You are Reading the Growing Up Category
The Busy Girl Buys Beauty
June 10, 2008 | permalink
When I was young, The Old Man took us ('us' being whatever collection of siblings, cousins, and relatives more removed that made up the family at any given time... it is strange to me, even now, how such a big and diverse group could have been so closed and insular... but that is another musing, for another time...) camping and hiking and boating quite often. These outdoor excursions are some of my favorite memories.
We had a couple of swimming holes that we liked to frequent; one had a wide, shallow stone shelf and a deep and fast moving center channel- it was good for really hot days, because the water was always so shockingly cold. There was another place we went often, a river medium wide and medium deep, with an old bridge that we would leap off of into the water. The river was probably too shallow, really, for the height of the bridge. It's a wonder we never cracked our skulls open.
There was another place we went a few times, a really wide, slow moving bend in a river. I learned to snorkel there, and once we found and cooked and ate river mollusks. I remember that there was the rusted out wreck of a car in one place, and I used to wonder how it had ended up on the bottom of the river.
I wonder what those places are like, now... I haven't been to any of them in over 20 years. Are they still as remote as I remember, as pristine? I doubt it. Likewise, the leap from the bridge that felt so death-defying would probably be revealed as only 10 or 12 feet, and the wide expanse of the river bend is likely nothing special to look at. I know where they are, and how to get there- I could go look, and see what has become of them.
But I think I prefer to keep them as they were.
Posted in Growing Up & Musings & The Old Man & The Past(1) Comments
Relentless Sun
April 10, 2007 | permalink
I think a lot about myself. I don't mean in a totally ego-centric 'enough about me, darling- what do you think of my dress?' kind of way; I mean that I spend a lot of time examining my thoughts and feelings, and actions and motivations, trying to figure out what makes me tick. Trying to understand what I want and what I am, and what I'm doing and why.
You would think at this stage in my life (being nearly thirty-five) that this would be clear to me. Maybe it should be, and I am hopelessly behind my peers in terms of self-awareness and understanding. Which is a notion that kind of depresses me, to be quite honest. But since I have no way of knowing, I suppose it is equally possible that no one ever really understands themselves as well as they would like. When I am feeling reasonable (and reasonably together), I think that both things are probably true; I should have more understanding of myself by now, but no matter how much I understand, there will always be something else. Perhaps complete understanding of oneself is unattainable, or nearly so; the quest what the Buddhists would call Nirvana, or the Shaolin concept of Enlightenment, for example, were both lifelong quests.
But on reflection, after trying to continue with this post, I think that perhaps I do understand myself more than the above passages would imply. I just don't like what I see.
I suppose that the basic problem I have, if I boil it down to its simplest components, is that what I think is my innate nature (which I obviously cannot change) is in direct conflict with the things that I was taught about the world when I was young (and we all know, I think, how hard those childhood lessons are to shake). And I don't know how to reconcile the two, and resolve the conflict.
If I had to describe my basic nature (the parts of it relevant to this discussion, at least), I would say that in my heart of hearts I was basically an honest and trusting person, who greatly desired to be close to people, and open with them, and all the things that entails- trust in others and faith in the future among them. Not a bad set of traits, I think. Except...
Except that anyone who knows me can tell you that I fall pretty short of this, in reality. Especially in the trust and faith and openness parts. These are things that, even though I have always yearned for, I didn't really know existed outside of fiction. If I had to sum up the lessons of my childhood, they would go something like this: Everyone is out to get you, if they can, so the less you give away the better; keep everything possible to yourself. And you can't count on anything that you have today being here tomorrow, so don't get attached to anyone or anything.
