unbreak my heart: nope

I had a series of heart attacks in 1997-98. I did not know I was having heart attacks when I had them. I would feel great pressure in my chest, but not really pain. Then the pressure would go away when I vomited. Once I vomited, I felt perfectly fine.

In those days, I almost never saw doctors. I had insurance to cover doctor visits but I neglected my self care. In the case of those heart attacks, however, I truly had no idea the experience was serious. I thought it was indigestion.

Somehow, though, a doctor became aware of what had been going on and referred me to a cardiologist, who fitted me with a heart monitor for 30 days. At the end, my cardiologist said "Well, you definitely had some heart attacks but it's too late to know exactly what happened."

I was much more obese back then than I am now. I imagine my weight had something to do with those heart episodes.

I have had good heart health since. . . but. . . . as part of my ongoing health care, while doing a routine heart test for a routine annual check up, rumblings of those long ago heart attacks showed up on the test. So more elaborate tests were found.  I don't remember the name of any of these tests.

when I went to the more specific test to see if I had heart episodes, the technologist doing the test was helpful and friendly. She pointed to the lines on the machine that showed my heart beating, but pointed specifically to the kinky lines that indicated that at some time in the past, I had had some serious heart 'episodes'.

Emotional broken hearts seem similar to me. If there were an echogram or cardiogram or whatever to see if my heart has been emotionally broken, I'd want to take that test regularly, although what is the point? Such a test would show, just like my medical tests to look at any possible history of 'heart episodes, would show kinky lines of heart brokenness. And such tests would not show that such lines had healed.

I will never heal from the loss of my daughter.

And I will not recover, ever, from other forms of emotional broken heartedness.

My health, physically, is okay but my broken heart debilitates me. Not the heart attack brokenness. The emotional breaks.

I can be happy again, although I don't really expect I ever will be happy again.  I am thinking very seriously of ending my life. Between the darkness overtaking the world, like the Deatheaters of Harry Potter, the world does not seem to be a good place for someone as heart broken as me. All appears dark and hopeless to me.

I wish I could unbreak my heart. I wish I could just believe it were possible. But I do not.

many people asleep

I have often said that although men are awake, they actually sleep through the most important concerns in life. And I can give you the not very heartening assurance that anyone who goes through life with alert consciousness to-day finds numbers and numbers of human beings who are really asleep. They let events happen without taking the slightest interest in them, without troubling about them or associating themselves with these happenings in any way. Great world-events often pass men by just as something that is taking place in the city passes a sleeper by … although people are apparently awake.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 182 – The Work of the Angels In Man’s Astral Body – Zurich, 9th October, 1918
Translated by D. S. Osmond with the help of Owen Barfield

the magic earrings live on

Long ago, when my now 33 year old daughter was four or five, my mom visited us. Like all good mom/grandmas with lots of money, she took us shopping.

I usually focussed on having my mom buy things for Rosie. Most single mothers, and I was a single mother for all but the first 18 months of Rosie's minority, have less cash than two-parent households. My mom was great understanding that I was always short.

I imagine mom would have bought me clothes on our shopping trips but I focussed on Rosie's needs.

Once, however, mom bought me a pair of Swaroski crystal teardrop earrings. The crystal is treated to reflect all the colors of the rainbow. Simple, relatively inexpensive for costume jewely. And maybe, just maybe, she bought them to facilitate Rosie giving me a gift.

My memory on why mom made the crystal tear drop earrings is fuzzy.

They are magic earrings. Many times I have lost one, sometimes for months at a stretch. And then the lost earring always reappears. 

Once, when I still lived in Mountain View, a swimming friend, Kay, and I went out to lunch together after swimming, showering, hair drying, dressing. Kay was interviewing a new, new to her, realtor. Kay was househunting, with a budget of up to one million dollars. In 2005, you could buy lots of very nice homes for a million bucks in Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mountain View, although, and this surprised both Kay and I, it was a lot harder to find bargain one million dollar homes in MV than in any surrounding suburbs.

Kay wanted to be able to go on swimming in the MV pool. She didn't like any of the houses we looked at, and I went with her on just about all her househunting shopping trips. She looked hard in Palo Alto becaduse for a long time, she was determined to only buy a new house. There are not many new houses on the Peninsula and the most, which was not all that many, were in Palo Ato.

Kay is from Thailand. She was deeply superstitious about buying a 'used' house. She said she could never know for sure if someone had died in a house and she did not want a dead person's energy in any house she lived in.

Eh. Kay ended up buying a used house in Palo Alto. She shopped more than anyone I have ever known. I eventually met her daughter, a Brown grad, US citizen because Kay came to USA to have her first child so that child could enchor the future citizenship quests of the whole family. Kay is now an American citizen, sponsored by her anchor baby. Once born in America, that daughter grew up in Thailand, where Kay and her ex husband became multimillionaires running a chain of lumberyards.  One kid went to Brown, one to London School of Economics and one to STanford.

