Twenty Years On

Twenty Years On

Or

How to Define an Anniversary

What is your definition of an anniversary?  Everyone has their own.  For all the straight, married folk of the world, it is the day they stand up in front of family and friends and say their “I do’s”.

 

For the rest of us, denied in large part this opportunity, we make up our own dates to celebrate and revere.  For some it was the first time they actually met, for others, it was the first time they had sex, for others it was the date they moved in together as a couple, for some…..all those things happened on the same day, problem solved.

 

It was twenty years ago today that Dave and I met.  The details of that fateful night are well and oft repeated and lovingly told on our homepages, www.wuzzle.com.  But today I choose not to reflect on the beginnings of our relationship but linger a bit on what it has become and where it has led us over the last two decades.

 

We started with a “no fault” clause in effect.  We would move in together for a year and then, like all good contractual obligations, review our status and either opt out with no penalties or move forward into…..what, the next relationship?  We had no clue but time would guide us along that path and we were full of fun and life and promise and the world was still our idealistic oyster to be shucked and the pearl was waiting to be discovered.

 

We came to each other from vastly different worlds, the classic “opposites attract” probably on full display although we were somewhat blissfully unaware at that point, a fact all our friends were loath to point out, repeatedly.

 

I was a loner in the world of relationships, a serial dater, happily on my own and with no real incentive or burning desire to settle into what my own family history had modeled to me as a marriage (see Going Feral at Fourteen, the blog).  Dave, on the polar opposite end of the globe, had come from the Beaver Cleaver School of Perfect Family and Parenting, the eldest of eight kids, religiously raised and calmly shepherded into adulthood with no major dramas save for a seemingly endless divorce from the wife he married just out of college, as was the supposed path we all were to take, coming from the era we did.

 

We met in a country bar in Atlanta amidst the masses of men swaying to the uber-country beat that was sweeping the nation and that presaged the rise of Country as a national pastime.  As such, we seem to have bonded over music early on and there has been a tradition of music in our lives ever since; A Sound Track for Our Lives.  Fast forward to this morning when the ubiquitous Facebook flashed a post from a friend that summed it up to perfection:

Ours has, always, had this soundtrack and while maybe not telling us what the hell is going on when it is happening, it has certainly signposted where we’ve been along the way.

 

The first and still most resilient of these road markers came, ironically, on one of our first road trips together, to meet Dave’s parents for the very first time in Asheville, NC.  Along the way, a song came on the radio (FM only in those prehistoric and pre-Sirius days) and went unidentified by the DJ, only the words and the melody, taunting us to pull into focus the singer.  We played a game then, and still do today, of challenging each other to the artist, year, and title of a song on the radio, seeing who could be first to recall these ancient and indelible markers of our own pasts and creating new and permanent ones into our growing future.  This one eluded us both and, in those foggy days before The Google, we were stubbornly and stupidly stumped.  We knew we had the CD on the shelf at home, we knew every word, I even knew in my freakishly fickle and frequently brilliant memory banks that the guy’s last name started with an “A”.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_hqexKkw8

 

We had to wait four loooong days until we got home to South Carolina and could reach for the shelf and the CD to find Rick Astley’s name.  For many years, like a permanently marring scratch on an LP, our brains stubbornly refused to recall poor Rick’s name though I’m happy to report that we both grin like Cheshire Cats when we hear it today and shout in unison “Rick Astley!”

Through the years, back and forth between us, on birthdays and anniversaries and occasions both momentous and mundane, we have included in our cards to each other song lyrics that have caused one and then the other of us to remember what we mean to each other and, as all good lyrics and melodies are intended to do, think fondly over one’s life to those people and places that mark the points of greatest fondness, love, satisfaction, and contentedness that constitute a life well lived, beyond all of one’s hope and dreams and into the hazy ether of an unexpected but hoped-for future together.

 

And now, twenty years on, through, really, only the very best of years one could have ever hoped for, we find ourselves today.  Our life and love has changed, as all living organisms do, but it’s not too cliché to say that it is all for the sake of a better, more personal and deeply imagined relationship than either of us had expected at the onset.

 

It’s an ongoing work-in-progress but one that deserves all the effort it requires and pays out, daily, all its rewards.

 

And so, as I was pounding away the miles on the Precor at the gym recently, another of our favorite bands took control of my brain for 3 plus minutes and the words seemed particularly relevant to this piece and to the man that I call mine: (gender corrected for political reason <g>) The band was Dakota Moon, a contemporary urban R&B blend band of the 1990’s with Darius Rucker in the lead.