Pretty bleak, eh? Those ideas seem inescapable to me, and color everything I do. And I hate them. I wish I could say that nothing has ever happened in my later life that reinforced them, and that I have managed to escape them, but I can't. The first friend I had set me on fire. My favorite uncle molested me. My father is (as I have mentioned before) paranoid and pretty much crazy, and consistency and stability are things I never knew until I left the house to go to college. (I lived in something like 15 or 16 different places before I graduated high school- on one occasion, we came home from school on a Friday to find out we were packing to move on Saturday.) My mentor killed himself. And I won't even talk about my ex-wife.†
Sometimes it feels like a lot to bear, and my worst fear is that I will never overcome the circumstances of my upbringing. That I will be stuck in conflict, always yearning for things I will not allow myself to have. I don't want you to think I am sitting here feeling sorry for myself; I'm not. I have survived all these things, and I'm not a total basket case. I feel certain that I can get through anything that life throws at me, one way or another. I am a success in my chosen field, and even if I am suspicious of people in general and tend to hold myself back and be a tad anti-social, I do have people that I love and trust.
I guess I just wish it were easier. I would like to be able to let go of all the crap and be able to be open and expressive to the people I care about. I would love to be able to not think of the worst things that could happen, all the time. (Not feeling like a complete cynic would be quite nice, I think).
I suppose the only thing to do is to persevere. I haven't gotten this far by giving up, and I don't guess I will start now. But like I said: I wish it were easier.
† I don't want to give the impression that I am being all 'woe is me, I am a poor sad helpless victim' here... I'm not a saint, and I have certainly done some things I am not proud of. And there are of course people who I have trusted who were indeed worthy of it. I am only trying to illustrate my point with my own experiences. I hope that makes sense...
Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & Musings & Social Life & The Past(0) Comments
Dreaming My Dreams With You
January 22, 2007 | permalink
I have bad dreams.
I have them often, more often than it seems to me that most people do, and I've had them since I was a kid. I have them is fits and spurts and cycles; none for a few weeks and then every night (sometimes several in a night) for a few days or a week. When it's really bad, I will have them for a couple of weeks straight. They range from the unclear and unremembered, filling me with a vague unease when I wake and a jaw sore from being clenched, to the vivid and unspeakable, from which I wake up thrashing and yelling, leaving me out of sorts for days. Most, though, are solidly between the two extremes- vivid and memorable, disturbing but not horrifying, full of tension instead of terror, and mostly shaken off by the time I get to work.
While I don't have recurring dreams very often (though it has happened on occasion) the vast majority of them fall into two broad themes- one where there is something terrible about to happen that only I can prevent, and no matter how hard I try I know that I don't have enough time and my efforts are futile; and the other where I am being pursued by something horrible that even as I attempt to evade know I cannot escape from. In the recent past I have a couple instances of a new type of nightmare, where, for reasons unknown to me, I am being beaten and tortured. I find these much worse than the others, and on all three occasions have woken up literally screaming.
Mostly my nightmares are populated by my family, and a wide assortment of monsters and beasts. Sometimes my family become the monsters and beasts, but mostly they are the people I am trying to save by preventing the terrible something that is about to happen. But always, whether pursuing or pursued, running free or in someone's thrall, I am on my own, with no one to help me complete my task or escape from danger.
I'm bright enough, I think, connect the dots between the circumstances of my upbringing and my nightmares, and to draw some conclusions about what it all means and where they come from. I clearly fear not being in control of my life, and with being at the whim of forces outside myself. I fear that I will fall short of the tasks that need doing, that I am not good enough or smart enough. I am afraid that I will be all alone in the world when I need help the most.
In case you were wondering, Gentle Readers, it's about as much fun as it sounds.
Posted in Growing Up & Musings & The PastGiddy Up and Go
December 22, 2006 | permalink
I was browsing around some of your writings the other day, Gentle Readers, and Emily of Pretty Crabby and Brian of An Audience of One were writing about Christmases both imminent and long gone, respectively, and it got me thinking about Christmas when I was a kid, specifically Christmas at my Mother's.
My parents split when I was seven or so, and my Mother got together (and eventually married) Red, and we had a real Brady Bunch situation going on. There was me, The Star, and The Rockette, of course, and Red had his daughter Cat and his sons the C.O. and The Architect. Three boys, three girls, all of us just about a year apart. There is actually a small three day window every year between The Rockette's birthday and The C.O.'s birthday when the six of us are in consecutive chronological order. My Mother says that then we are In Alignment, and tries to get a photo of us during this time every year.
I've strayed from the point of my story. Which was Christmas.
