Late yesterday afternoon, the Sassistas! watched the unfolding and heartbreaking news of the monster tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma. At the time of this posting, at least 51 people are dead, including 20 children.

Please share any information you have about what each of us can do to help.

Flannista discovered this email

when she opened her desktop computer this morning.

DISCUSS.

Our season of loss is calling the Sassistas! to be still.

We'll return when we feel less overcome.

Love to all.

 This year's Mother's Day poem is posted in memory of

Momista and PEACEsista's mom

who both died since last Mother's Day. 

In the year 2000, around the time Flannista's sister, Karen, was dying and another sister was in the middle of a sad divorce, my mother -- standing in the parking lot of Sam's Club -- said: "Compared to the rest of the world, our problems may be a drop in the bucket, but, by God, these are our troubles and this is our bucket."  I was struck by her sentiment because my mother fiercely dissuaded her daughters to feel sorry for themselves when we lived in her house. This was further reinforced by what I referred to as her "Hallmark-card mentality" that always seemed to kick in when any of us seemed sad. So I was relieved when she confessed that our family had its own bucket.

So do the Sassistas!.

Yesterday, I witnessed a stunning confrontation between Matissta and her next-door neighbor about a court parking space -- the subject of a feud with another neighbor that has been going on for years. Matiss has always quietly stayed out of it, but yesterday, her neighbor pounced on Matiss as soon as she left her house and insisted that Matiss see the disagreement her way. Exasperated, Matiss finally said -- her voice breaking, "This is so petty compared to what is going on in my life right now," and walked away. Dropping her jaw, the neighbor looked at me, and I said, "Matiss has lost her mother and she has lost her job."  The neighbor responded, "She doesn't lose her job until the end of the month, right?" Dumbfounded, I turned and walked away.

Three hours later treesta called with the unexpected news that my storytelling program for her elementary school was not awarded any of our County's Arts and Humanities grant money. Perhaps foolishly, I had held out that money (a drop in the bucket compared to what I once earned) as affirmation for taking a new direction in my life. I am deeply disappointed; a bit numb, actually.

Last night Matiss said, "Is this the price we pay for being responsible all of our lives?  As soon as I graduated, I got a job. I could have roamed around Europe, but I did the responsible thing. I got a job." I responded: "I wouldn't have lost all that money in the stock market in 2008-2009 if I hadn't done the responsible thing and saved it all." Simultaneously we then said, "Fuck responsibility."

For a moment, we felt powerful, in charge of our lives. Then we said goodnight and I went home.

"Bucket," I said, as I crawled into bed. "Bucket all."

"Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly, said the novelist Jean Rhys, "It's more often a succession of jerks."

Yesterday, the dull pain that began last summer in Flannista's left knee was officially diagnosed as osteoarthritis.  My femur and tibia are basically scraping each other.  "You've lost the teflon there," said my orthopedist, pointing to a large white area on the right of the actual MRI of my left knee above. The MRI report indicates "moderate-to-large joint effusion"; a fancy schmancy way to say that's fluid or whatever -- I'm not sure.

I was given four treatment options: continue to do nothing and pop Aleve when the pain significantly inhibits movement; injections of cortisone; injections of Orthovisc, a "high molecular weight hyaluronan";
or knee replacement. I asked my orthopedist about physical therapy (which I resorted to when I was diagnosed with frozen shoulder 15 years ago) yoga, and other alternative treatments. He concurred that all were good options but would not stop the deterioration. My doctor recommended starting with a cortisone shot and then trying the Orthovisc injections -- "think of it as WD-40 exclusively for the knee", he said. According to its flyer, Orthovisc "can provide significant pain reduction for arthritis of the knee for up to six months, with only three weekly treatments."

Apparently, Orthovisc is quite expensive. My knee was injected with cortisone because I had to first confirm that my health insurance would cover Orthovisc. It does.

THE BAD NEWS: I can't exercise for at least 24 hours following an injection. More significantly, I need to scale WAY back on weight-bearing exercise such as walking and jogging. Also, my knee will likely need to be replaced at some point.

THE GOOD NEWS: Biking is GREAT for knee arthritis! That I couldn't bend my knee enough to bike was what got me to the orthopedist in the first place. As you know, I love, love, love to bike. Swimming is also good. Twenty years ago when I turned 40, I vowed to learn how to swim and did. Seasonal allergies made swimming laps difficult, but heck, I may dive in again, er, hit the pool again.  Alas, I can't dive, but heck, maybe it's time to learn that, too.

And dare I say it?  Should I take a clue from Montaigne who wrote: "There is nothing more remarkable in the life of Socrates than that he found time in his old age to learn to dance and play on instruments and thought it time well spent."

To be sure, I won't be break dancing (and it won't be a Cakewalk), but Mashed Potato here I come!

