It was in Jamaica that I came to truly understand the wind as the breath of God. The seeds were sown a year previously by an older Jamaican woman preaching in church and reminding us to be mindful of God's caring presence. She said that when we are outside and it is so hot, and we feel that cooling breeze on the back of our neck, that is the breath of God. Jamaica is very hot in July, when I am there, even up in the mountains. The wind blows often, and even the wind is hot. But the wind is welcome and blessed relief, even when it is hot. It lifts sweaty strands of hair from my neck, like the soft hand of someone who loves me, and sends fresh air to me there.
I travel to an orphanage in Jamaica every July. It is far up in the mountains, far away from any place tourists visit. We are usually the only white people up there. The people in that area are traditional and conservative in their manners and their outlook. No dreadlocks, no talks of Rasta, very little reggae. In fact, they look askance at Rastafarians, as if they are people to be avoided. (The orphanage director once explained to me that her dogs, all 11 of them, never even barked at the Rastafarian man doing construction on the main building, and she wondered at that, thinking maybe he was an okay guy.) These mountain people are people of faith, people who have not had much and who work hard for what they do have. They get up early and work long days into the night and they know how to pace themselves. Even the elders among them work hard, and it is difficult to discern the true age of most of them.
Before I traveled to Jamaica this year, I was worried. Quite worried. So much so I had not been sleeping well for a month before the trip, though I did not realize that was the reason at the time. (Only after I got home again, and could sleep, did I understand.) The depression had been riding me for a full year, at least. It had dogged my every movement on the previous year's trip, and I knew I was now held firmly between its jaws. I worried about that, about how I would be able to function in a group of people where it is hard to hide our shortcomings, in a place where the heat brings out what we might wish to hide away inside. There's no faking it in Jamaica--even the natives i have encountered there are direct in their responses. And since this was my third trip, some of the people traveling with us had traveled with me before, and so, they knew me. They knew me in the context of the Jamaica mission trip, what I was capable of, and what they could count on me for. They knew when I was angry at the arrogance and judgmental attitude of a new traveler, and was trying to hide it with polite sounding words.
(Mission trip. I know the images those words evoke. Forget them. The people we stay with in Jamaica are better Christians than I am. They know their Scripture by heart, and they know their hymns. We go there to sing and play and do craft projects with the children, and to assist in construction projects.)
One night, at our end-of-the-day wrap-up session, the aforementioned new traveler began to question our motives on this trip, and to complain it was not 'spiritual' enough. He challenged us, wondering why we were all here. His sneering tone, along with his refusal to participate in some of the activities, angered me, and I responded to his challenge. I laid open the facts of my life. I told him I am nobody. I explained how I live below the poverty level and raise my daughter alone, how I have known abuse and abandonment in my life. I explained that I understand how some of these children feel, being abandoned and abused themselves. I come on this trip, I told him, with fire in my eyes, to simply be with these kids, to love them and listen to them and let them know someone hears them, someone sees them, someone appreciates them. I said that, and more, and at the end of the meeting, I turned to flee from the room in tears, because I had exposed my vulnerability to a judgmental stranger and I was afraid.
But the group leader caught my arm just as I was leaving, and she held me and whispered in my ear, "Don't ever say that you are nobody."
And she cried, and I cried, and then I ran into my room and hid.
The next morning, I went out early. There weren't many people around. I walked down to the playground and climbed up the tallest piece of equipment there, and sat facing into the wind. I began my morning prayer, and I talked earnestly to God about my fears and about how paralyzed and turned to stone I had felt because of the depression. I sang. The wind caressed my face, lifted my hair, soothed and smoothed my ragged edges. And I heard the voice of spirit say to me, "God fills all your empty spaces. You are not alone. You are not nobody. You are not without. God fills all your empty spaces."
I cried some more. I felt the wind. I knew it truly as the breath of God, breathing love and life into me.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Heart of Stone
Somewhere in the Bible the Lord says, I will take your heart of stone and give you a heart for love alone. When it comes to my feelings about my mother, and my heart of stone concerning her, God has his work cut out for him.
In our community recently, a baby was abused and beaten over 2 days and finally died. He was 7 months old. The boyfriend killed him, and the mother neglected him. She came home from work to find her baby with 2 black eyes and a split lip and a bruised head, and did she take him for medical help? No. She took him shopping. She knew the boyfriend had perpetrated those grievous injuries on that baby, and what did she do? Let him babysit her son again the next day. By the time she got home that night the baby was unconscious and in cardiac arrest. She took him to the hospital that time, where he was resuscitated, but was already brain dead. A ventilator kept him alive through the next day while the family wailed and prayed and had the baby baptized and then finally the ventilator was shut off and the baby died.
I went to that baby's funeral. I know the family of the mother. I know the mother. She was arrested, and she was bailed out. She has subsequently been charged with 2 counts of manslaughter, among other charges of neglect and endangerment, 2 counts for the 2 days she neglected to get her baby care while the boyfriend continued to choke and pummel and bite him. Plenty of people I know well are making excuses for her. I am not able to make excuses for her. She failed to protect her baby. Period. I sat there at that funeral--even seen a baby's coffin, by the way? Not very big. Kind of the size of a large cooler, it sat atop our communion table. Anyway, I sat there listening to the pastor say how much this baby was loved, and I felt sheer white rage. People around me sobbed and cried and I was rigid with anger.
I have zero tolerance for child abuse, and zero tolerance for adults who fail to protect children, especially their own. And I know why: because my mother failed to protect me. That fact has made me an angry she-bear when it comes to the protection of the very small and helpless. The mother of this baby, from what she told police at the time, was more concerned with the welfare of her boyfriend, who she also says wasn't actually her boyfriend because her real boyfriend, the baby's father, is currently in prison.
That baby, sadly and aptly enough, was buried in the dusk, on a hillside, in the cold. One basket of flowers marks the spot. I visited it the morning after the burial. It was snowing and sleeting at the time, it was dim and grey. Sadder images could not be used in a poem, images of the beaten-to-death baby's grave in the cold and the half-dark. I do believe that baby is safe and warm now, in God's loving arms.
And no, my mother's neglect did not lead to my death. To mental illness and suicidal tendencies and a life long struggle to stay healthy, but not to my death. It has led to me knowing what I know: we must protect the small and the helpless, we simply must. No excuses.
And therein resides my heart of stone.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
In our community recently, a baby was abused and beaten over 2 days and finally died. He was 7 months old. The boyfriend killed him, and the mother neglected him. She came home from work to find her baby with 2 black eyes and a split lip and a bruised head, and did she take him for medical help? No. She took him shopping. She knew the boyfriend had perpetrated those grievous injuries on that baby, and what did she do? Let him babysit her son again the next day. By the time she got home that night the baby was unconscious and in cardiac arrest. She took him to the hospital that time, where he was resuscitated, but was already brain dead. A ventilator kept him alive through the next day while the family wailed and prayed and had the baby baptized and then finally the ventilator was shut off and the baby died.
I went to that baby's funeral. I know the family of the mother. I know the mother. She was arrested, and she was bailed out. She has subsequently been charged with 2 counts of manslaughter, among other charges of neglect and endangerment, 2 counts for the 2 days she neglected to get her baby care while the boyfriend continued to choke and pummel and bite him. Plenty of people I know well are making excuses for her. I am not able to make excuses for her. She failed to protect her baby. Period. I sat there at that funeral--even seen a baby's coffin, by the way? Not very big. Kind of the size of a large cooler, it sat atop our communion table. Anyway, I sat there listening to the pastor say how much this baby was loved, and I felt sheer white rage. People around me sobbed and cried and I was rigid with anger.
I have zero tolerance for child abuse, and zero tolerance for adults who fail to protect children, especially their own. And I know why: because my mother failed to protect me. That fact has made me an angry she-bear when it comes to the protection of the very small and helpless. The mother of this baby, from what she told police at the time, was more concerned with the welfare of her boyfriend, who she also says wasn't actually her boyfriend because her real boyfriend, the baby's father, is currently in prison.
That baby, sadly and aptly enough, was buried in the dusk, on a hillside, in the cold. One basket of flowers marks the spot. I visited it the morning after the burial. It was snowing and sleeting at the time, it was dim and grey. Sadder images could not be used in a poem, images of the beaten-to-death baby's grave in the cold and the half-dark. I do believe that baby is safe and warm now, in God's loving arms.
And no, my mother's neglect did not lead to my death. To mental illness and suicidal tendencies and a life long struggle to stay healthy, but not to my death. It has led to me knowing what I know: we must protect the small and the helpless, we simply must. No excuses.
And therein resides my heart of stone.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Friday, November 23, 2007
Sweet Floral Magic
I wrote this article in late 1999, for an organic farming publication. I was playing around on the internet tonight, googling my own name like the egomaniac I am, and found it had been archived in several university libraries. This was written when I had yet one dog and two cats, and was still renting the second floor of that old rundown house. I had not had the breakdown that struck me like lightning and changed me so dramatically in 2002. I had not met and become involved with the Vampyr. I don't think I could write an article like this anymore.
Flowers feed the spirit. They bring us home. They are ciphers proclaiming the primacy of life. And they want us to smile—at them. (They do!) Because they are smiling at us, smiling and beaming bright tones of hope and of life. Smiling and saying, “Rest your mind on me a minute, and be glad.”
For 10 years I farmed, living amidst flowers (such beauties!) I’d planted, or who had lived there first, or who had invited themselves in. I learned another language gathering borage blossoms in the morning while honeybees droned contentedly beside me, or while watching butterflies dancing above the echinacea. I learned a secret the day I found a mouse’s cache of sunflower seeds nestled in the crook of a huge hairy leaf. Gold finches swaying on chicory stalks amidst constellations of Queen Ann’s lace was as divine a vision as I’d ever hoped to witness. Violets and trout lilies, asters and marsh marigolds, trillium and hepatica, nicotiana, tithonia, lavatera, rudbeckia, verbena, butterfly weed, these and so many others were sweet and happy friends.
And now I live in town, in a small old village that was settled in the mid-1600’s and burnt down and savaged twice during that strange dark time called the French and Indian War. It’s a village that sits directly on the western bank of the upper Hudson River and whose location once served as a major transportation center—a confluence of trails and waterways linking the Iroquois and Algonquin peoples meets here. And it’s living in this village, walking down streets lined with maples and oaks so venerable and huge, that I see impatiens and petunias in hanging baskets; portulaca in clay pots on wrought iron tables; morning glories twining up trellises beneath porch rails; fancy dahlias lining a walk; tiger lilies rounding the corner; zinnias half as tall as me flaming brilliant pink and orange along the sidewalk; foxglove peering between the slats of a fence; and scarlet geraniums in urns flanking a statue of the Virgin in a cobblestone grotto. Easygoing, friendly neighborhood varieties.
And then there’s the datura that volunteers in my neighbor’s garden. It’s a variety the likes of which I’ve never seen before, tall like Jimsonweed but many- branched as a moon lily, and its ivory white blossoms stink. Then when it blooms at moonrise, those tubular flowers shine lunar-luminescent and make me remember the wonder and the mystery of all plants who grow wherever the hell they want to. Like the pokeweed with its deeper-than-wine-dark berries clustered in cascading falls filling an abandoned greenhouse across from the Dutch Reformed Church. I figure I may not live on the land anymore, but the land is still right there under my feet, and while these tamed and chastened flowers, these wild and wily survivors may not
necessarily sing out in the strength of biodiversity, still they do sing. They sing and they whisper, they hum and they yell, and their song is a song of life’s magic.
Like over by Fish Creek where the dog and I walk every morning early to greet the new day’s light, there’s a little cove tucked in behind some oaks. And in that shady nook 100 yards or so up from the dam’s spillway, gleaming like the purest yellow
sunshine radiance, is a clump of 4 foot tall Japanese irises. How’d they get there?—so stately and exotic and elegant amidst the trash left by partying teens and people fishing who just don’t pick up after themselves. A little ways beyond are blue flags
opening up their own version of stubby stateliness to the sky. Just a few of them, enough to remind anyone who’d care to notice of this land’s wild antecedents, here at the edge of town.
Walking up the rise away from the creek, it’s easy to see agriculture’s imprint on the land, because to get back up to the road, you have to pass through pasture abloom with the subtle hues of red clover, vetch, birds foot trefoil, and goldenrod. These
aren’t very flashy plants. They don’t seem to try to catch my eye. Their purpose is not that they be noticed, necessarily. They are earnestly fixing nitrogen and attracting bees—not human admiration for their aesthetic charms (lovely as they all are
anyway). I get the sense they wouldn’t much care if I appreciated their beauty or not. They’re too busy. Unlike the
ornamentals of the neighborhood, so many of whom are prohibited by patent from propagating without a license. Their genetic heritage is copyrighted; their unique charms have a monetary value controlled by corporate entities far, far away from this little village. So what would these idle lovelies be busy with? They are specifically bred to be eye-catchingly beautiful. And so in order to fulfill their particular biological destinies, these ornamentals are hoping you’ll notice.
I noticed, one afternoon during the summer as I walked up to the school to pick up my daughter. A bright fuschia-pink geranium hanging along a porch rail winked and smiled down at me and I smiled back and in an instant of irrational insight I realized that was exactly what the bright blossoms wanted of me—that I lighten up and smile back. I told my daughter this as we walked back home; it was no news to her.
These town flowers (like the town crows who let me get up close and listen to them talk about how great it feels to fly) are used to being around all us people with our comings and goings and busy preoccupations. And they do want us to open up and smile at their loveliness. Even seemingly haughty cleome, with her hairy sticky stems and her hard to recognize face amongst her petals, sways in satisfaction when her beauty gives us pause, penetrates our preoccupation, and we stand enraptured by her loveliness, seeing for a moment...only her.
Flowers make magic. It is as if they are messengers from the strange and wondrous faerie realm that hopes to hear our voices breaking into twinkling laughter, into sighs of wonder— wonder at the vision of them, our eyes crinkling in the momentary
abandon of delight. Flowers are emissaries of light and loveliness, and, please, not merely the sex organs of plants. But then, genitals are doorways, mysterious portals of life’s encompassing power and majesty, of life’s hope and powerful triumph over
death and despair.
I work in an office now, and some days I am so engrossed in my work I forget there even is an outside, much less go out in it. So the flowers I see there, for the most part, are fine thoroughbreds shipped thousands of miles from hothouses in different continents and time zones, sent to deliver messages of love. White tulips in January, arrayed with neon bright heather in a clear glass vase— looking very much like inspiration for a still life painting. Exotic giant daisies whose names I didn’t catch, with deep brown velvet eyes and petals of burnt sienna atop 3 foot stems thick as corn stalks. And how all of us in that workplace sigh and fawn and ooh and ahh over the sight, the presence, of these delicate lovelies in our midst. The only other
natural phenomenon that can set us off so are the infants of some of our clients, sweet bright babies with the cosmos still swirling in their wise, dark eyes. We smile at them and when they smile back, our hearts flow over with the soft heat of happiness. How like flowers, these babies—so delicate, so true, such palpable reminders of life’s determined gentle
joy. How like babies, these flowers—faces bright with trust and hope. Both beckon us to soften, to stay still a moment and recognize the sweet magic and the quiet joy everywhere all around us, suffusing every moment with its peace—no matter where we are.
Flowers feed the spirit. They bring us home. They are ciphers proclaiming the primacy of life. And they want us to smile—at them. (They do!) Because they are smiling at us, smiling and beaming bright tones of hope and of life. Smiling and saying, “Rest your mind on me a minute, and be glad.”
For 10 years I farmed, living amidst flowers (such beauties!) I’d planted, or who had lived there first, or who had invited themselves in. I learned another language gathering borage blossoms in the morning while honeybees droned contentedly beside me, or while watching butterflies dancing above the echinacea. I learned a secret the day I found a mouse’s cache of sunflower seeds nestled in the crook of a huge hairy leaf. Gold finches swaying on chicory stalks amidst constellations of Queen Ann’s lace was as divine a vision as I’d ever hoped to witness. Violets and trout lilies, asters and marsh marigolds, trillium and hepatica, nicotiana, tithonia, lavatera, rudbeckia, verbena, butterfly weed, these and so many others were sweet and happy friends.
And now I live in town, in a small old village that was settled in the mid-1600’s and burnt down and savaged twice during that strange dark time called the French and Indian War. It’s a village that sits directly on the western bank of the upper Hudson River and whose location once served as a major transportation center—a confluence of trails and waterways linking the Iroquois and Algonquin peoples meets here. And it’s living in this village, walking down streets lined with maples and oaks so venerable and huge, that I see impatiens and petunias in hanging baskets; portulaca in clay pots on wrought iron tables; morning glories twining up trellises beneath porch rails; fancy dahlias lining a walk; tiger lilies rounding the corner; zinnias half as tall as me flaming brilliant pink and orange along the sidewalk; foxglove peering between the slats of a fence; and scarlet geraniums in urns flanking a statue of the Virgin in a cobblestone grotto. Easygoing, friendly neighborhood varieties.
