Lyrics dis-respecting the Beatitudes

          Mom, I think, had a spiritual side even though it's been years since she went to church--or, to get the tense right, she hadn't gone to church for years before her death; she didn't go to church after we moved to California in 1966, as far as I know.  But as a child she, the child of Methodists, like the pageantry and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church and became an Episcopalian rather than a Catholic just because she didn't want to break the hearts of her Protestant parents and because her best friend in Blackfoot, Idaho, was the wife of the minister at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where we kids--at least Dana and I--were baptized.   In fact, the wife of the minister, Betty Zulch, became my Godmother.  I think in Iowa we may have gone to the Methodist Church--maybe on Easter?  I just remember directing the choir from my part of the pew.  I also remember getting geraniums on Easter Sunday--oh, but was that in Blackfoot, when she took me to Pocatello one Easter?  Anyway, in South Carolina we went first to St. Martin's in the Field, where the minister said, in the early 1960s, that we didn't have to worry about Negroes coming to our church because Episcopalians were too well-educated and dignified to go where they weren't wanted.  Then, while Daddy was helping Kenneth Morrison write a book on pre-marital counseling, we started going to St. John's Episcopal Church, where Missy and I sang in the choirs and Mom cried during services.  Years later I asked her why she was crying when others were just reciting the liturgy and not seeming to take it very seriously.  She told me, "I kept thinking, 'If it weren't for God, I'd be divorced now.'"
           Now that I'm taking Comparative Literature, I see that I did pick up some teachings from the church.  My professor was surprised that I knew "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John" when he asked what the Gospels were and that I could quote (almost correctly) John 3:16:  "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believeth in him would not perish but would have ever after life.  I also know the Beatitudes, but I also know the songs from Camelot:

Two Songs from Camelot (that aren’t nearly as nice as the Beatitudes)

MORDRED :  The seven deadly virtues, those ghastly little traps

Oh no, my liege, they were not meant for me

Those seven deadly virtues were made for other chaps

Who love a life of failure and ennui

 Take courage-now there's a sport

An invitation to the state of rigor mort

And purity-a noble yen

And very restful every now and then

I find humility means to be hurt

 It's not the earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt

Honesty is fatal, it should be taboo

Diligence-a fate I would hate

 If charity means giving, I give it to you

And fidelity is only for your mate

You'll never find a virtue unstatusing my quo

or making my Beelzebubble burst

Let others take the high road, I will take the low

I cannot wait to rush in where angels fear to go

With all those seven deadly virtues free and happy little me has not been cursed

Read more: SOUNDTRACK ARTISTS - SEVEN DEADLY VIRTUES LYRICS http://www.metrolyrics.com/seven-deadly-virtues-lyrics-roddy-mcdowall.html#ixzz1c6qKqLE5
Copied from MetroLyrics.com

You can also send this song’s ring-tone to your cell.  (That sentence deserves an exclamation mark.)

Title: Fie On Goodness

CHORUS
Fie on goodness, fie
Fie on goodness, fie
Eight years of kindness to your neighbor
Making sure that the meek are treated well
Eight years of philanthropic labor
Derry down dell
Damn, but it's hell
Oh, fie on goodness, fie
Fie, fie, fie

It's been depressing all the way (derry down, derry down)
And getting glummer every day (derry down, derry down)

KNIGHT 1
Ah, but to burn a little town or slay a dozen men
Anything to laugh again

ALL
Oh, fie on goodness, fie
Fie, fie, fie, fie, fie

KNIGHT 1
When I think of the rollicking pleasures that earlier filled my life
Lolly lo, lolly lo
Like the time I beheaded a man who was beating his naked wife

ALL
Lolly lo, lolly lo

KNIGHT 1
I can still hear his widow say
Never moving from where she lay
"Tell me what can I do, I beg, sir, of you
Your kindness to repay"

ALL
Fie on goodness, fie
Fie on goodness, fie

KNIGHT 2
Lechery and vice have been arrested

KNIGHT 3
Arrested!

KNIGHT 2
Not a maiden is evermore in threat
Virgins may wander unmolested

KNIGHT 4
Unmolested!

ALL
Lolly lo let
Gad, it's a sweat
Oh, fie on goodness, fie
Fie, fie, fie, fie, fie

KNIGHT 5
How we roared and brawled in Scotland
Not a law was e'er obeyed
And when wooing called in Scotland
We'd grab any passing maid
Ah, my heart is still in Scotland
Where the lasses woo the best
On some bonny hill in Scotland
Stroking someone's bonny...

CHORUS
Fie on Scotland, fie
Fie on Scotland, fie

No one repents for any sin now
Every soul is immaculate and trim

SOME KNIGHTS
Immaculate!

