Coinkydink, Part III

Yep, it's happened to me, too. I think of somebody I generally never think of--suddenly and for no reason I can fathom--and within twenty-four hours they call or are in the car behind me at a traffic light or otherwise swim into view. I get impressions about jobs, too--things like "sure, management does appear to be crazy, but you must take this job, it will benefit you" and "it looks fine on the surface, but watch your back if you can't run for the hills right now". My impressions start at the interview and crystalize sharply the first time I'm officially staff in the milieu I'll be working in, and they are always, and I mean always, correct. As I'm a nurse, and most of us nurses cycle through jobs in a few years' time as a matter of course, this inner gauge is very useful to me.

Intuitive impressions are not the same as wild coincidences, but I put them in the same category, loosely, for they seem to come from a grid that intersects the one I live on (planet Earth, three-dimentional, too much time spent drinking coffee and thinking deep thoughts about nothing) but are not at all from the grid that I live on.

Thinking of my friend Patty from the Berkshires after many months of no contact or thought of her at all, and wondering, "She really liked that guy Dan...but he married someone else and moved to Brooklyn...or was it Queens?...what ever happened with that?", and having her call me the next day saying, "I was thinking about you! It's been so long! Guess what...remember Dan? Well, his marriage didn't work out...he moved back...we are seeing each other again...I'm so happy!", is not terribly life-changing or profound, but...it does make me take note. (They are now married, living in Brooklyn--or is it Queens?--and she is still very happy.)

Sometimes something useful happens that goes way beyond my "red light", "green light" psychic impressions or the entertaining parlor-trick type of coincidence I'm used to. Sometimes the Universe mashes my face right into it. It is curious...funny...very human of me how I then go on with things as if nothing extremely weird didn't just happen. (I've never seen a ghost or a UFO, but I think that falls into that category, as well--loosely.)

The story...my job has been completely insanely busy lately ("balls to the wall" as the saying goes, which never gives me an attactive visual of the male who says it), and we are all getting a little edgy with each other. That isn't good at all. My workplace has a culture that doesn't know what the fuck to do with conflict. We are hospice people! We are nuturing, empathetic, accomodating...we don't do bitchy too well. Things can get convoluted very fast if someone is having a rough day and can't voice it so everyone else can cluster around supportively, offering self-care tips and Kleenex.

I was having a bitchy day at work and I didn't want to talk about it. I wanted to keep on being short, surly, and unapproachable. That had gotten me in trouble in the past so I'd learned to amend my behavior in general (I keep telling people "I'm really not a nice person, you know," but they don't want to believe me), but lately work was just over the top, and I was effin tired of the high road. Plus, the social worker I work with had asked me to do something for her before she took a few days off, and I was indignant that she even asked--couldn't she see I was really, really super-crazy busy over here?--and I wanted to keep the indignation going now that she was back. (Somehow, righteous anger feels like a power surge...forgetting that power surges result in blown fuses and the lights going out, but never mind.)

She noticed. She didn't call me on it, but it was clear, she noticed. I ducked out of the office and hit the road to see patients, still energized by extreme annoyance...and a patient called me, overwhelmed, in tears, upset because the social worker had told her the insurance company situation was still messed up and the patient needed to call so-and-so and do such-and-such..."Why do I need to do that? Can't somebody else do that? Don't I have enough going on?", and I reassured her, "We'll take care of it."

The next day I didn't feel so bitchy. (Time passes, and nonsense floats away.) I saw that I had to talk to the social worker about the trouble with the patient and her insurance and her being overwhelmed, but everything between us was so clouded up with issues and irritations that all I wanted to do was avoid her until we could act normal toward each other again. Truthfully, I didn't care (as in "WAH! I DON'T CARE!!") that things between us were strained at the moment, and I didn't want to try to correct them, but on the phone that afternoon as I talked to a dear friend and colleague about it, he said, "You have to talk to her."

"Noooooo. I can't. It'll blow over. But I have to mention how the patient is upset, and I don't know how to say it without it looking fraught. Gawd, I hate conflict...!"