The Christmases when the six of us were all there together (roughly every other one) were great, by far the best holidays of my childhood. Up until we were too old and self-conscious, we would all camp out in the girls' room (which was the larger) on Christmas Eve, too excited to sleep and excitedly speculating about what the next morning would bring. Eventually, of course, no matter how hard we tried to stay awake and catch Mom and Red putting out the presents, we would one by one drift off. I don't think we ever did manage to stay up late enough to find them out; my Mother insists to this day that Santa, and not her or Red, places the gifts under the tree. She's cute like that.
In the morning whichever of us woke up first would wake the others, and our excited chatter from the night before would continue. We usually were up well before dawn, and even though we weren't supposed to wake up Mom and Red until at least 6am, we discovered we could usually push it to 5:30 or even 5:15 if we made coffee for them and sent it in with whichever of us was most in their good graces. Which was usually Cat or The Star. The Rockette and I were too consistent to ever be especially in or out of favor, and The Architect and The C.O. fought too much to ever rise to 'Golden Child' status.
I'm hard pressed to actually remember anything I got on those Christmas mornings; its the camaraderie I felt with my brothers and sisters (well, this subset of them, anyway) that makes the memories so special to me. So I will leave you with that happy picture, Gentle Readers, whilst I head upstate to see The Old Man. Happy Holidays, and I will return next week, no doubt with tales of holiday mayhem.
Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & Holidays & The Past(0) Comments
Well, I Guess I Just Didn't Notice
October 1, 2006 | permalink
I was unaware of my The Old Man's dissociative identity disorder until my late teens. There were some strange things that, in hindsight, make it clear that something was not right, but at the time it was all just normal. That's what we were used to, the baseline that we compared everything else to. I guess on some level, I figured everyone's family was more or less like ours. It wasn't until I went away to college that I had enough regular contact with people outside my family to realize that this was not the case. I can count on one hand the number of times that I went over to another kid's house when I was growing up, and I don't think any of my classmates ever came over to ours.
This didn't particularly bother me; as I said, it seemed normal at the time. I didn't feel deprived or like a shut in. Most of the time I was off in some daydream or another anyway. Of course, now that I am an adult and have trouble feeling comfortable when I interact with people, especially people I don't know well, I wish that things had been different; but that's another can of worms altogether.
I'm sure you are wondering, Gentle Readers, what the strange things that I mentioned earlier might be. I don't imagine that any of you have had any dealings with someone with multiple personalities. I tried for a long time, actually, to find someone else who had, so that I could discuss it with another person (besides my sisters- at that time it was something that we didn't talk about amongst ourselves. That is no longer the case). I never did. But I digress.
The Old Man would leave notes to himself, on the message board by the front door. Only, they were from one personality to another, reminding whomever might be at the steering wheel that day about the things that had to be done. Because when one of the personalities wasn't 'on top,' they had no awareness. Not of anything. He told me, once, years after the fact, about waking up one morning and not recognising where he was or knowing why he was there instead of in his own room. Except it was his own room- it was just that particular personality hadn't been 'on top' since before we had moved last, and had no idea that we had new digs. Things like this were not uncommon, and as you can imagine, there were serious mood and behavior swings all the time, reflecting the differences in each of The Old Man's facets. Different speech patterns, different likes and dislikes, different gaps in his memory. Something that was perfectly acceptable one day was practically a hanging offense the next. Some days he seemed like a rock, some days fragile. Some days he was approachable, some days he seemed so stern and aloof I didn't want to be in the same room with him. You just never knew what his reaction to anything would be. It was both incoprehensible and completely normal all at the same time. I guess I didn't really try to make sense of it; that was just how things were. The Old Man was a rollercoaster, and we were all along for the ride.
Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & The Old Man & The Past(0) Comments
Guard Duty
June 8, 2006 | permalink
One of the things that I had to do for The Old Man, one of my duties, if you will, was standing guard. Despite being a physically powerful person, the abuse he endured during his childhood made him more than a little paranoid. What he was most afraid of, I think, was being taken unawares, without a chance to flee or fight someone face to face. Using a public restroom made him especially anxious, and this, whatever it says about my childhood, is one of the things that stands out in my memory.
