Aging

Not Enough

Not Enough
A Jackpine Sonnet

Is it enough to treat people
as if they were equals,
when some need much more
attention than others?

Think colds, flu, bronchitis,
pneumonia, covid. Equal
treatment no longer works.

We need to see each person
as an individual needing
exclusive care, a unique style.

We must let them know
that they are not lost and alone,
that they will be approached
individually, each and every one.

Treated equally, yes, but each
in his or her particular case
and cultural situation.

A dream? Perhaps.
But the alternative
is a nightmare.

Comment:

An interesting chat over the dinner table – de sobremesa – led us to the meaning of equality and treating people equally. The kernel of the discussion – I said I believed in treating all people equally, Moo’s guest for the evening, his Plus One, said that treating people equally was no longer right. It was necessary to treat each person as an individual, with different needs, and we must therefore go beyond equal treatment to individual treatment. A word to the wise from the wiser.

Treat other people as you would have them treat you. The phrase goes back a long, long way to Socrates, Seneca, and maybe beyond. It ties in with the ideals of Buddhism and also of early Chinese philosophers.

It centers on the meaning of ‘equally’ and is a wonderful topic for discourse analysis. If by ‘equally’ we mean one size fits all, then we merely drop the grid down upon the targeted individual and tick the boxes where the pieces fit. However, if we agree that such ‘equal treatment’ is in fact potentially discriminatory, then we must break ‘equally’ down and give it the extended meaning of ‘with equal care and attention‘ according to their individual needs and cultural, social, medical, educational, or religious beliefs.

So, here am I, sitting over the dinner table, musing with my family and friends on the meaning of meaning and learning that old ideas can be renewed and that yes, even an old dog like me, eighty plus years old and still counting, can learn a new trick or two [or several], from those who are brought up in a different, younger, more diverse world, and whom are consequently more habituated to this world than I am. It’s a good lesson – and I hope, well-learned.

“And that,” said Moo, “is why I painted Who’s Who Zoo. Look carefully before you label who is who and where they stand in the Who’s Who Zoo.”

Anywhere

Anywhere
Jackpine Sonnet

I knew you the first day
I saw you. I knew your heart
before you could open it up
and let me in. I knew your soul
before you allowed me
to touch its beauty’s depth.

Did I know you from another
life? I just don’t know. I only
know that I knew who you were
and what you meant to me.

Once I saw you, how could I let
you go? I reached across the bridge
that spans the ages and saw you
as you always were, clad in white,
shining like the Milky Way
across a universe of falling stars
and you the only one I wanted
to catch, put in my pocket,
 and keep safe in my heart.

Comment:

“Know thy self!” So easy to say, but not so easy to do. Sometimes it is easier to know others, to see them clearly, than it is to know ourselves. As Robbie Burns once wrote – “Oh would some power the giftie gie us / to see ourselves as others see us.” The mirror of the self, alas, is a fairground mirror, snatched from the hall of mirrors, and it is a distorting mirror that turns us into different shapes and sizes.

And what about the ways in which people change? Miguel de Cervantes wrote that “the most difficult role in the play is that of the fool, for he who would play the fool must never be one.” How many of us wear a mask, play the fool, and it is only the joker’s bells that are heard, the fool’s mask that is seen?

And we can change in so many ways. Heraclitus – “we can never walk in the same river twice.” Why not? Because we change and the waters of the river change and everything is in fluctuation and nothing stays the same, not even for one day. Nostra vita brevis est … and it is subject to change.

How do we change? Let me count the ways – but, like petals on a daisy or seeds on a dandelion, the changes are almost impossible to count. Guillaume Apollinaire also wrote about change. “Je ne suis plus là moi-mème, je suis le quinze de l’onzième.” / “I am no more myself. I have become the fifth of the twelfth.” How often do people say – “I am a human being. I am not just a number.” Yet numbers are what we turn into. Statistics. Figures in columns. Dates in note books. Telephone numbers. Number plates on cars.

Oh the joys of time. Today’s heroes so soon turn into tomorrow’s forgotten people. Seeds on a dandelion, petals on a daisy, ants beneath the traveler’s feet … change is everywhere. And one day, even you, might look in that mirror and no longer recognize yourself. So – know yourself – yes – but always prepare for change.

