A TASTE OF MANZANITA HONEY

A TASTE OF MANZANITA HONEY

(Raw--Unfiltered)

I know I'm in trouble

when I start to identify

with the ants that keep trying

to get into the honey jar.

I've found a few

who made it,

tiny black corpses,

floating in their golden heaven.

Sighing, I scoop them out,

wipe the jar,

put it on another shelf.

They won't find it for a while.

Maybe those dead ants

are the lucky ones.

I, too, sometimes feel

I would die for a taste

of something sweet,

and so I eat chocolate

or have a drink

or buy something

or write a poem,

and I wonder who keeps moving

the golden dreams.

The Night The Bed Fell

   

The Night the Bed Fell

by James Thurber

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.
It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to be away where he could think. My mother opposed the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there was unsafe - it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on father's head in case the bed fell, and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter past ten he closed the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs. We later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or seven days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch.)
We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room and I told him that I was such a light sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake instantly. He tested me the first night - which I had suspected he would by holding his breath after my regular breathing had convinced him I was asleep. I was not asleep, however, and called to him. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a class of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. In case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone, he said, he would sniff the camphor, a powerful reviver.
Briggs was not the only member of his family who had his crotchets. Old Aunt Alelissa Beall (who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth) suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street. Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed at night without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube. To avert this calamity - for she was in greater dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods-she always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading,: "This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have." Aunt Gracie Shoaf also had a burglar phobia, but she met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had been getting into her house every night for four years. The fact that she never missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she scared them off before they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed she piled, where she could get at them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. 



Five minutes after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and say "Hark!" Her husband, who had learned to ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it slightly and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair.
But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred. In the front room upstairs (just under father's attic bedroom) were my mother and my brother Terry, who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually "Marching Through Georgia" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Briggs Beall and myself were in a room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours. Our bull terrier, Rex, slept in the hall.
My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by putting up, flat with the middle section, the two sides which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop-leaf table. When these sides are up, it is perilous to roll too far toward the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole bed down on top of one, with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact, is precisely what happened, about two o'clock in the morning. (It was my mother who, in recalling the scene later, first referred to it as "the night the bed fell on your father.")
Always a deep sleeper, slow to arouse (I had lied to Briggs), I was at first unconscious of what had happened when the iron cot rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me. It left me still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me like a canopy. Hence I did not wake up, only reached the edge of consciousness and went back. The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, "Let's go to your poor father!" It was this shout, rather, than the noise of my cot falling, that awakened Herman, in the same room with her. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical. "You're all right, Mamma!" He shouted, trying, to calm her. They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps ten seconds: "Let's go to your poor father!" and "You're all right! " That woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of what was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize that I was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the quick conclusion that he was suffocating and that we were all trying to "bring him out." With a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at the head of his bed and instead of sniffing it poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor. "Ugh, ugh," choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping his breathing under the deluge of pungent spirits. He leaped out of bed and groped toward the open window, but he came up against one that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the glass, and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me. Foggy with sleep, I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of and perilous situation. "Get me out of this!" I bawled. "Get me out!" I think I had the nightmarish belief that I was entombed in a mine. "Ugh," gasped Briggs, floundering in his camphor.
By this time my mother, still shouting, pursued by Herman, still shouting, was trying to open the door to the attic, in order to go up and get my father's body out of the wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and wouldn't yield. Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking. 


Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this time been awakened by the battering on the attic door. He decided that the house was on fire. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" be wailed in a slow, sleepy voice-it took him many minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught under the bed, detected in his "I'm coming!" the mournful, resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his Maker. "He's dying!" she shouted.
"I'm all right!" Briggs yelled to reassure her. "I'm all right!" He still believed that it was his own closeness to death that was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him, assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on, and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear father crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open, with a mighty jerk, and father came down the stairs, sleepy and irritable but safe and sound. My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began to howl. "What in the name of God is going on here?" asked father.
The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jig-saw puzzle. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. "I'm glad," said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, "that your grandfather wasn't here."

