I came from the fevered horniness of two fragile 19-year-olds in something like love.

I'm glad I am not a malevolent architect who makes, like, faulty buildings and stuff.
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My grandfather Russell, born in 1914 in Cambridge IL, was the oldest of seven siblings.  But growing up near him, the only relative of his that I ever met were a great uncle of his, and a distant cousin.  I never met Russell's parents or any of his many siblings or their families.  In fact Russell never told me his siblings' names, and he told contradictory stories of how many there were and where he fell in the birth order.  He said he wanted to forget about them and never see them.  He left home at age 16 and never went back.

While my grandpa was alive, he DID tell me that his father, Charlie, was a crook and a jailbird who had stolen money from Russell after he had left home.  Russell hated his father.

Four years after Russell died, my brother and I located his surviving siblings: three sisters, and the widows of his two brothers.  They live not far from where they were born.  They were all very sweet people who had wondered about their older brother and hoped to see him again sometime.  They said that Russell's mother Rena had looked for him rather seriously over the years.

My newly-found great aunts told me that  Charlie was an alcoholic who left their family around the time that Russell also left.  They believed that Russell and Charlie were living together happily, and even though they are now in their 80s-90s  they still feel unloved and rejected by both Charlie and Russell.  They were surprised to hear that Russell did not like his father, and never lived with him happily.

My great aunts also told me that shortly after Charlie left his family, he returned and burned down the family house for the insurance money.  Some of the children were in the house at the time.  Everyone survived, but just barely.  After that  the family was destitute and several times were split up among different households while Rena tried to care for them all.

Social Security death records tell me that Charlie died in Florida when I was a teenager.    Rena is dead now too.

The puzzle for me is: why did Russell reject his siblings?  Was he embarrassed to see them?  Did he feel guilty that he escaped?  Was he snobby?  Did he think he was better than they?  I am so sorry that they still hurt after all these years.  Clearly there was some kind of pain there, and I am trying to understand it.

There are people in my life, close friends from the past, who I never see any more.  Sometimes they ask my mother about me, or ask her to have me call them.  But I never contact them.  It seems like too much.  Like big overwhelming  too-muchness.

Once I had a boyfriend who left town.  He wrote me all the time.  Big pleading letters to write him back.  Sometimes I talked to him on the phone if he called, but I never wrote him a single letter.  It seemed like too much.

Is this like my Grandpa?  Is it a form of rejection?  Did my grandpa feel like it was all just too much?   If feels like a kind of repression done to avoid an overwhelming emotional feeling--even though the feeling would likely be positive.  I don't know.

I grew up in a town of 40,000 people on the Mississippi River.  Seven people lived in our little 3 bedroom house with brown linoleum tile floors and a single bathroom.  In spring you could smell the lilac bush through the cracked single-pane window in the living room.  In winter, you could lick the ice that formed on the inside of the same window.

In the backyard were 2 sycamore trees and a cottonwood that my sister and I and one of my brothers uprooted as seedlings from a rock quarry outside of town.  Still today, I love big messy trees that drop things.  And I love the scent of lilac.

Oh the delicious frisson I feel at the outing of (im)moral hypocrites like David and Wendy Vitter.  Is it wrong to be happy when bullys falter?  Ok, maybe right and wrong don't enter into it.  Does it add to the goodness of the world?  Does it subtract?  I don't know, it does feel good though.  I think Pema Chödrön addresses this in one of her books, I will have to dig through them to remember what she says.

I am so lucky to live in a world where big icy balls of hail just fall from the sky, without warning, free of charge!  Spectacular!

Ford Galaxy

I am standing on the asphalt drive on the other side of the fence at the Chaddock Boys’ Home for juvenile delinquents.  My friend Lisa and I are using bright DayGlo paints to draw designs on my family’s white 1965 Ford Galaxy 500.  The paint is washable so I’m sure my parents won’t mind.  We are painting swirls and the names of our favorite rock stars—Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.  Actually, I don’t listen to those guys.  But they sound cool.  We paint orange tiger stripes on the chrome bumpers.

