Anatomy Trains

Comes a time when one more storm adds naught to the glory of winter.  While we imagine the rest of you crowing over crocuses, envasing daffodils, or even awed by your azaleas, the snow continues to sweep over us: fluffy, then wet, then sodden, then mud, then frozen, again and again.  Pity your neighbours to the north - the Canadians, us Mainiacs, the Inuits, mountain folk of Vermont and New Hampshire – who for reasons unknown to even themselves fail to migrate south with the rest, who stay wrapped away from the winter winds through the long dark.

Such a month I have had at home, waking day after day in my own bed, sheathed in the warmth of Quan’s and my fifteen years.  We’re all caught up with taxes, the book manuscript, garden planning, summer strategizing – but still the storms roll over us one after the other, leaving us looking longingly out the window.

Spring has come for me, however, whether the weather says yes or not, and so between the high dirty banks of snow I exit from our rabbit burrow into the travel tunnel – the grey smells, ambient audio irritations, terminal plasticity projecting the interminable sense of delay - all the more sour on the tongue for having been abandoned for a month of hearth, wood fires, the whisk of skis in the latest snow, the fitting together in our large bed like a couple of old coffee spoons in the silver drawer.

As a smack dab baby boomer, I feel quite sorry for Hilary Clinton. She has worked so hard all these years and taken so much heat. Who would have thought that a junior senator could have come out of nowhere and so upset her carefully arranged apple cart? I didn’t like her before, but she has earned my grudging respect over this year, and from that respect comes the sympathy I now feel - watching her wave, spent, pull away from the shore.

I would have pulled the lever for her over war-horse McCain (or the mannequin Romney or the cadaverous Giuliani), but she is undeniably tied to the past, to the Democratic political machine, to her own set of special interests who paved her way, and Bill has revealed that he can still be a liability as well as an asset.

As she recedes, I find that risking our polity on Barack has me just a little queasy - he may really have to study the foreign policy manual she wouldn’t have to do more than review. But he has shown that he learns, and learns fast, so I have hope - an attitude my politically jaded and socially jaundiced wife laughs at.

I first voted in ‘72, but I was old enough at Kennedy’s election to feel the electrical charge, and of course felt his death. I fear for tall Obama and hope his security detail is attentive. But, like Kennedy, may his deft touch and his instincts not fail him during this long and grueling campaign process, or in the years of office if they are, as I now expect, granted to him.

Weird wizard wonderland
Winter way away in the wizened woods
Weft of woven branches, withered wracking runes
Written on a wan washed watercolor
Boughs bound down wound
Grounded in the mantle of snow
Gobbets of glacine wanton wax
Like a candle in Grimm’s Hansel

Writhing wraiths whisper ‘tween the trees
Gusts sweep the dust, crust scoured breeze
Waving winter wall of white
No wildcat, wolf or weasel
All the whining wicked wanderers
Nowhere to be witnessed
Even the Wascawy wabbits
Have gone to earth,
No tracks at all, no tracks at all
Only the owl, the silent owl
“Who? Who? Who cooks for you?”

Waning lune on black
Wending my warped way home
‘Tween tattled waste of cat-o-nine-tails
Loose lint lithping my sleeves as I path

Whither home, and whither danger?
Who is known and who’s a stranger?
Warlocks skulk and witches mutter
Wilder tree wisps crack and stutter

Vast winter waste, vale of weeping death
Keep your starkened beauty to yourself

Henry Gray (the original anatomist, not the TV show) notes that “fascia” is Latin for “bandage”, a simple fact that conveys the helpful image. Like bandage, fascia wraps around, covers, protects, and binds.

Your friendly local etymologist must take issue with this statement. Fascia, as every good student of the Roman Empire knows, does have the overt meaning of bandage or streak of cloud, but it comes from fasces meaning ‘bundle’. A bundle of sticks - faggot - derives from this, as does the bundle of reeds called a basket.

