" talk at 3 o'clock. That way I would be close enough to know when the first talk was over but wouldn't be too close to Darlene who was looking a bit nuclear by then, texting and frowning and slamming the phone on the tabletop after each message she sent.

Darlene scared me.

There came a point. at last, where she went off down the hall to the women's restroom. I took the opportunity to snitch an oatmeal cookie and a cup of ice water from the table. I guzzled down the ice water which was cool after half an hour of baking in the afternoon sunshine and I choked down the soft crumbly cookie, afraid Darlene might suddenly reappear, see what I had done, and go into a rage, flying at me with her neon-green permanent marker and her long-nailed opposable thumbs. I have seen rabid dogs who intimidated me less than Darlene did.

She finally returned and sat down at the reception table again, her phone idle on the tabletop beside her. She had found a People magazine to thumb through and it held her attention for the next 2 hours. She seemed not to even notice me, which was what I wanted except that it made me feel even less visible and less important and more out of place than I already felt.
~
Inside the auditorium later, I settled myself in the back of the large room, back in the safe, indistinct shadowy reaches of the room that was elsewhere too-brightly-lit by buzzing overhead fluorescent bulbs. The back of any room, large or small, is where all the ex-Southern Baptists I know, including me, seat themselves in adulthood. We are traumatized by the sermons of our childhoods, childhoods which were spent being made – by our God-fearing parents and the stern deacons – to sit in the sanctuary's front two pews, in close range of Preacher's rantings and finger-pointings and Bible-shakings. Hellfire and brimstone were hurled at us from those Sunday pulpits and tent-revival podiums, as were the seven deadly sins and the lesser sins of omission. Sometimes I left a revival like a scorched thing, having been so close to the hellfire sermon that I could almost smell the sulfur of brimstone in my hair.

Others entered the auditorium. No one smiled in my direction. No one spoke to me. They all moved, eagerly, dutifully, to the front and middle of the room and sat down, taking out their notebooks and folios, clicking their pens, ready to capture the secrets of Those-Who-Have-Arrived in the Kingdom of Blogging. I stayed put – just me and my pity-party – in the back of that auditorium where I read through the titles of talks once again and studied my highlighted lobby map and tried to hide the fact of my blank neon-green day pass from anyone who might look my way.

Soon, the house lights went down and the podium lights came up. The guest speaker was introduced and applauded. Then the big screen behind her lit up: a power-point presentation.

Oh. Goody.

Pie-charts and statistics. Acronyms and quotable slogans. Testimonials by the guest speaker followed by snappy little sound-bytes by those others who had been pioneers in blogging and its technology and by those who were devout followers of this speaker's "methodology," people who were quoted and identified only by a first name and last initial.

I have always suspected that these quotations are probably not written or spoken by real people, that they were "made up." Invented. Characters. Conveniently-placed characters. The syntax and diction are too similar from quote to quote. Sometimes, the punctuation and spelling errors are also consistent from quote to quote. I smelled a rat. A big fat smelly rat.

But I could see, even in the dim-lit hall, others were writing them all down as fast as they appeared on the screen, as if the words were pearls of great wisdom that could sink again into the sea-water and disappear. Lost riches. Little gems. Something to repeat to others when they also finally entered one day the hallowed halls of Those-Who-Have-Arrived.
Finally, the speaker took out her laser pointer and got down to the subject: that "web presence" we were all needing so badly to establish. How to build it. How to nurture it. How to capitalize on it.

Why? I wondered. Why do any of us care whether five or five hundred people are reading what we write, looking at what we post from week to week, month to month? We're not selling anything. We're not getting rich. We're not.

Or are we?

Maybe, in some deep sense of it all, we are selling something, even if it's only our own versions of what is and has been and will be. Maybe we're all trying to capture something about the world we know – or knew once – and raise it up again before others who might not have seen it, even when it shimmered (or shimmied) right before them. Maybe we're hoping that they'll see it finally and be astonished by it and agree with us that it's been one helluva life, this one we've shared with all those strangers and friends and followers out there.