And then there’s the datura that volunteers in my neighbor’s garden. It’s a variety the likes of which I’ve never seen before, tall like Jimsonweed but many- branched as a moon lily, and its ivory white blossoms stink. Then when it blooms at moonrise, those tubular flowers shine lunar-luminescent and make me remember the wonder and the mystery of all plants who grow wherever the hell they want to. Like the pokeweed with its deeper-than-wine-dark berries clustered in cascading falls filling an abandoned greenhouse across from the Dutch Reformed Church. I figure I may not live on the land anymore, but the land is still right there under my feet, and while these tamed and chastened flowers, these wild and wily survivors may not
necessarily sing out in the strength of biodiversity, still they do sing. They sing and they whisper, they hum and they yell, and their song is a song of life’s magic.
Like over by Fish Creek where the dog and I walk every morning early to greet the new day’s light, there’s a little cove tucked in behind some oaks. And in that shady nook 100 yards or so up from the dam’s spillway, gleaming like the purest yellow
sunshine radiance, is a clump of 4 foot tall Japanese irises. How’d they get there?—so stately and exotic and elegant amidst the trash left by partying teens and people fishing who just don’t pick up after themselves. A little ways beyond are blue flags
opening up their own version of stubby stateliness to the sky. Just a few of them, enough to remind anyone who’d care to notice of this land’s wild antecedents, here at the edge of town.
Walking up the rise away from the creek, it’s easy to see agriculture’s imprint on the land, because to get back up to the road, you have to pass through pasture abloom with the subtle hues of red clover, vetch, birds foot trefoil, and goldenrod. These
aren’t very flashy plants. They don’t seem to try to catch my eye. Their purpose is not that they be noticed, necessarily. They are earnestly fixing nitrogen and attracting bees—not human admiration for their aesthetic charms (lovely as they all are
anyway). I get the sense they wouldn’t much care if I appreciated their beauty or not. They’re too busy. Unlike the
ornamentals of the neighborhood, so many of whom are prohibited by patent from propagating without a license. Their genetic heritage is copyrighted; their unique charms have a monetary value controlled by corporate entities far, far away from this little village. So what would these idle lovelies be busy with? They are specifically bred to be eye-catchingly beautiful. And so in order to fulfill their particular biological destinies, these ornamentals are hoping you’ll notice.
I noticed, one afternoon during the summer as I walked up to the school to pick up my daughter. A bright fuschia-pink geranium hanging along a porch rail winked and smiled down at me and I smiled back and in an instant of irrational insight I realized that was exactly what the bright blossoms wanted of me—that I lighten up and smile back. I told my daughter this as we walked back home; it was no news to her.
These town flowers (like the town crows who let me get up close and listen to them talk about how great it feels to fly) are used to being around all us people with our comings and goings and busy preoccupations. And they do want us to open up and smile at their loveliness. Even seemingly haughty cleome, with her hairy sticky stems and her hard to recognize face amongst her petals, sways in satisfaction when her beauty gives us pause, penetrates our preoccupation, and we stand enraptured by her loveliness, seeing for a moment...only her.
Flowers make magic. It is as if they are messengers from the strange and wondrous faerie realm that hopes to hear our voices breaking into twinkling laughter, into sighs of wonder— wonder at the vision of them, our eyes crinkling in the momentary
abandon of delight. Flowers are emissaries of light and loveliness, and, please, not merely the sex organs of plants. But then, genitals are doorways, mysterious portals of life’s encompassing power and majesty, of life’s hope and powerful triumph over
death and despair.
I work in an office now, and some days I am so engrossed in my work I forget there even is an outside, much less go out in it. So the flowers I see there, for the most part, are fine thoroughbreds shipped thousands of miles from hothouses in different continents and time zones, sent to deliver messages of love. White tulips in January, arrayed with neon bright heather in a clear glass vase— looking very much like inspiration for a still life painting. Exotic giant daisies whose names I didn’t catch, with deep brown velvet eyes and petals of burnt sienna atop 3 foot stems thick as corn stalks. And how all of us in that workplace sigh and fawn and ooh and ahh over the sight, the presence, of these delicate lovelies in our midst. The only other
natural phenomenon that can set us off so are the infants of some of our clients, sweet bright babies with the cosmos still swirling in their wise, dark eyes. We smile at them and when they smile back, our hearts flow over with the soft heat of happiness. How like flowers, these babies—so delicate, so true, such palpable reminders of life’s determined gentle
joy. How like babies, these flowers—faces bright with trust and hope. Both beckon us to soften, to stay still a moment and recognize the sweet magic and the quiet joy everywhere all around us, suffusing every moment with its peace—no matter where we are.
The Man in the Chair
Our house had a ramp. None of my friends' houses had a ramp. We had extra-wide doorways and hallways. (In fact, when I was looking at this house to buy it--it has a very similar layout to my childhood home--this thought came to me unbidden: The hallway is not wide enough for a wheelchair to pass through.)
Our car had hand controls for the brake and gas pedals too. We drove all the way down to some weird place called City Island where they were put in--a custom job. When my step-father, the man in the wheelchair, first got out of the VA Hospital in the Bronx, a chamber of horrors my mother had dragged me through at much too tender an age, I am probably still at too tender an age for such sights and smells of suffering, he stayed close to friends he had met there, and so had connections like this shop in City Island where hand controls for the cars of the disabled were made. Because this was the early 1960s, and handicapped awareness was not a concept. Sensitivity to the needs of the disabled was not an ethic. Not. No special parking spaces or ramps or bathrooms or doors--nothing. Nada. Not a thing. No.
He was very adept at bumping up and down curbs. He had a way of tilting the chair back on 2 wheels to get down them. He could even bounce down 2 or 3 steps if he had to. He got up curbs with someone giving him a push from the back. If the curb was low enough, he could simply tilt the chair back up onto the curb and then bull his way with the strength of his arms pushing the wheels up and over it. If there was no one with him to help him, he would sit and wait for someone to come by who looked able to help. Then he would call out, "Hey chief, hey chief--can you give me a hand here." Not a question, really, but a statement. To say it was a massively humbling experience is to understate an obvious truth. He was disabled but he was fatally proud. You could see it in his face. I often thought in another lifetime, he could have been a king. He was larger than life, even in his injury. And people liked him, and they liked the fact they had a friend, like him. It made them look good that they were friends with the disabled guy. They made a special space for him at the high school basketball games, and mostly all of my friends simply liked him a lot.
I still remember a family vacation we took with my Aunt and her family. There was a particular restaurant they wanted to eat in one night. But it had steps, a lot of steps. Arrangements were made for my uncle and some men from the restaurant to carry him up the back steps and bring him in through the kitchen. He was not a small man, either. If he could have stood, he would have been well over 6 feet. He had a massive chest and big forearms, both from all the years of pushing the chair, but also from years of milking cows on the farm where he grew up. Only the lower half of his body was small--the long legs with no muscle anymore and his feet in useless shoes (the final pair of shoes he wore were brown suede with laces that came up over his ankles and he called them his 'fruit boots'). The color of his legs and feet were bad; their circulation was compromised. Eventually he got pressure sores on his butt, despite his sheepskin seat and special pillows, that left him bed-ridden most of the day, tilted to the side with his ass in the air. That was in the last years though, before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 40, the same way both his parents died. Heredity and a bad accident, he had such a burden to carry in life. It always made me wonder about karma, and the effects of past lifetimes. Was it simply a random thing, the tragic pattern of his life? My mind always looked for reasons, for meaning behind the suffering. Still does, and I have come to conclude that sometimes there is meaning, and sometimes, there just isn't.
He did not always carry the burden of his life gracefully or well, but how many people would? He drank too much, he always drank too much, it was a drunken driving accident that broke his back and left him paralyzed from the waist down. The other guy in the car, his friend, walked away from the crash (and later died an old alcoholic in a nursing home, practically abandoned by the family he had hurt so many times with his drinking. But he could be so funny and so gentle too, he taught me to swim, at age 10, when I had despaired of ever learning and could not relax in the water-- he was the one who taught a little bundle of nerves like me to relax in the water). My step-father, with a grievous back injury, was carried away from the accident scene in a blanket. Who knew about back boards for back injuries in that volunteer rescue squad in a poor rural county in the late 1950's?
His paraplegic friends all drank too much too. A lot of my childhood was spent in their company, them and their wives all at someone's house--often ours, and I was the only kid, these guys were functionally impotent--for the weekend, drinking and smoking and snacking and playing cards for pennies. My mother would cook up a big pot of chili or spaghetti and meatballs and Italian sausage for supper. I would sit at the table most of the day and listen to their dirty talk and wise ass humor. Much of their humor was dark and often directed at themselves, and I learned a lot of dark truths and dark survival skills from it. They called themselves 'gimps'. They were a fraternity of people the rest of the world preferred not to see, or stared at all too rudely. I got used to it as a small child, people staring at him like he was some freak sitting there in his chair, instead of a big farm boy who had gotten into a bad accident. They tended to see the chair and not the person. I got used to it. I knew the person, and after awhile, I never saw the chair. I didn't see any of the chairs anymore, just as I did not see how the one friend who had been paralyzed from his shoulder blades down in a diving accident could not cut his own food, or the amputated stumps of the friends of later years, men who came back from Vietnam missing limbs. I remember one guy, a double amputee (both legs), never used his chair in private. When he wanted to leave the card game to go to the john, he'd hop down onto the floor and locomote along somehow on his hands. What I remember thinking was how strong he was.
When these guys in the chairs got up in the morning, they'd wear a towel over their legs. They were naked underneath them. They did not wear boxers or briefs--getting into pants was difficult enough. My step-father had several beach towels just for this morning time. One friend of theirs wore a wash cloth. I became quite adept at not seeing him from the waist down. And the smells I learned to ignore--the morning smell of an unwashed alcoholic paraplegic is something that could be used as a torture technique.
Every couple of weeks, he would monopolize the bathroom on a Saturday for hours, washing and doing whatever he did in there. Lots of splashing sounds. Tricky for a small kid who just needed to pee. I would wait and wait and wait until he got to some point in his ablutions that he could take a break and let me use the bathroom. I would sit in there holding my breath and not looking at the stuff scattered all around the sink.
These guys were permanently catheterized. They had a bag on their legs where the urine trickled in all day. They called it a duck. Many times on road trips, we would pull over by the side of the road (because there was no public bathroom anywhere his chair would fit inside) and he would slide across the front bench seat to the passenger side and stick out his leg, pull up his pants a bit, and unclamp the clip on the tube of the duck and let the dark, bad smelling urine gush out onto the roadside. Something else I learned to ignore. Suffice it to say, the people I knew with spinal cord injuries did not have healthy bodies!
These guys played wheelchair basketball though. They participated in handicapped games. We went to those every summer. There were races in wheelchairs and swimming. My step-father was actually on a wheelchair basketball team (he had been a small town basketball star in high school) that competed in the Pan-American Games. He went to Cuba with the American team back in the late 50's, before it was illegal to travel there.
And, yeah, he used the strength of his big scary arms to beat me and the dog, sometimes brutally. He stuck his big, rough fingers in places on my body where they did not belong. He humiliated and shamed me. He also helped me with my math homework. When I was very small, I would stand on the foot pedals of his chair when we were out shopping, and I would ride along there. He taught me to tie my shoes as we sat in the car waiting for my mother at some store. Except he was a lefty, and taught me left-handed, and it took me years to figure out why my bows never looked as nice as the other kids. When I played field hockey in high school, he came to my games. He could not get across the grass to the field, but he parked as close as he could in the parking lot and watched with binoculars.
Besides the scars of abuse, living with him gave me a compassion that runs deep. It gave me eyes that tend to see the inner person first and a mind that does not judge people by their appearances (though I have learned with age that, in some cases, judging by appearances can be precisely the right thing to do). It gave me the ability to have extended conversations with almost anyone. I look in their eyes and talk with the spirit residing in there. I am proud that I am able to do this. And the fact of that gift, that ability, almost brings me to a place where I can forgive him the hurt he did me.
Almost.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Our car had hand controls for the brake and gas pedals too. We drove all the way down to some weird place called City Island where they were put in--a custom job. When my step-father, the man in the wheelchair, first got out of the VA Hospital in the Bronx, a chamber of horrors my mother had dragged me through at much too tender an age, I am probably still at too tender an age for such sights and smells of suffering, he stayed close to friends he had met there, and so had connections like this shop in City Island where hand controls for the cars of the disabled were made. Because this was the early 1960s, and handicapped awareness was not a concept. Sensitivity to the needs of the disabled was not an ethic. Not. No special parking spaces or ramps or bathrooms or doors--nothing. Nada. Not a thing. No.
He was very adept at bumping up and down curbs. He had a way of tilting the chair back on 2 wheels to get down them. He could even bounce down 2 or 3 steps if he had to. He got up curbs with someone giving him a push from the back. If the curb was low enough, he could simply tilt the chair back up onto the curb and then bull his way with the strength of his arms pushing the wheels up and over it. If there was no one with him to help him, he would sit and wait for someone to come by who looked able to help. Then he would call out, "Hey chief, hey chief--can you give me a hand here." Not a question, really, but a statement. To say it was a massively humbling experience is to understate an obvious truth. He was disabled but he was fatally proud. You could see it in his face. I often thought in another lifetime, he could have been a king. He was larger than life, even in his injury. And people liked him, and they liked the fact they had a friend, like him. It made them look good that they were friends with the disabled guy. They made a special space for him at the high school basketball games, and mostly all of my friends simply liked him a lot.
I still remember a family vacation we took with my Aunt and her family. There was a particular restaurant they wanted to eat in one night. But it had steps, a lot of steps. Arrangements were made for my uncle and some men from the restaurant to carry him up the back steps and bring him in through the kitchen. He was not a small man, either. If he could have stood, he would have been well over 6 feet. He had a massive chest and big forearms, both from all the years of pushing the chair, but also from years of milking cows on the farm where he grew up. Only the lower half of his body was small--the long legs with no muscle anymore and his feet in useless shoes (the final pair of shoes he wore were brown suede with laces that came up over his ankles and he called them his 'fruit boots'). The color of his legs and feet were bad; their circulation was compromised. Eventually he got pressure sores on his butt, despite his sheepskin seat and special pillows, that left him bed-ridden most of the day, tilted to the side with his ass in the air. That was in the last years though, before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 40, the same way both his parents died. Heredity and a bad accident, he had such a burden to carry in life. It always made me wonder about karma, and the effects of past lifetimes. Was it simply a random thing, the tragic pattern of his life? My mind always looked for reasons, for meaning behind the suffering. Still does, and I have come to conclude that sometimes there is meaning, and sometimes, there just isn't.
He did not always carry the burden of his life gracefully or well, but how many people would? He drank too much, he always drank too much, it was a drunken driving accident that broke his back and left him paralyzed from the waist down. The other guy in the car, his friend, walked away from the crash (and later died an old alcoholic in a nursing home, practically abandoned by the family he had hurt so many times with his drinking. But he could be so funny and so gentle too, he taught me to swim, at age 10, when I had despaired of ever learning and could not relax in the water-- he was the one who taught a little bundle of nerves like me to relax in the water). My step-father, with a grievous back injury, was carried away from the accident scene in a blanket. Who knew about back boards for back injuries in that volunteer rescue squad in a poor rural county in the late 1950's?
His paraplegic friends all drank too much too. A lot of my childhood was spent in their company, them and their wives all at someone's house--often ours, and I was the only kid, these guys were functionally impotent--for the weekend, drinking and smoking and snacking and playing cards for pennies. My mother would cook up a big pot of chili or spaghetti and meatballs and Italian sausage for supper. I would sit at the table most of the day and listen to their dirty talk and wise ass humor. Much of their humor was dark and often directed at themselves, and I learned a lot of dark truths and dark survival skills from it. They called themselves 'gimps'. They were a fraternity of people the rest of the world preferred not to see, or stared at all too rudely. I got used to it as a small child, people staring at him like he was some freak sitting there in his chair, instead of a big farm boy who had gotten into a bad accident. They tended to see the chair and not the person. I got used to it. I knew the person, and after awhile, I never saw the chair. I didn't see any of the chairs anymore, just as I did not see how the one friend who had been paralyzed from his shoulder blades down in a diving accident could not cut his own food, or the amputated stumps of the friends of later years, men who came back from Vietnam missing limbs. I remember one guy, a double amputee (both legs), never used his chair in private. When he wanted to leave the card game to go to the john, he'd hop down onto the floor and locomote along somehow on his hands. What I remember thinking was how strong he was.
