All posts by Charles

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Death, and given the date, Taxes

April 11, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Rushing Waters Moon

This time the snow storm underperformed. Maybe 3 inches. Good news, really, since it means Colorado Pulmonary Intensivists won’t close and we’ll finally get to have a delayed visit there, pick up Kate’s ct reading and discuss her j-tube surgery.

fear Got my own thing going on, too. Second PSA showed a slight uptick from a month ago, from .12 to .13. As Kate said, probably in the lab’s margin of error. Still, it is cancer we’re talking about here. Any increase over .1 sends some sort of signal, just how serious a one I don’t know. Going in to see the urologist as soon as I can get an appointment.

Not the best judge of my anxiety about this. When I sent the note to Dr. Eigner, the surgeon who removed my prostate, I said my psa had gone up to 1.2. That’s a huge difference from .12. I misplaced the decimal point. Not at my calm best on that e-mail.

As I hear myself thinking, my self talk is like this. I need more information. I don’t know enough to know whether this is bad or just something we’ll need to watch. Or, both. But wait. It’s cancer. You know, CANCER. I don’t want to have a sell-by date given to me, or worse an expiration date. This body no good after 13 years. Oh, come on. We all die. And, you’ve even referred to your eventual cause of death as your friend.

Death is not an enemy. It’s an inevitability. Yes, it takes my breath away when my inner conversation veers towards my absence, my annihilation. Sometimes. Other times, I take it in, embrace it. I take from the Tibetan Buddhists that being calm at the moment of your death is a spiritual goal. It is for me and that also means being calm about death since it always approaches, is never further away than your next breath.

We begin and we end. This much we know with certainty. If life, that time between a sleep and a sleep as the Mexica say, is filled with apprehension about the end, then this brief mayfly moment will be wasted. That’s why Yamantaka encourages us to consider our death in as realistic as a fashion as we can. See our dead body. Imagine it in a coffin. Feel the last breath leaving your body. Imagine the world without you.

Not sure about the notion of an afterlife. Reincarnation? The Buddhists think so. Heaven or hell? Very unlikely since I know the literary sources for both of them. Absorption back into the 10,000 things? Makes the most sense, but sense is an artifact of this life and in particular an artifact of human reason. All the data we have comes from our singular experience in this body, in this lifetime. We have no prebirth memories (I find past-life regressions difficult to believe. Which does not mean untrue.). We have no post-death returns save for those who have experienced death and been revived in some way. Even those experiences are brief and inevitably the product of a difficult moment.

death Osiris-nepra What about Jesus? There again, I know the literary sources. The earliest gospel, Mark, probably did not include a resurrection narrative. The dying and rising god is a motif of certain Middle Eastern belief systems, the story of Osiris for example.

Would we all like to have a definitive report back from beyond the pale? Not sure. What if it contradicts our hopes, our beliefs?

Here’s the nub of it. I know and love life. But it is, I admit, all I know for certain, except that it also ends. I’m not eager to trade a known good for an unknown. Most aren’t, I suppose. When a mortality signal like a possible return (or more like a reemergence) of cancer comes, part of me responds with fear, with anxiety. Another part of me responds with acceptance of my death.Which is, in any case, not yet.

Charon and Psyche, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope. 1883

The older I get I realize carrying contradictory states is the norm, at least for me. It’s like pneumonia. I learned this February that you can have both viral and bacterial pneumonia, in fact, you can have different strains of both. At the same time. We’re more complex, less simple than our reductive thinking processes can usually entertain.

One thing I find odd is being given thirteen years to live (a possible prognosis if this is a reemergence), makes me more anxious than not having such a number. Which is silly from a rational perspective. All that’s being taken away, all he said, is the fantasy of immortality. Without such a prognosis I could continue to live, well, ongoingly. Which of course we know not to be true. Anyhow at 72 I’m already two years into the bonus range beyond three score and ten.

Consistency, Emerson said, is the hobgoblin of small minds. On the matter of death and cancer I’m not a small mind.

