Revisiting Thirteen Years Ago - another introduction to the coma dreams

 It is such a strange thing to reflect on. Thirteen years ago, I was dying in the ICU. The surgery that was supposed to fix my diverticulitis had gone sideways. The anastomosis had failed, allowing fecal waste to enter the abdominal cavity. This led to sepsis and peritonitis along with about a dozen other catastrophic issues. I was dying. They had done an emergency surgery, performed a lavage, and given me a colostomy. They sent me back up to the ICU knowing full well that I was still dying. 

How do you reflect on reading the notes from surgeons who you trust/ed with your life, when their very notes clearly indicate that survival was not guaranteed. By the time I read the surgical notes five days post first surgery, the notes from the surgeons and ICU intensivists read like a very confused teenager being asked to write a book report that they forgot to read. Thirteen years later, it does not inspire confidence.

So I was dying. 

I guess we all are, whether or not we choose to recognize our mortality as being far off or imminent. It is the other side of the monotony of living. The abruptness of dying. 

I hadn't done anything wrong. I wasn't in the ICU because of a car crash. I hadn't overdosed on drugs. I hadn't fallen from a ladder. Nevertheless, I was dying. That's what the notes all said. Five days post-operative emergency. Yesterday I sat here when I should have been off to bed. I put on music I hadn't listened to in thirteen years. I let myself get carried back into the eddies in the current of time. I pushed against the double doors that opened onto the ICU, where the lights were all set low. And there I saw my dying.

I have looked at my death from myriad perspectives each time it has come to greet me. Always curious, slightly confused, always hyper-aware. Those memories have stuck like tar on a hot day. When I was in first grade, I was riding my bike to school. I was crossing one of the busier streets in Hialeah, in the crosswalk, with the light red and cars stopped. A white Camaro ran the red light. There was no sound of brakes until after I felt my bike torn from under me and I was on the hood of the car, pressed against the windshield. My mom had followed me to school that day, driving just behind me. I don't know if I imagined it, or if I really saw her over my shoulder... but I remember her face in a rictus of screaming fear as I entered the crosswalk. I was dying in that instant. By the time I came to rest on the asphalt, my bike nowhere near me, I was alive. I've been told (or maybe I remember) that I wanted to get up and go to school so I wouldn't be late. My legs refused to obey. My shoulder hurt. I couldn't find enough air to breathe. I don't know if I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I remember being in the hospital, on a gurney... waiting for x-rays. Might have been my first x-rays. I was sure that I had brain damage. Brain damage was what my child mind was certain had made my brother David unable to communicate. We didnt know anything about his autism at that point. We didn't know that he was a chromosomal anomaly and that his failure to speak wasn't caused by any damage done to his brain after his birth. But I didn't know it that day. I was sure that my injury was going to make me like David. 

I didn't die. I injured my collarbone. Nothing broken. Just the spell of childhood innocence. 

Reading the surgeon's notes from my failed surgery is similar in many ways. 

In my mind, there is the last memory before the coma. It is a strange disconnected memory. The heated air was being pumped through the gown I had put on in pre-op. I was so upset that the air was hot. The nurse was trying to explain that I was going to be cold otherwise... but I hate being hot. I remember being wheeled into the operating room and being so unhappy about the hot air blowing through the stupid gown. 

After that, there was blackness for a moment. Much like the time I spent in the air after connecting with the white Camaro in the crosswalk. It was a time when I was released from all the tethers that tie you to here and now. For everyone else in the world, the day continued on. I stopped. Due to the insane concoction of drugs (fentanyl, Propofol, and morphine) that they used to keep me in my sedated comatose state, I was gone. I stepped off of the merry-go-round and fell into a different stream. I was dying. 

If I am honest, I knew I was dying. I just couldn't figure out why it was taking so long. Let me back up. For the next thirty years or so, I experienced time pass just as I had for every day of my thirty-seven years up until that moment. I know now, that they didn't happen the way everyone else talks about time. But I also know that my body and mind experienced thirty years of strange, horrible, boring, wonderful, lonely things... and I also know that I was dying. In many of the coma dreams (as I euphemistically call them) I tried to die. There were all sorts of weird stories about me trying to find a way to either die or to be released so that I could die. Each time I would fulfill the task, some new revelation would make it such that dying wasn't possible. 

But I knew I was dying. I just didn't really understand how to do it properly. Through the perspective of thirteen years, I think the hubris is slightly more amusing. In the coma dreams, I tried to do just as I do out here. I tried to fit in... to blend. I tried to follow the rules as I understood them. No one explained shit to me. No different than out here. 

