Vector Control - from the (tragic) point-of-view of a honeybee

photo by Dustin Hume

When one’s routine is broken, it’s a shock, like being blinded by a bolt of lightning. Our lives are much the same every day, and we rely on the unbroken stream of monotony. It makes us feel safe. We had found a new place for our hive, inside the hollowed-out base of a tree on a residential street. It was spacious, though dark, and we liked the sanctuary of the internal body of the tree. As it was mid-summer, our honey production was going well, and the queen was satisfied with our work.

One day, when I was on guard duty, we saw two bright yellow signs around the tree which said, “DANGER – BEES / ABEJAS! - County Vector Control.” I guess we had encroached on human territory. It’s known lore that they fear us, but can’t live without us. We females continued working - building, protecting, cleaning the hive and removing waste, circulating the air by beating our wings, foraging for nectar and feeding the brood.

Then the fateful day came. I was processing nectar when I heard the angry alarm of humming which rose in volume. A noxious yellow foam oozed through our entrance, and darkness surrounded us. We backed up to the walls of our hive to avoid the toxic smell. And then we realized that we could not exit. The news made its way to our queen who did not take it well, and the drones surrounded her, trying to soothe her. It became hard to breathe. We had to get out to save our lives, but there was no other path! We stopped buzzing and were silent and still. We had to think of a solution. Were there any other holes in the tree to the outside, however tiny? Thousands of us were still out there working - what would happen when they came back home, legs laden with pollen?

Fresh, clear air was all we wanted to feel, but knew we were starting to suffocate. The ghastly truth was becoming known to us, and we began to panic, ricocheting blindly against the narrow walls and each other. The flowers I might never see again: the lavender with its heavy intoxicating scent, the implausibly pink cosmos that lifted my spirits, the blue hydrangea which enveloped me in its trance-inducing beauty. And I thought of Melissa, out there floating around with liberty. When I first laid eyes on her, I thought she was divine – petite, with her five luminous eyes, her beautifully defined stripes, and her sexy hairy legs. She had the unusual scent of another colony’s bees.

I still had about four more weeks to live and finish producing my lifetime amount of honey, about the size of 6 ladybugs. How I missed a typical day, with our buzzing in the key of C, the gals and I constructing the comb with wax from glands on our abdomen, which was a pleasing feeling and my favorite thing to do. Soon, it was to be my turn to feed royal jelly to the queen, something I’ve waited so long for, but I’m afraid that chance will not come. Would I ever fly freely in the sunshine and see the endless sky again?

Bee facts: 

Bees have existed for 100 million years.

One-third of food humans eat is the result of bee pollination.

Honey is antibacterial, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory.

3,000-year-old honey was found in King Tut’s tomb, which was still edible.

                                                                                                                                                  Source: bestbees.com                                

To The People Not on this Earth Anymore

MID-CENTURY HOTEL ROOM, 1955

 

The mid-century hotel room

   keenly chilled by air-conditioning

       against the wavy heat right outside the orange door

Watercolors of desert scenes on the walls

   Frank S. on the airwaves

        Mid-priced champagne in an ice bucket

 

The bed sheets feel deliciously cold against their legs

       Swimming earlier has tired them out

            in an intoxicating, weak-kneed way

Steak and baked potato dinner with Caesar salad

     no stomachaches during the night

          just matrimonial euphoria

               

It is six years before my entrance -

      I’m safe because I’m still in the ether

            so no fear, or thoughts of doom

 

I can glamorize the 1950s of my parents

    but my imagination is so wrong  -

Still, I like to dream of it

    as perfect

 I always confused Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, just like I thought "Come Fly with Me" and "Fly Me to the Moon" were the same song.

Beach Camping - (for Sam W.)