Science

Astonishing

April 10, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Rushing Waters Moon

first ever picture of a black hole, taken by the Event Horizon telescope. 6.5 billion times larger than our sun. And, btw, this also a picture of the telescope’s namesake.

Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate, Writing

Glimmers

April 7, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Rushing Waters Moon

Things we think about here. The snowpack, in all regions of the state, is way above average, nearly 150%. That means three things: an easing of the drought that has plagued the state, especially the southwest corner, a solid supply of water for the Colorado River basin states, and a much lessened fire danger over this summer. So much nicer to go into the summer months with good water supply. The arid west.

It means one other thing, too. Rushing waters. As the snow melts, our mountain streams will swell, spill over their banks. Our waterfalls will peak, like the ones just below us, the Maxwell Falls. The sound of these streams racing toward the South Platte (up here, anyhow) is one of my favorite mountain sounds. The soughing of the winds. The bugling of the elk. Late spring streams full and bubbling, babbling, crashing.

These are the Rockies now and have been the Rockies for thousands upon thousands of years. We’re here for a moment. We living things witness. It may be our most important act. We are the universe aware of itself and its wonders.

April, 2016 Gwangju. Just before the wedding

Kate had a not so good day yesterday. Some nausea. A Sjogren’s flare, maybe related. I hate to see her that way. I wish her recovery was one smooth arc from 77 pounds to 100, 105. It’s not and it will not be, but I wish it anyway.

Ruth had her third or fourth Destination Imagination state contest appearance yesterday. D.I., as she calls it, is a national program that has kids join with 4 or 5 of their peers, invent plays, and, this year, respond to improv challenges. There are judges and her team has placed at state the last couple of years in their age bracket. Don’t know how she did yet.

Jon says he’s tired of living in an unfinished house. Due to remodeling at his school, he gets done much earlier than normal this year, April 21st. He plans to use the long break to get a lot of work done. He’s done rewiring, replumbing, cleared out the old kitchen and purchased newer appliances. He’s done work on the kid’s rooms first, building Ruth a platform bed and Gabe a desk.

The first glimmers of new work. I’m taking my cousin Diane’s idea seriously. She wrote: “I think your writings deserve a wide (wider?) daily audience — they so compellingly chronicle daily life along with stretching the readers’ mind — and also possibly they could be gathered/edited in to a book that would appeal to our age group. Have others suggested any such to you?”

marble-main My plan is to print out all of ancientrails. I started a while back, but gave up pretty far from completion. That way I can fuss with them in the physical world, compile sheets and posts. Much harder to do, ironically, on the computer. Not sure what I plan to do, but that’s the place to start.

Probably going back to Jennie’s Dead. It’s unfinished and I want to complete it. Though. I may take time, too, to start the book Elise and I talked about, the one that comes from the heart. Main point, work is beginning to reassert itself after the long barren period.

Painting? Yes, that too. Not yet, but soon.

Ta for now. Gotta go down and take Kate off her feed bag. She’ll be free for 10 hours. She sounds much better.

Cooking, Family, Health, Myth and Story

Rejoining the Resistance

April 6, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Rushing Waters Moon

fitness2 First full week of resistance work in two months plus. And I have the aches to prove it. That’s the irony at 72. Get in shape. Get some aches and pains. My o2 sats alone have made me glad to have them. You may think it’s a technique problem for me, but I’ve been at this a long time, so my technique is pretty good. It’s mostly the normal strain and wear that comes from making muscles and joints do things they’re not yet quite ready to do.

You probably know this, but it’s always struck me as weird that you build muscle by creating small tears in the muscle tissue. That’s what the resistance work does. I can’t think about it too much or it makes me not want to work out. Similar to my attitude toward shaving. Here, take a very sharp piece of metal and scrape it across the delicate skin on your face. Every day. Without fail. Or be shunned socially. Well, no.