Maybe we're gravediggers in the old boneyard of mortals, digging our graves and others' too. Slowly. Beautifully. In such a way that it seems we do it like nobody else has ever done it. That we do it in such a way that grave-digging seems the only fitting end for something as wild and noble and filled with good and evil as our lives have been.

Or maybe we're resurrecting our dead. Bringing them back to stand, almost-whole again, before us. Bringing them into view so clearly and so deeply and humanly-flawed that, when we lose them again – as we surely must when the writing ends – it feels like a bitter loss to anyone else who happens to be with us there in that moment.

Maybe we are selling something: we who are writing from our most secret and vulnerable hearts and minds. Maybe we sell it – whatever "it" is – so well we don’t quite feel alone as we once did. Maybe we want even that brief connection to others, a tenuous connection, at best, that often seems so damned impossible to find any other way.

And maybe in the end, we are getting rich. Richer than we'd imagined we would be. Rich enough to fill our pockets full with the gold-dust of all those small, fleeting details of the moments we've lived and had almost-forgotten until we wrote them down or photographed them or painted them for others.

Maybe the guest speaker is wrong, a little, about that web presence and how critical the larger numbers of readers are. Maybe she is not seeing the forest for the proverbial trees, despite the colorful graphs and pie-charts and well-researched statistics. Maybe the only web presence that matters, in the end, is that we each be present and genuine in every blog-piece we write, each photograph we post, each thing we hold up to those who drop in from time to time and watch us act as if it is the only thing of any worth that we have to offer.

Maybe even Darlene the Terrible is entitled to a presence here today, with her wonderfully-manicured thumbs and her sorry attitude. Maybe even that blank green nametag is just one more ever-present manifestation of all the small signs that make decent people feel ruined and discarded, another version of signs like "For Whites Only" or "No Girls Allowed" or "Immigrants Go Home." Maybe the presence that matters today isn't the woman I was that afternoon at the Blogvention; maybe it’s the sudden presence again of the girl I was once, deeply hung in the practices and fears of a Southern Baptist childhood, her hair reeking of brimstone, her cheeks flushed from that close encounter with the hellfires.

Maybe even you, reader, are a presence, rare and wonderful, tagging along as you have, at my elbow all that miserable day though I had nothing more, ever, to offer you than this one afternoon, this little scrap from the rich bone-yard of my own life.

A FOOT IN TWO WORLDS: Photos from Alaska & PA

A WHITE TRASH STARTER KIT: What You'll Need

1. A trailer, single-wide, set out under pines and live oak, and monthly lot rent 'til the day you die;

2. Your grandmother's lace curtains at the kitchen window and, on the sill, those three monkeys always on your back: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil;

3. In the dirt yard, a bent aluminum lawn chair missing most of its webbing;

4. A good-sized plastic cooler with a duct-taped handle, for keeping beer and sodas cold and for sitting on (see #3 above);

5. A shoebox with a lid in which to put away, for good, all your girlhood dreams;

6. A man your mama warned you would come to nothing but trouble;

7. His recliner in the living room;

8. His porn by the toilet;

9. His truck, up on concrete blocks in the yard, sporting his Confederate flag in the busted rear window;

10. His skinny hunting hounds sleeping on the stoop;

11. His velvet paint-by-number Jesus painting hung over the living room sofa;

12. The camo Snuggie he gave you last Christmas;

13. Pride: not the kind of pride that "goeth before a fall," but the kind of pride that lets you pass – head-up, unscathed – through a sea of your "betters" as you read on their faces, There but for the grace of God. . . .

14. A strong back, strong arms, two good feet that can carry you to the bus stop and back again in any weather;

15. The prayer you begin every night as you fall into bed, Anywhere, Lord, but here. . .

16. The exhaustion of having spent all day, every day, elbow-deep in dishwater and detergent taking you under long before the bars close at 2 a.m. when the man will stumble in raunchy with beer and smoke, reeking of other women, to slur in your ear, Hey, Baby, you awake?

