The Velveteen Rabbit “Real isn’t how you are made, it’s a thing that happens to you.”

I have been binge reading.   One book after another after another.  Light stuff, heavy stuff, difficult, easy and confusing.

People of all colors and ages.  Stupid characters, smart but emotionally stupid characters.  People who are so fucked up that it’s amazing they are ambulatory.

I’ve been reading so much that one book flows into another until I stop for a breath and then another and wonder, what am I avoiding?  What’s going on here?

All of us,  fictional characters and real characters are trying to figure it out.  What is going on?  What is the meaning of this?  How do we discover who we are or is it all about discovering who we aren’t?

When I was in London the first time I was about 18 or 19.  I was all by myself having finished a study course at the University of Edinburgh.  I traveled down to London to begin a European adventure.  I was terribly alone and anxious and didn’t know what to do with myself.  To cover up my cluelessness, I donned bright clothes and put on a lot of makeup and went out in the streets.

I thought if I looked together, I’d be together.  But I was empty and my insides felt like a winter storm with high winds and bleak skies.  I was terrified of being alone, and I didn’t know how not to be alone.  I don’t think I knew how to connect with people outside of a context if you know what I mean.  I needed to be rescued but help was not going to come from outside of me.

The men or boys who tried to get my attention were all just on the make. I suppose if I was being honest I looked like I was on the make too but nothing could have been further from the truth.

I needed my mother.  I needed my family.  I was terrified, and, I was too young and too ashamed of being young, to sit myself down and say “Hey, what’s going on?”  “What do I need right now?”

As I got older, I got used to being frightened and keep my wits about me even so.  At a younger age, I had no wits to gather.  I was witless.  I was in a million pieces.  I didn’t know I didn’t know.  I had lived in books so long with such passion, that my resiliency, my mastery was fictional.

After a very long night, I got myself to the train station and left for Italy where I was to meet my friend Jeannie.  I still had a number of strange detours along the way, was rescued by an older woman who fed me tripe from a can and let me sleep at her apartment in Rome.

A couple of days later I met up with my friend.  I considered her with disdain as she was petite and sparky and lacked my sarcastic ways.  I had no idea that she was already a full blown person whereas I, who pretended competency, when faced with real situations, didn’t have a clue.

What has started me on this rant?  I suppose it is this book I just read, Trust Exercise.    I didn’t know what to make of this book.  It was maddening because it deals with a time in our lives when we all act “as if” we get it, and most of us don’t.  I am long past that age, but there must be some vestiges in me, under the layers of age and maturity that still vibrate to those times.

I still remember.  I  can travel back to that time so long ago when shame at being young needed to be hidden under a mantle of mastery.  I remember that girl, and I was a young girl, not a woman yet.  A dreamy unreal girl in the real world.

Foreign Affairs

Rob is in the living room screaming.  I don’t know what he is screaming at;  he screams alot.  I ask him what is wrong.

Rob:  “Netanhyahu asked for immunity from prosecution.”

Me:  “Why should he get immunity?”

Rob:  “Because he’s a fucking slimy asshole.”

Me”  “No, he’s a fucking slimy asshole and therefore he thinks he should get immunity.”

Rob:  “That’s what I said.”

I love my husband.

Walt Whitman

My grandmother Poodie, loved Walt Whitman.  The story goes that she would stand by the stove stirring whatever she was cooking up with a book in her hand.  The book was Leaves of Grass.

I have no idea what she liked about Walt Whitman, but I know what I like about him:  his lyricism, his love of nature, his passion and not to diminish the former attributes, his beauty.

Also, he loved trees.  What’s not to love.

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,”

 

A Boy

The road out to Chimicum is mostly forests and farms.  In the winter, it is mud and gravel and fog in the valley and is not fit for human consumption, at least this human.  The skies sit on your windshield or your forehead if you are unlucky enough to be out in the weather.  Miserable horses and cows gather in the lee of trees waiting for spring.  It’s a long way away I want to shout at them.  Start praying.

I don’t pray myself unless it is for other people near and dear to me and then I say a rather stilted Our Father or Hail Mary.  Is my heavenly father listening?  Don’t know.  Hope so.  Like to make the effort.

I had my birthday breakfast out at the Chimicum Cafe.

I remembered Robert. He was a feral boy.  He was being educated all by himself in a classroom in Chimicum.  His desk and chair were bolted to the floor.  He was barefoot so he wouldn’t throw his shoes.  Deprived of his shoes, he threw his whole body.

He came to our school; a big ungainly hulk of a kid with enormous hands and feet, a very low brow, an aspect of barely contained fury.  It was fury mixed with confusion.  He drew me pictures that described his brain perfectly.  Either his brain was on fire or it was a chaotic scribble.  His speech was mostly unintelligible.

I don’t believe there was a mean bone in that kid’s body but his head was so fucked up, no one could tell unless they took the time to know him.

Few people would take the time to know him as he presented like a maddened bull who could do you significant damage at the drop of a hat.  He was scary if you didn’t know him;  he was scary even if you did and so you just gave him space to come down from whatever storm was blowing up his head.

At times we’d have to call the cops to get him over to an inpatient unit.  I hated that.  I hate, hate, hated that.  He would bang his head bloody and sob in the back of the police car unless he was restrained.  How do you calm a seemingly unreachable kid?

What has happened to him, I wonder.  Where is he now?  We used to fantasize flying him up to Alaska where he was born and dropping him off.  We hoped, like bears, he would be able to survive and he and so-called civilized society could part company.  He would forage, build a rudimentary shelter, maybe learn to hibernate.

Silly people who have all the best intentions but not the wherewithal to help.  We could only contain him.

Where is he now?