The Divine E. Bunny

My son Ben told me
his Christian friends,
hoping to save his soul,
asked him to Easter services
at their church. But he,
learning there would be
no Easter egg hunt,
politely declined.

I explained to him
about the organized church
of the Divine Bunny
and the factions therein:
those who hunt
the chocolate fudge eggs,
those who search for
the painted hard-boiled eggs,
and those who pray to find
the pink, yellow and blue
candy eggs, nestled in bright green
faux grass, in the wicker baskets
of many colors.

Then I said: but the real Bunny
encircles the Earth,
and we are all His congregation.
He knows " what's up, Doc,"
he knows our deepest longings
which he has already given
and are just waiting to be found.

Yes, Benjamin, my son,
there is an Easter Bunny,
a Santa, a Jesus,
and a God
of uncounted names.
They rove our world,
hiding treasures to delight
and enlighten,
sacraments of the senses
and the soul,

in the sweet-scented grass,
in the Wonderland that waits for us
down the rabbit hole.

12 Ways To Look in the Mirror

My son Ben was assigned to come up with 12 ways to look in the mirror for his acting class, this is what he wrote.

12 Ways Exercise

Activity: Looking in the mirror.

1. I walk into the bathroom, sniff the cigarette smoke that is wafting in through the window from the aprtment below me. I turn to look in the mirror, and see a sunbleached wasteland, large creatures lumbering and moaning stampede past. My heatbeat slows, then accelerates. I lean forward to get a better look, resting my hands on the wall to either side of the medicine cabinet, then, disbelieving, I open the door of the cabinet and check the back of the mirror with my hand. I close the door and stare, rapt, into this strange world.

2. I step into the bathroom, feeling odd, and look into the mirror. My breathing is heavy and I am unsteady on my feet. As I look at myself, I suddenly realize that I am growing younger, my face is becoming softer. I rub my head and feel my hair, and then look down at my hands, as they begin to shrink inward, hairs retracting back into my body. I look back in the mirror and can see myself physically growing shorter and my head gradually sinks below the bottom edge of the mirror. I fall over and begin to curl up, catching my feet in the loose clothing that swims around me, feeling the cold tile under my belly, I begin to cry in a tiny baby’s voice.

3. I walk into the bathroom, I’m walking very evenly and carefully, as if I am balancing something. My head is three times bigger than normal. I’m not concerned, this was just the way I was born. I stand in front of the mirror, and my head begins to loll to one side alarmingly, and I grab my head with my hands and straighten it on my shoulders. I rub my cheek, scratch my nose, grab a comb and being brushing my hair back. I have to reach up as high as I can to comb the top of my head, and it is always in danger of tipping over to one side, so I have to continually be catching it with one hand or the other. I smile in the mirror, and head off to work with a bounce in my step.

4. I walk into the bathroom and begin to shave, looking in the mirror. “hey, lookin’ good, oh yeah.” I begin rinsing the razor in the sink when I hear a voice close by. I look up, and listen, my head cocked. I walk out of the bathroom and into my small apartment, but there’s nothing. Then I hear something again, coming from inside the bathroom. I walk back in and say “hello?” I hear a response, coming from the mirror. “what?” I say, as I turn to the mirror, looking intently at my own reflection “who are you?” I say, leaning my weight on the sink. “You can’t be me, I’m me” I reply, putting hand onto my chest. “That’s not true!” I reply angrily, and then I turn and face the wall. “This is crazy, something’s happening to me!” Then I whirl-- “You,” I point my finger at the mirror, “don’t say that about my mom!” I put my face in my hands. “Oh my god, you’re so mean!” Then I get angry and move in close to the mirror. “I’m going to smash you to bits!” It grabs me by my throat,  choking me. I scrabble at the sides of the medicine cabinet, and grab the reflection’s wrist, I finally pull free, gasping. I run out of the bathroom and slam the door behind me. Then I sit and catch my breath. I pull my cell phone out of my pocket, and call dial a number “Hello? are you there? Please pick up, doc... its happening again...”