 

Boy, you’re every breath I take,

Oh baby, Your love rules every move I make,

hmm baby And I know that you can’t read my mind

And baby, maybe

I Don’t say it as often as I should, but I really want it to be heard

When I say I love you that’s for good, you have my word

That day after day after all, I will always be true

That’s a promise I make to you
You, you take this heart of mine and make it better

I need you to Come and walk with me through this life forever

And I know these words are long over due

And baby, maybe I
Don’t say it as often as I should, but I really want it to be heard

When I say I love you that’s for good, you have my word

That day after day after all, I will always be true

That’s a promise I make to you
I may hold you, I may need you And baby, maybe I

Don’t say it as often as I should, but I really want it to be heard

When I say I love you that’s for good, you have my word

That day after day after all, I will always be true

That’s a promise I make to you
That’s a promise I make to you

A promise I make to you

A promise I make to you

 

Take a listen to Darius Rucker, the lead singer who, ironically, is today a breakout solo sensation in the world of…..wait for it…Country Music.  All good things last.

 

Happy Anniversary, Dave.

 

143

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2y5xh_-JFg

 

 

 

Rockin’ Robin

Walking With a Robin

 

The other morning, Bella and I saw our first Robin.

 

Bella is getting on in years and while she used to emulate the oft quoted “Squirrel, squirrel!”   http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YaAxzIFgNso

she is a more reserved and reticent version of her former self, content to stroll the Mansion walk a couple times a day, sniff and answer her PeeMail and visit with her other canine friends and the human treat repositories that accompany them.

 

But coming down the lane this day, we had a unique and somehow other-worldly experience with this first Robin of Spring.

 

He landed on the road about 20 feet in front of us and caught both our attentions.   Apparently unconcerned that one of us was a human and the other, a 90lb Rottweiler, he paused, looked us over and let us approach.

 

As we neared, he fluttered up in the air a half a dozen feet, skittered forward again about 20 feet, and landed once more, continuing to keep us in his avian gaze.

 

We sauntered onward, not lunging but not retreating or remaining at all frozen or quiet.  We even spoke quietly to him, acknowledging the day, the sunshine and his perfectly placed presence.

 

Again, another 20 feet forward.  Again; a landing, a pause, a glance back at us as we meandered forward towards home.

 

He continued in this exact pattern, around the bend in the lane, along at least another 200 yards of road until, seeming to read our intended path, turned up the hill and continued with us, in sync, un-flustered (or un-fluttered, I suppose…he is a bird).

 

He “walked” us all the way to our drive where he stopped one final time, tweeted a swift farewell and then disappeared back into the deep woods on his wormy way, leaving us to ponder the nature of nature and the odd communicative power that occasionally presents itself between the species.

 

Maybe it’s because I’ve had parrots for decades, maybe it’s because I habitually feed the birds outside my office window, maybe it’s just because he was happy, as we all were, that the winter had once again given up its hold and the harbingers of yet another Spring were about to burst forth and the sheer joy of the moment was worth sharing, even with these two, huge, foreign elements in his world.

 

I’ll never look at the first Robin of Spring again without thinking of this russet-breasted wonder of a bird, mere ounces of flesh and feathers, that absolutely had to be telling us of his joy in our mutually shared moment in time.

 

And so, without further delay, I leave you with….

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUKTgIK8DxA

 

Faters, Sons and Missed Opportunities

Fathers, Sons and Missed Opportunities

My father never talked to me.

He talked AT me, and often.

He exploded in pent-up, rage-fueled, anger storms that seemed to come from an inexhaustible well of discontent and frustration that even then, as a child in search of connections to the greater world through the vehicle of parental modeling, I knew had more to do with his lack of self esteem than my lack of….anything.

But still, the scars were formed and remain still, today.

I come across authors everyday who speak lovingly of the molding and formulative effects that their fathers imparted on their growing sons and the lasting effects seem evident, compulsory, welcome, and comforting.

I feel a sadness that has no cure.

All that I know about my father, really, comes from a few rudimentary family tales, some cursory history about his upbringing that he chose to share with me as a child, but mostly from my forensic rummaging through the family archives and lore, and a large amount of caustically critical vitriol that I have had to filter, again and again, which my acerbic and acidic mother felt compelled to poison the atmosphere of my upbringing with.

I have spoken before about the uneasy truce that was my parents’ marriage. A sort of Vietnam era demilitarized zone where only the occasional smart bomb managed to cross the scorched void of their unease to land with a lethal ferocity in the midst of the world I only wished was more like the ones I was witnessing on Father Knows Best.

But where in this combustible and combative world were my fathers’ dreams and aspirations?  What place had they once occupied in his psyche?  What part had they played in their early marriage? And when had they been suppressed, subverted, and sequestered?

I know that he was 27 when he married in 1939.  Late, but there was that “gay issue” undoubtedly clouding his horizon.  How hard must that have been to be that different, that sensitive, that isolated?  In a family of 3 boisterous brothers and a bear of a father whose real estate speculating and aggressive worldview permeated their world and butted heads with a formidable female, his wife named Tora. Theirs must not have been an easy life in the 1920’s either.

I know little of my parent’s courtship other than my mother was living in a boarding house run by HIS mother along with the rest of his brothers and assorted other boarders.  I know they went to Glen Echo amusement park on dates where my mother refused to ride the roller coaster (too scary, and the beginning of her phobias regarding me, I’m sure).  There is one photo of my father around this time, the height of fashion in his leather bomber jacket and pleated trousers, posing for all the world like a Tom Ford model of his day.  He was 6’6’, a shy smile and my own shock of dark red hair.  But what did he imagine of and for himself.  I’ll never know.  But what’s with those dirty white tennis shoes?  Really? Intrinsically confident or simply unabashedly unaware?

