Heart of Gold

Today is Neil Young’s 79th birthday. A friend reminded me recently of his wistful song “Heart of Gold,” which I listened to over and over again in the 70s. Hearing it again now, I’ve realized it’s not merely about his longing, but also contains insights into the reasons it’s been so hard for him to find his heart of gold.

“I wanna live, I wanna give

I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold

It’s these expressions I never give

That keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold”

“I’ve been in my mind,  it’s such a fine line,

 That keeps me searchin’ for a heart of gold”

I think I want to have a word with Neil, even though he hasn’t asked me for my thoughts on this and I’m betting he probably already knows everything I want to tell him, seeing as how he wrote the song in the first place. 

But here’s what I’d say:

What is a heart of gold, anyway? Kindness? Unconditional love (a two-edged sword indeed for the heart in question as it can imply an arrangement where all the giving is one-way)? Is the golden heart the kind that hangs in there for the long haul after the thrill of being “in love” fades?

I see the grizzled Old Man on Neil Young’s ranch taking a look under the hood of his beloved 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse for which he wrote the tribute “Long May You Run.” The old man mutters, “well here’s your problem right here.”

Maybe you don’t recognize a heart of gold when you see it, Neil. Maybe you’re afraid to express your deepest feelings well enough to be heard by somebody out there with a heart of gold—because expressing your feelings has ended badly in the past. 

Or, maybe you’re using that excellent brain of yours to keep overthinking it, drawing and redrawing the fine line that keeps you looking for a shinier, more perfect and self sacrificing heart of gold. 

Or, that uneasiness while you’re searching creeps over you, in those early days of an encounter when the balance of connection is so precarious. Who reaches out first? Whose turn is it now? Where is it written that there are turns?

Or, maybe there are so many golden hearts, so little time.

Maybe in fact what you need is an equal. Somebody who loves you as you are, who’s willing not only to give you love, but also fully expecting to receive it. Someone who’s willing to give you the space to truly find your heart’s desire.

The Floor Is Your Friend

 

When I was working long days in tech, I completely ignored an important voice, the voice of my body. Curved over the computer, stressed about details I no longer remember, I ordered pain into the background, ordered my body to keep going. I knew that I needed to exercise, so I parked at the far edge of the parking lot and walked to the building and up the stairs to my office. I walked on the weekends and made myself take classes: aerobics, toning, even a little yoga here and there. 

My least favorite part of these classes was getting down on the floor.

Getting up and down seemed like more effort than I could possibly afford. Some days just hauling myself out of the car and up the stairs to work seemed too much to ask, let alone getting down on the floor for exercises I was never sure I was doing it quite right. And the floor was an uncomfortable place, hard and cold, drawing my reluctant attention to my aches and pains.

My father, no stranger to long days and work stress, had a sympathetic piece of advice he used when I told him about my frustrations: “Don’t let them get you down on the floor.” An ominous expression if I ever heard one, it seemed to imply that once on the floor the battle would be over for sure, and also that you if you let them get you down on the floor it was your own damned fault. You’ve got to be tougher, be smarter, he urged me in these conversations.

Also, especially when I was younger, I periodically had a reaction to abdominal pain combined with stress in which I would sometimes faint. Eventually I learned how to handle this peculiarity by lowering myself down at the first sign of trouble, usually in the middle of the night. I would wake up a few moments later, face on the cold hard bathroom floor, sorting through that jumble of images and ideas that the brain has when it’s been rebooted abruptly and is trying to spin back up. And thus the cold hard floor became associated in my mind with fainting, losing consciousness, losing control—scary things.

However as I begin my 70s I have, as Joni might have said, seen the floor from both sides now. For over a year I’ve been a daily devotee of a specialized yoga practice called Kaiut Yoga that focuses on the joints, developing strength and greater mobility, reconnecting mind, body and spirit. To my amazement, this slow-moving, meditative form of yoga has become a cornerstone of my life. As a result of my daily practice I feel stronger both emotionally and physically, more centered. I now feel much more comfortable on the floor than ever before in my life. I still experience an occasional uneasiness as I lie on it though, the vague memory of unwanted floor encounters of the past. 

On the other side of 70, the floor’s sure support, its very hardness, its indisputable confirmation of the here and now, have finally made it my friend.

Winter Solstice

The longest night promises true winter.

The light of transformation is hard to see.

