Sheila's LiveJournal

I shed tears of joy when they announced Obama won. And I shed tears of grief when they finally said Proposition 8 had passed. What a day.

I voted at seven am, then went in to the hospice as usual. But yesterday I had to take a young man dying of AIDS to the poll who desperately wanted to vote for Obama and against Proposition 8 -- but he'd failed to re-register when he moved in with us. He's often confused mentally these days, and he started crying when we were trying to sort out what had happened. So I went over to the polling place and talked to the registrar about his predicament, including the real possibility he hadn't been registered at his previous address either. The kind people there said we'd help him fill out a provisional ballot so he could get his wish; if it later turns out that he's wrong about being registered anyway, well, no problem. They'd just throw the vote out. But he'd have the joy of voting one last time.

And that's how it happened. He was so excited he was telling everyone within shouting distance that he'd voted!

At the Eaton Conference recently, I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. The conference had taken as its theme science fiction about the moon, and Bradbury was an honored guest. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work.   

I wasn't disappointed. Bradbury's prose sings – it really is best when read aloud. Being introduced to Bradbury's work by a twelve-year-old boy long ago, I had fallen in love with the voice of these stories, saturating myself in his music. I realized, as I re-read of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me. Most of the stories have tiny plots that would sound ho-hum when summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably never existed even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point.

The magic of these stories lies in their poetry. I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:

    It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:

    And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....”

A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when all the apples fall from the trees” for the second – and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I re-read the book, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless tunes of simple words.

And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet whose prose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas. I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. The date I'd inscribed on the inside front cover was the year I went to college, the year after Thomas died. I'd hated “modern poetry” while I was in high school – until I encountered Thomas and the poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept off my feet by the sheer emotional torrent of words, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. Like Bradbury, Thomas loved small towns, though his are in his native Wales:

    ...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold  money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.”

I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. The thing is, these aren't the places Bradbury and Thomas lived either; they're myths about those places, more real than bricks and stones. That to my mind is good writing; that's Art.

Ah, Miss Warner, dragon of high school English classes, you told us that sentences ought not to run away with the images they contain but cower timidly behind their periods and semicolons, and that words ought not to be strung together with “and” like beads on a chain. How lucky you didn't teach Ray Bradbury or Dylan Thomas!

The AIDS Foundation made it official: the temperature reached 100 degrees during the walk last Saturday. Wouldn't you know I'd choose to walk five kilometers on the hottest day in June history! Luckily the first half of the route followed the bike path on the beach, from the Pike to the parking lot below the Museum of Art, and there was a breeze off the water. But the second half along Ocean Boulevard back to the starting point was HOT! Too many tall buildings blocking the breeze. The committee had posted much needed water stations at regular intervals along the route – I drank three bottles – and I saw the paramedic truck at one point. But the only “casualty” I saw was a long-haired dog, flat out on the grass verge, panting. A small crowd of walkers paused to pour water over it, all you can do under the circumstances. It was much too hot for a long-haired dog to walk; I'm glad I didn't even consider taking the greys along.

I wish they'd given the size of the crowd; it seemed pretty big to me but I'm very bad at estimating numbers like that. The Long Beach Press-Telegram ignored the walk in favor of reporting on the Cajun festival going on at the same time.

My daughter gave me a pedometer before the walk. I learned you're supposed to take between 6,000 and 10,000 steps a day for good health. By the time I got home from the walk, my pedometer read over 11,000. But if that's what it takes to reach the ultimate, I doubt I can do it too many times a week! Since then, my average has been a little over 6,000.

And now the Foundation has announced that the walk raised $144,000. So a big thank you to all of you who supported me and helped to push that total up!

Most of you know I've been volunteering in a hospice since I retired three years ago. I've seen far too many of our young people lose their lives to AIDS. It's not a pretty killer. It takes away your health, your beauty, your dignity. And often it seems to take away friends and family too, leaving only the kind hospice staff and the volunteers to hold your hand and keep you company.