Kay's baby went to STanford and she had followed her baby to the peninsula. On her first day headed to Stanford, she got off at the wrong freeway stop, not the one closest to Stanford and saw a model townhome for sale. Kay pulled in with her rental car and bought the model home, with the proviso that all the rented model home furniture come with it. After all, Kay had no furniture in America.

Her daughter worked for an investment bank, her fluency in Chinese being a powerful skill, plus her Brown degree. That daughter got a $350K bonus in 2008! So I guess she was doing all right. The daughter was living in Hong Kong when I swam with Kay but assumed she would eventually live in the US and decided she wanted to own a house for the mortgage income tax deduction.  That chick must have been making some very big bucks if, as an American living and working abroad, she wouldn't have had to pay incoe taxes on a fairly large chunk of foreign income. I guess a $350K bonus took her over the top and she needed a deduction.

Kay would buy a more expensive home, although the townhome was very, very nice. As she househunted interminably, and I had fun keeping her company because it was the only way I was ever going to see multiple expensive hoes in Palo Alto, Los Altos, etc. As she shopped, Kay decided lot size was more important than buying a used house. She ended up buying a very large lot with a decent sized house with 3 bedrooms on a corner in Los Altos. Then she did a gut rehab of most of the house, mostly to give it a state of the art and very expensive kitchen. The whole house revolved around that spectacular kitchen. And the back yard was huge, large enough to plop down a couple more houses. Such lots are very rare anywhere in N. Cali except in the most expensive places.

And, and this was huge to Kay, since Los Altos had no public pool, Los Altos had an agreement with MV that allowed Los Altos residents to use the MV pool at MV resident rates. As a senior, it cost very little to swim in MV and Kay may have been rich but she was cheap. She cheated on getting the senior rate a few eyars early because the young lifeguards selling the swim tickets didn't know how old she looked. Black don't crack. Maybe Asians don't show their age as much as whites. Or maybe one race doesn't recognize the signs of aging in other races. All the young lifeguards in MV were white and sold Kay the very cheap senior rate before she was old enough.

How I run on.

Kay and I had lunch with a new realtor. Kay had first used the son of her bank officer, the bank officer who had preapproved her for a million dollar mortgage, which meant Kay could make offers as she househunted with no delay for mortgage processing. Kay, unfamiliar with American culture, thought she had to use the loan officer's son to keep the mortgage guarantee and we had gone out with the kid once. Just once.

Five minutes into that outing and I was signaling to kay behind the kid's back that she could do better. If Kay bought a million dollar house, the kid was going to make a lot of money, at least fifty grand but he was clueless. And lazy. He seemed to think his commission was a sure thing, easy money. and maybe life works that way for some lucky white boys but this kid was dumb. And cheap. Kay trusted my judgment because of my law degree. Also, I once was a bona fide realtor. And once a mortgage banker. But mostly, I had her reject that kid after assuring her that now that she had the mortgage guarantee, she would not lose it if she didnt use the loan officer's son. Or nephew, whoever that dope was. The kid complained about spending gas to drive us around, when he had insisted on driving us. You don't brumble about spending ten or twenty bucks on gas when you have a sure-thing buyer with a preapproved mortgage. Heck, you buy her lunch along with the gas.

So Kay had asked around and we had lunch with a mature, forty-something, African American British realtor. She was well mannered, smart and clearly knew the real estate business. She'd been selling hosues on the Peninsula for twenty years and her husband was a contractor, who, I believe, got the job to gut rehab Kay's new home.

Long story short:  I had both my earrings on when we arrived for lunch with that realtor. Half way thorugh lunch, I realized one earring was missing. I stood up and shook to shake off the earrings. Kay and the realtor looked, even on their hands and knees on the floor.  I went through my swim bag microscopically. No earring.

then, about six months later, it turned up on a book shelf in my apartment.

A magic earring.

A couple weeks ago, and not for the first time since I moved to Berkeley, I lost one of my tear drop crystal earrings again. This time, I didn't even look for it, nor did I fret. I reminded myself it was one of my magic earrings and it would turn up.

And it did. Today.

Magic earrings. Lovely.

another 'I hate Catholic priests' tale

Around the year 2002, maybe 2003, my baby brother bought a house in Berwyn. Our mom had been living with him in his previous, much bigger house. When Dave and his longtime life partner broke up, they sold the house to split the equity, which was not entirely fair because my mom had bought that house, given them the downstroke, a huge downstroke. Tom, Dave's now departed ex who became his ex before he died, unfortunately (so after helping Tom build up his estate, Dave got zippity do dah and Tom's heirs got equity my mom's assets had built up for Tom.

