July 24, 2004

• It’s been a milestone kind of year actually, 2004. Today I turn 65, an age associated with retirement (and did begin in March to retire to part-time from 20 years at the same job). By the end of the year, it will be 20 years of Recovery for me, god willing. And in a few days, a year of Xanga. I joined Xanga to push myself to complete my life story that I began to write 10 years ago. My plan has been to write a five-page chapter for each five-year period of my life by first scrapbooking all the detritus I could find – letters, photos, etc., then writing it, then adding it to a web site that will eventually hold the whole thing. The decision to do this was three-fold – to come full circle and ground myself in my life, to keep my creative chops in working order, and to leave something behind for future family history. So it seems fitting to begin to post Chapter 6 today:
  (for previous chapters click here)
  _________
  

  Chapter Six – Metamorphosis In the next five years of my life, between ages 20 and 25, I dropped out of college; got my first job; began to write poetry; travelled to Russia with my husband by way of Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and a 20-hour train ride from Helsinki to Moscow; left my marriage after three months there; travelled alone out again by train to Helsinki; and flew back to New York via Iceland. Returning to California, I worked at UC Berkeley for a minute; spent three months near Monterey in a utopian community school; hitchhiked with a boyfriend from Oregon to New York City; worked at the United Nations; met my daughter’s father; traveled with him by freighter to Africa and into Spain, where we lived on the Balearic Islands for six months; and returned to New York by way of Paris, Brussels, and Iceland, once again traveling alone. Within another six months I would be back in California and never leave the west coast again. In those five years, the direction of my life was fractured like a tree limb in a high wind. My future would become a digging out from the wreckage that followed. (to be continued)

  Deep Thought: Instead of a welcome mat, what about just a plain mat and a little loudspeaker that says “welcome” over and over again?
  Today I am grateful for: The child in my heart
  End of Day – 8:27 pm
  + = Nice birthday breakfast with friends.
  - = Heat still up at 100, so pretty much kept my day to a crawl. Heard it’s dropping tomorrow.

  • 10:19 am
  • 12 Comments