We travelled a lot by car when I was younger, and I must have stood guard over The Old Man while he peed in every picnic area, truck stop, and rest area along the Eastern Seaboard. At first, I was too young to realize that standing guard was what I was doing; he would just come to the bathroom with me when I went. As I got older, I realized that he was nervous about being that exposed, and that having me around made him feel safer. That he believed that with me there, nothing could happen. Or maybe that's not right- maybe it was more like, with me there he would have some warning if something went down. I'm not sure. But it became part of my job, one of the facets of my unswerving service. It was another one of the ways that I was the adult, caring for the scared child that lived in The Old Man's skin.
The strangest thing about it, looking back, is that it didn't seem strange to me at all. Like so much of my childhood, it was just another set of circumstances that existed in the world I lived in. I had never known anything else. It was normal.
Posted in Growing Up & The Old Man & The Past(0) Comments
The Old Man: An Introduction
February 20, 2006 | permalink
I have a lot to say about my father. More than I could ever get out in one post. In truth, I could probably write in this forum for years about nothing else; but rather than subject you, Gentle Readers, to that, I will start a new recurring thread and string it out. Probably forever. It's a long, complicated story, but I will do my best to make it as clear as I can.
Before I start, there is something I want to clarify: I've been thinking about pursuing this topic here for quite a while. Some of it is going to be decidedly unpleasant, and I do not undertake this lightly. The Old Man has had, and continues to have, a huge impact on my life (beyond the obvious, I mean). The impact of the way he raised my siblings and I, of the way his personality and worldview was imprinted on us, is something I still struggle with. Despite having some resentment and bitterness towards him, I love The Old Man deeply, and have immense respect for his intellect and strength of will. As I write, that might not always be clear, so I want to say it right at the beginning.
In order for you to understand where I'm coming from, I think you need to understand where The Old Man came from. He was born in 1949, the son of a WWII veteran and a secretary. He has an older brother and an older sister. All normalcy ends there.
To call my grandfather abusive would be like calling the Olympics a track meet. The Old Man was derided and beaten for showing any kind of spark of creativity or independence. He was fed on the floor like an animal. He was the scapegoat for anything his siblings did, and often punished in their stead (not that you should believe that they escaped unscathed- far from it). He was tortured for the most minor offenses- fingers broken for drawing on the wall, choked to unconciousness for waking Grandfather from a nap. He was brutally raped, sometimes by his father, somtimes by his father's friends. (His Mother did nothing, by the way.) This happened from as early as The Old Man can remember until he realized that he had become bigger and stronger than his father. The Old Man hit back, once, and Grandfather realized that the gig was up, and never touched him again. Though I have no doubt that the emotional abuse continued until he left home when he was sixteen.
You might wonder, Gentle Readers, what effect such an upbringing might have on a person. The Old Man, not surprisingly, learned to be paranoid, anti-social, and was filled with self-loathing. In addition, and overshadowing the rest, he fractured, and developed Multiple Personality Disorder as a method of coping with the horrific abuse.
As I'm sure you know, abuse begets abuse. My Grandfather was no doubt ill treated by his father, and so on. The Old Man broke this cycle. Whatever problems I have with him, whatever resentment I harbor for being brought up within his skewed, paranoid world-view, he never beat us. The more I learn about myself, and the far-reaching way the past affects my present life, the more in awe I am of his incredible intellect and force of will. The man is a super-genius, scoring way off the charts... I often wonder what he might have become if he were raised by less sadistic people.
I think that's enough to digest for now, Gentle Readers. It's certainly enough for me. For now. There will be more.
Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & The Old Man & The Past(0) Comments
The Horizon Burned Like Heaven
January 15, 2006 | permalink
When I was seventeen, we were living on a small farm in Sullivan County, in New York State. And I do mean small... we didn't even produce enough to be self sufficient, let alone make a living at it. It was more like a sideline (albiet a very labor intensive one), a longtime dream of my father's. We had fresh milk, eggs and cheese, and a couple of acres of garden. And of course, every once in a while one of the chickens or rabbits ended up as dinner.