Life is often unfair, eh?

So Dave downsizes and, of course, takes mom with him.

Mom was isolated. Dave worked all day. And Dave parties a lot. Mom had no friends in the new neighborhood, not that our mom was every much of a social butterfly. she usually had at least a couple friends. But when Dave moved her to Berwyn, just as memory issues set in and she lost a meaningful capacity to form bonds, she was suddenly living alone almost all the time. Between work and dating, because Dave vigorously enjoyed his new found freedom for unlimited zipless fucks, our mom spent virtually all her life alone in the house, sometimes venturing out into the yard.

The poor thing regularly locked herself out of the house, by mistake. Then she'd get the young housewife next door to shimmy into the basement through an unlocked window and let mom in. Thank goddess that neighbor let her in, eh? Otherwise mom would have been adrift all day, no phone, her memory to addlepated to remember she had two other sons, multiple grandchildren, friends, and, push comes to shove, police and firemen to help her. The neighbor's help helped a lot.

Two houses away from where Mom and Dave lived, there was a YMCA building that was used for a senior day care center. One did not have to be enrolled full time either. One could just drop in, like most senior centers. We tried, as hard as I could 'try' from California or my sister from Kuwait, to get mom to check out that senior center. When we visited her in person, we'd go over there with her.

The center was not quite a day care center. It was a senior center to give seniors a space for socializing, with various classes.

Dave knew, and so did I, that by the time he had moved her to Berwyn, mom's memory was pretty far gone. She couldn't find her two two doors down to that senior center, much less make friends.

That unhappy situation for my mother continued for several years. My sister, by then, had moved back to thet states (altho she now lives in Shanghai!) and settled into Urbana, IL to get her PhD, which she got a couple years ago and left the country. by then, our mother had died.

One day, sis told bro that she was taking mom down to Urbana for a weekend. Then sis dropped mom off at a nursing home in Urbana, asked them to evaluate mom and mom was found to have such serious memory issues that she could no longer be alone. Mom had to have one of her children take legal responsibility for mom or else the court would appoint a guardian ad litem. Sweet sis would not accept responsibility. I tried to explain to sis and another brother that being legally responsible did not put my sister at any risk financially. It was about making decisions. The court wouldn't accept Dave to be mom's power of attorney because he had not been giving her all of her multitude of prescribed meds. I actually supported the choice not to give her the shitload of meds she was prescribed. But I was in CA and my mom and siblings duked out how mom would spend her final years in an arena in which I had no voice. And I was grateful.

But it was wicked hard on Dave. One day he lived with his mother, as he had for fiffteen years ore more and one day she was gone. If she had been put in a nursing home near where Dave was, he would have visited her once a week for the rst of her life. He didn't own a car so he could not drive to Urbana.

Once our mom was in the nursing home system as a ward of the state with an attorney makig decisions, mom got shuffled around to several nursing homes, each one further from Chicagoland than the last. She died in a nursing home that was a four-hour drive each way for Dave to visit. Sometimes he could get a boyfriend to drive him, make a day of it. And every time Dave visited her, which, dear fellow, he doggedly did as often as he could which was not a lot but it was something, the nursing home always said Dave was the only visitor our mom ever had.

Now I lived in CA and did not have airfare to fly to Chicago to see a mother who could no longer recognize me. And I had my own tenderness about Chicago, which is where Rosie had settled after college, after doing the NYC tour many college grads do. Chicago used to feel like an endless wound that I had to avoid.

So bitch sissy moved mom downstate. Initially mom lived a few blocks from sissy and even then, sissy, her husband and grandchildren, never visited our mother once. Not once.

I think sissy had kidnapped mom under the mistaken belief mom had assets sis could use. Oh, sis would have fed and clothed mom but then, I believe, she was imagining a little boost in income. Sis' family had some tight years when she was in grad school and her "artist" French husband was unemployed.

Families. What got me started? Catholic priests.

Before the depth of mom's dementia had fully bloomed, I went to the Catholic Church just a block or two from Dave's house in Berwyn.  I went to a mass with my mom.

I scorn the Catholic Church but my mom remained a devout Catholic always. True, she did divorce and remarry, which is technically a sin but, geez, go into any Catholic church for any Sunday mass and throw a ball at the congragation and it will bounce on at least several divorced and remarried Catholics who did not, by the way, seek annulments from Rome.

So I had my wandering mom with me after going to one mass with her. She was happy to be in a Catholic Church. They almost all have the same vibe, ya know? She felt that vibe. Then I waited to talk to a priest. One bombastic blowhard priest saw me, saw I was waiting to talk to him and he deliberately kept me waiting, turning repeatedly to talk to others that came up to him after i had. I suppose they were parishioners so he knew them, but geez, don't churches welcome newcomers, new potential, um parishioners?

