April 4, 2007

• 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)

  ---

  Deep Thought: “What
  would annoy me if a space visitor ever came to our planet would be if
  he kept talking about things in “his world.” Your world? We don’t give
  a flying hoot about your world!”
  Today I am grateful for: Splashing
  Guess the Movie:
  “Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella
  says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
  murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da
  Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love -
  they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?
  The cuckoo clock.”  Answer:  The Third Man, 1949.  Winner:  thenarrator.
  Three Years Ago Today
  By Cindy Sheehan
  Tuesday 03 April 2007
  Three
  years ago today I was a “normal” American mother with four children, a
  marriage of almost 27 years and a boring 8 to 5 job. On April 3, 2004 I
  went to a nearby mall and bought a new outfit for work and two CDs:
  Evanescence and White Stripes. I was dreadfully worried about Casey,
  but I didn’t know that my world was about to be turned upside down.
  (Rest of article here.)

  • 12:12 pm
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