One hazy evening in late summer there was a particularly spectacular sunset. I called back into the house to get someone else to see what I was seeing. It was gorgeous. It was like the world was on fire. After a few minutes, it became clear that this is exactly what was happening- something big was burning, just over the horizon. We hopped in the car and headed west. It didn't take long to find. The barn at the Hewitts' horse farm was completely engulfed.
Have you ever been near a really big fire? It is beautiful. And terrifying. The light from it, all orange and yellow, must have been visible for twenty miles in every direction... maybe further, on account of the haze in the air. The sound of it was a great rushing roar, deafening, like a waterfall and a hurricane together. Underneath the roaring, you could hear the wood cracking and popping, like in a fireplace. Only instead of small logs, the things popping and cracking were twelve inch beams. It was like gunfire.
The heat of it was like nothing I have ever seen, before or since. We couldn't get closer than two hundred feet, and even there it was uncomfortably hot, leaving us ruddy cheeked, like wind burn, for the next couple of days. Trees seventy and eighty feet away burned like candles, and the fence for the barnyard smoldered and smoked, even though it was a hundred fifty feet away. The fury of it all was incredible, and humbling.
The horses, by the way, were all in the far pasture, and safe. It was long suspected (but never proved) that Hewitt set the fire himself for the insurance. Everyone knew that he was going under, financially, and that he loved his horses like children. They were always in their stalls by sunset. Except that night. He always maintained that he got held up on his way back to put them in (he arrived at the fire after we did), but I don't think anyone ever really believed him.
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In Which Burdens are Disclosed
December 1, 2005 | permalink
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be someone else. Not in a casual I-want-to-be-an-astronaut way, but in a Jesus-I-wish-I-was-anyone-but-me way. I daydreamed a lot, and read a lot, and was generally lost inside my head as often as possible. I realized that a great deal of the self-loathing that I was writing about the other day is an extension of this long held desire to be someone else. And I realized where it comes from.
When I was born, my Father was on the brink of suicide. My birth was the reason that he decided not to end his life. I know this because he told me, many times. Not recently, the way that parents will share things with you as you get older, but when I was a child. For as long as I can remember, I have been aware that I saved my Father's life; that I was his best friend and the only person that he trusted.
I couldn't deal with that burden. Here I was, five years old, responisble for my Father's life, for the existence of my family. Somewhere in my mind, I believed that I had to be the best, or it would all fall apart. It was too much for me. I have never felt worthy of that responsibility. I set impossible standards for myself, and I lived in fear of falling short (which of course I did; no one could have met the expectations I imposed... still impose... on myself). I feel unworthy and inadequate to this day, and fear failing those that count on me so much...
Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & Musings(0) Comments
Wocka Wocka Wocka
September 26, 2005 | permalink
So, for the last week or so, I've been moody, surly, depressed and generally avoiding people. I've been doing a lot of thinking, and some self examination, and taking stock of this life I am living. A lot of things have become clear to me in the last couple of weeks, and while I am not too happy about all of them, I reminded myself (again) today that this, after all, was the point of all of the work I have been doing with myself; dragging the crap that's bogging me down out into the light. And seeing some real success in that venture, as unpleasant as some of it is, gives me no small sense of satisfaction.
The pecularities of my upbringing and personality have combined, as I was saying earlier, to make me a task oriented machine, seeking approval from whoever it is that set me at the task. This is very clear to me now, but for a long time it was shrouded in mystery... I couldn't figure out why I was happiest when I was working (maybe because the goals at work are very clear) or why when I didn't have anything I had to do or anywhere I had to be I had so much trouble motivating myself to get anything done. We were not encouraged, as children, to take initiative on things, or go off on our own; my father was too paranoid for that. Everything thing that he could control, he did. And self motivation just kind of fell by the wayside. It's really kind of a bizarre sensation... I mean, I don't think that I am a lazy person; it's like something gets turned off in my head. Standing by... standing by... standing by...
I talked to one of my sisters about this today... she said that she has the same problem with free time that I do... that she kind of dreads the weekends a little under the best circumstances, and when it's particularly bad she actually looks forward to getting up for work on Monday morning, because it's something that she has to do. I was very comforted to learn that I was not so crazy, that I was not the only one to have this particular problem.
