Güd wrtr

1. Three weeks before your tax appointment, drag out last year’s box of bills/receipts/miscellany that’s bound to have pieces of paper needed to accompany…

2. …the stuffed-full file folder of what you imagine might be write-offable/reportable for your Super Tax Lady who is endlessly patient with math-impaired you.

3. Two weeks before your tax appointment put box and folder in a prominent place. Like in the living room where you will surely trip over the box or scatter the contents of the folder if you don’t tend to them pronto.

4. Regather the contents of folder after cat scatters them. Attempt to unsquash the squashed box lid after your late mother’s 20-pound cat decides that it makes a good nap spot.

5. Gather office supplies (your favorite part): paper clips, stapler, sharp pencil with new(ish) eraser. Steal a few sheets of white paper from the printer. Try not to get sidetracked when you realize that:

a. you need the big, rubber-coated paper clips, and while you think you’ve recently replenished your supply (didn’t you?), now you have to find them.

b. you need at least one giant clippie thingie for the fat pile (of say, bank statements or book receipts), and you just saw some of those in the boxes you brought home last year when you and your sister cleaned out your late mother’s house, and you’re pretty sure you know which box that is.

c. A half hour later, after opening and moving the boxes (again) that have resided in your back bedroom for a year, you still have not located the giant clippie thingies. (They will, predictably, turn up some time after tax season. Just watch.)

d. And don’t you still have a calculator in a desk drawer?

e. Wait. There’s a calculator on my phone? (Oh, yeah, huh?)

f. Success! A giant clippie thingie (that you probably brought home after you retired five years ago) in the top desk drawer!

6. Go through the box and sort the receipts, making neat piles on top of the marimba in the living room (a musical instrument transformed into a large, padded, horizontal table for now), and be grateful that former cats who liked to sleep up there are no longer. Likewise, there is also no dog (whom you loved but who one year barfed on the box).

7. Remember that all you have to do is add up receipts (on the phone! check the results at least twice) and change numbers in little boxes on the sample form the Super Tax Lady sends every year. She will deal with them. She will ask polite questions. Remember not to sound defensive. (You two have had a relationship longer than… well, a long time… and you really like each other.) “I don’t know,” or “I will go home and check that,” are perfectly legitimate answers.

8. Remember that your late husband was so freaked out by the process that he literally used to sweat sitting in front of the desk of a long-ago Tax Lady. You are a Grown-Up, and you have been doing this for a quarter century on your own.

9. Remember what the long-ago Tax Lady used to tell you:

a. You are not going to jail if you do your best to tell them what you’ve earned. And save your receipts!

b. The chances of an IRS audit are remotely on the order of flying yourself to the moon—or, in my case, doing my own taxes.

10. Before you leave for your tax appointment, leave the box with its sunken lid in the living room so the cat can nap on it. He had a rough year, too.

11. EGBOK, your mother used to say. Everything’s gonna be OK.

12. She was not wrong.

•••

Thanks to our Super Tax Ladies Sheila McGovern and Mary Walters of MPW CPAs in Elk Grove, California, for your always-excellent work on our behalf.

Clearly, I have taken colons
for granted for far too long:
both kinds.

For one, the sweet little piece
of punctuation that sets up
a list or example.

(Digression: How many times
did I repeat that to students
who were likely to never

use one? And truly, you
don’t need to unless, as
one of them pointed out,

“You’re trying to be fancy.”)
Two vertically aligned periods
that, I suppose, imitate

the verticality of human
innards, though that colon
is a snaky, winding thing

resembling complicated
plumbing, which it is.
And as mine heals from

a who-knows-how-I-got-it
infection, I am more aware
of my own than ever before,

which just shows to go you,
as a former newspaper photo
editor used to intone:

Be good to your colon,
and your colon
will be good to you.

•••

With thanks to Rick Shaw, a former assistant director
of photography for The Sacramento Bee, who imparted
that wisdom to at least one of his staff photographers,
Dick Schmidt.

Rick went on to a great journalism editing career
at other newspapers, as well as serving as a
photojournalism faculty member and director
of the Pictures of the Year International competition
at the Missouri School of Journalism.

May my heart unfold its pink
petals like the first flowering
plum blossoms of the season,

unabashed, unafraid of what
might come to jostle or dislodge.
Let the sparkling hearts

in the center pop up eagerly,
hoping to attract early bees
awakening from winter, ready

to offer pollen to those whose
job it is to transport it
to the next waiting flower.

May my heart always find
purpose and reason to remain
open till the last possible

moment, then, whether
because of rain or wind
or simply because it’s time

to let go, may I do so as
gracefully as a bee twirling
a pirouette, before landing

in an elegant arabesque
after a most useful,
productive life.