17. The way you have learned to feign sleep so as not to have sex with him;

18. The minute between when his infernal snoring begins and your insomnia returns;

19. The way you think, those nights, you hear the kitchen matches taunting you, Strike One. Strike Two. Strike Three.

20. And all the mornings, after a night like that, that begin with some other broken, barren thing coming to your door to borrow a cup of sugar.

photo courtesy of Markt3

THINGS I DISCOVERED THIS YEAR

Instead of making the list of resolutions on New Year's Eve as many of my friends and family are doing tonight – that list of resolutions likely to be broken (given my proclivities) and likely to leave me riddled with guilt and loathing about my inability to stick to even a plan I'd made – I've decided to make another kind of list while waiting by the fire to hear the arrival of the New Year heralded by the local church bells and the fireworks in town square.

~ ~ ~

I thought I would amuse myself by making a list of "Things I Discovered This Year." I ended up with a 15- page list – shocking even to me – but here, for your amusement and horror, are 25 of them:

1. About transvestites: always use the pronoun which corresponds to the gender presentation. (Thank you, Eddie Izzard.)

2. Dandelions do not "nod in agreement." (So saith two of my fellow writers.)

3. What the world really wants from a Southern writer is a "White Trash Starter Kit." (I'm working my way through that one right now.)

4. Memory is an unreliable narrator. (Excellent news in regards to putting together that White Trash Starter Kit.)

5. The Devil's knickers are full of hot chili peppers and spicy salsa. (Don't ask. Don't.)

6. The devil singing in my inkwell has perfect-pitch. That's how I know he's the Devil.

7. Some days I am so close to being utterly lost, I let God play me like His fool.

8. There is a swing-shift at the local slaughterhouse.

9. You may explain the tides to me. You may point out the moon. But you will have to allow me to decipher for myself the undertow.

10. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones, had such a profound effect on me that, even in my dreams, I still conjugate the verb infinitive to be.

11. Something in me is always choosing. But between what and what, I do not always know.

12. Human beings have a large amount of retroviral material in their "junk" DNA.

13. Sometimes I am wrong – no; often I am wrong. And sometimes willfully so.

14. I miss pistons sometimes – the herky-jerky hump and frenzy of them under the hood – exchanged as they are now for the more efficient hum of the motherboard.

15. There is a difference between the rain and its parade.

16. Death sings nine songs as he comes for you.

17. Some nights, a dark bell rings me to sleep.

18. Some days, every cup in my kitchen cabinet wants to fly off its handle.

19. When I sense something is about to happen over which I have no control, I have that dream again I had as a girl: a man with a knife in his teeth looking at me as if I were hot butter.

20. God sleeps with one eye open.

21. I bought an old trunk at an estate sale and found in it a Book of Spells, but someone had torn out the pages for "Resurrecting the Dead."

22. When you are very ill, the wind can carry your soul away and even the smallest thimble can hold all the crumbling syllables of your name; that's how slender the tether is from you to the-world-as-you-know-it.

23. When I am committing the world to memory, I do not appreciate it when someone annoys me with the facts.

24. A man cannot promise you the moon when all he has is a barn.

25. When it comes to rodeos, my sympathies lie with the bull.

photo courtesy of photos.com

BREAD OF HEAVEN

The snow clouds that only threatened yesterday are making good today on their promises: it's beginning to snow outside and I can see this clearly from the hospital window where I have taken up my second-morning vigil. Large, irregular-shaped flakes are slamming wetly against the panes already and the nursing staff arriving for the day shift are pink-cheeked and glad to be indoors. The morning temps are hovering around 20 degrees and, while there's no wind today, it's damp and cold and miserable out there: a good day to be inside, out of the weather of the day. Or so they tell me.

So then, why do I want to be out there in it myself? Or, rather, to be well enough again to be out there in it, to be part of the whole rushing, slushy, wintry morning and those who are traveling miserably through it. There is nothing like a brush with serious illness to make you see something that ridiculous, this clearly.