When I was in Rwanda last year, I met women, many with small children, who had been deliberately infected by their HIV positive rapists during Rwanda's horrifying genocide. Now they're overwhelming the few clinics in that poor country because they're dying of AIDS. Often, the children of these mothers are infected too and they will be left as orphans to suffer alone.

Did you know that we have a serious emergency developing in this country among children aged 15 to 24?

We have to find a cure!

To help raise money towards finding that cure, I'm participating in a 5K walk in Long Beach, on June 21st, 2008. I've sent in my $25 registration, and – artificial hips and pins in my foot be darned! – I'll be walking.  I'm asking you to help by donating too. Any amount will be welcome, no matter how little you can afford. Or match my contribution. Or better yet, beat it! Please, open your heart and your checkbook.

Make your tax-deductible checks payable to “AIDS Walk Long Beach.”

I'm collecting them at:
Sheila Finch
Box 167
375 Redondo Ave
Long Beach, CA 90814.

Thank you for anything you can do to help!
Sheila.

I went to a memorial service this week for the son of an old neighbor, someone I'd lost touch with over the years. I'd been reading the local paper and his name jumped out at me from the obituaries. He was a year younger than my oldest daughter, a year older than my second daughter. In other words: in his forties and far too young to die. The obituary listed no cause of death, no wife, no descendants, just parents and siblings and far-flung family members. Something rang a bell in my head, reading that.

It was a Catholic memorial service, and as such not too unfamiliar for an Episcopalian. At the appropriate moment, the priest delivered the eulogy and I suddenly felt very cold. The priest rambled all over the place, mostly about people he'd known who'd taught him life lessons. Where was the young man who'd passed away in all this? We learned how his parents had loved him and that it was nice that so many people showed up for the memorial to support them. And that more people should volunteer to help the needy. But the young man himself – and his life that we were supposed  to be memorializing? Well, it slipped in that he'd been homeless for some  part of the last three years. And then we got to the point. Sometimes, the priest said, we wonder what we did wrong, what we did or didn't do that caused our children to go off the track. And the bells rang in my head again. I'm willing to bet the young man had been gay. Volunteering at the hospice, I've seen families who loved and supported gay sons dying of AIDS, and also those who couldn't bring themselves to accept it even at the last.

Fast forward to this Sunday. My church (St Luke's Episcopal, Long Beach) is busy planning its participation in the coming Gay Pride celebrations, manning a booth at the festival, taking part in the parade next Sunday. We have a fairly large contingent of lesbians and gays in our parish, some with small children they've adopted to make their own families. And in the midst of the announcements about the Eucharist to be celebrated on the ocean bluffs before the parade, and useful advice on how to get to and from the parade on city buses because parking will be a mess, I wondered how many carried the secret sadness of parents who couldn't accept their children for what they were, as they were  made by God.

On Mother's Day, that has to be a very sad thought.

Murphy has been very active around my place lately. I've run into one problem after another trying to get the first two-thirds of BIRDS up and running on my website. Sigh. Still trying!

Meanwhile, this is Gay Pride weekend in Long Beach, with the parade tomorrow. Members of my Episcopal church will march in the parade and so will I. I've been volunteering at a local hospice which has mostly AIDS patients, so I feel strongly about showing some support. Actually, the church whose parish I live in (just around the corner from my home) left the Episcopal Church over the issue of ordaining a gay bishop, so I've gone back to the one downtown where I used to go when the kids were little. (In fact, my youngest daughter was christened there. And ironically, my oldest granddaughter was christened in the one that left.) 

I considered taking my two greyhounds along because they'd enjoy it; they love people and regularly visit the hospice. But the prospect of having to clean up after their "accidents" -- and hoping marchers don't step in it before I'm done -- seemed like too much to handle, so they're staying home this time.  Just gotta hope my feet don't give out before the parade ends!