The fasces in Roman life comes from a story in which three sons were fighting over a putative inheritance, and their father, discovering them, showed how one stick could be broken easily, but a bundle of sticks could not - and so,in this Aesopian way, urged them to band together. This story led to the fasces, a bundle of sticks tied together with an ax handle in the middle and the ax blade sticking out of the top. This was supposed to symbolize the united and powerful nature of the ‘bundled’ Roman empire, and one of these things followed the emperor everywhere for some time.

There was even one on our money - the mercury dime had a fasces on the ‘tails’ side, but the rise of modern Fascism led us to the Roosevelt dime without such an imperial symbol.

Mussolini, determined to resurrect this power of the Roman empire, had a simple idea: the power of government ‘bundled’ hand in hand with dominant corporate interests. That’s what fascism is - government working together with large corporations. Bush’s idea is simple: get the telecom companies to help out with the fight against terrorism. The bundling together of the U.S. government with information companies is, in fact, a very powerful control mechanism, and the legislating of immunity for those companies that helped the government by disclosing our information is a very fascist act.

Who cares?  Any good citizen would say “I have nothing to hide”, and besides this is protecting us from terrorism.  In fact, dear friend, Bush and his government have plenty of tools to stop terrorism, and do not need this extra power.  Every tyrant uses an external threat to scare their people into giving up their rights.  And every time it works, because it is just the thin edge of a wedge that gets wider and deeper each increment it is driven in, until we no longer live in a land of laws.

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  “Those who give up their freedom for security deserve neither.” “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants.”  The words of the founding fathers still speak to us across the centuries.
Will Congress go along with this new bid for fascism?  Remember, Eisenhower only at the last minute left ‘Congress’ out of of the ‘Military-Industrial’ complex he warned us about in his outgoing speech. Congress is an essential part of the deal, and it leads to a fascist handshake between the profiteering of the large corporations and the continued power to entrenched interests in the government. 50 years after Ike left, and our current president wants telecoms legally protected from laws they broke in helping the government spy on Americans (though he even equivocates as to whether they did help), and our vice-president is openly an arms dealer.

I don’t know enough about the current situation to know whether Verizon and AT&T should get a pass on this one. But I do know that we are turning feudal, with democracy meaning less and less - despite the fun of this year’s election - as the real fiefdoms and vassals and serfs are not determined by the political realities but by the transnational corporate needs.

We are getting used to the hologram of democracy, because the reality is disappearing gradually as we speak. I still like the old bumper sticker: “It’ll be a great day when schools have all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to build a new bomber.”

As I write this, Super Tuesday is underway. I hoped to get this in earlier but what influence do I have anyway? Whatever the outcome, this is the ineluctable logic of the election:

Setting aside, for a moment, the attractive candor of John McCain (because his war policy is more of the same, and I wish he was as liberal as the chorus of talk-show hosts from Rush to Fox are trying to paint him today - ad nauseam, wall-to-wall, how can they hate a war-hero so?), and the crisp haircut masquerading as a businessman politician named (until he changes it to gain some other endorsement) Mitt Romney, the choice is uniquely and historically between a sister and a brother.

Though I respect Hilary’s hard work and long service, and Barack is indeed an unknown, I fall (with my daughter but opposed, I think, to my wife) to the Obama camp. Here’s how it parses for me:

For the nomination: If Barack wins the nomination, everyone who was going to vote for Hilary will vote instead for Barack. If Hilary gets the nomination, not everyone voting for Barack now will vote for a Clinton in the general election. Therefore, Barack is more ‘electable’.

For the election: If Barack is elected, Hilary will be offered a prominent role in his administration, so we get the best of both. If Hilary is elected, Barack is likely to get a ceremonial role in her administration, so there we lose his commanding presence and audacity of hope. Hilary - hard worker that she is - is bought and paid for, and though Barack may be also, there is more chance of his not being weighed down by a career full of political favors.

Therefore, though I will pull the lever cheerfully for either in this ‘anybody but the jokers we have now’ mood I’m in, I have been nursing a secret hope that Obama will make it, and make it big.