Sitting here in the high-backed chair at the prow-front windows of my fourth-floor room, looking down on the streets and the hills far off to the west that I can only barely make out now in the early flurries of the day, I think this early-morning view may still be one of the most beatific I've seen in a long while. The city seems wrapped in its soft gray flannel and the streets are shining with snowmelt already. The dullness of the day makes the particulars of all the small bright things stand out today starkly so that I notice them when I didn't yesterday: tail-lights and brake-lights on the commuter's cars, the bright green wreaths on the door and windows of the house below me, and the elementary school children in their bright parkas and boots, walking down the sidewalks together towards school. And that little church with the wooden cross on its front – the Lebanon Wesleyan Church – which has a sign out front that reads, "Many an argument is sound – and only sound."

I've been puzzling on that one this morning. Do they mean "noise," as in full of sound and fury? Or do they mean "solid," as in sound of mind? Or are they implying that being sound is just not sufficient unto itself? That's the problem, I suppose, with signs and bumper-sticker slogans and their employment of clever twists and turns of phrase: it's so easy for the meaning to slide right past you and to saunter on down the block.

Farther down the block, the rowhouses still gleam in their bright colors but today they look wet – as if some painterly hand has just laid on the colors – and today many of their chimneys have small spires of hearth-smoke rising out of them.

It's not exactly a Norman Rockwell scene from middle America, but it's got a certain appeal and charm today for someone like me.

* * * * *

In the two days I've been up here on the fourth floor, I have learned a secret about this hospital: the dietary services food staff makes and serves the best warm bread pudding that I have ever put into my mouth. I know bread pudding – in all its various and nefarious forms – and I'm not exaggerating here. It is warm and buttery and sweet and the whole concoction is swimming in butter. It's like a wallow of all my favorite ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and a little cinnamon. I found it my first day here on the dessert part of the menu the staff hands out to patients, and it's available every day at two meals: lunch and dinner. You can have as many sides and appetizers as you want – unless you happen to be on a restricted diet, which I thankfully am not – and you can have as much bread as you want. Drinks too. But, they warned me, you can only have one entrée and only two desserts.

Two desserts!

Two desserts. It's a bit like having died and gone to kindergarten heaven. Never have I been allowed to even think it is proper to have two desserts at one meal. Yet here is the dietary services corps of the Good Samaritan Hospital giving me permission, in my illness, to indulge in such sweet madness. Still, my upbringing won't let me take two: the guilt of it would do me in. But I do order one warm bread pudding with each lunch and dinner I have. I save the pudding for last – along with my half-pint of cold whole milk from the local Swiss dairies – so the little dish of warm bread pudding is the last-and-best thing I will savor of the meal. Just like I used to tell my undergraduate students in Composition classes: save your best point of persuasion for last.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to warn me, Never eat food made by a mean-spirited cook. (Or a sick one, or a spiteful one, or a sad one: the saying shifted slightly to accommodate the proper lesson for the day's woes.) She said that kind of cook would poison the pot and, if you ate the food, it would bring you no end of trouble, digestive and otherwise.

That may sound like charming folk wisdom. Like an old wives' tale. Like some quaint grandmotherly expression. But my grandmother was always tapped into some deep knowing about how things actually worked and I knew that even then, so I tended to pay attention to what she said.

So here's what I think today. The antibiotics and steroids are doing a little work towards making me healthy again. So is the respiratory therapy department. The nursing staff of the hospital helps it along a little more. The rest and sleep surely help healing along too. But as good as those things are, they fall just slightly short, pointed as they are and relentless about the push towards health.

But I'm pretty sure it is that cook – that happy, indulgent cook baking away in the hospital kitchen – who is doing the heavy-lifting work of making me well again right now. All that voluptuous attention to taste, to something sweet and warm. All those eggs and milk and flour. All of it beat and stirred and poured into a pan and sent into the heat of the ovens. And that final little whiff of warm cinnamon every time it comes to the bedside table! The whole thing is working towards the satisfaction of some longing I didn’t even know I had. It's not even meant to be healthy for me; it's a dessert, mind you, and its sole purpose is to move at someone with the intention of delivering a sudden jolt of pleasure and satisfaction through the teeth and tongue and taste buds and down into the stomach. For an unapologetic hedonist like me, that IS the ticket to well-being. At least it is for today.