As I eat my chili with a plastic spoon

As the Amtrak passes by

And wood smoke blows around me, imprinting my clothes

I listen to this  s o u n d

    Sometimes I hear it; other times I don't

It makes me think of you,

how you mixed your saliva with it

    just half a year ago

You once looked out at the horizon, surfboard under your arm

buoyant with hope

As the sound slams towards me,

you are here

    Your warm body in the cold ocean

And as the sound hushes flat,

you ebb away

    carried out to the eely blackness

the length of time you will be gone: eternity

I miss you with every pump of my heart

    A heart which had so intimately wrapped around you

I call for you

    Your name hangs and hangs but doesn't land

I'm only answered by the sand

thrown down by gravity in a lusty detonation

    Your absence leaves the world so barren

My ears are hoarse

and filled with fog

I can't hear you calling back to me

    We once ate chili together 

Berlin photos

 

Pretty Blue Paper

Grandma had saved

 about 50 sheets of pretty blue paper

 with rounded corners

The blue is like

 powdered cornflowers

 or milk in the lake

I found the paper in her desk drawer

 after she died

And I knew she had thought it was too good to use

 so it stayed in its cedar box

Until I found it and took it home

 where it lies in my drawer

 for the exact same reason

20 Photos

 

These Are Daddy's Last Days

These days, I feel like a new sprout that has peeked through the soil, and even the soft dawn light burns my baby green tendrils with the shock of being alive.

 These are daddy’s last days. They are finally here, and all my years have not prepared me for this obscene reality. No one walking down the street knows what’s going on right inside his window. A daughter with tears in her eyes feeding him water from a plastic spoon. All his 93 years alive have culminated in this dark little bedroom, like a tornado coming down to a pinpoint. No fanfare, no people. It’s too late to visit, and there were only one or two concerned relatives who live in town anyway.

My father is bones wrapped in skin, eyes sunken and not really focusing. Too weak to hold his head up. He has only his 2 bottom front teeth left, having probably swallowed the 4 or 5 others he had a month ago. He can’t smile anymore or show emotion on his face, having recently lost that ability. He was eating pureed food well until a couple weeks ago, and then he couldn’t. Now, as we wait 3 days for the hospice service which was caught up in stupid insurance company red tape, the caregiver and I are trying to feed him applesauce with his ground up medication, though he has trouble swallowing it. His rapid breathing isn’t a good sign; his body is fighting against its shutting down.

I feel so sorry for him every time I look at him. Sorry for his discomfort and the loss of his faculties. Death is not peaceful; the life force is still trying to do its job, creating discord. Clouded with dementia, does he know he’s dying? What does he think of my crying? The walls of his room are cracked, with concrete peeking through, his carpets are stained and ripped, but he is in his own bed, in his own room, on the street where he has lived for 55 years, with loving caregivers and his daughter by his side…not a bad way to go. Yet what’s happening feels ghastly. The TV is on as usual, and there are Ingrid Bergman and Leslie Howard, youthful and glowing. I see my dad half-watching them with one half-opened eye.

He tries to speak, but he can’t. His brain has forgotten how. A croaking sound comes out. He used to love talking, almost too much, about memories of a Brooklyn childhood and living through the Great Depression, but also the joy of meeting my mother, the love of his life. To entertain him, I show him old photos, which we’ve done countless times. I shine a flashlight on them and point out the details. My young gorgeous newlywed parents, my sister and me at our old house, a picture of my dad at 9 years old, his supple skin and shiny hair and big clear eyes. A photo of my dad in the 1950s on this very street, getting out of his cool old car, looking happy. I ask him, “Dad, is that a Ford or a Chevy?” He can’t answer. “Can you just give a little nod?…is it a Chevy?” but he can’t. It’s okay.

He’s still here with me. I can hug him, kiss his bald head, smell my daddy, tell him I love him, press my head to his, and oh God, it feels good. With the greatest effort, he slowly forms the words, “I…uv…ou,” and even though I’m a foot away, I rush to press against him and say it back, bawling. We’ve said these words to each other many times. My father, bless him, has never had trouble saying those beautiful words. In fact, he taught me how to love. He gave affection to his daughters effortlessly, not withholding it, like other dads.