Jon gave Ruth a copy of Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the U.S., and three alt-history sci-fi novels that imagine different futures for our country. 13 is the age of disenchantment, so very fitting. Next comes the alt-history of parents, the one in which they know nothing, never knew anything, and have nothing whatsoever to offer. Somewhere in college or soon after, that alt-history changes to a utopian vision of parents for many. Not me, however. At least not with Dad. Would have happened with Mom had she lived.

Forgot to tell Ruth that I was 13 in 1960 and her grandma was 13 in 1957. That should give her an idea of how old we are. Almost before rock and roll. Well before the moon landing. Dial, bakelite phones. Black and white TV. You know, antecellphonian.

Drove into Denver yesterday on an empanada run. Kate loves these Argentinian pierogis, and she has them for snacks, sometimes meals. The closest Maria’s is on South Broadway, a street I call the Green Mile for its high population of cannabis dispensaries. It also has funky shops, art galleries, wine bars, lots of interesting restaurants.

food hamburger stand Always wanted to stop at this drive-through hamburger stand, so I did yesterday. For health food. Two hot dogs and a chocolate shake. The hot dogs were good, so was the shake. I do wonder about the health risks for the people who work there though since the drivethrough is, as you can see, a covered affair. Gotta concentrate the car exhaust.

It was 78 in Denver. 78! I mean, really. Widest temperature swing so far going home. It was 57 back here on Shadow Mountain. The upside of being up. Compensation for low oxygenation.

Another King Sooper delivery, too. Their service has been a grocerysend for us. Ha. Gabriel was our shopper yesterday. Kate put away the refrigerated and frozen stuff. She also folded clothes, bagged up her empanadas, and did her ot/pt. This was a good, but hard week for her. We were out to eat three times, twice related to appointments. Each time wore her out. A lot. The good news? She got up chipper each morning. The tpn with the ot/pt has advanced her stamina and her resilience.

Cooking, Family, Health, Holidays, Shadow Mountain, The Move, Third Phase

Rushing Waters Moon

April 5, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Rushing Waters Moon

Went to Domo last night. Ruth’s favorite spot and her choice for birthday number 13. In fact I think we’ll probably be at Domo for her birthday until Ruth leaves for college. Kate went along. It wore her out, but it was worth it. She took a box of several rings and gave them to Ruth. This was in addition to our $10 for each year present we give in the Korean red gift envelopes.

Ruth, Jon, and I had wank0sushi. This is sushi prepared with different sauces, toppings. No soy sauce. It’s a lot of food and I ran out of room, so the birthday girl happily finished mine. Gabe’s using chopsticks, sort of, and had a big bowl of ramen. Kate chose appetizers, bland appetizers since she’s had more than her usual issues with dry mouth this week.

When we decided to move to Colorado, now five plus years ago, the primary reason was to be part of Ruth and Gabe’s life as they grew up. Ruth was 8 and Gabe 6 at the time. Their lives as children had begun to whizz by. Occasional visits weren’t enough.

Last night when we left the restaurant for Shadow Mountain I turned to Kate and said, “The move was worth it.” She smiled, “Yes. It was.” Birthday dinners and a big smile like that one. Way worth it.

Gabe is also an April baby, born on Earth Day, April 22nd. I’ll take the three of them to a Rockies’ game for his 20160623_171246 birthday. He’s pretty excited about that.

One baseball game a year. That’s me. I like the whole take me out to the ballgame thing. Once. Then I remember that I never developed the chops to enjoy the game itself. But the hot dogs and the brick and the seats and the national anthem. I even like the groundsmen doing their job. The first three innings or so, I’m interested, watching the pitchers, the hitters, infielders and outfielders. However, this repeats and repeats and repeats. I’m not much of a sports fan.

The move also had the unintended consequence of allowing us to support Jon during his divorce. Ruth and Gabe, too. Again, worth it. Glad we’re here.

