Yes. Well, some of you may know that Connecticut was in the dark for all of last week. I exaggerate. Only about eighty per cent of the state was dark, and I live in one of the towns that was hardest hit. As I write this Monday night, big chunks of my town and two of the towns adjacent are still dark. This is a situation we will have to sort out--negligence and apathy. I live in what some call the "quiet corner," which has often translated into the "Backward pore folk" corner.
In the late 1970's I worked at a university library way across the mighty Amazonian Connecticut River. One must understand that, in Connecticut, if you lived on the west side of the river, my side was seen as some foreign world of nothing but woods and farmlands. No one actually said outright that we must be uncivilized, but they came close. I was in a play and invited my colleagues to come and see me. They arranged an expedition, thinking they could see some quaint old-fashioned stores and perhaps take in the buccolic scenery.
When I saw them after curtain calls, one woman said, "Well you actually have a SageandAllen's store here. And a Stop and Shop!"
"Yes, Clara, and we got us indoor plumbing just t'other day."
"Well, I thought that this was all country out here. I didn't realize you all had..." Her voice trailed as she suddenly realized just how condescending and insulting she was sounding. "No, but you have regular stores and everything and... I'll shut up now."
Thirty years later we still are the forgotten towns when it comes to prioritizing funds or aid. We have the flagship of our university system, but people seem to think that other than that, we are a vast wasteland, except, of course, for our mall. Connecticut is the land of malls. If you do not live within twenty minutes of a large one, you are considered underprivileged. My town has three huge malls within twenty minutes. Truly, just how lucky can one woman be.
I hate malls. Sorry. I just do.
Anyway, my power came on late Saturday, thank goodness. My apartment complex is located in an area that has at least five other large complexes within about 3/4 of a mile, square. It is the most densely populated area in the town, yet we waited six days for the power. I could not get out of the complex for two days. For all six of those days, one of the streets had no exit at all, except by winding through our complex. There are still trees HANGING across roads. Poles partly fallen. Big branches blocking roads. One of my friends could not get out of her street until Friday. Fortunately she and her husband are campers and had a gas stove as well.
In this day and age we expect our electric companies to be able to get us back on the grid in short order, but our company is far behind the times. And if I had had to listen to the president say that the company exists to serve its customers, I was ready to throw a shoe at my tv. It exists to serve its stockholders. The president got a three million dollar bonus--for cutting 20% of our crews, I guess. And not paying bills. And having antiquated lines and transformers.
I am grateful to the Canadian crews who came, some of whom are still here--from Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec. We have crews from Kentucky, Massachusetts, the Carolinas, Tennessee. I don't know what other states sent us help--I think they said it was TWENTY states. I am so grateful to them all.
Last week was a lost week in some ways. In others? I now know my neighbors. We watched out for one another, making sure things were okay for each other. I had FIVE friends show up at my door, panicked because they could not reach me, worried I had fallen. I stayed six days with one of them and not ONCE did she complain. She gave me her room, so I did not have to use the stairs. I made dinner and brunch for a crew of our friends on night and one morning. We played games. I read five books.
Friendships were deepened. Acquaintanceships were solidified.
I am home and never have been more grateful to be here. The management team had generators here by Friday morning, because it was to be cold Friday and Saturday nights. We did not know when we would be on the grid again. I know they all worked well into the evening all week, making sure all the tenants were okay. They listened patiently to tenants SCREAM at them to fix things... as if they could. They showed up every day, working in jackets, sometimes wearing gloves to work in the mornings. Their generators gave them power to work, but not for heat. I stopped in every day, as did two other of the FIVE HUNDRED tenants, to let them know we knew it was not their doing, to acknowledge that it must be a hard time for them, too. They were without power in their homes, too. Two women had to bring their children with them each day.
It has been a hard time, but not without its blessings.
I missed my connections in the blogging world. I missed my connections to friends who live far from me. I missed my studio and my beautiful paintings and photographs on my walls. Just things. But ALL my things are gifts. Every piece of pottery, every picture, every little doodad... gifts from friends, from my sister, my parents, or handed down bits of family history. I have bought very little--the couches, two chairs, two tables. I have antique oak chairs that were my great grandfather's, and my great great grandfather--the traveling quack-- I have his desk. A bit of cut glass from my sister's best friend's grandmother. A dish from my mother's mother.
I missed my things because they live with stories, with the richness of family ties. I see the people, not just the thing.
I am rich beyond measure. I am home.
I won't revise this. I don't particularly care about the quality of writing today. I write simply because I am filled with gratitude today. Never have I felt so keenly the joy of being home. Never have I been more aware of how UNalone I am in this world. I am poor when it comes to income, but that's all. It's NOTHING in the light of the last ten days.
I am home. And tonight I will curl up on my couch, writing and working on my book. And tomorrow I will begin the painting I had just taped down when the power went out. And I will look online for images of snow on fall leaves... it was beautiful. To see yellow and flame maple leaves on snow... a once in a lifetime sight. Thank you Carl for the quick pic you sent!
Thank you all for reading what I write, and thank you to some in particular, who have reminded me that even in this "virtual" world, I am not alone. And I am not forgotten. Neither are all of you, as will be evident as I periodically blog hop to catch up on your lives.
I am such a lucky woman.
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Showing posts with label friendship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friendship. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
The Studio is Set Up
Last night I dreamed another painting and I can't wait to start it this weekend. I have some things to tend to first, drat it all. It had to do with the South of France and a dream I have had for about five years. When I am panicking about the future, when I feel alone, I dream this dream of a big yellow house. It is probably best described as a Victorian farmhouse, with a deep wrap around porch. The trim is white. I am almost always in the kitchen, the sunroom hallway leading to the old barn, which is now a four car garage with a studio above it, or in the sun room. There is a country kitchen with two ovens and a huge table that seats eight without the leaf.
The house always smells like oatmeal bread fresh out of the oven; that's my specialty. One winter when I was shut in almost all the time, I learned to bake bread the old-fashioned way. I would make the sponge, and then add my salt, oatmeal, remaining flower, and sometimes finely ground walnuts and pecans. I loved kneading the dough because it gave me an upper body workout. I always made enough for three large loaves. I especially loved punching down the dough.
People say it's a good way to let out aggression, but something in me always thought that putting negative energy in my bread was not a good thing. I try to name people and things I love when I knead and punch the dough. Silly? Probably, but who cares.
Anyway, in my dream, I live with at least three people. Rarely are those people actually in the room with me. Sometimes I hear a guitar in the background. Other times I see a familiar body bent over the flower garden that fills the U made by the corridor, garage/studio, and a wing of the house. Sometimes someone has just come up the gravel driveway and there is the sound of bags of groceries being put on the floor by the front door.
Always, always I am content. I am getting ready for company. I am singing. I am wiping my hands to go out to the garden. I am calling to someone that dinner is ready. Always the dream is in the middle of some activity that represents a full life, one of absolute contentment. I am never aware of whether or not I am romantically involved with anyone--it is irrelevant.
The other night I dreamed my house on a hillside in France, when the sunflowers are in bloom. I looked out at distant rolling hills striped in yellow and azure, and the walls of the room I was in were French blue. There is no other blue like it.
I had not dreamed my yellow house dream in months, so I saw it as a sign that I truly know my next phase of life has begun, and that I see it as good. And that is ironic, because I am coming out of three days of being quite literally bedridden for all but about three hours of the day--broken up hours. Even that didn't matter, once I paid attention to what my body was telling me.
This will come as a surprise, I am sure, but I had pressed myself a tad too much, trying to get everything done, wondering why I could not do what I did at forty-two years old. I'm only fifty-nine and have four more destroyed disks than I had then. What's the problem?
The non-word "duh" keeps springing to mind.
In my dream, however, I looked through a window that had hanging plants at the edges, to these beautiful hills, and one, lone tree that came across the scene from the right. One branch of some delicate small leafed variety, dancing at the edge. And for the life of me, that picture screamed joy to me and I have to find a way to translate it to my paper, don't you think?
Whether the dream is France or Pennsylvania or central Massachussetts, whether it is near a river, a lake, or the midst of the mountains, the house holds a family of women, with an occasional man floating through. The house holds light, and safety, and laughter. And this time the outdoors was the same, and as far as my eyes could see, I saw nothing but harmony, color, and light.
It isn't often we get to feel that way, I don't think. Or perhaps we can, and we forget to hold onto the center of our souls. We drift too far into the static of life, maybe. Or perhaps it's just me.
Regardless, this weekend the paints come out and I will paint my way home inside.
Again.
The house always smells like oatmeal bread fresh out of the oven; that's my specialty. One winter when I was shut in almost all the time, I learned to bake bread the old-fashioned way. I would make the sponge, and then add my salt, oatmeal, remaining flower, and sometimes finely ground walnuts and pecans. I loved kneading the dough because it gave me an upper body workout. I always made enough for three large loaves. I especially loved punching down the dough.
People say it's a good way to let out aggression, but something in me always thought that putting negative energy in my bread was not a good thing. I try to name people and things I love when I knead and punch the dough. Silly? Probably, but who cares.
Anyway, in my dream, I live with at least three people. Rarely are those people actually in the room with me. Sometimes I hear a guitar in the background. Other times I see a familiar body bent over the flower garden that fills the U made by the corridor, garage/studio, and a wing of the house. Sometimes someone has just come up the gravel driveway and there is the sound of bags of groceries being put on the floor by the front door.