Black Dog

Black Dog

The black dog leaps out
of the grandmother clock
and lands on my back.

His paws grip my shoulders,
then rake down my spine.

I try to shake him off,
but he growls, bares his teeth,
and won’t let go.

I love that clock,
its Westminster chimes,
the Roman numerals
standing guard
over the pointed arrows
of the hands as they march
round and round.

But I hate the hound
that makes its kennel
in the clock, leaps out,
snaps at me, bites and claws,
and grinds me
down into the ground.

Comment:

The Black Dog was Winston Churchill’s name for the depression that came over him, and overcame him, from time to time. It used to attack me when I was a young boy living in Swansea. My grandfather would point at the clock and say “He’s in there. He’s coming for you. I can see him. It’s the black dog.” Well, that used to drive me crazy and whatever it was that set me off became twice as bad when the black dog arrived. Alas, now I am entering into my dotage and my second childhood, the black dog has re-appeared to trouble my waking hours. I guess it’s the mood swings. Happy one moment, miserable the next. The good dog appears. The black dog drives it away. Then the good dog reappears and all is well again.

Moo understands me and my patterns very well. In fact he painted two paintings for me – Twin – the one above and Niwt – the one below. You can see evidence of the good dog and the black dog in each of them. But which is which?

I’ll leave you to guess which is the good dog and which the bad one. Really and truly, they are two sides of the same coin – heads and tails so to speak. Moo tells me you can think of the paintings as a mirror image, one of the other.

It’s like mood swings – either my mind or my body flips the coin and one of the two dogs jumps out visit me. Luckily, after a bit, the good one chases the bad one away, so it’s all swings and roundabouts and all the fun of the fair. Until I fall off the Ferris Wheel or see my own shadow while riding on the Ghost Train.

Twin, of course, is Niwt backwards. Or is it the other way round. Dylan Thomas, my favorite Welsh poet, set the standard for word reversal. After all, the town of Llareggub is bugger all backwards. What fun we can have when we twist our words, double up on our language, reverse words and their meanings, and generally weave the tangled webs of linguistic double-talk. Oh the mystery of missed and mixed up meanings. But are meanings meaningful or meaningless? Now that is the question. And when you have answered it for meanings, start thinking about double-meanings and their twins – or should that be quadruplets?

Green Banks

Green Banks

An empty shell I am
the sea sound swishing
when you hold me to your ear

Pwll Ddu and pebbles
Swansea Sands
their fishnets glistening
with golden day stars

Brandy Cove
ever-changing after
winter’s storm surge

Fisherman’s Point
early evening
when dog-fish bark

Pyle Corner
cows in the lane
quick to kick
high the five barred gate
we climb
to avoid them

Rats
in the rubbish dump
grey bodies
scuttling claws

Green Banks at last
home of our summer
sky cloud castle dreams

Comment:

Have you ever held an empty sea-shell to your ear and heard the sea’s soft sighting sound? I used to collect them from the sands, hold them to my ear, and listen. The best shells left you with the sigh and sound of sea and waves moving with a magic that sounds eternally. These I would take home and listen to them in winter, or at boarding school, when I needed such beauty to keep me alive and sound in heart and mind.

Sure I was a dreamer. But oh what dreams and how they have followed me step by step, town by town, country by country. And now they gather here, in Island View, and let me know that within my mind the dream world of memory is immense but I can still capture it and hold it to my heart.

Funny how things come back to me.

1. Taste – and I there at Eynon’s in the Uplands, where I first tasted crempogau, Welsh pancakes. They changed into the Crêpes Suzettes I tried in Cassis-les-Calanques, all soaked in Grand Marnier.

2. Touch – damp wood beneath the hand takes me to boarding school where the walls sweated and the bannisters gleamed in foggy weather. There, in the Vale of Severn, damp mornings were the warm. I also remember the touch of hot air, breathed into my shirt, to keep me warm.

3. Smell – the scent of things burning, burnt porridge particularly, drifting down the drive, and driving through the tree mist and into my nostrils.

4. Sound – so many songs take me back to the places where I used to sing them. Sometimes they attached themselves to a family member, though I didn’t understand how or why those associations were made, not until much, much later.