We feared this moment, and now it’s here. The discomfort is in the utter finality. It doesn’t matter how many times I kiss him, or how tightly I embrace him now. It will not be possible to do so in about a week, no matter what. Where is he going? (He himself has wondered this out loud over the years). I don’t know a world without my dad. What will it be like? I know how to take care of this old man, but I don’t know how to say goodbye to him. My friends have gone through it, in more tragic ways. How do I handle it? The way dad is handling it…without choice. Stepping into each next moment, without one’s own consent or will. Like me stepping into my dad’s room and taking in what’s going on, wanting to or not. It’s more than just witnessing. It’s changing my whole perception of the world. It’s changing the atoms in my cells. After our 61-year relationship, the man who helped create me is going away. The man who loved me, nurtured me, fed me from a bottle, taught me how to play cards, took me to every theme park, played catch with me…throwing the ball straight up in the air as high as he could, to see if I could catch it. Let us eat junk food that my mother wouldn’t allow. Sitting on the curb outside KFC with boxes of extra-crispy chicken on our laps. Going to movie theaters, which dad loved to do: Yellow Submarine, 2001- A Space Odyssey, every Woody Allen film…  Laughing at Danny Kaye movies on TV together, Bob Hope, The Marx Brothers. Playing tennis together, which he was very good at. A big reader, a spiritual seeker. He was liberal. He was sentimental and would cry freely. Taking us on little trips, staying in motels, having pillow fights. Always giving me a sip of his milkshake.

But it was complicated too of course. As sweet as he was, he lacked the social graces of two-way conversation, turning everything into monologues. He didn’t know how to inquire about my life, and so he never found out. He didn’t visit me in the hospital a few miles from his home, even though I was there for a month. He was someone who admitted to loving TV, in the days when it wasn’t cool to say it.

He lived like a hermit for many years after my parents’ divorce destroyed him. He overshopped and hoarded. As angry as I was at him, he was always so lovable. He never, ever let my sister and me forget that he loved us wholeheartedly. Greeting us with a big bear-hug always.

I can’t help but to flash-forward to my own deathbed. Who will be there with me? Will it be as bad as this? Or better? What is ‘better’ in this situation? The only thing that’s for sure is that day will come. I’m at the stage of life of trying to preserve my middle-aged looks. How meaningless at this moment. My dad was dashingly handsome in a Tony Curtis way. His body has served him very well for pleasure and sport. Now, it’s purely a vessel for his soul, with no accessories. What a contrast in the way we value our bodies at different stages of life.

Leaving his house yesterday, I passed the recliner where he used to be practically planted like a tree, and said to myself, he will never sit in that chair again. Even though he’s right there in the bedroom, he doesn’t have the strength to ever come back out.

April 1, 2022

 

 

Southwest Chief

 

In a moving pencil box

Close the curtain and the sliding door

We shrink to fit

   into our tiny home

 

It’s jagged and lurchy -

squealing, groaning, banging

     Impossible to walk without

boomeranging

               down the hallways

   A toddler is steering his toy locomotive

     and the wheels have jumped the track

 

But grandma also rocked us side to side

We babies dozed, without a care

Someone else is driving now, so

I can take my eyes off the road

 

Scenery unscrolling before us

square red adobe homes

      in Albuquerque

A clock that doesn’t care if it’s 3 or 10 or 7:22

There is no other sense

   than barns blurred by speed

      and skittering grain silos

 

Yet what great fear and panic

   led up to this

What outrage, what fury

Afraid of change, fear of moving

frightful of choosing –

 

The view is a sponge that absorbs

 the last fiery trickles of anxiety

  Powders the baby’s butt

      and wraps the package in clean blue tissue paper

 

Last night, my guy and I

in the same bunk, sparkly dark

Looking out the window at a few stabs of light

Kissed, and this felt new

 

Kansas City brick buildings

  pointy-roof houses in a row,

    smokestacks

The difference from the usual

   palm trees and freeways

    is beguiling

 

Iowa, snow on ground

red barns and horses,

greenhouses

Illinois farmland, naked trees

Flat as a griddle

 

On a 7-minute stop in Missouri

If you pick up snow off the ground,

they instantly know you’re from L.A.

