It takes ALL the villagers...

CAUTION: This is about death. A little bit.

Recently, our long-time friend and community stalwart, we’ll call him Bob (not his real name), was in distress. We used to see him around town, or at Friday night “church” at our local watering hole, but we hadn’t seen him for a while. We just figured he doesn’t go out much anymore.

It’s hard to know the actual chain of events, but essentially, Bob, who is our age and lives alone, had fallen and couldn’t get up, just like the old commercial. He doesn’t really know how long he was on the floor. He says he was screaming for help. He also says he had NPR at top volume on his radio. He also says he was “visited” by an elderly Black woman who sat in the corner, and that a large group of people moved in with him. Neither the old woman nor the group would talk to him, though he remembers talking to them. He says he was on the floor for 3 days, and that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for at least that long, probably longer. And he either fell once or more than once.

Finally, a neighbor in the complex heard Bob yelling, found a manager with a key, and went in. They got him up in a chair, and he called our friend L. She called us, and we all converged on Bob’s apartment. Somehow, though he’s typically a pretty stubborn guy, we talked him into going into the ER, “just to check him over.” He needed help to stand and walk. Of course they admitted him.

We never got the straight scoop from the docs, but it seems his heart enzymes (he’d had a previous heart attack and had ended up on a ventilator that time—a very narrow escape) and his kidney function were wonky, and that at some point, he’d broken his tailbone. He was down almost to my high school weight (I looked damn fine in HS, but on Bob it’s skeletal) and was completely dehydrated. He may have been living on Coke and Camels for a while before this.

While Bob was in the hospital inching back from the brink, we all went over and cleaned his apartment, enough to make it a safer place to live. Bob hadn’t had much strength for a good long while, so things had been piling up around him. He’d been too weak to get very far, even around his apartment, and he hadn’t been able stand at the stove and cook. He didn’t have a microwave. Even if he had been able to cook, he’d lost enough weight so that his teeth no longer fit. At this point, he looked like he’d been living under the Dakota Street bridge, and he was so weak, he needed help to get up from a chair. I’m sure no one in the hospital would have believed that Bob is among the most talented folks we know...book…cover….

We never dreamed the powers/angels would allow him to go back home again and live alone. But after 2 days in the hospital, they sent him home. And here’s the rub: While we were getting him settled back in his apartment, a family gathered down the hall outside another apartment. Soon the police arrived. Then the coroner. What started as a “welfare check” became an “unattended death.” I suppose this brought back my horror when some years ago, they found my friend and former paramour Dave dead on his toilet, in his house where he lived alone. He’d been there a couple days. There are other stories I could tell of family and friends who died alone, but you get the idea.

So here’s my real point: I’m not afraid to die. I know we’re all headed there from the day we’re born, and that in a philosophical sense, we’re each alone when we go. BUT, I don’t want to be an “unattended death”—to be discovered after days (or longer), discarded, alone. And it’s not that I care about the state of my body once I don’t need it anymore, and maybe I won’t care about anything else at that point; it’s just that I believe we each deserve to leave this life in some measure of love, or at least with company to say bon voyage.

For now, our “Bob Team” has come up with a daily call schedule to check on Bob. Home Health will set up visits with him starting next week, IF he’ll agree to it. Did I mention he’s stubborn?

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to live in my Little Town community, with friends who I know will check on me if I go silent for too long. I wish that the person down the hall from Bob had had someone who missed her/him sooner—there’s no blame here; we all just assume things are okay until they’re not. But it’s a powerful reminder for us all not to wait. Call. Stop by. Send someone over. Don’t be afraid to get involved. Because regardless of age, it takes a village—all of us—to raise a villager.

The Good, Hard Lessons

They say that everyone who comes into your life is there for a reason. If that’s true, there must have been a million reasons I needed to know Maureen (Reen the Bean, Reenie). I became conscious of her presence in my life around age 3 or 4, although she’d been there before that. We were next door neighbors in Omaha, Nebraska, and we would spend the next 60+ years moving in and out of each other’s lives. Through each phase of our friendship—even the times we drifted apart—Maureen and I learned together, and taught each other, crucial lessons about life, love, and enduring friendship.

My 8th birthday, kneeling, Maureen far right.

1. Communication. In one of my earliest memories of Maureen, whoever finished dinner first would go out on their front porch and give a loud a mourning dove call: oo-OO-oo! That meant you were done eating and ready to play again. Back then, in our neighborhood full of young families, you played outside except in the most brutal winter weather. Some of us went to school, we preschoolers played all day or had half-day kindergarten, then we all ate dinner with our families as fast as we could and got right back out there until the streetlights came on. I still sometimes do my mourning dove call in the back yard after dinner when no one’s around. 