To this day, I think the most interesting aspect of the coma dreams was the idea of waking up somewhere, fully formed, at a seemingly random age, sometimes not even male, in a place I had never been, as though it was just another Tuesday. Sometimes I woke up in a barn, asleep against the side of sheep. Other dreams had me waking up in old abandoned houses whose basements connected to underground caverns where people raced illegal cars. Each time I woke up, I was there. But most importantly, I had never been anywhere else. I didnt carry with me any of the memories that we all carry. I wasn't Alex from Miami. I didn't have my parents or siblings. I hadn't been married. No history at all. Whenever TV or movies depict a person suffering from amnesia, there is always that mythology about how memory vanishes. Far stranger for me was to lose that entire sense of self that connected to past self. I was fully there, just as real as today... but I had no day before and somehow, that was just fine. Would you remember yesterday if you weren't trying to remember it? Life without rear view mirrors and windows. Just straight ahead. None of the experiences in the coma dreams carried from one dream to another. I was always someone different, somewhere different, a different age, and usually lonely. 

And because my body outside (in the ICU) refused to let me forget, I was also dying. Periodically the coma dreams would toss me into a blended Frappuccino of hospital and Salvador Dali. If it was an easy coma dream, it might almost make sense. Other times the coma dreams would take a real-world physical setting in the hospital and just play havoc with it. I'll get to some of those stories soon. I needed time to write this preface (again). Probably just for my own sake of understanding. 

I was dying thirteen years ago, and I did it badly. I failed miserably. Instead I ended up living thirty years or more, in ways, places, times, and people I could never have been. Those experiences have changed my understanding of what it means to be alive. So many of the negative associations I had previously held about death, don't apply anymore. There was never a "white light at the end of the tunnel" moment. It was so much more mundane and prosaic. I was dying inside a Burger King where I couldn't find a bathroom to pee. 

Like I said earlier, I really struggled to die any differently than I have lived. 

Between now and October 10th when I first woke from the coma, and which we celebrate as my second birthday... I try to reflect on the bizarre experiences I went through. When I can free up my hands to type and convince my mind to untangle some of the threads of the coma dreams, I will write more of those stories. 

Six Years Later, Ten Years Later

To say that life has drawn me away from writing more of these coma dreams would be an understatement.

I recently had dinner with a fantastic writer who encouraged me to get back on the horse and to get these stories written down. That made me dig up my old notes that I had written down on paper, in a notebook I used to carry everywhere in the years immediately following the coma. I had very little ability to remember things... lot of short term memory problems. This notebook went with me to physical therapy 3x a week, enabling me to jot down exercises I should be doing at home to rebuild my body. It also gave me a place to throw out ideas that came floating into my head. This became the place where I tried to list all of the various coma dreams that I lived through.

Last week, nearly ten years after the coma began, I scanned those original notes. These notes are barely legible... but my hope is to tease out the intense stories that I tried to remember through these one-sentence blurbs.

Since trying to read my handwriting is nearly impossible, I aim to write down the bare bones of each idea here, in hopes that it will allow me to circle back and flesh out each story... To give each experience its due. So much of this memory is so intensely personal that I hesitate to write any of it down. There are so many aspects that I still struggle with, even ten years on. But, I told my friend I would try to write it all down.

Having said all of that, I have one more request of anyone reading this: imagine you had a spectacular dream this morning. Can you remember it? Can you still taste it, smell it, hear all the tiny things that were happening? Most dreams tend to vanish quickly on waking. It has been nearly ten years since I woke up from the coma... and these dreams, for lack of a better word, are just as real and tangible as the day I woke up.

My notes follow:

