Working For Love

Pancakes this morning. Today's offering is oat bran, peach, sweet potato, banana and pecan.

I know.

That's ridiculous.

And oh yeah, buttermilk is in there too.

I'm moving slow today. I had so much fun last night. I swear, it takes a damn atom bomb to get me out of the house on an evening but last night I went to Monticello and walked into the back door of the kitchen and before I knew it I was hugging beautiful ladies and snipping basil into vats of tomato and hauling trays and filling water glasses and sprinkling dried parsley with abandon onto plates. It occurred to me as I was cleaning up the tables after the diners had gone upstairs to watch the show that the happiest hours of my life in elementary school were the ones I spent working in the cafeteria and maybe I should have just become a food worker.

After the tables were all cleared and I'd told my good-byes to the women I'd shared my evening with, I went upstairs myself and I tell you what- the Stage Company's performance of The Mouse Trap was nothing short of wonderful. I truly and really enjoyed every moment of it. I went backstage during intermission and collected hugs and gave hugs. I didn't have one moment of regret that I hadn't been part of the performance. For some reason I just don't have the motivation right now to do that sort of work because it IS work. And it's stress and it's pressure and yes, it's a beautiful and creative joy as well, but it was lovely to just sit in the audience and enjoy the fruits of others' labors.

And as a bonus to the evening, Kathleen showed up with her man, the man she just traveled across the whole United States with on the back of his Harley, from Lamont, Florida to the Pacific Northwest and back and she looked amazing and happy.

So yes, it was a wonderful evening but today I am stiff and sore (I weeded for a few hours before I went to the Opera House to sling trays) so I am moving slowly but who cares? I'm going to town to go to the grocery store with Lily and the boys and I've got sheets in the washing machine and Mr. Moon is working on the deck today between the house and my office as he did yesterday.

He pronounced the pancakes "maybe my favorite ever," which he does most Sundays and it's just been a good weekend.

Since it's Sunday I will say that I just listened to a thing on NPR about Scientology and it seems like that may be the most advanced religion of all in that it directly charges you money to control your mind in ever and ever more bizarre ways. Plus, I'm not sure that god is even involved. I'll just offer my own opinion and say that I think god is involved in work and in women who work together. Women will notice your earrings and they will ask about your grandchildren and they will laugh as they do the holy work of feeding people and then cleaning up. They will set aside the salad that people didn't eat for you to take home to your chickens and they will hug you like crazy when you say hello and when you leave. They will make your soul at ease. 

And thus, my soul IS at ease today.

Now to go shop for food and kiss babies. I wanted to put up a video of Springsteen doing I'll Work For Your Love but I can't find one I like very much and yet, somehow I love them all so here's the lyrics and if you want to hear the song, just go find it. Any version will do. I think I've actually done a whole post around this song before but hell, after ten gozillion posts I get to repeat myself plus I'm old and that's what old people do, repeat themselves. 

There are only so many stories, y'all.

Here's the words to one of them. Have a good Sunday, whether you are working at something for love or resting from work you've already done and are about to, no doubt, do again.

Love...Ms. Moon

"I'll Work For Your Love"

Pour me a drink Theresa in one of those glasses you dust off
And I'll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross
'Round your hair the sun lifts a halo, at your lips a crown of thorns
Whatever the deal's going down, to this one I'm sworn

I'll work for your love dear
I'll work for your love
What others may want for free
I'll work for your love

The dust of civilizations and love's sweet remains
Slip off of your fingers and come drifting down like rain
The pages of Revelation lie open in your empty eyes of blue
I watch you slip that comb through your hair and this I promise you

I'll work for your love dear
I'll work for your love
What others may want for free
I'll work for your love

[Instrumental]

Well tears they fill the rosary, at your feet my temple of bones
Here in this perdition we go on and on
Now I see your pieces crumbled and our book of faith's been tossed
And I'm just down here searching for my own piece of the cross
In the late afternoon sun fills the room with a mist in the garden before the fall
I watch your hands smooth the front of your blouse and seven drops of blood fall

I'll work for your love dear
I'll work for your love
What others may want for free
I'll work for your love
What others may want for free
I'll work for your love
What others may want for free
I'll work for your love

Working For Your Love

Went to see my old friend Lynn today.
She's not old, it's just our friendship that is. We met and became fast friends thirty-two years ago this month. We were both young, blonde hippie girls then. She was in school and I was barely pregnant with my first child. I was twenty-one, she was twenty-five and we've been sisters-of-the-heart ever since. She's been a major part of my kids' lives since before they ever took their first breaths. She's been Aunt Lynn to all of them.