I don't know who here gave this dish such a modest name, but I think it might be something more than just the "warm bread pudding" it's billed as. I think it may be the Bread of Heaven, going incognito as ordinary pudding, a poor man's dessert made from leftover crusts of bread and sauced up with eggs, butter, milk, and cinnamon. Or maybe the bread of heaven IS just ordinary food, a warm dish made by a happy cook in some kitchen that is not your own, and served up to you by a Mennonite volunteer who delivers it to you, smiling, as if it were not the miracle it really is sitting there in its steaming little white ceramic dish, waiting for you to take it into yourself and be made whole – or at least pleased – again in a way you can't remember having been since childhood.

photo by the author, December 11, 2010

WAITING FOR THE SUN

It's been a long time since I had a vantage-point like this: four stories up, facing west, overlooking a cold, dark, sleepy town in the foothills, staring up at the starless sky, waiting for the sun to arrive. Well, I have no assurance that the morning will be sunny, not gray and overcast or foggy, as early mornings here in the hills and valleys of Central Pennsylvania can often be. But I'm hoping for sun.

I've gotten up early and moved my bed – tilted it askew actually – so I can see out the prow-front double window of my room: room 452, Good Samaritan Hospital, Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

By seven a.m., I've already had blood drawn, had a nebulizer treatment, have had two of the myriad intravenous antibiotics prescribed for the pneumonia, and have phoned in my selections for breakfast from the "Room Service Dining" Menu. Now, I'm sitting here upright, watching the sky pink up and waiting for first sun and that steamy bowl of Cream of Wheat, when it suddenly occurs to me, I am breathing again.

And now, as if on cue, the sun crests somewhere behind me, over the eastern ridge. I can't see it, but I know it's happening: all the windows of the row-houses below flash like brightly-burnished mirrors and their twilight-dulled colors leap into rich barn reds, dove-grays, burnt golds, Williamsburg blues, and that late-70s Dusky Rose that's come into fashion again across the country. I can distinguish again the lush evergreens from the bare-limbed oaks and maples and sycamores. The street below my window is thrumming now with morning traffic and the large, wooden, burnt-umber cross on the church across the street comes into sharp relief against its ochre-colored clapboard and rusting steeple spire. The house to the left of the church – one half of a two-family house – has greenery wreaths tied with big red bows in celebration of the holiday season. Maybe tonight, I'll be lucky enough to see this town transformed again by street-light and holiday-light before someone arrives at the appointed time to pull the heavy drapes into place again and turn down the room-lights.

I can make out the brickworks and glass of the old steel foundry building and its tall, rust-eaten water tower midway across the valley and I am reminded of how much steel once meant to this state and the hard economy of loss that followed as production shut down, foundry by foundry.

* * * * *

Midmorning now and the clouds are moving in from the west, damping the blue morning sky and throwing into shadow the whole sun-bright town, and my IV monitor (Horizon® Nxt – Modular Infusion System) starts pinging like a mad devil of sonar and is flashing red digital letters across the front: OCCL. . .OCCL. . . .OCCL. . . . An occlusion somewhere in the line. And though I am at the farthest end of the hall from the nurses' station and have promptly rung my call bell, as instructed, it will be a while yet before anyone comes to reset the beast. I know this because I can hear several other things pinging and ringing down the hall.

So here's what I'll do. I am going to sit here at my fourth-floor window breathing again, in and out and in, without having to will my lungs to expand and contract – blissfully ignorant again of the mysterious workings of my ancient reptilian brain - enduring the annoyingly loud, fouled mechanics of modern medical technology while I look westward, to the foothills and ridges beyond Lebanon Valley, watching the snow-clouds move in, feeling my whole body pinging with a strange happiness at being right here, right now, in the world and of it. . . .

photo courtesy of photos.com