Always, always I am content. I am getting ready for company. I am singing. I am wiping my hands to go out to the garden. I am calling to someone that dinner is ready. Always the dream is in the middle of some activity that represents a full life, one of absolute contentment. I am never aware of whether or not I am romantically involved with anyone--it is irrelevant.
The other night I dreamed my house on a hillside in France, when the sunflowers are in bloom. I looked out at distant rolling hills striped in yellow and azure, and the walls of the room I was in were French blue. There is no other blue like it.
I had not dreamed my yellow house dream in months, so I saw it as a sign that I truly know my next phase of life has begun, and that I see it as good. And that is ironic, because I am coming out of three days of being quite literally bedridden for all but about three hours of the day--broken up hours. Even that didn't matter, once I paid attention to what my body was telling me.
This will come as a surprise, I am sure, but I had pressed myself a tad too much, trying to get everything done, wondering why I could not do what I did at forty-two years old. I'm only fifty-nine and have four more destroyed disks than I had then. What's the problem?
The non-word "duh" keeps springing to mind.
In my dream, however, I looked through a window that had hanging plants at the edges, to these beautiful hills, and one, lone tree that came across the scene from the right. One branch of some delicate small leafed variety, dancing at the edge. And for the life of me, that picture screamed joy to me and I have to find a way to translate it to my paper, don't you think?
Whether the dream is France or Pennsylvania or central Massachussetts, whether it is near a river, a lake, or the midst of the mountains, the house holds a family of women, with an occasional man floating through. The house holds light, and safety, and laughter. And this time the outdoors was the same, and as far as my eyes could see, I saw nothing but harmony, color, and light.
It isn't often we get to feel that way, I don't think. Or perhaps we can, and we forget to hold onto the center of our souls. We drift too far into the static of life, maybe. Or perhaps it's just me.
Regardless, this weekend the paints come out and I will paint my way home inside.
Again.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Off to Montague, MA!
Saturday is my fifty-ninth birthday. I am running away for the afternoon with one of my dearest friends, Paige, with whom friendship stretches back full fifty-four years. We met in kindergarten and have been close ever since. We have always had one of those friendships that has been easy to step back into, even when we have not seen one another for years. She and I wrote my first stories together during what we called junior high back then. Middle school had not been used as a label yet.
These years held much terror and pain back then, much as they do for kids these days. We were poor and I wore hand-me-downs from my sister who was far heavier than I, and I was a bit overweight then. Furthermore, when I had dared to ask my mother for a hair cut, in one of her psychotic episodes, she dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night, yanked my hair into a pony tail and hacked off a chunk of hair with pinking shears. Let's just say I did not set any fashion trends that year. And let me also say that my mother was absolutely devastated the next day that she had done this to me and she tried to even it out. She was so guilt-ridden she drank for two solid weeks to drown out her guilt. She was difficult when she drank, but she was not psychotic; she was rarely a mean drunk at all back then. She was a tortured soul is all...
Needless to say, I was bullied quite a bit, as were some others. I think that the middle school age is the most brutal age. We are all scared and do not know how to cope with raging hormones, constantly changing bodies and urges. And to have the wrong clothes and hair and to be the "wrong" size? What saved me sometimes was my mouth. I had a quick wit and could turn a crowd sometimes. I try not to think of those two years much. They were lonely and terrifying.
Yet Paige did not desert me, even though she even had a BOYFRIEND. She did not like the cliques, the pressure to conform, any of it. We learned to create a wonderful game that filled the hours with an entire world of our own. The days before instant ANYTHING except pudding...
We were both Beatles fans and all things Brit. So we would call one another and create our own soap opera with a complete cast of characters. We would have British accents and assume the characters and have adventures on the phone. When we tired of the Brits, we invented a cast of California kids as well, and invented beach and our image of California hills, mountains and desert stories. We would sneak into our parents' bedrooms where the spare phones were and stay on the phone for hours, until one or the other was discovered and end our adventure du jour to the tune of some mother screaming at us.
And in the summers, when she was at camp and I was at the Lake, we wrote to one another. We wrote twenty page letters--scripts really. Full of intrigue, deception, pain, humor, and all sorts of things of which we knew absolutely nothing. I'd get TWO fat packets and run down to our little ledge by the water, where there were two Adirondack chairs, and I would read them aloud. I know she did the same. By the end of each of those two summers, we had literally hundreds of pages FULL of our imagination, on BOTH sides.
She was my salvation.
We have never lost our joy of creating, side by side. I taught her to paint and we spent eight to ten evenings, creating in the studio I had here for about four months. We once spent an entire afternoon in Pennsylvania saying almost nothing to one another while she worked on her book and I worked on a painting, played the piano, and worked on some writing. We have both felt that her three day runaway to me in PA was one of our closest times. We also went exploring and found a raptors' rescue place in the middle of nowhere. Let me just say that central PA has more middle-of-nowhere spots than anywhere I know. You drive through a tiny town that is five buildings on either side of the road, drive over a farm hill and suddenly enter a forest, round a bend and the road opens wide to a divided highway and you are in the middle of a magnificent mountain range, then find yourself once again lost in the farmlands, with huge bales of hay tied as the Ammish do, so they look like giant women bent over so all you see is the outline of their bottoms and a flowing skirt of gold flaring around them.
It is mythic sometimes. And on that day, after the raptors we found middle earth just down to the right of the road, in the sun-dappled forest. Water pouring down the far bank which was nothing but a coal black wall reaching straight up until it was lost in foliage that seemed to grow sideways. But the rocks in the stream were completely coated in moss, and the foliage around us had no undergrowth. The effect made the very air slightly green and glowing, and the rushing water seemed hushed, as it fell and danced around completely cushioned rocks. Paige and I simply wandered along the stream, saying little, until she said, "Now THIS is really Middle Earth."
Of course it was.
And it is with this pure gem of a woman that I will escape packing boxes and the business of moving, and suburbia for an afternoon of nothing but books and laughter. We once sang the entire "Ladies of the Canyon" Joani Mitchell CD... without the CD, as we drove home from PA.
It cannot help but be a perfect day. I am one of the luckiest women on the planet in the friends I have. All is well. All is NORMAL. It is so wonderful to be able to have a whole week of simply living. Plenty of little highs in the week, but absolutely not a low in sight. One thing about my life; I have learned to absolutely savor the times of "average" days. Hum-drum is under-rated, I think. I am LOVING hum-drum.
Tomorrow, however, will be special. It's all I have planned for my birthday, and that came as a surprise when Paige called in the afternoon to suggest it. So you all have a stellar weekend. I'm gonna go play.
These years held much terror and pain back then, much as they do for kids these days. We were poor and I wore hand-me-downs from my sister who was far heavier than I, and I was a bit overweight then. Furthermore, when I had dared to ask my mother for a hair cut, in one of her psychotic episodes, she dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night, yanked my hair into a pony tail and hacked off a chunk of hair with pinking shears. Let's just say I did not set any fashion trends that year. And let me also say that my mother was absolutely devastated the next day that she had done this to me and she tried to even it out. She was so guilt-ridden she drank for two solid weeks to drown out her guilt. She was difficult when she drank, but she was not psychotic; she was rarely a mean drunk at all back then. She was a tortured soul is all...
Needless to say, I was bullied quite a bit, as were some others. I think that the middle school age is the most brutal age. We are all scared and do not know how to cope with raging hormones, constantly changing bodies and urges. And to have the wrong clothes and hair and to be the "wrong" size? What saved me sometimes was my mouth. I had a quick wit and could turn a crowd sometimes. I try not to think of those two years much. They were lonely and terrifying.
Yet Paige did not desert me, even though she even had a BOYFRIEND. She did not like the cliques, the pressure to conform, any of it. We learned to create a wonderful game that filled the hours with an entire world of our own. The days before instant ANYTHING except pudding...
We were both Beatles fans and all things Brit. So we would call one another and create our own soap opera with a complete cast of characters. We would have British accents and assume the characters and have adventures on the phone. When we tired of the Brits, we invented a cast of California kids as well, and invented beach and our image of California hills, mountains and desert stories. We would sneak into our parents' bedrooms where the spare phones were and stay on the phone for hours, until one or the other was discovered and end our adventure du jour to the tune of some mother screaming at us.
And in the summers, when she was at camp and I was at the Lake, we wrote to one another. We wrote twenty page letters--scripts really. Full of intrigue, deception, pain, humor, and all sorts of things of which we knew absolutely nothing. I'd get TWO fat packets and run down to our little ledge by the water, where there were two Adirondack chairs, and I would read them aloud. I know she did the same. By the end of each of those two summers, we had literally hundreds of pages FULL of our imagination, on BOTH sides.
She was my salvation.
We have never lost our joy of creating, side by side. I taught her to paint and we spent eight to ten evenings, creating in the studio I had here for about four months. We once spent an entire afternoon in Pennsylvania saying almost nothing to one another while she worked on her book and I worked on a painting, played the piano, and worked on some writing. We have both felt that her three day runaway to me in PA was one of our closest times. We also went exploring and found a raptors' rescue place in the middle of nowhere. Let me just say that central PA has more middle-of-nowhere spots than anywhere I know. You drive through a tiny town that is five buildings on either side of the road, drive over a farm hill and suddenly enter a forest, round a bend and the road opens wide to a divided highway and you are in the middle of a magnificent mountain range, then find yourself once again lost in the farmlands, with huge bales of hay tied as the Ammish do, so they look like giant women bent over so all you see is the outline of their bottoms and a flowing skirt of gold flaring around them.