It drove my ex-wife crazy. She said sometimes she felt like she had to take care of everything, because I wouldn't. I remember one exchange where she was pissed because I hadn't done something or other... I don't remember what. I couldn't understand why she was so mad. I told her all she had to do was ask, and she responded that she shouldn't have to. Looking at it now, I see how and why I drove her so crazy; at the time, though, I was totally clueless. Not a very flattering portrait, is it?
Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & Musings(1) Comments
Pow! Right in the Kisser...
September 18, 2005 | permalink
You know how your brain percolates information all the time, even when you are not really aware of it? And then when it finishes with something, all of a sudden you have this new insight that pops into your head, or you see the relationship between what you thought were previously unrelated things? You know how sometimes that's no fun? Yeah, me too.
In the last couple of weeks, I have written about my grandmother's death and some of the feelings that brought up, my ex-wife, and nightmares I've had. There is a kind of vague discontent in all of the entries, taken seperately. All together, though, the discontent is a little more obvious.
The other night, after the house opened and the audience was filing into their seats at my last show (the Star Wars one), I was suddenly so depressed. It was that fast, like a kick in the gut. I couldn't figure out why; I had just completed the most difficult Fashion season I had ever had with great success. After mulling it over for a while, I realized that I was so depressed because I had just finished. Now I had nothing to do, no purpose. And that set off a landslide of connections and realizations in my head that have, quite frankly, left me reeling.
My dad is a little crazy. When I was a kid, he was even crazier. Paranoid, distrustful of other people and society at large, and as a direct result, obsessed with self-reliance. (To be fair, he did come from a horribly abusive environment; for him to be as sane as he was is an amazing feat.) He's told me more than once that when I was born, I was the only other person on the planet that he really trusted. And he did his best to instill in me what he believed were vital attitudes and skills for survival.
The first thing I was taught was to obey; without question and without hesitation. The rationale being that in an emergency, I would not give in to fear or panic, but instead do as I was told. Jump from a second story window to escape a fire, for example, or to stay perfectly still no matter what was happening around me. By four I had discipline that would make a drill seargent proud. Survival was next; by eight I could be dropped in the woods with a knife and a pack of matches and be able to find food, water, and shelter. By ten I didn't need the knife or the matches. I can set a broken bone or stitch a cut. I can make a fish hook from twigs, and a line from braided strips of green bark; not just in theory. Most of this I have had to do.
The trade off of all this... indoctrination, however, is a sense of individual identity and motivation. I realized the other night that I was trained from a very young age to be set loose on a task or set of instructions. The goal becomes everything. And because this was my father, his approval became tied in with whatever goal or task I was set at.
When I'm on a job, nothing else matters. Not sleep, not eating, not family; nothing. All there is is the job. My whole sense of self worth is tied to it. This is great for my employers- I will tear myself apart if that's what it takes to get it done. But for me, not so much. And when it's over, I've got nothing left.
I realized the other night, sitting there watching the audience file in, how pervasive this all has been in my life, how far reaching; and how blind I was to it all. My whole life, I have been happiest in the execution of a task on someone else's behalf. It doesn't matter what it is; making someone dinner or putting up a huge show- the result is the same. And outside of those instances, I feel lost and depressed. The pattern is so obvious now, but I never saw it before. No wonder I have trouble with being close to people... no wonder my wife left me. I feel like a fucking mess.
Posted in Growing Up & Musings & WomenEggs 30ยข a Dozen
July 28, 2005 | permalink
This show that I am building makes me think about the years I spent living on the farm. It was my father's dream to have a farm and to be able to live off of the land... that self-reliance coupled with distrust of others again. We never were completely self-sufficient, but we did get an awful lot of what we ate from our own labor.
We had about 75 acres, which in farm terms is really not that much. On the hill behind the house we had a garden, maybe two acres square. The land was not that great for growing things... the garden was rocky and shallow, and it seemed like the only thing that really thrived was zucchini. We had frozen zucchini, fried zucchini, pickled zucchini, zucchini jam, zucchini bread; if it could be made with zucchini, we made it. I still am not too fond of it.