2. Construction (and Vengeance). A mean woman named Lillian lived on the other side of Maureen. She yelled at us to stay out of her yard, and she wouldn’t let us play on her very nice swing set. So in an empty lot behind Lillian’s house, Maureen and I built an elaborate, multi-story, low-rent public housing complex for our Troll dolls. We used cinderblocks, bricks, rocks, dirt piles, trash, and anything we could drag over. We made matchbox & Kleenex beds, fabric scrap carpeting, and stick & Elmer’s glue furniture. Poor Lillian could only sit at her kitchen window, watching us and wringing her hands. And I won’t tell you about the time a team of resourceful small people made a secret formula of Clorox, Wishbone Italian salad dressing, and dish soap, and poured it on Lillian’s new rose bushes, meant to be a barrier between her yard and Maureen's. Hell hath no fury like spurned first-graders.

3. Sharing. Debbie Lechner lived behind us on the next street over. I remember her as the sweetest kid in the neighborhood. One time, I grabbed Debbie’s tennis shoes, ran home and put them in the milkbox on our porch (those were the days we still got daily milk deliveries from the “milkman”), and sat on the milkbox. She cried, but I was unrelenting. Her crime? She wanted to play with us, and I wanted Maureen all to myself. But Maureen patiently and kindly negotiated a truce, I gave up the shoes, and from then on, Debbie was often part of our band of renegades.

4. Fashion. When we were 12 or 13, back in the days when it was safe to do this, Maureen and I took the bus downtown to Brandeis department store. Brandeis had four stories, a soda fountain, a photo booth, escalators, and an elevator. We could have root beer floats, buy PEZ (my favorite back in those hippie days was “Flower Power” PEZ which tasted, maybe a little too much, like flowers), and ride the elevator up and down till we got kicked off. But on this occasion, we were on a mission: to buy our first bras (which neither of us needed). We had both worn white shirts—so the straps would show through, of course—and hit the photo booth for our “model” shots.

Our sophisticated, bra-wearing model shot.

Another photo booth glam shot.

5. Travel. When we were 18, Maureen and I each bought a Greyhound Bus “Ameripass.” For $99 back then, you could travel on Greyhound on any of their routes in the contiguous U.S. for two weeks, getting on and off anywhere, any time, as many times as you wanted. So we went from Omaha, to Lincoln, to Denver, to Los Angeles, to San Fransisco, and on up the coast to Vancouver BC, then back home. We often slept on the bus by night (so we wouldn’t have to pay for motels) and toured different cities by day. We stopped in Lincoln to attend the Burt Hall banquet with friends at Nebraska Wesleyan. I had my Ovation guitar along, and we sometimes sang for our supper (usually grilled cheese or pie). We went to Huntington Beach. At Disneyland, we made 8 mm movies—I still have those reels somewhere, and interestingly, they’re all shots of cute guys, not us or the park. We got a motel room once or twice so we could shower. We sat on the library steps at UC Berkeley, where a young man told us, “I dreamed you last night.” We cooked dinner in San Fran for a friend’s brother—spaghetti…always spaghetti.

Greyhound depot, a bit too early.

Dressing up for the Burt Hall Banquet.

We're all Bozos on this bus.

Denver

Meetup in Denver with Maureen's dad.

The ocean at last - Huntington Beach.

Welcome to the hotel California.

Long overdue showers.

6. Real (Almost) Adulthood. When we got back from our epic bus trip, Maureen and I rented a house together in Lincoln (except for family and husbands, Maureen is the only roommate I’ve ever had). I enrolled at Nebraska Wesleyan (with a full-ride scholarship I would forfeit for dropping out less than a year later—it was the 70s…I was distracted), and Maureen enrolled at UNL. We had a tiny, cheap, one-bedroom house at the end of a street that dead-ended at a cemetery. I had seven cats to take care of (our mama cat, which I’m sure we couldn’t afford to properly vet, had five kittens). Maureen, the cats, and I all shared the house’s only bed. We both had jobs in addition to school. We paid the bills. We bought groceries. We did laundry. We had friends over for dinner. I remember our diet consisted mainly of spaghetti with butter and salt (pre-Ramen days), Wonder Bread, and Grape Nuts. We mowed our lawn.

The Tucker Hotel

The Tucker Hotel

Our little house in Lincoln.