They married and took 3 years to produce a child, my sister (again, that gay thing?)

During the early years of their marriage he worked as a night clerk at a hotel on Connecticut Avenue and went to George Washington University Law, putting himself through school.  I know he graduated. I know he passed the bar and I know, only by finding his certification documents, that he also qualified to practice before the Supreme Court.  I also know he never practiced law.

I was told in some from of revisionist history that he now had a family to raise and so, took a job as the business manager for a large meat packing house, Auth Bros,  on the Southeast docks of D.C.   I also know there is more to this “story” that I’ll never uncover.  Was his shyness and reserve in a public forum like the law a hindrance he could not overcome?  Was my mother’s forceful ambition too formidable a fortress to even approach?  Was the prospect a job in hand too tempting not to hold on to during the Great Depression?

He remained with Auth Brothers for the next 25 years, finding a “family” of sorts with this family run operation.  Why he left, another well guarded family secret, as were his thoughts and motivations, hermetically sealed away in a historical vault of secrecy almost 75 years ago, too embarrassed or too beaten down to ever air, even within the confines of his own family though judging from my own feelings of insecurity and danger there, it is no real surprise.

I read with detached interest, authors impressions of the fathers, their similarities to them, their differences, the wisdom they felt privileged to have garnered from them and the methodologies gained from them to help navigate the unsteady waters of their own wave-tossed worlds.

I have none of that.  It is a lacking I feel more keenly as I age and, with no children of my own to impart this particular frustration upon, I wonder; what if?

I have only the example of negative reinforcement foisted upon me by my utterly unhappy mother.  What not to be.  How not to act.  What not to emulate.  Nothing remotely forward thinking and useful to ply into usability, only retrograde angst and anger and ennui, upon which to build…..what?

After every nuclear meltdown my parents fomented into existence, I never recall a correspondingly sweet denouement.  Certainly no make up sex there!  The most commonly uttered refrain, spoken to me in private, as my father axed firewood into submission outdoors was; “Just don’t grow up to be like your father”.

What the fuck?  Really? This was the sum total of my life lessons?  Don’t grow up to be like HIM?

Yet here I am………him.

I look exactly like him.  From my earliest years, the Puerto Rican cooks and waiters at the nightclub my father owned in Georgetown called me “Ditto” and “Repeat”, I was such a dead ringer for him.

And I’m sure, now, in retrospective introspection that I act exactly like the genetic coding he installed in me as well.

I mention the nightclub.  I might expand.

The Town House, on Wisconsin and “O” streets in D.C

During the Auth Bros years, he bought half interest in a supper club frequented by the glitterati of Washington in the 1950’s.  Then Senator Jack Kennedy lived up the street and the justices, the lawyers, and the Capital Hill denizens all hung out at the bar and did deals over the white-clothed tables.  I suspect that this was his one and only escape valve from the Harridan House in which we all lived at the time.  He worked at the meat plant from 5am until late afternoon and then went over to Georgetown and socialized at the club until almost closing, existing on 4 hours sleep a night and while fueling my mother’s harangues about alcoholism and a wayward nightlife, I’m sure he welcomed the respite from just such confrontations.

I never saw my father on weekdays.

On the occasional weekend day when my mother would allow him to take me downtown to the restaurant, I lived a briefly alternative existence.  I was allowed to roam freely about the streets of Georgetown, buy penny candy at the Rexall Drugs on Wisconsin Avenue, eat my fill of “death balls” at the White Castle burger joint and revel in the attention of the completely foreign element of completely foreign restaurant workers.

I was 7 years old.  I was free.

Free from the tensions and taught-spring tripwire I lived at home.  And I know, somewhere in there, was a spark of pride in my father….but one that was never fanned, never expressed, and most of all, never to be mentioned in tales of derring-do brought home to my mother for fear of a retribution greater than one the god they didn’t really believe in could elicit.

After he sold the club, my father began to fade away in earnest.  For the next several decades he became a paler and paler version of himself.  Where he was reportedly garrulous and conversational with each and every customer he met while on the “stage” of his element, the nightclub, he was now, post club, reduced to playing the obedient supporting character in my mother’s highly publicized dramatic version of “Life According to Her”.

Yet something of our “sameness” still resonated within me even through the hormone poisoning years of youth.  Once, after I had been caught cutting over a month of classes in my senior year (my office spies knew my mother was on the phone with my advisor, attendance records in his hands), I intrinsically knew that my father would be my only ally in this world-ending drama-to-be-unfolded.  I left school (duh) and drove to his office, where, coincidentally, I caught him with a cigarette (he purported to have stopped a dozen years before), and threw myself on the mercy of the Paterfamilias-Court and enlisted him in my crime. My instincts were correct and the fact of his complicity somehow blunted the wrath that was preordained to befall over dinner that evening.