5. I’m the richest man in the universe, I slide down into my bathroom, where a butler stands, holding up a mirror. I trot over to the mirror, and stand while I am shaved, combed and powdered by Tunisian triplets. I turn my head back and forth as they rub my face with aftershave, sleepily observing what is happening. When they stop fussing over me, I mess up my hair with my hands, and run off hooting.

6. I look in the mirror, but it is only me, looking back at myself.  I stand there, arms outstretched, hands resting on the wall, staring right into my own eyes, looking at myself looking at myself. Then I laugh, because it’s not me at all, it’s just someone who looks like me. I stare at the other guy who looks like me. But it actually it is me I realize, so I laugh again, this time louder. It was me all along! Then I look at myself again. My hands slip and I fall face first into the mirror. I’m very very drunk.

7. I go to comb my hair while looking in the mirror, and the comb escapes, running up my shoulder and leaping onto the floor. I spin around and slam the door of the bathroom so it can’t get out, then I bend over, holding a newspaper. “Hey, it’s ok,” I say soothingly as I reach under the back of the toilet to grab the comb. But it’s too quick for me. It leaps in the air, scrabbling around on the smooth surface of the tub. I pull back the shower curtain, smiling as I watch it try to get out of the tub,  wild-eyed. It just looks so silly.

8.I stand looking at the mirror, then I wave my wand at my face and cry “Beardicus Grownicious!”  Instantly, a beard begins to sprout from my face. “Ooh,” I say, as I reach up to my face and feel the hair streaming out of my face. As the beard gets bigger and bigger, my eyes widen with horror. I wave the wand at my face, but it gets caught in the growing hair and gets knocked from my grasp, carried away by a giant river of hair that is roaring out of my face.  "No!” I cry. The hair fills up the room and forces me up against the wall. “Stopicus grownicious” I cry weakly.  Then I’m saved by Harry Potter.

9. I’m incredibly old, I’m bent over, my head is a shrunken raisin, all squinched up, and I slowly, carefully walk over to the bathroom, resting my weight on the wall, then the doorknob, then the sink. “Woo,” I say, as I rub my hip. I look into the mirror, squinting. Then I pull out my glasses, carefully rubbing them with a cloth I keep in my breast pocket. Then I put them on, look in the mirror and squint again. “Looking good!” I smile a toothless grin, and then slowly begin shuffling out of the bathroom.

10. I’m a tiny baby kid, I’m full of energy. I run around in a circle 3 times, making plane noises. Then I run into the bathroom. I look up at the mirror, but it’s too high. I run out and grab my toybox, and begin pulling it into the bathroom. It’s very heavy, and I have to lean my whole weight into pulling it. I finally get it in the bathroom, and clamber up on top of it. I look at myself somberly, and then make a hideous face, involving my tongue and my cheeks, but I can’t hold it because I'm laughing so hard. 

11. I try to look in the mirror, but it’s so dirty. I squint and move my head this way and that, but all I see is a greasy shimmer. I spray some Windex all over the mirror and begin wiping it down. I wipe it all over, up and down, round and round, I spray even more Windex on it, and wipe some more. Then I throw the dirty paper towel into the trash and look into the mirror. Then I walk away.

12. I look in the mirror, but I think it’s another fish, so I bump my head against it for the rest of my life.

The Trial: Flight From Self

In The Trial by Franz Kafka, Josef K. is put "on trial" for an unnamed offense. Prior to this, conflicts and inconvenient desires are ignored, festering under the bland surface of his rigid, routine existence, where even his visits to his mistress take place on the same day each week. The trial brings those conflicts out into the open.