• Jesus in the graveyard, being left behind
• Fishing : restaurant: broken down rig: scuba diving and fear of water: circular driveway
• Kayaking across big lake
• Moving kiln w/woodfire
• Recycling via sidewalk streams, Ithaca
• Dragon making via Nancy; hammering coins
• Display behind my head covered in Led Zep based foods
• Swimming across polluted channel w/ dirty city (recycling focus)
• Sitting in pools eating lunch with David Bowie in France (gallery with pedestal platforms at eye level with David Byrne)
• Falling out of taxi in Queens, carried to stairwell, left in room with glass table, Bridgid brought bread. Diabetes.
• Wyoming dream. Hunting antelope, laying silver $ on train track 
• Living in a barn with animals
• Working in diner, cleaning, setting included trees, road, snow
• JFK house w/Nancy - new AC - new clothes/bed
• Old houses @Xmas, singers, smells, horse carriage bells
• Old woman, knitter/weaver w/feathers, looking out her window at sunset
• Room with German platter/disk - played backwards by wife
• Trains rolling by - through army camp ca., WWII
• Housesitting for couple in 1950-1960, very mod - include carpet, chrome, leather
• Canadian woodlot as punishment for speaking out against bad sheetrock and the tearing out of sheetrock @hospital on other side of the mountain
• Hospital setting looking for Mecenas, 3D displays
• Cruise ship with BTS, wife having affair on tape; Jose on call; Grandmother called at port of call
• Restaurant w/Nancy fish restaurant, next to fishing tour boats
• Restaurant w/Nancy van broke down, breakfast only - started story as Another Story
• Mexican scenario w/ morning villa, weird lunch restaurant w/margaritas, salsa verde tacos, fragrant flowers on rock wall, motorcycle dudes in restaurant
• Going through box of records (Mary Ellen, Nancy and I) and dressing up like albums
• Ducts & power company - hiding in abandoned  house
• Finding rogue car racing group / underground in ducts 
• Cooking / baking during depression @ holidays - trying to perfect not-chocolate for donuts
• Photographing in x-ray film, converting a camera to use x-ray (not IR)
• Martin's Japanese GF racing motorbikes and jetskis - cant remember this one now, 10 yrs later
• Working w/ Nancy's grandfather
• Eating sushi w/couple & mother making food, finally walking across wet field
• Dancing after wedding to Nancy in Spain, paella, rosemary
• Invention device using croc foam to print anything
• Room in house where ^^^ happens, multiple servers
• Ride home from work @ diner in snow
• Hike ~ Spain to see Japanese potter, firing wood
• Waking up in bus depot, stuck there till custodian takes outside
• "" w/ latino and Jesus & tree
• Inside cruise ship BTS - elevator and cameras in CCTV room
• Outside dirty city, BK everywhere, tables, recycling lines, getting trapped in Brazil-esque setting - started writing in Hell is a Lonesome Place  needs more.  Also started as Thoughts on Dying - still incomplete
• Visiting w/brother, racing off road motorcycles & jet skis -cant remember this one, 10 yrs later
• Mother sitting in corner, knitting / fan blowing
• Indian angry that I could talk to birds, animals - maybe related to weaving woman dream
• Kids poaching deer & woman being so upset, sawmill (ref. Melanie?)
• Seeing Mag's artwork, photography & then seeing subjects in person, together
• Meeting couple with and without kids on kayaking expedition
• Photography out in desert
• Working w/ contemporary photographer w/ pkging 
• My medical bed in hospital breaking and fixing it by pushing it to the ceiling - me telling them that I was ready to go home
• Being held post-surgery in an old movie theater's projectionist space w/file cabinets and soda
• Playing w/Xray film, buying special cameras to play with. 
• Being arrested for video & being held by FL troopers - ref cruise ship
• Stuck on a long mountain road, needing chains for the truck and the only person I could call was Grandma Barbara
• Landing planes in Okinawa post WWII - written as Landing the Planes
• My mother telling me she was a punk rock groupie
• Stuck in the old room w/diabetes and running out of meds. Needles on the floor. 
• Leah and Tim watching kid get killed - Syracuse or Binghamton perhaps - lollipop wrapper near the curb - Now written as: Scenes to Forget
• Passing judgement on souls - in garage with dust and oil
• Recycling life in Ithaca, very hot, needing AC, curbs carrying water, retarded kids and adults working at recycling center
• Watching kids w/candy wrappers and lollipops in Binghamton, (while judging souls)
• Woodfired electric kiln, made by L&L/dusty / taken to  CA roadtrip.
• Helicopter ride with Obama's kids, landing on the WH lawn
• Asian food restaurant/kitchen/sliding doors, fish etc.
• Hockey w/girls TGHA in CO, WY, sleeping in crappy hotels w/wet carpet (related to being in teardrop trailer?)  - part of this dream written into Burning from the Inside
• Packaging ideas while working for photographer 
• Looking for Mecenas in Hospital in Miami - Gangs & 3D screens and virtual presence
• Recycling center in huge scale in city, unable to get out - giant machines like bucket loaders
• ^^ related somehow to Burger King and London
• Hockey arena while on gurney to watch 12U play, but audience unhappy because no beer (<18 yr olds) played Camilus and won
• Hockey travel team going from motel to dive, wet carpet, high fever
• Being stuck in Denver, 2nd story apartment, with ostomy, smell and wet damp everywhere, renting with lots of people, and being stuck in recliner
• Russian hospital w/ labels in Cyrillic - started in Coma Dreams #1  incomplete
• Russian family taking care of me on their table in return for American insurance $$$
• World as Lowes @Thanksgiving/Xmas, including inflated stuff, giant fans and wiring everywhere, fixing house we were renting - tied into JFK house  - written as Dust that Burns
• Nancy was there, no AC, installed AC and painted via Lowes- written as Dust that Burns plus part two We Now Return to Our Story
• Laying half out of taxi in NYC/Bronx/Queens, near river, can see bar w/Irving's room above
• Transition to all family inside waiting for Bridgid who brought bread, wall of open shelves, knickknacks. 

Coma Dream #1 (repost from Dec 8, 2009)

Yeah, I know. Not everyone wants to know what it was like while I was in the coma.... so if you don't, now's the perfect time to hit your browser's back button.

Today as I was felled by this nasty head cold, something hit me from out of the blue. Not sure what triggered it. Within seconds though, I was reliving an odd aspect of one of my coma dreams.

As I was prepping for the first "swallow" test, they feed you applesauce mixed with a seriously blue food dye. Apparently the dye shows up as a leak if you are unable to swallow properly. Considering I had been ventilated for over a month and still had a trach-tube in... swallowing was rough.

The setting: I am sitting in my recliner, waiting for the speech pathologist to administer the test. Meanwhile: All around me I can hear voices, but something is amiss. The voices slowly become more sharp and distinct. I am definitely not hearing English. Not sure yet what though.