When these guys in the chairs got up in the morning, they'd wear a towel over their legs. They were naked underneath them. They did not wear boxers or briefs--getting into pants was difficult enough. My step-father had several beach towels just for this morning time. One friend of theirs wore a wash cloth. I became quite adept at not seeing him from the waist down. And the smells I learned to ignore--the morning smell of an unwashed alcoholic paraplegic is something that could be used as a torture technique.
Every couple of weeks, he would monopolize the bathroom on a Saturday for hours, washing and doing whatever he did in there. Lots of splashing sounds. Tricky for a small kid who just needed to pee. I would wait and wait and wait until he got to some point in his ablutions that he could take a break and let me use the bathroom. I would sit in there holding my breath and not looking at the stuff scattered all around the sink.
These guys were permanently catheterized. They had a bag on their legs where the urine trickled in all day. They called it a duck. Many times on road trips, we would pull over by the side of the road (because there was no public bathroom anywhere his chair would fit inside) and he would slide across the front bench seat to the passenger side and stick out his leg, pull up his pants a bit, and unclamp the clip on the tube of the duck and let the dark, bad smelling urine gush out onto the roadside. Something else I learned to ignore. Suffice it to say, the people I knew with spinal cord injuries did not have healthy bodies!
These guys played wheelchair basketball though. They participated in handicapped games. We went to those every summer. There were races in wheelchairs and swimming. My step-father was actually on a wheelchair basketball team (he had been a small town basketball star in high school) that competed in the Pan-American Games. He went to Cuba with the American team back in the late 50's, before it was illegal to travel there.
And, yeah, he used the strength of his big scary arms to beat me and the dog, sometimes brutally. He stuck his big, rough fingers in places on my body where they did not belong. He humiliated and shamed me. He also helped me with my math homework. When I was very small, I would stand on the foot pedals of his chair when we were out shopping, and I would ride along there. He taught me to tie my shoes as we sat in the car waiting for my mother at some store. Except he was a lefty, and taught me left-handed, and it took me years to figure out why my bows never looked as nice as the other kids. When I played field hockey in high school, he came to my games. He could not get across the grass to the field, but he parked as close as he could in the parking lot and watched with binoculars.
Besides the scars of abuse, living with him gave me a compassion that runs deep. It gave me eyes that tend to see the inner person first and a mind that does not judge people by their appearances (though I have learned with age that, in some cases, judging by appearances can be precisely the right thing to do). It gave me the ability to have extended conversations with almost anyone. I look in their eyes and talk with the spirit residing in there. I am proud that I am able to do this. And the fact of that gift, that ability, almost brings me to a place where I can forgive him the hurt he did me.
Almost.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Thanks Giving
It is grey and dank this morning. But the furnace works, and I can pay the natural gas bill, and our house is sound and tight. I have covered the windows that let in cold air with heavy plastic that I get free at work (it lines boxes of cardboard tubes we use in packaging). I have food enough to eat and tea enough to drink, and I bought a pumpkin pie that was made at our church by women who have a talent for baking. It helps raise money for the church and it provides my daughter and me with an incredible large pumpkin pie decorated with pie crust cut out in leaf shapes. Very lovely! I plan to eat a piece for breakfast, holding it in my hand, no plate, no fork. My Grandma made incredible pies, and every incredible pie I encounter on my walk through life brings me back to her.
Thanksgiving at her house is a memory of scents and tastes and colors. And of warmth. Walking out of the cold into the back door after the long car ride, I was always greeted by the scent of the pine wood walls and of her homemade yeast rolls. She would roll the raised dough into balls and put 3 of them into the spaces of a muffin tin and bake them. She would buy brilliantly green baby sweet gherkins, just for me, and she would make vibrant cranberry orange relish, fresh, just for me. Such colors, and so shiny! There would be scalloped oysters topped with crackers for my Grandpa and scalloped corn for my mother. And lemon meringue pie for my Aunt.
To make the relish, she would clamp the heavy metal food grinder to the wooden counter curving out just above her radio, always playing WGY. She would fit it with the right sized plate, grind the cranberries, and then the oranges, and then sweeten it all with sugar. I loved to push the fruit down into the grinder as she turned the crank (the cranberries would go Pop!), and to watch the ground fruit pour out into the bowl set beneath the grinder. A kid easily amused, I guess.
She would also make a small mincemeat pie just for her and the man in the wheelchair. It even had beef in it, hence the name, mince meat. (One of our pie baking church ladies made mince pie for our annual Harvest Supper, and she made hers from green tomatoes. Who knew the many manifestations of mince pie? Not me, I won't touch the stuff.) Along with the mince and the lemon meringue, she would bake apple and pumpkin pies. She had been baking pies since she was 12, and she did not even need to measure out the ingredients for the crust, just did it all by hand, the day before, from memory.
The metal grinder would be washed and dried and used again to grind up the turkey giblets to be put into the gravy. I loved that job. I would strip the meat from the turkey neck (eating the choicest strips), I would shove in the gizzard and the liver and the heart and the neck meat into the grinder and watch in fascination as it came out, transformed!, from the opening in the grinder. I loved that giblet meat. Loved it. So did my Grandpa, and he and I had worked out a deal to share the gizzards. When I was very small, and did not know--yet--it disgusted people so, I would eat every single inch of the drumstick, save the bone itself. I even cracked out the marrow and ate that. All I can say is, I guess it is the Indian in me that had to eat like that. A throwback, my mother called me then, and calls me yet. (They had their own myths and legends of Indian blood, this Dutch-German clan, ever since my Grandpa's aunt had begun researching a family tree and then abruptly stopped her research, not liking what she had found, apparently, but never telling anyone why. And so the speculation of Indian blood began. My mother had her own version of that, however. She insisted we were part African-American. In fact, she and the man in the wheelchair told me my own creation myth: That they had found me in a greasy bag in the garbage in the Bronx, and that when I turned 10, I would turn into a black person. When I replied that we were not black people, my mother flattened her nose with her index finger, as if she looked black African then, and said, 'See?")
Today my daughter and I will be walking down the hill to share Thanksgiving dinner with friends. My friend grew up in a big family on a Michigan orchard, and her husband grew up in a big missionary family in Hong Kong. Her 2 sons--the younger a young man with developmental disabilities, and the older a sweet and earnest idealist currently living in Brooklyn--will be there, along with the older son's girlfriend. She is Swiss/Czech, but raised in the US, and she teaches ESL to immigrant children in Brooklyn. She and I often have friendly arguments over whether Jamaican children should be in her class (I say yes and she says no). Also invited is a young man from our community who lived all his life in Las Vegas and ended up here because of an internet romance, but once he arrived, the lady in question took one look at him and said, No way. (He doesn't always brush his teeth and a stroke has made it so he walks funny.) She promptly fixed him up with an abused, mentally ill woman, but he and she have since divorced. A combination of her incestuous relationship with her uncle and her need to walk into the river fully dressed at 3 AM drove him out of that relationship. He is sweet and polite and smart. He has very strong faith in God and that helps him survive. We have that in common! Anyway, of such sad and colorful truths are real life composed.
My contribution to the feast will be cranberries served in a beautiful clear glass dish that belonged to my Grandma's mother and cooked in a way my daughter loves them. She has always loved cranberries since she was very small. I would keep the unused portion of a bag of raw berries in the freezer, and she would toddle over asking for a 'cranbear'. ( What is it with kids and sour things? Sometimes they just love them!) A creative culinary challenge faces me in this year's cooking of the cranberries. I usually cook the whole berries in apple juice and honey until they pop, but I forgot to buy the juice yesterday (too busy buying Newcastle Brown Ale, but that is another story). So, my sweetening options are these: honey, brown sugar, grape jelly, orange juice. I am leaning towards a combination of honey, orange juice and a bit of grape jelly. We shall see.
I also prepared a feast for my bird friends, laying out for them in 3 feeders a repast of their favorite black oil sunflower seeds. I have added 2 feeders this year. Along with the usual one out on the back porch, tucked in amidst angel's trumpet and woody nightshade vines, (that's the one I can see from my dining room table), I hung one out in the sumac. I told the sumac that since it is a persistent yet uninvited resident of my bit of earth here, defying all attempts of mine to mow it and hack it away, it might as well be useful. Hence, a feeder now hangs there. I also have a small feeder on the front porch made by a Jamaican man from a coconut. It has 2 parrot type birds rising up on either side of it, and an opening carved out that creates a kind of coconut cave where I put the seed. Even if the birds don't visit the feeders today, they have an open invitation to feast here. I am thankful for those birds, for their cheerful little lives, chirping and sticking together even when the coldest wind blows drifts of snow and the world is half-mad with darkness. I am thankful for all the plants and other critters who inhabit my world and make it a place full of spontaneity and life. As I am thankful for the many friends who love me despite my cranky, grouchy ways, and solitary eccentricities.
But now I need to go cook those berries.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Thanksgiving at her house is a memory of scents and tastes and colors. And of warmth. Walking out of the cold into the back door after the long car ride, I was always greeted by the scent of the pine wood walls and of her homemade yeast rolls. She would roll the raised dough into balls and put 3 of them into the spaces of a muffin tin and bake them. She would buy brilliantly green baby sweet gherkins, just for me, and she would make vibrant cranberry orange relish, fresh, just for me. Such colors, and so shiny! There would be scalloped oysters topped with crackers for my Grandpa and scalloped corn for my mother. And lemon meringue pie for my Aunt.
To make the relish, she would clamp the heavy metal food grinder to the wooden counter curving out just above her radio, always playing WGY. She would fit it with the right sized plate, grind the cranberries, and then the oranges, and then sweeten it all with sugar. I loved to push the fruit down into the grinder as she turned the crank (the cranberries would go Pop!), and to watch the ground fruit pour out into the bowl set beneath the grinder. A kid easily amused, I guess.
She would also make a small mincemeat pie just for her and the man in the wheelchair. It even had beef in it, hence the name, mince meat. (One of our pie baking church ladies made mince pie for our annual Harvest Supper, and she made hers from green tomatoes. Who knew the many manifestations of mince pie? Not me, I won't touch the stuff.) Along with the mince and the lemon meringue, she would bake apple and pumpkin pies. She had been baking pies since she was 12, and she did not even need to measure out the ingredients for the crust, just did it all by hand, the day before, from memory.
The metal grinder would be washed and dried and used again to grind up the turkey giblets to be put into the gravy. I loved that job. I would strip the meat from the turkey neck (eating the choicest strips), I would shove in the gizzard and the liver and the heart and the neck meat into the grinder and watch in fascination as it came out, transformed!, from the opening in the grinder. I loved that giblet meat. Loved it. So did my Grandpa, and he and I had worked out a deal to share the gizzards. When I was very small, and did not know--yet--it disgusted people so, I would eat every single inch of the drumstick, save the bone itself. I even cracked out the marrow and ate that. All I can say is, I guess it is the Indian in me that had to eat like that. A throwback, my mother called me then, and calls me yet. (They had their own myths and legends of Indian blood, this Dutch-German clan, ever since my Grandpa's aunt had begun researching a family tree and then abruptly stopped her research, not liking what she had found, apparently, but never telling anyone why. And so the speculation of Indian blood began. My mother had her own version of that, however. She insisted we were part African-American. In fact, she and the man in the wheelchair told me my own creation myth: That they had found me in a greasy bag in the garbage in the Bronx, and that when I turned 10, I would turn into a black person. When I replied that we were not black people, my mother flattened her nose with her index finger, as if she looked black African then, and said, 'See?")
Today my daughter and I will be walking down the hill to share Thanksgiving dinner with friends. My friend grew up in a big family on a Michigan orchard, and her husband grew up in a big missionary family in Hong Kong. Her 2 sons--the younger a young man with developmental disabilities, and the older a sweet and earnest idealist currently living in Brooklyn--will be there, along with the older son's girlfriend. She is Swiss/Czech, but raised in the US, and she teaches ESL to immigrant children in Brooklyn. She and I often have friendly arguments over whether Jamaican children should be in her class (I say yes and she says no). Also invited is a young man from our community who lived all his life in Las Vegas and ended up here because of an internet romance, but once he arrived, the lady in question took one look at him and said, No way. (He doesn't always brush his teeth and a stroke has made it so he walks funny.) She promptly fixed him up with an abused, mentally ill woman, but he and she have since divorced. A combination of her incestuous relationship with her uncle and her need to walk into the river fully dressed at 3 AM drove him out of that relationship. He is sweet and polite and smart. He has very strong faith in God and that helps him survive. We have that in common! Anyway, of such sad and colorful truths are real life composed.
My contribution to the feast will be cranberries served in a beautiful clear glass dish that belonged to my Grandma's mother and cooked in a way my daughter loves them. She has always loved cranberries since she was very small. I would keep the unused portion of a bag of raw berries in the freezer, and she would toddle over asking for a 'cranbear'. ( What is it with kids and sour things? Sometimes they just love them!) A creative culinary challenge faces me in this year's cooking of the cranberries. I usually cook the whole berries in apple juice and honey until they pop, but I forgot to buy the juice yesterday (too busy buying Newcastle Brown Ale, but that is another story). So, my sweetening options are these: honey, brown sugar, grape jelly, orange juice. I am leaning towards a combination of honey, orange juice and a bit of grape jelly. We shall see.
I also prepared a feast for my bird friends, laying out for them in 3 feeders a repast of their favorite black oil sunflower seeds. I have added 2 feeders this year. Along with the usual one out on the back porch, tucked in amidst angel's trumpet and woody nightshade vines, (that's the one I can see from my dining room table), I hung one out in the sumac. I told the sumac that since it is a persistent yet uninvited resident of my bit of earth here, defying all attempts of mine to mow it and hack it away, it might as well be useful. Hence, a feeder now hangs there. I also have a small feeder on the front porch made by a Jamaican man from a coconut. It has 2 parrot type birds rising up on either side of it, and an opening carved out that creates a kind of coconut cave where I put the seed. Even if the birds don't visit the feeders today, they have an open invitation to feast here. I am thankful for those birds, for their cheerful little lives, chirping and sticking together even when the coldest wind blows drifts of snow and the world is half-mad with darkness. I am thankful for all the plants and other critters who inhabit my world and make it a place full of spontaneity and life. As I am thankful for the many friends who love me despite my cranky, grouchy ways, and solitary eccentricities.
But now I need to go cook those berries.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Saturday, November 17, 2007
The Fairlands
My grandmother was an only child like me. For part of her childhood, she lived with her grandparents way up in the hills in a place the locals called The Fairlands. And, yes, it was so fair and so beautiful up there, with an incredible view to the north of high mountain peaks. It was a place of alternating stands of trees and green and golden meadows, of ponds and brambly berry patches and far flung farm houses and barns. She lived on her grandparents' farm. Her mother had left her there to go find work in other places.
The farm had a pond where they would fish and catch bull frogs for supper. Her grandparents came from solid Dutch, German, and French lineage, and they had a lot of kids. My Gram spent her days with an aunt who was very close to her own age. They walked several miles to a one room school. She told me when they went out berry picking in the hot sun, they would be careful to cover their arms with long sleeves and their heads with broad brimmed hats so that they would not get tan--because rich people had fine white skin, and only poor laborers got tanned. They did not want to look like poor laborers. When she outgrew the one room school, she went alone down into the valley to the nearest small town to attend the high school. But she was embarassed by her homemade country clothes and was afraid the town kids would laugh at her. So she quit school and worked instead. She always regretted quitting school. She was uneducated but she was certainly not stupid.
The story was always told that my grandmother's father was killed before she was born. But when I was doing geneaological research several years ago, I found no death records for the man whose last name my grandmother carried before she married, not at the time when she was a baby. None at all. I also found no marriage record for her mother and father. My grandmother was born in 1914.
The story my grandmother told me about her father's death, told to her by her mother, sounds made up to me now, but also apt. She said the man was walking back to be with them around the time she was born. He had been gone but he was coming back. As he came, he fell from a railroad bridge, and was impaled on a spike--right through the heart.
Sounds to me like a story an abandoned, embittered, unmarried mother might tell her child.
