Week in Seven Words #508

This covers the week of 10/13/19 - 10/19/19.

fittingly
Her cooked vegetables are in autumn colors: moist purples, tender shades of orange and gold.

luminosity
The windows of the plane are tinted, so that the clouds look like they're dipped in blue. Soon, the plane tilts and soars over the water, which is all dark except for silken spills of light, like shifting dunes, where the clouds have cracked open to admit the sun.

memories
I show her a song sheet she gave me years ago. She sings quietly with tears in her eyes and says, "I came from a warm household. Poor, but warm."

parakeets
There are wild parakeets in the park. They look like bright, chattering leaves that have peeled away from their home trees and now go where they wish.

practicing
They arrive in homage to a religion they lightly practice. They feel that some traditions are worth preserving, at least for their kids.

revealing
Just because I use the expression "relatively small," she guesses that I have a research background.

weight
Two men – pot-bellied, slow, gentle, sure, with ruddy, cube-shaped heads – discuss weight loss. "You know," one says to the other, "losing 50 pounds is like strapping a sack of potatoes to you and walking around with it all day. It takes effort."

The Optimist's Daughter: Examining Love and Loss

She wept for what happened to life.

Laurel, the main character of The Optimist's Daughter, is a widow and now an orphan after her father passes away, years after her mother's death. She moved away from Louisiana a while ago, but returns for the duration of the book - first for her father's medical problems, then for his death and for a short time after the funeral.

Her parents' home is full of things she hasn't known about or hasn't thought about in a long while. It's also tainted by the presence of her father's second wife, Fay, a crass, insensitive woman who at one point gets compared to the weather, an uncomprehending force of nature that sweeps through people's lives.

For Fay was without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person. Other people, inside their lives, might as well be invisible to her. To find them, she could only strike out those little fists at random, or spit from her little mouth. She could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him.

The novel reckons with the costs of love. With love comes profound loss; how does one cope? Is the solution to live like Fay, who performs grief but doesn't feel much of anything in a deep way? Because she feels less, her survival in this world seems more assured; in this sense, she's more hardy than Laurel. But she's brittle in other ways. Laurel does survive, in her own way, relinquishing possessions and bearing memories forward.

The memory can be hurt, time and again - but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it's vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.

One of the things I appreciated about this novel was the sensitive way it made the dead come alive in memory. They aren't fixed and silent images. Laurel, for instance, considers those who have died and wonders about them, why they acted as they did, and what they'd say or do now. Of course, it's not the same as them being alive, but they're a part of her world still. I think a part of her courage - to keep living, free, afraid, full of light - comes from thinking about her relationships with them and their relationships with each other.

Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.

While Fay lives in the realm of objects, just plain hard materials, Laurel has greater depth and so has more to lose. And yet, she's strong at the end, cut loose from her father's home and going off on a tide of spirit and possibility.

(I read The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty for the Classics Club Challenge.)

Week in Seven Words #371

bursts
Several adults are squashed together at a picnic table. They shout, sing, and jump up to make backstroke swimming motions. One of them pretends to ride a horse. They're playing Time's Up, round after round.

delicacy
The stationery store reminds me of a candy box. I buy a couple of gifts for someone and linger over the glossy, gold, silver, pink papery confections.

disjointed
Walking a couple of miles at night. The streets look like they were sloppily glued together. The sidewalks have ruptured. The buildings leak. On one street, the strongest light is from a supermarket window papered over with ads for detergent and ham.

entertainment
In one room, the kids make silly videos with their phones. In the other, the adults seethe at the cable company over service disruptions.

overlooking
I can remember details from conversations that took place months or years ago, but I'll step into a home I visit regularly and not notice new furniture arrangements or a large new shoe rack by the door where I'm just now placing my shoes.

screen
The high school students walking alone are stone-faced and wear earbuds. Some hold their phones a couple of inches from their eyes.

sprung
I stare at the screen for minutes without knowing how to finish the paragraph, but as soon as I get up to run errands, everything - the paragraph, the whole article - comes to me.

Week in Seven Words #273

auroral
Gray and pink light in the early morning. The trees stirring, birds in song.

brown
Shades of cedar in the desert, umber and hickory. Cliffs the color of roasted sesame seeds.

festive
The dark pink flowers form an arc from the wall to the cars parked on the curb.

fruitless
He tries to tell a story, but his sentences wind up chasing words he can't remember.

hypersaline
People turning pink in the sun, their bodies stung with salt water. A burning cut on my leg. Cacti springing out of the salty dirt like coils of hair.

keenly
The song reminds her of her parents. She gives me the words to tuck into the back of my book and take with me home.

olid
A woman rolls down her stockings and washes her feet in a reeking rest stop.