Not that I couldn’t, but more likely, I doubt I’m gonna:

• Become a rock climber (which I fantasized about decades ago)
• Or a hot air balloon pilot (ditto on the fantasy)
• learn to SCUBA or surf (ditto on the fantasy)
• Travel all the places I thought I would
• Take my late husband all the places I thought I would
• Give birth
• Become a plumber, electrician, roofer—i.e., acquire useful skills
• Learn algebra or chemistry, not to mention Latin or Greek
• Spend time in squat pose (especially rising from it)
• Ask my parents questions I wish I had asked
• Learn to drink coffee or martinis
• Hike high peaks

Though I did, at various times, learn to:

• Read books as naturally as breathing
• Climb some trees and not fall out of them
• Be a big sister (and adore my younger one, Donna Gail)
• Be a good friend (to many, I hope)
• Turn garters (the hosiery kind) into tiny people (thank you, Sue Lester, first BFF)
• Throw a softball (thanks to the late great husband Cliff Polland)
• Mow the lawn (another thing Cliff taught me)
• Make split pea soup (thanks to Lisa)
• Make a wicked cheesecake (thanks to Marge)
• Make Grandma’s brownies (thanks, Grandma)
• Become a fast typist (thanks, Gerry Colón, Oakmont High School)
• Become a versatile writer (mostly by writing and not stopping)
• Drink tea
• Swim/waterski/do a wicked ballet leg in synchronized (now artistic) swimming
• Coach/teach/encourage others, especially writers
• Ride a bike (big challenge for tippy me)
• Put color on paper (can’t really call it painting) and enjoy it (thanks, Eric and Terri)
• Drive (also big challenge for young me)
• Take care of waaaaaay too many cats and some dogs
• Love Hawaii and visit often (thanks, Dickie!)
• Sing a barbershop tag (thanks, Mom and Dad!)
• Publish books and anthologies (thanks to many writing students)
• Become a reporter/editor in the journalistic sense (thanks to teachers, editors, colleagues)
• Become a poet/novelist in the creative writing sense
• Learn to meditate, often while walking (thanks, Julia Ellen)
• Practice yoga and become a yoga instructor
• Play (in this order) the piano (not well), snare drum, bells, tympani, marimba and assorted percussion instruments… plus kazoo! (thanks to music teachers and band directors)
• Go back to band (at age 67) and play some of those assorted percussion instruments
• Help care for those in their final stages of life
• Be so well loved by so many
• Love so many people, I hope, so very well

Look at how long the second list is.
Look at how much I can add to it.
Gonna add to it. Not done yet.
In more ways than one.

•••

• With thanks to Amherst Writers & Artists facilitator Ann Bancroft,
one of my former journalistic colleagues, for the invitation that prompted
this piece,
and
• To my parents, Roger and Darlene Haag, who married 59 years ago today,
then made me about 17 months later, and my sister a little over two years
after that.

In the hospital emergency department
I overhear a social worker talking to a young
woman in a recliner getting heart meds but
has no place to sleep tonight.

“Do you want two days at the Salvation Army
and then apply for permanent placement?”
he asks.

She hesitates.

“Do you have anywhere you can be safe?”

Her rapid-fire response ricochets down the hall.
“I can’t go to my mother. She using, and I…”

The social worker listens. “I understand,” he says.

And this is after another woman in the recliner
next to me has arrived with a six-day headache,
whose usual medications have not worked,
sits tethered to an IV cocktail drip, only in
slightly less pain when her husband arrives
to take her home.

And after five days of lower gut pain and fever,
I have slid through the doughnut of a CT scanner
with my name emblazoned on top like a theater
marquee to take pictures of my infected colon,

which three weeks ago, at this very hospital,
was scoped out while I, deep in twilight sleep,
had one of the best meditations of my life,
floating through nirvana, not wanting to return.

And as I, too, receive my own IV cocktail,
I hear the social worker tell the hesitant young
woman, “I know it’s a Band-Aid, far from ideal,
but we don’t want you sleeping on the street.”

And I think of my warm bed waiting in a house
that I own, a big black and white kitty waiting,
too, and, as I so often do, give thanks for my
lucky, lovely life—as well as antibiotics for
a momentarily unhappy colon—grateful that,
in more ways than one, this, too, shall pass.

… If you were to collect the found art of your everyday life and honored it—
the repetition, the patterns, the strangeness, the heartbreaking familiarity—
well, then I think you would see that your ordinary life is actually
quite extraordinary.

—Jamie Cat Callan

•••

The way you rummage through the sock drawer
to find the just-right pair of identical charcoal gray ones.

How your tea choices change, predictably, with not
only the seasons, but the temperature.

How you swept the kitchen floor before the front porch,
then the back landing just outside the door, every day.