"I know you do, especially these days with all of that going on recently with your ex...but you have to talk with her, straighten this out!"

 I was walking through my neighborhood as we talked, on my way to get my son from his best friend's house, where he had spent the day while I worked. I thought to myself fiercely, "I don't want conflict. I am not in the mood for TALKS. I want this to go away. I'm sorry for being such a rat yesterday, and I am more sorry that I can't get away with being a rat without having to have TALKS about it!"

At the friend's house, the father was the one who was home with the kids. My son and his son have been buddies for two years, and they fit together like gloves--two of the nicest boys you could ever hope to meet. I liked the parents very much--they were good people, down-to-earth, relaxed, and friendly. The father said to me, "He was great, as always, no trouble at all...hey, I've been meaning to ask, do you work with someone named so-and-so?"

"So-and-so" being an uncommon last name, and the last name of the social worker I work with. Who happened to be on my mind at that very moment, so...

"Uh, yeah, I do, in fact, she's on my team...how do you...?"

"I took a class from her [she teaches at the college on the side] years and years ago, she wouldn't remember me, but I remember she worked hospice...she is so nice!"

I blinked, feeling guilty. She is truly a very, very nice person, I admit.

"She is the nicest, nicest person I think I ever met! She taught some wellness course or something...she really stuck out in my mind. The nicest person!"

I agreed, gathered up my son, and we walked home in the warm late summer sun. Okay, I was given this. Clearly I was given this, as a little bit of a jab in the ribs to wake me up, but also as a useful gift I could pass on.

The next day I called her first thing.

She began, "The patient is so upset with me! I feel so bad! Everything has been so frantic at work, and those days off I took, well, I could have stayed away much longer, easily, it's been so stressed out around here...I feel so bad!"

The patient had told her at the time how upset she was, so I didn't have to bring it up, which was a relief. We talked about the issue and made a plan, and when we were done I said, "Hey...I've got a heartwarming gift for you," and told her about what a former student of hers had to say about her.

"Really? Oh, wow, I have tears in my eyes! Thank you so much!" (We really are constantly thanking each other for every lttle thing over here in Hospiceland. It is not such an annoying thing after all, I guess.)

"No problem, glad to pass it on. We all need an extra uplift these days."

And the last of the rancor drifted off into the ether, no longer of any use whatsoever.

I e-mailed my friend and colleague about it right away. "You have some powerful medicine, girl!!!" he e-mailed back. "That was a fucking ANSWERED PRAYER, is what that was," I replied.

Work is still a madhouse ("a hospice, a madhouse?" you are thinking, worriedly, but no fear. Lots of admissions, too few nurses. No botched diagnoses or medication screw-ups. All is well), but the social worker and I are riding it out gracefully...which means, of course, "to be full of grace".

(Carl Jung, the guy who came up with "synchronicity". You know, as in...it's more than a coincidence.)

Coinkydink, Part II

I have the Eye of Horus tattooed on my right wrist. My one other tattoo is on my left shoulder blade and is of a small spider in a small spider web, and I got that in a roadside establishment in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1990 (where the bikers can get "L-O-V-E" and "H-A-T-E" tattooed on their knuckles if they haven't gotten around to doing so in prison), and I am fond of explaining that tattoo with a "It's the only spider I want on my body", which I think may work, because I never wake up with spider bites.

The Eye of Horus tattoo happened about as impulsively as a tattoo can happen without alcohol involved; I was in San Francisco April 1992 for a week by myself, and woke up in the hotel one morning with the thought, "I want an Egyptian eye tattooed on my right wrist"--and by that afternoon, it was done. I didn't even know what the symbol really meant, only that I wanted it and that I was happy to have it. The design was thick and solid, not fine and scrolly like many Egyptian eye designs can be, and I'm left-handed so my right wrist made sense--as if it could do the watching, while my left hand did the doing--and all I thought about it was, "It's there to keep me honest."

