Back to the Baja and San Ignacio Lagoon

What is it about a gray whale that inspires you to reach over the side of the panga (little boat) and pet this friendly ocean mammal on the head? I'm not sure what the attraction is, but I'm heading back to San Ignacio Lagoon again this year to do it again.

This year, though, I'll make sure to put my lifejacket on over my shirt not under it!

Celebrating a Birthday . . .

Well, another birthday to be grateful for. On this day, more than 60 years ago, my 19-year-old mother zoomed along in the backseat of a taxicab to a Providence hospital about 12 miles from home. My grandmother, a nurse, rode along with her. I think my grandpa, the town's much loved doctor, was on call at the hospital and already there waiting for us to arrive.    

As the story goes, my dad didn't hear about my impending birth until after I arrived at 3:45 am. No cell phones or other social media back then, right? Actually, most people had a "party line" and shared a phone with neighbors. Kind of like cans and string. Very few people enjoyed the luxury of their own phone line. If you picked up the phone and you heard talking, you just hung up and tried back later. Emergencies, like the birth of me, allowed an interruption and a special call to the hospital.

Because my mom had moved back home for her last months of pregnancy, my dad agreed to stay at his URI frat house until my arrival. After than we moved to "DiChristofaro's" on Anthony Green into an apartment I remember having huge furniture. My first memory is standing in my crib looking at a bright light under the door of the bedroom I shared with my parents. I could hear laughing and happiness, but I was alone in the dark.

When I learned to walk, I couldn't reach the doorknobs or climb on the couch.

Folktales about my life threaded through the neighborhood with stories of my mom dropping me on my head on the cement floor at the Boy's Club where my dad lifeguarded, leaving the brakes off my carriage so it careened into the river and floated Moses-style along the shoreline, and forgetting me in the bathtub with the water running.

As a toddler, one of my favorite things to do (according to my mother) included waving my training pants at the cars as they drove by my playpen set in the sunshine out on the Green near our fence. So, I can honestly say that I've spent a lifetime with my bottom exposed . . . in one way or another.  

We lived at DiChristofaro's until my sister arrived on the scene in the spring of 1953. My grandmother gave the ancestral home, called affectionately 751, to my mother, and we all moved in with the ghosts of my great-grandmother (Nellie) and great-grandfather (Armand) and the spiritualists who lived there in the ell many years before them.

Flat-out spooky, this house still stored Nellie's floor-length gowns and my great uncle Rollo's WWII medals and uniforms up in the attic. The old garage in front of my grandpa's and grandmere's garden had wagon wheels and rusty tools for tending to horses' hooves.

I loved that house. My childhood memories live there still . . . but in a fictional way. I'm working on the stories for you right now.  

Skatin' Around the Christmas Tree - 1950s Style

Memories of Christmas back in the late 50s start with the living room filled with presents. This is before my brother arrived on the scene in 1959, so the presents circa 1958 included all-girl stuff for my two sisters and me. Dolls galore for Debi and Van, along with an easybake oven with a pack or two of cake mixes, a red tricycle with fancy handlebar handles with red and white streamers, and lots of new dresses and patent leather maryjanes. 

For me, the oldest at age 10, a microscope is the gift of choice. My mother gave me the deluxe model with a separate accessories case full of things like glass slides, little magnifyiers, dried bugs, and diatomaceous earth (I'm not sure I ever figured out what that was for). I was the girl child who never wore a dress, except when required for school. 

The crowning glory of our Christmas tree included special lights on the tree bubbling gold and red inside their 3-inch, liquid filled, glass spires. There's nothing in the 21st century to compare. (Now they are considered too dangerous to use, even if you can find them.)


Can it be true I received a new microscope every year? No, that's impossible. But I did receive a new pair of white ice skates every year. That's every single year from age 10 to 14. Rhode Island in winter is frozen solid and perfect for skating. Ponds and lakes from Weekapaug to Exeter hosted skaters in red and blue and snowflake sweaters. They twirled around the perimeters making sure someone special watched from the hillside nearby.

I had the skates, but I wasn't much of a skater. Once I stood up in them, my feet hurt no matter how many pairs of socks I wore. So, I would skate 5 minutes so my mother could watch and wave. Then I came in for hot chocolate.

Every year a child or two would fall through the ice and be hauled out later by the fire department. To me, this meant skating should be forever banned everywhere. But no. To be a New Englander, you must skate. Maybe that's why I live in Maryland. . . . 

Scoutie O' Scoutie - 1996 to November 2011

My dog Scoutie O' Scoutie died last night at the emergency hospital for animals in Friendship Heights in Washington, DC. From the waiting room chairs my daughter Erin and I could see Scoutie on the table with three attendants petting him, checking his blood pressure with a little blue cuff, and giving him fluids through a catheter line in his right front leg. His snout rested in an oxygen "mask" made of clear plastic with an air tube coming into it from a central panel that looked like a rocket ship's display board with lights flashing and faint bells going off here and there.

Every once in a while, he'd raise his head to see where we were or at least what was going on . . . When well, he never liked the vet. Last night, he let the team work on him without a struggle. His fluids were low and his blood pressure hovering at 50 . . . instead of a healthy 100.

It was Erin's idea to go to the emergency room . . . I felt that if we took him there, he might not get out. Well, this is not the time to say I was right. At 15 and 9 months, Scoutie was definitely an elder in the clan of his breed, Shiba Inu. In Japanese, those words translate to "little dog." Foxlike, playful, and communicative, Scoutie lived like the king of his domain. Last night he let Erin hold him in the back seat the entire time we were driving to 4105 Brandwine Street NW. I never saw him do that before . . . ever.