A remembrance

My paternal grandmother, Safta Dvora, passed away yesterday. The last time we'd spoken to each other was a little over a week earlier, a brief conversation as she was in a very bad state of health. She had wished me well in her customary way; she ended pretty much every conversation with well wishes and hopes for good health, happiness, and good luck. She was blunt and opinionated - also a tough lady, a Holocaust survivor. She'd enjoyed talking about her family, sharing book recommendations, discussing T.V. shows and movies she'd watched and concerts and lectures she'd attended; she also liked a good game of cards and had an eye for artistic jewelry. From what she'd told me, she felt that she hadn't left something undone and that she'd led a full life.

Week in Seven Words #184 and #185

#184
ambition
He struggles with reading and math but maybe he'll get the life he wants anyway, his photo in Sports Illustrated and a mansion with many sports cars.

embalmed
Old cakes topped with sugared roses wilt in the dull white light.

faultfinding
It doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to get done. It doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to get done.

nasal
A drippy optician, sniffling while squinting at a computer that doesn't work.

resurrection
She pulls back the moth-eaten curtains and discovers a world that's forgotten she exists.

promotion
They've recruited an unfunny comedian to hand out flyers for their comedy club. People will be sure to come.

whitecaps
Light breaks in waves against my brain.

Worth Watching: The Trip to Bountiful (1985)

Title: The Trip to Bountiful
Director: Peter Masterson
Language: English
Rating: PG

The Trip to Bountiful has one of the most beautiful opening scenes I've ever watched: a mother and her young son running through a field of bluebonnets. They're full of life. They look as if they could run forever.

Flash forward a few decades, to the 1940s. The mother, Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page), is now an old woman. She lives with her son, Ludie (John Heard), and his wife, Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn), in a small Houston apartment. Ludie isn't the carefree boy he once was; he's recovering from an illness and trying to get a promotion at work. He and his wife haven't been able to have children. Jessie Mae is a self-centered, petty woman, who needles her mother-in-law at any opportunity she gets. I also sensed resentment in her, that she has to live with her mother-in-law in close quarters, and that Carrie makes her feel inadequate as a homemaker and wife. The two just get on each other's nerves, and Ludie is, for the most part, tired and withdrawn.

Living in that little apartment is driving Carrie insane; she's reduced to being a child, squabbling with her daughter-in-law. She's cut off from the only kind of life that ever gave her meaning. Realizing that she's in poor health, she's overtaken with the desire to see her old home again in Bountiful, Texas, out in the country. She won't let her son and daughter-in-law stop her.

Worth Watching: Still Walking (2008)

Title: Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo)
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Language: Japanese
Rating: Not rated

From Wikipedia, Fair use

An elderly wife and husband host their children and grandchildren for the day; the reason behind the family gathering isn't obvious at first, and at least one of the children, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), wishes he didn't have to come at all, to be reminded that his parents consider him a big disappointment because of his career choice and because he married a widowed mother, Yukari (Yui Natsukawa).

But the movie isn't a stormy drama. The members of the Yokoyama family are polite, for the most part; they try not to be confrontational. They mill around the house, cooking together, talking about this and that, teasing each other into laughter and wounding each other with oblique remarks. There are beautiful close-ups of food simmering in pans, of the hands of young children reaching for pink blossoms in sunlit air. But the movie is never self-conscious about its beauty, just as it isn't self-conscious about the quiet moments of pettiness and cruelty that maintain the tension in the film, even if there's nothing earth-shaking going on on the surface.

The director likes to arrive at things sidelong. One of my favorite techniques that he uses is to have a character stand alone listening to other characters talk in a different room. There's a strange feeling of both connection and isolation, of listening in on people who are closer to you than anyone else but in some ways are still strangers.

An eerie moment in the film is when you hear the talk and laughter of the family posing for a photo off-screen, while on screen the camera lingers on a room where the photo of a deceased family member, Junpei, is displayed. Junpei has been dead for a dozen years, but now it feels like he's alive and listening. Memories of the dead are evoked to hold people together or to drive a wedge between them.