How, upon awakening, you listen for the bird that sang
at dawn in the back yard, though it has been gone for years,

How you always knew, when the phone rang,
that it was him. And he never believed that you did.

How all the dead loved ones visited your dreams,
and sometimes, you remembered that they had.

What if your ordinary life was truly extraordinary,
though you never realized it?

What if you got all the way to the end, and on a last breath
you heard that single bird, calling you home?

Walking out of the grocery store
not long before closing time
behind three young people—
well, young to me,
as so many are these days—

I heard the young man in the trio say,
“As far as I’m concerned, Sophie and me
are already friends.”

They had been talking with the
equally young night manager inside,
and, scanning my two items,
as I often do these days,
my half-tuned ears perceived only
part of their conversation.

But it was clear that between
the four of them, they had people
in common they were delighted
to learn about.

And because I have given up
the self-appointed job of grammar guru
after decades of English professor-ing,
debating about whether to end a sentence
with a preposition (grammatically OK for years)
and other rules that I once considered absolute,
it did not even occur to me to mentally correct him:

“…Sophie and I…”

Instead, I grinned at them as I walked to my car,
equally pleased that they had made such
a nice connection on a cold winter night
as the half-full moon directly overhead
beamed down on us all.

(for Rebecca on her birthday)

•••

We love them as who we are now.
We love because that’s what’s left.
—Alberto Rios from “Five Years Later”

Going through each drawer, each closet,
opening every cupboard and pulling out
the large and the small,

the tiny treasures and the humdrum—
her nursing school pin,
her mother’s wedding ring,

none of it can you bear to part with.
Not her pie plates that caressed crumbly
crust, cradled the smooth center of her
cheesecake that was more pie than cake,
your late brother’s perennial birthday request.

The box of her elementary school drawings
and reports carefully penciled between faint blue lines
on pages sheltered in the dark for six decades,
still readable.

Every piece of sheet music neatly organized into
binders she tucked into a bag and toted to church,
propping them on the piano or organ, as required,
thousands of weekly performances, accompanying
singers, flutists, pre- and post-sermon,
at memorial services.

Which pieces asked to be played at hers?

You must take apart the life of the one who made
yours, whom you cherished beyond all others,
this tearing apart of house that matches the
rent in the fabric of you.

You, the adored daughter, bending to put your
mother’s sweaters in one more box, offering
things to helpers. Take it, take it! you plead,
anything not to try to figure out where to
put one more thing in your house,
in your heart.

As if she’s not there already, circulating
through you with every breath, her
greatest gifts given to you long before
you burst into the world,
before she taught you to breathe.

(In memory of Sonya Hunter,
July 30, 1941 –Feb. 17, 2026)

On my way down H Street to exercise
on a rainy winter morning, my mind
conjures summer mornings in my backyard,
the heat to come lingering in the still sky,
yoga mats spread beneath the big sycamore tree,
several of us ladies flowing into a forward fold,
then rising, arms overhead, to greet the day.

You came faithfully every time. Until you couldn’t.

Like the day when you said—so unlike you,
without explanation—that you could no longer
take care of my cats, as we had long done
for each other when we traveled.

Only with benefit of hindsight did I come
to understand that some part of you
had begun to realize—though you did not
have words for it—that this was the beginning
of the slipping away.

And much later, when a group of your friends
and I moved through your house, gathering
what you needed to move north near your sister,
we all wept.

I have missed your neighborliness ever since.

Today, after getting the call from your sister,
I drive and sigh, wishing you roses,
the bold Mr. Lincolns from your backyard
across the street, a bumper summer crop
for nearly five decades.

A profusion of roses, an explosion of deep
crimson long stems interspersed with smaller
pink and whites, several of the soft yellows,
a literal bucket full, which, on more than one
occasion, I came home to find on my porch,
their fulsome blooms grinning at me,

which, with all my love, all my thanks,
are what I send you in the after,
wishing you well on your journey.

Because, really, when you think about it,
you can’t love small if you’re really loving.

When you throw your whole heart into it,
headfirst off the high dive, it’s big.

But then comes the challenge, after the easy
fall into warmth, into embracing arms,

into a baby’s smile or a tail-wagging bark.
Love bigger. When the water cools and you

want to climb out, when the arms loosen,
perhaps even let go for good. When the child

kicks dirt at you, pouting. When the four-footed
ones sicken, when hard decisions stare at you

from their pained eyes. Love bigger. Let tears
fall without embarrassment; don’t hide the ache.

Love anyway, even if they’re going. Even if they’ve gone.
Even if they didn’t want to. Even if they did.

Because your gigantic heart can only love big, to your
everlasting, toe-tapping, larger-than-life credit.

And know that there are so many of us
who adore your big love, revel in it, rely on it,

and we’re shining it right back at the mirror
of you, sweetheart, bigger than you ever imagined.