That priest was a dick before I said more than hello, father, I'd like to talk to you.

Then I explained that my mother was a lifelong devout Catholic, that I lived in CA and although mom lived with my brother, he worked on /sundays and did not have a car anyway. Could the parish find a parishioner/neighbor to take my mom to church?

Now this priest knew bupkiss about any memory loss issues with my mom. I had escorted her out to the car because standing for long stretches bothered her. In fact, I had finally interrupted that pompous gas bag and said "Father, I need to talk to you and my mom is elderly and waiting, I only need a minute." Finally, the twat talked. Well, listened. Then he told me the parish did not want to be liable for any possible harm to my mother.

"For real?" I exclaimed. "Are you seriously telling me, and I was raised Catholic, going to a Catholic school just like the one this parish has so I know how Catholic parishes work, I know you have an Alter Guild Society that does just the kind of thing I am asking for. You have absolutely no foundation for refusing my mom. You've never spoken to her."

He said to call the parish, maybe someone could help my mom get to Sunday mass, which would have meant a very great deal to my mom. She may have been slipping but she was not yet slipped out of reality. And she loved the Catholic Church and all of its tenets.

I never called the parish. That gasbag had reminded me that the Church had nothing to offer my mom. I suspected the priest didn't want to help my mom get to church because he, rightly, suspected that an old lady living with her son was not likely to put a lot of money into the collection basket.

That's the thing. My mom would have given that church money. Many's the time when we were growing up, when maybe dad had gambled his paycheck on the  ponies (which my dear old dad loved to do and his behavior caused much heartache for my mom), mom still paid into the Sunday offering. The parish I grew up in required every household to meet with a church staffer, disclose tax returns and settle on what each household would pay. My mom filled up the weekly offering envelopes, which were coded to each household, before she spent dime one on her family. So my mom might have had a hungry baby or two but the church got those filled envelopes (unless gamgling dad thought to steal those dollars for his beloved pass time, betting on horses).

Even if mom had never given dime one to that Berwyn parish, a real Church, a Church built on Christ's perfectly wonderful message to love, would have welcomed her. And found her a god damned ride.

I told that scummy priest that I was a lawyer and I saw no way the church would be liable if a parishioner, in their personal capacity, decided to make a Christ-like choice and be kind to an old lady.  He wasn't concerned about liability. He was just an asshole, as most priests in my childhood had been, although in my childhood, I worshipped all priests as above mere mortals like purely innocent little girls such as I had been.

his will unbroken: no fucking way would he give in

My mom pressured me into declaring myself to be dedicated to becoming a nun.  My luck turned, to my happy surprise, when my aunt the nun saved me. My mom moved on to my Irish Twin, my brother Joe, ten months younger than me.

Mom did more than pressure Joe. She enrolled him in a seminary boarding school for seventh grade, age 12, without consulting him Training to become a priest at age 12, just imagine.  Although ballsier than me, Joe also felt her pressure and agreed to spend half of his seventh grade – age 12 – at a residential seminary for future priests.

A priest brought Joe home, unannounced one Sunday afternoon, after several weeks  before the end of the semester and solemnly asked to speak to our parents.

Joe and I eavesdropped.

“You son does not have a vocation. He cannot return to our seminary.”

At that seminary, all the boys, twelve years olds and up, had to get up, knee and pray on their knees at 5 a.m. Knee and pray for an hour before breakfast. Joe would not do it. And when the priests yelled at him, my ballsy awesome brother joe would say “There is no fucking way I am going to get up at 5 a.m., hungry, and pray on my knees for an hour before breakfast. NO fucking way.”

The priests had tried many things to break Joe. They made him knee before the whole school all day, with a piece of wood running across his arms and shoulders, made him hold up that wood, like a piece of the cross. Sometimes he had to kneel while holding up that board. And he always endured his punishment in front of the school as everyone else ate breakfast. They actually would withhold breakfast from Joe. They made him do it every day for weeks and occasionally they would ask Joe is he was ready to knee and pray at 5 a.m.

His answer was always the same: no fucking way. Once, that priest, told our parents, Joe had said “I’ll fucking starve to death before I get up at five fucking o’clock in the morning and pray while hungry. No fucking way.”

Mom gave up on giving any of her children to god.  I still wish I had had joe’s balls when I was 12. 

And Joe proudly bragged about how he had stood up to those seminary priests, who were expert at breaking boys. My mom forbid him to tell anyone why he had left the seminary but, geez, if a bunch of tough priests had failed to break Joe, our mom was clueless if she thought she could order him to do anything. He was proud to be unbroken, unbowed. I was proud too.

Actually, the only way my mom could ever get Joe to do anything was to pay him. Joe loved money. He would painstakingly weed every single weed of our front lawn, which had more weeds than grass, if mom paid him a penny per weed.  He knelt for those pennies.