Anyway, like I said, my grandmother was an only child, just like me. Her mother married several times throughout her life, but she never had any more children. And when I was very young, 2 or so, my mother wanted to leave me with her and my grandfather while she went off with her new husband--the man in the wheelchair--in a white Oldsmobile covertible with red interior. My Gram said no. She said no because she had been left behind by her mother and subsequently felt like her mother never wanted her. (She often said she felt like no one really wanted her, and that she never really belonged anywhere. I have often felt exactly the same way. A family legacy, I suppose. She had depression too, another legacy.) And even though she was doing what she thought best for me, I would have been better off staying with her and my Grandpa and my aunt, who was 12 when I was born. It was Major Trauma for me to leave them. I loved them so much. They never yelled at me, or spoke to me unkindly, or beat me, or touched me inappropriately. They never ever thrust me into terrifying chaos. I also loved their old country house on a sloping hill with the ditch full of wild mint across the road. I loved the tall hollyhocks my Grandma grew and the Montmorency cherry tree and grape vines out back. She would can those tart pie cherries and keep them in jars in the cold cellar. I would eagerly follow her down the wooden steps into the cellar where the big wringer washer stood, and she would swing open the cold cellar door and get me a jar of cherries. I would eat them in a dish, red like lips and just as firm and delicious, in amber juice.
I loved the little succulent plants called hens-and-chickens that she had planted in her flower bed. I loved to smell the peony blossoms in June, and watch the way the ants helped the buds to open. The sweet, rosy scent of peonies still brings me straight back to that time of my childhood, and I remember how my Grandma and I would play around saying the word peony, saying pee-nee instead.
My Grandpa had built a picnic house down back, and it had a fireplace. I loved to play in there, I loved its screen door and the sound the door made when it swung shut, impelled by a big spring. My Grandpa had also built a large swing, the kind with two seats facing each other, and you could sit and talk and gently rock back and forth. He too had had to leave school early to go work. He came from a family of 10 kids, and had to help support the family. He was also very smart, and he read a lot. He taught me about continental drift and the whole Pangaea theory back in 1965, when he was sick in bed with cancer and I had climbed up beside him with the new globe I had been given. My family always told me that when I was a toddler and could not quite walk yet, he would hold my hands in his and walk me around and around and around. He was proud of his Dutch heritage and made a point of always eating Gouda cheese in the red wax. That cheese in wax fascinated me, I did not know anyone else who ate cheese that came in red wax, and could you eat this wax? (Not really.) He died when I was 8, so I only had a few years with him, but what good years they were. I still remember how he said 'winda' instead of window, and said the days of the week ending in the word 'dee' instead of day. My Aunt still talks that way. He also used to stand on the front porch afternoons and shoot starlings with bird shot while we waited for the school bus to bring home my aunt. He had rheumatoid arthritis really bad--another family legacy, and he was all crippled up by his late 40s. He got around on metal crutches, and he was only 59 when he died, from cancer.
I did not love the garter snakes that lived in the stone wall so much, they always scared the crap out of me. It seems like I would look down and-blah!--there one would be, all coiled in a spiral, or poking its head out from a shadowy space in the grey field stone. One morning when I was about 10, and was spending some time with my Gram, I went outside to the back garage, the one that had at one time been my Grandpa's wood working shop, to get something from the car, but was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a snake making its leisurely way in front of the garage door. I ran back in and told my Gram, and she got right up and went into the mud room and took a rake from the closet and went out there and coiled that snake up in the rake, and carried it across the road and shook it out into the ditch. She was so brave, my Grandma!
I also loved to tag along behind my teenaged aunt and her girlfriend from across the road. I loved the tiny cones that fell from the tall hemlocks lining the driveway. I loved the large lichen covered rocks beneath the red pines along the back fence line. I loved the big, tall chicken house next door, and the neighbors who kept those chickens. The Mrs. next door had a parrot! He sat on a big ring on her glassed-in front porch during the warm weather.
Early mornings when my teenage mother would sleep 'til noon, practically, I would let myself out of our apartment over the other garage--a mother-in-law apartment, as that kind of arrangement is sometimes called, and, in fact, my Grandpa did build it for his mother-in-law to live in. She had since moved on up the road a bit to live with her brother and sister-in-law, probably to make room for my recently widowed mother and me. I would walk across the grass in all weathers, barefoot in the dew in the summer, and across crusty frost in my feet pajamas in November, and go inside my grandparents' house. They were early risers like me, and we would all sit down to a breakfast of Thomas's English muffins. My Grandpa would drink Red Rose tea from a brown one-cup teapot, a pot I still use today, though I dropped the lid when I lived with the X and it shattered on the concrete floor (seems like lots of stuff shattered in my years with the X).
One morning, my Grandma had forgotten to unlock the back door, and so when I padded my way across the grass and climbed the back steps to the door leading to the mud room, a room panelled with real knotty pine boards, and with big closets filled with red and black checked hunting jackets and winter coats and snow shovels and rakes and a shot gun or two, though mostly the guns were kept behind the cellar door, I could not get in! I rattled and rattled that door knob, and then, undaunted, I made my stubborn little way over to the house next door, the house of the parrot. Mrs. Parrot let me in and I visited a bit with her before she took my hand and led me back to my grandparents' and knocked so loudly they had to hear and let me in. I myself never thought to knock. And my Grandma felt so bad she had forgotten to unlock the back door for me! She always said that, because this was one of our favorite stories to share, and we repeated it to ourselves and the rest of the family for years and years.
In later years, when my parents and I would come back from the disgusting city place we lived in to visit my grandparents (I always knew we were getting closer when I could spy mountains from my back seat perch in the white car), they would always set me up in a roll-away bed at the foot of their big bed. They had a beautiful heavy wool Hudson's Bay point blanket on their bed, a white one with 5 points and one broad red, yellow, black, and green stripe across the top. That blanket is on my bed now. I would lay there in my roll-away bed, in the chilly room, under lots of blankets, and I would look up in the dark and see neon colored snakes twining along in the space where the ceiling met the wall. I would sometimes awaken to witness large prehistoric fish swimming through the room. As an adult I read of how William Blake saw angels peeping through the leaves of trees and smiling at him when he was a child, and I would remember the snakes and the fish. And wonder just what the hell that was all about. But, I suppose, that is another story.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
The farm had a pond where they would fish and catch bull frogs for supper. Her grandparents came from solid Dutch, German, and French lineage, and they had a lot of kids. My Gram spent her days with an aunt who was very close to her own age. They walked several miles to a one room school. She told me when they went out berry picking in the hot sun, they would be careful to cover their arms with long sleeves and their heads with broad brimmed hats so that they would not get tan--because rich people had fine white skin, and only poor laborers got tanned. They did not want to look like poor laborers. When she outgrew the one room school, she went alone down into the valley to the nearest small town to attend the high school. But she was embarassed by her homemade country clothes and was afraid the town kids would laugh at her. So she quit school and worked instead. She always regretted quitting school. She was uneducated but she was certainly not stupid.
The story was always told that my grandmother's father was killed before she was born. But when I was doing geneaological research several years ago, I found no death records for the man whose last name my grandmother carried before she married, not at the time when she was a baby. None at all. I also found no marriage record for her mother and father. My grandmother was born in 1914.
The story my grandmother told me about her father's death, told to her by her mother, sounds made up to me now, but also apt. She said the man was walking back to be with them around the time she was born. He had been gone but he was coming back. As he came, he fell from a railroad bridge, and was impaled on a spike--right through the heart.
Sounds to me like a story an abandoned, embittered, unmarried mother might tell her child.
Anyway, like I said, my grandmother was an only child, just like me. Her mother married several times throughout her life, but she never had any more children. And when I was very young, 2 or so, my mother wanted to leave me with her and my grandfather while she went off with her new husband--the man in the wheelchair--in a white Oldsmobile covertible with red interior. My Gram said no. She said no because she had been left behind by her mother and subsequently felt like her mother never wanted her. (She often said she felt like no one really wanted her, and that she never really belonged anywhere. I have often felt exactly the same way. A family legacy, I suppose. She had depression too, another legacy.) And even though she was doing what she thought best for me, I would have been better off staying with her and my Grandpa and my aunt, who was 12 when I was born. It was Major Trauma for me to leave them. I loved them so much. They never yelled at me, or spoke to me unkindly, or beat me, or touched me inappropriately. They never ever thrust me into terrifying chaos. I also loved their old country house on a sloping hill with the ditch full of wild mint across the road. I loved the tall hollyhocks my Grandma grew and the Montmorency cherry tree and grape vines out back. She would can those tart pie cherries and keep them in jars in the cold cellar. I would eagerly follow her down the wooden steps into the cellar where the big wringer washer stood, and she would swing open the cold cellar door and get me a jar of cherries. I would eat them in a dish, red like lips and just as firm and delicious, in amber juice.
I loved the little succulent plants called hens-and-chickens that she had planted in her flower bed. I loved to smell the peony blossoms in June, and watch the way the ants helped the buds to open. The sweet, rosy scent of peonies still brings me straight back to that time of my childhood, and I remember how my Grandma and I would play around saying the word peony, saying pee-nee instead.
My Grandpa had built a picnic house down back, and it had a fireplace. I loved to play in there, I loved its screen door and the sound the door made when it swung shut, impelled by a big spring. My Grandpa had also built a large swing, the kind with two seats facing each other, and you could sit and talk and gently rock back and forth. He too had had to leave school early to go work. He came from a family of 10 kids, and had to help support the family. He was also very smart, and he read a lot. He taught me about continental drift and the whole Pangaea theory back in 1965, when he was sick in bed with cancer and I had climbed up beside him with the new globe I had been given. My family always told me that when I was a toddler and could not quite walk yet, he would hold my hands in his and walk me around and around and around. He was proud of his Dutch heritage and made a point of always eating Gouda cheese in the red wax. That cheese in wax fascinated me, I did not know anyone else who ate cheese that came in red wax, and could you eat this wax? (Not really.) He died when I was 8, so I only had a few years with him, but what good years they were. I still remember how he said 'winda' instead of window, and said the days of the week ending in the word 'dee' instead of day. My Aunt still talks that way. He also used to stand on the front porch afternoons and shoot starlings with bird shot while we waited for the school bus to bring home my aunt. He had rheumatoid arthritis really bad--another family legacy, and he was all crippled up by his late 40s. He got around on metal crutches, and he was only 59 when he died, from cancer.
I did not love the garter snakes that lived in the stone wall so much, they always scared the crap out of me. It seems like I would look down and-blah!--there one would be, all coiled in a spiral, or poking its head out from a shadowy space in the grey field stone. One morning when I was about 10, and was spending some time with my Gram, I went outside to the back garage, the one that had at one time been my Grandpa's wood working shop, to get something from the car, but was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a snake making its leisurely way in front of the garage door. I ran back in and told my Gram, and she got right up and went into the mud room and took a rake from the closet and went out there and coiled that snake up in the rake, and carried it across the road and shook it out into the ditch. She was so brave, my Grandma!
I also loved to tag along behind my teenaged aunt and her girlfriend from across the road. I loved the tiny cones that fell from the tall hemlocks lining the driveway. I loved the large lichen covered rocks beneath the red pines along the back fence line. I loved the big, tall chicken house next door, and the neighbors who kept those chickens. The Mrs. next door had a parrot! He sat on a big ring on her glassed-in front porch during the warm weather.
Early mornings when my teenage mother would sleep 'til noon, practically, I would let myself out of our apartment over the other garage--a mother-in-law apartment, as that kind of arrangement is sometimes called, and, in fact, my Grandpa did build it for his mother-in-law to live in. She had since moved on up the road a bit to live with her brother and sister-in-law, probably to make room for my recently widowed mother and me. I would walk across the grass in all weathers, barefoot in the dew in the summer, and across crusty frost in my feet pajamas in November, and go inside my grandparents' house. They were early risers like me, and we would all sit down to a breakfast of Thomas's English muffins. My Grandpa would drink Red Rose tea from a brown one-cup teapot, a pot I still use today, though I dropped the lid when I lived with the X and it shattered on the concrete floor (seems like lots of stuff shattered in my years with the X).
One morning, my Grandma had forgotten to unlock the back door, and so when I padded my way across the grass and climbed the back steps to the door leading to the mud room, a room panelled with real knotty pine boards, and with big closets filled with red and black checked hunting jackets and winter coats and snow shovels and rakes and a shot gun or two, though mostly the guns were kept behind the cellar door, I could not get in! I rattled and rattled that door knob, and then, undaunted, I made my stubborn little way over to the house next door, the house of the parrot. Mrs. Parrot let me in and I visited a bit with her before she took my hand and led me back to my grandparents' and knocked so loudly they had to hear and let me in. I myself never thought to knock. And my Grandma felt so bad she had forgotten to unlock the back door for me! She always said that, because this was one of our favorite stories to share, and we repeated it to ourselves and the rest of the family for years and years.
In later years, when my parents and I would come back from the disgusting city place we lived in to visit my grandparents (I always knew we were getting closer when I could spy mountains from my back seat perch in the white car), they would always set me up in a roll-away bed at the foot of their big bed. They had a beautiful heavy wool Hudson's Bay point blanket on their bed, a white one with 5 points and one broad red, yellow, black, and green stripe across the top. That blanket is on my bed now. I would lay there in my roll-away bed, in the chilly room, under lots of blankets, and I would look up in the dark and see neon colored snakes twining along in the space where the ceiling met the wall. I would sometimes awaken to witness large prehistoric fish swimming through the room. As an adult I read of how William Blake saw angels peeping through the leaves of trees and smiling at him when he was a child, and I would remember the snakes and the fish. And wonder just what the hell that was all about. But, I suppose, that is another story.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Bumby the Fat Girl
So Bumby ran away for awhile during our walk this morning. When I had gotten to the place on the hill, after the meadow, before the cemetery, the place where I always stop to put her back on the leash, she was not there. It was foggy and dark and I couldn't see her. I did not hear the jingle of the tags on her collar. I called her and called her. I didn't want to call out too much because it was very early and there are houses nearby with people in them, presumably sleeping. But she didn't come. I waited for a bit, then decided to walk on. But even as we went on, Little Bear and I, I was still listening for the jingle and trying to see her dark grey form down the hill in the dark.
I was worried and distracted as I walked through the cathedral of Norway spruces, fringed black towers in the early grey dark. That is usually a place of peace for me, where I find the stillness inside myself, but not so much today. I have been on the edge of worry and self-blaming for too many days now, and Bumby disappearing like that wasn't helping anything inside me stay calm. The evening before I had noticed the Mother Cat had slash wounds on her head and ear, and she hadn't been cleaning them. One of them looked swollen and abscessed and as I felt it, it broke open and I was able to wipe out the pus with a tissue. But it was still worrisome, the fact she wasn't grooming herself. (Give me a reason, any reason! I am always primed for disaster to strike again.) My daughter began vehemently insisting I not let the Mother Cat outside anymore, but the cat is half feral, and while she was a good mother once, she hates her babies now, she hates all the cats in the house. She won't use the litter box and she growls and is upset all the time she is in, unless she is sleeping. So I have to let her out for a bit, which I did do this morning but with the plan of finding her before I went to work, and bringing her back in.
Also one of the fish had been ailing over the weekend, all loopy and lethargic, and I had been blaming myself for that too. I had lost track in my mind of when I had last changed the water in her tank. But she was better yesterday, thank goodness. Adding all this to my recent financial nightmare and my concerns and disputes with my daughter, I am feeling a bit raggedy around the edges. My black crow feathers are rather ruffled. It doesn't appear anything will come along to smooth them back down anytime soon either.
Work yesterday wasn't any better. My employers were away enjoying a day off in the city, and that left me to open up and get things rolling, that left me to look after the developmentally disabled young man who works there, and that left me to look after the mentally ill widow who also works there. Believe me, my employers do not pay me enough for all that I am expected to handle and to do. Anyway, she freaked out and flipped out early on in the day when I had given her a new job to do. While I was endeavoring to teach it to her (feeling a lot like a vocational therapist), the phone rang and it was a customer wanting to order something from our retail store. The call made me remember I had forgotten to open the store, because I was busy trying to teach Deidre the new task. So, then I had to go back and forth between the store and the phone so as to be able to tell the woman exactly what shape and color Chinese vases (I recited 'chocolate brown, celery green, sky blue, yellow' over and over as I walked back to the phone) we had left, because she wanted to buy 4 of them. I am very good at customer service, so good in fact, I should be given an Emmy or a Tony or an Oscar for my daily performances. Actually a lot of my life is a daily performance, because I often feel so ragged and bereft inside. By the time I got back to Deidre she was over by the windows panicking because she could not see well enough to do the new job. She decided to go home and get her glasses. And her bottle of water! she exclaimed loudly. She had forgotten her bottle of water!
By the time she got back, precisely 12 minutes later, she informed me, she had calmed down and settled in and was okay for the rest of her 3 hours there. By the time work was finished for me, many hours after that, I walked home in the gathering gloom as some poet so aptly named it, feeling bleak and sad. Feeling alone, feeling like I needed some tender loving care but also knowing that was like wishing for world peace--it just ain't gonna happen.
Honestly, I wish I was making this all up but, wah wah wah, it's all true.