We almost never spoke again.

After I left home, pretty much for good at 18, I don’t recall a single conversation with my father about anything other than the weather, the animals, or how horrible my mother was to him until his death some 30 years later.

Missed opportunities.  On so many levels and on so many parts.

Losing My Religion

Losing my Religion

 

Or

 

My Polyglot of Churchification

“That’s me in the corner, That’s me in the spotlight, Losing my religion” REM

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

It was the 1950’s and 60’s.  Religion was at the nascent beginnings of it’s ultimate waning but this had yet to be realized and assimilated into the cultural norms that guide us through societies’ pratts and pitfalls.  We still “clung to our guns and religion” in an even more aggressive way than Obama would espouse decades later.  It was who our parents had been and whom we were being reared up to become.

My parents came from disparate but respectable religious backgrounds, mom, a midwestern Lutheran, dad, an east coast Protestant.  When they met in the 1930’s in Washington, D.C., they negotiated an acceptable middle ground faith in which to raise their expected family.  They chose Episcopalian, Catholic-Lite, as it was often referred to.

As newly minted Episcopalians, they chose to be married in Bethlehem chapel, one cold, stoney floor beneath the main sacristy of Washington National Cathedral.  Bethlehem Chapel was and is a dark, dank, claustrophobic, tomb of a place that in many ways was the harbinger and bitter omen of the marriage they were to ultimately have. In truth, judging from my mothers once and future love of all things Cathedral, I think it was more about the architecture than the religious rote, but that would become evident later on.

They settled in the Maryland countryside, north of D.C., and righteously attended the local Episcopal parish, St. John’s, and I was duly in attendance at Sunday school classes and Sunday services in the old country church.  So far, nothing out of the ordinary for a squirming young kid, trapped into Sunday suits and stuffy classes.  I was an altar boy (loved the pomp), acolyte, and all around obedient pup.

More than that, I was “destined”, at least in my mother’s mind, for greatness, or at least societal acceptance as among the privileged.  As such, I was confirmed by the Archbishop on the main stage at Washington National Cathedral at the requisite age and was expected to follow in my esteemed cousin’s legacy footsteps, to sing in the National Cathedral Choir, to attend St. Alban’s School for Boys….fast tracked to religious fervor and social respectability.

Several things conspired to derail these lofty aspirations.

My mother threw her allegiances in with the small town, slightly creepy, and downright power hungry priest of our church who provided the space required to advance her dream of creating for me the perfect childhood educational system in the form of a church-affiliated elementary school with her at the helm as the headmistress.

After adding a grade every year to keep me properly sequestered, she had a very nasty, very public, dispute with the priest and the vestry board and was removed as headmistress.  Tragically, dramatically, and fundamentally changing our family’s religious course ever after.

My parents quit the church, never to set foot in another religious institution again, save for every cathedral in every city in Europe but then, as previously posited, it was the architecture that was the draw………not the internal (sic) salvation.

It is here that my religiosity takes a giant leap into the unknown.

I was sent off to Sidwell Friends School in D.C, a Quaker school.  Go figure.  Although not as strange as at first blush.  All of us chilluns in the ‘hood’, be we Catholic or Baptist, were being raised in a truly one of a kind, historic Quaker community.  Founded back in the 1700’s, it still thrives today, albeit on a smaller scale than most other religions and, truth be told, if more people were Quakers, the world would be a better place. (Not withstanding the ultimate outlier Quaker, Richard Nixon).

They also do great school.

If it were not the mid Sixties,

If I were not in the midst of hormonal teenage rage

If I only knew then…….

I shoulda stuck with the Quakers. It was an automatic draft deferment, they made me learn Latin, French, and real World history.  I could have had it all.

But they started advocating for the legalization of marijuana.  I really, really, could have had it all.

The mother figure then decided these Radical Faeries called Quakers didn’t deserve me so I was transferred to a predominantly Jewish public high school.  Interesting. I learned all about Seders, Kosher food, alternative holidays………..oh, and marijuana.

And Mescaline

And LSD

And shoplifting

And cutting class

And lying to my parents….a lot…..

All necessary evils in order to form a more perfect person but not the best for the true religion of the soul.

At home, miles away from where I went to school, my hanging gang were predominantly Catholics, at least as Catholic as their parents could make them once we had drivers licenses.  Mass was a convenient excuse to get a car, skip off to the nearest abandoned barn to get high, and return home filled with a slightly altered form of soulful zealotry.  We did the “high” holy days, again, midnight Xmass mass was a great excuse for a Partee!  And the CYO teen dances were almost the only game in town for minimally supervised outings.

After high school, my inner self was thoroughly infused with drugs and consciousness raising lingo that really tended towards Buddhist.  Self actualization, all things connected to nature, Karma….the Ultimate Golden Rule if you will; these were what settled into my core as principled beliefs.  What was being modeled by the “adults”, politicians, and people of power, was corrupt, insidious, and evil.  Still is.