5. Sight – put them all together and you can see those memories surging out of the mists in all five forms.

Have you tasted sea mist on your tongue? Have you touched the dampness of your jersey when you cycle down Painswick Hill in the mist? Have you caught the smell of wet wool, mist moistened, and clinging close? Have you heard the rustle in autumn when the November mists wrap themselves around ghostly trees and the dry leaves rattle like bones? Have you seen long dead mist warriors rise up from the ground at Badbury Rings or atop Maiden Castle, or on Cley Hill, or Westbury White Horse?

Time and tide wait for neither man nor woman. And memory’s mists do not wait either. they rush in, like angels, and foolish is the the man who refuses to meet them, eye to eye, tongue to tongue, nose to nose, finger to finger, ear to ear – in all their mystical mist-filled glory.

Decision Time

Decision Time

When down means up
and up has nowhere to go
save for the desert sand
barren and bare shifting
through helpless fingers
or the hour glass waste
with two trunkless stones
propping up the sundial’s
wrinkled face and time’s sneer
of command its wilderness
voice always a choice
between thinking and feeling
for yourself or believing
frozen words dropped
from winter’s snowflakes
to melt in the toothless mouth
of a new day another decision
the future laid out ahead
and you with no map
no GPS nothing to get you
to the last place you want to go

Comment:

Some strange touches of surrealism in this little poem that weaves its way through an intertextual maze recognizable, I hope, to many of those who read this blog and follow these comments on a regular basis. Travelers from far-off lands tinkle their echoes through the lines.

How many of you have read the South Wales Echo or listened to the paperboy, almost always an old man, chant his late afternoon song outside Cardiff Market or Down by what used to be Howell’s, not so long ago, when my world was so much younger and I too lived in a far-off land before I became a traveler. What sort of traveler, you ask. Why, a traveler in time and space, of course. Listen. Can you hear him? “Echo. South Wales Echo.” As regular as clockwork.

But in Swansea, everything was different. There it was the South Wales Evening Post, chanted by a paper boy turned old man who sang out – “Po-ost, Po-ost, Evening Po-ost, South Wales Evening Po-ost!” That double or extended vowel was a signature tune that brought on the evening and the turning on of the old gas lights that used to light up the streets.

Living in Santander, Spain, the street calls were totally different. There it was the lottery man, usually blind, who stood on the street corners crying out “Para hoy! Tengo para Hoy!” Today’s lottery. I have tickets for today’s lottery. So many lotteries in Spain. So much fun. In the laundry at the bottom of Perines, where I used to lodge, if your laundry ticket number matched the winning lottery number of the Ciegos – the Blind People’s Lottery, then you could claim a free wash that day.

So many memories. The past fading slowly away. The future coming ever closer. I look out of my window, and what do I see? Well, there’s always a bird in a tree, but today the clouds are building, playing piggy-back, and climbing on top of each other, reaching higher and higher into the sky and, sooner or later, there will be rain. Blessed, comforting rain. The gardens are dry. The aquifers are low, and yes, we need that rain. Para hoy – today – please!

And then maybe the desert will bloom again. The woods will flourish and, guess what KTJ saw in the woods the other day? You can’t guess? Well, I’ll tell you what KTJ told me – “I saw a partridge, then an owl, then two bear cubs, and the mother cub, followed by a third cub, and then a mother moose with a wobble-legged baby moose trailing behind …” If you ever see a mother bear with cubs – oh-oh, decision time, remember to make the right decision – don’t get between the cubs and the mother. Or you might end up as the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. And you wouldn’t want that!

And each time you meet a wild animal, you make a decision. To stop or not to stop. To take a picture or not to take a picture. To shoot or not to shoot – with a gun this time [nasty!] not with a camera [nice]. And remember, Santa’s got a list and he remembers who is naughty and who is nice. So think twice before you make that decision – you wouldn’t want to end up on the wrong list at Christmas Time, would you.

From my window

From my window

Not snow
these white flecks

floating flocons
wind drifted
past my window

they rise
rarely fall
never settle

blown pollen
post-lapsarian

the grass white
when they caress
sheltered places

white blossoms
on the mountain ash
sunshine
hidden within this cloud

not quite a snow storm
this pollen
drifting

Comment:

So, Moo’s taken to reading the poetry of Lorca. This is his second green painting from Lorca’s Verde, que te quiero verde. Funny – I speak a little bit of Spanish, but I didn’t know that Moo did. I didn’t even know he could read, let alone read Spanish. I know – that’s a little bit mean. That’s the problem with being neuro-diverse and a split personality – you never know which half your speaking to or from.