It is mythic sometimes. And on that day, after the raptors we found middle earth just down to the right of the road, in the sun-dappled forest. Water pouring down the far bank which was nothing but a coal black wall reaching straight up until it was lost in foliage that seemed to grow sideways. But the rocks in the stream were completely coated in moss, and the foliage around us had no undergrowth. The effect made the very air slightly green and glowing, and the rushing water seemed hushed, as it fell and danced around completely cushioned rocks. Paige and I simply wandered along the stream, saying little, until she said, "Now THIS is really Middle Earth."
Of course it was.
And it is with this pure gem of a woman that I will escape packing boxes and the business of moving, and suburbia for an afternoon of nothing but books and laughter. We once sang the entire "Ladies of the Canyon" Joani Mitchell CD... without the CD, as we drove home from PA.
It cannot help but be a perfect day. I am one of the luckiest women on the planet in the friends I have. All is well. All is NORMAL. It is so wonderful to be able to have a whole week of simply living. Plenty of little highs in the week, but absolutely not a low in sight. One thing about my life; I have learned to absolutely savor the times of "average" days. Hum-drum is under-rated, I think. I am LOVING hum-drum.
Tomorrow, however, will be special. It's all I have planned for my birthday, and that came as a surprise when Paige called in the afternoon to suggest it. So you all have a stellar weekend. I'm gonna go play.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Weeding to the Music of Lilacs
"In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary." Aaron Rose
This quote was used as part of Pauline's Writing Down the Words: January 28 entry That particular quote made me remember the role that gardening has played in so much of my healing time of the last twenty years, the years of home ownership, and visiting without words.And it reminded me of the extraordinary friendships forged around ordinary routines.
When I was in my twenties I did a great deal of visiting over toddlers and folding laundry. I was single; my friends were not. (See "Laundry Eagles" for an understanding of what I mean.) I was a thoroughly obnoxious sort of friend. I'd watch their children for an hour or two when they had errands to run, hang around to help unload the groceries, the laundry, whatever and, when the little ones began to implode along around 3:00, I would smile so sweetly and say, "Ha ha ha, ha HA HA, I think I'll go HOME now." They all threatened me with much future suffering, but continued to allow me into their homes nonetheless. NOt only that, they fed me, listened to me, and held me close when my heart was broken and my body followed.
During that decade we visited with talking. Endlessly deep, profound and mundane conversations over coffee, stolen lunches out, when one child or another invariably slumped into her soup, sound asleep. When my parents went off on vacation, I would overrun their home and entertain the lot of them, husbands, wives AND children. I would make some Julia Child wonder of a meal, insist on no help and have everyone at the table together. The children would be bundled en mass onto my parents' bed, and the adults had hours to laugh, watch bad t.v. and discuss everything from politics to the dangers of the new something on the horizon called "Total phone" and the clunkiness of mobile phones. The best night was watching the Miss America Pageant and feigning disagreement over whether or not Miss Oklahoma's singing "I am Woman" while dressed in a ridiculously frilly apron and riding a tricycle trumped Miss Nebraska's attempt to sing "Send in the Clowns" while dressed as Bozo. I had served coq au vin with a magnicient four layer Boston Cream Pie (Made entirely from scratch) and flopped onto the couch, saying, "Someone peel me a grape." I was ignored.
Ten minutes later Andrea appeared with my mother's hexagonal silver tray with one peeled grape in its center.
It's the little things.
But our friendships were loud. We danced and had parties. We lounged by the pool, watching with one eye, the endless games of Marco Polo as toddlers grew to double digit children. I was the neighborhood silly mobile aunt. I loved it. I knew I should not have children with the back I'd been dealt. I did not have my first surgery until I was twenty-eight. I was diagnosed with severe problems at just 23. So I exercised like a fiend to avoid surgery. I did weights when it was not fashionable, and tried the weights machines, only to find that it made a difference that they were designed for men. I hurt myself. My PT guy said I was the only woman he'd ever met who overdid it in the pool to the point of injury.
What's this nonsense anyway about moderation being good? BULL.
I dreamed big. I Mean BIG. I would write the best novel ever and Oprah would have me on. I would be "Discovered" at a poetry reading by Coventry Lake. I would go to grad school and become an expert on Adult Learning, and write the definitive light reading books for adults--compelling and interesting, not glorified kids' books. So many dreams. My friends had them, too, and they were not so big. How was it, then, that my friend who spoke English as her second language got her masters in international accounting, and another became a nationally known and respected program director for Public Broadcasting, and another went to law school at thirty? I talked about the big dreams, and so did they, but when it came down to it, after all the talking and laughing and sharing, in my thirties I watched the others run after their dreams while I spent five years in hospitals, raising half-grown children in between the four to six-week stints? I felt my life slipping away, I thought. The noise seemed to die down, but not the chaos.
I did not lose these friends at all. On the contrary, I was the stay-at-home mom for my daughter's best friend. I was the one who would suddenly show up at whichever home "the gang was hangin" with a tray full of Slurpees® and a bright smile. As my son said, "It was impossible to, like, be that mad. I mean, you didn't stay. You sat down and you asked us about our days, brought the drinks and sometimes cookies and smiled and then left after fifteen minutes. And come back later because you forgot your wallet or something. You always forgot something."
I would smile at his recollection and then he'd say, "DAMN. You didn't forget, huh. But we NEVER knew if you'd come."
"Exactly."
The life was mundane and my pleasures were tiny, mostly. An unexpected hug from my son. Dinner time laughter that included Mark AND the kids. And, of course, hanging out with my friends for cookouts. Still, mostly we talked. And, sad to say, mostly I envied them their marriages, their vacations, their big homes. I felt that not only had I disappeared, but my family was not likely to move forward. Of course, it was my fault. I was disabled and brought in almost no money. I banked all of the kids', and used my own for necessities. I had no right to buy luxuries. The money was Mark's, not mine...
But somewhere along the line, I realized that I was not seeing my life. I had not held up the proper light to it. Others seemed to see me as a success. (Not my family, of course. There, my Aunt Joy summed it up when they were dissecting me as if I were absent. Joy said, "Well, Jean, she IS a wonderful mother. Let's give her that much.) My friends saw more, for which I am beyond grateful, but they told me I was either seeing myself and my life in a funny mirror, or I needed new light bulbs in my brain.
It began after the eight operation, when I was confined to bed because I had gotten up on my own to use the loo, and had lost my mind in a sea of blood in the bathroom. It was a new procedure, trying to avoid my normal hematomas. The fourteen inch incision was sutured very loosely so the pressure would not build, and blood could escape in a controlled way, but I went into the bathroom and, well, the thing exploded, splattering blood all around me and I had a flashback. My first. Right there and then, blood on porcelain and I was gone to another place. The sound. The sight. The fear. I remember nothing more.
I awoke tied to my bed, and life changed immediately. I did not then confront the flashback; it was too soon for that. Yet at last I knew that there was something to confront. As I looked next to me at my drug-addicted, far older roommate, a woman whose husband would come into the hospital and say, "Why don't you simply DIE, Annie, and help us all out?" .... as I looked at her, and looked back at my panic-stricken husband beside me, my life took on a new sheen. Our marriage felt strong and real. And I remembered something about Jessie.
One day she had come home with a papier maché daffodil from middle school art class. "I can't even show this to Mom or Dad. They'll laugh at it. I can't laugh at it. Jeannette, it's pathetic." Well, yes, it truly was. It had a stem the size of a Grecian column and a blossom the size of a thimble. It was lopsided and one leaf was fat and squat, the other tall and leaf-like. "She gave me a B out of pity and for the good leaf." There she stood, hair to her butt, one arm behind her back, the other holding this monstrosity toward me, eyes pleading for help.
"Well, Jess. I can't throw it out. My guess is you worked hard on it." Her tears were falling and she nodded. "I know, I'll put it on MY shelf in the closet and I'll think of you every day." She brightened up enormously, but every time she saw it in the closet she'd come out and look at me, shaking her head.
A couple of years later she said, "You really don't have to."
I always said, "I love it. Especially when I knock something near it and it falls on my head." She would laugh and kiss me.
But when the ceramic vase came home, lopsided and unevenly glazed, she begged me not to put in the living room. "No, REALLY Jeannette. You can't do it. There is nothing that you can make look okay in this. Nothing."
I'd said, "Trust me, honey. You wait." Jess ran into her room crying because she thought it would be humiliating.
I found some beautiful silk flowers and dried boughs of who knows what? I put it in the corner of the shelves, and you saw only the ruffled line of the lip of the shining forest green vase, and the curve of the base, and a profusion of delicate color, there in the center corner.
She looked at it and began to tear up and smiled, "You made something beautiful out of something ugly. You always DO that for me." And she hugged me, holding on longer than I did, and I was never as whole in my life. It was the sweetest compliment I'd ever known. An ordinary act of motherhood, I thought, seen through the eyes of an extraordinary child who did not know her power yet.
I lay in my hospital bed, tied down, thinking of her and a dozen other little sweet things that suddenly felt huge, and how I'd nearly blown up my marriage. And I apologized for the billionth time for the pain I had caused Mark, only this time he looked at me and said simply, "I want you home. I want you not to hurt so much. I can't reach where your pain is, Jeannette. It's always out of reach."
But he kissed it away just the same and I remember it as a series of the best kisses of our marriage.
Something changed. I was thirty-five and was about to learn the heaviest of life's lessons, but I began to listen to silence and look harder at the small things of my life. I stopped paying so damned much attention on the big successes of my friends, and looked at my small successes. I could stand when they told me I'd fall down. I was not an addict. And I was determined to stand STRAIGHT. I was able to do the laundry within two weeks, and for the first time in three years—I started dancing around like Rocky for the accomplishment. There, with no one to hear or see the mountain I had climbed, I danced.
