THURSDAY WHATEVER

Whew, had to take a breather once I got that last chapter out. In the meantime, I stumbled on this page of World Prayers.
I’m not especially a praying person – meditation yes, holding a good
thought yes, wishing you well yes, but nothing organized. But on this
site I randomly found a prayer by 13th century poet Mevlana Jelaluddin
Rumi (commonly known just as Rumi). It just kind of grabbed me as a
little different than any other prayers I’d seen before. Here it is:

Love Dogs

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs no one knows the names of.

Give your life
to be one of them.

“You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube.”  Answer:  The Silence of the Lambs, 1991.  Winner:  RedHairedCelt.
New earth find suggests we are not alone
MICHAEL HANLON, LONDON DAILY MAIL, CLARE PEDDIE

WEDNESDAY BIO (cont.)
(Rest of chapters here)

For
her part, Jane had a classic camp experience – hating it at first and
settling in for the long haul later. An early letter said, “Almost
everyone hates me or is crude or cruel to me around except for the kind
people that usually turn out to be my friends – 9-year-olds or younger.
Call me up right away or write me right away because I want to come
home. I miss you so bad.” This was immediately followed by a letter
saying, “For the moment my feelings have changed but they can possibly
change again in the close future!!! Please send some thing(s) like
cookies, candies or brownies etc. as a care package.”

And so the
summer passed into fall and winter. The children returned to school,
and I clung to my daily routine. It was a winter of honors for my
diligent, idealistic, activist overwhelming mother – with commendations
from the Mayor of Corvallis, the Sheriff of Benton County, O.S.U.
Democrats,and the Myrtle Sykes Grass Roots Award. As winter became
spring and I approached my 40th birthday, my spirits were breaking
under the weight of all the loss and setbacks of a life reaching
halfway through. I didn’t know it then, but it would be only five more
winters till redemption.
—Will you tell me, once and for all, how to open this door.—

(And
with that dear readers, I’m done with this five-year chapter of my
life. It was kind of hard putting it out there. Thanks for letting me
feel safe.)

Guess the Movie:
“Is that it? Is that all you’re gonna ask me? Well I got a couple of
thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in
charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people
crazy! You think I investigate every Walter Cronkite story there is?
Huh? If this is just nerve gas, how come I know everything in such
detail? I’ve never been here before. How come I know so much? What the
hell is going on around here? Who the hell are you people?”  Answer:  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977.  Winner:  pray14me.

TUESDAY BIO (cont.)
(Previous chapters here)

The
summer I turned 39 , Jane went to horse camp for three weeks. She was
12, the perfect age for horse love. What is it the mysterious
attraction of adolescent girls to horses? (This past year it was my
granddaughter’s turn at 10.) Camp Tamarack in the Deschutes National
Forest in central Oregon – my parents paid $100 for the experience and
for my part I wrote notes and/or sent a gift every single day she was
gone. When she returned, Josh got to visit the beach with friends for a
week to make it even.

In
the notes to Jane were reports that I too was taking a week’s vacation
from work because the assistant professor had returned from sabbatical
bringing a woman with him. It’s hard to remember now, but in fairly
short order he left again, taking up employment at Gallaudet University
in Washington, D.C. where he has remained ever since. (to be continued
next post)

MONDAY BIO (cont.)
(Previous chapters here)

We
moved almost across the street from my parents for the last part of our
Corvallis stay. We opened our eyes in the mornings to a house that
struggled to hold us together. Jane constructed shelves and shower
stalls and studied hard for school, while Josh racked up more sports
team photos and brought home two kittens from a neighborhood litter
that were orange and black, the OSU basketball team’s colors. Ferd and
Panther stayed with us (and finally just me) for the next almost 20
years and are now buried in my back yard, having shared my home longer
than any human ever has.

It was the year Jimmy Carter was elected
President and granted amnesty to Vietnam draft dodgers. The Son of Sam
killer was arrested in New York City. Elvis Presley died at 42 in his
bathroom and Bing Crosby died on the golf course at 73. The U.S. and
Panama signed the Canal Zone Treaty. But what I remember was a morning
before going to work when I drank my usual large tumbler of red wine,
felt my stomach revolt, tossed it back up into the bathroom sink, and
immediately poured a second glass and drank it. I was daily shocked,
embarrassed, and grateful to remain on my feet to feed my children, go
to work, and pay the rent. My mother came one day to my house to give
me a gift of vitamins “especially for people who drink” and I reacted
with anger. (to be continued next post)

SUNDAY BIO (cont.)
(Previous chapters here)

There
was a drought that year in Corvallis, the driest year on record. How do
you measure thirst in a life that is drying up notch by notch behind a
layer of chemicals? You wait for the falling to end.

When the
dark months began in my 38th year, life got darker with them. The
assistant professor went on sabbatical to the other side of the
country. No promises were made. It began to feel like my path through
each day was a tightrope. Balancing took every ounce of focus I could
manage. Somewhere during this time I acquired a shrink who prescribed
antidepressants, sedatives, and tranquilizers in various combinations,
never checking about the daily alcohol I added. At night I would lie in
bed like a frozen stick figure in panic about getting up and appearing
in the world the next day. In the day, I would devise elaborate schemes
to avoid making eye contact or performing tasks that would show how my
hands were shaking. My speech deteriorated into stammering. If walking
pneumonia is functioning with fluid in the lungs, this was a kind of
walking drowning too. Drowning while dying of thirst – the perfect
paradox. (to be continued next post)

SATURDAY BIO (cont.)
(Previous chapters here)

Jane
started junior high in 1976 at Western View (which I just discovered
was immortalized in the 2004 movie, The Incredibles, by its writer who
once went there too). Neither of us can remember anything about it. In
the families of drinkers, there is a well known hierarchy of roles: (1)
chief enabler – spouse or parent; (2) hero child – tries to give the
family self-worth by over achieving; (3) scapegoat – since the hero
child has that role locked up, gets the family to focus in destructive
ways (being stubborn, acting out); (4) lost child – stays under the
radar to provide relief; and (5) the mascot – uses humor to survive and
lighten the damn family up. They say an addict of any kind is like a
prizefighter who keeps getting knocked down but continues to get back
in the ring. The family and friends close to that person all fall
together until one day something happens and the addict gives up the
fight. Then the falling of all of them can end.