It’s there, though, in the gladness 

Of the chickadee sipping at the shimmering bird bath,   

In the silvery morning light on the maple branch, 

In the stars shining against a fathomless indigo sky.

 

Going Gentle

After careful thought 

I would like to say that I wish 
You had gone gentle into that good night
And that your rage had turned to softness 
And that you had remembered how much you loved us
And perhaps found a way to stay
Just a little longer
To witness the glowing autumn flame
Of the maple tree we planted long ago
And the fire of ivy on the fence
And the bravery of the last red dahlias 
Defying hints of winter 
Still rising tall toward the sun

One Year Later

Wearing Out One’s Welcome

One doesn’t want to seem needy
Overly grateful for a child’s call
Willing the cat to linger longer on the lap
Counting the days since the last hug

One looks up one’s life expectancy at 70

And finds that it’s a little over 17 years

And sometimes 17 years seems like a very long time

And other times it seems entirely too short

One leaves out punctuation in a poem like this one

To let the thoughts flow freely

To dare a tiny bit of rule-breaking

And in consideration of the finality of a period

It’s the rule-breaking that will keep one alive

Over the long haul

When in doubt break the rules

To hell with other people’s opinions

Wear purple yoga pants in public

Wash one’s hair less often

Leave the bra in the drawer

Travel to new places

Eat potato chips and sour cream 

While playing on-line Scrabble

Light a single candle for dinner

Or dine out at the bar

Have a glass of wine 

Or be a real rebel and drink water

Have cake or at least relish the idea of having cake

And as the impermanent world turns

Even if one is never noticed again

Remember always that one is truly enough

An excellent conversational companion for oneself

(Or as spell-checker would have it “one’s elf”)

A Tribute to Mark

Mark and I go way back, more than 50 years.  I met him when I was 17, in the fall of 1971.  With my mother trailing close behind me I was carrying a cardboard box of my stuff upstairs, moving into a room on the third floor of a house at 9th and Dunn in Bloomington, Indiana to I begin my freshman year at IU.  

 

Mark stood in the upstairs hallway, bent over a greasy communal stove, wearing long thermal underwear and a railroad engineer hat, hair halfway down his back, skinny as a rail.  He was cooking up a batch of turkey-in-a-bag and rice, one of his go-to meals as an impoverished student back then.  He nodded hello.  He lived just down the hall, so we became friends, and we were friends for a couple of years before we became more than that.  We both liked good conversation, playing guitars and shooting baskets on the court just across the street.  Back then I didn’t drink coffee, but Mark showed me the way.

 

Believe it or not in those years I was surrounded by various young men who showed an interested in me.  But ultimately Mark stood out from the crowd because he admired and respected women. He truly saw me.  And he loved what he saw.  Not just my appearance, but my music and my mind.  At my small hometown high school in Ellettsville I scared away the guys—I used long words and got way too excited about ideas.  Mark loved writing, and philosophical quandaries, and long words.  We sparred intellectually, attending classes like Comparative Religion and “The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles” and first level Astronomy together, competing for the best grade.  He got the kinds of comments on papers he wrote that I only dreamed of.  He also had an excellent editor and typist for those papers, if I do say so myself.

 

Eventually I met Mark’s family—his Mom Jacki and Dad Bill, his siblings Bill, David and Ronna—all unique and interesting people who welcomed me warmly into the family from the very beginning, and I grew to love them all.

 

Around the fall of 1972 we became much more than friends, and in May of ‘73 we moved in together, or “shacked up” as my father preferred to call it at the time.  We lived in a communal house on West 1st Street where we shopped for food and cooked shared dinners each evening. Despite Dad’s misgivings about our living in sin, he often showed up for surprise visits to give us big shopping bags full of zucchini, green peppers, corn and tomatoes from his garden.

 

Mark had a spiritual connection to nature and especially all aspects of trees—their leaves, trunks and deep roots.  We went on long walks through the tree-lined streets of Bloomington, and skinny dipped at Griffy Lake, and lay under the forest canopy in Brown County breathing in the earthy scent of the leaves.

