Category Archives: metaphors

what the hell is that on her head?

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My mom is sitting down at the table having a cup of her fake coffee. AsI look down at her, I notice a thick smear of something light green stuck in her hair. Huh?
So, I touch it. It’s sticky. I smell it. It smells minty. Aha!

Toothpaste!

I have to admit it. I laughed a lot.

She has a spot on her scalp that always seems to itch her. When she tells me about it, I put Scalpicin on it, and that helps. I guess this time as she combed her hair in the bathroom mirror, she picked up the first thing that looked like an ointment tube and rubbed it on the itch.

The last time she rubbed something strange on her body, it was on her lips and they swelled to the point where I had to take her to the doctor’s. As far as anyone could tell, it was an allergic reaction to something, and I think she had been rubbing her 30-year-old Lancome cream on her lips. I cleaned out her beauty lotion drawer and it hasn’t happened since.

She always seems to be fidgeting. Mostly she takes sheets of Kleenex and folds them into squares and loads her pockets with them. She insists on having tops and pants with pockets. Sometimes I miss emptying a few when I do her laundry. Even if I use those scent-free dryer softener sheets, those little bits that stick to the clothes are a bitch to pick off.

She would love to fold blankets and other larger squares, but she has a torn muscle in her left shoulder. Not only can’t she raise that arm, but the whole shoulder is painful, even though she’s had a cortisone shot. After Thanksgiving, I am going to arrange for a physical therapist to come over and help her with that arm. I think I finally found a place that is certified for Medicare.

Very often, she snaps. No, literally. She snaps and unsnaps those closings on the tops I buy her so that they are easy to get on and off. Last night, she was desperately trying to snap closed the edges of a very old pillow case that she had long ago sewed snaps on to keep closed. (I guess she’s always been obsessed with snaps.) When she went to sleep, I resewed the ones that were coming off and sewed on a few additional snaps so that she could have yet another snap-happy fiddle thing.

Actually, I found a site on the web where you can buy fidget things for people with dementia. Other sites suggest these stress-reduction toys. My mom will not fiddle with toys. She will only fiddle with things that are familiar to her; things that she has used in her role as wife and mother. Safety pins are one of those things. She finds them and pins them to the inside of her slacks. The other day I found her picking her teeth with the point of a large safety pin. She has a drawer full of various dental picks that I bought her. But she uses a safety pin. Sigh.

I spend a lot of time Googling for ideas on how to calm my mother, since her fidgeting is associated with her nervousness and anxieties. As a result, I sent for a really soft furry teddy bear and made a sweater for it with a Polish logo. You’ve heard of Polar Bears? Well, this is a Polish Bear:

bear.jpg

I thought that stroking the bear’s fur might relax her. I thought the Polish theme would attract her. Nope. She knows it’s a toy. Cute, but no cigar.

Well, I tried.

In another day I’m planning to try to leave to go to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving. Actually, I’m going no matter what. I don’t know how my brother is going to manage, but I’m leaving enough food, clean underwear, desserts etc. so that my mom will have whatever she needs. He just has to make sure that she gets it all.
I can’t wait to see my grandson, who has been unofficially adopted by the guys in the local firehouse that his mom takes him to visit periodically. The last time he was there, they gave him a piece of real fire hose (including nozzle) and a door chock (whatever that is). His firefighter suit, of course, is compliments of Grammy.

firelex.jpg

He wants to be a firefighter when he grows up. Also the owner of a tree-cutting service. Or a road construction worker. Or some kind of para-medic/rescue worker.

I think he’s going to spend Thanksgiving rescuing his Grammy.

Lililth in the Darkness East of Eden

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lilith in the darkness.jpg

If you’re familiar with Kalilily Time, then you know who Lilith is. The image above is from here, a treasure trove of Lilith images. Lililth was said to be banished by god into the darkness east of Eden.

If you read the previous post, it should be obvious why that image resonates with me tonight.

I think of the days when this one would have been the Lilith image that spoke to me. And I think of the time when, again, the crone in me will fire up and fly away.

Assassination Christmas

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Bizzare.

It’s Christmas. I just finished watching The Bourne Supremacy and made my mother some chicken soup, since she’s got what looks like a tooth abcess — swollen jaw and pain and on an antibiotic prescribed by her dentist after I called him at home early on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve I spent reading Hunter’s Moon, a paperback escapist novel that defies categorizing, but does feature an assassin who is a werewolf and a female who hires him to kill her because her mother is driving her crazy and she can’t bring herself to be mean to her mean mother.

Aha. A pattern here, bizarre though it might be.