A woman president is important, and it will happen in my lifetime I am sure, but the look forward instead of the look back is a crucial and telling symbol at this particular stage.

Following on from the reign of death, dead rabbits continued to show up after I left for another teaching round. Each morning Quan would find another one – throat gaping, neck eaten. The poor woman was sleepless each night waiting for some noise to tell her it was happening, and afraid to go feed them in the morning for fear of whom she’d find. The first Trapper Joe was convinced that it was a weasel, showing Quan weasel hair caught on the edge of the fence. He spread the kitchen table with dangerous looking killer traps, and showed Quan how to set them, using one of the dead rabbits as bait – another instance where we have had to cut up one friend to save another. What kinds of lessons are these?

The traps were set outside the rabbitat, with one Have-a-Heart inside, and some leg-hole traps on the top of the fence in likely places. Nothing got in the traps, but another rabbit – Quill, poor thing – was decapitated in the morning. The first trapper came and took his traps away, partially because no predator was being caught, and partially because he was afraid of being fined, since this story was all around our little town and he didn’t have a license. The second trapper – also named Joe – was an old geezer who put out large Have-a-Heart traps with stinky codfish and salmon heads as bait, but these traps did nothing either.

The next morning, Louise didn’t come out to eat, and Quan saw her legs sticking out from under the hutch. She reached into the closed area under the hutch to draw Louise out, only to discover that she was in the clutches of a barred owl, who had dragged her under the hutch to eat her. The owl hissed at Quan, keeping her claws on the rabbit – “This is mine!” Quan had a moment – the owl was only couple of feet from her face – but fascination trumped fear. The owl was on top of the rabbit, with a pile of what Quan took to be feathers – and thinking the owl must be hurt, and she called everyone – vets, Avian Haven, and animal control to try to get some advice. The best advice was to throw a towel over her and bring her in. Dubious that this plan sounded better in theory than it would work out in practice, she sought help and went back out.

With George on the camera, and our young friend Peter in his long rubber oystering gloves holding the towel, Quan slowly dragged out the rabbit. But the owl wasn’t going to let go of her meal. Nor was she hurt – the ‘feathers’ turned out to be a pile of rabbit fur she had pecked off - and as soon as the owl cleared the hutch into the open, she abandoned her catch and took off over their heads before any towel could be thrown – silently, totally silently. The owl hung around on a branch for about ten minutes, to see if he was going to get dinner back, and then flew off without a sound.

Awed, Quan took Louise and left her on the top of the shed as an offering, but the owl never came back. She then put him out on a stump near the pond, but a coyote – judging by the tracks next day – took her away. What was left of the previous rabbits, at least the ones not cut up for bait, we had taken out of the rabbitat and left for the fox that is struggling for his living under the barn up on the hill.

The next morning one of Quan’s dutchies was dead – same thing, throat opened, head partially eaten. Still unsure whether the owl was the cause of the deaths or just picking up after the weasel, Quan gathered everyone she could and started putting the bunnies in a makeshift protective fence. The bunnies hated this and were tearing around, injuring themselves and fighting horribly. When a bunch of them poured (gratefully) though a hole in the fence back into the main unprotected body of the rabbitat, Quan gave up and broke down, saying, “OK, abort this project. I give up.” Everyone left – it was bitter cold – and Quan took the little dutchie back to where it was killed, and left it as an offering to the owl.

Quan’s project with the rabbits has always struck me as a little metaphor for man’s dominion over the beasts. On the one hand, she has striven for a ‘natural’ habitat for the rabbits where they can be free and have running room and make their own relationships etc. On the other hand, it ain’t natural for domestic rabbits to be outside in such concentrated numbers. We have been lucky up until now, but this year we have had more disease of unknown derivation, and now predation, which is about as natural as it gets. But of course Quan loves each rabbit like a pet, so finding one with its throat torn out each morning was a little too much naturalness, and she felt as if she was just serving up dinner, putting her little charges in harm’s way. It’s a recipe for craziness, and in my phone calls with Quan these nights, I reckoned she was darn near ready for the men in the white van.

