IdyllopusPress Presents

H.o.p. reports it takes 307 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop.

Yesterday afternoon I spent quite a long time talking on the phone to an old friend who lives half this continent away while H.o.p. was with Marty touring the Jim Henson exhibit at the Atlanta History Center. She was adamant I bring up NPR on the radio and listen to the concert at the Lincoln Memorial. By the time I did, however, the concert was over. Then last night I saw on Americablog a link to a video from the concert, at Youtube, of Pete Seeger singing “This Land is Your Land” with his grandson and Bruce Springsteen, and Marty and I sat down to watch it with H.o.p., to listen to Seeger exhort the rest of us all to join in, and I tried vainly to explain to H.o.p. why it might mean so much to his parents and to others to watch Pete Seeger up there singing

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

I’d post the video here for memory’s sake but it has since been removed from Youtube due to a copyright claim by Home Box Office. We have Direct TV but don’t have flashy ornaments like Home Box Office so I’m glad we saw the video last night when it was still available.

Of course I had mixed feelings while I was listening to Pete Seeger, his grandson and Springsteen. The kind of mixed feelings I didn’t have as I sat last Friday with H.o.p. and watched Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery and explained to him what that journey of “discovery” was really about, talked with him about Jefferson’s plans for the indigenous nations and the meaning of Lewis and Clark’s interactions with them, for though he already knows a lot about this I feel compelled to reiterate and tell him again, impressing upon him that, well…what Peter Seeger was singing about Sunday is a sentiment that didn’t exactly drive the creation of this nation as history teaches us it has. I ever remind him, as we pursue history, so that when he chooses to sing along to “This Land is My Land”, he needs to be ever mindful of the bone closets.

Just as I could choose to sing along with Pete Seeger on Sunday even as I thought about a link to a website a friend had sent me over the weekend, that website showing volumes of ledger picture art his great-grandfather had done circa Wounded Knee.

Later that night I read aloud to Marty Making Light’s “The True History of the Bush Years” in the form of headlines from “The Onion” and I laughed and laughed. As I hit the entries for 2008 (Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job, Crocodile Bites off Bush’s Arm, Vice President Cheney Seen Dragging Egg Sac Through West Wing) I was finally laughing so hard I could no longer speak. And it felt weirdly good even though it was painful as hell. Like the night my appendix ruptured when I was 28. I didn’t know my appendix had ruptured, I just knew I was in dire straits and made Marty read comedy to me for hours as an anesthetic. It hurt to laugh but still I laughed, eager for life to be more than Bruegel’s hell. Of course, the next day I was barely conscious, on morphine in the hospital, and then I was really really sick ten days later when I finally had my long-since-ruptured appendix removed after having been misdiagnosed (though they did peg the peritonitis). And I laughed after that, too, because I’d made it through and if I hadn’t laughed I’d have been petrified with fear over the fact that I’d not been just a walking time bomb, the time bomb had in fact gone off and still I’d managed to keep breathing those ten days despite it all. Hell, they’d even sent me home from the hospital and I’d had to keep pestering them, telling them, “Listen, things aren’t right.”

So, I laughed last night. And it felt good.

And it felt really, really awful.

This morning I woke up feeling emotionally like I’d been on a terrible drunk, one that can net you a life of penalties after only a couple of days, much less eight years, only I don’t drink (been there, done that, found out long ao I couldn’t do that) and I was paying for someone else’s bloody mayhem while they rode away scot free and merrily whistling. There are so many parties going on I could probably sling a rock in any direction and trepan a giddy celebrant, but my stomach was sour, I sagged under tons of psychic burden and all I really wanted to do was sit down in a corner and cry.

H.o.p. is excited because one of his uncles is in D.C. and will be attending the inaugural. H.o.p.’s hoping for pictures.

H.o.p. is still talking about the election. He recently asked if we could go back down and vote again soon because it was so much fun and so exciting standing in line with all the friendly people during the presidential election. I think he’ll remember that day for a long time.

We have a friend who is up in D.C. and the house she’s staying in lies under the exiting flight path that Bush’s helicopter will be taking. I hear that there are plans to take photos of it as it passes overhead.

Maybe I’ll get it in gear and feel a little more jovial when the big moment arrives…

How this came about, I don’t know really, and though it works for me it may not work for anyone else, and though it has worked for me now a number of times over the past few months, it may not work for me in the future. But it has worked for me every time I’ve done it…for now.

Big revelation. Here it is. I’m only sorry I can’t describe exactly how I do it. But I realized through yoga how to stop hiccups. At least those which belong to me.

I’m one of those people who when they get hiccups, nothing ever works for getting rid of them, that is until many years ago I read about taking a sip of water and standing on your head and swallowing. I tried this and it worked for me. Usually I’d have to take several sips of water but it would work for me much of the time, though not always.