A month or so ago, I rented Assassination Tango, a movie that deserves a lot more than the little attention it got. Robert Duvall made my mouth water. Perhaps there’s a little werewolf in me.

Loveable assassins. Wishful thinking?

That mesmerizing flow of light and dark. That dancing with your demons and stepping fast to keep your balance. Life with adventure, sweet danger, passion, power.

No dancing here for me this Christmas, though. Just fantasy assassins with heart.

Living Life Spherically

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Second draft:

still life with lunch

I indulge my tongue with baguette and brie
and contemplate a miniature collection
of my life’s best metaphors,
captured in small wooden squares
framed, off-center, in an expanse of
off-white kitchen wall–
spiny shells and chunks of stone
bought or stolen from gritty beaches
and hallowed hillsides;
two miniature totem poles,
stacks of toothy masks eternally
divining and defying;
a ceramic face of serene Kwan Yin,
open hands inserted
in stiff maternal blessing;
a pious, pewter St. Anthony,
haloed, holding the sad Child, and
on the lookout for misplaced keys;
a feather, probably a duck?s
because the wild turkey’s didn’t fit,
and every altar needs a feather;
a brass double dorje, the mate
to the Tibetan bell I ring
in moments of turning
toward thoughts of a box-less future;
and, finally, a crumbling wine bottle cork
on which someone I can?t
remember had printed
in balky blue ballpoint:
Conundrum.

Elaine Frankonis 3/04

My life and my poetry — striving for art, settling for whatever it is.

“Live life spherically” is a line from Mona Lisa Smile — a movie a rather liked because it harkened back to my life as it was in the 50s (although I was a couple of years younger than those characters) and I felt good about not having made the assumptions that those girls made about being a successful female. And I really like that one line: Live Life Spherically.

Back in the 50s, being a helper, taking care of others, was not part of my life’s plan. Now it’s one of my primary functions.

But that doesn’t stop me from writing. At the moment, I’m wrestling with the first exercise for the NY State Writers Institute Advanced Poetry Workshop led by poet Eamon Grennon — to write three different 11-line (9 to 13 syllables per line) stanzas based on a assigned Vermeer painting.
A Google search located poems about paintings written by a variety of well-known poets. I find that I like this exercise.

I particularly like this poem by Wislawa Szymborska, “Two Monkeys by Brueghel”:

I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing–
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.

Actually, years ago, I wrote a short poem about Renoir’s Peonies.

There are no blossoms real as Renoir’s Peonies.
No rose as red. No red as real.
I would have them for my lover’s table,
to bloom red
and real
as a heart
open
to the palette knife.

In the meanwhile, I’m also helping to make arrangements for a reunion of a dozen or so of my old Beta Zeta sorority sisters. Most of us haven’t seen each other in more than forty years. I know for a fact that one of them will be participating in the Republican Convention in NYC this summer. We shared an apartment with four other BZers the summer of 1958. That was after my freshman year in college and I didn’t want to go home so I took some courses over the summer. I was 18 and we were all politically liberal. I guess I’d better not talk politics at the reunion. Man, that’s going to be hard!!!

And also, meanwhile, I watch my mother grasp for words, sleep away afternoons, and fret over losing control of everything she fought so hard to hold onto.

Live life spherically. But don’t hold on too tight.

The Crone’s Wall of Power

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A couple of months ago, a long-time friend of mine who’s a quilter agreed to quilt a “portrait” of me that I could hang on my wall — not a literal portrait, but her creative interpretation of “me.”

And she did it. And I hung it on the wall above my couch. And then I surrounded it with images of the people in my life who empower me, because the piece that she made, for sure, exudes pure power.

She usually quilts pieces that hang as rectangles; but mine she made as a diamond, with the diamond-shaped inside pieces representing the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The fabrics are rich and textured and appliqued and metalicaly embroidered — with milagros attached — hearts and turtles and salamanders.

It’s like a magical “ojo de dios” watching over me.
I’m not sure that my friend knows what an “ojo de dios” is, yet she created one as she delved into her feelings about what she knows about me. (She’s out of town now, but I’m going to check with her when she gets back to find out if she ever heard of it or not; she might well have, since she travels often to Mexico and collects Mexican art.)
Here’s my wall of power:

smpowerwall1.JPG
Meanwhile, I’m collecting textured yarns with which I want to make a mandala based on the “ojo de dios” idea. This site provides directions on how to make one. Jay Mohler, the artist, makes and sells them, but I have my idea for my own — one with lots more texture. I want to hang it over my computer, across from my wall of power — the eye of the god and the eye of the goddess sparking the space between.
Cool, huh?