I looked at the list. The list looks back at me; trivial, trite, redundant, so I turn on the news. The sky has taken the bail, the air is earnest spring, clouds and impending rain like a suspense novel you just started reading.
The list is still in front of me. Call the bank for the fourth time this week. Their new and highly improved website refuses to give me access. Find the copy of the passport application I just submitted. Next, pack up winter clothes and replace them with spring-summer. This obligation irritated me until late afternoon, and then in one swift harmonious leap, I packed up the winter clothes and removed them from my eyesight. Then, I heard a breeze, a solid applicable one that needed to blow through the winter staleness. I opened all the doors and windows that I can open, and let the house breathe. I’ve been quarantined since a week ago Saturday with Covid. It was not as agonizing as I’d imagined. Two days of annoying muscle and nerve pain, and flopping over four or five times a day to sleep. Today, I will use my energy to cross off the mindless tasks.
Next on the list, are estimates on the spring cleanup of five hundred or more dead stalks, leaves, bushes, etc to make Follies ready for spring. Internal conversation goes like this, I should do it myself, save the hundreds they will charge, but where do I empty all the leaves? The village has rules about placing leaves on the street. Too physical, back to the list.
Submissions for publication, are the most tedious and necessary acts if you are a writer. Nope, not in the mood for that. So I took a drive along a country road, with the top down, and listened to Joe Bataan, a waist-twisting Salsa boogaloo disco singer. I turned around after fifteen minutes, even Joe cannot spring my spirit to life.
My relationship with the world is not dependent on what happens to me. It is with Ukraine. My heartbeat is in slow motion as I watch the latest news feed from Zelensky. He is holding a press conference this Saturday. It lasted two hours or more. As the camera scanned the packed room of reporters; expressions rooted in awe, admiration, eagerness, and razor-sharp comprehension I thought, they resemble a child’s face the first time a book is read aloud. Within the hour’s conference, a news blip surfaced. Blinken and Austin will meet with Zelensky in Kyiv on Sunday. My suspicion is they were watching.
As I sat down to dinner, I thought of the announcement earlier that day, “One loaf of bread fed forty people in a bomb shelter. How do we live within the torture, death, and starvation? How do we get up and laugh or enjoy an outing? For me, I have not found a way.
We can pay to go into space, text unlimitedly to avoid, a phone call, we can avoid meeting because we have too many social media reply’s waiting. We can upload, download, delete and save in a second. We can install security alarms, and electronic remotes to open and close our appliances, and electricity. We can drive a car without hands-on, we can buy a private plane, an armored car, bodyguards, and we can remain anonymous by creating a false identity… What we are not doing is improving our behavior, our own personal evolution as humans. Our civility is most recently televised as the Chris Rock, Will Smith slap. I’m sixty-eight and have watched the Oscars, so I remember what they gave the audience- humble sweet, amusing award-winner speeches, not a political coma, or reprisal for a joke. If Chris did not know the sensitivity of Jada for suffering from alopecia, ( and she is gorgeous with or without). After the slap Chris said something like, this will be the most-watched television show. WHAT? Is that all there is to our humanity; attention, vanity, and ratings?
As time grabs our life without us evening knowing it, one day we may wake up and say, I don’t have that much time left, what should I do? If you are single without children then the options are galactic, unless you live in Ukraine. The war bleeds in my veins, sometimes I feel nausea from the videos, and other times enraged that this was not prevented. The best news of the day is that Russia is expelled from the Human Rights Council. Pause, just today? I am half-Ukrainian. My father, grandfather etc, were Ukrainians. I’ve always thought and said I am half Russian, as noted on Dad’s papers. But I am not Russian, excuse my blind spot.
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. Ayn Rand.
The latest poll on our opinion about NUCLEAR WAR revealed that seventy-five percent of us are worried about NUCLEAR WAR.
April 1, 2022 Day 34
Listening to the news on and off today to collate my life with Ukraine. My tasks and routines are dismissed or performed fecklessly. Just now at four-thirty pm, a splash of the sun touched down to give me a moment to sit on the porch and let the warmth saturate through my gloves and coat.
I’m looking at the magnificent great great grandfather spruce tree across the street. A ballet wind fan is blowing the branches as if they are in toe shoes. Nature granulates humanity. We don’t live for thousands of years like rocks, rivers, oceans, mountains, waterfalls, and trees. Then I think of the Ukrainians, they will survive. I watched three hours of news today. The longevity and persistence of nature emulates the Ukrainian heart and spirit. My dice, cards, everything is on their winning this war.
“I’ve asked myself again and again whether it wouldn’t have been better if we hadn’t gone into hiding; if we were dead now and didn’t have to go through this misery, especially so that the others could be spared the burden. But we all shrink from this thought. We still love life, we haven’t yet forgotten the voice of nature, and we keep hoping, hoping for…everything.”
July 6, 1944, From the Diary of Ann Frank
“It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
I am not comparing the Holocaust to Putin’s genocide, what I am comparing is humanity,. It’s evil and it’s virtue.
A non-profit Humanitarian Relief Aid Van bringing medicine, food, water, and clothing was pulled over by The Russian Army. Fifteen volunteers were removed and brought into custody. The news reported the destination, punishment, and length of stay are unknown. Imagine…. I cannot because I’m fearful when I get on a plane. This is one that was reported. People from all over the world, literally, have abandoned their own lives, families, and work to fill the emptiness, starvation, pain, and fear in Ukraine. One of these valiants is a Doctor, and he left his practice in the Midwest to save patients in Ukraine. A fairly new organization, SAVEOURALLIES. ORG, was contacted about a journalist who suffered extensive injuries was rescued by this organization and returned to the USA for treatment. He is recovering. We will hear his story when he is ready to speak.