So, in the final analysis, coming of age during the Age of Aquarius definitely left its imprint. Skipping through religions like a flat stone across a summer-calm pond got me just the right amount introspection to become a moral adult and just enough suspicion of authority to make me a healthy skeptic.

So rock on REM.

That’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion…..and gaining my soul.

Who Are You This Time?

Who Are You This Time

 

John was my best friend.

 

Over many a late night, drink infused, conversational introspection we talked of past lives, present circumstances and future possibilities.  We strongly believed and encouraged each other in our core certainty that this mere mortality which we were coexisting in at that time was not the first instance we had been travelling together and would not be the last.

 

As John became sicker with time, he and I had many lengthy discussions about death, after-life, and what exactly happens to the “us” that is now and the “we” that we were sure would be coming.  We had so much left to do that it seemed unfair and distinctly not possible that this present moment in time was all that we were allowed to have.  And so we cemented our belief in our future selves and with the surety of youth and certainly of faith, we proceeded onwards towards John’s untimely death.

 

We also swore an allegiance to each other that whoever reached that place on the other side of the far horizon of mortality first, they would be SURE to posit a sign, something tangible and unmistakable, that they had indeed arrived and we were, in fact, correct in our earthly beliefs of the hereafter.

 

After John’s death, another friend of mine, another John, took me to a dinner at a local artist’s home, yet another John, Jean Luis (Hout).  We spent the cocktail hour perusing his studio files filled with ghostly haiku images stacked by the hundreds and layered with his personal progression and history.  After a lovely dinner as I started to clean up, Jean Luis said to me;

 

“You’re only obligation is to go and choose any piece of work that speaks to you and take it as my gift”

 

Immediately and without any forethought, I went rummaging through the stacks until I pulled a simple black on white haiku that read:

 

who

are

you

this

time

 

It spoke to me of John and our many years of thoughtful ponderance on what would become of us as we left behind this thread of mortality that we so tenaciously clung to.

 

It has rested, peacefully, on the wall, on my side of the bed ever since, starting and ending each of my days with a wistful thought of the man who was so much my teacher and my friend.

 

John’s mother, Doris, was also a major part of our lives.  A singularly independent woman; statuesque, elegant, a force of nature in her own right.  John and I visited her on Maui where they had both lived for many years and then, after John’s death, Doris continued to live on in San Francisco where she had come to help John make his transition out of this world.

 

Dave and I always made a point of visiting her through the years, going to lunch at the Cliff House, John’s favorite spot, just spending time in the here and now remembering times in the growing distant past.

 

Somewhere in our moving about the country, we lost Doris and even with the Google and all the new technology I could not turn up her whereabouts.  She was getting along in years and we sort of assumed that she might have gone south to family or maybe even gone on to meet up with John on Little Beach once more.

 

Just last week, I awoke at 4am with a start, still deep inside a vivid dream I was having.  John, Doris and I were sitting at a long wooden table under a palapa in Hawai’i having dinner with a large group of people, the rest strangers to me, but it was John and Doris who were almost sparking, electric, with their presence.  I was instantly awake, alert and on point, something was propelling me…..out of bed, onto the computer, firing up the Google and typing in Doris’ name.

 

Within a moment, there was her obituary from a Riverside, CA newspaper……from just 3 months earlier.  I had found her and my immediate thought was “too late”.  In the obit, much was mentioned about John and her devotion to him and her care of him as well as the rest of her family. I was not sad, just curiously alert and reassured in some odd measure.

 

“There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,’ my mother explained shortly before she left me. ‘If you can remember me, I will be with you always.”
― Isabel Allende, Eva Luna

 

After a day or so of ruminating on this it became abundantly clear….just as Jeff Foxworthy would say “here’s Your Sign!”….this was what I had been waiting 25 years to experience.  John was “there”, wherever “there” is, with Doris……and me, a me that is yet to come, sharing a meal, watching a sunset and reveling in past lives and future glories.

 

who

are

YOU

this

time

?

 

 

Revelatory Shit

Revelatory Shit

Disclaimer:  I am a definitive child of the 60’s and all that that implies.  Should this not resonate with you, then stop now.

I have always held close to my heart many of the precepts and of the 60’s generation flower children.

I believe in spirit over religion.

I have astral-projected……..often…….and to great lengths.

I have a sneaking suspicion that crystals do hold some power and not just because I find them fascinating and beauteous.

I own a white sage smudge….and use it….. when moving into new digs or purging unwanted energy left over after someone of lesser processes has sullied my space.

I have a twenty page, hand written, astrology chart done for me thirty years ago by a Kahuna healer that I dated in the 80’s.  It still rings true.

I own a chakra-tuned, crystal singing bowl.

I believe in body-work, the spirituality of animals, the purity of the earth and the redemptive quality of the soul.

I have lived my life for forty years on the basis of Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization; Every action in the world was a thought in someone’s mind before it manifested itself in the world.

That being said; today I had a major, long overdue, and much needed revelatory experience with my massage therapist that snapped me to attention and clarified so many things that have been muddling around in my life for months, maybe even years; the jury is out on how far this influence will infuse and marinate.