CHORUS
No one is covered with chagrin now
Lolly lo lim
Gad, but it's grim
Oh, fie on goodness, fie
Fie, fie, fie

There's not a folly to deplore
Derry down, derry down
Confession Sunday is a bore
Derry down, derry down

KNIGHT 1
Ah, but to spend a tortured evening staring at the floor
Guilty and alive once more

CHORUS
Oh, fie on virtue, fie
Fie on mercy, fie
Fie on justice
Fie on goodness

Fie, fie, fie, fie, fie

Mom's 90th Birthday

          Photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berkeley_Square_evening_December_2005.jpg

          Yesterday was Mom's 90^th birthday, and since she’d talked for several years about her plan to go to Berkeley Square in London with friends on her 90^th birthday and sing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” Jonathan printed out a picture of Berkeley Square (above), and we took it to Pleasant Hill, where he, Kathy, and I sang it for (and we hope with) Mom while sipping champagne in her honor and before lighting the candle on a cupcake and making a wish!

          I'd never heard the song sung by anyone but Mom, who played it on the piano, but now I see that all the major artists have recorded it:  Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, even Ron Stewart!  Apparently Petulia Clark sang it at a major event commemorating World War II.  I wonder what Mom's special attachment to the song was.  Maybe a love of London?  I love that image of "angels dining at the Ritz."  How elitist!

  And what's this about a puzzled moon wearing a frown?  Anyway, with lots of love for Mom, I'm letting you see the words.

That certain night,
The night we met,
There was magic abroad in the air.
There were angels dining at the Ritz,
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.


I may be right, I may be wrong,
But I'm perfectly willing to swear
That when you turned and smiled at me,
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.


The moon that lingered over Londontown
Poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown.
How could he know that we two were so in love?
The whole darn world seemed upside down.


The streets of town were paved with stars,
It was such a romantic affair.
And as we kissed and said goodnight,
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.


~interlude~




When dawn came stealing up, all gold and blue
To interrupt our rendezvous,
I still remember how you smiled and said,
"Was that a dream? Or was it true?"


Our homeward step was just as light
As the dancing of Fr-ed Astaire,
And like an echo far away
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

Mom's Obituary

Mom's obituary is in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle this morning (as well as in the Contra Costa Times), and you can almost see the clouds behind her in the picture.  (Now I wish I'd asked about color!)  The picture was taken the day Kathy and I took her to the U.C. Davis Alzheimer's Disease Center in Martinez.  She wasn't leaving the house during that period because of a  very personal fear that I won't explain here.   One exception to her refusing to leave the house was when I was staying with her and she came across a letter from Nancy Pelosi saying, "Before you do anything else, write a check to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee" or something to that effect.  Mom said, "Oh, I meant to do that before!"  She wrote out a check for $150.00 and asked me to take her to the post office.  She directed me there, too.  There were also occasional visits to her doctor, though she didn't always make it to  those.  In March, she left the house with us and buoyed her own spirits by observing the cloud formations and sharing with us all she saw.  I sang her just the beginning of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now."

Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feathered canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way.

I didn't continue with the less cheery lyrics.

Mom was really brave that day, and the picture of her in today's newspaper shows her afterwards, smiling outside against a backdrop of fluffy white clouds--even though there's just the slightest suggestion of the clouds.

There are things we left out of the obituary.  I wanted to make a special mention of David and her asking about him and expressing the hope of seeing him.  He had asked about her recently, too.  We were going to take him to see her at Aegis on her birthday, October 25. Instead, we'll have a special family gathering--hopefully with our nieces and grandnieces as well as with Suzy and Kathy before the nieces return to the East Coast.

I also hope that by mentioning that Mom was adopted, I didn't make it sound as if the Robisons weren't the "real" parents.  I always thought they were, and I loved them both.  Mom adored her father.

I'd wanted to give some examples of  her travels:  She and Kathy traveled together to Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia, bicycled across the Netherlands, visited her daughter Tina in Algeria, took cruises to Mexico and Hawaii, and went camping across the northern part of the United States to find the perfect apple pie.  A francophone, her favorite trip abroad was probably one to see the Impressionist exhibit in Paris.  She also made trips to see her daughters Dana and M’Lissa and their children and to visit her daughter Susan and son-in-law in Texas.  

Of course, I'll always remember her comments when she asked me (a year after I first mentioned him), "So who's this man you love?"  We had the following exchange.

"I wish I knew.   He's very secretive.   I think he's either a drug dealer or a CIA agent. "

"Well," she said, "I hope he's a drug dealer because I don't think CIA agents are very nice people."

