I said a while ago, that this blog for me is my practice memoir--a place to learn to write about pain, about fear, about life. And tonight I had a breakthrough on more levels than I can count. Another wild ride, perhaps. And for some, uncomfortably personal. But if I write a book, it will be uncomfortably personal. I have to learn to be brave enough to reveal my own stupidity, and my own frailties. And to learn to do it so that I tell a story that reaches beyond the personal.
Thank you for reading. I understand if you'd rather not!
Tonight one of my best friends showed up, just to help me remember what has gotten me through everything. He showed up with his twelve string guitar, his ridiculous sense of humor and, well, his friendship that stretches back to eighth grade. Maybe that's not why he showed up, but it's how it felt anyway. Kinda like my beautiful stag. It doesn't matter whether or not the reason the deer shows up is to help me. His presence DOES help. That's what counts.
Jamie and I riff, in our own strange place. He will start playing chords and I hum, to fill in melodies that simply run through my head while he plays. I know just enough to hear where the music is headed and we do our thing without words. Without fanfare. Without an audience. We simply talk to one another as we fill in each other's lines. And I remember that once, a long time ago, I thought he would be the one, too--though, to be fair, I kept hidden from him, as I did from everyone else. And it broke my heart when he no longer wanted me. Both times. Yet here we were tonight and the friendship is rich and true, as deep as any friendship I have. Just different. He shows up when I need the calm, the substance at the core. He and Martha seem to know when I am in trouble before I speak. Everyone should be this lucky, to have people like this in their lives.
I had told my son about how tenuous my future is. And he had the panic-stricken look I'd feared. Modern life. I'm his stepmother, and no matter what I want to believe, or how I feel about him... It's there. It isn't that he loves me less. He feels he is overwhelmed by parents, but, at least, he had said, his mom and dad were remarried, and to younger people. I think he sees this as something he'd have to deal with later. I don't blame him. I get that. I don't want it for him, either... but it broke my heart to see it.
So Jamie came with his guitar. And I sang with him, and I simply put the world far away. He brings different music and even the songs that overlap with things that are hard to hear just now... he does them in his own way. And when he left, I connected on FaceBook with my friends in Pennsylvania. Friends who are coming out with a new CD. Someone who went to an all-day silent retreat. A singer who contacted me because I posted about singing.
My Soul's Retreat
Where the rivers run--Penn's Creek, Buffalo Creek, the branches of the Susquehanna, Lycoming--so many rivers, large and small. Where the mountains are just an hour from home, in Lewisburg. Home. I think that I may aim myself back there, at least for a few years, if I have to leave my house. I went there after Mark left, after my Jessie died. I ran
to the place, more than running away from home.
I re-created myself there. I learned to paint. And since I left? I met the musicians there. The Local Music Collective. There are professional and amateur musicians, a group that gather once a month to jam at one another's homes. One of my friends took me to a jam and I was hooked. I re-discovered my voice with these people. It's a community of artists and writers and musicians. I think the water makes the difference. I don't know. But there has always been magic there for me, and I think I will need the magic soon.
When I first moved there, I realized that I'd have to make a life from scratch, and the way to make it happen was to get involved with something that mattered. Within a month, there were two activities: An auction for a battered women's shelter, and a potluck picnic for an organization that was created to fight the KKK. These two organizations set me up with structure and purpose in my life that lasted the whole two years I was there. But the friendships and connections that sprang from them are with me still today.
Art
I stood in line for the auction and a woman came up behind me in a rush. She was late and introduced herself to me and asked me what drew me. When I told her I'd been in town a month, that I'd simply packed up and moved here and this was my first main event, she grabbed me and said, "You're at my table. Bid on my art lessons."
Sharon taught me to paint. Introduced me to a new world, and the possibility of more artistic fulfillment than I thought was possible. She was my first brand new friend. Because of her then, I have a studio now.