My spouse, Dave, and I were in a run-of-the-mill, rear-ender last fall.  We expected stiff necks and car repair frustration.

What we got was a HUGE lesson in life’s vagaries. From aging and mortality to infirmity and rehabilitation, we have traversed these past few months full of trials that tested our mettle and literally flattened us, physically, and flat-lined us, mentally, in many ways.

Dave ended up with two spinal surgeries to correct a ruptured disk, loads of pain and immobility and I ventured forth an a cascading stream of moving targets up and down my spine; like playing whack-a-mole with my skeletal structure, fix one misalignment, trigger another and so forth up and down and back again.

I’ve been religiously (sic) seeing Joe Reef, my fortuitously recommended massage therapist twice a week for really, really deep tissue work to try and stabilize and rebuild my core.  Slow work but in the end, I had ultimate faith.

Last Friday something happened.

After a particularly intense session (read painful and WORK) I got up off the table and thought “Wow!  Something shifted in my body!”

I had just scheduled a series of Cortisone injections of the spine for the next Tuesday, impatient for results and not wanting to wait for the physical therapy to slowly try and work wonders.  Over the ensuing weekend, I continued to notice that the body had, indeed, shifted in some basal sense, the pain was almost gone, I felt lighter, less burdened by the physical and more hopeful than I had in months.

I had another session with Joe scheduled for Monday morning, trying to squeeze in one more reinforcing workout to see if the changes were real.

I cancelled the Cortisone, ever hopeful.

On Monday we went to work.

During any hour and half session, if you’re doing it right, you can be expected to do a deep-dive into the inner most recesses of your mind and touch places that are injured, infrequently accessed, and difficult to confront.  Often, people cry, laugh, and in general release a lot of “stuff” that they have been holding onto unconsciously for many moons.

As Joe was REALLY going deep into my back and upper thigh muscles I was, in fact, cursing and screaming, loudly, but constantly reminding myself that to get the most out of this controlled torture I had to continue to breathe through the pain and relax……as if.

And then the images started.

After several particularly practiced and controlled deep breaths I actually felt the muscle structures give way.  Joe told me later that I had an incredible amount of scar tissue built up from 4 hip surgeries over the years and that the pain-inducing nerve clusters were bound up and locked within these masses of scar tissue.  He had been working for weeks to break up this scar tissue and get at the core of the issues plaguing my recovery, and finally he had.

I cannot specifically recall the images, just the clarity with which I saw and experienced these profound thoughts.  I knew as I experienced them that they had deeper meanings that would unfold in my waking life as time passed.

I knew these were revelations.

I knew this was healing.

Towards the end of the session I was suddenly extremely aware of the Singing Bowl the had always resided, silent, in the corner of the studio.  It was crystal (sorry) clear to me that I desperately needed it to sound, long and loud, and that the reverberations of those sound waves were a necessary part of this particular session.

I never said a word.

In less than a minute, Joe stopped his work, walked over to the bowl and began to make it sing.

I was stunned.

Soon the session was over and I slowly came back into my corporeal self and began to move and dress and come back to engaging with the world.  Joe came back and we started our usual review of the just completely work.  I was so completely energized and “on fire” I could almost not contain the energy.  When I explained what had happened with the Bowl he was almost as excited as I, making that type of real connection with a client is as great a validation of what a therapist does as can be had.

He went further to tell me that the elements I was expressing to him were threefold:

Fire

Metal

Earth

He really does not know me well enough to know that my passions in life, as all who DO know me will attest to, revolve around the color orange, rusted metal, and gardens and dirt of any nature.

Fire

Metal

Earth

Maybe he does know me after all.

So a few days have passed and the body is truly healing. My energy is elevating daily, my mood is soaring and there is a peace that has been absent.

And the lessons of this healing are unfolding daily.

Primarily the word “edit” comes to the front of the pack.

We must all work to edit our lives, discarding the negative, the useless, the passé, the clutter of living that we have collected.  In doing so we free up our souls to engage with the world once again and reap untold new benefits what we have only denied ourselves by the distractions of a lives lived too full of Stuff.

This……..is Revelatory Shit.

sSilent Rage

Silent Rage

There is an interesting juxtaposition of themes in those two words.

One, Silent, expressing quiet, solitude, introspection, snowy landscapes, secret sanctuaries, lofty cathedrals, intimate caves.

The other, Rage, conjuring images of hate-fueled anger, unpredictable, noisy arguments, inexplicable, unfocused lashings out, and frightening, out of control intensity.

Together: they imply a simmering cauldron of explosive potential that seethes with a life of its own, an uncontrolled and uncontrollable force that, once unleashed, threatens to tear away the shell that has contained it and everything in its path.

When I look back at my life as a child, it is full of Silent Rage.  I was born and raised in what would have then passed as a normal, nuclear family, along with my older sister.

Retrospectively, I have often asked myself “How could they not have known?”  But then times were what times were, and they were who they were, and the generations that have marched on since theirs view life, and self-examination, and introspection, and evaluation, much differently.