On the third hand, we both felt that feeding an owl was somehow different from having these rabbits taken by a sneaky weasel. The owls have been particularly hungry and deprived this year because of the early snows and declining vole population up in Canada. When I am skiing in the woods, I see fewer tracks this year – of everything – then any other year we have been here. So the owl is coming to where the food is.

And here’s the part that makes this worth an entry to this blog: the offering was accepted. Each night the owl comes down and eats a bit of the frozen dutchie. No more rabbits have been taken. It’s just a small owl, and couldn’t lift the rabbits to take them with him. We, thinking the weasel had just randomly killed and drunk the blood, took each rabbit out of the rabbitat to give them to the fox, who is also hungry in this bleak winter landscape.

The owl left the rabbit each time because they were too heavy for the small owl to fly away with. We were taking the rabbits out of the rabbitat for obvious reasons. So the owl killed each night. But once she left the rabbit there, the owl – not a wanton killer like the weasels or fishers – returned only for what he needed - a bit of the rabbit each day was enough. So Quan has learned from this of the measure of nature – “I should have just left each rabbit in place, so the owl could feed, and I wouldn’t have been losing a rabbit each night.’

Which brings us to this morning:

Once again, Quan saw the legs sticking out from under a hutch, and sure enough, there was poor little Minouche, the next to die under the talons of the owl. I bent down and looked in – the owl had small but needle-sharp talons, and the strangest face, like the dwarf in ‘Don’t Look Now”, orange-eyed, yellow-beaked, the feathers laid away from his features to make a very clean Italian ‘commedia del arte’ face, wise and witchy and full of arcane knowledge – you can see how they got their rep.

We went and got a cat carrier, and put the open door over the space where the owl was, and slowly started sliding the hutch away from him. He flew / walked right into the cage, hissing and growling, but a quick snap of the door and he was trapped. I put him in the trunk of the car, along with the cold and very dead Minouche. They said 20 miles, so I drove him up the river to Head Tide. Along the way, I stopped for coffee and our friend who works at the bookstore said he would love an owl at his barn, which is overrun with pigeons (‘rats with wings’, say the New Yorkers).

At the barn, I took him out of the car and over to the corner of the barn. I took out the rabbit and placed it in front of the cage. I told him we wished him no harm, that he could have Minouche, and we were sorry to displace him, but having the rabbits for dinner wasn’t part of the program. He was welcome to the pigeons, I said, and I hoped he would find this a good home. With gloves on, I opened the door and he lost no time in stepping out and into flight – so silent, so assured. His body was maybe a foot long, his wingspan near two feet. He flew to nearby apple tree, and stood regarding me. As I turned to pick up the cage, he flew off to a copse of trees at the edge of the field. May he find peace and another lunch – and I am glad we did not need to hurt him in any other way.

So now we see whether this was it – the single owl, not a weasel, caused all this havoc. Whatever the outcome, Quan is determined to downsize – too many rabbits to save in this world, too much angst.

As Mary Oliver (The Journey) says:

… there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company as you strode
deeper and deeper into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

What with all this death, and Quan’s neck and brain problems reasserting themselves, and Mum recovering from hip replacement, we are emptied vessels.  I have been unable to return to the Maine time zone since Japan, sleeping at all hours of the day, and waking at any time in the night.  For the most part I have given in to its whims, but now I must work again to a schedule, but I am grey inside and ding-y like a cartoon character with those tiny bubbles popping off around my head.

What will work be like when I have nothing to give?  I am drained to where I make that honking noise, need a sabbatical after 14 years of non-stop push, the long list of pressures swelling behind me, the long road to a successful legacy rising into distant mists before me.  Eleanor Roosevelt must have felt like this – I cannot go on, what’s the point? The sky is falling and who cares, I am old, I am old, I shall wear my trousers rolled, we must find a way through this seeming grey and sodden wall to something else, a new mission for the farm, a new relation between Quan and I.