Sometimes simply tying one's shoes is an extraordinary act. That's what I was showing Dad--that I could tie my shoes--while quietly and slowly the subject drifted away. I was always quiet with him toward the end. Noise confused him. But because I was happy to simply BE with him, I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the FATHER, even more than when we'd commuted together. He gave me the journal of his last months, a revelation of pain, selfish arrogance and humble regrets. Anyway, on this particular day, I'd told him how hard it had been to learn to do and how much harder it was to appreciate an act I'd done thousands of times, and he nodded. Then he said, "I've sung Ah Sweet Mystery of LIfe at Last I've Found Thee easily a thousand times. Why did I have to be dying to listen to the words? Love was next to me all my life, sweetie. Don't be like me. Mark hurt you. I know that. We know that. He isn't the man we thought he was. Dear, you can do anything. Listen to your words when you sing them. Listen to your life as you live it. Listen. I never listened." There were many small moments with them both, while they were consciously preparing to go. I'll save them for another time, but when they were gone, and we had bought our house, I began to garden.
The quietest thing I know, gardening. My friends gardened, too. Sometimes we would work together and say nothing, yet felt we had visited all the way through to our cores. Perhaps we had. We would be filthy, sweaty, make-up-less and aging. Yet sometimes I thought that Andrea was most beautiful with her hair unruly, her unmatching eyes glittering, her pale skin still shining from her sunblock. There seemed nothing ordinary to me about many of the flowers, especially peonies.
I mean really. Every peony is its own statement of life -- no, of LIFE, with flourishes of trumpet as well. Their coloring is as delicate as Dresden, but the flowers themselves? A subtle peony is an oxymoron. I was weeding in my lilac island when I thought about that one very early morning. I liked to weed when the sun still cast gold in the sky, there on the far side of my yard.
I was laughing at myself because I love their showiness, revealed only through the never-ending ordinary march of ants to soften their buds. Ants. What is more ordinary than an ant? The lilac island was my first garden, designed, planted, dug with my own hands out of the twenty-year-old perfect turf. My mother's and sister's favorite flower is the lilac and, since Jean Ellen lived here, I wanted to have my first garden be for her and for Mom, whose soul I had clearly channeled, against my will I tell ya, against my will! (I loathed gardening as a child, as I stood by her holding the trowel, the watering can, and some worms to put in the holes. Worms, it appeared, were the key to every garden success. They were the best thing about it all, because the rest of gardening seemed the most boring thing in the world. Put in some nameless tiny green thing and when you were done? It looked like a limp clump of weed. And a clump of junk we had to be careful not to let the kick- soccer- foot- or baseball get into.)
So I chose four different lilac varieties, then found the Miss Kim, and realized that I could have a whole month of lilac blooming with one of those, if they did not all bloom at once because of a hot spell. And I had to admit that subtlety had not been what I was going for here, either. The double blossom shrub was nearly bent to the ground from the weight of the eight-inch long pregnant blossoms.
That season we had had a hot spell, though, and I saw that every single bush was budded, from the doubles of the deepest violet bush to the white. None were in bloom, but they would be any moment. Oh, well. I shrugged and decided how beautiful our enormous vases would be with five shades of blooms, if only for a few days.
I shook my head a moment because a decade before I had planted them too close together, and had actually put a peony plant in there, not realizing how big both got. A common mistake for new gardeners. Furthermore, lilac island across from an open field, so nameless horrid weeds invaded all the time, including the Chinese vine I SHALL NOT NAME. I call it KUJO, for the killer dog. I had just finished wrestling one 20-foot obsenity out by its roots from the very center of my "grove", and had removed, painfully, no fewer than EIGHT thistle plants when, as I unbent my body to breathe, I heard the rain. I looked up and the sky was blue with the barest hints of rose and gold on the horizon.I stood very, very still; stunned, in fact. Gentle rain engulfed me, yet all was dry.
"A miracle?" I asked aloud.
No. An ordinary act of nature, the sound of lilacs blooming.
Clearly, though, I should have answered, "Yes."
This quote was used as part of Pauline's Writing Down the Words: January 28 entry That particular quote made me remember the role that gardening has played in so much of my healing time of the last twenty years, the years of home ownership, and visiting without words.And it reminded me of the extraordinary friendships forged around ordinary routines.
When I was in my twenties I did a great deal of visiting over toddlers and folding laundry. I was single; my friends were not. (See "Laundry Eagles" for an understanding of what I mean.) I was a thoroughly obnoxious sort of friend. I'd watch their children for an hour or two when they had errands to run, hang around to help unload the groceries, the laundry, whatever and, when the little ones began to implode along around 3:00, I would smile so sweetly and say, "Ha ha ha, ha HA HA, I think I'll go HOME now." They all threatened me with much future suffering, but continued to allow me into their homes nonetheless. NOt only that, they fed me, listened to me, and held me close when my heart was broken and my body followed.
During that decade we visited with talking. Endlessly deep, profound and mundane conversations over coffee, stolen lunches out, when one child or another invariably slumped into her soup, sound asleep. When my parents went off on vacation, I would overrun their home and entertain the lot of them, husbands, wives AND children. I would make some Julia Child wonder of a meal, insist on no help and have everyone at the table together. The children would be bundled en mass onto my parents' bed, and the adults had hours to laugh, watch bad t.v. and discuss everything from politics to the dangers of the new something on the horizon called "Total phone" and the clunkiness of mobile phones. The best night was watching the Miss America Pageant and feigning disagreement over whether or not Miss Oklahoma's singing "I am Woman" while dressed in a ridiculously frilly apron and riding a tricycle trumped Miss Nebraska's attempt to sing "Send in the Clowns" while dressed as Bozo. I had served coq au vin with a magnicient four layer Boston Cream Pie (Made entirely from scratch) and flopped onto the couch, saying, "Someone peel me a grape." I was ignored.
Ten minutes later Andrea appeared with my mother's hexagonal silver tray with one peeled grape in its center.
It's the little things.
But our friendships were loud. We danced and had parties. We lounged by the pool, watching with one eye, the endless games of Marco Polo as toddlers grew to double digit children. I was the neighborhood silly mobile aunt. I loved it. I knew I should not have children with the back I'd been dealt. I did not have my first surgery until I was twenty-eight. I was diagnosed with severe problems at just 23. So I exercised like a fiend to avoid surgery. I did weights when it was not fashionable, and tried the weights machines, only to find that it made a difference that they were designed for men. I hurt myself. My PT guy said I was the only woman he'd ever met who overdid it in the pool to the point of injury.
What's this nonsense anyway about moderation being good? BULL.
I dreamed big. I Mean BIG. I would write the best novel ever and Oprah would have me on. I would be "Discovered" at a poetry reading by Coventry Lake. I would go to grad school and become an expert on Adult Learning, and write the definitive light reading books for adults--compelling and interesting, not glorified kids' books. So many dreams. My friends had them, too, and they were not so big. How was it, then, that my friend who spoke English as her second language got her masters in international accounting, and another became a nationally known and respected program director for Public Broadcasting, and another went to law school at thirty? I talked about the big dreams, and so did they, but when it came down to it, after all the talking and laughing and sharing, in my thirties I watched the others run after their dreams while I spent five years in hospitals, raising half-grown children in between the four to six-week stints? I felt my life slipping away, I thought. The noise seemed to die down, but not the chaos.
I did not lose these friends at all. On the contrary, I was the stay-at-home mom for my daughter's best friend. I was the one who would suddenly show up at whichever home "the gang was hangin" with a tray full of Slurpees® and a bright smile. As my son said, "It was impossible to, like, be that mad. I mean, you didn't stay. You sat down and you asked us about our days, brought the drinks and sometimes cookies and smiled and then left after fifteen minutes. And come back later because you forgot your wallet or something. You always forgot something."
I would smile at his recollection and then he'd say, "DAMN. You didn't forget, huh. But we NEVER knew if you'd come."
"Exactly."
The life was mundane and my pleasures were tiny, mostly. An unexpected hug from my son. Dinner time laughter that included Mark AND the kids. And, of course, hanging out with my friends for cookouts. Still, mostly we talked. And, sad to say, mostly I envied them their marriages, their vacations, their big homes. I felt that not only had I disappeared, but my family was not likely to move forward. Of course, it was my fault. I was disabled and brought in almost no money. I banked all of the kids', and used my own for necessities. I had no right to buy luxuries. The money was Mark's, not mine...
But somewhere along the line, I realized that I was not seeing my life. I had not held up the proper light to it. Others seemed to see me as a success. (Not my family, of course. There, my Aunt Joy summed it up when they were dissecting me as if I were absent. Joy said, "Well, Jean, she IS a wonderful mother. Let's give her that much.) My friends saw more, for which I am beyond grateful, but they told me I was either seeing myself and my life in a funny mirror, or I needed new light bulbs in my brain.
It began after the eight operation, when I was confined to bed because I had gotten up on my own to use the loo, and had lost my mind in a sea of blood in the bathroom. It was a new procedure, trying to avoid my normal hematomas. The fourteen inch incision was sutured very loosely so the pressure would not build, and blood could escape in a controlled way, but I went into the bathroom and, well, the thing exploded, splattering blood all around me and I had a flashback. My first. Right there and then, blood on porcelain and I was gone to another place. The sound. The sight. The fear. I remember nothing more.