A nurse aid comes into the room and says something I can't quite make out. Then proceeds to tell me that I should expect some changes in hospital staffing. Then goes back to speaking Slavic.

Bewildered, I look around the room, obviously unable to get up or really move around. As I survey the equipment, all of the instructions are either in Spanish or in Russian. What on earth? So I asked the nuse aid: her response was that it was simply cheaper to provide care this way.

With the first couple gulps of the swallow test down, I knew I had to urinate. A lot. I was sure that it was all going to come out blue and leak everywhere. Mind you, I was actually sporting a catheter at the time, and was semi-conscious. Not enough though. Weird stuff happens on all the drugs they had me on.

I probed further. She replied that now that the hospital was incorperating with multinational corporations, they had to maximize profitability and the easiest way to do that was to start with folks who would work for less. She explained that she and her family lived near the hospital. For some of my care, she would be bringing me to her home. Apparently her mother was an RN and was moonlighting as well.

Moonlighting or bootlegging depending on how you look at it. What they would do is when a patient could be moved out of the ICU they would take them home instead of the post-operative care unit. There, family members would administer to the patient's needs. In addition, they would collect unused medical supplies that would otherwise be thrown away at the end of the shift. They repackaged them and sold them on the black market to folks who couldn't afford proper medical care.

So as I lived with this family, my mother and I got to know them pretty well. Apparently the husband of the family had injured his back severely in a firefighting accident. All of the kids were nearly finished with school and two of them were planning to work for the hospital. They all worked as "outreach" for the community. They provided care, medical supplies and serious help to folks who would never otherwise be able to afford a hospital stay.

The dream ends with me laying on the dinner table having their youngest sons who were still in high school, drawing blood for a workup. They kept telling me we needed to hurry because it was almost dinner time and they needed to set the table. But I shouldn't rush, because that would skew the results. Their care was impeccable. They were skilled and compassionate. It sort of made me wonder what it would be like to live in a world like this. I am sure this is common place in other parts of the world.

Thoughts on Dying (repost from April 2010)

Let me begin with the obvious: I am alive. But I think of death often. Not with any morbid fascination, but more the casualness one would exhibit looking through a family photo album.

Perhaps we should call this the first glance through an album of memories.

But are they your memories if they didn't happen during your lifetime? What do you call things that happen while your body sleeps and your mind doesn't?

_______________________________

Let me say again: I am alive. I know this because the smells are different. The light is better too.

For a long time I lingered in a twilight haze of ashy shadow and grease. It was always 3am. For years at a time, it was always 3am.

Each day began with me sitting at a table. Outdoors, but without the weather that comes from being outside. The table was made of downward curving metal, perforated with large half-inch holes over the entire surface. The tabletop was covered in a thin rubber coating that once must have been mustard colored but now, like everything else around me, was dingy, grey and fading. Not quite black but never again anything remotely as lively as yellow.

The table was the end of the line for the production of the fast-food joint I was at. No one stood at a counter to take you order... well, not really. There was always someone standing there... but they just looked at you and then looked down as though that would tell you all you needed to know about ordering your meal. A meal. Even now I am not sure I can call it that. Imagine the ubiquity of water fountains and now imagine that in the same way, all food supply units were essentially a bastardized version of Burger King.

After looking down to order, something would be garbled back behind a wall, sounds of movement would begin, quiet, hushed then loud clunking and slow feet shuffling. Far across the open space of the dining plaza, a garbage can would start to beep. Incessantly, but quietly so as to not annoy you if you weren't really sure yet that you wanted the food coming your way.

Then with a whir it would present, through the open slot. Your food. On a tray, grey-brown with wet paper separating the food from the sticky plastic tray. Almost warm but by no means hot. Smells of old onions, scorched coffee and egg shells are the first smack to the face.

Leaving the tray and food intact, I am sure there has to be something better around to eat. I also desperately need to find a bathroom. It has been days since I could pee. I would trade a perfect chocolate milkshake for a chance to pee in a clean bathroom. But there is no bathroom. When I ask at the counter where the meal originated, I get the same bleary eyed response... that downward cast glance as though one could order a trip to the bathroom through this device.

I look down at my clothes. A cover-all that once must have been blue-grey with thin white stripes, but now, like everything else, it was greyed with time, grease and dust. I can't find the sun in the sky. The buildings around me rise ceaselessly into the sky, each one a copy of the one beside it. There is an occasional breeze which at first feels like it might have the warm touch of spring but by the time I can sort out the smell I am overwhelmed with the sickly sweet aroma of decay. The wind grows until I have to duck into an entryway of building so as to escape from the stench that threatens to coat my skin with an oily scum.

Looking through the scratched silver windows of the building lobby, I keep my eyes moving... hoping for someone to talk to. I really want to find a bathroom.

