imposing…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

this decadent dawn…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

smoker…

This week, in Albuquerque, we went to a casino. In addition to an assault of noise and lights, we were engulfed in cigarette smoke. In the U.S., it’s easy to forget that this used to be the norm: people smoking in offices and movie theaters, in restaurants and on airplanes.

My parents were both smokers. My dad quit in his 50s after he tore something coughing — but not on the first try. It took my mother saying that she bet he couldn’t quit to get him to stop for good. My mother smoked right through her pregnancy, but she quit when I was born. She said she didn’t want to pollute that sweet-baby smell with smoke. I know it couldn’t have been easy and I count it as a gift.

But it didn’t stop me from smoking, starting at about 11 or 12 with stale cigarettes cadged from the crystal box that my parents would put out for guests and continuing until I was 25. Every time I lit up someone was sure to say, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

One day I caught sight of myself in the mirror, cigarette in hand, and was shocked at how wrong it looked. So I quit. Finished. Done. But even now, after all this time, and not ever being a heavy smoker, I sometimes wake up in the morning and realize I was contentedly smoking in my dream.

The casino visit feels like an inoculation — a booster shot — against the dark temptations of such dreams.
. . . . .
drawing by Dorothy, circa 1941

watching New Mexico…

the busy sky…
virga — the veils of rain that don’t reach the ground…
shadows draped across sculpted mesas…
the many colors of sand…
prairie dogs…roadrunner…woodpecker…
a shaggy donkey…a pink-nosed week-old calf…
the fragrance of ponderosa…
. . . . .
photo of Red Rock Park

Happy Mother’s Day

This is a card for Mother’s Day by jik, age 6
© j.i. kleinberg

the sacred slow waters…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

rock the pastoral…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

feathered…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg
(Yup, permanenence. Straight out of the magazine.)

as the moon…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

unfolded…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

each whirl…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

what we wear…

My mother loved clothes. When she was young and still trying to fit in, she selected each garment with attention to style, color, fit, fabric and whether it was classic enough to endure the fickle seasons of fashion. Classic was a word she liked and one she emphasized as she instructed me in my own choices. She had beautiful clothes and yet she was rarely extravagant and not averse to wearing the same clothes many times over.

Dorothy loved to shop. It was an adventure, an artistic endeavor. But it was also a frustration because the garment she envisioned would not arrive in the stores for at least two years. She would set out with the conviction that her closet required a corduroy jacket or harem pants or something in a particular shade of pumpkin and it would simply not exist. Yet, had she waited a couple years, the shops would be bulging with pumpkin and corduroy and wide-leg flowing slacks. This ahead-of-its-time vision never failed her. But it was disconcerting in the moment, as she found herself unable to assemble the look she sought.

As she grew older and acknowledged the advantages of her identity as an artist, she became less a slave to convention. Still not extravagant, she recycled familiar garments into new combinations, became the queen of quirky accessories and relished the attention she garnered. (Note that in this photo of Dorothy at age 76, her ‘necklace’ is made from an electric cord, complete with plug.)

When I was an adolescent, everything about my mother embarrassed me. She could have dressed — and nearly did — with the restrained elegance of Jackie Kennedy and, from my uncomfortable-in-my-own-skin vantage, it would not have been suitable. I wanted her to be a mother that no one would notice so that I could be a girl — and I nearly was — that no one would notice.

Yet by the time she had transitioned to quirky, I had grown more tolerant, more appreciative, more able to laugh with her as she thumbed her nose at the expected. I discovered in myself the two-years-ahead sensibility and admired her willingness to be odd, even if I was still uncertain how to dress the person I hoped eventually to recognize — and accept — as myself.

After spring…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

memory…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

signs of spring…

The perfect greens of spring, scale precise upon scale, new growth bright as the robin chick’s gape, this hunger for air, for life, this urge to twirl the slowest waltz.

. . . . .
thujopsis dolabrata – elkhorn cypress

bring…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

in the scrape…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

weakened…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg

the line of defense…

Toward the end of her life, her faculties compromised by dementia, macular degeneration and the cumulative wear of some ninety years of minor ailments, my mother never lost her appetite, her fashion sense or her eagerness to be the center of attention.

If she couldn’t bathe or dress herself, she was still emphatic about how she looked and insistent upon a careful, daily review of all the options. Though the choices didn’t change, deciding what to wear took up more and more time.

She loved going out and the promise of a restaurant meal or a walk through a museum would fuel her with anticipation. Yet these small adventures were, again and again, the most challenging interactions we had in those last difficult years.

Excited as she was to go, as much time as she had spent preparing — choosing the right clothes, earrings, accessories — when we arrived at the car she became mulish and angry and refused to move or be moved. She was always small, but she might as well have weighed a thousand pounds for all my ability to budge her from her wheelchair.

Any evidence of new-found passivity or compliance would vanish as she seemed to concentrate an entire lifetime’s worth of complaint and blame into this minuscule geography: the stand-turn-sit between the wheelchair and the passenger seat. It was not as if she couldn’t; she still could and did transfer in and out of the chair and she still walked, if very unsteadily, with a walker.

It didn’t matter where we were going or even if Southern California was having one of its rare rainstorms. There we would be, at the curb or in some parking lot, she unmoving, I cajoling, flattering, joking, soothing, looking for any wedge into her stubbornness.

Sometimes, if there was time urgency, I would have to recruit help — a man to lift her from the chair and set her in the car. The rest of the time, I’d just have to wait until her determination weakened or her mind signaled readiness. She’d seem to lighten, set her hands on the chair arms and push herself upward. Buckled in at last, she’d look around eagerly, excited, again, to be going somewhere. But arrived at the other end of our journey, the scene would unfold once more as she refused to emerge from the car.

It wasn’t just me; she did this with other people too, and, not surprisingly, the number of friends willing to drive her diminished fairly quickly. From one time to the next, she had no memory of these confrontations and no awareness that her obstreperousness might have a negative impact on someone’s desire to take her out.

For whatever reason, and I still don’t understand it, this was the line she needed to defend. Whether it was some unexpressed fear or simply the disconnect between the way she imagined herself and the reality of the moment, she would not or could not say and I will never know.
. . . . .
photo: Dorothy at age 6

an accordion…

found poem © j.i. kleinberg