She is resisting how much she needs me.  I gave up that resistance years ago, though I kept it up through the first years of marriage, never really accepting her into my deepest recesses until after her injury ten years ago.  And she, though loving in most respects, retained the illusion in her corner that she could clear out, be on her own and be alright.  But these recent losses, loss upon loss, have put paid to that delusion, and she knows we are in it together, for the duration, wrinkles and bags and grey hairs and menopause, all in the wan January afternoon light that makes the line between success and failure hard to see.

I am content that this is so, but my track is more determined and has found its value, while hers – all the animals – is at a low ebb; the farm nearly thrown for a pin with the hole left by Dakota, and now the rabbits being presented to us one by one each morning, slaughtered – in three months there will be none if we cannot find and stop this slinky mink.

Quan is left with the nakedness of her need, with nothing to give back, so these two empty vessels go floating through the harbor, useless, vulnerable, but wedded to one another as never before by that invisible cord of gravity we humans call love.

We would not choose it, but only by submitting oneself to annihilation – and never have we been so close – does one find that part within one’s self that is beyond annihilation.  Shocked, addled, death-obsessed, sexless, adrift – it doesn’t matter, we are closer than ever.  The more that dies – though we won’t admit it – the more we are aware of that between us which cannot die, and will not die.  This cold comfort, what we get in a Maine winter, is the icy white light at the heart of suffering.

Rain in January is not a good sign in Maine.  It never happened when I was a kid, but now global warming throws these Cape Cod storms up across our coast as wetness, not as the sere white anger of winter snow.  Snow – usually a constant from December to April - is our dues to death, the sparkling white blanket that keeps Death at bay in the dark and the cold.  But even though we’ve had some snow this January, we’ve had more sleet and rain on its edge than we ought.  And these have been the rains of death, for each day the Grim Reaper walks outside the door.

It’s been a year for it, ever since last February we have been losing cats – Leyden, Gandhi, Sweetie - and rabbits – Gracie, Isaac, Thelma and a dozen others - with the death of Dakota crowning these Saturnian jewels.  But it didn’t stop at New Year; Quan and Lea had to kill a rabbit by hand to stop its ongoing squeal of suffering while I was in Japan.

And then just after I got back my old cat, Angie, lost it totally, shitting and pissing everywhere on the downstairs furniture.  She had been having ‘accidents’ over the last year, but this was wanton and just totally addlepated (not malicious). I called the vet to explore how it works, and she was available that very hour, so the time came upon me quickly and without preparation.

Before she came, I asked Angie if she was ready to go; she leaned into my hand – yes.  I asked her if she meant it, spelling out what ‘ready to go’ meant and she leaned in with more – yes, please.  I looked her in the eye, and she looked right back – yes, again.

When the vet came, she started at the smell, but quickly settled right back into my lap.  She hardly noticed the prick of the ketamine, even though her back legs are nearly without muscle.  The sodium pentathol looked like some blue Amway cleaner in the syringe, and this was the moment – she could come back from the wide-eyed dissociation of the K, but she would not be coming back from the pentathol.  She snuggled in closer, and Dr Welch took a limp leg and sprayed it to find a vein.

Quietly, quickly she was gone, a transition as smooth as a Mercedes, curled in my lap the whole time.  Even though she consented, even though it was peaceful, I am stricken to the core and leaden with playing God.  Even God has farmed this harvesting out to the Grim Reaper, and I have just killed my cat, my companion of bed a fire for 16 years.

Quan has suggested out by Dakota, but in dying Angie told me that’s too far from the house – too far from the fire was how she put it.  So I wrap her in her burial towel – she peed on me and the couch one more time in death, as a last laugh – and take her out among the fruit trees by the garden where she played.  The ground is not at all frozen, and the brown dirt mixes with the half a foot of white snow atop it.  Annie comes over and we mark her with a rock.

Angie was Quan’s first gift to me, first animal gift, before we were lovers even.  She said if you have a child you must have an animal, and instead she came by and left me two, and Misty named them – Angelina and Josefina.  Josefina was the more independent, and was taken by a fisher cat weasel shortly after we moved here, but Angelina – ever the lover of the warm fire and the close to home – stayed with us inside, loving me and Misty as special, and Quan for her everyday thereness.

