. Spinning .

Every morning between seven-thirty and eight, my neighbor calls me to let me know she is alive. She has been widowed now for five years (oh Andy, I still miss you so!) and is frightened of being found dead three days after the fact, as happened recently to someone she knew who lived alone. This is a reasonable fear, and though I tease her unmercifully about remembering to keep the air conditioning on in the summer and note that luckily she no longer has dogs in the house, I understand the worries of the lone survivor.

But this morning she tells me about four large brown birds swooping over our backyards, and wonders if they are the eagles. I do not know. It is too late for me to run out and confirm what they are as they have disappeared over the horizon to fish the river. I doubt that they are eagles, but I will not tell her so and destroy the excitement I hear in her voice. She is not an outdoors person, and needed to be prodded into noticing the world above and beyond her doorstep and car. But I take my coffee cup and head out the back door anyway, sit on the back step and scan the sky.

Cardinals, robins, grackles, housefinches and blue jays score the blue yonder in abundance. But I am patient, and these satisfy me for now. The trees are yellowing up from Spring’s slow entrance. The tips of maple trees silhouette against the sky like the many buttoned backs of wedding gowns. Soon the buds will burst and turn into seeds that look like something else, then leaves that look like something else again.

There is so much out there, more than you can see at any one time, in the morning sky.

I don’t blog very much, if at all, about current events. The war in Iraq, the Americans killed in the effort, the unspeakable cruelties human beings heap upon each other, the poor, the hungry, the sick and the dying. I care. I can’t help them, and would if I could. I am not cold-hearted or even apathetic. It is just that my mental energy and compassion has always been focused much closer to home, and maybe I just don’t have enough left in me to spread too much further out; to reach across oceans.

One of my dearest friends is most likely going to die from cancer soon. This outrages me because her death will be determined by her decision on how much they are willing to spend on what may be a useless cause. Her out-of-pocket medical expenses to date, with chemotherapy and radiation treatments are just over the $50,000 mark. Yes, that’s $50,000, with only one three-day emergency hospital stay, one round of chemotherapy, and one long, one short round of radiation treatments when the cancer had spread. Because her husband is self-employed, and she worked in a small company without insurance benefits, they paid $800 a month for private insurance coverage. Yet the insurance will cover $1,500 out of a $3,500 single treatment of chemo, and will not cover whatever they can get away with. This couple has worked all their lives to provide a modest living for themselves, their two daughters, their own home, and were planning their retirement in a few years. But their savings is slowly shrinking, and she refuses to leave her husband with bills that their middle class honesty will ensure being paid in full.

Further, she had to work as long as she could, despite going down in weight to 95 lbs. from 115 and losing all energy and appetite to maintain, just to qualify for workmen’s compensation benefits. These benefits do not pay until she has been out of work for five months. Unemployment will not cover the five months because, naturally, in her condition she would not be considered eligible to work. Obviously, if they were rich people they could afford top quality insurance, or to pay the medical expenses themselves. Conversely, if they were poor, all would be covered by Medicaid. Unfortunately, they are typical of the hard working, tax-paying middle class American.

So forgive me if I do not seem to care about what’s happening on the other side of the world. Or if it’s right to work six months and collect six months, or not work at all and have seven kids to feed and be willing to let others pay your bills. I can’t join the battle if a guy wants to marry another guy, and I can’t waste time figuring out which politicians are lying, because most likely they all are. The wealthy Republicans take care of themselves, and the wealthy Democrats love the poor as tax deductions. I’m sorry if I am un-American by not caring enough about every single one of my fellow men, but I also don’t go around bad-mouthing America and its leaders because I am unwilling to apply for their positions and do a better job myself. I have seen too many of the elderly cutting their pills in half, taking daily medications every other day, refusing or being refused treatment. I have seen a young man refused insurance coverage that he pays premiums on because a breast biopsy on a male is not considered life threatening because it is rarely cancer. I have watched my friend bear her pain to get an extra couple hours out of painkillers, and turn down alternate methods of care because a potentially helpful but speculative medication costs $50 a pill. I have heard loving couples discussing divorce so that they wouldn’t lose their home to medical bills. I have seen first hand how expensive it is to stay alive if you are neither rich nor poor. Now I have nothing against the rich, they have attained their position and they are welcome to it, and their tax dollars provide the overwhelming majority of relief for those who cannot afford it and must be dependent upon aid.