They struggled to survive the hell they had created by and for themselves, I’m sure with little thought as to the effect they were having or the hell that they were inflicting on those that they bore the most responsibility for.

Or did they?

I have questioned this a lot over the course my life.

Did they know just how toxic a stew they brewing?

Had they always been this volatile?  Was lethality in their DNA or was the synergy of their respective components such that the test tube of their lives together simply had no choice but to rumble, smoke, and continually erupt like a volcanic pool of miasma just beneath the calm surface of the populated earth, sporadically and without apparent warning, boiling to the surface with deadly emanations of poison and vitriol?

Do opposites really attract?

My parents were, in true fashion, opposites.

I cannot speak to their attraction, at first, only to their revulsion, later on.  Like two hand-held magnets, when you try to push the like polarity ends together, they push back….hard……reeling randomly away from the mirror of themselves held in your hands, while you, clutching them desperately, have no control over where and when they rebound.  We all did this as children….with magnets….over, and over again…marveling at the forces of nature clutched in our eager hands, not understanding the principals involved but respecting the laws that they were governed by.

I did this with my parents, holding them in separate hands while they, repulsed by each other but committed to their dance of family and respectability, careened off the walls of their self-inflicted scientific experiment of a home, seemingly unaware or at least unable to even observe the carnage that they were creating with the violent vortexes of their internally driven repulsions.

I can’t remember ever loving my parents.

Shocking? It’s hard for me to say.  There are just no imbedded memories of soft times, gentle hugs, and quiet words, or unconditionally loving responses.

There is a tension to my young life, taught, like a car spring that bounces back to its rigidly held manufacturer’s-detailed specifications if you push down on the trunk deck.

I was always “in check”…….waiting……alert…….ever expecting the next sharp word or misplaced phrase or unintended letdown to trigger the recoil that would shuffle the energy of my small universe, violently at first, and then slowly, like a roller coaster dissipating its energy on each subsequent hill, draining the force out of the explosive outburst until the world was quite once again, and rigid once more, ready for the next test, but stable?

Never.

Think of those funhouse Bozo Balloon Bop Bags.

That was me, complete with the fire engine red hair and the screaming-scarlet, permanently ashamed, and embarrassed, complexion, buffeted by the energy waves of my parents mini-nuclear warfare, careening off whatever was in my path but always on a steady course to try and right myself back to the quietude of center….but never, ever, getting fully there; shuddering with solitary determination, waiting for the next set of shock waves to send me reeling once again on the wild ride that was life in my own personal fun house.

Where did it start?  What was the genesis of this dysfunction? Was it always so?

I asked my decade older sister once if they had always fought like this.  “Only after you were born.”

Our relationship was doomed from the start, obviously.  It, like my parent’s marriage, continued to careen out of control and spiral downwards for decades until, after a particularly volatile and religiously tinged series of exchanges, I pulled the plug and like any machine, without it’s power source, it………just………stops.

Period.  The end.

But back to opposites.  My parents were, literally, from two distinctly different worlds.  Both were born, 3 months apart, in 1912.  Their similarities began and ended there.

My mother was the eldest daughter of seven children born in rural Wisconsin of immigrant Norwegian/German stock and raised, as many were, in very humble and lower working class beginnings.  Her tyrannical German father was a house and barn painter, gruffly commanding the home and hearth while her Norwegian mother did what most women did then, bore and raised children….and tried to avoid and downplay the volatile and egomaniacal outbursts of her under-educated, petty minded, ineffectual-in-life German husband.

My father was the second eldest of four sons born to well-to-do Washingtonians of staunch New England stock with a dash of Southern gentility sprinkled throughout for flavor, and raised on Chevy Chase Circle at the District line.  His father, in real estate, provided well but not opulently until the crash of 1929 when the rupture in the country’s economy fractured his family’s fortunes as well.

Things were never the same.

My mother, through dogged determination and with the help of a kindly teacher, managed to complete college, a first for her struggling clan.  Her father, belligerent to the end, brought home a Civil Service exam from the Post Office and said; “Take it, you’re smart, you can pass this”.

She was.  She did.

She left Wisconsin at the beginning of December in the late 1930’s on a train for Washington, D.C. with no friends, no real life experience, but with a job…grading the very same Civil Service exams she had just taken and passed.

She found a room at the YWCA, settled into her routine at the Civil Service and began to shake off her small town roots and aspire to become a big city gal.  One of her co-workers whom she befriended suggested that she move into the boarding house where she was living off Dupont Circle and share a room.  Meals were included.

And here the plot thickens.

The rooming house was owned by none other than my paternal grandmother.

After the Great Depression and the early death of my grandfather, all she was left with, aside from four boys and an antebellum manor home on the Potomac, was a whole lot of debt.  She sold the home, and bought the boarding house on New Hampshire Ave and 17^th St that would provide her with some income.  Some of the boys were grown but still living at home, my father included.