First Sense of Community
I used to eat lunch on Wednesdays in a little cafe inside an antiques mall/mill. There was a group of people fifteen to twenty years older than I, and I loved hearing them talk about the war, about the fifties, just about life. One of them turned out to have known my dad. My dad had helped him get certified and was pivotal in helping him succeed in his education career. I had one of my bouts of pneumonia about a month and a half after I'd started going there. When I returned after a two week absence, my group all started to yell at me, and one by one gave me their phone numbers and the proprietor of the cafe sent me home with soup and one of his quiches. And they told me that I was not in Connecticut any more, and that I never need be alone and sick again.
That I never need be alone again. See, that's what resonates still today, particularly now. Solitude and living alone need not be a sentence of loneliness. I lived there just two years, but in that time, I found people with whom I will be connected for life. And I know now that there are about a dozen people who would show up if I were in need, within half an hour. And there would be music and a community of which I could be a part. The give and the take in life, fully connected again.
I love my house. I love New England as well. And I love my friends back here. But it is not a community of friends. We are all together at Christmas and we visit in between. Mostly it is more fragmented and modern--there is little inter-connectedness. They mostly bond through me.
I want more from my life again. And I think, perhaps, I will need that the most.
Water, Mountains, Peace
There is a bend in the river below Port Trevorton, where the mountains rise high on either side. In the mornings, just a couple of hours past dawn, the clouds rest in puffs on the water. The coffee Clatch of them seem to gather for the morning gossip, and the glitter in the rising sun, sometimes shooting rainbows all over the place. Then, without warning, they simply rise, racing off to wherever clouds go after sleeping.
There is a rock at World's End, smack in the middle of the creek. On a summer's day, I walk there from the parking lot, and pick my way down over the rounded river rocks. I wade into the water, beyond the loudest of the family picnic noises. The laughter and the squeals are close enough to hear, but far enough to sound like white noise. I lie on my rock, braving the pain of swollen scars on rock. I look up and watch the eagles circle. I drift away, to the music of laughter and the beauty of bird against blue.
At night, in town, I walk the best I can over the cobblestone sidewalks, peeking through the old carriage gates at gardens as wondrous as any botanical park. And I run into friends, who stop and talk. We laugh and move on, together or on our separate paths.
The town's in trouble these days, like everywhere else. But it is alive. It is alive with art, with musicians, with the small town gossip of anywhere. But the river edges it all. It has a pulse that never ends; it shapes this place in spite of itself. It slows everything down.
When I lived there before, it was a winter of blizzards. We got one dumped two and a half feet only our town and Milton, the other side of the river--nowhere else in the country! This as after two feet just two days before. The town became alive with people walking. No cars. Sleds. Children. I stepped back into another century and we had a magic two days, until the flooding started. I remember walking with a friend up onto the bridge. Two elderly ladies were wondering why, when the plows were pushing water off route 15, they could not plow Front street. I said, "Ladies, this is the RIVER itself. You cannot plow a river."
"Well, I don't see why not. they can do all sorts of things. What are our taxes for?"
Suddenly the bridge shook. And ice flow about twelve feet long crashed into the pilings. The ladies said, "Shows how strong our bridge is."
I blinked and said, "No. It shows how strong the RIVER IS." And I left.
The town is not Nirvana. Nowhere where there are people ever is. But it has its own music. And if I am to be alone in my heart, in my day to day life, I would rather be alone in this place of water and mountains. Among these people who are so kind and talented. And they fight and make up and are flawed. And their lives are messy and often hard. But they opened their hearts and welcomed me in, and somewhere inside? This is home.
The Need to Shake My World Up: The NEED for change
Jamie and I talked without speaking, as is our custom at times. It's more that we punctuate the music with occasional speech, I guess. He moved me there those many years ago. He knows how it touched my soul. It's cheaper, too, to live there than here. But he knows where the place touches me. He was there.
That's the way plans develop. First we kick them around in grief, and in pain, knowing now isn't the time to move or do anything drastic. Yet I am opening my mind to the possibilities, nonetheless. The subsidized housing complex is fine. It would be adequate. It isn't that.
I want more than fine! I want way more than fine!
