"Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants." -- Dorothy Parker

I spent most of last weekend working on a poem, but when I read it for the 110^th time on Tuesday or so, I dumped it.  Admitting it wasn’t any good was a relief, really.  See, there were a few lines I liked, but I was asking too much of them. You know, sometimes you can write a poem, and sometimes you can’t.

Yesterday I had a Nonnie and Drago idea-doing a blog about one of Drago’s claims to fame.  He’s one of the guys on the black and white “Village People” album.  My brother, wearing a sleeveless and sideless T-shirt  (a style he says he invented) stands behind the motorcycle and next to the Indian Chief.  In fact he had his hand on the Chief’s ass, but you can’t see that.  You can Google it and see what Drago looked like during the club crazy, disco crazy early eighties, before so many of the gay or drug-addicted village people died of AIDS.  I wanted  to write yesterday, but it would have been drivel.  My brain was thick, my fingers leaden.

I think it was the news that Japanese babies under a year old couldn’t drink the water-too radioactive.  Like a mother would feel okay giving her 13 month-old baby tap water.  Like anyone on that sad, sad island would feel okay drinking the stuff.  Maybe that was why I couldn’t write about all the funny things that have been going on around here since I last blogged.  And there’s Libya and all.  Dunno, but *“so it goes.”  Hope you’re okay.

*Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five. (He might be able to write something these days-if he weren’t dead, if he wanted to.)

First there was an exciting, interesting, scenic, warm, loving, poignant week and then there was a frightening, frustrating, blurry, chilling, discouraging week

What happened was my brother, Drago, and I traveled to Philadelphia to visit my other brother, Leon, his wife, Rae, their new home, their funny, stately, standard poodles, Ajax and Harry, and a bit into the week, go to the Moravian cemetery on Staten Island, New York, where Mom’s, Dad’s, and my brother Ric’s ashes are staying. We met our cousins, Simon and Cosette, at the cemetery and after some time there we went to an excellent Italian restaurant, La Strada, (real name) right there on New Dorp. Simon and Cosette are from different sides of our family, and had only met each other once before, in 2006, when they put my mother’s “cremains” (I didn’t know that word until last March, when Dad died. I don’t like it much. Just don’t.) in the wall, which sits on the highest hill on Staten Island, giving all the ashes and bones  a lovely view of the bay.  Lunches, dinners, a visit with Leon and Rae’s daughter and four month old grandson, playing with the poodles, taking walks around, admiring every single thing about Leon and Rae’s converted carriage house, the kind of Eastern/autumnal weather I miss most, seeing my cousins and helping them get to know each other, which for some reason I felt they already should have -like something got messed up there- all that was very, very fine. I didn’t fall or knock anything over and I think I did a good job of keeping up. Well, Drago was there to help me in the airports, and everyone toned down the outings for me, I think.

Then came a massive change in mood. Right after Drago and I got to the Philadelphia airport, to fly home to Panama City Beach in Florida, I started seeing spidery black things in my right eye. Not your regular floaters-these were seriously alarming. I didn’t say anything about it until after my brother and I got through security, then I told him I had almost no vision in one eye. (By that time, when I looked at what my eye could see, there were only light and dark blurs and possibly a billion little black dots.) We kept calm, probably for each other, and because we both badly wanted to get all the way home without a fuss.  I did indulge in great bursts of cursing, shouting, and bewailing my fate, but carefully kept all that to myself. By the next afternoon I’d seen three eye doctors, and the day after that, a Saturday, I had undergone eye surgery for two retinal tears and a retinal hole. I also looked uglier than I can ever remember looking as in a bloody eyeball, bruising, swelling, one helluva dark, crappy looking, eye. This second week of quiet terror has ended. I still can’t see, but my vision is supposed to come back, and I don’t look as scary. I’ve been told to keep my head down 45 minutes out of every hour, which, of course, I’m not at all good at. But Drago took me back to the eye surgeon yesterday, and the doctor was satisfied with my progress. Our cat and dog have been keeping me company when my brother is out, or in, for that matter, and although I bump into things, I’ve kept my balance almost all the time. (I did fall over an armchair.) I plan to cook tonight-but not chop. I’m not up to chopping.

I know this is a long blog entry, but I’ve been musing all week on the fantasticality of one week rolling right into such an utter mess. Remember the Vonnegut novel where he keeps saying “So it goes…”?  He really had something there, didn’t he?

       ,