 

One of Mark’s favorite things was to go out to my parents’ house on Sugar Lane for Sunday dinner with my family.  Mom loved him from the start and her excellent cooking was a big draw with lots of grilled meat and potatoes and garden salads and lively talk around the dinner table.  Occasionally there’d be a big fish fry with blue gill Dad had caught in the nearby lakes, fried green tomatoes, corn on the cob, and wilty lettuce.  Despite his habit of wearing his hat to the dinner table, Mark started to grow on my father, and eventually my whole family came to love him.

After I got my degree in English with a certificate to teach in 1975, Mark, Mom and I took a road trip out west so I could interview for teaching positions.  At Mark’s request, Mom cut his hair short in the Sugar Lane kitchen before we left—I still remember that because I think it felt a little like some kind of transition or ceremony.

 

We drove the old blue station wagon; Mom slept in the back and Mark and I had a tent—occasionally we splurged on a motel.  My interviews were in Oregon and Washington mainly but we also travelled through Colorado and over the Divide.  

 

I didn’t snag a job but it was then we started to realize we wanted to live out west by the mountains, so we saved our money and in May of ‘77 we packed everything we owned into our rickety square-back VW and drove to Boulder, where we discovered to our horror that there were fewer trees than we expected, although we quickly found redeeming qualities in the town.  

 

Our master plan was to live a few months on our savings and write fiction, and Mark would attend Naropa University.  

 

Soon we settled into Boulder with CU jobs (Mark as a janitor and me as an admin for a scientist) and after some rental adventures we ended up at 619 Marine Street living with a few other people.  When we posted a notice for a new housemate, who should show up knocking on our door but Virginia Mitchell, newly moved from Chicago.  Ginny was the perfect housemate, and even moved in with us for a little while when we later bought our house in ‘83—she and Mark got along swimmingly and she’s still a wonderful friend to this day.

 

We lived with and knew many rock climbers, who would spread out and inventory all their gear on the living room floor in preparation for ambitious expeditions to Banff and other exotic destinations.  It was at Marine Street that we met an energetic young fellow named Mark McIntyre.  Memory fades, but it may have been McIntyre along with housemate Gene who actually convinced Mark and me to climb the Whale’s Tale in Eldorado Springs—I do remember one or the other of those guys poking me in the butt to get me up the rock face.  At the top Mark and I learned the hard lesson that the scariest part is the unroped descent, clambering down among the boulders and trying not to fall.  Little did we know that one day we would have a son who would become an amazing climber and boulderer.

 

My sister Nell came to live in Boulder on and off.  I remember her sitting on the Marine Street porch swing, enchanted by our friends and lives.  Eventually my brother Paul made the permanent move here, and stayed for the rest of his life.  

 

We had no Internet back then, children; I know it’s hard to picture.  Also, we had very little money.  We amused ourselves by hiking, cooking dinners together, playing penny ante poker, playing music, and sitting around reading poems we selected out of books Mark and I had from college.  Mark loved Charles Bukowski, Robinson Jeffers, and T.S. Eliot, and even the fascist Ezra Pound.  To the end of his days, he and I would quote Ezra to each other on the first really cold day of the year:  “Winter is i-cumin in, Lhude sing goddamn!”

 

More than once he quoted the last line of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” which held great significance for him I think.

 

Mark loved bike riding.  Back then, he and my brother Paul were great friends and they’d take long rides together up into the mountains.  One evening I came home from work and Mark was lying in the bathtub up to his chin in a hot bath, trying to warm himself up after a mountain bike ride in a sudden hailstorm, and hoarsely muttering “Ward!  Ward!”  He’d finally made it all the way up to Jamestown and Ward, but barely made it back.

 

Mark played racquetball with Paul and later with Shannon.  He took great joy in tennis and played with bloodthirsty competitiveness against his Dad, his brother David, and others in Boulder and Florida when we went for visits.  

 

Ultimately Mark identified as a writer of both fiction and poetry.  Before we had children he wrote most of a novel, weaving his fascination of mythology together with his current work experience to create the story of a janitor who must, Orpheus-like, enter the underworld to rescue his true love.  We even bought one of the earliest word processors, a Kaypro II, so that he could edit his writing after I input the rough drafts for him since I was the faster typist.  As always with his writing, as I typed I performed a Lynn Weatherwax style “auto-correct” on spelling and grammar.  

 

Mark had eclectic tastes when it came to reading, from great fiction to poetry to science to deep philosophical works I couldn’t begin to comprehend.  He gave me no end of grief because I had never, despite my claims of a degree in English, managed to get completely through “Moby Dick.” He spoke of this so often that our friend Elizabeth, who loved arguing with Mark on any and all topics, gave him the gift of a coffee cup with a picture of the big white whale on it, which we own to this day.