Later I found that when the curly bit under the eye goes in one direction it's the Eye of Ra, and in the other direction it's the Eye of Horus, and Horus is the Falcon God and there is a myth tied in with Osiris and him being raised from the dead by Isis, and so on and so forth, but I can never remember any of that. All I know is I still like it, the ink has held up beautifully, and I have never covered it up with a wide watchband as a nurse manager told me I would end up having to do, "nursing being a very conservative profession." (Since then we have had nurses with pink hair and nose rings, so times they are a-changin'.)

People always ask me, "What does it mean?", and I am always at a loss. I usually default the question with a weak "Oh, I just like it", and the next question is "Did it hurt?", and I say, "Yes, along the bone, there, but it's not right at the bend of the wrist, so it wasn't too bad, not like the back of the neck...I hear that REALLY hurts." This is a conversation that has been repeated countless times through the years.

A few weeks ago my friend and colleague Jerry asked me, out of the blue, "What does your tattoo mean?" Jerry is a dear friend, and our conversations get deeper and more cosmic than conversations generally go in life, so I tried to answer his question, but could not. "To keep me honest" had been the starting point all those years ago, but my tattoo meant different things to me than that, and the eye was never one of reproach or judgement. I didn't talk to it (that would be rather psychotic, eh?), I didn't get an otherworldly vibe from it, I didn't even think of it as "a tattoo"...those were what other people had, with their colorful sleeves and the initials of dead loved ones embedded in roses. Mine was part of me, like a fanciful looking birthmark.

I babbled a bit about the Falcon God, and the rebirth of Osiris, and blah-blah, and then I said, "I don't know. I just woke up one day in San Francisco and wanted it, so I got it. I just liked it...and I still do."

It bothered me that I had no answer to that very reasonable question about a symbol I had permanently etched on my body. Why couldn't I answer that? What did it really mean?

It so happened that April of 1992 marked the start of what was the worst year of my life. I returned home from that trip and jumped immediately onto a runaway train of drama, danger, mental torment, and bad, bad choices far beyond what I had ever dabbled in before. That sickening ride ended with a whimper in March of 1993. One dreary morning, looking out my window in a sort of freeze-frame of activity, the thought came to me, "There must be another way," and just like that I was off the crazy train, never to return.. Life has been life since then, for sure, but it has never been so dark and ugly as that particular year.

The day after Jerry asked me, "What does your tattoo mean?" my bosses sent me to a nursing home to do an admission. I was at the nurse's station copying meds and various tidbits of information from the chart, when the charge nurse on the floor--who was very friendly and chatty toward me, not at all like the typical nursing home charge nurse who finds us hospice nurses to be superfluous pains in the asses--said, "What is your tattoo? Is that the Eye of Horus?"

"Yes, it is," I said in surprise.

"What did you get it for?" she asked, looking at me keenly.

"Um, I don't know, it's pretty old, actually. 1992. I just liked it, and the ink has held up really well..."

"That's a sign of protection, you know."

I was shocked. With all the explanations I had heard, and all the images of it I had seen on this and that piece of jewlery at the New Age stores in my city (and my city is a Mecca of New Age stores, by the way), and knowing that a very typical place to get a Eye of Horus tattoo is on the back, I had never realized that it symbolized protection.

"It is?"

"Oh, yes! People carry it for protection, the gods keeping an eye out for you. It's interesting that you have it on your wrist...tell me, did it hurt?"

I have meant to tell Jerry, "Here's the answer to your question...your question, and mine!", but work has been too busy and I forgot. Maybe he'll read this instead.

a link:  http://www.squidoo.com/the-eye-of-ra-tattoo

the Eye of Horus on the back of the neck (ouch, better her than me)(and mine looks WAY better):

Coinkydink, Part I

There is a friend of mine--we'll call him Jim--who has been avoiding me for months, and I can't say that I blame him. Whenever our paths cross, some mildly weird stuff starts to unfold, absolutely meant to kick his ass.