Walking farther down the street, I find a body curled around a bench made from the same perforated metal rounded into tables like I saw earlier. Finding at first his head amongst the papers and rags, I was unsure he was awake. With none of his hands visible I feared that if I asked of their absence, knowing would be worse than the reek wafting from him. Just when I was sure that he was deep aslumber, he opened one eye at me. Asking me with that same downward glaze and soundless hush, he asked why I was there.

I told him I wanted to die.

I also needed to pee.

Laughing into last month's urine soaked newspaper, he turned his head to me. Our eyes met only briefly before I turned away, afraid that his one good eye might see me for what I was. His other eye, caked with drying puss, kept oozing with each blink.If only he would look away... I could ask him again.

Before I can repeat myself he lifts his shriveled hands from beneath his shabby mound and points to an alleyway a few feet away. Slumped between a wall uncertain of its future and the ground well past worn, a woman looks at the needle in her arm, hoping for release. I am not even worth a glare from her direction.

With a plaintive look on my face, I ask again: how can I die?

Shouldering the wet mass of cloth and sopping cardboard, paper and shit, he pushes me headlong towards a guardrail over a highway. Looking down, bits of detritus falling away, he admonishes me to pick one. Slow or fast, both definite. Either way, I could die. Looking for some merciful solution, I look all around, hoping someone would see me in my plight. I asked again: How can I die?

Laughing that piteous laugh again, he slurs through wet teeth that all I need to do is keep eating the food that came out of that slot.

________________________________
END
________________________________

For folks who wonder: I have contemplated suicide only a few times in my life. Mostly during a rough time in college when my girlfriend had been replaced with a demon from hell.

I find it interesting that while in the coma, I needed to pee. I find this to have been almost an omnipresent sensation throughout all of the coma dreams.

But the wish for dying? I did want to know. How could I escape the 3am grey-gloom? I would have done anything to break free of those awful smells and sights. Even now, I feel the need to scrub my body with borax in the shower... anything to get that oily stench off of my skin.

I know you don't smell things in dreams. I never dreamed for years at a time before either.

Landing the Planes (repost from May 2010)

Though these dreams probably flew through my mind in some order of disarray, I can no longer say which ones came first. If I had to guess, I would say they all happened simultaneously. Especially in light of how so many of them overlap in odd ways. Seriously, when asked to recollect which order these dreams happened, I am always at a loss. Some of them repeated multiple times. (We'll get to those sometime soon... kinda scary.) With that said, here is installment #3- Landing the Planes.

It is sometime post-war, probably late 1948 or so. I am stationed on a Marine air base somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, fairly near Japan. I know this because my job is to help land airplanes all day (and sometimes into the evening). The planes are predominantly Vought F4U Corsairs. Long and blue, with those beautiful bent wings. And the sound of their engines howling as they screamed at take off!

In this dream, my job is to establish radio contact with incoming airplanes and guide them back home. Most of the time this is proves to be fairly mundane. There are usually four to six of us manning the radio in shifts with two to three of us glassing the horizon, looking long for that broken wing silhouette.

Most aircraft at this time were not adequately equipped for nighttime landings. Without radar, it was even more difficult to land six to ten aircraft in short order at night. On this night, it was made nearly impossible with a fog that came in before dinner. The flight was late returning. Six planes coming back from Okinawa. Due in over half an hour earlier, we knew that the fog was delaying their arrival.

We asked the ground crew to prepare searchlights, but their beams couldn't penetrate the fog. For all their effort, only a dull glow reached through the fog. The woman who I was sharing the shift with suggested aiming the search beams low, almost parallel to the runways. Our hope was that then the runways would be lit up and more visible from the air.

When the rain began it was more of a wet mist first. It didn't take long though before none of us could see more than 100 yards or so along the runway... and that was with the help of the search lights. The tension on the ground was palpable. Each of us had somewhere they would much rather have been, only because worry had surpassed reason. Something was amiss and there was nothing we could do.

After what seemed like hours, the radio let loose the first crackle that didn't end in static. Numbers were squawked out, repeated and new coordinates relayed. Six times we traded this information until we knew each pilot could see our blur of light winking in the soggy wet. With sighs and relief we each surrendered our headphones and unplugged from our panels.

Walking down the stairs, I asked the woman beside me what she was hurrying off to. Looking like a teenager off to prom she laughed and let on as how she was going to a concert. Around me the room changed from air station to a space more akin to a waiting room in a large airport. She fell in line behind a crowd waiting to leave the terminal. Waiting there, I had to ask: what sort of music would they be playing at this concert. Punk music of course! Curious, I asked how she knew anything about punk music. She explained that the lead singer of the band was a friend of a friend, and he had invented a bionic knee device. I asked her if they were any good and she laughed. She said she was their biggest fan. Then the line opened up and with nothing more said, she was off into the night.

_____________________________________________________

At first glance this dream seems to make sense (until the punk-rock concert goer rears her head)...