I guess that’s why Moo paints. So many things come out in color and shape that have no need of words. Such a strange thing, literacy. What a blessing it is to have the ability to read and write. Color and shape double or quadruple the quality of creation that a person can engender. Taking a line for a walk or making meaning out of color and shape is so very different from the careful reproduction of vowels and consonants in the correct order.

And who is to say what the correct order is? I have known people who have claimed that their fifth grade teacher taught them everything they know about writing. Really? Alas, I never went to grade school, so North American. I don’t know what grade a five education is or means. But ‘everything about writing’ – wow! I am 82 and still learning. I guess I am just a slow learner, perhaps that’s why I have always been a low earner too. Still, penny wise, pound foolish. Or should that be scent wise, smell foolish Or cent wise, dollar foolish. Or dollar foolish, cent wise.

Okay – so what is the correct word order? I guess I had better enroll in grade five and find out. Unless one of you out there can enlighten me. Mule? Dog sled? Drone? Your choice. They are digging up the road at the end of our road and I am not going into town until the tarmac’s back down. “And when will that be,” sing the bells out at Battersea. “I do not know,” booms the great bell of Bowe. Or you could send it by Bowe Street Runner aka the chasqui. Now that will sift you out! I bet they don’t teach that in grade five.

Neighbors

Neighbors

lights in the new house
we haven’t met them yet
we’ve seen them clearing the lot
digging basement and well
setting up the tile field

children playing riding bikes
bouncing on a trampoline
swinging on swings
their shrill voices breaking
the brooding silence of trees

sooner or later we’ll meet
it will be neat to put names
to faces and decipher
the stick shadows seen
in the distance shifting
dancing changing shape

a new generation of hope
turned into neighbors

Commentary:

“The olde order changeth, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” Idylls of the King – Tennyson.

We have been here in this house for 37 years. We planted trees, and watched them grow. We watched lots being sold, developed, turned into houses. Many of those who were here when we arrived downsized, moved away, or in some cases, simply passed away and died.

We have seen families move in, and then move on. Some became very good friends, and we miss them dearly. Others were mere nodding acquaintances. Some spoke our language, others didn’t. We met many of them and their children at Hallowe’en until Covid arrived and spooked even the spooks. As an event, it ghosted out of our lives.

Soon it will be our turn to move. Our house will belong to somebody else. Our house? We are restless souls inhabiting a changing planet. We own nothing. We merely borrow, use, and pass it on to someone else who, in their own turn, will eventually pass it on.

So – what exactly do I own? What do I control? Only this single moment of time, this tiny particle of time when I raise my fingers, choose which keys I will type and in what order. And sometimes, even that is incorect / incorrect, for i / I make misteaks / mistakes, fale / fail to corekt / correct them, place the wrng wrong finger on the wrong key. A single slip of the finger – a bright red button – sometimes I wonder how it will all end.

Loopy

Swings

They told me that one day
my feet would be up in the air,
and the next they would be stuck
on the ground.

A roundabout, they said,
a merry-go-round,
with all the fun of whatever fair
happens to be around that day.

Someone, not me, flicks a switch,
music plays, the carousel horses
move up and down, slowly at first,
then faster and faster as day, music,
and horses all gather pace.

There are no reins. If there were,
I would heave those horses
back towards whatever reality I left.

But what is reality now?
These hot flashes that warm my flesh?
Those cold flushes that make me shiver,
then turn up the heat
until I am sweating again?

Shadows grow. I pull less strongly
on the swing boat’s ropes.
My journey slows. The showman
raises the bar beneath the wooden hull.

Wish it or not, my time is nearly up.
With a bumpety-thump,
my journey grinds
to its inevitable end.

Comment

Moo is having a bad hair day. Somebody glued all his paint brushes together and he hasn’t painted anything for a long time. The painting above dates back to April. Oh dear. Poor Moo. I shall shed a little tear for him, when he is not looking. I wouldn’t want him to know I care, so please don’t tell him. I wish I could unclog his paint brushed for him. but I am not very good at that sort of thing. In fact, I don’t think I am particularly good at anything right now.