Alan in the Evergreen Chorales Holiday Concert

Had lunch with Alan Rubin yesterday at the Wildflower Cafe in downtown Evergreen. Kate and I used to go to the Wildflower and do our money meetings a couple of years ago. Alan’s taking over as President of the Ovation West board in July. He performs in their musicals, too. And, sings in the Evergreen Chorale. With the Rotary and Beth Evergreen he’s got an active third phase underway and having a great time with it. It’s healing to get out of the house, to talk with another adult. Good to have a friend like Alan.

While parked, I also saw Dan Herman, who will be president of the CBE board after Hal Stein’s term is up. He had coffee with our nearby neighbor, Sheri Pissoneault. She’s the chair of the education committee for the synagogue. I liked seeing them in Evergreen, helps with that this is our home feeling. Small town.

Back to regular workouts, still very far from back in shape, but getting there the only way you can, by repetition. I haven’t gotten back to the off resistance days cardio, but I will. A few aches and pains go along with working out at 72. Part of it. Interestingly, my o2 sats have already improved with the limited work I’m doing right now. 95 in Denver last night. 93 here this morning. (that’s % of 100, or full saturation of the blood with oxygen)

groceries When we got into Domo, Denver was 70 degrees. We were, as often happens at this time of year, over dressed. When we got back home around 7 pm, it was 48 up here, headed down to 30. Vivé la differencé!

Grocery delivery today. Having a delivery service for groceries is a wonderful thing right now. Sometimes the week’s activities wear us both out. Like this week. Kate and I ate three meals in restaurants: No No’s, Aspen Perks, and Domo. The first three we’ve eaten out since her bleed last September. While it was wonderful to be out with her, it tired her out a lot. Me, too, though not as much. Not having to spend the time and the energy shopping in person is a real gift.

Asia, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Legendary

April 4, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Recovery Moon

Tom Crane sent me this street poet’s work, found on Maui. I wrote him back after reading it and said we could go for an epic third phase. I meant legendary, but epic appeared anyhow. He wrote back, said he’d like that, too, but didn’t know how. I agreed. Beginner’s Mind, eh? We’d have to redefine epic, Tom replied. Yes.

And, we don’t want to get stuck in the success trap. That trap can consume the second phase, career and family, but it can be set aside in the third. So the question could be, what would a legendary third phase look like? Better than epic. Epic has that Hollywood feel, doesn’t it? Let’s forget I transmuted legendary into epic and go back to the poem.

What does an open spirit look like in the third phase? What risks might we take if we had one? What risks are particular to the third phase? To get an idea of where this might go, I looked up the Hindu sadhu. A sadhu intentionally creates a fourth phase of life.* Of course in a Minnesota winter like the last one the Jain option of wearing nothing would require modification unless the sadhu phase was to be short.

I wonder if other cultures have similar ideas? Don’t know. What I do take from the sadhu is that they have an open spirit, moving toward moksa means getting free from samsara, the worldly enmeshment that the second phase presses upon us with such vigor.

Part of a legendary third phase might involve letting go, leaving the old desires of life, shaped by education, work, and family behind. But, if they’re left behind we might be left wondering, what else is there? Those desires are the ones that motivated us, got us up in the morning, out the door coffee in hand, ready to do. The old finish line model of retirement pretended that this was as easy as buying a set of Pings, selling the house in Kenwood, and moving to a Del Webb village to drive, chip and putt. Or, head out to Margaritaville, collect umbrellas in the sand next to your beach chair. Doesn’t sound like a sadhu approach, does it?

Another image, similar to the sadhu, was the Chinese scholar who would retire from the bureaucratic life, paradigmatic of the second phase in that culture, and move into the mountains to write poetry and live amongst wildlife and forests. This is a Taoist vision, one that took over from the Confucian when either work was over or changes in the political life forced a scholar out of the court. I like this one a little better than the sadhu because I like clothes.

Wu wei: “a state of being in which our actions are…effortlessly in alignment with the ebb and flow of the elemental cycles of the natural world” is the Taoist principle these mountain hermits follow. And, a sound one, though as I’ve written before, I’m also a “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them” sort of guy. This may be the key attitude that prevents me from fully letting go of success, of my set of Pings, that beach chair.