Reality:
I told my mom about this dream, since my memory of this coma dream puts her into the dream as it transitions from the air station to the waiting room/airport scene. As I related this story to her, she started to stutter. I decided to jump straight in and ask: Did you leave me at the hospital to go to a punk rock concert? Yep. And yes, the lead singer in the band happens to have invented a knee-replacement device which borders on science fiction. Very cutting edge. They have just released their newest album and guess what's on the back of the closing liner notes? "Dedicated to our biggest fan: Candace" (That's my mom for ya.)

Apparently though, that wasn't what had left my mother so speechless. Her concern was that I had never met my great-aunt Sally. My maternal grandfather was the youngest of ten siblings and the only male. From my grandfather I knew little bits and pieces about his sisters. I spent parts of my summers in Wyoming getting to know my great aunts Louise, Winnie and Ollie. But I never got to meet Aunt Sally.

The little I knew about her was that she had lived overseas. I think most of her adult life had been spent in and around Japan. Once she sent us a lamp in the shape of an owl, made from a tank shell casing from World War II... left behind in Okinawa. Some part of me always thought that it could have been fired from my grandfather's amphibious tank he crewed during the invasion of Okinawa.

What I didn't know about Aunt Sally was that she used to land airplanes. In the Pacific... around Japan, for years following the conclusion of the war. She landed Vought Corsairs. And according to my mother, women were often used because their voices came through the radio more clearly and their eyes more easily spotted the broken wing pattern against the sea and sky.

______________________________________________________

Other thoughts:
I have no idea how any of this could have entered into my dreams. Ideas? Has anyone read about this sort of thing? There is more to come. Maybe later in the week.

I've Asked You All Here to Discuss... (repost from June 25, 2010)

This an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a dear friend, mentor, teacher and potter.





I have put this letter off long enough. I apologize for not writing back sooner.

I am grieving.

This is a long story. If you want the short version, skip to the end. It's all there in the last
paragraph. Otherwise....

Not long after NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) I took a long (and far too dangerous) drive to the Cleveland Clinic to have a long talk with the best colo-rectal surgeons in the US. I really should have either flown or had someone else drive. We didn't know it at the time, but have since learned that one of the side effects from this coma has been that I have developed extreme obstructive sleep apnea. Apparently I haven't slept real sleep since before surgery. The exhaustion caught up to me about a month ago... but I am getting ahead of myself. Before the drive to Cleveland, we knew that I was exhibiting extreme sleep exhaustion. I had a hard time staying awake on the drive into town(Ithaca) each day for PT. I had fallen asleep at the wheel at least 1-2 times a week. Bad stuff. But I knew I needed to get to Cleveland,
and Nancy doesn't drive. Friends offered but I figured it would be no problem. Luckily I took Aurora with me and she acted as my conscience. When I started to doze she was adamant that we get off the road and made me sleep.

Even with all of our precautions it was still a rough drive.

And that was the easy part.

Walking into a hospital, of my own accord, under my own power... to submit to more
tests, probings, and worse....

It was rough.

Finally I was able to see the surgeon with my clothes on for his assessment of my candidacy
for a "reversal or takedown" procedure. I will spare you the lesson in anatomy and say only
that my chances of a simple surgery fall into the category of slim to none. He wasn't optimistic.
He gave me a few options and a final ulimatum - lose 50# or he wouldn't even consider me for surgery.

I asked him how he would repair my abdomen so that I would no longer have this monstrous herniation at the colostomy site. I also asked him how soon after surgery I could actually RESUME my life as a potter.

He looked me in the eye and said it was time for a career change. I am glad Aurora was there. I might not have been able to walk out otherwise. From the looks of things, I will not ever be able to do what I could do so easily before.

No lifting of things greater than 20-25#. Definitely no heavy lifting. No moving of kiln shelves. Or boxes of clay. Or buckets of glaze. Or boxes of pots.

I thought about this on the six hour drive home. There were hour long stretches where Aurora and I said nothing. The Clash, The Pogues and U2 screamed through the stereo. And now and again, she would find me crying. Sobbing. Trying hard to keep focus.

The following week I met with my cardiologist who let me know that my heart had a scary story to tell about my sleep issues. Short version: I was a prime candidate for a stroke. My heart was being tortured every night... first from lack of oxygen and then from racing constantly to wake me up and start that adrenaline racing. Bad combination.

I just finished my second sleep study a week ago. I am finally sleeping for more than two hours straight. It has been over eight months. As I talk to the doctors they are all remarkably surprised I am even here at this moment.

Since sleeping I have had more cognitive function again... (I have had virtually no short term memory for months. Would realize I was somewhere and have no idea why or how I got there)
Being able to think has been a radical relief. Nancy jokes that my brain running on half-power puts me in the position most folks are in every day. That is simply not acceptable.

So... now that I am sleeping again, I have had more time to think and greater focus during the day. I have been trying to figure out how to dig myself out of this hole I have pulled my family into. We are broke. Well, worse than broke. We started looking at bankruptcy back in March.
Since then things haven't gotten better... until this past week.