When I met Lynn she was just the dancin'-est woman you ever saw. Music was what she loved best and she loved a lot of things- the sea, rum and coke, cute fellas, children, her friends. She was about the most joyful woman I ever met, too, and not afraid to work as hard as any man ever born to get what she needed.

She met a man and married him. He had two kids and she took them in like they were born to her. She couldn't have loved them more if they were. It wasn't an easy marriage, it wasn't an easy family, but she loved them with a powerful love. She worked hard at loving them.

She understood that sometimes you have to work hard for love. She knew that.
We went through so much together. Marriages, divorces, birth, death, good times and bad. She moved to Houston for awhile, but we were never really apart. We were that kind of friends.

And then about seven years ago she was diagnosed with a horrible degenerative neurological disease. She knew something was bad wrong. She kept dropping things and her hands didn't work right. Lynn's hands had known how to type a hundred words a minute; they could cut fabric and sew, they could spread themselves in the air as she danced like strong, quick birds. They could cook, and tend her son, they could carry and tote and now, all of a sudden, things were dropping out of them and they wouldn't work to put in her earrings or fill out a form. And her mind wasn't quite right. And she started forgetting how to do things like talk, go to the bathroom, open a door, turn on the CD player, zip a dress, button a coat, peel an orange.

So they told her she had this disease and that she would die eventually, a slow, painful death.

She's in that process now. Her words are mostly gone, although once in a while she'll tear my heart out by saying quite clearly, "I love you," or "Thanks for coming" when I've gone to visit her in the nursing home where she lives.

In the last week, she's forgotten mostly how to walk and has had several falls. She had to go to the hospital twice yesterday after she fell out of her bed and did a faceplant. She has stitches in her chin, a busted lip, a swollen eye, a cracked jaw. I can't imagine the trauma she went through, having to go to the hospital in an ambulance, the pain, the blood, the strangers. She was withdrawn today, she seemed scared.

I got in the bed with her and she beamed at me when I said, "Do you know I love you?" It was like the sun came up in her eyes. She knows.

I've loved her for so long. And it was so easy to love her when we were young and the path before us looked like a flower-strewn road of soft, white sand we could dance down forever, maybe ending up at the beach where the sun sparkled diamonds to jump and jitter on the waves.

It's harder now, that love. It's mighty hard to go see her in a nursing home where she lies in a bed and stares out of the window and waits for someone to come along to feed her, give her water, give her pain medication, turn on the Beatles for her to listen to. It's painfully hard to love someone and see them like this- caught in a nightmare where the only path is a hard rocky one that can only lead to a hoped-for light that will offer relief and release.

I fed her some lunch although she didn't seem to want much and who would with all that injury to her mouth? Her sister and mother were there. They visit her all the time and her sister brings cookies she bakes and quilts she makes and flowers she grows for the nurses and the aides and in that way she is making them pay attention to Lynn. She's put pictures up all over the room of Lynn at various points in her life and also pictures of things Lynn loves the most- Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Statue of Liberty, her friends. Mostly of Lynn's son, the boy born to her late in life, the child she never thought she'd have.

I don't even know if Lynn can see those things any more. She doesn't seem to. But she knows me and she knows I love her.

Bruce Springsteen came out with a new CD today and one of the songs is titled I'll Work For Your Love and I listened to that song after I left the nursing home.

I think we forget that sometimes we do have to work for love. For the love of our spouses, our children, our friends, and all the people who have tucked themselves up into our hearts. It's easy to dance down the soft road with someone with the lure of the sparkling water before us. It's a lot harder to trudge down the dark road with them where the rocks cut our feet and the destination is so final.

Hard work. But in the end, it's the work that matters most.

And work that we constantly need to remember is one we must be most grateful for, because that means we're human, that our ragged hearts are still working, working for love.