Everyday is an adventure now. Every day something happens. Sometimes for the better, more often for the worse. Like a knocked my morning cup of coffee over. Like I burned the toast and the fire alarm went off. Like I squeezed the orange and the juice went all over the table cloth to join the wine stains that I made when I reached for the salt and I knocked that over s well. And don’t let’s talk about filling my fountain pens and leaking ink everywhere.

So – look on the bright side of things. Every cloud has a silver lining. Hooray. Down every rabbit hole, there is a little rabbit. Dig deep and you will find it. Or not. If not, then find another rabbit hole or buy your own rabbit, stuff it down the hole, then dig it out again.

Never surrender. Never give up hope. And look – there’s a rabbit, just going down it’s rabbit hole. Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a little while, as soon as I have caught it. Welsh recipe for rabbit pie – “First, catch your rabbit.” And watch out for those fleas. “Little bunnies have tiny fleas upon their backs to bite them. And lesser fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum.”

My AI investigation tells me that Augustus De Morgan (1872): The 19th-century mathematician popularized the rhyming couplet known as Siphonaptera (the biological order of fleas):

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.


Tuseday’s Child

Tuesday’s Child

1

Thursday’s Child has far to go …
so too does Tuesday’s child,
especially this one, when he sets out
on a Tuesday on a long journey.

Just by chance, I caught this cormorant.
“Behind you, quick,” said Clare.
I turned and ‘Click!’

2

Such a miracle:
the first steps of flight
taken over water.
That first step heavy,
the second one lighter,
and the third one
scarcely a paint brush
pocking the waves.

3

The need for Tuesday’s Child
to take flight lies deep within me.
Fleeing from what?
Running towards what?
Who knows?

All I know is that the future
lies to the right of this photo
and the past lies to the left,
and I don’t know
what either might contain.

4

But I do remember the words
of Antonio Machado:

‘Caminante, no hay camino,
sólo hay estela sobre la mar.’
traveler, there is no road,
just a wake across life’s sea.

5

We may not know what lies ahead
but, like a ship at sea,
we leave white water behind us
and that wake tells us
where we have been
and what we have done.

Waist Land

Wind-sculpted tree on rocky coastline with turbulent ocean and cloudy sky
A lone, wind-shaped tree stands on rugged coastal rocks under a cloudy sky

Image generated
not by Big Brother
but by Little Brother
who left the Frying Squad
to become a painter
and mind-reader

Waist Land

Jack Pine Sonnet

living in a waste land
surrounded by books
he writes in his journal
things false and true
in memory of the old days
when the world seemed so new

a life built on sand
slips through his fingers
wouldn’t it be grand
if the sand stays and lingers
refusing to pass through
the hour glass’ waist
so time stops to flow

then he could say no
leave me alone
there’s more sand to fall
I don’t want to go

Comment:

It’s a bit like a cliff-hanger, isn’t it? Hanging on by our fingertips and not daring to look at the depths down below. We know they are there, but look, there’s a tiny fossil in the fissure in the rock, so much older than us, we’ve got a long time to go to catch that up. And remember – 80 is not old, if you are a stone!

Treading air – great fun. Not as good as treading warm water in the local YMCA. Just a lovely sense of balance, floating there in the warmth, no weight on arthritic joints, and the world around us amniotic, as it was in the beginning. Ah, those original waters, we have all swum in them, the rich and the poor, the black and the white, and all shades in between. Even King Charles and the late Queen. And remember, they may speak of blue bloods, but all blood is red -and, if you cut us, do we not bleed.

Speaking of bleeding – blood-thinners – my favorite doctor’s latest joke. I cut my arm the other night, getting into bed. Didn’t even notice. Pillows and sheets soaked in blood when I woke up and my scalloped arm, stuck to the sheet, opened itself up and started to bleed again. Feels like seventeenth century Spain, the wounds of the dead man re-open and start to bleed when the assassin appears before him. Certain truth. Obviously 100% guilty.

And they tell me that in South Wales people are adding cooking oil to gasoline to make the petrol go further. Scotland Yard sent the Flying Squad to South Wales to sniff people’s exhaust pipes to see if they were cheating the tax man. I asked my friend – “Is this true?” “Ah, yes,” he said in his lovely Welsh lilt, “and we call them the Frying Squad!”