442. "Mindful of the Mountain" Song/Poem [Fragment?] of My Grandfather Ray HUB BLOG FOR RAY-MARION

Mindful of the Mountain Song/Poem. The PDF can be found here: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/mindfulofthemountain.pdf.

I've written a few poems that have immense personal meaning in concern of my grandfather. It mainly started with "Two Generations Removed from the Land," which I frantically wrote in the middle of September, essentially during a panic attack session in the car, when I found out the Ray had a horrible "transfer" session from a Physical Therapy Center to the nursing center where Marion used to be--then he exclaimed over the phone to me "These centers just want to milk your money! They don't care about you!" and then my panic attack ended because though Ray had a bad day--slump--he was rebounding rapidly. Two other heavy poems I wrote were after Ray's passing, in which one was "Stepped off the Planet," and the other one was "Mindful of the Mountain," in which I have a ditty above, but I made a much lengthier song back in October of 2009, and I haven't had a chance to revisit the audio.

"Two Generations Removed from the Land" can be found in Blog 296

and the book "CHESS: The Poetry of Human-Environmental Change."

"Stepped off the Planet" can be found in Blog 387.

And of course, "Mindful of the Mountain" can be found right on this Blog 442!

Descriptions of a turbulent time during the passing of Ray are found in Blogs 349 and 350, as well as the Question Reality GoogleGroup.

It seems that each poem that I wrote for Ray had become more and more simple... and somewhat more emotionally profound in messaging (at least to me, personally). I am sure I have other unfinished fragments and ideas of poems and stories layng around. The poems showed that I was greatly attached to my grandfathr, in the best ways that I knew now.

During 2004-2007, I had written a few poems about my grandmother Marion, but they were along the lines of "Artificial Life," (I tried writing this poem twice, but rendered unsuccessful, something that needs to be done) or my level of disgust on how modern medicine was extending life to a point of visceral absurdity. If you rewind the clock two hundred years to a few thousand, my grandmother would have been first in the line of saber tooth catnip, flat out. She could barely function on her own. I told Jules last night that I cried at age 15 when I discovered Marion had Alzheimer's and I wrote a long report in my English class about Alzheimer's Disease (which seemed to make sense), but after that, I was emotionally flat and even cynical, as the whole family, especially Ray, went for a very long ride of ten-year decay. Other than that, my father told me that Marion was very instinctively caring and nurturing--housewife type--and Ray was more of a dominant fatherfigure of the household, but those were the times, and my father treated me and my sister as two kids who deserved the best of the best, whether we were a female, male, or or "it," whether we had four, six, or the magic number of 5 fingers.

I also happened to write a little bit about Marion when I sketched out a short story called "The Immensely Minor Passing of Cat-Kat," which is found in Blog 334.