"Some people don't think drug dealers are all that nice," I pointed out.

"It depends on the drug," she said.

Then, after she met our Mystery Man, we had another exchange.

"He's so nice!" she said.

"Yes, he is," I agreed.  "And I love him.  But, Mom, he lies."

"Well, that could work," she said, and when I laughed, she explained, "I mean, as long as you know he's lying."

Yes, she made a good point.  We can appreciate and even love people who aren't honest with us as long as we don't fool ourselves into believing that we can trust them or base our happiness on them.  As Mom knew, our happiness comes from within or not at all.

 

The Inadequacy of Obituaries

I've finished writing, with the help of  Jonathan and Suzy, an obituary about my mom, and it will appear in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle as well as in the Contra Costa Times so if friends don't know about her death this past week, they'll know, and people who know me but don't know Mom will have a little bit of an idea about her.  But really, obituaries are so inadequate!   I think that's the way with resumes.  Facts don't really sum us up. So today I want to write a little bit about what's been left out of the obituary.

I got a message from the nurse at Aegis on Saturday night that Mom had choked at dinner, been unable to breathe, lost her pulse, been resuscitated and taken to Emergency at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek.  Of course, I rushed out the door, but traffic was such that it took me 40 minutes to get to the Bay Bridge!  It had taken the paramedics only four minutes to reach Mom after they were called, but there was no saving Mom even though there were “heroic measures.”  We spent three days with a mother who was no longer there but was, instead, attached to far too many tubes—and this in spite of her Advance Health Care Directive stipulating that she not be kept alive artificially if there were no hope of recovery.  I guess that there was hope of getting  back brain activity with something called Hypothermia Therapy.  They said some patients come out of it knowing the date and that Obama is president, which gave me fantasies of Mom’s getting back the brain activity she had before Alzheimer’s.  But I also thought of how horrible it would be if she were “saved” but paralyzed and unable to do anything more than breathe.

                While we were waiting for them to let us see Mom, my sister Suzy mentioned the play W;t.  She had just seen the movie version with Emma Thompson as the brilliant professor of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets? 

                “And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.”  The comma is supposed to mean that nothing but a breath (the comma) separates death  from everlasting life.

               

                John Donne is the one who wrote “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

                Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so.”

                The professor is nothing like my mom, but she’s also facing her death. giving DNR orders, and she speaks directly to the audience at the beginning:  “It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die at the end."

                So I’ll tell you that last Wednesday I began the day at the side of the body of the wonderful woman who was my mother as she took her final breaths, finally—after three days—disconnected from all the tubes and the machines that were keeping her artificially alive without any brain activity.  They did keep her attached to morphine, though.  It was good to see her face without the tubes, but it didn’t seem to be her face at all.  She looked like a little bird, fallen from the nest.  Kathy and I were there to stroke her hair and tell her all the things we loved about her and were going to celebrate about her 90 years—just as if she could hear because you never know, and the hospital staff was wonderful about also speaking to Mom as if she were there and about working around us, encouraging us to be there instead of making us feel as if we were in the way. Nurses are among my heroes.  While Mom was at Aegis, I would sometimes lie down beside her and cuddle with her, and a couple of times we even sang together--showtunes!  She would join in.  We got all the way through "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Carousel, and after we sang "Bali Hai" together, Mom said, "You know, if you gave that to me for my birthday, I think that would be my favorite present, but I wouldn't tell anybody that."  Even with Alzheimer's Mom thought about hurting the feelings of other gift-givers.  That's the kind of thing you can't put in an obituary.  I went home that day and ordered the sheet music so Mom, still able to play the piano, could have it for the sing-along for her 90th birthday.  Carousel arrived the day I came home on Wednesday.  Anyway, once when we were cuddling, Mom said, "This is very comforting," and at the hospital I wanted to lie down with her, but the tubes got in the way.  So did the body temperature in the Hypothermia Therapy they used.

                After Mom had had 24 hours of the “chilling” part of hypothermia, which they began at 10:00 PM on Saturday, they started the warming on Sunday and got her back to a normal body temperature by Monday, but she didn’t say “October ten”  or “President Obama.”  She never responded at all except for little seizures—although at one point, when she was still attached to too many tubes, her eyes opened and her mouth trembled, and she really looks as if she were sobbing for a couple of minutes.  The nurse gave her more Adivan.   On Monday we waited all day for the hospitalist, the doctor who makes the rounds and is allowed to say more than the nurses are permitted to say.  Of course, he came after Suzy left and Kathy had gone home to feed the dog.  He told me, “It’s so sad, but…”  and even though he continued his sentence, I already knew from his first words and from seeing Mom what the end would be.  Yesterday I brought in the afghan my mom made for my 40^th birthday so we could cover her with that for our last hours with her (body).    The first hours of her “passing” went so slowly that Suzy called Jonathan to ask how long it might be, and Jonathan looked it up and said “from ten minutes to two and a half days, average.”  So Suzy left with the idea that she would come back this morning after picking up some breakfast for Kathy and me.  But it was at 12:45 a.m. that Mom stopped breathing, and 1:15 a.m. that the nurse disconnected the monitors showing her “progress.”  So I called Suzy to let her know, and then I drove back to San Francisco, where contacted Jonathan, my sister Dana and her two sons by e-mail before collapsing.