We were low-key e-mail buddies who had not seen each other since high school and really never knew each other until Facebook. One day he posted about the movie Wings of Desire, which is one of my favorites of all time but had forgotten about--in brief, it's about angels watching over the citizens of Berlin in 1987, before the Wall came down, and one of the angels falls in love with a beautiful, lonely trapeze artist who wears angel wings for her performances and has a liking for the music of Nick Cave--and the next day while in Five Guys with the kids waiting for our food, thinking of the movie and how I must get the DVD and watch it, I looked up and there was Jim, twenty-five years older than when I saw him last, smiling in recognition.

Jim said the whole thing was odd--he had been watching the movie the other day, after just purchasing the Criterion DVD realease, and the next day found out that Rowland S. Howard--one of the musicians featured in the film, along with Nick Cave (and one of the several painfully skinny guys playing guitar with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths)--had died.

 There was some vague talk about having coffee sometime, which didn't materialize before the next coincidence came up. I had just finished reading a novel by Chuck Klosterman and right away thought of Jim--Jim being deeply into music of all kinds, and Klosterman having made his living writing about music, sort of the American equivilent of Nick Hornby--so I e-mailed him, "Hey, check this author out," and he replied that he would. The next day (repeat: THE NEXT DAY), he visited the books-for-sale table at the library, just for something to do, and there on the top of the heap was one of the nonfiction, cultural commentary, music-focused books by Chuck Klosterman.

Jim e-mailed me about this in wonderment, and we both agreed it was some sort of sign. Jim had been professionally stuck for years, working in the far, retail-centered fringes of the music industry his whole adult life, with a little mix-DJing thrown in there now and then but nothing that had lead to anywhere. He wanted this year to be the year of change, but didn't know what to do or how to go about doing it.

I happened to notice that Nick Cave was coming to town, playing a show at the House of Blues with his side project Grinderman. I got tickets for me and Jim, and we had coffee at Atomic Cafe in Beverly one sunny fall afternoon a month or so before the show, and talked about where we were in life and where we would like to be. Jim suggested we then get some lunch somewhere, so we left the cafe and ended up across the street at a nice little joint called Wrapture that sells excellent wraps, salads, and that sort of thing. Jim talked about his DJing, and some mixes he'd come up with, and how he had a copy of one in his car and would give it to me before we parted, which made me happy, for his taste is vast and eclectic. There was a pause in our conversation, and Jim said suddenly, "Wait. Wait. The music they're playing. I know this," and he got up and spoke to the guy behind the counter, and returned to where we were sitting with an incredulous smile.

"The music they are playing is a mix CD I made a few years ago. I can't believe it," he said.

"What?!" I exclaimed. "Did they see you come in and then put it on?"

"No, they had no idea. I just about never come in here, they didn't realize it was me until I said something."

"Wow...the Universe is trying to get your attention, I think."

"Yeah, no shit! My mind is completely blown!"

The Grinderman show was short but intense, completely worth paying the babysitter for. Nick Cave was looking not too much like the guy singing "From Her to Eternity" in Wings of Desire anymore, but he hadn't lost a trick. Jim and I had a great time.

I e-mailed him, "We should be each other's ass-kickers! Isn't it obvious? There are things I want to do but drag my feet, and you too...we can be each other's 'Life Coaches'. Whaddaya think?"

"Sounds perfect!" Jim wrote back, and I pretty much have never heard from him again. He's still on Facebook, and he still has the same cruddy job, and he is still posting beautiful music nobody has never heard of but should...

...and the Universe is still patiently waiting for him.

(Jim is passionately into Icelandic musicians. I don't have the savvy to put all the little lines and squigglies above the letters to type her name properly, but below is the song "Innundir Skinni" by Olof Arnalds. I have zero clue what it's about, not knowing one tiny little whit of Icelandic, but it soothes, and the video is simply gorgeous. I have the CD, and generally can't tolerate listening to it in city traffic during my workdays--much too incongruous with my surroundings--but I had it repeating as I drove around Provincetown last April. It went very well with the quietness of the dunes. (See my "Provincetown" post for details of the peace I found on that solitary, overnight trip I took in mid-April before the tourists had descended on that part of the world.))