 

I have to admit Mark was quite resistant to having children.  But after we’d been living together 13 years and with my biological alarm clock shrieking, I came home from a business trip one night and he’d written up a proposal:  we would have exactly two children, and he would quit work and stay home to care for them, and he’d have time to write.  Anyone who has stayed home with small children will smile at the “time to write” part of the proposal, but who knew?  So that’s what we did, and two beautiful children arrived on the scene:  Shannon and then Caitlin.

 

I will be forever grateful to Mark for that choice, which was a gift to me.

He often commented on how very glad he was he’d changed his mind, and he loved Shannon and Caitlin dearly.

 

Once I was pregnant with Shannon we went down to the Boulder County Courthouse on November 22, 1985 and Judge Roxanne Bailin officiated as we tied the knot, with just a few friends in attendance.

 

We launched into a full role-reversal, the dynamics of which back then were still quite perplexing to many people, but Mark did a stellar job of running the household, cooking all the meals, and rearing the children.  I worked, perhaps many more hours than was good for the family.  But because I had a “wife,” I had the time and energy to rise to a level in the computer field that allowed us to start accumulating some savings.  As the retirement accounts grew, Mark never lost sight of how lucky we were, regularly sending generous checks to Community Foodshare, the Boulder Homeless Shelter, Emergency Family Assistance, Habitat for Humanity, and other charities.  He continued to do this until his very last days.

 

Mark was reluctant to be tied down by owning a home and didn’t like owing money.  But I insisted, and in 1983 we bought the house at 40 South 33rd, making it our own over the years. 

 

Mark had always admired Dad’s big garden and now that we were home owners he began gardening himself, first vegetables and eventually quite beautiful flowers.  He took great delight in flowers, especially dahlias, roses, peonies and lilies.  He looked forward to planting the annuals each spring; it always lifted his spirits after the long, cold Colorado winters.

 

Mark had a passion for playing the guitar.  His fingers flew over the frets, producing impossibly complicated lead riffs.  In the early 90’s I gave him a Fender Stratocaster for Christmas and he played it for hours at a time.  We would play the blues together and he would weave in wild guitar leads while I strummed along with my steady chords.  He also loved listening to music and was listening to selections on Spotify even at the very end of his life.

 

As the children grew, Mark encouraged them to be curious and nudged them toward science.  He had a subscription to Discovery Magazine, and loved to read about the latest developments and inventions.  He was beyond thrilled when both Shannon and Caitlin graduated from CU in the winter of 2010:  Shannon with a degree in Integrative Physiology and Caitlin with a degree in Biochemistry.  

Caitlin later got her PhD from UCSF, another extremely proud moment, and Mark always asked her about her research and tried his best to understand what she was doing.  

 

Mark enjoyed games and played hours of chess with Shannon.  He also liked poker and in the last few years he and I enjoyed many games of Texas Hold ‘Em with Shannon, Caitlin, Justin, Nan and friends.  Mark was a Broncos and Nuggets fan, and Shannon commented just the other day that it was ironic that the Nuggets were finally having a championship season this year and Dad was missing it.

 

We’ve all been telling each other about all that he’s missing now:  the Nuggets season, the spring flowers, mornings sitting on the back patio with me drinking coffee and talking, watching his children’s lives continue to unfold and evolve.

 

When I look through all the photographs, I take comfort in reminding myself that he had many good years and was able to find at least moments of joy all along.  And even toward the end he kept trying in his own way.  He stayed around for us as long as he could despite immense suffering.  

 

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t take the trouble from his eyes.  But he tried in his way to be free.

 

Even though at times he broke our hearts, Mark loved us very much.  

 

For those of you with Stoddardian blood in particular:  Bill, David, Ronna, Jordan and my children Shannon and Caitlin:  I hope that whenever you look in the mirror and raise a single eyebrow, or see a maple tree turn a brilliant red in autumn, or hear a thunder and lightning storm as it brings a deluge of rain or a particularly fine guitar riff, or read about an amazing new scientific discovery, or take a long walk in a forest filled with deciduous trees—and definitely whenever you plant a flower in spring, you’ll remember him with love.

He was one of a kind.