I awoke tied to my bed, and life changed immediately. I did not then confront the flashback; it was too soon for that. Yet at last I knew that there was something to confront. As I looked next to me at my drug-addicted, far older roommate, a woman whose husband would come into the hospital and say, "Why don't you simply DIE, Annie, and help us all out?" .... as I looked at her, and looked back at my panic-stricken husband beside me, my life took on a new sheen. Our marriage felt strong and real. And I remembered something about Jessie.
One day she had come home with a papier maché daffodil from middle school art class. "I can't even show this to Mom or Dad. They'll laugh at it. I can't laugh at it. Jeannette, it's pathetic." Well, yes, it truly was. It had a stem the size of a Grecian column and a blossom the size of a thimble. It was lopsided and one leaf was fat and squat, the other tall and leaf-like. "She gave me a B out of pity and for the good leaf." There she stood, hair to her butt, one arm behind her back, the other holding this monstrosity toward me, eyes pleading for help.
"Well, Jess. I can't throw it out. My guess is you worked hard on it." Her tears were falling and she nodded. "I know, I'll put it on MY shelf in the closet and I'll think of you every day." She brightened up enormously, but every time she saw it in the closet she'd come out and look at me, shaking her head.
A couple of years later she said, "You really don't have to."
I always said, "I love it. Especially when I knock something near it and it falls on my head." She would laugh and kiss me.
But when the ceramic vase came home, lopsided and unevenly glazed, she begged me not to put in the living room. "No, REALLY Jeannette. You can't do it. There is nothing that you can make look okay in this. Nothing."
I'd said, "Trust me, honey. You wait." Jess ran into her room crying because she thought it would be humiliating.
I found some beautiful silk flowers and dried boughs of who knows what? I put it in the corner of the shelves, and you saw only the ruffled line of the lip of the shining forest green vase, and the curve of the base, and a profusion of delicate color, there in the center corner.
She looked at it and began to tear up and smiled, "You made something beautiful out of something ugly. You always DO that for me." And she hugged me, holding on longer than I did, and I was never as whole in my life. It was the sweetest compliment I'd ever known. An ordinary act of motherhood, I thought, seen through the eyes of an extraordinary child who did not know her power yet.
I lay in my hospital bed, tied down, thinking of her and a dozen other little sweet things that suddenly felt huge, and how I'd nearly blown up my marriage. And I apologized for the billionth time for the pain I had caused Mark, only this time he looked at me and said simply, "I want you home. I want you not to hurt so much. I can't reach where your pain is, Jeannette. It's always out of reach."
But he kissed it away just the same and I remember it as a series of the best kisses of our marriage.
Something changed. I was thirty-five and was about to learn the heaviest of life's lessons, but I began to listen to silence and look harder at the small things of my life. I stopped paying so damned much attention on the big successes of my friends, and looked at my small successes. I could stand when they told me I'd fall down. I was not an addict. And I was determined to stand STRAIGHT. I was able to do the laundry within two weeks, and for the first time in three years—I started dancing around like Rocky for the accomplishment. There, with no one to hear or see the mountain I had climbed, I danced.
Sometimes simply tying one's shoes is an extraordinary act. That's what I was showing Dad--that I could tie my shoes--while quietly and slowly the subject drifted away. I was always quiet with him toward the end. Noise confused him. But because I was happy to simply BE with him, I had the opportunity to meet the man behind the FATHER, even more than when we'd commuted together. He gave me the journal of his last months, a revelation of pain, selfish arrogance and humble regrets. Anyway, on this particular day, I'd told him how hard it had been to learn to do and how much harder it was to appreciate an act I'd done thousands of times, and he nodded. Then he said, "I've sung Ah Sweet Mystery of LIfe at Last I've Found Thee easily a thousand times. Why did I have to be dying to listen to the words? Love was next to me all my life, sweetie. Don't be like me. Mark hurt you. I know that. We know that. He isn't the man we thought he was. Dear, you can do anything. Listen to your words when you sing them. Listen to your life as you live it. Listen. I never listened." There were many small moments with them both, while they were consciously preparing to go. I'll save them for another time, but when they were gone, and we had bought our house, I began to garden.
The quietest thing I know, gardening. My friends gardened, too. Sometimes we would work together and say nothing, yet felt we had visited all the way through to our cores. Perhaps we had. We would be filthy, sweaty, make-up-less and aging. Yet sometimes I thought that Andrea was most beautiful with her hair unruly, her unmatching eyes glittering, her pale skin still shining from her sunblock. There seemed nothing ordinary to me about many of the flowers, especially peonies.
I mean really. Every peony is its own statement of life -- no, of LIFE, with flourishes of trumpet as well. Their coloring is as delicate as Dresden, but the flowers themselves? A subtle peony is an oxymoron. I was weeding in my lilac island when I thought about that one very early morning. I liked to weed when the sun still cast gold in the sky, there on the far side of my yard.
I was laughing at myself because I love their showiness, revealed only through the never-ending ordinary march of ants to soften their buds. Ants. What is more ordinary than an ant? The lilac island was my first garden, designed, planted, dug with my own hands out of the twenty-year-old perfect turf. My mother's and sister's favorite flower is the lilac and, since Jean Ellen lived here, I wanted to have my first garden be for her and for Mom, whose soul I had clearly channeled, against my will I tell ya, against my will! (I loathed gardening as a child, as I stood by her holding the trowel, the watering can, and some worms to put in the holes. Worms, it appeared, were the key to every garden success. They were the best thing about it all, because the rest of gardening seemed the most boring thing in the world. Put in some nameless tiny green thing and when you were done? It looked like a limp clump of weed. And a clump of junk we had to be careful not to let the kick- soccer- foot- or baseball get into.)
So I chose four different lilac varieties, then found the Miss Kim, and realized that I could have a whole month of lilac blooming with one of those, if they did not all bloom at once because of a hot spell. And I had to admit that subtlety had not been what I was going for here, either. The double blossom shrub was nearly bent to the ground from the weight of the eight-inch long pregnant blossoms.
That season we had had a hot spell, though, and I saw that every single bush was budded, from the doubles of the deepest violet bush to the white. None were in bloom, but they would be any moment. Oh, well. I shrugged and decided how beautiful our enormous vases would be with five shades of blooms, if only for a few days.
I shook my head a moment because a decade before I had planted them too close together, and had actually put a peony plant in there, not realizing how big both got. A common mistake for new gardeners. Furthermore, lilac island across from an open field, so nameless horrid weeds invaded all the time, including the Chinese vine I SHALL NOT NAME. I call it KUJO, for the killer dog. I had just finished wrestling one 20-foot obsenity out by its roots from the very center of my "grove", and had removed, painfully, no fewer than EIGHT thistle plants when, as I unbent my body to breathe, I heard the rain. I looked up and the sky was blue with the barest hints of rose and gold on the horizon.I stood very, very still; stunned, in fact. Gentle rain engulfed me, yet all was dry.
"A miracle?" I asked aloud.
No. An ordinary act of nature, the sound of lilacs blooming.
Clearly, though, I should have answered, "Yes."
Friday, March 5, 2010
March is Better! Let me Eat Cake
First of all, there was cake involved. Homemade butter recipe cupcakes with mocha butter cream frosting. LOTS of cupcakes.
Yup. Not quite a pluot. But guilt-free when it's shared. I spent a great deal of February WITH PEOPLE, doing my PT four days a week, writing on my own, painting.
I completed two REALLY BAD paintings, except that I learned a whole lot doing them, so I've started a couple that I think I will enjoy.
One of my best friends had to spend three or four nights a week overnight here because of our foul weather. She works in human services and gets out at about 8:30 at night and would face a 45 minute commute. So she has stayed with me and, as many of you know, February is colossally hard for me--so she was a blessing!
So I shared cake with friends and some little kids. And there has been a whole lot of laughter that began, oddly enough, the last week of the month. I wrote a closure letter that I HAD to write for myself. And, oddly enough? It closed the unfinished business for me, whether or not the recipient reads it. It was the writing and the sending that mattered.
I write a lot about my childhood in here. And about loss. I do not write much about the family dysfunction of my early adulthood and perhaps one day I will, perhaps not. I will write about it publicly ONLY when I have turned THAT into a positive in my life. Need some distance for that, but it was what crashed into my head this February. When my relationship ended so abruptly in the Fall, I found myself saying, Of COURSE he left. Who would want a woman with all this baggage, with all these problems.
Only you know what?
I don't lay baggage on people in my relationships--not any more than we all do. We are products of our WHOLE lives and cannot have lived without bringing our histories along. And I never did ask people to take care of me because of my back, because of my lung problems... So I found myself wondering why on earth I was going to this fall back position.
Well. The memories came, and I wrote them all down and I wrote what I needed to put that somewhere to percolate without hurting me. HUGE work. But not public work. I never want this blog to be about venom or hate. EVER. That difficult entry about Jack? There will be another entry about him, about the goodness that was Jack, my protector... the beauty of being with him. Regardless of the inordinate pain of my childhood and the abandonments that came later, I love four out of the five other members of my childhood family. And I've made my peace about brother Jim, to the point that, if he is still alive, I do not wish him bodily harm. I will leave him to God, Whatever God may be. It is enough to let him go. I have been given tremendous gifts from having had my parents, Jack and Jean Ellen. I would not be the best of who I am without those gifts. I want my memoir, or anything I write BECAUSE of that history to be more about what happens after the pain... how do we turn that all into gold.