Week in Seven Words #116

bereavement
It was a shock to hear that my maternal grandpa, Saba Yossef (Grandpa Joseph), passed away. In the past few years his condition had been slowly deteriorating, and he spent the last five months of his life in a hospital, fighting one infection after another (he contracted these infections courtesy of the hospital itself, where powerful bacteria are rampant and patient care is uneven, to say the least). But still, he was a fighter. This is a guy who evaded the Nazis when he was 12. He was a war veteran. He fought off colon cancer a decade ago. We kept expecting him to live somehow.

concoct
He liked to make simple, fresh dishes with few ingredients. Salads and side dishes. Though he wasn't a consummate chef like his wife, he was good at putting together quick meals, and his niche in the kitchen was usually one corner of the countertop where he'd stand chopping and sprinkling things and making use of whatever he'd found in the back of the fridge or the cupboard.

eloquence
He also had a way with words, composing blessings, articles, essays, and poems. He spoke well, loved good conversation and swapping jokes. He was even eloquent in his sleep. He could nod off a little in front of the nightly news and start arguing with the newscaster (and he'd stir awake if you tried to change the channel). Though he had strong opinions he wasn't a preachy or rigid person; he liked to be on good terms with people and help them out. Discussions held in a relaxed atmosphere and helped along by good food and drink were much more his style than shouting matches.

expected
Another memory of him is from a trip I took to Italy when I was sixteen with various family members including him. At one point we were in Siena during The Palio, the famous horse race that turns the city into a madhouse, and we'd split up into smaller groups for the afternoon. A few hours later, when we'd regrouped, we realized he hadn't joined us. No one knew where he was. Everyone else in my family immediately became worried or outright frantic - what if he'd gotten lost or attacked or had sat down and dozed off somewhere? - and off they went searching for him. I stayed behind to keep watch at the spot where we'd all agreed to meet, in case he came along. And I remember standing there calmly, not worried at all, thinking to myself that at any moment he was going to come down that street, smiling and relaxed, and wonder what all the fuss was about. And that's exactly what happened. He suddenly appeared, strolling along the street, his smile a trifle sheepish and apologetic, and immediately set about deflecting criticism, soothing worries, and trying to coax people into laughing. I'm not sure what happened - it's very likely he had sat down for a spell and dozed off - but it didn't matter. No worries.

golden
The last time I saw him functioning well and full of life was in spring 2006, when he visited the US with my grandma. One highlight of the visit was taking a walk with him in Central Park. Before leaving for the walk I was asked to look after him, to make sure he didn't fall (he'd fallen a few times before, from what we came to realize were most likely mini-strokes that had made him 'blank' for a moment). He chuckled at the suggestion that anyone needed to look after him; he was good-humored, independent, and wasn't prone to worrying. We had a very good walk that day. We went at a brisk pace up and down twisty paths in the Ramble, and by the lake too. We talked about many things, from world affairs to guys to places we wanted to see. It was just the two of us for those few hours.

musicality
His laughter was gleeful. He also had a beautiful voice and liked to sing and hum at every good opportunity - at the dinner table or during a game of rummy or as he walked. For the past few years, living in the aftermath of a series of strokes, he could barely talk; his voice, when he could talk, was hoarse and flat. He didn't laugh either. But to the end he loved music, was moved deeply by it.

open-eyed
He found something of interest everywhere he went. To him there weren't boring places. When he visited us in the suburbs for instance he'd go exploring by bus or train or foot and visit places we'd dismissed as uninteresting. When I was a kid I used to think of it as one of his endearing quirks, but in recent years I've come to respect this approach, this attitude of always seeing the world through fresh eyes and not letting yourself become jaded. I liked going places with him, whether it was to listen to a concert or hop on a paddle-boat or just walk through a park, in part because he was very much interested in the world. He was alive to it.

Week in Seven Words #103

bibliophilic
The takeout sushi and blaring battery-powered car have distracted him for long enough. He crawls to the bookcase in the corner of the room and uses a shelf to pull himself up and stand before it. We think it's wonderful that he's interested in books at his tender preliterate age, and when he starts to scratch the spines of the books, up and down, it looks like he's trying to break through them to get to the good stuff inside. One of his older siblings tells us that he likes scratching them because of the funny sounds they make, a raspy choir of book spines; we shouldn't start calling him a scholar yet. But maybe that's how a kid starts loving books, because of the weird sounds and sensations, the look and feel of them.

concealing
Snow coming down like curtains around the world.

inspired
He tells me what he needs for inspiration. It isn't the recreation room with its tables full of old folks bent over pieces of paper. It isn't the ballet playing on the large T.V. in the corner, though he watches it from time to time with a far-off look in his eye, Romeo locked in dance with Juliet to the music of Prokofiev. What he needs is a room with a piano and sunlight and peaceful solitude.

phlebotomy
I stare out the window and pretend that the lab technician is not currently rooting around in the crook of my elbow trying to coax blood out of my vein.