                I spent the next two days writing Mom’s obituary, and even though I feel sad that she didn’t make it to her 90^th birthday and that her death from choking was such an awful way to go,  my overwhelming feeling is one of love and admiration.  I believe in the adage that "With a death, a life ends, but a relationship continues."  And in a sense Mom's life hasn't really ended because of what she permanently left with us, and some of that is mentioned in the official obituary.  

          On Sunday Javier and I will see my brother David, and, sparing him the details that I'm not sparing you, I'll  tell him about Mom, who often asked about him.  He had asked about Mom, too, who after forty years of going to see him with me, could no longer go.  We were waiting for her to get stable at Aegis, and then we were going to bring David in to see her on her birthday.  That's something else that isn't in the obituary--her love and concern for David.  I couldn't mention the funny, off-beat things she said, either.   'But, to paraphrase Tennyson a bit, "She is part of all that she has met." 

Sea Lions and Drought Invasons

I really want to get in the habit of blogging every day, so I'm back with some news items that interest me.  "Vets euthanize wounded sea lion" is an article by Carolyn Jones about a disoriented sea lion who crossed Highway 101 and got named Broadway Bound because the rescuers found her at the Broadway exit in Burlligame.  She had to be euthanized because she wouldn't eat, didn't respond to people--even those bringing herring-- and she kept trying to climb the fence around the enclosures.  She had a "chronic brain impairment" and couldn't go back to the bay or learn to live at a zoo or aquarium, so they put her to sleep.  She had a necropsy, and there was a bullet fragment in the left side of her brain.  Fishermen have been shooting sea lions, their fishing competitors.  She was also suffering from seizures caused by eating fish poisoned by toxic algae.

Another sad story is the one about the animals like hippos, elephants, and buffalo in East Africa who are so desperate for water and food that they've been invading villages and hurting people.  . 

Post Office

As a letter-writer (who now uses mostly e-mail but never texts) I'm fascinated to read that the Postal service is in debt with more than $15 billion and that it's the nation's second-largest civilian employer--after Walmart!  They're thinking of ending door-to-door delivery, "which costs the Postal Service $100 a year for EACH of 30 million addresses.  (It's interesting to me that there are "only" 30,000,000 addresses, but of course their aren't separate addresses for each of the 300,000,000 people in our country.)  The Obama administration has signed on to ending Saturday delivery.  Others want to end no-layoff provisions in the union contracts, cut 220,000 jobs in the next four yeas, cut 3,700 post offices...They want to relocate post offices so they're in grocery stores, gas stations, etc.  I see that stamps are sold at Office Depot.    The article (by Carolyn Lochhead, by the way)says that letters with stamps plummeted 36 percent in the past five years.  Junk mail is now more prevalent than letter mail.  The PO service will lose $10 billion this year.  So Netflix is one of the few new customers, and it's a big one.  Netflix spends $600 million a year mailing DVDs. If we didn't have Saturday deliveries, I wouldn't have been able to watch (again) The English Patient, a movie I hated when it first came out but am now willing to reconsider.  I also learned that Congress in 2006 prefunded retiree health benefits by 100 percent over 10 years, and that's a rate "that no other entity, public or private, has to achieve."  One of the considerations in closing and/or relocating POs is that they're taking real estate places--more than Starbucks, McDonald's and Walmart combined (in the US).  The Postal Service was built to carry twice the volume of mail that it now delivers, but there's union and political resistance to closing POs.  Some say it's a vital component of our nation's infrastructure because a third of U.S. household don't have a home Internet connection, and a four don't use the Internet at all.  The article says close to the end that the Postal Service still delivers 560 million pieces of mail every day to 150 million addresses six days a week.  I thought they said 30 million.  Oh, and she mentions that it goes by mule to the Havasupai Indians at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, by boat to passing ships in the Detroit Rover, by plane to roadless Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska--but plane is how it arrives most places.  She says that European post offices have moved heavily toward commercialization and privatization.  "Germany's Deutsche Post has just one post office left, and Sweden none."