 

Safe, sleepy, contented

til I am gobsmacked

by what is revealed

through the rectangular eye

 

Speeding away from what I was.

I am on a train.

 

Baby Monkeys

 

 

 

Late at night, when everyone’s asleep, I watch baby monkeys on YouTube. They have their own channels, and there are new videos every day. The owners of the monkeys are young women from Thailand or Vietnam where the monkeys are available in the forests. These women seem to care about the monkeys, hugging and kissing them, bathing, feeding, diapering and dressing the monkeys in human clothes. But one can’t help but feel that the bottom line is there is money to be made by posting these videos.

The monkeys are bottle-fed, eagerly watching their human ‘mother’ mixing the powdered formula with water. Sometimes the monkeys get fruit, but they have to wait and wait until it’s cut up or mashed, reaching for it and getting swatted away. When the woman is diapering one monkey, with a disposable infant diaper (a hole poked in it for the tail), the other monkeys are made to watch and wait. They are trained to be docile, waiting their turn, but inevitably, like children, they step out of line and are reprimanded. The monkeys are so small and light that the woman picks them up like chess pieces and moves them back to where they belong. She’s constantly rearranging the monkeys, putting them in order, like a drill sergeant. Instead of the expected screeching, the monkeys make clicking sounds. They move so fast, it’s almost like a trick of the eye seeing them go from here to there. At their wildest, the baby monkeys ricochet off the wall.

They bathe the monkeys in kiddie pools, using people-shampoo, which is probably harsh, and rub the monkeys harder than necessary. They clean their hairless red tushies that make you feel embarrassed to look at. They rinse them by pouring potfuls of water on their heads, and then wrap them in towels. At this point, sometimes the women cuddle them.

It’s more about discipline than love. But that’s what keeps me watching, in a weird way. The monkeys are adorable, with their quick eyes darting, and their heavy eyelids, especially when they look at the camera. An older baby monkey might hold a younger monkey like a doll. Or the littlest baby will wrap its hand around another one’s leg, for some contact. Sometimes they clutch onto the woman, as they would do with a mother, and when she plucks them off, they complain with jerky movements and try to hang on. The videos have titles like “Monkey Cry Hug Chair Not Want to Bathing When Mom Call Him,” and “Obedient Monkey Sitting Wait Mom Mixed Milk.”

Sometimes the children of the women look on or help. Do they ever question why their mothers are giving more attention to the monkeys than to their own kids?

There are more angry comments than there are fans of the channels. Yes, the monkeys are cute with their close-together eyes, flat-top hairdos, and human-like features, but people are enraged that the monkeys aren’t left alone to live in their natural setting, free and wild. I agree, and I started wondering how these infant monkeys are so plentiful if they weren’t taken from their mother’s breast? They don’t just appear at the pet shop. What is the back story?

I just saw a video nestled among the monkey videos that tells us that the mother monkeys are murdered as hunters and poachers take the baby monkeys after birth and sell them to the YouTube channels. “They’re exploiting these animals. And when they’re old, they are dumped back into the forest and torn to shreds, not knowing how to defend themselves. These governments need to make this illegal. Why does YouTube enable this? There are thousands of monkey YouTube channels. These videos should be banned.”

