Remembering Pam

Posting is sad today...   but when I came to post, I discovered a December post draft that I had never finished, published... it made me smile.   So at least I got that posted prior to this entry....

And on to today....

I loved Pam Patterson.   I loved her writing on our departed meeting ground, Pearlsoup.  I visited the PS nearly every day online in 2003-2005. PS was a writer's website that saw a good deal of of my poetry when I had revived my voice and was writing nearly every day.... some of my editorial and joke posts, and way too much of my comments and personal opinions!   It may be that latter part of the comments and opinions that bonded a few of us together, so that when the website went dark, we were still able to email and to follow each other's blogs.

Pam and I got together for the first time with her sister Kelly and a writing friend of mine that I had met in a Yahoo group, the delightful Marion.  We were all living in the south and spent a girls weekend at a beautiful cottage on the river in Louisiana in 2008.  I flew to Dallas and Pam and I drove there, meeting Kelly, who had driven in from Arkansas and picked up Marion along the way.  The weekend was a delight.

 

 

Pam was a special poet...not afraid to pursue dark and lonely thoughts in some poems, along with witty repartee in others. 

Pam had a love for family, for her dogs...a penchant for decorating her beautiful home, and a compelling need to clean that house like a whirling dervish!  Having been a devoted caretaker for her two grandsons while her daughter worked, Pam  incredibly, late in life, found a career teaching/aiding special needs children in the Dallas school system.  I last saw her on a visit to Dallas in 2009.  I got to see Bear Bear, too, on that trip, my favorite of her pack of "furkids".  Bear Bear passed on in 2010, but Pam continued to run with her pack of "furkids".  I think her pup Spanky replaced Bear Bear in the pack. 

Last pic that Pam sent to me, shows her in her classroom, with a student... a real illustration of how devoted she was to the career that came along late in life:

As her life got busier, Pam's time to devote to blogging became less and less.  So, while I could continue to follow Ms. Marion's active blog and to live text and stay in touch weekly, with Kelly, I did not have as much interface as in the past.  We reduced to following each other on Twitter, although I got an amazing email from Pam just a few months ago. 

More's the pity that I did not take more time.   That I didn't let her know how much I cared.

~~~~~~~~~~

Pam passed away after a short bout with a terrible illness on February 24.  My heart breaks at having not called her in her final weeks.  But I know she knows I was thinking about her.  I always will.

More Maya Stein

No FreeVerse available this Wednesday, but I went back in time to post an exceptional new poem from Maya Stein (parents, take note!):

Peculiar and Exceptional

Take exquisite care of yourself

she said, and that day, fighting a cold,

I misunderstood, took myself directly

to bed, then to the kitchen for soup,

then wasted an obscene amount of hot water

on a late afternoon shower.

Later, when the weight in my chest

had cleared, when I could breathe again,

and tell the difference between fogginess and fog,

it occurred to me I had not been listening

for a long time.

Here, she was saying, is the poem of you.

Here is your delicate architecture, you fragile aliveness.

Here are your deer legs, your dandelion heart.

Here are your dormouse tracks on fresh, permeable snow.

Here is the way you sing, your voice millimetering toward sound,

how you hold your gaze on the coastline as if it were

a fiber of gold. Here is your language,

thin as a moth wing, your kiss a whisper

of offering. Here is how you cross the street,

how you drive the car, how you throw a Frisbee and bake a cake.

Here are the contents of your purse,

the Chapstick down to the quick

the receipt for midnight groceries,

a square sachet of lavender, a pair of broken

sunglasses still, somehow, salvageable.

Here are the thousand tiny ways you know to love.

Here are your wild little arms,

the soft tentacles of your fingers.

Here is how you sleep and how you wake up,

how you tiptoe toward the edge of the water

like a turtle, a drip of honey, an heirloom sweater

buried in a pile of attic castoffs.

Here are your shoes.

Here is the way you eat.

Here are your secret favorite things, the underbelly of clover

lining the deck boards, the moss erupting near the recycling.

Here is your devotion to precision and the giddy, uncontainable

mess you nevertheless effort to contain.

Here are the sounds you make when you’re happy,

the alleyway damp of your sorrow.

Here is the lullaby tucked inside your bureau,

the joy hidden under the last shelf in the pantry,

the smooth belly of peace obscured by traffic lights.

Here is everything you know,

and everything that is still waiting patiently

for you to know it.

And I saw that this exquisite care

I was asked to take was not a matter

of sleep or soup, or hot water,

but an unflagging allegiance to my own wisdom,

the curves and wayward bends of it,

wool-scratched and seaglass-soft

syllabled or a baby’s babble,

however it was shaped and however it shaped,

wisdom, mine, certainty and uncertainty, a light,

however dim, steady and beckoning.

and this too:

loyalty to the peculiar and exceptional

ticking of my heart, which, without any intervention,

knows exactly what it needs

to chase the next breath

and the one that will come

just after.