I’m not talking here about monastics or hermits who take to those lives, as Thomas Merton did, in the midst of their second phase. These are escapist lives, profound in their way of course, but ones that set aside the second phase much earlier. What I want to consider is the legendary third phase possible after the more traditional transition from work and raising a family.

Look forward to any ideas you might have. This preliminary look suggests some things to me. Let go. Seek spiritual liberation. Attune life to the seasons, to the natural world. Live in some seclusion from the old, second phase world.

“The sādhu is solely dedicated to achieving mokṣa (liberation), the fourth and final aśrama (stage of life), through meditation and contemplation of Brahman. Sādhus often wear simple clothing, such saffron-coloured clothing in Hinduism, white or nothing in Jainism, symbolising their sannyāsa (renunciation of worldly possessions).” wiki

Family, Health

(More) Adventures in Medical Imaging

April 3, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Recovery Moon

Took Kate into the InVision Sally Jobe imaging center. Sally was the radiologist’s wife who died at 56 of breast cancer. The reception staff there was as good as I’ve seen in these many months of taking Kate to various medical venues. They would come out into the sitting area and ask if folks had been helped. They smiled, remembered Kate was waiting on the cd, generally put out warmth. A pleasure

This was the hi-res ct to determine if she has interstitial lung disease. We’ll know the answer. Eventually. When we took the cd to Colorado Pulmonary Intensivists, I learned that Dr. Gupta is gone until the end of April. The other doctor, Kelly Green, whom we were originally supposed to see? Yes, I asked about her, too. Out to the end of May for a family emergency. This has been one frustration after another with them. Gupta himself seems all right, but the organization of the practice, not so much.

We went out to eat at Nono’s, a very good New Orleans restaurant in Littleton. Their beignet’s are as good as the ones I remember at Cafe du Monde. Of course, the Mississippi River’s not as close, or the French Quarter. The day, though, wore her out. She went right to bed when we got back. But she got up perky, so it was exhaustion.

Cinema and Television, Family, Health, Travel

Travel by Television

April 2, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Recovery Moon

Kate, BJ, Ruth, solar eclipse 2017 at BJs Idaho house

Glad BJ’s a true New Yorker. She saw the train as a good way to return to the airport. Saved me a couple of hours in transit. It was a good visit and I have the spritz cookies to prove it. I’ll be sending a box full of yarn to Idaho. No room in the Beacon Hotel for it, I guess.

Kate got her teeth cleaned yesterday. In addition to all her other miseries Sjogren’s, which makes her mouth very dry, does so by diminishing the natural defense against cavities, saliva. That means good news for the dentist’s income, bad news for her. As I might have said long ago, if it’s not one damned, it’s another.

Had my make sure I’ve got the technique down session at On the Move Fitness. The deadlift move was hard for my body to figure out. I had a tendency to slump my shoulders. Drive your glutes back, chest up, Dave said. Oh, I see. That advanced quadraped had me going, too. Had my hand sweeping forward when my leg came up rather than when it went back. Fixed that. Now I’m good to go for another 6-8 weeks.

fitness Cardio wise I’m way behind my usual fitness level. Totally detrained. It will take a while to get that back, probably longer than getting my muscles into shape. No other way than through it. This paleolithic body wants to be hunting and gathering, but I’m sitting and coughing. Sigh.

Netflix provides me with some of my travel needs. How, you might ask? By funding shows that not only take place in foreign climes, but ones created and acted by folks from those same climes. (what is a clime, anyhow? ah. “a region considered with reference to its climate.” There you go.) They’re not all great, most aren’t, but they show a particular culture in situ and from within its cultural norms. Sure, they use some cliches from American and British TV, imperialism is not just about gun boats and occupying armies, but the cultural mores seep through anyhow.

television Example. The Protector. This story is set in Istanbul. Its origin is a fantasy novel by Turkish author, N. Ipek Gokdel, The Strange Story of Charcoal and a Young Man. The novel itself has not been translated into English and the language of the series is Turkish, but, you know, subtitles. The settings include the Grand Bazaar, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and many parts of Istanbul with which I’m not familiar like Prince’s Island and residential neighborhoods.