propel
Blow up a balloon and pinch the end shut between your fingers. Then tape it to a straw. Slip the straw onto a wire or long piece of string, and tie the wire/string between two chairs or the walls of a room. Release the balloon. As the air flows out, the balloon-straw contraption rockets forward. Most of the time. Sometimes the balloon makes a horrible whining noise and deflates in agony without moving.

reconstructive
On Martin Luther King Day there's a sing-a-long at the nursing home. The pianist and singer, who isn't much younger than the residents, grew up in the segregated South. The audience, mostly wheelchair-bound and living in different states of lucidity and coherence, were a part of that era too; it's likely that there are civil rights protesters and activists among them, and people who went to hear King speak. Some of them remember, and for others this is a pleasant interlude of songs unconnected to anything past or future. But often they know the words; the words and melodies and sentiments of old beloved songs stay with them even when other things crumble.

subterrane
People expect cutesyness from young kids. They want to imagine that a first or second grader for instance doesn't have any serious fears or frighteningly complicated thoughts. Probably because as adults we often can't handle those kinds of thoughts well ourselves, and we hope that children won't demand more of us than the regular pat reassurances.

Week in Seven Words #56

bidirectional
There is a link between the ability to remember the past and the ability to imagine the future. People who struggle to recall their past with any clarity or detail also tend to have difficulty envisioning fleshed out future scenarios.

coating
Fresh snow in a garbage can conceals all waste.

perfunctory
His eyes dart to the clock or stare past my shoulder at the wall; you're done existing for me now, they seem to say.

reassertion
Raw knuckles and the dust of snow on rooftops. It's cold again.

silliness
At dinner after a long day the conversation is full of welcome nonsense.

spotless
Seven years ago, at age 53, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He's physically fit, still jogs on familiar paths around his home, his cheeks flushed and his complexion healthy. You need to keep moving, he says, or else you die. There are many things he can't do anymore without guidance and supervision, like making a cup of tea or even setting the table for dinner, but his wife keeps pushing him to do as much as he can for himself - she says she's not going to let him go so quickly. He pauses at the dining room wall, thinks a photo of his son is himself at that age. His wife corrects him. Outside, resting after his run, he says you have to keep going and not think about the future. He can't think about the past either. Lost and optimistic, he jogs on clean beautiful paths in the countryside.

synaptic
I prepare several topics to cover and questions to ask, but there's only so much you can plan when teaching. When it goes well, when you and the students are alive to each other and interested in the discussion, fresh connections form between facts that seemed unrelated, new ideas emerge to be refined or torn down, and everyone sings a little with a spark of inspiration.

Week in Seven Words #55

anterograde
He was a man with anterograde amnesia - he could encode no new episodic memories. He had some past memories to anchor him a little, give him a sense of identity. Otherwise he was adrift. He inhabited narrow parcels of time, probably no more than half a minute long (and often less), whatever his short term memory could hold. He did not remember people he had just met, or what he had just been saying or doing, or what others said and did to him. Every morning when he woke up he felt as if he was awakening after a long sleep, years-long. He would lean over to a diary at his bedside and write that he was finally awake. Then he would discover a previous entry documenting the same thing (that he had finally woken up!) and with a feeling of uneasy dismissal he would cross out that previous entry, thinking it impossible that he could have written such a thing. Most of his life felt like that - the recent seconds slipping, and then a sensation of waking up fresh to the world, not remembering why he was sitting on the couch (his couch?) or why there was a dinner plate in front of him.

floe
Less than two weeks ago the field was caked from end to end in snow and ice, brilliant in the sunshine, with a couple of benches bobbing around like rowboats on an arctic sea. This week the snow has crept away, uncovering dry brown grass. Boys and girls in sweatshirts, tee-shirts, and shorts rush out to play frisbee. Nearby some guys play volleyball barefoot on a sandy court; their big golden dog dashes around their bare legs.

halting
The words come with difficulty, over the phone or face-to-face, but once I find them and say them some relief comes to me; things haven't turned out badly or as awkwardly as I feared. I can even laugh.

observer
Several times this week I watch myself from a somewhat detached vantage point within my mind, like a master observing the workings of an automaton that she ostensibly controls. There I am speaking to one group of people, then to another, and there I am walking, one foot before the other, and listening patiently, and being in turn observed by others. And in response to a lot of what I see I think, "why"?

penmanship
Bad hand-writing makes for a sort of malleable identity. What's meant to be a 'G' looks like an 'S'; a lowercase i is more like a lowercase o. One person no longer exists on the roster, and several have wriggled out of order, out to explore new alphabetical territory.

venture
Diagrams on a board; illustrations dotted out on yellow notepad paper. We map out another attempt at overcoming a difficult problem.

zephyr
For the first time in months I sit outside on a bench and read. I don't get much reading done; the breeze tempts me to distraction.