Most of the rest of the farm was pasture. We had three milk cows, whose milk we sold, and a dozen or so beef cows that we tended for someone else; six she-goats, whose milk we drank and made cheese with; a goat buck for breeding (the resultant kids we mostly sold off, but on one occasion we had goat for easter dinner); thirty or so chickens, whose eggs we ate and sold (and whom we occasionally ate); four sheep for wool, which we sold (we tried to milk them too- that sucks, and we gave up...) a hutch of rabbits for eating; and we raised two turkeys every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. We also had a few ducks and a small horse, though they were purely for decorative purposes...
As you can imagine, all of the feeding and watering and milking and egg gathering was quite a bit of work. In addition, there were stalls to much out, fences to maintain (electric and otherwise), and wood to chop for the stoves. I liked most of the work- the only thing I hated was tending the garden- I found it to be tedious in the extreme, and it seemed like it never ended. At least when you were splitting a pile of logs there was progress you could see; the weeds just grew back twice as thick as soon as you turned your back. But work is good... I think everyone should have to spend some time working with their hands. It teaches you about your abilities and limits, and how to figure things out, and there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of a completed task. (And work makes beer taste better.)
And some of the things we did were just cool by any standard. We tapped the sugar maples one year and made our own syrup. Once we bought something like 50 pounds of honey in the comb; when you wanted some honey, you just had to break open a piece of honeycomb. We made our own cheese and ate our own eggs. We were warm in the winter because I spent all summer cutting wood. There is a lot of appeal to that life. I miss it sometimes.
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They Tell Me it Can Land On a Dime
July 3, 2005 | permalink
I'm not really sure what, in the conversation about scars and surgeries that I was having the other night with my roommates, sparked this memory; but then again, the workings of the mind are strange and mysterious, and have puzzled and stumped men and women much smarter than me. So let's just leave it that somewhere out of that bloody, painful, and narcotic-ridden conversation, this childhood memory pops up out of nowhere.
I was thirteen or fourteen. We (me and my sisters) were at my Mother's house for the weekend. It was after dinner... I think I was clearing the table. The girls had already gone back outside. All of a sudden they come running in, telling me and my mom to come outside, quick. We run out, and there is this hot air balloon drifting towards us. It's low. Really low. Like, just clearing the tops of the trees across the street low. Suddenly it becomes clear that the hot air balloon is going to land in our backyard.
It was awesome, and surreal. I'd never seen anything like it; I can tell you, hot air balloons are MUCH bigger up close than they seem in pictures. And why, you may ask, did they land in our yard? For directions. They'd set out from outside of Scranton earlier that day, but had lost track of their landmarks and their ground team, and now had no idea where they were. They saw my sisters playing out in the yard and decided to stop.
As cool as it was when they landed, taking off again was way cooler. the burner roared, and this giant, graceful thing floated away like a soap bubble.
Posted in Growing Up & The Past(2) Comments
Bringing Up Bear
April 21, 2005 | permalink
I've spent a lot of time and energy in the past avoiding any kind of ties or connection to people or places. When friends reminisce about hanging out in the old neighborhood or grade school chums with whom they have become lifelong pals, I smile and nod like I know what they are talking about. But really, I have no such experiences. I don't think I had anything like a close friend until I was in my twenties. I've actually forgotten a great deal of my childhood- working so hard to avoid any kind of bond, coupled with the instability of my household, taught me to live in a moment-to-moment kind of mindset. The past didn't matter, because I couldn't count on anything that had been true yesterday to be true tomorrow. The future didn't matter, because any plans I made or things I hoped for were sure to get swept aside by circumstance out of my control. All that was left was the moment I was in. While this worked very well at the time to help keep me sane, it has outlived it's usefulness; I'm sure you can imagine all kinds of problems that this mindset might cause.
This is, I feel, one of my big stumbling blocks. It tends to make me ignore the cause and effect of my actions- I can come off as careless with other people's feelings. And if I put something aside to get to later, it is very difficult for me to get back to it- out of sight, out of mind... It's a big pain in the ass, and I will be glad when I get it licked.
Posted in Growing Up & Musings & The Past
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