So, Bumby ran away and then she had this particular madwoman to contend with when she finally had re-traced our steps and caught up with us. She was slurping and licking her chops in an extremely disgusting manner and I knew then she had been busy eating something. Something dead, or fecal, in nature. I told her she was a disgusting fat girl. I told her that a few times. She walked most of the way home with her tail down (who likes being called a disgusting fat girl?). She knew I was unhappy but, I am sure, in her limited doggy way, she did not know precisely why.
Bumby is a mess. (A shaggy, grey mess, not unlike me before I colored my hair.) She is beautiful inside, loving, empathetic, loyal. But she is also terrier-stubborn and a pig for anything vaguely edible. She came from the animal shelter where she had been living for 3 months (it is a no-kill shelter) because no one wanted her. Her coat is long and tangled most of the time--she is a messy, shaggy dog. She looks like a fat girl but she actually isn't--she is quite muscular and sturdy. She had been abandoned as a pup and ran around a city north of here before being injured and taken to a vet. She lived at the vet's for one month and no one claimed her. Then she went to the shelter, and still no one claimed her, or wanted her.
We came to the shelter a week before I was moving ino the house I had just managed to buy and I was still wondering if this was some unconscious child of alcoholics' self-sabotage attempt on my part. For some insane reason, I was planning to adopt a different dog that a friend had told us about. That friend had also called ahead to the shelter (she had an 'in' there) and told them to expect us because we were "a very good home" for this particular little male mongrel. Except Little Bear had other plans. Seems he doesn't like other boy dogs, and that was the day we found out. He snapped at the little male mongrel and they told us no way would they let us have that dog. Then my daughter started to cry. She was almost 10 then, and she thought we were adopting a dog! She cried and the staff said, go look at the other dogs. So I did. There were so many of them. Finally a staff person brought out Bumby. She was the only one of the 35 dogs there that was not barking. I always remember that because, now that she lives here, she barks really loudly at nothing any chance she gets. My daughter took her outside for a walk . They paraded her past the cats to show me she liked cats. So we ended up with Bumby. I didn't really want her but I would never tell her that. She is very sensitive.
This is how sensitive she is. Once when I was crying and sad, bent over in a chair, my face in my hands, tears leaking out, wondering why I was so alone in this life, a dog toy was sudddenly thrust in my face. That was Bumby telling me she loves me and I am not alone and here's a toy, so let's play! She always tells me she loves me, a million ways every day. Sometimes I don't realize how upset I am until I realize Bumby has been sticking to my side like glue, trying to crawl into my lap when I sit down. I truly think, if she was able, she'd make me a cup of tea and give me some of the TLC I crave. And when she knows I am upset with her because she rolled in something stinky or ate turds out of the cat box, she goes under the couch until I feel better. Or it is time to eat. Or time for bed. Whichever comes first. She is a very forgiving soul and has plenty to teach a grouchy old crow like me. Like, about forgiveness! Starting with myself.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
I was worried and distracted as I walked through the cathedral of Norway spruces, fringed black towers in the early grey dark. That is usually a place of peace for me, where I find the stillness inside myself, but not so much today. I have been on the edge of worry and self-blaming for too many days now, and Bumby disappearing like that wasn't helping anything inside me stay calm. The evening before I had noticed the Mother Cat had slash wounds on her head and ear, and she hadn't been cleaning them. One of them looked swollen and abscessed and as I felt it, it broke open and I was able to wipe out the pus with a tissue. But it was still worrisome, the fact she wasn't grooming herself. (Give me a reason, any reason! I am always primed for disaster to strike again.) My daughter began vehemently insisting I not let the Mother Cat outside anymore, but the cat is half feral, and while she was a good mother once, she hates her babies now, she hates all the cats in the house. She won't use the litter box and she growls and is upset all the time she is in, unless she is sleeping. So I have to let her out for a bit, which I did do this morning but with the plan of finding her before I went to work, and bringing her back in.
Also one of the fish had been ailing over the weekend, all loopy and lethargic, and I had been blaming myself for that too. I had lost track in my mind of when I had last changed the water in her tank. But she was better yesterday, thank goodness. Adding all this to my recent financial nightmare and my concerns and disputes with my daughter, I am feeling a bit raggedy around the edges. My black crow feathers are rather ruffled. It doesn't appear anything will come along to smooth them back down anytime soon either.
Work yesterday wasn't any better. My employers were away enjoying a day off in the city, and that left me to open up and get things rolling, that left me to look after the developmentally disabled young man who works there, and that left me to look after the mentally ill widow who also works there. Believe me, my employers do not pay me enough for all that I am expected to handle and to do. Anyway, she freaked out and flipped out early on in the day when I had given her a new job to do. While I was endeavoring to teach it to her (feeling a lot like a vocational therapist), the phone rang and it was a customer wanting to order something from our retail store. The call made me remember I had forgotten to open the store, because I was busy trying to teach Deidre the new task. So, then I had to go back and forth between the store and the phone so as to be able to tell the woman exactly what shape and color Chinese vases (I recited 'chocolate brown, celery green, sky blue, yellow' over and over as I walked back to the phone) we had left, because she wanted to buy 4 of them. I am very good at customer service, so good in fact, I should be given an Emmy or a Tony or an Oscar for my daily performances. Actually a lot of my life is a daily performance, because I often feel so ragged and bereft inside. By the time I got back to Deidre she was over by the windows panicking because she could not see well enough to do the new job. She decided to go home and get her glasses. And her bottle of water! she exclaimed loudly. She had forgotten her bottle of water!
By the time she got back, precisely 12 minutes later, she informed me, she had calmed down and settled in and was okay for the rest of her 3 hours there. By the time work was finished for me, many hours after that, I walked home in the gathering gloom as some poet so aptly named it, feeling bleak and sad. Feeling alone, feeling like I needed some tender loving care but also knowing that was like wishing for world peace--it just ain't gonna happen.
Honestly, I wish I was making this all up but, wah wah wah, it's all true.
So, Bumby ran away and then she had this particular madwoman to contend with when she finally had re-traced our steps and caught up with us. She was slurping and licking her chops in an extremely disgusting manner and I knew then she had been busy eating something. Something dead, or fecal, in nature. I told her she was a disgusting fat girl. I told her that a few times. She walked most of the way home with her tail down (who likes being called a disgusting fat girl?). She knew I was unhappy but, I am sure, in her limited doggy way, she did not know precisely why.
Bumby is a mess. (A shaggy, grey mess, not unlike me before I colored my hair.) She is beautiful inside, loving, empathetic, loyal. But she is also terrier-stubborn and a pig for anything vaguely edible. She came from the animal shelter where she had been living for 3 months (it is a no-kill shelter) because no one wanted her. Her coat is long and tangled most of the time--she is a messy, shaggy dog. She looks like a fat girl but she actually isn't--she is quite muscular and sturdy. She had been abandoned as a pup and ran around a city north of here before being injured and taken to a vet. She lived at the vet's for one month and no one claimed her. Then she went to the shelter, and still no one claimed her, or wanted her.
We came to the shelter a week before I was moving ino the house I had just managed to buy and I was still wondering if this was some unconscious child of alcoholics' self-sabotage attempt on my part. For some insane reason, I was planning to adopt a different dog that a friend had told us about. That friend had also called ahead to the shelter (she had an 'in' there) and told them to expect us because we were "a very good home" for this particular little male mongrel. Except Little Bear had other plans. Seems he doesn't like other boy dogs, and that was the day we found out. He snapped at the little male mongrel and they told us no way would they let us have that dog. Then my daughter started to cry. She was almost 10 then, and she thought we were adopting a dog! She cried and the staff said, go look at the other dogs. So I did. There were so many of them. Finally a staff person brought out Bumby. She was the only one of the 35 dogs there that was not barking. I always remember that because, now that she lives here, she barks really loudly at nothing any chance she gets. My daughter took her outside for a walk . They paraded her past the cats to show me she liked cats. So we ended up with Bumby. I didn't really want her but I would never tell her that. She is very sensitive.
This is how sensitive she is. Once when I was crying and sad, bent over in a chair, my face in my hands, tears leaking out, wondering why I was so alone in this life, a dog toy was sudddenly thrust in my face. That was Bumby telling me she loves me and I am not alone and here's a toy, so let's play! She always tells me she loves me, a million ways every day. Sometimes I don't realize how upset I am until I realize Bumby has been sticking to my side like glue, trying to crawl into my lap when I sit down. I truly think, if she was able, she'd make me a cup of tea and give me some of the TLC I crave. And when she knows I am upset with her because she rolled in something stinky or ate turds out of the cat box, she goes under the couch until I feel better. Or it is time to eat. Or time for bed. Whichever comes first. She is a very forgiving soul and has plenty to teach a grouchy old crow like me. Like, about forgiveness! Starting with myself.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Sunday, November 11, 2007
My First Daughter
My friend Janelle has a wry, dry wit. She was the first person I farmed with, before I met the X. Actually, I met the X at Janelle's farm; he was working for her then. She introduced me to him. I had recently quit my job at the university library and was doing an extended volunteer stint on Janelle's organic vegetable farm. I was still married to my first husband, but not for long.
Anyway, it was Janelle who said my dog Marley would always be my first daughter. She had said this when I was pregnant and none of us knew whether the baby I carried was a girl or a boy. For my part, I was positive he was a boy. So much for that kind of intuition, eh?
Marley was half purebred yellow Lab and half what I called 'wild dog of the Helderbergs'. Her father was apparently some rambling black Shepherd mix who met her mom when her mom was in her first heat ever. Marley came out brindled, mostly black with wavy golden stripes, floppy ears, a long tail, and a ridge of fur running straight down her muzzle to her nose. She was my girl, my puppy, my love. I adored her. She went with me to as many places as I could take her and I never, ever had to worry about her running away. She always stayed close by my side. If she was out in the yard, and I looked out the window, she would immediately turn my way, alert to the fact I was seeking her with my eyes. Me and Marley, we were tight. We slept together, we rambled the woods and fields together, rode in the car, visited friends, went camping and explored the world.
When I left my first husband, and ended up with the X, he put a wedge between Marley and me. No longer were we allowed to sleep together. She had to stay outside with his dog, Yoko, in the dog pen. Marley didn't like that, and neither did I, and so, for the longest time, Marley slept in my car. It was familiar space to her and it smelled like us. She liked that. Eventually he relented so that the dogs could sleep in the house, and then they had their own beds downstairs--but they were not even allowed to come into the bedroom. And I did not dare invite her in.
But during the day, as I worked in the greenhouse and fields outside, we were inseperable. People often commented when they came to the farm that if you wanted to find me, you just had to look for the dogs. We were always all together, the 3 of us.
I know now what I could never have known then, that it is a terrible mistake to sacrifice a loving, loyal dog for the love of a man who shuts that dog out of your room. Doesn't that sound silly and stupid and obvious in hindsight? Because she always loved me, and he didn't. I will never do that again. Ever. Because all her life, even to the very end of her life, even after I had left her behind, she trusted me absolutely and completely.
Maybe I should not have left her behind when I left him. That was a very difficult decision and I am still not sure if I would have done it differently. Because Yoko loved Marley so much and I did not want to break them up. Also, Marley was so old (13--old for a large dog) and out of it by the time I left, I thought she would be okay without me.
About a year after I had left, my daughter was having her bi-monthly weekend visit with her father. She was 9 then. She called me on the phone to tell me Marley had collapsed and could not get up. She was very upset and crying. I said I would be right over. I got into my old Ford station wagon and drove the 5 miles to his place. I asked him to help me lift Marley into the back of my car, and he refused at first, saying it would hurt his back. I told him I could not lift her myself, and pleaded with him to help me, and he finally did.
As I drove her to the vet, I sang to her all the way over. This is what I sang:
'Midnight has come
I hear music
And I'll keep on singing'
over and over again.
When we got to the vet, I went inside and was relieved to see my friend Sue who worked as a vet technician was working that day, and she came out to the car with me to get Marley. We carried her inside and got her up on an examining table. The vet, another very kindly woman I had known for many years, came in and examined Marley thoroughly with kind and competent hands, and finally told me they could probably put her on fluids and stabilize her, but she would not get better. She said dogs can mask their illnesses for quite some time, and by the time they collapse like this, they are pretty far gone. As was Marley. She left it up to me to decide whether I would have Marley euthanized, but she was supportive and loving as I grappled with the decision.
And so we would put my girl Marley to sleep, as we call it to tell the kids. As the vet went and prepared the injection of sodium phenobarbitol, I stroked Marley's soft silky head and ears and spoke softly to her. She had been quivering the whole time we had been there. I stroked her and whispered in her ear that she was a very good girl and she was going home soon. As I whispered to her, she became calm and stopped shaking. By the time the vet administered the injection, she was relaxed in my arms, ready to go home.
The X told me a week or so later that he was awakened in the night by the sound of Yoko, howling mournfully, missing her dear companion Marley.
Her ashes are in a box. I keep it in my bedroom, right beside my bed.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Anyway, it was Janelle who said my dog Marley would always be my first daughter. She had said this when I was pregnant and none of us knew whether the baby I carried was a girl or a boy. For my part, I was positive he was a boy. So much for that kind of intuition, eh?
Marley was half purebred yellow Lab and half what I called 'wild dog of the Helderbergs'. Her father was apparently some rambling black Shepherd mix who met her mom when her mom was in her first heat ever. Marley came out brindled, mostly black with wavy golden stripes, floppy ears, a long tail, and a ridge of fur running straight down her muzzle to her nose. She was my girl, my puppy, my love. I adored her. She went with me to as many places as I could take her and I never, ever had to worry about her running away. She always stayed close by my side. If she was out in the yard, and I looked out the window, she would immediately turn my way, alert to the fact I was seeking her with my eyes. Me and Marley, we were tight. We slept together, we rambled the woods and fields together, rode in the car, visited friends, went camping and explored the world.
When I left my first husband, and ended up with the X, he put a wedge between Marley and me. No longer were we allowed to sleep together. She had to stay outside with his dog, Yoko, in the dog pen. Marley didn't like that, and neither did I, and so, for the longest time, Marley slept in my car. It was familiar space to her and it smelled like us. She liked that. Eventually he relented so that the dogs could sleep in the house, and then they had their own beds downstairs--but they were not even allowed to come into the bedroom. And I did not dare invite her in.
But during the day, as I worked in the greenhouse and fields outside, we were inseperable. People often commented when they came to the farm that if you wanted to find me, you just had to look for the dogs. We were always all together, the 3 of us.
I know now what I could never have known then, that it is a terrible mistake to sacrifice a loving, loyal dog for the love of a man who shuts that dog out of your room. Doesn't that sound silly and stupid and obvious in hindsight? Because she always loved me, and he didn't. I will never do that again. Ever. Because all her life, even to the very end of her life, even after I had left her behind, she trusted me absolutely and completely.
Maybe I should not have left her behind when I left him. That was a very difficult decision and I am still not sure if I would have done it differently. Because Yoko loved Marley so much and I did not want to break them up. Also, Marley was so old (13--old for a large dog) and out of it by the time I left, I thought she would be okay without me.
About a year after I had left, my daughter was having her bi-monthly weekend visit with her father. She was 9 then. She called me on the phone to tell me Marley had collapsed and could not get up. She was very upset and crying. I said I would be right over. I got into my old Ford station wagon and drove the 5 miles to his place. I asked him to help me lift Marley into the back of my car, and he refused at first, saying it would hurt his back. I told him I could not lift her myself, and pleaded with him to help me, and he finally did.
As I drove her to the vet, I sang to her all the way over. This is what I sang:
'Midnight has come
I hear music
And I'll keep on singing'
over and over again.
When we got to the vet, I went inside and was relieved to see my friend Sue who worked as a vet technician was working that day, and she came out to the car with me to get Marley. We carried her inside and got her up on an examining table. The vet, another very kindly woman I had known for many years, came in and examined Marley thoroughly with kind and competent hands, and finally told me they could probably put her on fluids and stabilize her, but she would not get better. She said dogs can mask their illnesses for quite some time, and by the time they collapse like this, they are pretty far gone. As was Marley. She left it up to me to decide whether I would have Marley euthanized, but she was supportive and loving as I grappled with the decision.
And so we would put my girl Marley to sleep, as we call it to tell the kids. As the vet went and prepared the injection of sodium phenobarbitol, I stroked Marley's soft silky head and ears and spoke softly to her. She had been quivering the whole time we had been there. I stroked her and whispered in her ear that she was a very good girl and she was going home soon. As I whispered to her, she became calm and stopped shaking. By the time the vet administered the injection, she was relaxed in my arms, ready to go home.
The X told me a week or so later that he was awakened in the night by the sound of Yoko, howling mournfully, missing her dear companion Marley.