I love recalling his refusal to bend to those priests, who are all a bunch of cunts of one kind of another.

to bloom

I'll be good

I am not actually crying as I write this but, emotionally and energetically, I am sobbing the way a young child sobs as they talk after having a hard cry.  My being is atremble, my breathing uneven and silent sobs are rending my being.

I am very unhappy.

your longings are lanterns on your path

I like this line:   your longings are lantern on your path.

"know thyself"
Do you know how beautiful you truly are? (No, I do not.)
Do you know how deep your courage runs? (Yes, this I know quite well.)
Do you know you are always loved, no matter what?(No.Intellectually I know,energically, not know)
Do your know your body is a sacred Temple of Wisdom? (The nuns taught me this! I believe it.)
Do you know your sexuality is wild and innocent? (I like this but do not know it)
Do you know your womb holds the power of all creation? (Yes I know)
Do you know your longings are magical lanterns on your path?
Do you know your fears and pains are places calling for love? (yes, this I know)
Do you know your precious heart opens in vulnerabililty?  (this I know quite well!)
Do you know you belong here on earth? (No, I am not sure I do, long to check out.)
Do you know everything can be healed, and is being healed?  (No, this I do not know, not for me.)
Do you know you are love? (Yes, I know.)

crunchy v. smooth nut butter

Like many American parents, I fed my daughter some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My favorite peanut butter sandwich is peanut butter with banana slices. I don't remember if I ever served her that.  I don't recall, but my memory could be faulty, feeding her PB&J a lot but I always had peanut butter on hand.

I packed her lunch for her child care day the year before kindergarden, again in kindergarden. She did not like to get the school lunches when she still went to a public school with school lunches. 

Kids compared lunches. And many items a parent can tuck into their child's lunch have currency in the lunch swap business.  I used to often tuck in packaged strips of fruit leather, first the crappy kind with sugar but eventually our fruit strips were nothing but pure fruit. I knew Rosie bartered away most of those fruit strips because she told me so. She complained when I switched to the no-sugar, all fruit ones because they had lower value on the swap market.

I don't recall her telling me what she got in those trades. I would have just packed whatever it was she was hoping to get if she had asked. I don't think what she got mattered to her as much as having something that was desired by other kids. It was the act of swapping lunch treats that mattered, not the treats. Not so much.

As time passed, she and other children talked about lunch. And, apparently, the children preferred plain peanut butter to crunchy. If the preference, the popular choice, was plain, then a crunchy peanut butter sandwich had no value.

I was just fine with my daughter being unable to swap her crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on carefully chosen, whole grain, nutritious bread. I wanted her to eat the sandwich.

Again, and I could be wrong, I think the real concern was having things in her lunch box that other kids were willing to trade for.

One day, she asked me to stop giving her crunchy peanut butter. I explained that I had once read that one of the top sources for kid's choking on food was smooth peanut butter, which could get stuck in a child's throat and stop breathing briefly, sometimes long enough to harm or even cause the death of the child.

The article also said to slice hot dogs in half because the average hotdog bite could lodge in a child's throat. For a few years, I had sliced her hot dogs so she wouldn't choke, but then i coached her, extracting her promise that she would chew chew chew.

She brought up her preference for plain peanut butter a few times, with me always holding my ground. Until one day, when she was five or six, she started crying when, once again, I said I couldn't bring myself to buy plain peanut butter.

I don't think I told her, and this is my truth, that I prefer crunchy. She and I shared our household peanut butter. Maybe I should have just told her I like crunchy and don't I get to have some food in the house that matches my taste?

The last time, when I finally gave in and switched to plain, after I repeated yet again my anxiety about choking hazards from smooth nut butter, she was crying, unhappy and lamented "But mom, I am old enough to eat creamy peanut butter. I am old enough now."

To which I responded "I am not old enough, yet, honey, to buy plain peanut butter."

I may have never given her plain peanut butter. I really do prefer crunchy nut butters.

Nowadays, I eat no peanut butter. I eat almond butter. In Rainbow Foods earlier this week, I bought a jar of raw, organic almond butter. First I put the crunchy almond butter of my favorite brand into my shopping cart. As I began to walk away, however, I saw that the sixteen ounce jar of crunchy cost $19.95 and the smooth almond butte was only $13.35. So, for what I believe might be the first time in my whole sixty two years and counting, I bought the smooth.

So what does this price differential mean? It is not more expensive to make crunchy. Is crunchy more costly because it has greater demand or because it has less demand?

I quickly surveyed several brands of raw almond butter. There may have been three different brands. They all had the crunchy priced higher than the smooth.

Living with another one of life's mysteries. Why more for the crunch?

You were alive during the Vietnam War?