K's plight worsens the more he shies away from taking responsibility for himself. He represses a strong feeling of guilt which emerges abruptly at decisive moments, while in court, he denies all guilt until the very end. To Miss Burstner he says: "Your room was thrown into disorder a bit this morning, through my fault to a certain extent--it was done by strangers, against my will, and yet, as I said, through my own fault." The "strangers" in question are the warders, who are whipped by the authorities following K's accusation, and he cries out, "I do not consider them to be guilty at all; it is the organization that is guilty, it is the high officials that are guilty." What is more, "it would have been almost simpler if K. had taken off his clothes and offered himself in place of the warders." And on the following day, he closes the door to the lumber room where they are being whipped, "hammering against it with his fists as if it would be shut tighter that way." His ultimate reaction to anything that doesn't fit his heretofore tidy, cloistered way of life is to deny and "shut the door" on it. He wants the lumber room cleaned out: "I tell you, we're being drowned in filth!" Conflicts, irrational incidents are experienced as overwhelming filth that must be thrown out, rather than faced and worked through.

Josef K. is very attracted to Miss Burstner, but is passive in relation to her. She has little "experience in legal matters", but she "would like to know everything, and legal matters, particularly, interest me very much. A court of justice has a particular attraction, don't you think?" She is "inordinately disappointed" that K. himself does not know what his prosecution is all about. The "court of justice" here represents the law of Josef K's inner being, or soul-self. Since he fears and in fact flees from that self, he is unable to have an truly intimate relationship with another person.

K.is in a rage at his arrest, but at the same time, he succumbs: "He harbored the intention...of offering himself up to them for arrest." He sees the situation as a "comedy", and at the same time, it gives rise to thoughts of suicide that recur throughout the novel.

His first impulse is to deny any wrongdoing, proclaiming that he has been falsely accused. He can only think of struggling against the forces threatening him. In the face of such external blows, he has not developed the kind of unassailable inner freedom and security that Kafka spoke of in Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way: "The fact that only one world of the spirit exists, takes hope from us and leaves us certainty."

K's conversation with the priest in the cathedral illustrates this concept of spiritual independence. They agree that his case is "going badly", and the priest asks him what he proposes to do about it. K's answer is: "I'm going to get more help...There are several possibilities I haven't explored yet." "You cast about too much for outside help," said the priest disapprovingly. "Don't you see it is the wrong kind of help?" K. then makes a derogatory remark about the character of the men in court, calling them "petticoat-hunters", and the priest loses patience: 'Can't you see even one pace in front of you?'...It was an angry cry, but at the same time sounded like the unwary shriek of one who sees another fall and is startled out of his senses." The priest then relates the parable "Before The Law." In this parable, there is the possibility that the man from the country can enter the door to the Law (which again, is his God-self, the Law of his Inner Being) after his death; what is more, he could have entered it during his lifetime, had he asked earlier for whom the entrance was actually intended, instead of waiting until he was at the point of death. Then he would have received the "redeeming message": the door was meant for him all along.

K., in plotting how to get "help", puts himself in the position of the man from the country pleading with the doorkeeper to let him in. As the man from the country is fixated on what he thinks of as the ultimate power of the doorkeeper, so K is fixated on the idea of getting help from others who he imagines to be "in the know", somehow more able than he to solve his problems. He has hopes that the priest will be able to help him: "...it was not impossible that K. could obtain decisive and acceptable counsel from him which might, for instance, point the way..." But at the end of their meeting the priest also identifies himself as a member of the Court, and once again K. is thrown back on himself.

K. comes to feel it is his "duty" to execute justice upon himself, but as he is never clear about the details of this, he is executed in a "play" put on by puppet-like "tenors" and "supernumerary actors." In the end, he is assailed with questions:


Like a sudden blaze of light, the casements of a window flashed open there; a human being, faint and tenuous in the distance and at that elevation, suddenly leaned far forward and stretched his
arms even farther out. Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who was concerned? Someone who wanted to help? Was it a single individual? Was it everybody?



Josef K. does not know the answer to these or the other questions raised by his trial; he has not attained certainty within himself. But, even as the man from the country in the parable "Before The Law" may be able to enter the door to the Law after his death--for the "portal of the Law is always open...always, that is, irrespective of the duration of life for the man for whom it is ordained, the doorkeeper will not be able to close it"--so too, perhaps, Josef K. may attain certainty after his death. He has made progress; he has been forced to look into himself, has learned that there are important questions, and he yearns to know the answers.