Her ashes are in a box. I keep it in my bedroom, right beside my bed.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Icy Hard
I was sitting at the table, reading a bit, drinking a cup of hot apple cider vinegar and honey. I had recently gotten back from my job cleaning the church. I had spent a fair amount of time, halfway through vacuuming the sanctuary, sitting at the piano and working on our anthem for this Sunday. I plunked out the alto part with my right index finger and thumb as I worked through the measures I hadn't quite learned yet. It is a lovely acapella piece by someone named Zingarelli, sung in 4 parts. I hadn't gone to choir practice this week, as that was one of my days from hell. This was a very hard week for me emotionally. My daughter worried me almost constantly with her behavior, and I have some scary financial problems. By the time Thursday night rolled around, I was feeling angry and sad and tired and resentful. Feeling like everyone just wants a piece of me, that no one cares about my needs but only about what I could do for them. Still fast in the flush of PTSD flashbacks--the pure emotional kind--because actually no one was really doing that to me, and that if I had reached out for help, friends would have helped me.
Anyway, I haven't been singing at all since I have been feeling so bad, and I didn't warm up before working on the Zingarelli. My throat was feeling rough when I got home, and nothing works better than the cider vinegar and honey. I usually drink a cup or two every day in the colder weather to help my throat. I was enjoying the relief of the hot drink and reading a bit of Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shoutin". He was talking about his mean, damaged, alcoholic father, and suddenly a harsh memory rose up in my mind like a scary monster surfacing from black waters.
I want to say first that I do not enjoy emotional pain, though I am accustomed to it. Sometimes it is so familiar I do not actually realize I am in the midst of it, and I think sometimes I actually look for it, unconsciously. Because, for obvious reasons, it became a familiar state of being and if I wasn't in it, then where was I? As I get healther, by degrees, I recognize it better and protect myself from it more. I think part of that is I still do not completely trust feeling peaceful, as if something will surely come along and shatter that peace, so if I am already in pain, I am ready for anything, right? It is exhausting, to say the least. However, emotional pain has an edge to it that I would not call enjoyable exactly, but that can be somehow addictive, and I think that I am not alone in seeking it out sometimes. I think many people in our wacked out culture seek it too, in all kinds of ways. I am somewhat ashamed by my own participation in that, but, in this instance, I wasn't looking for it. Or maybe I was: Bragg's memoir is full of pain but written, crafted, so beautifully, and with such a fine sense of dark humor that he and I are kin of a sort, having been raised in a similar wasteland. Reading another survivor's memories can help make sense of something that felt largely senseless at the time, for me anyway, and so transforms--redeems?--something ugly into something beautiful. It also creates a sense of connection, of not having suffered alone. A function of art. Anyway, I digress hugely. Forgive me. This memory, one I haven't thought of in a very long time, demanded my attention, and now I have to tell it, hopefully to put it to rest as best I can.
We had had a lot of snow. My daughter was 3 or 4 and she had the cutest little pink snowsuit. She was (is) such a beautiful child, and her joy in life was a pure and wonderful thing. She was like a happy songbird, chattering away in her little girl language. We were all outside, the X and I shovelling the most recent snowfall from the driveway, a wide expanse that sloped steeply up to the road. It was a lot of work. There were really high piles of snow packed in on the sides of the road, pushed there by the plow, and we had had to dig through that first before we could begin to throw up snow onto it. I remember the sight of my daughter as a brilliant spot of vibrant pink in a very white world. What I don't remember is what set off the X, but suddenly we were arguing and he shoved me out into the road and grabbed me by the back of my neck and shoved my face into the snowbank. He crushed my face into the icy hardness and held it there. I remember the sound of my daughter sobbing and screaming and trying to catch her own breath as I thought to myself, 'This time I am going to die. I am really going to die."
But I didn't die. I got really scared and couldn't breathe and flailed in panic, but I did not die. He finally let me go, and I gasped for breath like someone surfacing from deep water and I staggered over to my terrified little daughter. As I picked her up and held her close and rocked her slowly back and forth, making quiet, soothing sounds, he said to me, "Look what you did to her."
No, he didn't say it, he spit out the words, contemptuous and hard, bloody broken teeth, shards of dirty ice, huge crystals of bitter rock salt. I stood there stunned by what he had just said, not to mention reeling from what he had just did, holding my little one in my arms, and you can be sure I was crying too. He turned away from both of us as if we were too disgusting for words, and he went into the house. By the time I got up my courage to go in too, he acted like nothing unusual had happened.
I wish I was making this up. And maybe you can see, that when my daughter's behavior worries me now, I can't help but think about then.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Anyway, I haven't been singing at all since I have been feeling so bad, and I didn't warm up before working on the Zingarelli. My throat was feeling rough when I got home, and nothing works better than the cider vinegar and honey. I usually drink a cup or two every day in the colder weather to help my throat. I was enjoying the relief of the hot drink and reading a bit of Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shoutin". He was talking about his mean, damaged, alcoholic father, and suddenly a harsh memory rose up in my mind like a scary monster surfacing from black waters.
I want to say first that I do not enjoy emotional pain, though I am accustomed to it. Sometimes it is so familiar I do not actually realize I am in the midst of it, and I think sometimes I actually look for it, unconsciously. Because, for obvious reasons, it became a familiar state of being and if I wasn't in it, then where was I? As I get healther, by degrees, I recognize it better and protect myself from it more. I think part of that is I still do not completely trust feeling peaceful, as if something will surely come along and shatter that peace, so if I am already in pain, I am ready for anything, right? It is exhausting, to say the least. However, emotional pain has an edge to it that I would not call enjoyable exactly, but that can be somehow addictive, and I think that I am not alone in seeking it out sometimes. I think many people in our wacked out culture seek it too, in all kinds of ways. I am somewhat ashamed by my own participation in that, but, in this instance, I wasn't looking for it. Or maybe I was: Bragg's memoir is full of pain but written, crafted, so beautifully, and with such a fine sense of dark humor that he and I are kin of a sort, having been raised in a similar wasteland. Reading another survivor's memories can help make sense of something that felt largely senseless at the time, for me anyway, and so transforms--redeems?--something ugly into something beautiful. It also creates a sense of connection, of not having suffered alone. A function of art. Anyway, I digress hugely. Forgive me. This memory, one I haven't thought of in a very long time, demanded my attention, and now I have to tell it, hopefully to put it to rest as best I can.
We had had a lot of snow. My daughter was 3 or 4 and she had the cutest little pink snowsuit. She was (is) such a beautiful child, and her joy in life was a pure and wonderful thing. She was like a happy songbird, chattering away in her little girl language. We were all outside, the X and I shovelling the most recent snowfall from the driveway, a wide expanse that sloped steeply up to the road. It was a lot of work. There were really high piles of snow packed in on the sides of the road, pushed there by the plow, and we had had to dig through that first before we could begin to throw up snow onto it. I remember the sight of my daughter as a brilliant spot of vibrant pink in a very white world. What I don't remember is what set off the X, but suddenly we were arguing and he shoved me out into the road and grabbed me by the back of my neck and shoved my face into the snowbank. He crushed my face into the icy hardness and held it there. I remember the sound of my daughter sobbing and screaming and trying to catch her own breath as I thought to myself, 'This time I am going to die. I am really going to die."
But I didn't die. I got really scared and couldn't breathe and flailed in panic, but I did not die. He finally let me go, and I gasped for breath like someone surfacing from deep water and I staggered over to my terrified little daughter. As I picked her up and held her close and rocked her slowly back and forth, making quiet, soothing sounds, he said to me, "Look what you did to her."
No, he didn't say it, he spit out the words, contemptuous and hard, bloody broken teeth, shards of dirty ice, huge crystals of bitter rock salt. I stood there stunned by what he had just said, not to mention reeling from what he had just did, holding my little one in my arms, and you can be sure I was crying too. He turned away from both of us as if we were too disgusting for words, and he went into the house. By the time I got up my courage to go in too, he acted like nothing unusual had happened.
I wish I was making this up. And maybe you can see, that when my daughter's behavior worries me now, I can't help but think about then.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Solitary Dance, Part One
The older I get, and the more people I get to know, the more I see how really no one's life has worked out in the way they had hoped it would. And that how we handle that says a lot about individual character.
One big thing I never thought I would be doing is raising a child on my own. (She really isn't even a child now, but this challenging changeling creature, part young woman, part teen, part child.) The fear of trying to do that, and my own lack of confidence in myself at being able to do that very thing, kept me trapped with the X for many years. I believed that living as his hostage was preferable to raising my daughter alone, not to mention managing to keep a roof over our heads, and all that that entails.
Circumstances finally forced me out of that house. Once I had served him divorce papers, he began to turn his abusive mind and hands away from me and on to her. I tried to get an Order of Protection from Family Court, but had the bad fortune to get a substitute judge on the Friday before Labor Day who implied I was 'trailer trash" (he asked if we lived in a trailer) and told me that since the X had not verbally threatened to kill either one of us, he would not grant me my order. He also very astutely said, "It sounds to me like you are just trying to get this guy out of there."
Oh, if only I were making this all up at an attempt at satire and comedy.
So, I very quickly found us an apartment I could afford, the second floor of an old house that had once been nice but had fallen into a condemnable state. I could hear every move made by the tenants downstairs along with every word spoken. When they fought one night at 2am, I realized their bed was right under mine and so I dragged mine across the room. The furnace belched out black soot onto our walls and smelled bad, and when it was very cold, I would worry the house would burn down while I was at work. The pipes froze and the hot water was not very hot and not very ample. When I gave my daughter a bath, I filled the tub with kettles of water heated on the stove. I gave her the warmest room, a cozy space with carpet on the floor and a south facing window. A room with a good window, unlike most of the rest of the windows that were broken and I had to mend with newspaper and plastic to keep out the cold as best I could.
I moved there with Little Bear, who was still a pup, and our oldest cat, a tortoise shell named the Empress who was not much more than a kitten herself at the time. I did not bring my beloved dog Marley because she was so old then, because I did not think she could make it up the 13 very steep steps to our place. She was also beloved company for the X's dog, Yoko, as they were bonded pals-- Yoko had known Marley since Yoko was a pup. It was not an easy decision, by any means, especially since Marley died a year later partly due to the X's benign neglect. But that is another story.
Little Bear and I would get up very early and walk, out of necessity. The house had virtually no yard. I could not just tie him out. I walked him 5 or 6 times a day between work and meals and sleep. The river was nearby and that was a wonderful place to walk to--he and I enjoyed it very much. When winter came and we were out very early in the deep cold, I got myself a good parka with a hood that I zipped and snapped myself inside of and so felt protected from the world.
The house was on a quiet street in this quiet village and the Catholic Church was just across the way. Its bells rang 18 times every morning at 7. I loved to watch the sun rise through the branches of a large old tree that sheltered many birds and embraced the front of the house. I loved to listen to the sound of the waterfall at the dam just a short walk away. Its sound pervaded the air at all times. I had a kind and friendly neighbor next door who proved to be another angel on my walk of life. Her own son, a baby at the time, has autism and Down's Syndrome. She was yet another example to me of a person who does not have much but will always share what she has with others. Sisters in suffering and heartbreak, we do tend to find one another and support one another. She has a husband too, a hard working, quiet guy who helped me out when I needed tools or a truck.
This was the time when I found our church too. I had the sense that once my daughter was a teen, I would need the support of a community. One night I was doing some meditations involving white light. I had recently come to realize white light is the light of Christ. As I sat there visualizing white light, wrapping it around me, and my daughter, and our home space, that light suddenly took a turn of its own and led my mind up the street to the church on the corner. It was a church that had drawn my attention in the past. I had walked by many times and wondered what the lovely stained glass windows, illustrating scenes with grapes and flowers and books, would look like from the inside. I had seen the pastor standing outside in her white robe, with a rainbow colored stole around her neck. The place seemed filled with light, and the sign out front simply said: "Welcome." During the meditation, the church was revealed to me as the place filled with the light of love that I had sensed it to be. So I decided to check it out as soon as my daughter was away one weekend with the X. I was skeptical then, as I am now, at what people create when they band together in the name of organized religion, and was going to choose carefully. But I had the sense that with the white light as my guide, I was not being steered the wrong way.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
One big thing I never thought I would be doing is raising a child on my own. (She really isn't even a child now, but this challenging changeling creature, part young woman, part teen, part child.) The fear of trying to do that, and my own lack of confidence in myself at being able to do that very thing, kept me trapped with the X for many years. I believed that living as his hostage was preferable to raising my daughter alone, not to mention managing to keep a roof over our heads, and all that that entails.
Circumstances finally forced me out of that house. Once I had served him divorce papers, he began to turn his abusive mind and hands away from me and on to her. I tried to get an Order of Protection from Family Court, but had the bad fortune to get a substitute judge on the Friday before Labor Day who implied I was 'trailer trash" (he asked if we lived in a trailer) and told me that since the X had not verbally threatened to kill either one of us, he would not grant me my order. He also very astutely said, "It sounds to me like you are just trying to get this guy out of there."
Oh, if only I were making this all up at an attempt at satire and comedy.
So, I very quickly found us an apartment I could afford, the second floor of an old house that had once been nice but had fallen into a condemnable state. I could hear every move made by the tenants downstairs along with every word spoken. When they fought one night at 2am, I realized their bed was right under mine and so I dragged mine across the room. The furnace belched out black soot onto our walls and smelled bad, and when it was very cold, I would worry the house would burn down while I was at work. The pipes froze and the hot water was not very hot and not very ample. When I gave my daughter a bath, I filled the tub with kettles of water heated on the stove. I gave her the warmest room, a cozy space with carpet on the floor and a south facing window. A room with a good window, unlike most of the rest of the windows that were broken and I had to mend with newspaper and plastic to keep out the cold as best I could.
I moved there with Little Bear, who was still a pup, and our oldest cat, a tortoise shell named the Empress who was not much more than a kitten herself at the time. I did not bring my beloved dog Marley because she was so old then, because I did not think she could make it up the 13 very steep steps to our place. She was also beloved company for the X's dog, Yoko, as they were bonded pals-- Yoko had known Marley since Yoko was a pup. It was not an easy decision, by any means, especially since Marley died a year later partly due to the X's benign neglect. But that is another story.
Little Bear and I would get up very early and walk, out of necessity. The house had virtually no yard. I could not just tie him out. I walked him 5 or 6 times a day between work and meals and sleep. The river was nearby and that was a wonderful place to walk to--he and I enjoyed it very much. When winter came and we were out very early in the deep cold, I got myself a good parka with a hood that I zipped and snapped myself inside of and so felt protected from the world.
The house was on a quiet street in this quiet village and the Catholic Church was just across the way. Its bells rang 18 times every morning at 7. I loved to watch the sun rise through the branches of a large old tree that sheltered many birds and embraced the front of the house. I loved to listen to the sound of the waterfall at the dam just a short walk away. Its sound pervaded the air at all times. I had a kind and friendly neighbor next door who proved to be another angel on my walk of life. Her own son, a baby at the time, has autism and Down's Syndrome. She was yet another example to me of a person who does not have much but will always share what she has with others. Sisters in suffering and heartbreak, we do tend to find one another and support one another. She has a husband too, a hard working, quiet guy who helped me out when I needed tools or a truck.
This was the time when I found our church too. I had the sense that once my daughter was a teen, I would need the support of a community. One night I was doing some meditations involving white light. I had recently come to realize white light is the light of Christ. As I sat there visualizing white light, wrapping it around me, and my daughter, and our home space, that light suddenly took a turn of its own and led my mind up the street to the church on the corner. It was a church that had drawn my attention in the past. I had walked by many times and wondered what the lovely stained glass windows, illustrating scenes with grapes and flowers and books, would look like from the inside. I had seen the pastor standing outside in her white robe, with a rainbow colored stole around her neck. The place seemed filled with light, and the sign out front simply said: "Welcome." During the meditation, the church was revealed to me as the place filled with the light of love that I had sensed it to be. So I decided to check it out as soon as my daughter was away one weekend with the X. I was skeptical then, as I am now, at what people create when they band together in the name of organized religion, and was going to choose carefully. But I had the sense that with the white light as my guide, I was not being steered the wrong way.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Legacy
Here's a lovely legacy of the damage inflicted by years of abuse--times like this when I feel dreadfuly alone, isolated, cut off. Stuck on my own little ice floe and floating farther and farther away. It is an inner reality that belies what the eye sees on the external face of things. I look calm. I look cool. That is a learned behavior. Showing distress or need only brought me greater trouble when I was a child and when I was with the X. Being vulnerable was a bad thing, a victim place; it made me prey. And so, I look cool. I look calm. I look like I have no needs at all. But inside, I am a howling mad woman in a raging thunderstorm, tramping the wild heath as the wind drives the rain in horizontal gusts, and I am screaming in despair. (Yes. Imagine the energy it takes to keep that inside. And now you know why I am always so tired.)