This is so hard, to have to send her.  Why could she not just die on her own?  I resent Quan for telling me it’s time, but I know it is, she has been pleasantly senile and AWOL for some time, but I have resisted.  But now I stand with a dirty shovel, holding the reins of death.

With our two closest animals gone – Dakota and Angie – surely that’s the end?  But no, yesterday morning Quan found Cocoa Puff, out in the rabbitat with his throat neatly torn out down to the cervical bones, the blood sucked out of him.  A weasel eats like this – a dog or fox or coyote goes for the meat, a bird pecks, but this is quick and dirty work, and there is no blood on the ground beside her.

So, after ten lucky years, a predator has found his way into the rabbitat.  We lost two to dogs way back in the beginning in Scarborough, and we have lost a few periodically to disease, and a lot this past year to various ailments and old age.  But never have we had the rampant predator within the stockade.  Quan is so discouraged – her experiment in creating safety for the innocent and scared, her attempt to externalize her wounded inner child – is lying in ruins in the grey-lit January morning.

A weasel can get in the smallest hole – we track around the enclosure, looking for any gap in the chicken wire.  We cannot find one, but we’re not sure that’s how he (she?) is getting in anyway, and they are so slinky they can get through the tiniest hole or maybe over top via the trees? – who knows.

And sure enough, this morning there is another one for Quan to find, her white fur coated crimson, the head loose, the now-familiar anatomy of the tubes in the throat.  There is only one way to get it, and that is to trap the fucker.  As I leave on yet another trip for work, Quan has regained the tread of the determined and is set to find a trapper to stop this reign of death.

I thought I had commercial airplanes pretty well-sussed, but today as I boarded the flight from sunny LAX to snowy Detroit, I discovered that I had a large set of red stains down my shirtfront. The last time I can remember eating anything red was the marinated tartar at the dinner with Kim et al. the night before, which means I have been sporting this old man’s stain for a whole day so far. I try mineral water and the napkins, but they are just shredding paper all over, as are the paper towels from the bathroom.

I ask the cheerful matronly stewardess at the back for a cloth. She hands my a can of club soda and says, “Fish around in the drawer next to the sink, you’ll find some maxi pads – that’s what I use when I have spilled something.” New one on me, but damned if she isn’t right – the boxes of maxi pads are right in the bathrooms – never thought of it, never having needed one in a hurry – it soaks up a lot of club soda, scrubs well, and doesn’t leave a trail of shredded paper behind. The stain soaks out and I rest my hand on hers as I leave the plane and she hits my shoulder in jest. So few of the airplane staff still have their humor and their humanity these days.
——
In the end, it’s a 30-hr extravaganza from Seoul to LAX to Detroit to Portland to home. Although I had business class across the Pacific, there’s business and then there’s business. And I had no business on the LA flight – 38th row and a full plane – so that by the 5th hour of that flight my bum was aching, along with my neck, hips and feet, and there was no position that those chairs and my body could find in common. The book on ‘who wrote Shakespeare’ had lost its allure, and I am again watching the clock and not living by my zen approach to the travel tunnel.

And God was testing my zen wa in any case – I run sweating through the airport to make my flight to Portland, and then we sit on the runway for more than an hour in line for getting de-iced, so we arrive at PWM way late (without my suitcase, so that’s another hour filling out a lost bag report) but by then the limo has gone, if it was ever there, so I engage a cab, and my new best friend Yusuf, here from Somalia for less than a year, drives me home at 45 mph, again I am clock-watching his digital clock on the dash as the hours slip away. Jusuf is wandering all over the whitened road, requiring me to stay fully awake to complete the transition from the colorful East to the monochrome of a Maine winter night.