Sipping water while inverted is not always practical or possible though, is it?

Several months ago, I got the hiccups, and via the yoga and some of the postures in which the concentration is on the palate, somehow I simply knew that if I concentrated on my palate and sucked up and back from inside/above it, while at the same time drawing the muscles at the back of my throat down, then the hiccups would probably stop. I knew it was different from taking a sip of water and standing on your head but it was somehow the same. So, I did this and it worked, the hiccups immediately stopped.

Would it work the next time? It did. And the next. Every time now I get the hiccups, I do this, and they stop immediately…except for once when I had to do this brief procedure three times before they stopped.

H.o.p. gets the hiccups, usually at bedtime. He doesn’t want to sleep, is excited and laughing and the next thing he knows he has the hiccups.

The other night he got the hiccups. I told him, “Try this. Suck up on your palate and pull the muscles at the back of your throat down at the same time.”

Now, H.o.p. had just heard me describe to his dad how I do this and how it works for me.

He hiccuped, “I can’t! I don’t do yoga!”

He was adamant on that last point. H.o.p. has it in his mind, somehow, that yoga is for girls. Never mind that I’ve got a couple of books showing Iyengar in the postures, as far as H.o.p. is concerned, his mom rolls out a mat and does yoga and therefore it is for moms and girls. I know this because he’s told me, “Yoga is for girls!” Sometimes he’s nice about me doing my yoga (which I practice in the living room as it’s the only place in our apartment where I’ve room to roll out the mat) and will be respectful of it, and sometimes he’s even helpful, and then a lot of the time he likes to sneak up behind me when I’m in a difficult posture and grab me and give me a bear hug and yell, “I love you!” and grin while waiting to see if I fall over.

“This isn’t yoga,” I assured him. “Just try. Suck up on your palate and pull the muscles at the back of your throat down. It has to be at the same time.”

“I can’t!” he hiccuped. “I don’t do yoga!”

“Just try.”

He tried. “I can’t do it!” he complained vigorously. “I really can’t do it! I can’t! I don’t know how! I told you, I don’t do yoga!!!! Aren’t you listening to me?”

I said, “Do you still have the hiccups?”

H.o.p. stopped and reflected, surveyed his body. “No,” he said.

He didn’t. But I’d observed he didn’t have them any longer or else I wouldn’t have asked.

He looked at me as if I was somehow suddenly beyond his ken. A mystery of a person who could work strange feats of magic.

“OK, now go to sleep,” I said, and as I stood and left the room he didn’t say a word. For the first time in his eleven years (and probably the last) there was no complaint about having to sleep. No outcry.

He had been awed, for once, by mom.

This will never work again, of course.

* * * * *

P.S. I figured why not look this up on the internet and see if someone else has written about the same experience. I find a woman named Kris keeps a yoga blog and she has a post in which she discusses her discovery that Jalandhara bandha (the throat lock), perhaps through stimulation of the vagus nerve, gets rid of hiccups after a few breaths. I compared the procedure I described above with Jalandhara bandha and I think it is, in effect, the same thing.

Interesting that even being a yoga neophyte, through your practice you can intuit bandhas you had no idea existed. And makes sense as well.

If you think about it many cures for hiccups, such as eating a big spoonful of peanut butter, sipping water through a paper towel or washcloth, applying sugar to the back of the throat, are ways of attempting to a throat lock.

When I was in my 20′s I did a lot of hand tinting of photos. Then I started going to the library and photocopying images from books and most frequently working on them with pastels and colored pencils and ink. The photos were always old black and white ones of things like the Lion Gate at Mycenae and pyramids and old sculptures and chickens and old trees and simple tables. I loved working with these photocopies, which were sometimes as poor in quality as the photoshopped glasses above; it was like working with ghostly artifacts.

Later (still in my 20s) I did a series of photocopied Japanese photos from the Meiji era. This was when I was reading nothing but Japanese novels and trying to learn Japanese…and I managed to learn enough eventually that I was able to sort out a good bit of the dialogue in Japanese movies. The photos were beautiful (I forget the name of the photographer) and these I reworked with thick bold pastel treatments. They came out quite well. But whatever happened to them I haven’t a clue. As with the Lion Gates and pyramids and chickens and old trees and simple tables, they didn’t survive. They may have been destroyed when a tree fell onto the house we were renting and destroyed the roof over the room that I used as a studio, crashing through the ceiling. There were several disasters there that ruined hundreds of drawings and inks. The tree was one of the worst as it brought with it a lot of water damage.

This post isn’t to rue the destruction of those images. Instead, it’s just to remark on how much I still like photocopies.

P.S. They’re not “glasses” as they’re plastic, but they’re not properly tumblers as their bottoms aren’t curved. I don’t know why the English language hasn’t come up with a suitable word for plastic drinkware.