So where am I going with all of this? What is the point to this lengthy blathering?
To say that I am letting go of my dreams in clay. I had high hopes years ago, that I would be teaching young college students by now. I had visions of classrooms with students ready for a challenge. Kiln pads crowded with ware carts loading and unloading firing after firing. Smoky air filling the quad as wood kilns and raku firings finished up. Ironically I have never had any real course of study planned. I sure love teaching. Strangely enough, I think the only thing I have ever really wanted to impart is my love for learning.

Which leads me to where this is all going. In letting go of clay, I am taking up my camera again. Fortunately this seems doable. I am finding myself capable and competent. Building a new career is daunting but exciting. It hasn't come easily though. I have been ruminating on this since waking from the coma.

Letting go of my dreams though, has been hard. Walking into my studio and finding nothing to trim, no pots to load into the kiln... and dust and cobwebs where there should be plastic sheeting... it has been difficult. I can still throw pots. And I may. I think if I can find a way to make enough of a living to have spare time again, I would love to make pots as time allows. I don't think that my expectations for this business were ever going to be realized, so this is something of a wake-up call. I love the idea of making the pots I WANT to make, firing them any way I feel like firing them and then, once a year, having a nice studio sale where folks can come and pick out what they want. No orders. No galleries. No showroom. Just pots.

For now, this means we are planning to close the studio and gallery in September... maybe sooner. I am ready to turn the showroom into our new photography space. A clean room with places to sit, to shoot, to review work, to see big prints... who knows? Having said all of this (which I am sure has been far too long a letter for anyone to read) I must apologize. Knowing that you have followed my progress, success and failure alike, means a great deal to me. I know there is a bright future ahead, but letting go of clay has been .... well, you can imagine.

All the best,
Alex

Seen Through a Sliver (repost from Jan 15, 2011)

It was here that the beginning and the end wrapped behind him to caress the sores on his spine. His fingernails had become misshapen bloody nubs as he tapped out the rhythms of the voices beckoning through the slit in the wall. Not as raw any longer, but calloused from years of calling out with the only voice left him.

Rolling over to find the darkest spot of blackness, off behind his head, against the far ceiling, he cries out. Wordless, the sobs are drained by the hollow maw surrounding his broken frame. As his body adjusts to the transition from body-warm stones to the new-cold pavers, he shivers and tries to bring his knees to his chest. His heat is quickly tugged from his extremities.

His eyes roll back in his head as he seeks the soft warmth of sleep. A tiny sound outside and his eyelids pull back, anticipating. With one eye fully open and focused on the floor, the other eye half-heartedly stays focused on the darkness. A knife appears through the wall and spreads buttery warmth along the cobbles. Both eyes are open now. Waiting.

First he learns that she is excited, anxious, anticipatory... though the words are stretched taffy-like through the narrow crack. He can see her move in and out of frame as the light spreads her worry on the floor beneath him. His eyes can make out her decision to bundle up today, warding off winter's cruel teeth. As her shadow peeks in and out of the glow laid like a map across his floor, he struggles to read her story.

All he knows is that every few days, usually grey days filled with rain or wet fog, she will stand outside. He knows that she is different from the other people outside because he can smell the seasons on her silhouette. Once he could even make out the chicken salad sandwich she had eaten for lunch, right down to the cucumber slices and dill. The summer-ness tiptoed around his room before being tackled against the far wall and being pummeled unconscious by the inky shadow. He listened to the wind whisper through her hair, leaving bits of leaves and the smell of snow not far off. Reaching out to the sliver of light that cut through his room, his hands ached to touch, to know.

And then she was gone.

Replaced by the form he knew too well. This one, he knew preferred throwing hot water against the wall rather than actually using it on his body to clean. The smell of wet mud and yeasty molded bread always barked a warning before his shadow crossed the frame. Once into the light, his story poured out with no hope of stemming the flow.

He could tell this man spent his days cleaning the floors, reaching into the corners behind the garbage cans in hopes of finding the makings of a quick bite. His lunchtime was taken hunched over behind the boiler in hopes no one would notice his pant legs covered in wet filth. By the time he had downed his meager lunch, his clothes would have shared the better part of the meal. Somehow, the light carried this simple letter through the wall, sharing the day's goings-on in an instant.

As the wind outside pounded against the silent stone, only the light wavered. No sounds came through the tiny slit. He knew the gale would only last till morning, and when the morning men came with their egg hair and laughing cigarettes, the storm would have passed. A new day meant that these men would trade their rippling laughter as shadows dancing across the beam of light. One's arm was much too small, though at least his shadow wasn't embarrassed. The other fellow's yellowness came through no matter what he ate. He could turn cold oatmeal into sunshine with his laughing hair.

Today they brought him delicious blackberry jam, spread warm across thick toast. The bitter dark coffee rings around the silky shadow touched the solid ice of his feet. As he reached over, into the slice of light, the wine stained shadows washed over his imagined repast, revealing only tired grooves in the stone's mortar.

Rolling over, he closed his tired eyes and searched out the songs that lulled him to sleep. By the time he reached the refrain, the sliver of light had crept from the room, leaving him.

