Beginning Somewhere

Is this thing on?

Apparently is it.

Can you hear me out there in Radio-land?  

How do you start this thing?  Do you turn it?  Do you flip it?   I know you click it, and then have to edit it by clicking again some more and then deleting and making that capital letter into a lower case letter.

this is the life of a luddite in the year 2012.  Someone resisting technological advances except when completely convenient, like when some sort of medical intervention is needed.  Like when a Porter Robinson song is available only by digital download.  Like when i have to allow my i's to be lower case so you know it's not a mistake, it's a style decision.  You can only do certain things now online that you used to do by the phone.  But now, the companies have gotten wise to it, and now they charge you for a human interaction.  Can you believe it?  i think there's a $25 fee to get a flight if you call them.  sometimes it's worth it, you know, calling from the woods or whatever, as i have found myself in from time to time.  But then there are other times, and i have to get down and do it.  get on the come-poot-urr, as the young child of one of my longest-time friends used to call it.

but you say, Kyra -- a la Aunt Kiki, ky, kysie, kak, kayak-a-canoe-uh -- didn't they train you for that?  and i say, well yes, they sure did.  yes, way back in the early eighties, they did indeed train me for that.  Apple IIe was in first grade, the one with the green MS-DOS language and the game called 'Lemonade Stand' which was a probability game -- in fact, i was just discussing the game of probability with my mother the other day, the day before yesterday, when she said that she was looking forward to me coming home, and just being there.  there in the house, as a presence, since my grandma ran away twice already this week.  i said, mom, you gotta lock her in the house.  but what if the house burns down, my mother worries.

i said to my mother, mom, there's got to be a solution for that, some tool already created for this exact purpose.  some sort of child lock-type thing that would allow her to exit only in the -- and i am having a visual flashback to an object that was in that house that Grandma raised my mama in.  there was this little wooden joke thing with painted words that read,' In Case of Fire', in the back of the house, by the back door, where you could run out down the brick stairs across the gray gravel down past the bright red sour cherry bush that would entice you as you continued running down the little brown dirt path across some weird broken cement bridge underneath which a small trickling creek always trickled.

and then you would get to the grass, the green green lush soft grass in the middle of a somewhat small enclosure of hardwood trees next to her garden, her all organic-sustainable garden that was lined with stacks and stacks of old newspapers that created a wall behind her metal wire four-by fence that intended itself to keep little critters out.  i don't know if that worked, but we sure loved the raspberries we found if we went a little further into the enclosure.  there was a quite large, tall apple tree, and some littler trees - seckel pear, if i remember correctly. 

can you save this thing?  i want to hit command save, because now is the time when i have some stuff down, i don't want it to be eaten by the computer -- maybe i just ...publish it?

anyway, okay, i did it.

so, back to Grandma's garden.  it was great.  it was always kind of wetter in there, especially in the old horse trough up front where the frogs used to live.  my brother and i were always fascinated with that thing, made of cement, and all covered with algae and funk and gross, sometimes cute lily pads.  i imagined the horses coming for a drink a long time ago.  

i'm telling you this to take you back to a place where i played in the dirt.  a place where i loved my grandmother, even her horrible cooking.  she nearly set the place on fire weekly, burned-out pots were a regular visual decoration on the wooden surfaces in her kitchen.  everything in her house was well-worn.

i'm telling you this because, now, my grandma's house belongs to some one else.  and my grandma now lives in the house in which i was raised.  and now, on a regular basis, grandma leaves the house - in twenty degree weather - without shoes or coat - and this is where probability must step in.

i say to my my mom, dipping back to the resources partly imparted thanks to that early training on the Lemonade Stand game on the Apple IIe, well mom, let's talk about probability.  the probability is high that she will run away again.  she's done that twice already this week, you said.  but in thirty-some years, the house has never burned down, and in the twelve or so since grandma moved in, she hasn't burned it down either.  but what about hypothermia?  it sounds like she has a much higher probability of getting hypothermia, or just getting lost forever -- saying things like, "The woman was in the field" and "I need to help the horse in the barn" and "the man is drowning down at the creek- i need to help him" -- luckily, there are no bears in the neighborhood.  so that won't happen.

but poor grandma.  and my mom, well, i say mom, you gotta forget about telling her to not do these things, forget about the lists of numbers you are offering her and the telling her not to do stuff.  she's  a little toddler whose hand you need to hold by the street because she doesn't understand that there are cars there that will hurt her.  and really, maybe all these things are a gift to you.  all these 'weird' things she's saying -- it seems that there is a consistent narrative in her words, the things she's choosing to say, top focus on, to help the horse in the band, the lady in the field, the man by the creek -- maybe she's just showing you who she is, mom, so you can know that it was never personal.  that she's just who she is and she's how she's always been, and that really what is happening is a total gift.  so maybe just watch.  listen.  observe.  see her being her.  she's showing you.  all the other stuff can go away. 

so then my mom told me a horrible story.  about how violent my grandmother's father was.  about how he was in World War I and they lived in Kansas during the dustbowl era.  how my grandmother had told my mother a story about an old mule they had.  well, apparently, one day, the mule, a great big animal, was not doing what it was told to do.  so he hit it in the head with a hammer.

i briefly wondered out loud to my mother:  if he hit a mule in the head with a hammer when it wouldn't do what he wanted it to do, well...kids often don't do what they are told.  so who knows.  poor grandma.

i am telling you this now, because i feel these stories all link us together.  these stories are part of our human tale, our human experience that links us all, that hopefully motivates us to be different or better or somehow improved in certain ways in our own time here as humans in our bodies in this life our one go 'round.

i'm telling you this because it is one thing that i can do that can create social change.  telling stories, our oral history.  our literature, our experiences, our time.  our questions, our finding solutions. our innovation.

so.

has there been an object invented yet?  to keep my grandmother in and hypothermia our, while allowing escape in case of fire -- a veritable child-lock for adults?  is this out there?  maybe you know.  i know that it needs to be out there -- the Baby Boomers are on their way to Dementia and Alzheimer's and everything else that causes strange behaviors in humans that we love, that maybe we don't know that well, that maybe we will encounter on the street someday and we won't understand what they are talking about.  but we can do our part to re-humanize the world one interaction at a time.

ok.