In the mornings, his routine included trotting along the fence in the front yard making sure that no intruder squirrels had entered the yard. Then he'd trot right back in to have his arthritis medicine wrapped in cheese and his usual food. Turns out that xrays showed he had some kind of growth in his belly. His low blood volume meant that growth was causing some bleeding that no other checkups or treatments caught.

So here we are, in the ER, with the doc telling me it would be "inhumane" to bring him home in the car. The alternative? Leave him there for hydration purposes and see the internist on Monday morning to do an FNA and see what kind of growth we were dealing with. Chances that he might not survive the two days waiting for the internist were high. And chances are he might not survive the chemo to treat the tumor.

At home he would be more uncomfortable without the fluids.  This is a difficult decision . . . He raised his head from the table and looked directly into my eyes . . . I hugged him and that was it.

If you love your pet, would you make him go through chemo? Scoutie was so weak at that point, I couldn't imagine him surviving through the night.

And that was true . . .

My son and I almost lost our lives getting Scoutie near a strip mall on the other side of Richmond. We arrived early and as we hung up the payphone (1996, remember), this car full of teenagers came barrelling into the parking lot and crashed their car right into the payphone seconds after WE had stepped away.

So, we were compelled to pick out a puppy . . . the girl seemed aloof and certainly cost more. As Sean sat on the floor near the puppies, one tumbled over his legs and plopped in his lap. And Scoutie was ours . . .
forever, we thought, but no. Just for a while. As a family, we are grateful to have Scoutie as long as we did.

Scout seemed wise beyond his puppy existence . . . he came in every morning to wake me up in a staring game that always beat the alarm clock for precision. 6:30 on the dot . . . This morning I felt his eyes on me as usual . . . except of course, he wasn't really there. Or maybe he is . . . and will always be. My Scoutie.

Third Thursday Reading Series in Takoma Park Begins on September 15

Poetry season in Takoma Park begins on September 15 at 7:30 pm with the Third Thursday Reading Series at the Community Center. Four poets, including Meredith Pond, will read or perform their work in front of a wild crowd of town residents, friends, relatives, and former teachers and parole officers.

Meredith Pond . . . Who?

Is she the woman who used to post all the time to her Pond on Pond blog? Yes, yes, yes. Well, she's been busy. But, Meredith promises to read some of her published poems, including "Peeling Psyche Off the Wall" and "Sleeping with Tigers" as well as a few more recent poems that would scare the hide off a cat. 

Third Thursday Reading Series in Takoma Park, Maryland: Begins September 15, 2011.

A Poem Celebrating Langston Hughes

The poem below, one I wrote before Christmas last year, was published online in Beltway Poetry Quarterly (Volume 12, Number 1  Winter 2011) for the Langston Hughes Tribute Issue.  After the poem appeared online, I met Kim Roberts at a fundraiser for the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. The event feature alums, friends, family, and a special music moment with Kermit Moyer on harmonica and David Keplinger on guitar . . . blues against a painted wall looking a little like a street corner in New Orleans. 

You can still catch the entire Langston Hughes tribute issue online. Visit Beltway Quarterly's Website This issue is co-Edited by Katy Richey and Kim Roberts.



LANGSTON HUGHES TRIBUTE ISSUE


NOBODY HERE
by Meredith Pond


Nobody here I know ‘cept you,
painted on a big mural, you
standing at the mic at the Vanguard,
Mingus playing those weary blues
as you recite your poems.
Your face conjures a time
when the city hummed and glittered,
and we listened to you on vinyl
and slow danced in the corner
when Shirley Horn showed up to sing
at the One Step Down on the edge
of Georgetown, not far from our own
dusky river, that cruel-hearted river,
all fog and phantom now as we stand here
at the boathouse looking out at white
on white. Before dawn we walk home.
Looking at you reminds me what poetry is,
that syncopated beat, the heart pounding,
all that foot tapping to music only we can hear.


Bio 
Meredith Pond makes her home in Takoma Park, MD, a nuclear-free zone. Published poems include "Peeling Psyche Off the Wall," in the Georgetown Review (Spring 2008); and "A Cormorant Dries Her Wings," Poetry Magazine online (Summer 2007). Pond's experimental short fiction, "Way Back When," is included in the anthology Gravity Dancers: More Fiction by Washington Area Women; "Proud Hail," is included in Kiss the Sky: The Jimi Hendrix Anthology. Pond received her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC, where she studied storytelling, poetry, and fiction.


"Nobody Here," by Meredith Pond, published in Beltway Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2011.

San Ignacio's Gray Whales: What a Trip!

A couple of days at whale camp at San Ignacio lagoon on the Pacific side of the Baja is just not enough . . .
Here's me in all my SPF 30 gear scritching the head of a young gray whale. This "little" whale, way bigger than the panga, liked us enough to come back to visit two times of the four trips we made out into the middle of the water.
It's easier when the water's calm. The encounters I mean. There's a special area where pangas can wait for a whale or a mother and child to approach. I think no more than 16 boats can be there at a time. Most of the lagoon is exclusively for the whales with no humans allowed at any time.
There's tremendous respect for these wondrous creatures. They feel like memory foam mattresses . . . not fishy or slimy. Other folks may have a different reaction to touching a whale's body. Tell me what you felt! It all happens so fast . . . the boat is moving, you are moving around with the four or five other people in there, the guide has his camera, the person handling the motor is on the special radio, and all the while other whales are breeching up ahead and behind you, other pangas are having whale encounters, whales are everywhere.
March is a great time to be there . . . Check out Baja Expeditions online.
And my apologies for the delayed posting. It's true, things are happening!!