Run Like Hell (repost from Oct 2011)

Another short story:


I was helping a young woman find book in the town library. Mind you, I wasn't the librarian, but since I handled all the reshelving and finding of books it was my job. She was looking for an old edition of a magazine and I knew we had bound volumes of this journal on our third floor. Rather than send her up to find it, I told her I would bring it down when I finished my final reshelving for my shift. She wasn't in a huge hurry and sat down to read some of the books she had already amassed.

A quick jaunt up the staff stairwell and I found my booktruck right where I left it. I finished reshelving a dozen or so books and then found the volume of Craft Horizons that she had asked for. Flipping it open I was greeted with a flood of memories. I could see my mother opening the January 1977 issue, all of the clay dust on the cover and the red iron oxide stains on the pages with glaze recipes. I saw potters long-dead that I had never met but knew from our shared history. I saw woodturners whose woodwork had inspired me along the way.

Closing the cover of the hardbound journal, I felt my heart stop for a moment. Unsure why, I quickly raced down the stairs, hoping that the young lady was still waiting. Reaching the first floor, I quickly scanned the reading tables and found her at the main desk, checking out a small stack of books. I brought over the journal and laid it on top of the rest of her selections. She was very curious as to how I could find it so quickly and I explained that I had spent a lot of time going through that section due to my interest in ceramics.

She and were talking about clay and glazes and other potters as we made our way out towards the entrance.  We were just under the threshold when the floor shook. It shook and throbbed. The walls vibrated and rippled. The ceiling over our heads twisted and tore like old parchment.

With a sudden shock, she looked up into my eyes, as though I should know what was happening. At that moment, the floor lurched and I was tossed back into a supporting pillar. The floor beneath us dropped away. The space that moments earlier had been century old hardwood flooring with oak and elm framing was suddenly gone. Rotting earth stared up at me with an open maw.

The next few moments took years to pass. My arm reached out to pull the young lady to the firmament I was planted on adjacent to the pillar. My hand, fully outstretched... her fingers so close. And that look in her eyes. There was no chance. Even if I had reached out sooner, there was no way to reach her. I watched her fall twenty feet or more before being lost to me.

I held tighter to the column, hoping that the rolling tremors would stop and that somehow everything would be okay again. The shaking stopped. Then the floors above me began to give way and suddenly the air around me was filled with huge walls of books from the second and third floors crashing through the floor and passing right beside me.... anxious to choke the gigantic opening in the earth.

Between the smell of decaying wood, of mold and mildew, of old wood dust, of wet earth... between all of these ripe raw smells that assaulted me, my own imminent fall to my death... and all I could think about was that I didn't even know this young lady's name.

As the dust cleared and the books and shelves stopped crashing, the sheer magnitude of the event was made clear. The entire structure had been undermined. It was gone. No floors, no walls, no people. Just the outer shell of the building. This library had been a large barn in its first incarnation and as a result the outer shell was incredibly strong. The subsequent additions had made the barn into a library. Rooms for offices, storage and of course storage for books.  Looking around me, it seemed like somehow the building had shrugged off the last hundred years and emptied it into this gigantic earthen trash can beneath me.

In a desperate act of self-preservation, I started making my way across the rubble, clinging to structural members as best I could. Outside of the library, people were doing their level best to reach those trapped inside. Cars, trucks and tractors were all shining their headlights into the now-empty shell. The glare from their high beams made it impossible to see where I was going. It was worse than the sudden darkness from all the falling debris. I had to get out.

Each time I moved I had to check my feet to ensure that I was on solid ground that would bear my weight. When the soft roiled earth started to move under my shoe, I was sure the upheaval had begun again. Imagine my shock when I could finally see down into the cloudy debris... and through the dust, through the beams of light cast by the townsfolk, I could barely make out the bodies. Dozens of them. With layers of fallen wood, timbers, earth and years of books... these bodies were crumpled under the massive weight. No one made a sound. There were no cries for help.

With only a few feet ahead of me, the only thing blocking my way out was a huge rift in the ground. Perhaps only five or six feet across, with those bright lights in my eyes, it may as well have been a mile. I couldn't take the chance. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a clearer, safer path. With the light behind me, I could see to either side of my shadows. Bit by bit, I reached, clawed and cried my way to the farside of the building. Just a matter of inches away from the staff entrance, I saw that exit completely blocked with piles of timbers and fallen shelving. I could hear the townspeople just outside the way. All of the plaster and lath had cracked away in the upheaval. As a result, I could see cracks in the outer shell of the structure.

Like any old barn, those boards and battens were held in place with old nails. A few swift desperate kicks and I had one board loose. Enough room to get my head part-way through so I could breathe and scream for help. No words came out...just spittle and desperate whines. There was no way I could wait any longer. With one huge push, I shoved aside the adjacent boards and with a loud creak and then snap... I was free. I was outside the building. All the action was happening on the other side of the library, but I was outside at last. The cold gravel from the driveway felt like soft summer grass as I laid there and thought about what had just happened.

Sleep found me long before the searchers did.