The Protector is a figure from Istanbul’s Ottoman past, a magical figure who gains the power to stop the seven Immortals who threaten Istanbul and, by implication, the whole world. The plot draws from the era of Mehmed the Conqueror. At 21 he defeated the Byzantine’s and began the Sunni Muslim era of Turkey. A key figure in a few episodes is the architect of Suleiman the Magnificent, Mimar Sinan. The show visits mosques he designed and his tomb.

Various Turkish foods, table customs, history, family traditions, as well as story telling tropes are in every scene. It’s not a bad story line and the actors are good, not great, but good. Plus I get to see Istanbul and learn about Turkey. In this period of my life I’m more stay-at-home, so I appreciate these opportunities. Roma was another example. Genghis Khan, which I’ve not watched yet, is another. Kingdom, set in Korea, too. The long series on foods of Southern China. None of the other streaming services have this variety.

Family, Health, Mountains, Music, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate

Soul’s Jumping Off

April 1, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Recovery Moon

BJ returns to the Beacon Hotel and Broadway today. She suggested taking the train to the airport, so I’ll be taking her down to the Federal Center station. It’s very close to Ortho Colorado where I got a new knee and Kate got a new shoulder. We’ll wave to our now spare parts as we pass by.

It’s been a good visit. She and Kate made spritz cookies yesterday. They also sorted through Kate’s stash of yarn. The result is a box I’ll mail to Idaho. Something for BJ to do next summer while she manages renovation of her home there before the Grand Teton Music Festival starts up in August.

We had five inches of snow the night BJ came. It’s gone now from the driveway and roads. Some remains in the shade and on the thicker snow that has been here for a while. As I said yesterday though, we’re not done. Our second snowiest month starts today. Not April Fool’s either.

Not sure exactly what prompts them to do this, but Kepler and Rigel take turns lying down in the narrowest part of our home, the passage between the kitchen and the living room. As a meal is under preparation, they watch. Hope. Then, when it’s ready, they lie there and watch as food gets carried from kitchen counter to dining table, then back. This is beneficial because it promotes good balance as we step between legs and over bodies.

Friend Tom Crane sent a picture from Maui. They’re in, I think, a set of condos just to the right of Whaler’s Village if you’re facing the ocean. He and Roxann were in Lahaina yesterday. Its whaling history had Tom wanting to harpoon something. He said he wouldn’t though because that’s bad juju. Yes. But, maybe he could find a whale of deal in one of Lahaina’s many shops and art galleries. Harpoon that.

Beyond those condos is the Sheraton. It publicizes Pu‘u Keka‘a (Black Rock), a spot where divers sometimes jump into the ocean. Notes from travelers say that such diving is frowned upon. As it well might be, since this rock was, in traditional Hawai’ian lore, the jumping off spot for soul’s to the after life.

halema'uma'u Jules Tavernier — halema’uma’u Jules Tavernier

There is a real and probably unresolvable tension between the booming tourist industry on all the islands and the native population. Many places sacred to the natives, like Pu’u Keka’a, draw tourists. Another such spot is Halemaumau crater on Kilauea. This crater, which has undergone rapid transformation since the most recent eruptions of this active volcano, is the traditional home of Pelé, the Hawai’ian goddess of volcanoes. On any visit in the past there would be offerings scattered around the crater, fern fronds, flowers, bottles of alcohol. Pelé is not an abstract, far-away goddess, but one who upends life on the Big Island often. Even non-native locals give Pelé her due.

Though the USA claims to be a non-imperial power, Hawai’ian history proves otherwise. We took it, dethroned the monarchy, and made the islands safe for sugar plantations. Michener’s Hawai’i tells the tale in easily readable prose.