I am entertained by the videos, as I am by cat videos. But cats in cat videos are not held captive in the same way. Monkeys are more intelligent, and more like us. You feel that they are going to explode with rage one day; they have no choice but to comply and wear these doll clothes. I am truly fascinated by observing how another species behaves, and it’s even more interesting to see how they act in this unnatural setting. But that it’s purely for the viewer’s merriment is not fair to the monkeys. A part of me wants to hold the monkeys, love them and care for them, help them escape. I feel sorry for them, and after this, will I refuse to watch another monkey video, in protest and solidarity? I tell myself to stop, but the next video pops up, and I watch it with guilt, like watching a snuff film. 

3 photos

A Teenage Grandson’s Visit to Grandpa, and I’m There Too

One of the few ways I can get my 16-year-old son to visit my 92-year old dad is for us to swing by Dad's on the way to Julian's annual check-up in the same neighborhood. The last time they saw each other was Christmas, and now it's mid-June and Dad's 92nd birthday. I had bought some brownie bites, and a card with a big footprint next to a little footprint in the sand. Poor Dad always got a combo birthday/Father's Day card, as they're a few days apart. Julian doesn't love being there because it's boring in many ways, but he's a good sport and comes along without complaint.

     We walk into Dad’s apartment and say hi to Dad’s caregiver. My dad is asleep in his wheelchair, with a towel pinned around his neck from lunchtime. He’s very thin, and looks small and frail. We say happy birthday - Julian has a generous smile on his face which is real and for my dad. Dad smiles back, and I wonder if my dad truly knows who it is. After all, grandkids grow fast, and their image is constantly shifting. Julian has a little summer beard, his first one ever. The TV is on, something interesting but violent that the caregiver chose. I lean down and kiss Daddy’s bald head and cheeks. I rub his back. I like to communicate this way, since talking is kind of secondary now. Dad is of few words these days; they’re mostly out of reach except “I love you.” (I’m lucky.) I wonder if Julian can remember that my dad used to be garrulous. You couldn’t stop him.

     My sister pointed out the other day that our Dad’s outgoing answering machine-message is the voice of the dad we used to know, sure of his words. He probably recorded it a decade ago.

     I ask the caregiver if we can change the channel to Turner Classic Movies, Dad’s favorite. A Tab Hunter movie is on, in which he fights with a very young Tommy Lee Jones while…what’s his name?.. that familiar face…with that nose…he used to play a police officer…looks on from the back seat of a car.*

     I want my son and father to engage more, but it’s like there’s a hard clear wall between them. It’s not anybody’s fault. Maybe it’s enough that they are sitting in the same room. 

     Julian eats a brownie bite, and I feed one to Dad. The next movie comes on and it’s Cold Turkey with Dick Van Dyke, about a small town that tries to quit smoking for prize money. I say in Dad’s good ear, “Remember you took us as kids to see this movie in the theater when it came out?” And then I play the game that Dad and I used to play, naming all the character actors as they appear, though I’m the only one playing now. Julian is impressed as I rattle off Jean Stapleton, Tom Poston, Vincent Gardenia, straight-man Bob Newhart, and all these 1970s actors who are no longer around, except for good ol’ Bob Newhart and the wonderful Dick Van Dyke who are in their 90s, even older than Dad. Their being still alive gives me some kind of hope…for what? Just hope.

     Oh, God. Is this what it’s come to, showing off my knowledge of 1970s character actors to my teenage son?

     I go and get a photo of my heavy-set dad holding my infant son, and then say to Dad, “Look. You used to carry Julian,” so proud of how tall and broad-shouldered my son has become.

     “Julian is on the tennis team,” I say every time. Dad used to be an avid tennis player. “And he’s interested in real estate, your old career.” I wish he could tell him all the stories he told me about trying to sell plots of land in the Antelope Valley in the ‘80s, all the tricks of the trade. I had heard them so often, as he loved to talk about his job…how he could turn a “no” into a “yes,” sealing the deal. But those are locked away now.

      One day, I will recede from the world like Dad has. How strange not to be able to read your mail anymore, talk to neighbors, walk around the block. At his age, maybe he’s tired and glad not to have to do these things, so he can rest.