Week in Seven Words #21

accented
Out in the hall a French woman and a Russian woman speak in English, their voices bright and cordial. Soon after, a Greek woman speaks boisterously on the phone, sometimes in English and other times in her native tongue. In a different time and place, two men from Ireland harmonize together on a stage and banter between songs.

limpid
On a day when heat chokes the air and cars snarl along the road, I listen to limpid music; it spills and flows over all the other sounds - horns, brakes, birds, the stutter of machinery, conversation, the creak of trees in the wind.

loop
We could easily have taken the bus, but why not walk? Without walking we wouldn't have as much time to talk, or see the river at thirty minutes to midnight, or come across that sculpture with the words carved into it from several different languages, French and Greek included.

pluvial
There's a primordial fury to the rain; it mashes up the ground, crackles on the windows, and clots the air.

sundered
In the wake of the storm, trees stretch out leafy and shattered on walkways, cars, and roof corners. Branches lie in all angles on the sidewalks and sometimes dangle in the embrace of other branches that have remained aloft and intact.

tunefulness
Music in a long dark room lit with candles in glass, the illustrations on the walls crowding around to listen in shades of red, white and black. With voices that fit well together the musicians sing about old love, new love, a laughing universe, what it would be like to be a work of art, and how they're traveling around in search of feet; at one point they invite a friend to jam with them on the guitar, and she's in a trance, so happy to be up there playing and part of the music.

wresting
It's a song he once knew by heart; now he wrestles different passages out of the piano. Whenever he comes to a lacuna in his memory, he sits with fingers splayed across his forehead and stares with a puzzled frustration at the keys.

Undone - a short film

A wrenching, disturbing, and beautiful film.

From the film-maker:

A stop-motion animation using textured and tactile materials, as well as personal imagery, that represents the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Inspired by my grandfather.

Undone from Hayley Morris on Vimeo.

One reading of "Travel Directions"

Earlier this week I came across a good poem. Travel Directions by Joan Siegel doesn't focus on the traveler's destination, which remains unspecified.

There ought to be a word
for the way you know how to get some place
but don't remember the names of streets

The poem speaks of a number of things. For one, the very real phenomenon of knowing how to get around a place or from one place to another without necessarily knowing street names, exact distances, or any other details you could readily use to direct other people. It's just a route you've taken so often it's embedded in your cognition, your senses and muscles. You don't have to think about it, and if you do, the details that emerge will probably be meaningful only to you.

That's another thing about this poem - how ultimately personal life and its travels are. We can share our perceptions with others, but at a fundamental level we experience the world alone; no two people will perceive, experience, think about something the same way. We can always do our best to share though, invite people into our minds (as far as they can go).

Another beautiful excerpt:

then the road turns sharply uphill past a red barn
where a black dog jumps out to race you for a quarter mile
and finally recedes in the mirror like a disappointment

The dog offers enthusiasm, joy, and simple companionship; these are kept at the roadside, never embraced, as the journey unfolds.

the road winds vaguely past
houses people road signs
while time hums in your ear and you remember
the dream you left behind that morning

There's a shift from the outward senses and the external world (which, even if experienced differently, can still be acknowledged and experienced together) to the writer's inner world, to a dream that only the writer knows about and no one else can guess at. The traveler's at a place where really no one can follow her.

Now I'm going to go off on a neurology-related tangent:

The poem reminds me of an article I read a few months back on episodic vs. semantic memory. Episodic memory is the term used to describe our memory for autobiographical events, our personal narrative; semantic memory is for general knowledge (knowing the state capitals, or what a watch is used for, or the multiplication tables). The two kinds of memories can certainly overlap and be enmeshed, but there are also distinctions between them; these distinctions can be seen, for example, in people with certain kinds of neurological damage that predominantly affect one type of memory but not the other.

In one neurological study, a person with episodic memory amnesia was asked to describe his old neighborhood. He could remember major landmarks and broad, general spatial relations between different places. But it was all a brittle, bare sort of mental map, very sparse. Minor landmarks and details were absent. Associations, memories, the whole personal feel was gone; I don't think he would have had the experience of the person in Travel Directions, being able to describe a journey based on such personal recollections/associations rather than the most abstract generalities.

(Though I'm not sure how he well he would navigate those places on foot, and I forget if they gave him such a test. Episodic memory can also be distinct from motor memory; for instance, a person with episodic memory amnesia would not necessarily lose his ability to play the piano, so maybe he could walk around his old neighborhood in habitual accustomed routes.)