So Jane kept her
nose to the grindstone academically, Josh turned his focus to excelling
in sports and before long would find ways to get in scrapes, and I
continued to plummet. It was kind of like having an autoimmune disease
where the body attacks itself. It was part of the very beginning of a
reach for help that I’d made the decision to return to live so near my
parents because, while they enabled me to postpone the inevitable, they
also helped to keep my children safer than I could have on my own.  (to be continued next post)

FRIDAY BIO (cont.)
(Previous chapters here)

In
fairly short order once my job was established, the children and I
moved into a tiny house not far from where my parents lived, so the
after school scenario could continue. That fall Josh started second
grade and Jane her fifth. No one discussed the future. Everyone plowed
ahead doing what they did best – my grandfather had his 98th birthday
surrounded by dozens of us, my mother and father’s hair turned white,
the children completed their year of school, and I slid further toward
the summer of my 37th year.

One of my favorite memories of those
Oregon summers is that we would go as a family – my parents, the
children, and I – to the sea, the patchwork of sand and sky and rocks
and chowder and raw wind like a stiff blow to the soul, standing it
upright. A few years ago I recreated for myself this old mirage by
bringing my grown children, grandchildren, and significant others for a
weekend of homage – to brief escape, to the magic of the ions in the
ocean spray. I wish it could have started a similar tradition but it
seems unlikely.

THURSDAY BIO (cont.)
(Previous chapters here)

The
children were better at falling than I. They adapted to their new
school, for the first time the same one. Josh took to athletics,
finding that besides the joy of it, the issue of his skin color was
solved by his success. He was strong and big and never unenlisted in
whatever season’s sport it was. And they had their grandparents who
were both hands on, especially my mother. After school, when I was
still at work, they had their flesh and blood to come home to.

I fell for a young assistant professor in my department who was
newly separated and heading for divorce. He was irresistible – tall,
gorgeous, and bright as a steel trap. Looking back, I think he was
really just confidence building, dallying, never moving toward a
permanent connection. I pressed up against his respectability and
backburnered thoughts of a future like the one I might have had long
ago with that first doomed teenaged marriage, or like my mother once
thought she would have where everything would look and feel exactly
right. Trying to keep our relationship low profile, we snuck into each
other’s lives like culprits. (to be continued next post)

WEDNESDAY BIO

Chapter 10
Return (cont.)
(rest of chapters here)

My
courses that last California spring included Abnormal Psychology,
Psychology Statistics, Genetics, and Forensic Science (no memory of
what my long-term goal was). In my old papers, there is a letter from a
teacher telling me that had I just taken his final, he wouldn’t have
had to give me an F and that he had enjoyed reading my last paper. I
remember little of those classes, but somewhere in the month before the
term ended I flung myself to the mat, packed us up, and allowed my dad
to fly down from Oregon and drive us in our old white Chevy Impala,
packed to the gills with our worldly goods and two cats, back to
Oregon. By May, the kids were plunked into the Corvallis school system
and we were lodging with my parents. By the time I turned 36, I had
gotten a job as Secretary to the Department of Anthropology at Oregon
State University. On the very day of my birthday, the last Apollo
flight splashed down after exchanging gifts with the Soviet Cosmonauts
somewhere out in space, but news of the world at large was lost on me.

Butch said to Sundance who refused to jump from the cliff because he
couldn’t swim, “Why you crazy, the fall will probably kill you.”   I felt
like I was always falling now and not gracefully. My parents had a
decent ranch style three-bedroom home on a nice suburban street in this
99.9% white small college town and their lives were in order. They did
politics and their garden and their friends and paid their bills, and
we took up their space with our new lives. I felt a slight boost about
a new job and new scenery, new clothes, new routine but kept on
drinking in my back room, hiding my bottles under the bed and taking
them out when empty to leave along a curb somewhere in the dark. (to be
continued next post)

SUNDAY BIO

It was October 2005 when I last posted another
chapter of my life story, which was the original reason I joined Xanga
- to get this tale up and out of me and done with (because I want to
leave something behind for some relative down the road somewhere, and
because I want to keep being creative, and because it helps me ground
myself here at the last part of my life). So for those who weren’t
around for the earlier chapters, see: here. And now for

CHAPTER TEN
Return

The
best mazes are those with complicated, drawn out dead ends where the
imagination must fetch up, bang into walls, and turn back towards the
right way out. So it was in the summer and fall of 1974, as I careened
through two more quarters at the College of Marin, that my bruised mind
full of antidepressants and alcohol conjured up the idea that I could
go back to Real University right across the Bay.

I wrote a paper
to apply for a scholarship for one term at U.C. Berkeley – something
about “black and blue,” having to do with the civil rights movement
from my perspective as the white mother of a biracial child. It was
good enough for them to grant my wish, and by December we had renested
in a tiny second-floor apartment in the Berkeley flats six blocks from
campus. In 1968, the City of Berkeley school board had created the
nation’s first non-court-ordered busing plan for desegregating the
schools and it stayed in effect for 25 years. This meant that Jane and
Josh boarded buses each day to separate schools. In a burst of hope,
all three of us started in new classrooms but our brave beginning
faltered almost from day one. (to be continued next post)

Truthout 2007: Freedom and Democracy Awards