There are certain kinds of abuse we never completely heal from. Kind of like when someone is in a disfiguring accident and lose an arm or a leg or an eye or part of their face. You go on, you function, but you are never the same. You are altered for the rest of your life. Sexual abuse does that. Repeated physical, emotional, mental abuse does that. Years of mind games and beatings. Years of heartbreak and emotional pain. Neglect. Disrespect at a phenomenal level. The injuries to trust. They change us, inside, into forms different from the ones we started out with. We learn to go on--or not--just as an amputee learns to function without a right hand or half a left leg.
I can say this with certainty: if I did not have the spirits, in all their many forms--Holy, animal, ancestral, earthy, angelic--if I did not have them to lead me and guide me and touch me and comfort me and remind me, I would be dead. If I were an atheist or an existentialist, I would be dead. I need to believe there is something greater than this earthly life, this worldly structure of human ego run amok, this place that only the eye can see. I need to believe there is something greater than this world obsessed with satisfying itself, this human world so intent on acquisition. Because that, for the most part, has been not so great. In fact, it has been a huge disappointment, a place of hollow emptiness, betrayal, and pain. Heartbreak. Cruelty. I need to believe there is more than this, that what I feel with my heart and see with my inner vision and hear with my inner sense of hearing is true. Because it is true, it has touched me and saved me countless times. It has spoken to me, and taught me truths. Without the spirits, I would be dead. They have touched me, and so, I live.
What is it that impells us over and over again to go on seeking love? Is the heart so blind? And now I must ask you this: now that I have revealed this part of myself to you, will you abandon me too?
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
There are certain kinds of abuse we never completely heal from. Kind of like when someone is in a disfiguring accident and lose an arm or a leg or an eye or part of their face. You go on, you function, but you are never the same. You are altered for the rest of your life. Sexual abuse does that. Repeated physical, emotional, mental abuse does that. Years of mind games and beatings. Years of heartbreak and emotional pain. Neglect. Disrespect at a phenomenal level. The injuries to trust. They change us, inside, into forms different from the ones we started out with. We learn to go on--or not--just as an amputee learns to function without a right hand or half a left leg.
I can say this with certainty: if I did not have the spirits, in all their many forms--Holy, animal, ancestral, earthy, angelic--if I did not have them to lead me and guide me and touch me and comfort me and remind me, I would be dead. If I were an atheist or an existentialist, I would be dead. I need to believe there is something greater than this earthly life, this worldly structure of human ego run amok, this place that only the eye can see. I need to believe there is something greater than this world obsessed with satisfying itself, this human world so intent on acquisition. Because that, for the most part, has been not so great. In fact, it has been a huge disappointment, a place of hollow emptiness, betrayal, and pain. Heartbreak. Cruelty. I need to believe there is more than this, that what I feel with my heart and see with my inner vision and hear with my inner sense of hearing is true. Because it is true, it has touched me and saved me countless times. It has spoken to me, and taught me truths. Without the spirits, I would be dead. They have touched me, and so, I live.
What is it that impells us over and over again to go on seeking love? Is the heart so blind? And now I must ask you this: now that I have revealed this part of myself to you, will you abandon me too?
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Monday, November 5, 2007
Simmering Stew
I awoke today in a simmering stew of anxiety. This happens sometimes. It used to happen all the time. So much so that I did not even notice it as odd until a therapist asked me if I ever woke up that way. Then she asked me how far back could I remember waking up that way. Way back into childhood is what I remember. I can see the view from my bed in my old bedroom, right there beneath the window, and I can hear the starlings in the hedgerow of trees out back. It is autumn and the early sky is pale grey and I am a simmering stew of worry. Living with crazy alcoholic parents can lead to that. You never knew precisely what to expect from them, but you always knew it would be something. To paraphrase Rick Bragg in his memoir "All Over but the Shoutin'", when you have drunks for parents you know in your bones it is all going to fall to shit again eventually.
Regarding this morning, I know a therapist would ask me, "What do you think set this off, Rozenkraai?"
I will try to be a good student of my mood disorders and tentatively answer this way: the annual time change. We turned back the clocks this weekend. I hate change, particularly fundamental change in the structure of my reality, such as that was. It rattles me despite my best intentions for it not too. All tangled up in the stew of awakening worry was a dream I was having. Part of it concerned anxieties I have about my daughter and the process of her applying to and being accepted to college, a process she is currently engaged in. The other part had to do with time. My bedroom clock, a tiny travel clock I keep under my pillow where I can grab it easily when I want to see it, had, in the dream, needed new batteries. I could not get its face to light up and so see the time. That worried me. I had batteries for it, but when I replaced them, I could not get the clock back together in one piece. That really worried me. And so, after the sequence in the dream where I confront my daughter with my fears about her apparent sloth and inertia regarding her college obligations, I am out walking unknown streets alone, my tiny clock in my hands, trying earnestly and somewhat desperately to get it back together.
And then I woke up in a stew of worry, a thick stew that would suffocate and drown me. And what have I found to help me in these times, here in my latter days of trying to manage PTSD and depression (in the same way other people learn to manage diabetes, for example)? Prayer. Scripture. Hymns. The word of God, of Jesus, as assurance and balm, as if a gentle caring person was there beside me, consoling and soothing me.
So today I started with prayer, fervent, scared prayer. That got God's attention. Then Scripture came to mind, where Jesus tells his terrifed disciples (they are terrifed that he is going to leave them, because he is, but not really, a glorious, mystic truth of our Savior, he is with us always, as he tells us, 'even to the end of the age') that what he is leaving them, as a kind of parting gift, is his peace. But he goes on to explain that his peace is nothing like the world's peace, and that he does not give it in the same way the world gives. And because of that, "Do no let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." (This is in the Gospel of John 14 : 27. I find John to be the most mystical and least literal of the Gospel writers, and so he appeals greatly to my poetic mind.)
I repeated that for awhile and eventually began to feel a soothing white light enfold me. I felt held in the arms of angels, or maybe even Jesus himself (I did not open up my eyes to look, merely accepted this miracle of God's love with a grateful heart). And as I surrendered to his love surrounding me, I began to breathe the word peace in and out, inhaled peace and exhaled peace, and that peace finally soothed my rattled, ragged mind and calmed my painfully beating heart.
But having been shaken to the ground by fear too many times in my life, I still feel its after shocks. Even yet this morning I jump at sudden sounds (Luke the cat appears unexpectedly beside me and meows) or I find myself intensely irritated by the sound of Little Bear digging away at an itchy spot in his thick fur. Thankfully, I have learned from experience this jumpiness will subside as the day goes on, just as earthquakes finally, eventually, stop shaking the earth. "Peace is what I leave with you; it is my own peace that I give you. I do not give as the world gives. So do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." Amen.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Regarding this morning, I know a therapist would ask me, "What do you think set this off, Rozenkraai?"
I will try to be a good student of my mood disorders and tentatively answer this way: the annual time change. We turned back the clocks this weekend. I hate change, particularly fundamental change in the structure of my reality, such as that was. It rattles me despite my best intentions for it not too. All tangled up in the stew of awakening worry was a dream I was having. Part of it concerned anxieties I have about my daughter and the process of her applying to and being accepted to college, a process she is currently engaged in. The other part had to do with time. My bedroom clock, a tiny travel clock I keep under my pillow where I can grab it easily when I want to see it, had, in the dream, needed new batteries. I could not get its face to light up and so see the time. That worried me. I had batteries for it, but when I replaced them, I could not get the clock back together in one piece. That really worried me. And so, after the sequence in the dream where I confront my daughter with my fears about her apparent sloth and inertia regarding her college obligations, I am out walking unknown streets alone, my tiny clock in my hands, trying earnestly and somewhat desperately to get it back together.
And then I woke up in a stew of worry, a thick stew that would suffocate and drown me. And what have I found to help me in these times, here in my latter days of trying to manage PTSD and depression (in the same way other people learn to manage diabetes, for example)? Prayer. Scripture. Hymns. The word of God, of Jesus, as assurance and balm, as if a gentle caring person was there beside me, consoling and soothing me.
So today I started with prayer, fervent, scared prayer. That got God's attention. Then Scripture came to mind, where Jesus tells his terrifed disciples (they are terrifed that he is going to leave them, because he is, but not really, a glorious, mystic truth of our Savior, he is with us always, as he tells us, 'even to the end of the age') that what he is leaving them, as a kind of parting gift, is his peace. But he goes on to explain that his peace is nothing like the world's peace, and that he does not give it in the same way the world gives. And because of that, "Do no let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." (This is in the Gospel of John 14 : 27. I find John to be the most mystical and least literal of the Gospel writers, and so he appeals greatly to my poetic mind.)
I repeated that for awhile and eventually began to feel a soothing white light enfold me. I felt held in the arms of angels, or maybe even Jesus himself (I did not open up my eyes to look, merely accepted this miracle of God's love with a grateful heart). And as I surrendered to his love surrounding me, I began to breathe the word peace in and out, inhaled peace and exhaled peace, and that peace finally soothed my rattled, ragged mind and calmed my painfully beating heart.
But having been shaken to the ground by fear too many times in my life, I still feel its after shocks. Even yet this morning I jump at sudden sounds (Luke the cat appears unexpectedly beside me and meows) or I find myself intensely irritated by the sound of Little Bear digging away at an itchy spot in his thick fur. Thankfully, I have learned from experience this jumpiness will subside as the day goes on, just as earthquakes finally, eventually, stop shaking the earth. "Peace is what I leave with you; it is my own peace that I give you. I do not give as the world gives. So do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." Amen.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Sunday, November 4, 2007
One of My Poems
wild girl
wild girl,
her eyes are green
like woodland streams, at seventeen
she dreams of desert mesas
and rough cowboy lovers
whose tongues are soft,
golden tequila and salty limes
under a moon crusted by dry stars.
back east
she rode the boys too fast,
like wild horses in her dreaming.
they didn't know what had just
passed them by,
wondered maybe if
it was fiery roses, what the sunset
might smell like.
wild girl she dreamed
so far from home, certain her
crazy mustang longing
would carry her there.
now she walks a hillside,
and she steals canned peaches
from the poor people’s food
pantry
when no one is there,
after she’s mopped up the salt
from the fellowship
hall floor, after she’s straightened up the hymnals
and stacked the bibles, bleached the shit stains from
the toilets, and quenched her longing
with leftover
communion grape juice--
this wild girl whose eyes
are still green like forest moss,
but softened by the dew
of useless tears, and rimmed
by lines put there
by squinting too long
into the western sky.
her heart
echoes with painful rhythms
of endless footfalls,
love turning away, saying good-bye--
good-bye to wild girl
dreams, to impossible men,
to friends and soft places
where hope dared speak up for itself.
she’s too hard now, too scared, too scarred, too hurt
to even hint at the hiding place
of her wild rose heart
and let out its scent to trace the sunset wind.
she still dreams a little about
a kind of man who’s
elusive and sad, a little bad,
lean, handsome
craving her touch
her heat
her heart
her special madness. partners in crime
is what they’d be. they would ride
paint mustangs into the sunset.
but really she walks
home from work at sunset,
under a dusty grey sky,
kicking a chunk of ice up the hill.
she knows
the wild boys are mostly
broken old drunks now,
addicts with grand kids ,
big bellies, bigger trucks,
flabby, stupid dreams.
she knows
the wild men are damaged boys--
mean, dangerous, bitten up,
or maybe tamed
by long marriages--
become fat dogs farting before the fire,
full from supper, their teeth now yellow
and flat.
so when she vacuums up baby’s breath
and blood red rose petals after weddings
in the only sanctuary
that hasn't failed her,
and when no one can hear,
except maybe the busy praying
ghosts ,
she howls out her wild girl dreaming
voice, long and sweet.
she sings out her passion in a tongue
the wolves know, under the moon,
above the snow,
sings so that even Jesus looks up
from what he’s doing
and wonders at the sound.
wild girl,
her eyes are green
like woodland streams, at seventeen
she dreams of desert mesas
and rough cowboy lovers
whose tongues are soft,
golden tequila and salty limes
under a moon crusted by dry stars.
back east
she rode the boys too fast,
like wild horses in her dreaming.
they didn't know what had just
passed them by,
wondered maybe if
it was fiery roses, what the sunset
might smell like.
wild girl she dreamed
so far from home, certain her
crazy mustang longing
would carry her there.
now she walks a hillside,
and she steals canned peaches
from the poor people’s food
pantry
when no one is there,
after she’s mopped up the salt
from the fellowship
hall floor, after she’s straightened up the hymnals
and stacked the bibles, bleached the shit stains from
the toilets, and quenched her longing
with leftover
communion grape juice--
this wild girl whose eyes
are still green like forest moss,
but softened by the dew
of useless tears, and rimmed
by lines put there
by squinting too long
into the western sky.
her heart
echoes with painful rhythms
of endless footfalls,
love turning away, saying good-bye--
good-bye to wild girl
dreams, to impossible men,
to friends and soft places
where hope dared speak up for itself.
she’s too hard now, too scared, too scarred, too hurt
to even hint at the hiding place
of her wild rose heart
and let out its scent to trace the sunset wind.
she still dreams a little about
a kind of man who’s
elusive and sad, a little bad,
lean, handsome
craving her touch
her heat
her heart
her special madness. partners in crime
is what they’d be. they would ride
paint mustangs into the sunset.
but really she walks
home from work at sunset,
under a dusty grey sky,
kicking a chunk of ice up the hill.
she knows
the wild boys are mostly
broken old drunks now,
addicts with grand kids ,
big bellies, bigger trucks,
flabby, stupid dreams.
she knows
the wild men are damaged boys--
mean, dangerous, bitten up,
or maybe tamed
by long marriages--
become fat dogs farting before the fire,
full from supper, their teeth now yellow
and flat.
so when she vacuums up baby’s breath
and blood red rose petals after weddings
in the only sanctuary
that hasn't failed her,
and when no one can hear,
except maybe the busy praying
ghosts ,
she howls out her wild girl dreaming
voice, long and sweet.
she sings out her passion in a tongue
the wolves know, under the moon,
above the snow,
sings so that even Jesus looks up
from what he’s doing
and wonders at the sound.
And Where Was God?--Part 2
Memories of my teen years are memories of fire and darkness, of the pain of shattered glass. I speak in metaphor here. I was troubled, depressed, unhappy, suicidal, love-starved, risk-taking, self-destructive. I was desperate; I was a mess; I was ashamed. I got drunk for the first time at 12, on a summer afternoon when my mother was at work. I drank scotch straight from the bottle, enough to make me loopy and exhilarated, and then staggeringly, deathly sick until finally I blacked out. I vaguely remember surfacing from my stupor to the sight of my step father leaning over my bedside in my dark bedroom, breathing in my boozy breath, and telling me I could have killed myself.
This makes me realize I should add vomiting to my list of teen memories, vomiting after drinking. Head in the toilet, toilet seat falling down on my head (that actually happened at a family event, and my mother and aunt stood in the bathroom doorway laughing at me while I struggled to get the toilet seat off from around my neck), and, if at a party, crouched over the toilet with a loyal girl friend behind me holding back my hair from the mess. We did that for each other, we girls. Someone always came with us when we puked, so we could hold back each other's hair. Because I was certainly not the only one who drank. Drinking was what we did, every party, and puking was part of the deal. Also once we could drive, we drove drunk. I remember slamming my hand in a car door while drunk and not feeling it. We are all lucky we are still alive, when I consider what we did in cars while drunk, deleriously, wildly drunk.
Anyway, I looked okay on the outside, as has always been true for me. People knew little of what a burning wasteland existed inside me, a place of toxic waste emitting vile gas. Skilled observers in the form of certain teachers responded to the girl in pain. These were my angels then, English teachers for the most part, who read my poetry and other writing and responded to me--saw me. Saw. Me.
(Then there were the ones who did not see. At 16, I asked to be able to see the school psychologist. I knew how suicidal I was. The day after I had asked, I was called down to the office during the morning announcements. I was met there by Mr. Fischer, the man who headed up the Audio-Visual Department. He beckoned me to follow him. We went down the hall past the trophy cases and turned left into the nurse's office. Once inside, he led me into the room where the hearing tests were administered. He told me to sit. He shut the door. He sat across from me at the table. He looked at me for a moment before asking, 'What does Rozenkraai, who plays field hockey and writes poetry, want with the school psychologist?"
This was the 1970s. Obviously I wasn't enough of a mess to qualify for the services of Dr. Gold. Very affirming!
