Ding-a-ling MacArthur Foundation calling/ Poem: Going down

If I counted correctly, 24 brilliant minds received a phone call last week announcing they'd won a half a million dollar prize from the MacArthur Foundation. Here they are.

A couple years ago, I actually had the nerve to see if I could get a grant from MacArthur and was soundly rejected. My philosophy is: Expect to be turned down.

We had such a great guest speaker in September and I'm now making calls for a financial expert to speak to our group about What to do with your money in these hard times and also Debt consolidation. I just called my personal banker at my credit union and do expect to be turned down. Does anyone have any ideas of who I could get to speak? Please send me an E. My daughter laffed when I told her my passcode. It's daylily.

My friend Nancy just called. I told her I was making my famous potato salad sans potatoes (high potassium count, bad for my kidneys). I substitute fresh green beans for delicious skin-on red bliss potatoes. AND THEY WOULDN'T GIVE ME A GRANT, THE NERVE!

So the phone rings this morning and it's Nicole Pimble, a psychotherapist I worked with at NHS. She's now working at Abington's Creekwood Center. I could not picture what she looked like but her voice sounded very familiar.

We talked about old times. A couple years ago I drove over to NHS (Northwestern Human Services) off Sunset Road in Fergusonville, outside Bristol, PA, and found to my horror, the old schoolhouse building - Clymer Elem School - had been torn down and a housing development put in.

I just sat there in my car and breathed. Then I comforted myself by going to a nearby Rita's Water Ice and ordering a small lemon.

Did I tell you my email was broken for 2 days? I could receive but not send. I spoke to Comcast teks Erica and then Josh. Erica of Newark, DE spent 40 minutes with me, during which time she had me disable my entire email system, but that didn't fix the problem. Then I called Josh of Wilmington, DE. I complained to him that my entire inbox was gone plus all the important emails I'd saved over the past year such as info for a trip I'm taking later this year and I asked Josh how I could retrieve my inbox.

Steel yourself, said Josh. You can't retrieve it.

Not good.

Comcast was sposed to phone me within 6 to 48 hours. A day had gone by. I called again. This time Abdul of Canada answered the phone.

I see the problem, he said. It's on our end. I want you to pull out the black wire from your router.

Abdul, it's not gonna work, I said. I did that already. I've done everything.

Please try it, he said.

I went upstairs into the room w/the dead stinkbugs and unplugged the black wire. We waited 30 seconds and then I plugged it back in.

The email worked. I thanked him effusively. He was nonplussed.

I drove over to Creekwood Mental Health Center in Abington to say hello to Nicole, bringing her a copy of the Compass, arguably our best issue yet. She loves to run groups there at Creekwood and I peeked into the empty group room. I told her I'd recently found a poem I'd written about the demise of NHS and seeing her had given me the opportunity to print my poem. It's about a former boss of mine and speaks for itself.

THE DAY THE SHIP WENT DOWN: The Closing of Northwestern Human Services, Bristol-Bensalem in Fergusonville, PA

I knew by the way my boss moved
across my office toward the empty chair,
a man who never sat,
a man who never rested,
so full of loose grace and a misplaced
assurance that he was — to what avail?—
descended from a line of Scottish royalty,
knew without a word that I had lost my job.

Knew, too, by the way he sank in the chair,
the whoosh of it,
the sigh of it,
that it was something greater than myself,
greater than my endless worries of pleasing my clients
or whether my charts were done up in
the proper shade of black ink.

Finally, he said, it’s come to this:
Our flawed, failing, panic-stricken
agency was shutting down for good.
Bankrupt on promises.
He sat in one of my for-company-only
chairs, an impossibly gorgeous blue upholstered
chair with dust so old I couldn’t
budge it from the corners
even with moistened fingers.

Now he was seated,
the man who never sits,
one tree trunk leg crossed over the other,
shiny black policeman’s shoes
reflecting the light of day,
the future King of England
had things gone his way.

I loved our newfound virgin closeness, the pretense that
he would share with me the rumble of
his discontent; his massive ambition knocked silly,
the man who sat atop tables at meetings and consulted his
watch with flourish. Henry the Eighth, I called him,
and waited for them to take him down.

Instead, we’d end our lives together,
he and I, an odd, out of sync pair,
sinking together.