In refusing to stuff those parts away again, that I had so carefully hidden, it will be next to impossible to go to that cold, gray place, before R. woke me up. I am awake. TOO awake now. And the ache for him will be there, long after I no longer bother to mention him to anyone, least of all in here. Long after he may have forgotten a thing about these last weeks, I will remember what counts for me from it all. I am awake; he did that for me. And I may never see him again, but I will never forget his face how he looked, when all of me appeared, when I let all of who I am appear at last. The love remains in me. I would rather not kill it, even if it means living with that peculiar ache. It's livable, that ache.
BUT ... I owe it to
myself, and to whatever was real, to remain awake. To take all my "committee members" and use them. Perhaps they will add to my writing. Or maybe they will simply give me the courage to try to start over again. Fresh. In the place I have loved for so long.
I asked Jamie whether he thought it was a good idea. He asked something about state disability and I said, "Disability's federal."
"Well then go. Right away." He knows.
And I know myself, too. If I stayed here? Somehow or other, because I am so good at deluding myself, I would find myself waiting for something to change, for a dream of what I wanted. For something to simply happen: for R to come back, for things to work out with people here. I am afraid, if I stay, I will not allow myself to run after my dream. I will get caught up with the families who consider me their own, but only to a point. They love me; I love them. It would be easy to be absorbed and to let myself be lost in whatever their lives become. Or I'll be waiting to try a plan with some friend or another. I will fritter the precious years I may have without poverty, not daring to even try... my memoir, my poetry, my novel, the drawing, the painting. I will wait for "something" to
make things better. I will simply dabble, marking time, waiting for a miracle.
Sometimes you have to create the environment for miracles, and sometimes the miracle itself is in knowing when it is time to shake things up.
*****
I need mountains and water, like air. And people who feed the spirit in me to explore. And I need to make things better myself.
They call the mountains that fill the state north to New York and on to Canada the Endless Mountain Range. the first time Jean Ellen and I drove north from State College, we went through a place called Snow Shoe, then we curved northeast, for a day-long mountain arch home. We were rising slowly, but did not realize it, until we emerged from a woods, and out before us stretched, in three directions, nothing but mountain tops. We were among them, looking out like gods all around. And lining the edge of the road, as far as the road could be seen, were monarch butterflies. A million butterflies glittering golden and flame in the sun. We pulled off the road and got out.
Jean Ellen began to laugh and said, "THIS is what someone was looking at when they wrote the Bear went over the Mountain." Like children we shouted the song. And both of us had butterflies on our arms and our head and we danced around like children.
It was a moment of pure joy.
I have had many moments that equal that, while I lived there, and in my visits home... there. My home.
Not Settling: NEVER SETTLING... If joy won't find me, then I'll just go after it
The place speaks to me somewhere that music speaks. In a place without words. And it inspires me to be better than I am. Geographical cures are not always about running away. We take our problems with us, yes. But sometimes a brand new life, in a beloved place? In a place that speaks to our soul? Sometimes it can offer us miracles we believed were done.
Not since Jessie died has life seemed so uncertain, so painful on every front. And never has my actual financial future been so devoid of any buffer. There is only my house. When that money is gone? I will have nothing at all. Yet others have had to survive like that, and without good health. I want to be a success story. I don't think, once we straighten out my health, even if my health
is scary, that I can stay where it is so "safe."
I think, if I am to live a long, long life, like my Grandma M., that I must not choose what is safe. She knew how to create adventure from string beans, for Heaven's sake! She had her love for most of her life. I don't have that, and most likely I never will.
But I can still walk and do for myself. And even if there are new troubles, I don't think that they will keep me from being able to create. It will just be harder. But I don't think I was built for "safe." Doesn't mean that I like danger or am dangerous. I'm not. I just feel that to grab onto the joy, I have to be willing to risk doing what is difficult, doing what I know will make some very angry with me, and what will make a few people more than sad.
The angry ones want me to be there
for them. The sad ones want me
with them. There is a difference. But I will not do more than drift from one person's problems to another's if I stay. I will be committing myself to being the single older woman, who is there for others, but not for herself, and there is nothing whatever wrong with that!