     I don’t think twice about being part of the world…driving, taking elevators to doctors, reading newspapers, paying bills, while I’ve watched my dad slowly ebb from life outside until he can only see it framed by TV, or hear our watered-down news as we enter his place. He doesn’t need to know that there’s a pandemic out there (he’s safe) or that there recently were days of protests and uprisings in our neighborhoods after another black man was asphyxiated by a cop with his hands smugly in his pockets.

     My dad has seen it all…does he really need to hear the news? He saw people starving in the Great Depression, he witnessed world wars, the Civil Rights Movement, assassinations of great men, even 9/11. Just know, as I do, that he can’t handle that much these days, and give him simple love.

     Julian has seen a lot too, and he’s only been on this planet for 16 years. He knows so much more than when I was safely sitting in dark movie theaters with my dad. He and his generation have needed to develop an armor to face life, which we never had to have. We grew up pretty sheltered and laid-back, playing with Lite-Bright, tying macramé, listening to Carole King, James Taylor, Elton John. The Vietnam War was a blur. We didn’t watch the equivalent of The Daily Show or John Oliver with our parents, like Julian does. We watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

     As we walk to the car, need I say out loud, “One day, I’ll be in grandpa’s position, and you’ll be in my position”? No, I needn’t, but I do. Why do I? I don’t want to burden Julian with that thought. It’s enough to know that Julian watched me kneeling down next to, and transferring my pure love to the man who raised me. It’s easy for me, as I wrote on the Father’s Day card to him today, “You taught me how to love.” Julian read that when I gave the card to him to sign.

     Julian says, “His eyes really lit up when you told him I liked real estate.”

     "Really?" I ask. I didn't notice.

“How tall was grandpa?” Julian asks. And I realize, he doesn’t really know because it’s hard to tell when you’re a little kid looking up, and my dad’s been bent-over and in a wheelchair for the past 6 years.  He doesn’t know something that I know so well. “Somewhere between you and Papa,” I answer.

*Karl Malden.

 (He had bright blue eyes.)

Grandma’s Thread

I’m sewing together a mask out of a handkerchief and some elastic. Not surprisingly, there are people all over the world doing this same thing right now, since we’ve been told to wear them out in public. This is during the coronavirus pandemic of spring 2020. I’m using my grandma’s Clarks pure silk 50 yards, 323.1 silver colored thread, which I found in her sewing kit many years ago. We just started wearing masks on our walks in the neighborhood, but the one I quickly made out of a scarf and hairbands was uncomfortable and kept falling off.

       It’s raining, so no walk today. I’m listening to Django Reinhardt on YouTube with two comforting cats on the bed with me.

       My grandma was born in 1898, and died 32 years ago, but it occurred to me that she may have made masks with this very spool of thread at age 20 during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The only memories of those days that she had ever talked about were fairly happy ones, so hopefully she didn’t lose anyone to that deadly outbreak. I wish I’d asked her more about what it was like to live in the early part of that century. Why didn’t I ask?

       I don’t want to think about Zoom meetings and how things were different. In 1918, rain wasn’t different, cats weren’t different, even Django was born only 12 years after grandma.

       It does occur to me to be thankful that our survival rate nowadays is much better. The world didn’t really know what a virus was, and with many immigrant families in my grandma’s Brooklyn (her parents among them), there was a general mistrust of medicine. Some people lived in tenements which had little to no running water and no electricity. Schools stayed open with the thought that poorer children would be better off away from the unhygienic conditions of their homes and under supervision where they could be better educated about the disease. Theaters stayed open too, to educate the public on how not to transmit the flu. Fortunately, temporary health centers were created, as well as mass distribution of informational posters telling how to self-quarantine. In the old photos, there are pictures of police officers, postal carriers, and of course, nurses wearing masks.

     Grandma survived. The silver thread makes me feel closer to her.

my grandma Frances

(Thanks to Untapped New York by Noah Sheidlower for info.)

Italy photos