7. Religion. My friendship with Maureen sparked what would become my lifelong interest in (obsession with) religion and spirituality. I was the one kid in our family who went to Florence Presbyterian church with my grandma, with whom we lived off and on in the North Omaha historic “Tucker Hotel,” a 17-room house and former hotel that had been in my mom’s family since the 1800s. I sang in the choir and was confirmed. I went to Bible camp in the summer. Maureen’s family was Irish and Catholic, so she went to St. Philip Neri, half a block from the Presbyterian church. On many Sundays, I went to mass with Maureen, then she went to the Presbyterian service with me. In the Catholic church, I genuflected, blessed myself with holy water, and knew all the call & response passages. I adored the ritual. I made Maureen go to confession when she picked a flower in Forest Lawn cemetery with its “DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS” signs. I even took communion until a horrified Father Meyer discovered I wasn’t Catholic.

8. The Village. Maureen’s mother (who I remember only as a blurry sort of gorgeous “movie star” presence) died when we were quite young, leaving Maureen and her 8 siblings to be raised by her dad, a wonderful, warm, larger-than-life man who worked for Union Pacific railroad. We learned almost from birth that the Village raised children: my mom and Maureen’s older sisters all mothered us both. We had dance parties to “Spooky” on the hi-fi or Shindig on the TV in her living room, with her dad as our audience. My grandma was constantly feeding and washing neighborhood children. All the adults kept track of us.

9. Tolerance and Forgiveness. When we were 19 and living in Lincoln, I took up with a folksinger, as one often did back then, and went with him and his folk duo partner on a three-week road trip to New Mexico. While I was gone, Maureen met a young Iranian man who invited her to dinner, then convinced her to join the Unification Church (called the “Moonies” back then after their founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon), and she left for New York, where the church was headquartered. She let local church members pick through the house and take what they wanted—these were considered “donations” to the church—and she left the house untended. She eventually called my mother from the road (this was pre-cell-phone days, so she couldn’t get in touch with me). She told Mom that she had gone. My mom had to borrow a truck and go clear out what was left in the house. The cats, left in the house, had by then torn open a screen and disappeared.

I ended up marrying the folksinger and moving back to Omaha and the Tucker Hotel. We eventually had a son and a daughter. I didn’t hear from Maureen for several years, although I learned she had been one of 4,000 people married by Rev. Moon in Madison Square Garden. She married a French man she hadn’t known before the wedding. They eventually had three daughters.

I’ll admit I was pretty angry with Maureen for a good long while after she left—I had lost some things very dear to me in Maureen’s church “donations” and the untended house, like my cats (my male cat, Gandalf, was an Abyssinian and a gift from my then boyfriend, Dave), my grandmother’s antique wool carpet, china handed down to me by a great aunt, houseplants my grandmother had been growing for years and gave me when I moved into the house, including a 30-year-old crown of thorns I had named Barney.

But once the anger softened, I missed Maureen. Seeing her again and knowing she was okay became more important than my stuff. Maureen stopped by to visit when she finally came back to town for the first time since joining the church. We muddled our way through that first rocky reunion. We weren’t back on great footing, but it was a start. A few years later, she was back in Omaha visiting family again, and she drove up to South Dakota, where I was living by then with my new husband, my two little kids, and our new son. She brought her three adorable girls, toddlers then, and we had a happy, sweet visit. We were slowly finding our way through. 

Maureen and her beautiful daughters, Ivy the dog.

We met up a few times after that, whenever she was back in Omaha. I’d drive down from SoDak, and we’d meet up for coffee or lunch, or we’d visit each other’s families. By our last visit in 2022, seeing her was joyful, natural, and light again, with lots of laughs, hugs, goofing around, and wonderful conversations about spirituality, our shared history, and family.

Maureen and her sister Margaret.

10. Life & Death. In another of my earliest memories, we were maybe five or six, I was playing by myself in our basement, twirling around a support pole. I remember the feel of the pole in my hands. My dad came downstairs and told me that Maureen had been riding her bike down King St. (our two houses were at the very top of steep King St. hill) and had been hit by a car. She’d gone to the hospital in an ambulance to get checked out, but she was okay. I can still remember bursting into tears, yelling, “Maureen’s dead!” To me, “hit by a car” meant killed, and my dad must have been lying about her being okay. I didn’t calm down until Maureen came back home, and Mom took me next door to see for myself.

When Maureen and I were living together in Lincoln, we had a tiny aquarium. We were young and still just learning to be responsible, so it may not surprise you to learn that one day, we noticed our fish were floating. Neither of us had the stomach to fish them out (pun intended) and flush them, so we invited friends over for dinner (spaghetti) and sweet-talked them into disposing of the fish. We were learning about our own strengths and weaknesses—we gave away the fish tank. 