I have a long way to go there, but I'm hoping to have plenty of time to keep working on it... and I love having a blog to try to write about it.
The tribute will come for Jack, as it did with my sister. For now? As I vacillate between blogs, I will be remembering to stand tall again... to recognize that surviving nine back operations, even ten days in a Striker (sp?) bed without visitors, driving MYSELF to Boston for surgeries when my husband didn't want to take time off, going through six days a week of PT to learn how to walk--these are STRENGTHS, not weaknesses.
I took a break to learn some important lessons and to tend to the business of being able to stand up straight. I can't walk any further than I could a month ago, but I can walk that distance BETTER! My feet point forward and I can lift my legs properly. When I was married, when I had worked hard to be able to point my right foot forward and lift my leg straight from the hip and bend my knee, I was excited and came home from PT to show my husband.
He said, "So you want a medal for this?"
I looked at him and said, "You're damned straight I DO!" And I left the house and went for a drive to cool off.
Better to live alone just now and enjoy my friends. And I showed Martha what I could do and she clapped. And I baked cupcakes. We had veal marsala I COULD STAND LONG ENOUGH TO MAKE, broccoli with parmesan cheese, carrots with a light hone glaze, an entire bottle of wine, and CUPCAKES. We saved the frosting for last.
Hell, that's BETTER than a pluot!! (We had a spinach omelet and fruit for breakfast, though. And laughed some more over coffee this morning.)
I was going to go to the pool this afternoon, but I wanted to do this kind of therapy instead. And start to write on my blog again.
To those of you who have remained my followers through this absence, THANK YOU. When I've been online and read, it's helped. I have my beautiful photograph on the wall where I see it every day and I am enjoying a wonderful book written by a new friend, and have been reading back issues of a magazine I'd never have discovered on my own. And a saying is STILL on my mirror to see every single day.
I am back. I am me. Still have to sell the house. Still trying to apply for disability. Still have absolutely no income. But you know what? It's MARCH.
Spring is coming. The days are longer. And I can point my feet forward in more ways than one. I have missed your blogs and will start catching up on YOUR lives now!
Yup. Not quite a pluot. But guilt-free when it's shared. I spent a great deal of February WITH PEOPLE, doing my PT four days a week, writing on my own, painting.
I completed two REALLY BAD paintings, except that I learned a whole lot doing them, so I've started a couple that I think I will enjoy.
One of my best friends had to spend three or four nights a week overnight here because of our foul weather. She works in human services and gets out at about 8:30 at night and would face a 45 minute commute. So she has stayed with me and, as many of you know, February is colossally hard for me--so she was a blessing!
So I shared cake with friends and some little kids. And there has been a whole lot of laughter that began, oddly enough, the last week of the month. I wrote a closure letter that I HAD to write for myself. And, oddly enough? It closed the unfinished business for me, whether or not the recipient reads it. It was the writing and the sending that mattered.
I write a lot about my childhood in here. And about loss. I do not write much about the family dysfunction of my early adulthood and perhaps one day I will, perhaps not. I will write about it publicly ONLY when I have turned THAT into a positive in my life. Need some distance for that, but it was what crashed into my head this February. When my relationship ended so abruptly in the Fall, I found myself saying, Of COURSE he left. Who would want a woman with all this baggage, with all these problems.
Only you know what?
I don't lay baggage on people in my relationships--not any more than we all do. We are products of our WHOLE lives and cannot have lived without bringing our histories along. And I never did ask people to take care of me because of my back, because of my lung problems... So I found myself wondering why on earth I was going to this fall back position.
Well. The memories came, and I wrote them all down and I wrote what I needed to put that somewhere to percolate without hurting me. HUGE work. But not public work. I never want this blog to be about venom or hate. EVER. That difficult entry about Jack? There will be another entry about him, about the goodness that was Jack, my protector... the beauty of being with him. Regardless of the inordinate pain of my childhood and the abandonments that came later, I love four out of the five other members of my childhood family. And I've made my peace about brother Jim, to the point that, if he is still alive, I do not wish him bodily harm. I will leave him to God, Whatever God may be. It is enough to let him go. I have been given tremendous gifts from having had my parents, Jack and Jean Ellen. I would not be the best of who I am without those gifts. I want my memoir, or anything I write BECAUSE of that history to be more about what happens after the pain... how do we turn that all into gold.
I have a long way to go there, but I'm hoping to have plenty of time to keep working on it... and I love having a blog to try to write about it.
The tribute will come for Jack, as it did with my sister. For now? As I vacillate between blogs, I will be remembering to stand tall again... to recognize that surviving nine back operations, even ten days in a Striker (sp?) bed without visitors, driving MYSELF to Boston for surgeries when my husband didn't want to take time off, going through six days a week of PT to learn how to walk--these are STRENGTHS, not weaknesses.
I took a break to learn some important lessons and to tend to the business of being able to stand up straight. I can't walk any further than I could a month ago, but I can walk that distance BETTER! My feet point forward and I can lift my legs properly. When I was married, when I had worked hard to be able to point my right foot forward and lift my leg straight from the hip and bend my knee, I was excited and came home from PT to show my husband.
He said, "So you want a medal for this?"
I looked at him and said, "You're damned straight I DO!" And I left the house and went for a drive to cool off.
Better to live alone just now and enjoy my friends. And I showed Martha what I could do and she clapped. And I baked cupcakes. We had veal marsala I COULD STAND LONG ENOUGH TO MAKE, broccoli with parmesan cheese, carrots with a light hone glaze, an entire bottle of wine, and CUPCAKES. We saved the frosting for last.
Hell, that's BETTER than a pluot!! (We had a spinach omelet and fruit for breakfast, though. And laughed some more over coffee this morning.)
I was going to go to the pool this afternoon, but I wanted to do this kind of therapy instead. And start to write on my blog again.
To those of you who have remained my followers through this absence, THANK YOU. When I've been online and read, it's helped. I have my beautiful photograph on the wall where I see it every day and I am enjoying a wonderful book written by a new friend, and have been reading back issues of a magazine I'd never have discovered on my own. And a saying is STILL on my mirror to see every single day.
I am back. I am me. Still have to sell the house. Still trying to apply for disability. Still have absolutely no income. But you know what? It's MARCH.
Spring is coming. The days are longer. And I can point my feet forward in more ways than one. I have missed your blogs and will start catching up on YOUR lives now!
Friday, January 22, 2010
Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister
I've tried a dozen times to write about her, to capture her. What it was to have a sister who lived her life with on section of her soul in past lives, one part in this life, and one part in whatever came next. She always expressed her spirituality in terms of our being on an eternal continuum, that this time here, now, was just a section along the way. She'd have visceral feelings of déja vu, but talked about them to very few people.
She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers. She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"
She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.
But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before. Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."
Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."
Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."
"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."
"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"
"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."
We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.
By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.
Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."
I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands. I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."
All was right in our world.
***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks. I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that. Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand. We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.
"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.
"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.
"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."
We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....
Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...
I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.
Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."
Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.
We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters. We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet. We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine. We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...
But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.
We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment. The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello. All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town. We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast. A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay. The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.
We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.
We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.
And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.
I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She mourned my not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet. I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection. He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.
But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives. We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed. She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.
I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave. She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."
The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.
When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.
"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"
The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...
My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...
The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."
But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."
I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum. I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.
Before I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."
I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.
At dawn.
She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers. She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"
She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.
But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before. Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."
Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."
Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."
"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."
"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"
"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."
We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.
By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.
Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."
I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands. I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."
All was right in our world.
***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks. I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that. Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand. We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.
"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.
"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.
"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."
We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....
Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...
I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.
Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."
Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.
We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters. We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet. We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine. We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...
But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.
We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment. The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello. All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town. We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast. A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay. The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.
We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.
We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.
And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.
I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She mourned my not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet. I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection. He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.
But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives. We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed. She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.
I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave. She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."
The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.
When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.
"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"
The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...
My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...
The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."
But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."
I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum. I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.
Before I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."
I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.
At dawn.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Where We Head When We Heal
Prism Women ©2002
Tucked in dark corners to collect dust
What are prisms but broken glass?
Yet strung gleaming, spinning in the light?
Sun-dancers
Diamond-catchers
Rainbow-throwers.
Every shining cut casts the spectrum,
Each twirl offers a rainbow dance.
Then our gray days spin wonder.
Each polished cut hordes our light
To toss, teasing with every turn.
The trick to being a prism is to face the light,
Polish all the cuts,
Then let the magic happen.
†††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††
This may be kind of short tonight. It's strange when the old ways no longer work. I have allowed my heart to be completely accessible for the first time in my life, having saved some part of it to come out again when I thought I would be safe at last. Turns out that I was mistaken, and that my heart was even less safe with him. And with having every corner of my life vulnerable, this particular misstep on my part has taken a toll.
We can, as I said, reach a wall and feel there is nothing left. And I don't know that I can find a way to keep my home. And I really have no idea how I will make a living at all, and the disability application process is appallingly slow--I've been through it twice before. I worked my way off it twice before. Not this time.
I think that this is where it is all so hard. I've reached the end of my back's getting better. And losing my home ... I can't even talk about that fear. And losing the career that I worked so hard to create, the career that my central nervous system could handle for so long. At this time of life, it is hard to create another. To have no retirement. To have no health insurance within the next three months. Possibly to lose one's home.
This, my friends, is why this man's desertion, his betrayal hurts to the core and has had such an impact. It was the hope he created that is the hardest to lose. No hope is better than false hope. I was foolish; he was worse. But it's the timing of the thing, that has made it so very hard. It's done; he's gone. Faster than he arrived he's done. And I have to get on with this life.