The stories of these islands have a geologic tale of great scientific interest. They have a Polynesian mariners’ tale that unveils the navigational skills of thosw who took to the seas in catamarans, sailing north to populate these islands. They have a long story of their descendants and their battles, their taboos, their human sacrifice.

They have a shorter history of the haoles, non-native Hawai’ians, who came from Asia and the U.S. Some worked the sugar plantations, later the pineapple and coffee fields, mostly from Japan and Korea. Others came with money and power.

Hawai’i has a more than a soft spot in my heart. It’s a second home. Yes, that’s not too strong. We fell in love with the islands long ago and would have lived there if we had enough cash. Yes, in spite of the imperial history and in spite of the tourist industry. They are beautiful, enchanting, mesmerizing. The scent of loamy soil, gardenias, and jasmine are as fresh for me now as when we first went. The combination of lush landscapes, the vast Pacific, and the unimaginable power of the volcanoes that created them, casts a spell, one which we willingly let enchant us.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television

Roma

March 31, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Recovery Moon

First, it’s not about gypsies. Roma is a neighborhood in Mexico City.

Second, it’s not a thriller, or a mystery, or a comedy (except perhaps of manners), or a drama. It’s not fantasy, anime, or horror. I would call it cinema verité, a slice of life, in this case a short period in the life of Cleo, an indigenous woman who serves as a maid to the deteriorating family of a physician. She and Adela, another maid, wake up the children, kiss them and love them, make meals, clean the house, and work from morning until night.

Cleo is affectionate, a para-mother, to the four children, three boys and a girl. They love her back and the relationship among them is strong enough that, despite not knowing how to swim, she wades into the Bay of Campeche to save Sofi from drowning as threatening waves break all around them.

The film is told with Cleo and her life as its center, and a good part of it covers the evolution of her pregnancy, the result of one afternoon with Fermín. Fermín’s full frontal nudity, while brandishing a staff in martial arts fashion, serves to highlight what I perceived as the strongly feminist theme. His is the only nudity in the film.

Cleo’s pregnancy ends in the birth of a dead girl. The physician moves away from his home, leaving his wife, her mother, the four kids, Cleo and Adela in the family house. After a drunken drive into the garage with the oversized, masculine body of a Ford Galaxy, the wife says to Cleo, “We’re all alone Cleo. We women are always alone.” Her mother is there, alone. Cleo and Adela are there alone.

Cleo tells Fermín that she’s late while they are at a movie. He says, “That’s good, yeah?” She looks a little bewildered, but nods. “I’m going to the bathroom.” He disappears. When she finds him much later, he’s moved back to a village and trains there. She asks him if he has a minute. He shouts at her, brandishes his staff, “It’s not mine. If you come back, I’ll beat your face in.”

Though the film consistently portrays the physician’s family, including his wife, as caring for Cleo, “We love you, Cleo, very much.” there is always the underlying dynamic of employer/employee. “Will you fire me?” Cleo asks when informing the wife of her pregnancy. “Of course not.” The story from Cleo’s point of view suggests several different times that her position could be precarious, even if the family does love her.

We don’t see films focused on servants. Especially not films that take a more or less neutral attitude toward servitude like Roma. Yes, we see the threat to Cleo, but we also see the families genuine affection for her, the children’s, too. She displays no anger at her life, nor does Adela. Her most negative emotions come after the birth of her dead girl. She sits and stares.

The black and white film, the setting in the early 1970’s, and the depiction of an infamous police riot against protesting college students give Roma the patina of a story from long ago, as if the participants were sitting around a campfire somewhere recounting that year that Cleo got pregnant. In that sense, and in its third person style, gives the viewer a distance from the events in the movie, like watching a newsreel.

This is a powerful, well-observed film. It drew me in to Cleo’s world, made me ache with her, want more for her, appreciate her love for the children, which, of course, drew a double line of irony under her unsuccessful pregnancy.