I have him leave me out at the end of the driveway – it’s not plowed anyway – so I can drink in the cold air, say hello to Cammy and CB and mourn Dakota’s empty stall, before I trudge through the powdery snow to shower quietly and crawl in with my honey, testing Dr Kim’s proposition that the most intense pleasure comes from something leaving the body and finding it wanting – the most intense pleasure comes from shared love, inning and outing at the same time.

Enter the travel tunnel with no thought of when you will get out.  This bit of zen wisdom informs all my travel these days.  No matter what my expectation, the myriad possibilities for delaying and frustrating the best laid planes of mice and men have been amped up these last couple of years, to where I dare not take the last plane out any more, but have to build in padding time to account for the delays.

I curtailed my walk around the Tsukiji market with Mark (wondering how I will get the sushi knife back through customs) to say good-bye to the more-bounce-per-ounce Kaori (that’s Cowrie, not Kay-oar-ee as I have been pronouncing it) and get on the bus for Narita at 11:30.  I didn’t get to the hotel at Seoul until after 10:30.  Snow in Seoul delayed the plane – feels like I could have walked quicker.

I was met by Dr Kang (It’s very difficult to render these names in the Roman alphabet – One Dr. Gong, who has applied Anatomy Trains, tensegrity, and Rolf through the practice of Prolo therapy – he showed me some films of his work, needling with lidocaine and glucose mostly horizontally under the skin.  He jams the needle in and skews it around under the skin, much like a liposuction operation, where they break up the fascia prior to sucking out the fat.  It looks horrendous and my sphincter lifts just looking at these films because the technique comes across as excruciating, but apparently he gets great results, treating 60-70 patients per day, and showing before and after videos and photos with significant postural decompensation.

Anyway, every time I refer to him, I call him Dr Gong, and Kim or Kang will correct me, saying, “No, Dr Gong!”  So I say, Oh, Dr. Gong” and they say No, Dr Gong.  There is some aspect of this sound in Korean I am simply not hearing and so cannot reproduce.)

Dr Kang is cheerily annoyed that I have not called in advance, as he has been waiting at the airport since my original arrival time, even though I have made it in earlier than my original flight – I am nearly three hours late and had no phone to call.  Korea at this moment seems very dark, as I sit in the back of his car and search for conversation.  The factories of Incheon fly past, and after an hour we are in the city and I to my bed.

Having felt badly done by by Dr. Kim whn he tried to cancel our course, I am surprised by liking him (again) immediately, and we work together very well for the two days in the Catholic Hospital, to an audience of about 50 doctors, yoga teachers, and Pilates teachers.  I lecture and demonstrate, but it is tedious for all of us, since they cannot practice, and some do not even remotely practice in this way.  We do alright until the second afternoon, when Kim fades and Dr Kang, who is pleasant enough but not a translator, takes over for him.  The audience is tired also, and the last afternoon I am in a staring contest with the clock at the back of the room.  Usually, I do not count the hours while teaching, but here I am counting the minutes.

Many business cards and photographs later, I am released from this cobbled together group.  Dr. Kang and Kim and Sook Hyang, the porcelain head of the Pilates association and another chiropractor and I repair to the hotel for a fine and convivial meal.  Kim and I discover that we are both Taoists in orientation, if not practice, and I feel a great kinship with this shaker and mover – he is doing so many things, and has got Erich Franklin to come in next week – I will have to hear what Eric thinks of teaching ideokinesis to the Korean professionals.

This is perhaps the end of my sojourns in Korea, I don’t know, but I will take the twinkle in Dr Kim’s eye with me, “Sex is the best,” he says sadly and admiringly – his wife is in China for the month with his kids, “The best pleasure is when something leaves the body.”  The two women are shocked and don’t know what to say.  I appreciate the sentiment – I like a good shit too, like Robin Williams in The Fisher King – though I remember vomiting into the Japanese hotel techno-toilet in my room without pleasure on the night I overdid the sushi-sake combo, but I don’t bring that up.

So now I am back in the travel tunnel – headed for LAX, and then into a snowstorm in the northeast, so who knows when I will get home?  I don’t, the Lord does, but She ain’t tellin’.