Then I thought about my friends, my "laundry eagles" who are hovering around me now, closing ranks. The flock is here. They call; they send notes. They let me know I am better than any man who would betray and leave me. They tell me all the things to make me remember I'm whole. We talk about Christmas and children and chocolate. We laugh about nothing at all. They make me remember to shine, these women. All by myself, to shine.
The strength of their love begins to sink in. They tell me he's stupid to leave, that he's weak and he's blind if he cannot see he's left the best woman behind. And I smile. These are not things that I say to myself, they are things I find hard to believe. They tell me I'll find a way to fly, to earn my own way, to do anything I want. My friends think I will soar. They think that I am better than I ever believe of myself.
That's what women do, when the men feed and just leave. We close ranks. We lift one another up, put her on a pedestal and unabashedly worship while she heals. I turned 50 in 2002, and it was a difficult year... among difficult years. One of my friends, when she read this poem said, "Well, that's the thing Jetty. You have so many cuts, you are the brightest prism of the bunch." Lucky me ... or maybe I am. Too soon to feel that just yet.
My women friends are busy polishing just now. This newest cut is so sharp and so new, they are busy polishing the sides, smoothing the edge so that I stop cutting myself in all this pain. They won't let me go back into hiding, I'm afraid. They keep drawing me out, reminding me that I will always have a home, or perhaps I'll have twelve and just move from place to place. The Gypsy Jet, they call her. I offer to take my tambourine. We laugh and for moments at a time, I forget the ache, and just be.
And here is this heart of mine, that he so carefully drew out, looked at from every direction, kissed, held, promised to cherish for life... and kicked to the side of the road. Here it is. And now I have written about putting it away. Tying the whole mess up in a box and throwing in a closet. I did that with the horrors for years, the ones I have only hinted at yet. I did it before, like an artist. I could reduce a memory to a bit of tissue and stuff it where I could not see or feel or hear or taste the pain, where it was dead to me. I am an expert at stuffing the pain. And that's what I'd done with this man before, this love of my life. I stuck him far away so I barely remembered his name. And here I am again, ready to put it all away.
Only now I don't know how.
I have lost the ability to hide. I have lost the knack with turning the phrase to make what is poison palatable. I think to put all those parts back in a box would kill something more precious still. He woke up all this love in me, all this sparkling faith that life could be good. He said he wanted just to make it so I would not have to worry, so that I could get up every day and CHOOSE to write or to paint, without having to worry about keeping my home. Such a pretty wish from him. Yes. There is bitterness here... but there's something else I've not named.
Perhaps the only way I can salvage my soul from the damage is to keep that sparkling heart. I loved without conditions, without artifice. For once in my life I did not hold back, I did not pretend, I lived in each moment with him.
The cut that he made is so deep in this newly revealed heart, this child's soul who finally came out to dance. He cut her; I bleed. But the women work on just the same. She is not doing too well, but I think... I think perhaps ... she has a name to me, a child in me, the part I would let no one see. I think I must let her stay here.
Little Rita has come out at last. The quiet, somber, big-eyed child who sat up with the dying,
who turned on her brother when he did his worst, and simply asked him, "WHY?" So he ran.
who dropped the knife, choosing not to attack her attacker,
who closed her sister's eyes.
This child came out for this man who is gone. She slipped her hand in his, one sunny afternoon, certain of his love, of his honesty, certain that this man was her home. She had waited for him to come back; and he did. Never once did she think he would leave ... again. And this tiny child, with the strength of the mighty has, for the first time in my life, been walking through my life with me for six weeks. Since the first time he was here, when she came out only twice, she's appeared only when I needed strength to walk with grace through times when I had none to give. She would come. But mostly she stayed in the shadows, rarely daring to come out just to breathe. I have loved having her out. She does different things with paint. She takes no crap from him or anyone at all. Rita dances without moving at all.
And now she's been ripped open again.
But something's changed; I tried to start putting her back into that box, to that cold, gray place, she shouted me down. She clung to my dress. She begged me to stay with the lights. I told her I didn't want her to hurt any more, that we just can't take the pain, but she made me turn and look.
"LOOK AT THE LIGHTS!" My little girl screamed and I turned and I saw and I cried.
Paige, Martha, Judy, Andrea, Laura, Sue, Linda, Sue G., Nancy, Ann, Gail, Martha L.,
Came the Dozen, Dancing
Twirling, laughing, throwing rainbows every where...
skipping toward us
with tea and with cookies,
with puff quilts and stories,
with hairbrushes and pillows,
coming toward us with nothing but love.
I think I need Rita with me now. I think I need to not stuff one single thing anywhere at all. For the first time in my life, there are no secrets left.
And I am terrified.
And I am heart-broken.
And I am weary to beneath my core.
I am revealed.
I cannot allow his abandonment to cover this newest light.
The women will polish,
But we are finally whole.
No matter what the pain ahead, or loss.
No matter where we make our home,
The women will help us heal.
... and we will dance rainbows at last.
Tucked in dark corners to collect dust
What are prisms but broken glass?
Yet strung gleaming, spinning in the light?
Sun-dancers
Diamond-catchers
Rainbow-throwers.
Every shining cut casts the spectrum,
Each twirl offers a rainbow dance.
Then our gray days spin wonder.
Each polished cut hordes our light
To toss, teasing with every turn.
The trick to being a prism is to face the light,
Polish all the cuts,
Then let the magic happen.
†††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††††
This may be kind of short tonight. It's strange when the old ways no longer work. I have allowed my heart to be completely accessible for the first time in my life, having saved some part of it to come out again when I thought I would be safe at last. Turns out that I was mistaken, and that my heart was even less safe with him. And with having every corner of my life vulnerable, this particular misstep on my part has taken a toll.
We can, as I said, reach a wall and feel there is nothing left. And I don't know that I can find a way to keep my home. And I really have no idea how I will make a living at all, and the disability application process is appallingly slow--I've been through it twice before. I worked my way off it twice before. Not this time.
I think that this is where it is all so hard. I've reached the end of my back's getting better. And losing my home ... I can't even talk about that fear. And losing the career that I worked so hard to create, the career that my central nervous system could handle for so long. At this time of life, it is hard to create another. To have no retirement. To have no health insurance within the next three months. Possibly to lose one's home.
This, my friends, is why this man's desertion, his betrayal hurts to the core and has had such an impact. It was the hope he created that is the hardest to lose. No hope is better than false hope. I was foolish; he was worse. But it's the timing of the thing, that has made it so very hard. It's done; he's gone. Faster than he arrived he's done. And I have to get on with this life.
Then I thought about my friends, my "laundry eagles" who are hovering around me now, closing ranks. The flock is here. They call; they send notes. They let me know I am better than any man who would betray and leave me. They tell me all the things to make me remember I'm whole. We talk about Christmas and children and chocolate. We laugh about nothing at all. They make me remember to shine, these women. All by myself, to shine.
The strength of their love begins to sink in. They tell me he's stupid to leave, that he's weak and he's blind if he cannot see he's left the best woman behind. And I smile. These are not things that I say to myself, they are things I find hard to believe. They tell me I'll find a way to fly, to earn my own way, to do anything I want. My friends think I will soar. They think that I am better than I ever believe of myself.
That's what women do, when the men feed and just leave. We close ranks. We lift one another up, put her on a pedestal and unabashedly worship while she heals. I turned 50 in 2002, and it was a difficult year... among difficult years. One of my friends, when she read this poem said, "Well, that's the thing Jetty. You have so many cuts, you are the brightest prism of the bunch." Lucky me ... or maybe I am. Too soon to feel that just yet.
My women friends are busy polishing just now. This newest cut is so sharp and so new, they are busy polishing the sides, smoothing the edge so that I stop cutting myself in all this pain. They won't let me go back into hiding, I'm afraid. They keep drawing me out, reminding me that I will always have a home, or perhaps I'll have twelve and just move from place to place. The Gypsy Jet, they call her. I offer to take my tambourine. We laugh and for moments at a time, I forget the ache, and just be.
And here is this heart of mine, that he so carefully drew out, looked at from every direction, kissed, held, promised to cherish for life... and kicked to the side of the road. Here it is. And now I have written about putting it away. Tying the whole mess up in a box and throwing in a closet. I did that with the horrors for years, the ones I have only hinted at yet. I did it before, like an artist. I could reduce a memory to a bit of tissue and stuff it where I could not see or feel or hear or taste the pain, where it was dead to me. I am an expert at stuffing the pain. And that's what I'd done with this man before, this love of my life. I stuck him far away so I barely remembered his name. And here I am again, ready to put it all away.
Only now I don't know how.
I have lost the ability to hide. I have lost the knack with turning the phrase to make what is poison palatable. I think to put all those parts back in a box would kill something more precious still. He woke up all this love in me, all this sparkling faith that life could be good. He said he wanted just to make it so I would not have to worry, so that I could get up every day and CHOOSE to write or to paint, without having to worry about keeping my home. Such a pretty wish from him. Yes. There is bitterness here... but there's something else I've not named.
Perhaps the only way I can salvage my soul from the damage is to keep that sparkling heart. I loved without conditions, without artifice. For once in my life I did not hold back, I did not pretend, I lived in each moment with him.
The cut that he made is so deep in this newly revealed heart, this child's soul who finally came out to dance. He cut her; I bleed. But the women work on just the same. She is not doing too well, but I think... I think perhaps ... she has a name to me, a child in me, the part I would let no one see. I think I must let her stay here.