When my daughter was in high school, in an American history class, she studied the Vietnam War. She talked to me, some, about what she was studying. By h.s. she didn't keep me way in the loop but I usually had a general understanding of what she was studying. She might have told me what she was studying inadvertently by simply recounting some social interactions in her day.

But she was interested in the Vietnam War and actually brought it up with me, reciting some facts she had just learned in school.

I responded by extemporaneously sharing with her some of my memories of the Vietnam War. I do not remember, now, what I told her, or what aspect of the Vietnam War I discussed. Not precisely. I think I talked to her about knowing college guys that had been to Vietnam or guys who had been drafted and only gone to college to avoid Nam. I described the night in my freshman year in college when all the guys my age were subject to a lottery. Guys with low numbers were going toi be drafted and being in school no longer spared them from war. This shift was just. It was unjust to let kids who could afford to go to college avoid serving and make only poor guys go.

She listened attentively. Her listening to me attentively slowly waned during her two years in high school. She left high school to start college, on a scholarship, at age sixteen. I don't think she ever appreciated what a huge sacrifice that was for me, realized that by letting her go to college away from home two years early, I was giving up two years with my only child. If I had known she was going to disown me, I would not have given up those two years. And, low, in the fourteen+ years since she left me, I have painfully reviewed the way I just gav away two years with my only child.

Anyway, when I said a few things about the Vietnam War, she said, rapt by whatever I said, "You mean you were alive during the Vietnam War?"

I was surprised she had not done the math, not fully realized I was, indeed, alive. Not onlyw as I alive, but I participated in anti-war marches, of course.

Then I told her about the fall of Saigon.

The fall of Saigon, in April 1975, came up today in my writers' group, triggering my memory of Rosie appreciating me for some moments in 1995 or 1996.

In 1974, virtually no students at my college had televisions in their dorms and ery few students at my university lived off campus.  When Richard Nixon resigned, in 1974, college kids packed into the student union to watch the one television in the union. There were also one television per dorm but those tv rooms were tiny. Most students wanted to be around others at such a solemn time. It seemed ominous to watch the president of the United States resign and it felt good to be surrounded by friends to watch it.

When the whole world was able to watch Saigon fall on television, the crowd in that student union was even greater. The students were all deeply silent and we all stood to watch, even though the student union had lots of sofas and chairs.  Now I am recalling some of the images, of people with their children crowding to get on planes and choppers to get airlifted outbefore Nam completely fell. We listened to tv announcers talk about how Vietnamese who had supported the US were the ones getting out, which, gulp, meant some didn't get out that wanted to.

And we all know that Kissinger set up the fall of that war so that Cambodia would fall into the hands of the brutal Khmer Rouge who slaughtered over three million Cambodians. I don't think I talked to Rosie about Cambodia.

I didn't impress her much by the time she was in high school. And it seems somewhat sad  that it was only the fact that I was alive during the Vietnam War that impressed her. But at least she paid attention to me, listened to me, placed some value on what I had to say.

She sure doesn't place any value in me now.

draft halloween blizzard, sled, 12 pack of diet soda

If I were going to get a book length manuscript published, I think my best, most prolicate, work is about me. So memoir. How to plot that out?

I have been thinking of doing something a little different. Publishing a bunch of memoir pieces but without a narrative thread. Is such a thing doable? All things are possible but, realistically, would any publisher publish a book that had my old man matha fucking, my "I am going to bring you down, Father" in the same book? Or 'I'll be good" and 'my pants fell down in a food store'.

favorite story:  after the 1992 Halloween blizzard in Minneapolis, when 36 inches of snow fell in one blizzard and kids trick or treated in that blizzard singing christmas carols, I was in between homes and Rosie and I were staying with Joni and Cary.  I shoveled a path from the street to their drive way so I could pull my car off the street for the snow plows. And then Rosie and I decided to walk the several blocks to a small cluster of shops nearby, mostly just to get out. We were all feeling cooped up and Joni and esp. Cary were not used to little girls all day long. And Rosie was not used to being cooped up.

I bought that sled, which thrilled Rosie. And I hauled her home in it, easy to do with all that snow. Walking to the shops had been arduous. Walking in large mounds of snow, because snow drifts a lot higher in places than the total snowfall measurement, had been exhausting. She thought I bought the sled to pull her home and give her a toy to use in the snow.

We had gone into the hardware store because we had trekked in and out of all the shops, for something to do. All shops were packed because everyone was getting out, waiting for the city to plow streets so folks could resume normal lives. NO one could drive for a couple days, which is unusual in Mpls. Usually one can get driving soon after a snow fall ends, the plows are out before the snow stops. But this wallop of a storm paralyzed even winter-adept Minneapolis for a couple days.