One-quarter of the forty million that escaped Ukrain are now homeless. Today the government announced we will accept one hundred thousand refugees. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? We accept over two hundred thousand refugee immigrants a month from all over the world at the southern border, how does that figure on the side of fair?
Another puzzling decision by the government was in taking Iran off the terrorist list. I haven’t heard any reporter asking that question at a Press House briefing, I’m waiting for an explanation.
The Mayor of Kyiv, an ex-pro boxer is on the street of his city, surveying the damage. His face is wide, with dominant features that remind me of a face made in clay, hardened, seriously angry without the visible expression, said “ Act now.” And to paraphrase, as the camera shifts to the burning buildings behind him, and the grounds of rubble, he says this, “You can see on your television what’s happening. We need help.”
In Russia, over ten thousand peaceful, young protestors were forcibly taken into custody after the soldiers shot rifles within several feet of the crowd as they scattered running in all directions. They know the consequences; jail time, fines, interrogation, but they don’t know the details and I imagine each prisoner is penalized in different ways.
The spokesperson for Putin said this on camera, “ If there is a threat to our country we will use nuclear war.” Stalin starved four million people, Hitler tortured till death six million Jews and thousands of sympathetic accomplices.
Today the official statement from the White House declared Putin had committed war crimes, but ” IT’S UNDER INVESTIGATION, IT’S AN ONGOING PROCESS AND, WE ARE COLLECTING THE EVIDENCE.” Okay, shoot me if I’m wrong. We need more than a thousand innocent people: children, mothers’ fathers’, grandparents, buried in dirt pits because the funeral homes are completely full, that doesn’t count as evidence?
The latest poll on the USA population opinion revealed that seventy-five percent of us are worried about NUCLEAR WAR.
I WANT TO BLAME SOMEONE, to take my anger, rage, and sorrow and give it direction. Of course, it is Putin, but why wasn’t Ukraine prepared. I read that seventy thousand troops landed on the border in April. If applied to myself, when that red dot on my nose appeared, instead of going then to the Dermatologist, I waited and waited. A year later, they had to dig out cancer and left me with a noticeable scarred nose. Preemptive, proactive measures could have been, should have been installed, and why not? If it’s true that Zelenskyy asked for NATO SUPPORT in April, why didn’t they listen?
I watch the sky tonight on my porch, clustered clouds, and anticipatory rain; no smoke, fires, explosions, or sirens. GOD BLESS OUR PEACE AND PLEASE SAVE UKRAINE.
Some domestic and global tragedies diminish in our consciousness as weeks go by. Just as the news turns their stories from our southern border crisis, Covid pandemic, inflation, and other unsolved problems.
Ukraine defending their country against the vicious unprovoked genocidal attack by Putin is not going in this direction. It is more explosive and brutal each day and the response by NATO and the USA seems to be in pandemonium. You hear, “ Everything is on the table.” “Nothing is off the table.” I understand strategic covert operations are classified, still, this leaves me asking, shouldn’t they be beyond discussion by now? If I continue to vacillate on a decision, it only exacerbates the consequences.
I’m watching more interviews. So far, I’ve seen about forty. Not one of the Ukrainians on camera shed tears, a blaring recognition of their bravery, courage, and ancestry.
MARCH 13, 2022
I LISTEN TO UKRAINIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC https://www.pandora.com/station/play/123965540132723942or the blues, it seems unjust to bob around to the Stones or club music. It is day seventeen, and everyone knows now what that implies. You don’t have to explain it, and if you do, then I’d move away from that conversation. Did you hear about the eight-year-old boy who walked five hundred miles to join his parents in Poland? He made it and here is his photo.
WHAT ABOUT THE WOMAN hours away from giving birth when the bomb struck the Maternity Hospital and was carried away bleeding on a stretcher? She gave birth to a baby girl and is recovering.
MARCH 14, 2022 Today, I learned that both mother and child died.
STRAIGHT OUT OF A WAR MOVIE is the elderly couple who did not hesitate to face four Russian soldiers who broke thru the gate to their property, rifles aimed at their defiant threatening souls, and ordered them off their property shouting obscenities. The soldiers retreated.
Several weeks ago a Ukrainian soldier blew up a bridge to prevent the convoy from crossing over, knowing he would die.
The interviews and comments from man, woman, and child harmonized ” I’ll fight them with my last breath.”
Some domestic and global tragedies diminish in our consciousness as weeks go by. Just as the news passes on stories from our southern border crisis, covid strains, inflation, and other unsolved problems.
Ukraine defending their country against the vicious unprovoked genocidal attack by Putin is not going in this direction. It is more explosive and brutal each day and the response by NATO and the USA seems to be in pandemonium. You hear, “ Everything is on the table.” Nothing is off the table.” While I understand strategic covert operations are unnamed this leaves me asking, shouldn’t they be beyond discussion by now? If I continue to vacillate on a decision, it only exacerbates the consequences.
Today, as the sky is like a London fog I’m watching more interviews. So far I’ve seen about forty. Not one of the Ukrainians on camera shed tears, a blaring recognition of their bravery, courage, and ancestry.
The inner voice where gaps of expression are liberated. 