And so, wondering just what the hell Mr. Fischer had to do with this anyway, I told him I was suicidal. We left it at that. Next thing I know, I am placed in the group therapy led by a social worker. I am there with all the druggies and burnouts, and they are talking about the different grades and types of pot and their differing effects. I never, ever went back, and I never, ever asked for help at the school again.)
But the writing! The writing was a green shoot of life inside me, a growing vine. In the writing was the presence of God. It kept me alive, it gave me hope, it was fueled by love. It helped me then, as now, to transform ugliness and pain into something beautiful. It helped me make sense of it all, and it gave voice to feelings that were tidal in their immensity. It also gave me a sense of accomplishment and nurtured the tiniest flame of self esteem that somehow managed to glow valiantly inside me, small, but present nonetheless. This flame was a legacy of the love I had faithfully received along the way, from all my angels, all the spirits who surrounded me and nurtured me along. For I know in truth that God is love, and in all acts of love, God is there.
And it would be through the writing of one poet in particular, later on in college, that my heart and my mind would open to matters of the soul and of the spiritual immensity of the cosmos. I would then begin to consciously seek, so as to truly know, God-- a journey I have been on ever since. But that is another story.
Until then, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
This makes me realize I should add vomiting to my list of teen memories, vomiting after drinking. Head in the toilet, toilet seat falling down on my head (that actually happened at a family event, and my mother and aunt stood in the bathroom doorway laughing at me while I struggled to get the toilet seat off from around my neck), and, if at a party, crouched over the toilet with a loyal girl friend behind me holding back my hair from the mess. We did that for each other, we girls. Someone always came with us when we puked, so we could hold back each other's hair. Because I was certainly not the only one who drank. Drinking was what we did, every party, and puking was part of the deal. Also once we could drive, we drove drunk. I remember slamming my hand in a car door while drunk and not feeling it. We are all lucky we are still alive, when I consider what we did in cars while drunk, deleriously, wildly drunk.
Anyway, I looked okay on the outside, as has always been true for me. People knew little of what a burning wasteland existed inside me, a place of toxic waste emitting vile gas. Skilled observers in the form of certain teachers responded to the girl in pain. These were my angels then, English teachers for the most part, who read my poetry and other writing and responded to me--saw me. Saw. Me.
(Then there were the ones who did not see. At 16, I asked to be able to see the school psychologist. I knew how suicidal I was. The day after I had asked, I was called down to the office during the morning announcements. I was met there by Mr. Fischer, the man who headed up the Audio-Visual Department. He beckoned me to follow him. We went down the hall past the trophy cases and turned left into the nurse's office. Once inside, he led me into the room where the hearing tests were administered. He told me to sit. He shut the door. He sat across from me at the table. He looked at me for a moment before asking, 'What does Rozenkraai, who plays field hockey and writes poetry, want with the school psychologist?"
This was the 1970s. Obviously I wasn't enough of a mess to qualify for the services of Dr. Gold. Very affirming!
And so, wondering just what the hell Mr. Fischer had to do with this anyway, I told him I was suicidal. We left it at that. Next thing I know, I am placed in the group therapy led by a social worker. I am there with all the druggies and burnouts, and they are talking about the different grades and types of pot and their differing effects. I never, ever went back, and I never, ever asked for help at the school again.)
But the writing! The writing was a green shoot of life inside me, a growing vine. In the writing was the presence of God. It kept me alive, it gave me hope, it was fueled by love. It helped me then, as now, to transform ugliness and pain into something beautiful. It helped me make sense of it all, and it gave voice to feelings that were tidal in their immensity. It also gave me a sense of accomplishment and nurtured the tiniest flame of self esteem that somehow managed to glow valiantly inside me, small, but present nonetheless. This flame was a legacy of the love I had faithfully received along the way, from all my angels, all the spirits who surrounded me and nurtured me along. For I know in truth that God is love, and in all acts of love, God is there.
And it would be through the writing of one poet in particular, later on in college, that my heart and my mind would open to matters of the soul and of the spiritual immensity of the cosmos. I would then begin to consciously seek, so as to truly know, God-- a journey I have been on ever since. But that is another story.
Until then, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Saturday, November 3, 2007
And, Where Was God?--Part 1
So, it's easy to wonder where God was throughout the various disasters, lost paths, vile turnings and traumatic moments of my life. I myself cannot help but wonder how terrible things can be perpetrated onto children--such as when my step-father sexually abused me in the bathub when I was 3, although he no longer laid his rough hands upon me in a sexual way much after that, and also just as my mother made her last attempt at beating me when I was 13, tackled me in my bedroom and soon realized she had taken on more than she could handle. So much horror is perpetrated against the weak, the helpless, the powerless, and the innocent of this planet--the very ones we are called as Christians to care for-- that I cannot even begin to postulate a theory of where God is. I can't. And that is not to say my faith is weak or that God has some explaining to do. All I can do is look back at my own life and find the blessings and kindnesses and bright spots, and say, There, God is there.
Because that is what I believe: that instead of standing around and tsk tsking about where the hell is God anyway when bad things happen, it is up to us to fix things and mend things and lend comfort and sustenance to those who are hurting. It is up to us to not commit wrongs upon each other, and to not intentionally cause each other harm and pain. For God works through us--that is how God's fixes things; he uses our hands.
I have explored many spiritual paths throughout my life. I was baptized a Catholic, because of my father's Italian, French Canadian, Mohawk background, but after he died I was firmly in the hands of the Protestants. As a child I was made to go to a mainline Protestant church that shall remain unidentified, and have, to this day, a Fear of That Denomination's Faithful. Thankfully my parents' own flabby faith saved me from having to go there too much, and they gave up on the attempt at making me go fairly soon after it started. Suffice it to say I found it to be a fairly cheerless place. I have vague memoires of learning about Nero fiddling while Rome burned, and the song 'Jesus Loves Me.' I spent one horrible Sunday as the nursery attendant, and was postive I left that assignment absolutely covered in boogers. I also remember my mother curling my long hair and dolling me up in Easter finery, while they barely managed to get out of their pajamas and t-shirts to get in the car and drop off me, bright and colorful as a little Easter egg. In their mangled way, they were trying to do the right thing, but even then I had a whiff of how damaged an attempt it was.
My mother had also tried to teach me to pray, to her credit. Bedtime prayers in which I asked God to bless my my loved ones, and I named them by name. She had also hung a bedtime prayer that glowed in the dark above my bed, though it is that one that is a little scary, ending with the lines, "If I should die before I wake....."
Beyond that, I took solace then, as I do now, in nature. I took solace in the companionship of my beagle, Cindy. I basked in the love of my grandmother, and enjoyed the times spent with my Aunt and her family. I also had a huge company of imaginary friends I spent my days with. I had an altered identity when I was with them, and they were all people who loved me, first and foremost, but who also were accomplished and talented. They treated me with respectful kindness. As I look back on it now, I think perhaps my 'imaginary' friends were truly angels, because I believe that if we can imagine it, it can indeed be a true thing.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Because that is what I believe: that instead of standing around and tsk tsking about where the hell is God anyway when bad things happen, it is up to us to fix things and mend things and lend comfort and sustenance to those who are hurting. It is up to us to not commit wrongs upon each other, and to not intentionally cause each other harm and pain. For God works through us--that is how God's fixes things; he uses our hands.
I have explored many spiritual paths throughout my life. I was baptized a Catholic, because of my father's Italian, French Canadian, Mohawk background, but after he died I was firmly in the hands of the Protestants. As a child I was made to go to a mainline Protestant church that shall remain unidentified, and have, to this day, a Fear of That Denomination's Faithful. Thankfully my parents' own flabby faith saved me from having to go there too much, and they gave up on the attempt at making me go fairly soon after it started. Suffice it to say I found it to be a fairly cheerless place. I have vague memoires of learning about Nero fiddling while Rome burned, and the song 'Jesus Loves Me.' I spent one horrible Sunday as the nursery attendant, and was postive I left that assignment absolutely covered in boogers. I also remember my mother curling my long hair and dolling me up in Easter finery, while they barely managed to get out of their pajamas and t-shirts to get in the car and drop off me, bright and colorful as a little Easter egg. In their mangled way, they were trying to do the right thing, but even then I had a whiff of how damaged an attempt it was.
My mother had also tried to teach me to pray, to her credit. Bedtime prayers in which I asked God to bless my my loved ones, and I named them by name. She had also hung a bedtime prayer that glowed in the dark above my bed, though it is that one that is a little scary, ending with the lines, "If I should die before I wake....."
Beyond that, I took solace then, as I do now, in nature. I took solace in the companionship of my beagle, Cindy. I basked in the love of my grandmother, and enjoyed the times spent with my Aunt and her family. I also had a huge company of imaginary friends I spent my days with. I had an altered identity when I was with them, and they were all people who loved me, first and foremost, but who also were accomplished and talented. They treated me with respectful kindness. As I look back on it now, I think perhaps my 'imaginary' friends were truly angels, because I believe that if we can imagine it, it can indeed be a true thing.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Love of My Life
The X. He was most assuredly the love of my life. Tall, handsome, charming. In the moonlight, he looked like an ancient King. I could almost see that star shining on his brow, like Aragorn from 'Lord of the Rings'. He was intelligent and gracious. He wrote me love poems, good ones. He told me how he saw me as a wild Indian woman in a vision, his pregnant wife driving a team of horses in a dream. He made me tea. He wooed me in grand romantic style, welcomed me in, lured me close using compliments as sweet bait. I thought finally here is a man who truly knows me! I loved him so!
Think of a villianous fox in a Beatrice Potter tale, the one with that Silly Goose, next in line to be stuffed with sage dressing--dinner! He was suave and smooth. I fell for it as surely did the goose. So kind and gracious to me--me! Little Miss Nobody. Wow.
He wanted me to move in, he wanted me to marry him. So, I married him, and when we kissed during the wedding, that final seal of a kiss, I felt a charge, a current, a subtle energy pass between us in a grand circling flow, making us one. I did. This was a marriage on more than the physical level, it was a union of souls, I was sure of it. (Conveniently forgetting, needing to forget, perhaps, that on the day of our wedding, held at the farm, outside, on our land, in May when the violets bloom like tiny amethysts in the grass, that when one of his former woman friends--never my girlfriend, he assured me--crashed the wedding, all his attention turned from me to her. I became secondary on a day when I should have been primary. Janelle, the woman who had introduced me to him and who now stood as my maid of honor, turned to me at one point as my new husband kept his full attention on the female wedding crasher, and asked me, wryly, "What the hell is that about?")
Trouble brewing. But I remained as optimistic as I could manage, because this was my life now, after all. Besides that, I was pregnant. Six months pregnant, and beautiful, with long flowing chestnut hair and wearing a flowing purple dress. More beautiful than that wedding crasher, surely that accounted for something? Not really, it would take me years to learn, not really for a man who went through women like candy bars, eating the entire piece, licking the wrapper clean, and then tossing it aside.
And me, who never wanted children, pregnant? My baby was an 'unplanned blessing'. Remember contraceptive sponges, taken off the market because they didn't work? Yes. Well. But I was so in love, such a fool for love, I was delighted to be having a baby, his baby, and we had a farm and she would grow up there in the beauty and joy of nature, and he and I would grow old there together and it would all be so fine. He used to spin fantasies of our child working alongside us at the farmer's market and about the house he would build us with an upstairs balcony that faced the sunrise, and a garden enclosed with a high stone wall, and I listened like a bright eyed child hearing fairy tales but thinking it was all too true. All true. He was so wonderful, of course it was all true. And I deserved a happy life, so yes, it would all come true.
What a set-up I can say now, with wiser, experienced eyes. But I was so happy and hopeful then, I thought my dreams for a good man and a nice family and the life I had hoped to achieve had come to me. That was the hook, that was the trap. It took many years for me to awaken to that nightmare disguised as a happy dream, and then to rouse myself, and untangle myself from the details of a marriage and a business and a home, and get my daughter and myself the hell out of there. Because what I know now that I did not know then was his charm, his too-good-to-be-trueness, were the hallmarks of an abuser. And that at some point I would fall from grace in his eyes, never be good enough for him again, and would try over and over to win back that loving attention. Like a child.
When I stood up to him like an adult woman, he would strike me down. With his hands, with his words, with his scorn. Much like my step-father did when I spoke truth to his abusive power. Because as any domestic violence counselor will tell you, it is all about the power, and them having it to control you. Power and control. It manifests in so many ways, from the subtle emotional and psychological madness to the gross level of physically pounding you down. And we get wrapped up in it and whipped around by it until our heads spin and we have forgotten what normal is supposed to look like. I remember trying to figure out how to please him again, to make it all right between us again, and him changing the rules as soon as I had figured out the game. Endlessly. There is a word for that kind of thing: crazy making. They make us crazy, our heads spinning, our hearts broken, our energies focused on the thought, if only I can get this right, he will be happy with me again. It was a nightmare, a life in hell; I was a hostage, a prisoner of war. And it took me many years to shake off the degradation and wake up to the illusion and stand up and walk tall and get out of there, get away. Escape. It wasn't easy. And, I still loved him. But that, my dear friends, is another story.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
Think of a villianous fox in a Beatrice Potter tale, the one with that Silly Goose, next in line to be stuffed with sage dressing--dinner! He was suave and smooth. I fell for it as surely did the goose. So kind and gracious to me--me! Little Miss Nobody. Wow.
He wanted me to move in, he wanted me to marry him. So, I married him, and when we kissed during the wedding, that final seal of a kiss, I felt a charge, a current, a subtle energy pass between us in a grand circling flow, making us one. I did. This was a marriage on more than the physical level, it was a union of souls, I was sure of it. (Conveniently forgetting, needing to forget, perhaps, that on the day of our wedding, held at the farm, outside, on our land, in May when the violets bloom like tiny amethysts in the grass, that when one of his former woman friends--never my girlfriend, he assured me--crashed the wedding, all his attention turned from me to her. I became secondary on a day when I should have been primary. Janelle, the woman who had introduced me to him and who now stood as my maid of honor, turned to me at one point as my new husband kept his full attention on the female wedding crasher, and asked me, wryly, "What the hell is that about?")
Trouble brewing. But I remained as optimistic as I could manage, because this was my life now, after all. Besides that, I was pregnant. Six months pregnant, and beautiful, with long flowing chestnut hair and wearing a flowing purple dress. More beautiful than that wedding crasher, surely that accounted for something? Not really, it would take me years to learn, not really for a man who went through women like candy bars, eating the entire piece, licking the wrapper clean, and then tossing it aside.
And me, who never wanted children, pregnant? My baby was an 'unplanned blessing'. Remember contraceptive sponges, taken off the market because they didn't work? Yes. Well. But I was so in love, such a fool for love, I was delighted to be having a baby, his baby, and we had a farm and she would grow up there in the beauty and joy of nature, and he and I would grow old there together and it would all be so fine. He used to spin fantasies of our child working alongside us at the farmer's market and about the house he would build us with an upstairs balcony that faced the sunrise, and a garden enclosed with a high stone wall, and I listened like a bright eyed child hearing fairy tales but thinking it was all too true. All true. He was so wonderful, of course it was all true. And I deserved a happy life, so yes, it would all come true.
What a set-up I can say now, with wiser, experienced eyes. But I was so happy and hopeful then, I thought my dreams for a good man and a nice family and the life I had hoped to achieve had come to me. That was the hook, that was the trap. It took many years for me to awaken to that nightmare disguised as a happy dream, and then to rouse myself, and untangle myself from the details of a marriage and a business and a home, and get my daughter and myself the hell out of there. Because what I know now that I did not know then was his charm, his too-good-to-be-trueness, were the hallmarks of an abuser. And that at some point I would fall from grace in his eyes, never be good enough for him again, and would try over and over to win back that loving attention. Like a child.
When I stood up to him like an adult woman, he would strike me down. With his hands, with his words, with his scorn. Much like my step-father did when I spoke truth to his abusive power. Because as any domestic violence counselor will tell you, it is all about the power, and them having it to control you. Power and control. It manifests in so many ways, from the subtle emotional and psychological madness to the gross level of physically pounding you down. And we get wrapped up in it and whipped around by it until our heads spin and we have forgotten what normal is supposed to look like. I remember trying to figure out how to please him again, to make it all right between us again, and him changing the rules as soon as I had figured out the game. Endlessly. There is a word for that kind of thing: crazy making. They make us crazy, our heads spinning, our hearts broken, our energies focused on the thought, if only I can get this right, he will be happy with me again. It was a nightmare, a life in hell; I was a hostage, a prisoner of war. And it took me many years to shake off the degradation and wake up to the illusion and stand up and walk tall and get out of there, get away. Escape. It wasn't easy. And, I still loved him. But that, my dear friends, is another story.
Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai
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