During the course of the next few years, my mother enlisted several of her siblings to come to D.C. to work as well….and to live in the boarding house.  Having managed her younger siblings as they grew up back in Wisconsin it naturally fell within her demeanor to continue to navigate and direct their lives to some extent; a little nudge here, a minor introduction there.  Her brother was one of my father’s roommates, her sister roomed with another young woman who would eventually marry another of my father’s brothers.  My mother’s own roommate, Grace, her office mate as well, married my mother’s older brother.  All very incestuous sounding but rather like dynasty building if one were to objectify it.

It goes without saying that the emotional entanglements must have been confusing, at the very least.  And here lies the first symptom of the troubles that were to follow.

Clue 1

There must be an allowance made for the plausible deniability factor of the times in which these people were operating but none-the-less, when your future brothers-in-law tell you; “He’s not the marrying kind” (hint, hint, wink, wink) one might have paused to stop and pay some duly warranted heed.

Or not.

And so my parents were wed,  in April, 1939.

Clue 2

My only sibling, a girl, was born in March, 1942.  Either there was very effective birth control that none of us has ever heard of or there was some sort of malfunction on the home front for it to take 3 years to produce a child.

Clue 3

I was not to make an appearance until a full decade more had passed, February 1952.  Smell the smoke, yet?

Yes, my father was gay, a topic I’ll cover in a later chapter.  But the Silent Rage was forged here of Pittsburghian quality steel.

Yet their lives trundled along, bumping spheres with all their other married relations who also settled mainly in the Metro area.  I might add that none of these unions were particularly procreative either, certainly not when compared to the par stock that rural farm families of their generation were capable of husbanding.  One’s and two’s thoroughly dominated my generation of cousins.

Life in the middle of the Twentieth Century was on a crash course with history.  Literally the first half of the century harkened back to what would soon be considered quaint if not antiquated social mores and formulas.  Young women dated but only in groups, socializing under a strictly monitored parental gaze and a highly structured scholastic system. This was the world my sister came up in.  She dated lightly, went off to college when I was 8 and married a dentist the week she graduated.

That left me……….Home Alone.

The focus shifted in dramatic form and the dissension over who was “ruining the boy” escalated to new and more vociferous heights.  As I have stated before, when I reached sufficient age and height to feel somewhat empowered, I finally stepped between the two of them, literally, held up my hands and shouted “SHUT UP” .

They took me at my word.

I’m fairly certain that not another anything-but-the-facts, civil, conversation took place in that house again while I was a teenager.  My mother even took to eating separately from us much of the time and I, not wanting to break bread with either of them, abandoned this Lusitanic ship of silent fools and found my own way out into the greater world at large.  My “chosen family” down the lane was my salvation, more on them in the future as well.

But as to Silence and Rage:

The Silence in the domicile (I will not ever use the word home in reference to my childhood digs) promoted a slow boil of emotion and inner turmoil that simmered away like soup stock on a low flame.  Every so often, given a good stir, something new would bubble up and like water added to the pot, this new fuel would flare and cause a brief but dramatic explosivity before, once again, calming from a roil, it would go back to its watched pot status, waiting for the next infusion.

The Rage came from the constant irritation that the Silence imbued upon all who dwelled there.  Too much time in one’s head can warp even the mildest and best of intentions into venomous bile.  The ensuing eruptions were sharp, aimed, and effective in keeping everyone off balance and on guard.  I can still access the feeling in that pool of dread that churned in the pit of my stomach whenever I would come back to the house after being outside in the real world.  As a teen, pulling into the driveway after a night out with friends, it would hit me like a knife in the gut, wondering what waited behind the front door; what infraction was I guilty of this time; what manner of let down had I foisted upon them? If the light in the living room was on, it was a certainty that my mother would be sitting in her rocker…..waiting……..impatiently……..to pounce.  If she couldn’t yell at my father in front of me (remember “SHUT UP”), then she would have had the donnybrook with him in private and saved the retribution and incrimination solely for me.

It probably culminated at their 50^th wedding anniversary dinner.  I was living in California and definitely NOT going to be headed back east for this sham of an excuse for a “celebration”. My hideous sister had come in from Ohio, booked a restaurant (the same one she had had her wedding rehearsal dinner in, talk about gilding the dead lily of tradition), and invited all the relations.  Apparently, wheelchair access for my father was limited in the historic home setting and there was some sort of “incident” with the wheelchair, my father, and a flight of stairs.  According to my sister, our mother tried to push our father down the flight of stairs IN his wheelchair….on purpose.  So antagonistic was the scenario that the sister packed up her brood and drove home to Ohio in the middle of the night, leaving my parents to once again reside………alone…….together……… in Silent Rage.

Eventually, when my mother grew weary of care tending her failing husband of half a century and realizing that any further attempt at husbandcide would be carefully scrutinized, she outed him as gay to my sister and me, washed her hands of him by foisting him into a rest home near my sister and lived most of her remaining years alone, in another form of Silent Rage.  This one formed in the realization that her life had not been her own but was most certainly of her own design.

I suppose this was the most virulent form of Silent Rage imaginable………the Silent prison of one’s own making with no one left to Rage against.