So we went through the hardware store single file. Virtually anything useful for winter was sold out so when we got to the back of that hardware store and I saw one, last purple sled, large eough for three children, I grabbed it. Rosie squealed in delight. And I was happy to pull her home.

But I bought that sled beause I was a diet soda junkie in those days and I wanted the sled to haul home a twelve pack of diet coke.

I also bought packages of frozen Byerly's wild rice soup, which is awesomely delicious. For reasons I no longer recall, I bought a package, one serving, of that wild rice soup for JOni, me and Rosie but I chose something else for Cary.  Maybe it was the ham in it. She was fussier than Joni.  Something about that soup lead me to believe JOni wouldn't like it.

I bought a few other things, all seemingly heavenly treats becaduse it had taken just about a whole day to get to those shops and return home. When I upacked the soup, with JOni, Rosie and Cary watching me pull out each treat, when I said I had not gotten wild rice for Cary, she was crestfallen. When I tried to offer her my wild rice soup, she wouldn't take it, wouldn't admit she was hurt but she was.  I wanted to understand my blunder but she wasn't talking.

I had been scheduled to move that Nov 1st into my next home, my things in storage. The moving company had called early in the day and informed me that I would be their very last move, and probably not for a few days. With my things being in storage, instead of an apartment underpressure to be empty so the next tenant could move in, my things could wait. Sounded reasonable.

The move delay was understandable but a stress on us all. Joni and Cary had been gracioius hosts. We had shared dinner most days, taking turn cooking and cleaning up, but we had worn out our welcome. It was me, but also a 9 year old child is a lot noisier than a house with two forty-somethig lesbians who have never had kids. It was harder on Cary than Joni who was, after all, a child psychologist.

are you equipped to handle the extraordinary?

gratefulness and reverence

"Gratitude is the vessel that we lift to the Gods that they may fill it with their wonder-gifts. If in all earnestness we foster the feeling of thankfulness, then gratitude, living devotion, must be there to the invisible spiritual givers of life; and it is the most beautiful way to be led from one's personality to the supersensible if this guidance goes through gratitude. Gratitude ultimately brings us to veneration and love of the life-bestowing spirit of man. It gives birth to love, and love makes the heart open for the spirit-powers pervading life. If after every meditation we arouse in ourselves the feeling of gratefulness and reverence--a feeling that we can call a mood of prayer--and be aware in what grace we are taking part, we shall realize that we are on the right path for spiritual worlds to approach us."

--Rudolf Steiner, Guidance in Esoteric Training

chrysalis

I wish I could emerge into my fuller, more real self. I love this image.

I am stuck.

Stuck stuck stuck.

embrace who you are, yeah, right

I agree with the thoughts expressed here but I find it easy to say "embrace who you are' than to actually do it.  I feel painted into a corner, with heavily oil-based paint that is never going to dry. In other words, I feel deeply isolated and cut off, unable to follow the pull I feel my life is calling me to. Everything costs money that I don't have.  It costs money to socialize. And after not being able to afford any new clothes for at least ten years, it is hard to show up appearing middle class. I look shabby and one's appearance limits one in social settings. Being unable to join friends for outings that include spending money is isolating. Not having money to take classes to build my skill set is isolating.

Embrace who I am, what, in an empty apartment with no one to see or know me?!

reminded of time I lived in a battered women's shelter

This reminds me of the month I lived in a battered women's shelter while awaiting my temporary divorce hearing, at which the judge ordered my husband, who had changed the locks on our jointly owned home and refused to let me in to get baby clothes even. The residents had to take turns cooking meals for all the other residents, which was abused moms and children trying to figure out their next steps under the pressure of the limit of just one month in the shelter. I was lucky. I was upper middle class, only temporary cut off from my assets when my now-ex canceled all credit cards, closed our joint bank account with the bank going along with that illegal act, and his bro was our investment broker and when I tried to access some of MY money in that brokerage firm, he just wouldn't let me -- also illegal but 35 years ago, such discrimination against women was so routine that few people grokked that it was, um, illegal to deny a person their own legal assets.

Anyway, I cooked a lot, largely because as the oldest girl in a family of 8, I was used to cooking large quantities and most of the women either were not much as cooks or too stressed to plan meals.

The shelter would give the cook a list of what food was available for her assigned meal and then the cook could make whatever she wanted. One time, my food list included hamburger so I proposed having hamburgers. The person in charge of doling out food told me hamburgers were too expensive, they used up more hamburger per person than the shelter could afford.

The shelter had endless supply of flour and vegies so I made hamburger pizza. After that great pizza, all the women begged that I do all the cooking. I was happy to oblige. Every resident had to do a chore daily and I preferred cooking to cleaning toilets. Plus it was fun to do and fun to be praised. We had hamburger pizza once a week, each time hamburger popped up on our food list.