Little Rita has come out at last. The quiet, somber, big-eyed child who sat up with the dying,
who turned on her brother when he did his worst, and simply asked him, "WHY?" So he ran.
who dropped the knife, choosing not to attack her attacker,
who closed her sister's eyes.
This child came out for this man who is gone. She slipped her hand in his, one sunny afternoon, certain of his love, of his honesty, certain that this man was her home. She had waited for him to come back; and he did. Never once did she think he would leave ... again. And this tiny child, with the strength of the mighty has, for the first time in my life, been walking through my life with me for six weeks. Since the first time he was here, when she came out only twice, she's appeared only when I needed strength to walk with grace through times when I had none to give. She would come. But mostly she stayed in the shadows, rarely daring to come out just to breathe. I have loved having her out. She does different things with paint. She takes no crap from him or anyone at all. Rita dances without moving at all.
And now she's been ripped open again.
But something's changed; I tried to start putting her back into that box, to that cold, gray place, she shouted me down. She clung to my dress. She begged me to stay with the lights. I told her I didn't want her to hurt any more, that we just can't take the pain, but she made me turn and look.
"LOOK AT THE LIGHTS!" My little girl screamed and I turned and I saw and I cried.
Paige, Martha, Judy, Andrea, Laura, Sue, Linda, Sue G., Nancy, Ann, Gail, Martha L.,
Came the Dozen, Dancing
Twirling, laughing, throwing rainbows every where...
skipping toward us
with tea and with cookies,
with puff quilts and stories,
with hairbrushes and pillows,
coming toward us with nothing but love.
I think I need Rita with me now. I think I need to not stuff one single thing anywhere at all. For the first time in my life, there are no secrets left.
And I am terrified.
And I am heart-broken.
And I am weary to beneath my core.
I am revealed.
I cannot allow his abandonment to cover this newest light.
The women will polish,
But we are finally whole.
No matter what the pain ahead, or loss.
No matter where we make our home,
The women will help us heal.
... and we will dance rainbows at last.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Cover the Fear with Love
Before I went to bed, as usual, I was trying to figure out ways to save money and then I started scrawling all over the page, "Believe." Over and over and over again, I wrote that. Then I started writing "Act out of love" and I scrawled on top of the scrawl, faster and faster, then just "Love." Over and over. I turned the paper over.
I wrote "Write the names of every single person you remember loving." And I did. I wrote the name of my horrendously abusive brother even. The one who tortured my other brother and me. I wrote his name because I remember he carried me the mile and a half from the beach one day because they had just tarred the road and he didn't want me to burn my feet. I'd lost a flip-flop. When we got home my mom started to get understandably upset and he said, "Oh, Mom. We'll find it. She feels really bad."
My mom was so surprised she didn't yell. She kissed my brother instead. I loved him mightily that day.
I wrote the names of old best friends and boyfriends and teachers and adults who helped me and grandparents and people long gone from my life. I covered the 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper to the point that you could no longer see the scribblings of numbers way beneath.
I literally covered my fear with love.
I went to sleep at 2 a.m., smiling.
Nothing has changed today and I am way too tired to boot. But in the light of today, it still feels wondrous to have loved so many people in 57 years. Next Thursday I will have lived 57 years. I have no money to show for it. I struggle, like so many. I don't know what is down the road, but don't we delude ourselves when we think we DO know what lies ahead?
Behind me? Love all over the place, far bigger than the pain, the abuse and the dysfunctions of my family, there is passion. Passion enough for twelve families.
So I cover the fear with love and know that all will be well. Don't know what that means. "Well" may be something I cannot see today. Who cares? I covered a whole sheet of paper three times over with the names of people who have made me know I was loved. I can cover a sheet once over with the names of people I love who are still active in my life--some of them are not with us, but they are active in my life. Behind me lies a world of love; why should I doubt that the same lies ahead?
I was right. Today IS a better day. And all that changed was me.
I wrote "Write the names of every single person you remember loving." And I did. I wrote the name of my horrendously abusive brother even. The one who tortured my other brother and me. I wrote his name because I remember he carried me the mile and a half from the beach one day because they had just tarred the road and he didn't want me to burn my feet. I'd lost a flip-flop. When we got home my mom started to get understandably upset and he said, "Oh, Mom. We'll find it. She feels really bad."
My mom was so surprised she didn't yell. She kissed my brother instead. I loved him mightily that day.
I wrote the names of old best friends and boyfriends and teachers and adults who helped me and grandparents and people long gone from my life. I covered the 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper to the point that you could no longer see the scribblings of numbers way beneath.
I literally covered my fear with love.
I went to sleep at 2 a.m., smiling.
Nothing has changed today and I am way too tired to boot. But in the light of today, it still feels wondrous to have loved so many people in 57 years. Next Thursday I will have lived 57 years. I have no money to show for it. I struggle, like so many. I don't know what is down the road, but don't we delude ourselves when we think we DO know what lies ahead?
Behind me? Love all over the place, far bigger than the pain, the abuse and the dysfunctions of my family, there is passion. Passion enough for twelve families.
So I cover the fear with love and know that all will be well. Don't know what that means. "Well" may be something I cannot see today. Who cares? I covered a whole sheet of paper three times over with the names of people who have made me know I was loved. I can cover a sheet once over with the names of people I love who are still active in my life--some of them are not with us, but they are active in my life. Behind me lies a world of love; why should I doubt that the same lies ahead?
I was right. Today IS a better day. And all that changed was me.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
My Women Friends
Laundry Eagles ©1992
My friendships were forged bouncing babies on hips,
folding towels to each other's tune, accommodating without question.
Speaking over-the-fence music of mothers,
we searched for our songs among static-free
billows of sheets and unmated socks.
Like socks, our mates vanished without warning,
leaving us bound in fang-lined cocoons, too small for eagles.
My friendships were fed by outstretched hands,
binding wounds as we emerged bleeding, free falling, plummeting.
We landed on eagle backs,to soar straight up
on the wings of whichever had healed.
Our touch downs were never fatal.
My friendships flourish in our flights apart
and our headlong rushes home. Crazy quilt eagles dancing round the sky;
free in our love and our strength,
alone together, together alone,
free-flying, floating toward light.
***
I am a lucky woman; whenever I have needed holding, there were women around to oblige. Before my husband came and long after he left, there were the friends who knew beyond words, just where the bleeding was. As I look at the three years since my sister died, I am thrown by the number of women who simply left my life. I am shocked by the number of losses in a short amount of time. Yet though the drama of my life was more than they wanted to witness, others remained. Others appeared. The continuity of that poem remains as true today as it was in 1992, the year my husband left.
Judy, Andrea, Nancy, Paige, and Gail -- they are fixed planets in my system. Martha, Laura, Linda, and both Sues. Newer perhaps, but no less important. My grandmother used to say it was hard to leave this world because there were too many colors to say good bye to. She said each person was a distinct color and I was her lilac girl. I was touched when she said this, but I did not truly understand what she meant. Twenty-five years later, I know.
My friends are the colors of my flower garden. They are just as unruly, defying the planting instructions which so clearly define height and width. They grow according to no one's rule but their own.
And they fly.
I have awakened, terrified because my family has all died, but for my son. This was silly, I realized the other day. My family has not died. They are all around me. My laundry eagle friends are scattered, but we fly home to one another, in joy as much as sorrow. We offer more colors than any rainbow. More strength than any man I ever knew.
I am a lucky woman.
And I sleep deeply.
And I fly.
My friendships were forged bouncing babies on hips,
folding towels to each other's tune, accommodating without question.
Speaking over-the-fence music of mothers,
we searched for our songs among static-free
billows of sheets and unmated socks.
Like socks, our mates vanished without warning,
leaving us bound in fang-lined cocoons, too small for eagles.
My friendships were fed by outstretched hands,
binding wounds as we emerged bleeding, free falling, plummeting.
We landed on eagle backs,to soar straight up
on the wings of whichever had healed.
Our touch downs were never fatal.
My friendships flourish in our flights apart
and our headlong rushes home. Crazy quilt eagles dancing round the sky;
free in our love and our strength,
alone together, together alone,
free-flying, floating toward light.
***
I am a lucky woman; whenever I have needed holding, there were women around to oblige. Before my husband came and long after he left, there were the friends who knew beyond words, just where the bleeding was. As I look at the three years since my sister died, I am thrown by the number of women who simply left my life. I am shocked by the number of losses in a short amount of time. Yet though the drama of my life was more than they wanted to witness, others remained. Others appeared. The continuity of that poem remains as true today as it was in 1992, the year my husband left.
Judy, Andrea, Nancy, Paige, and Gail -- they are fixed planets in my system. Martha, Laura, Linda, and both Sues. Newer perhaps, but no less important. My grandmother used to say it was hard to leave this world because there were too many colors to say good bye to. She said each person was a distinct color and I was her lilac girl. I was touched when she said this, but I did not truly understand what she meant. Twenty-five years later, I know.
My friends are the colors of my flower garden. They are just as unruly, defying the planting instructions which so clearly define height and width. They grow according to no one's rule but their own.
And they fly.
I have awakened, terrified because my family has all died, but for my son. This was silly, I realized the other day. My family has not died. They are all around me. My laundry eagle friends are scattered, but we fly home to one another, in joy as much as sorrow. We offer more colors than any rainbow. More strength than any man I ever knew.
I am a lucky woman.
And I sleep deeply.
And I fly.
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