Anne Frank Speaks

[…] I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside, and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and I could be…if only there were no other people in the world. (8/1/1944.6)

I am a young girl still, yet no age at all,
and I have learned some things.
I know now I have always been free
to be all I can be,
to soar with the birds of the soul
even as we hid ourselves away
and hardly dared to play,
tiptoeing around
for fear of being heard downstairs.
I see now that all I've lived
has been part of me.
and I know, beyond doubt,
there are no "other people" in the world
or anywhere,
for my heart is still turned inside out
and I see them there,
sharing, living, loving, free,
my heart, my part,
dancing here upstairs with me.

My Tormentor, My Friend

I was in my twelfth year, attending summer school at my parents' insistence. I endured the classes as well as I could, and at their conclusion, relished my emergence into the sunshine, and the ultimate reward to myself: a chocolate eclair at a nearby bakery.

Being hearing impaired, and quite severely at that, I missed much, if not all of what went on in class. Usually the teachers became aware of this, or semi-aware. They were busy people with jobs to do, and many other students to consider. One of the classes that summer was in creative writing, where I was at more of an advantage; reading and writing had always been my strong suit, something that I actually enjoyed. I was more motivated to seek out the teacher's understanding and assistance. I would speak to him after class - one-to-one communications were always easier. One way or another I was able to find out our assignments - at least I remember a few poems put together with some pictures I cut out of magazines, and the teacher's scribbled comment: "You have a nice creative sense, Jenifer."

But there was a problem. Right behind me and giving no indication that he would go away, sat a boy who frequently and annoyingly would kick the back of my chair. I didn't know what to do about it. I didn't feel able to confront him, speak to the teacher about it, or even move to a different desk in that crowded classroom. I felt I was under the thumb of a malevolent boy out to get me, and all I could do was hunch in my seat and wish he would stop. It didn't help that he was black - I'd had just about zero contact with any blacks in my life up to that point. Our town and the schools I went to were overwhelmingly WASP.

Kick, kick, kick. I wondered if he considered me the enemy because I was white. I retreated even more within my shell.
Perhaps if I made myself small and hid out well enough, he'd lose interest in kicking my chair. There were lulls, but then it would start up again. Kick, kick, kick. Surely my hunched shoulders and palpable tension telegraphed to him the effect this had on me.

I finally got up the nerve to turn around in my chair and ask him to stop. To my surprise, he was not unfriendly, and he did stop. Well, mostly. Once in a while it seemed he would forget, the atavistic urge would kick in, and he'd kick away until I got up my nerve again, turned around and asked him to stop.

I still regarded him as a thorn in my side, someone I had to deal with in my beleaguered summer school life. But near the close of summer session, we actually conversed. I seem to recall I shared my poems with him - I would show my poems to anyone who would look at them. He glanced at them casually, and then he asked me a question: "How did you lose your hearing?"

My psyche did a double take. It was like I was seeing and understanding him for the first time. For one thing, no one - certainly no boy - outside of the hard of hearing world, had ever asked me that before. For another thing, there was a vulnerability and a depth of questioning in his face and eyes that told me this wasn't just idle curiosity.

I answered him as best I could: "We're not sure why. Maybe because I hit my head, or had a high fever." This was true. The onset of my deafness at age seven was shrouded in mystery. And I now understood that this boy had been a mystery to me, too. He was not at all the tormentor that I thought he was. He was someone who cared.
And perhaps this was why he kicked my chair. He was interested in knowing me and this was the only way he could think of to get me to turn around and speak to him.

We weren't meant to extend that moment. When class was over for the last time, we went our separate ways. But I was changed by the encounter. His sad, yearning eyes and question stayed with me, and as I ate my eclair, I mused on the surprises and sweetness of life. Today, I hope my friend is happy, wherever he is.