A couple years after I left the shelter as a resident, but had continued at its weekly aftercare support group for support during my custody hell, I somehow came into possession of a watch, a free male watch. Acting on instinct, on the evening of Christmas Eve, I went to the shelter, where alumni were always welcome to enter (the location was kept as secretive as possible), I knocked on the door, a woman who knew me for she was a social worker when I had lived there with my baby and thanked me profusely. She said a little boy had just come into the shelter, that they had small gifts for all the children but that boy and now the boy would receive that cheap watch. A little thing but anyone whose life path leads them to a battered women's shelter, much less on Christmas Eve, is traumatized.

I wonder, sometimes, if battered women shelters still exist. Back when I benefited from one, it was kinda new in this country for anyone to acknowledge spousal abuse was an actual thing.

our task, as part of a whole

A human being is part of a whole,
called by us the 'Universe',
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts
and feelings, as something separated
frm the rest - a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion
to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty.
~~ Albert Einstein

my pants fell down in a food store

When my daughter was in the second grade, her class was asked to write in their writing notebooks daily. They would be given a prompt. The children had to write at least two complete sentences, which is a steep goal for a child who is still writing in block letters, not knowing how to spell many words.

Rosie never wrote more than two sentences but she also never failed to write two complete sentences.

My favorite memory of those writing assignments was when she was asked to write about her most embarassing moment, as of age 7.

She wrote "My most embarrassing moment was in a food store. My pants fell down."

All the kids tended to echo the writing prompt in their first sentence. The word prompt was written on the blackboard so they could all copy down big words like embarrassing.

Why do I love Rosie's two line story about her shame in a food store?

When she showed me her writing notebook, I remembered the moment her pants had fallen down when she was three or four, in the Byerly's in St. Louis Park. At least I think it was SLP. It was the biggest Byerly's at the time, a fancy new store. The main floor of the store was filled with straight aisles, up and down. All along the outer perimeter there were little turn outs that focussed on one kind of food. There was a dairy turn out, a wine turn out, a coffee and tea turn out.  These 'U' shaped bulb-outs from the main store had displays in the middle of the "U" and then all around the perimeter of each 'U'. In the back of the "U", if no other shoppers were present, no one could see any shopper in the "U".

Rosie had been in the back of the dairy "U" when her pants suddenly fell down around her ankles. I happened to see it and, just about as fast as the pants had fallen, I pulled them upt. No one saw her but me. She did not voice any embarrassment at the time.

When she wrote about that moment a few years later and I read it in her writing notebook, I remarked on it, telling her I had been unaware she was embarrassed. She must have felt her shame keenly if she remembered it years later.

When I brought up her two-line story about her pants falling down in a food store, she laughed and said "I had to write 'food store' because I couldn't remember how to spell grocery."

I love that very short story. I feel empathy for my very little girl feeling embarrassed in a moment when no one saw her vulnerable but me. And I love, so very much, her intelligence in writing 'food store' because she couldn't remember how to spell grocery.

I had known since she was an infant that she was very smart. Heck, a pediatrician had told me when she was only a year or so old that I had a genius on my hands and I should be prepared to send her to a school for gifted kids. But she, personally, demonstrated her intelligence when she wrote 'food store'.

I love her. I miss her.

a vast, all-encompassing quality

“Love can have this vast, all-encompassing quality. It can be allowed to spread until it permeates the very core of our relationships. Yet often, instead of giving love room to expand, we box it in with our expectations. Expectations make our love conditional on whether or not the relationship fulfills our wishes. How can you expect love to last when you demand that it meet your conditions, and you act as if you own another person?”
–H.H. the 17th Karmapa, ‘The Heart Is Noble: Changing the World from the Inside Out’

S. Carolina is a bit cray-cray

Two friends of mine decided to move from Whidbey Island in Puget Sound (north of seattle about 45 minutes) to south Carolina. They had decided to move somewhere warm. When I began to tell mutual friends that this couple was moving to S. Carolina, virtually everyone I talked to about it said "Oh, you must have gotten that wrong, South Carolina is such a conservative red state. They must be moving to N. Carolina!" One friend, Peggy, even mentioned that no blacks had represented S. Carolina in congress since the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. I was impressed with that friends knowledge of SC history. I had gotten it right: they moved to S. Carolina. And this couple is very liberal. This is their retirement home. And they have the man's brother and sister-in-law live there and they thought it would be nice to live near some family.The woman had lived in the Pacific Northwest her whole life; the husband was originally from the Northeast, NYC, I think. And they are wealthy. I think wealth can cosset liberals in cocoons of other liberals.

My friend has shared a few funny stories of the hated in SC for yankees and how pretty much anyone who was not born and raised and lived in SC all their lives is a Yankee, according to her.

Soon after they moved, SC elected a black to Congress, although I am not sure which office.