The following poem is posted in honor of Flannista's oldest sister, who celebrates a birthday today. Thank you, dear sister, for teaching me how to "sing". Also in exactly one month, Flann turns "the page from fifty-nine to sixty."

You beak-chattering blaze of blue,

patch of sky squatting on a power line,

teach me to cock my head, too.

Together, we'll watch -- what is there to see

in Tennessee? July can only shrug,

after a night's caterwaul of katydids.

Now, into the deserted street, a fawn tiptoes

from the woods toward well-tamed lawn.

A dead branch moves, doe rustling to life.

You keep singing, bird, and no one minds,

but I have drawn breath too noisily -- 

toward me, eyes carved of obsidian turn.

Into mossy ears as big as a man's cupped hand

a clamor pours: somewhere beneath us,

a mole shoves earth from one dark to another.

Blood blunders through the chambers of my heart.

My life waits to turn the page from fifty-nine to sixty.

A feather too blue to be real -- how long does it last?

-- "To An Eastern Bluebird" by Debora Greger

For the past month or so, Flannista has been revisiting writing projects she began years ago, but never finished. Above is a photo of two August 1992 articles from the Washington Post that Flann discovered in her "unfinished" folder. No attached note or draft indicated why I had saved the articles.

The articles detail the death of Rebecca Thomson Brown who, in 1992, plunged 112 feet from the same Wyoming bridge where she was raped and thrown into a canyon with her 11-year-old stepsister, Amy, nearly 19 years earlier. On September 24, 1973, two men abducted Brown and Amy; Amy died in the fall, but Brown survived and crawled up the canyon for help.  

"She [Rebecca] was raped and murdered 19 years ago, but didn't die until this July [1992]," said the county sheriff at the time, David Dovala. "If that hadn't happened to her, she would be alive today and happy. There's no doubt about it."

The photo above shows Sheriff Dovala giving away Rebecca at her 1989 wedding. The marriage ended in divorce as Rebecca struggled with alcohol and depression. Her assailant's death sentences were commuted to life in prison and, Dovala said, "She had a fear when these guys came up for parole that they would get out. It really tormented her. But most of all, Dovala said, Rebecca was haunted. "She felt bad that her sister died and she didn't. She had some guilt."

To read more of Rebecca's story, click here.

Why had I saved these articles, sticking them in a file folder called "Writing Projects"? What had I planned to write about? Surviving trauma? Sisters?  Sisters surviving trauma? Yesterday, I read and re-read the articles, searching for clues. None were obvious.

I then remembered a passage from Jeanette Winterson's, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, a book that so captivated me, that I did back-to-back posts about it last April: "Why Be Normal" and "Blood Trail". I was struck by how some of Winterson's points subtly dovetailed with the details of Rebecca's story:

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson [the writer's mother] objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.

Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

Had Rebecca's language helped me to get back mine?  Had Rebecca "deep-dived" the words to my story in some way? I searched through my journals and found this entry dated August 13, 1992, the same date as the longer Washington Post article (pictured above) about Rebecca's death:

I continue to read. Am reading Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, wondering if I will ever get it. Also, Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach; The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers; How Far She Went, stories by Mary Hood; and Vita and Harold, edited by Nigel Nicolson. I'm rather obsessed with Vita Sackville-West's ambivalence about everything. The story I read by Mary Hood this a.m. was, "How Far She Went," about a mother and the child she had to raise -- the last line was wonderful:

The girl walked close behind her, exactly where she walked, matching her pace, matching her stride, close enough to put her hand forth (if the need arose) and touch her grammy's back where the faded voile was clinging damp, the merest gauze between their wounds.

Such subtlety!

The Power of Myth is taking me so many places that I can scarcely keep up. In the chapter, "The Hero's Adventure," they discuss that all we need to save us is what one myth calls, "The Ariadne thread": "Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, or a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is a piece of string."

Would Ariadne's thread -- a piece of string -- have saved Rebecca Thomson Brown?

I often wonder if my memory would be released, uncovered once I made that giant leap over my mother; once I conquered my mother -- my dragon. The biggest difficulty I seem to encounter in writing my own stuff is a blank mind. I just seem to go blank. Just blank.  Oh, to make that leap, trusting in a piece of string.

Twenty-one years later, I'm leaping. Deep diving into my own language.

Yesterday, singlemommasista sent Flannista the following email she received from one of her clients. Your challenge: translate it into simple and clear English:

In an effort to incorporate the use of the new 50 Mbps fiber Internet connection with the existing 10 Mbps Internet connection at Corporate we will be performing some additional configuration today beginning at 2:45 PM EST. The configuration will involve enabling the BGP routing protocol to utilize both Internet connection. This will provide multipath routing, load balancing and redundancy. There will be momentary outages experienced during the turn up. This will affect all corporate hosted applications such as OPERA, Simphony, KHMS, iScala as well as VPN connectivity. The outages are expected to be very minimal. Should you have any questions please contact the Corporate IT department.