It just is not me. My time with R. reminded me of that. The moment we spoke of our dreams, I knew that my life was off-track, and it cannot be dependent on him. It was wrong for me to believe that his being at my side was the key to hope. He simply reminded me of what I want--and I think I was unfair to pin the hope on his promises. Unfair to us both. I simply
want him with me, to make it all richer, not to make it possible;
I don't need him with me, to go after the dreams of a life beyond fine. That is an important difference.
I think I have to go out on an edge again. Move away, to find my interior home. I think I need to leave the safety of the cocooning friends and run to this nest of people who ... do not know what it IS to have money. Who start nonprofits, develop rituals for all occasions, find odd ways to make ends meet, because they would rather experiment from their hearts than be "safe." Perhaps that's why R. came into my life. He may not have wanted any part of the change that meant being with me. And I realize that the change of being with someone who shared this passion for life... this yearning to do more, that this would have been the making of me. It might have been for him, or maybe not--don't know, maybe it was timing;
but that's all irrelevant. It has to be now. What matters in that, is that he wanted that
for me, to do more, to explore. There were no lies in that, no misleading. We want that for one another. And I can hold onto that.
So I'll figure out a way to do it alone. That will be okay, no matter how raw the wanting still is. I know it will be okay. I've never feared change.
And I believe that if joy--the happiness you cannot feel unless you know its flipside--if joy is what I want in this life, I have to go running out and grab it with both hands.
We cannot wait for luck to happen, sometimes. Even when everything's a mess. Even when our hearts hurt. We have to find what will shake us loose. I need to shake loose, even if I have MS. Even if there is more spinal cord damage. Even if I have no job. And even though I will still be flying alone.
It's scarier now than ever before... but isn't this just the time to go after it all? I am not, was not wrong to love R. all the way, to learn that I DO feel joy and absolute happiness is worth the risk. Worth pain and fear and losing. It's worth doing what's hard. There's a gift in there, beyond the love story, beyond any pain... There is. And I have to believe that it's never wrong to love. And that lesson, that gift can withstand the absence, the anger, the ache. You learn simply what to do with the gifts that the love brought and try to put them into your future, regardless of where the other person travels or lands.
And I need to be where I will focus on what counts.
I want to go home again. It's
time to go home again.
************
When I was in Lewisburg, I wrote all the time again. As I said, I began to paint. I felt free of my family, of the weight of my past, and I could spin the pain into gold. I can do this again. Jamie began a familiar riff, he calls the "Let's annoy Jetty riff." It wanders and goes nowhere. Just when you think you know where you are headed, he changes the key and we're off on another trail. It reminds me of my life, I think. We always end up doing something fine, in among the mis-sung notes or the chords too far off any trail. We forget that it began as a joke and get lost in the moment. We get lost in the joy of creating.
I created that studio to free myself, to develop a talent my sister saw, but I never dared explore. I started this blog to begin my writing for real. I let R. in at last, because it was time to be whole.
November 2nd revision...to R. in particular
I can no longer settle for okay, for "tolerable" in my
own life. I guess I've had to sort out my own life, too, haven't I, as we all have to. The anger is gone. And that blind terror, even, at what lies ahead.
For the first time in two years, I feel I can handle whatever is coming: losing my house, new central nervous system problems, poverty, leaving here again. For the first time in all of my life, I am whole.
Thank you, Jamie, for simply being you.
And if you come in here to read again, thank you, R. For showing me I had more light in me, than I ever let myself see; for bringing out those parts of me that I had silenced for so long. Forgive me my anger, where it was out of line, and know it was from a place of pain and fear beyond what you did or said. And because, well, it hurts. Pure and simple.
I know you did not lie. Know that I refuse to douse that flame, or shove those parts back into the dark—because you came. I can and
will use them to go after something more than okay —
because you came. You did that for me.
The love remains, as it has for thirty years. Not shoved in a box in the dark, though. I think I'll keep it closer to the surface, where I can see its light when I need to. That's really all that matters for sh... that matters. ... The rest can go into our really bad country song.
****
And so ends this love story on my blog. But because I write, I heal faster. And maybe someone else will find something in here that strikes a chord, makes you smile or tear up. Thanks for hanging in with me through this part of the Wild Ride.