My friends, as many like them, are not people looking for handouts, nor would they accept any. They are reluctantly in the position of having to seek out early benefits for which they willingly paid through insurance premiums, payroll social security taxes, property taxes, and even income taxes on interest gained on those savings that are being used up now for medical expenses. Their tax dollars helped many, many others achieve sustenance, housing, and education as well as medicaid benefits.

So yes, I feel grief, and yes, it is tainted by anger over social injustice. But I can’t help the world. I have a few injustices of a more personal nature to try to compensate for first.

Just got this old article in an e-mail from my brother-in-law. They must have been spring cleaning…

After many days of passing by an old and empty tree, I saw the eagle resting there today. His back was to me, but his great white head was turned in profile, golden beak sharply breaking up the softly swirled grey sky that he is free to fly through, mixing up its colors with the paintbrush tips of feathered wings. I would take it gladly as a sign of strength, persistence, dignity. But he can fly, and try as I might, I never will.

Today is 04/04/04, and in 6 months, I wrote 666 thoughts that would have been kept to myself. My father’s birthdate is 12/12/11; my mother’s 1/2/12. My husband’s social security number is only 2 digits different than mine, and if you add 2 to the total of my 2 different numbers, you get the single number that is different in his. I count pizza slices among friends. I find saneness in numbers. Reliability. Something whole and comprehensible, dependable and trustworthy. An escape into order from the chaos of words.

And aside from a precious few, no one cares about the words. Allowing them to boil and bubble to the surface and rush madly into the atmosphere did not halt but just reveal, and led them to evaporate.

I worked in the frameshop today from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. in a desperate attempt to catch up on my workload, only taking two potty breaks and grabbing cookies for breakfast and lunch as I ran through the kitchen back to the shop. Needless to say, I never got a chance to change the same five CD’s that played over and over again. These lines from lyrics to one of Waylon Jennings’ songs stuck in my mind:

“Long-legged girl, you really don’t need to talk,
Long-legged, good-looking thing, you don’t need to talk”

Okay ladies, you can breathe now, calm down. Men, I’ll bet that 90% of you are smirking. Unless, of course, your significant other is hanging over your shoulder reading this. Me, I’m with you. I’m smiling, with a little shake of my head and an eyeroll.

I lived through the 60s and 70s and the birth of feminism amid the cries of “chauvinist pig!” Yes, much good has come of it, but it came at a cost and has affected the natural instincts of the human male species forever. For every right gained, someone loses something—not always a bad thing, but sometimes an irrevocable change in our history and stamp upon our future. Sexual attraction is, after all, as necessary a part of our evolution as is civilization or refinement of our baser instincts.

But in the process of upgrading and learning, we always manage to sacrifice something that managed to get us to the point we are at. Basic needs are often crass, but only because we have come to believe them to be. Have we ever seen a male and a female chimpanzee engage in conversation before copulation? Does he even care if she knows how to peel a banana? We are, needless to say, far advanced of chimpanzees in intellect, but why do we need to get so stressed out and self-righteous about the basis upon which we are formed?

These simple, straight-forward words from this song are based upon natural instinct. If you are offended by them, fine; don’t listen to them. “I am woman, hear me roar” by Helen Reddy might be more to your liking. But men shouldn’t have to outwardly cringe upon hearing either side of the story, if deep down inside they really don’t deny a relation.

And come on, the words do imply that “talking” would be a bonus, something over and above what is needed, something special. Can’t we accept that and let it be? Isn’t that what tolerance and being open-minded is all about?