Some guys from the boys’ home come out to the fence to see what we are doing.  They can’t believe we are painting up a car like this.  We must be pretty cool.  Actually, that is why we came here—to be all cool in front of some cute boys.  Later, one of those boys would get my sister pregnant.  And also the paint never actually fully washed off the car, but my dad drove it to work anyway.

Eep!  We have this conflict resolution training thing at work next week.  And I have this whopping conflict that needs to be resolved between me and a co-worker.  I think it is mostly my anger that needs resolving.  I am already feeling the fear and feeling very avoidy.

So, I am re-reading Thich Nhat Hanh's wonderful 2001 book called Anger.  And there is a lovely paragraph in it which is something that Stephanie Stean is VERY good at:


Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past.  You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her.  Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes.  During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less.  This is your only purpose.  Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work.  But first of all listen with compassion.  (pg 93)

So a few months ago, Stephanie went around to my co-workers and did this kind of deep listening with everyone.  What this paragraph does not say is that deep listening DOES tax the mental resources of the listener, and I'm afraid that Stephanie felt alot of pain during this listening process.

But now that part is over and the resolution work is beginning and I think it is going to be very hard for me.

Grandma’s Kitchen

I am standing in my Grandma’s kitchen.  She said we could have pie and ice cream for breakfast, my sister and I.  There is a lovely peach pie on the counter with a sugary crust—room temperature.  And she is scooping out vanilla ice cream from the Dairy Delite down the road.  (My Grandpa calls it the Dairy Drip.)

I love pie for breakfast.  How luxurious.  How decadent.  What a pleasure!  So much better than Wheaties or Rice Crispies.  Grandma let’s us have pie for breakfast, I think, because we are only staying a week.  So every day can be a special exception to our other days at home.

And with our pie we are having Tang, breakfast of astronauts.  It’s mixed up in a square Tupperware bottle stained reddish brown from well water.  It’s served to us in plastic Thermo King coffee mugs—the same cups that Grandpa drinks his Sanka from, their pink liners stained brown.

The sun is sparkling in through the window.  The air smells like wood smoke, and Grandpa’s body odor, and green walnuts.  And I know it will be a wonderful day.  What will we have for lunch?  Hot dogs and fried potatoes?  Biscuits and gravy?  Chicken and noodles?  Or more delicious pie…

 

Interesting blog written by a cute guy:
http://www.digitalcitizen.info/

What are the very first rock/pop songs you remember growing up?

For me, my earliest recollections are from 1972.  I had a student teacher in fourth grade who brought a record player out at recess and played 45's for us to dance to.  The two songs I remember most strongly are Elton John's Crocodile Rock and Loggins & Messina's Your Mama Don't Dance.

Then, my next strongest memories are from a summer road trip my family took in 1974.  Three songs were played over and over on the radio that summer: Gordon Lightfoot's Sundown, The Doobie Brothers' Black Water, and Dobie Gray's Drift Away.  I still love those songs alot.

My first record album was Bachman-Turner Overdrive's Four Wheel Drive.  It was a Christmas gift I asked for and received in 1975.  I was 12.  It is still awesome.

The Time I Won a Radio in 9^th Grade

I am sitting in the darkened gymnasium of Quincy Senior High I, home of the Blue Devils.  We are having a dance with a live band—the Barking Spiders.  It is time to draw for the door prizes.  The lead singer (with long hair who looks like the guy from Journey—very cute with wide bell bottoms and a Western shirt with snap pockets) reaches into a bucket filled with pink tickets.  He reads off the number and I can’t believe he has called mine!  And now I have to get up and walk in front of the entire school to collect my prize—a transistor radio with a tiny white earplug.

I really want that prize because then I can listen to KGRC at night in my bedroom instead of in the living room.  But I know that as soon as I walk up in front of everyone, someone will laugh, or oink, or call me fat.  So I act like everyone else is stupid, and I am as cool as anyone.  I hope the lead singer will like my black and yellow sundress and my wedgie sandals.

I collect my radio and I love it.  It is new and still in the package and the earplug is all coiled up so neatly.   I can’t wait to go home and lie in bed and listen to the music that comes on at night.