Most recently, Maureen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to her lungs. She was still living in NY, and every fiber of my being wanted to hop on a plane and go. But Maureen didn’t want visitors beyond her daughters. She was determined to fight, and she didn’t want distractions, sadness, or pessimistic energy around while she was doing that, which I completely understand. In the end, her departure was too swift and everyone too stunned for me to get there in time. So like too many other times in the recent past, I’ve had to test my beliefs about life & death—Maureen is helping me learn even now.

There are people in our lives we may not see often enough, but on whom our equilibrium somehow depends. We just need to know they’re out there somewhere we can get to if need be. Maureen is one of those people in my life, and I’m trying hard to be at peace with her being out of my reach now. In the meantime, I’m so grateful for every single memory—our joyful last visit and the lifetime of happy, crazy, challenging, angry, stubborn, silly, informing and forming moments that came before that. I am who I am in part because Maureen, my fellow student in this incarnation, my patient teacher, my dear friend, is in my life still and always. Oo-OO-oo, Maureen...

Dear Jack Blizzard - is that all you've got?!?

You can’t live in South Dakota and not talk about the weather, especially this time of year. Jack Blizzard stomped across the state in the first week of the year, dumping about 15” of snow on us. Happy fecking New Year! 

We got that just about cleaned up when Jack threw another hissy fit, and this one was a real doozey. Another foot of snow at least, real temps that got down into the -20s, and wind chills that got as low as -48 here (colder in other parts of the state). There are little mountains of snow all around town and down the middles of streets – nowhere to put it all. It’s a balmy -3 right now, heading for a high of 13, which will feel like summer. We’re finally going to venture out for groceries today, wrapped up for our polar expedition in multiple layers of wool, fur, wicking nylon, Thinsulate, and more wool.

I’ve heard a number of people wonder aloud lately (including us), why do we live here? The honest answer is “because we’ve always lived here, and humans don’t really like change.” But another answer, for me, has to do with something I learned early on about poetry: Good poems play with contrast. Think about it. My favorite poems show me the contrast between dark/light, life/death, day/night, out there/in here. Similarly, one of the things I love best about winters here is that when spring comes (or even on bright sunny days like today, with temps above 0), the contrast is absolutely stunning.

Spring isn’t just the next season here, like I imagine it is in warm southern states. It’s a goll dern miracle. The sense of relief SoDakians feel on a suddenly-warm winter day or with the first signs of spring beats any mood-altering drug on the market. We’re positively giddy. We peel off layers and go right outside. We invent chores to stay out as long as we can stand it. We scrape gunk off birdfeeders. We stack empty flower pots in order of circumference. We make a new garage hanger for our 17 pairs of garden gloves. Did I go outside this morning and brush a foot of snow off my clamshell lawn chairs? Why, yes. Yes I did.

And I know I’ve said it before, but SoDakians, like the stalwart prairie stock from which many of us spring, are uniquely prepared to deal with Jack’s little tantrums. Here at the row, we’re dipping into our larder for those wonderful jars of canned summer – stewed tomatoes. Tomato soup, chili, spaghetti. We could probably live a month on tomatoes alone. There’s always a couple whole chickens and roasts in the freezer, along with bags of frozen veg, and plenty of noodles, beans, and grains in the pantry, so we could live another month on soups. We have wine, a good supply of coffee beans in the freezer (I order coffee in 5-pound bags), and we refilled all our old-people prescriptions before Jack rolled into town.

Winterfolk learn early to self-entertain, which retirement makes infinitely easier: I have a new poetry book, Hysterian, coming out this year, and I’m already well into the next. Then there are jigsaw puzzles, guitars & ukuleles, crossword puzzles, TV documentaries (I now know more about cephalopods, fungi communication, and the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate than any human should), knitting, journals, and books books books. I unpacked my new set of Fluent Pet language buttons yesterday, because I’m pretty sure Pretzel has something to say about winter, too. (Check out What About Bunny for a dog who’s mastered the buttons.)

So bring it, Jack. You don’t scare us. In the time it’s taken me to write this post, the temp has already gone up to +2, and the wind chill’s only -16. I’m pretty sure the students at Little Town University are wearing shorts. And if we get a few groceries today, we’ll be good till mid-April.

FOOTNOTE: Here’s a link to the poem that gave Jack his name, at least for me. It’s from Australian poet S.K. Kelen, who spent some time here as a visiting professor, so he knows whereof he speaks:"Jack Blizzard"