... it's worth going too far.

I went to a burlesque show last night not knowing what to expect.  The opening act was a wretchedly tedious marionette show.  Bad writing, poor execution.  I liked the girly stuff that came next, stripping down to pasties, hula hoops and popping balloons and all that; but then there was an act where two fellas were doing painful things with staple guns, beds of nails, sledge hammers and mouse traps and the like.  Then the guy who was dressed like a trapper and yodeled really well decapitated a road-kill squirrel, drank the blood and ate some of the innards.  I was only half-looking through my fingers and shouting "that's disgusting!"  It soon became time for Tracy to go home.

Was he going too far? Yes.
But was it worth doing?  That's the pertinent question.

It's interesting once in while to see someone else do what you wouldn't dream of doing... I think.  Anyway, I think I discovered what goes beyond my limit last night.

As an antidote, today I'm going to meditate and focus on peace and love.  Just peace and love, all day long.

In April, I boarded a flight to Maine to attend the funeral of my young brother-in-law, Brett.  For me this was, as all travels to Maine have been and will be, a return to my origin.   This is true whether I return for joy or sorrow.  It's always for family that I go home.  The moment my father's car left the vicinity of the Portland Jetport and entered onto highway 95, time and space seemed to dilate.   One could still see mounds of snow through the trees on the long drive north, wherever there was no sun shining.  Half way to our destination, we passed my childhood home on route 29 (I think?)  in Sydney, which is now painted white, but which, familiarly, still boasts loads of clutter in the yard and on the window sills.  

Brett's funeral took place on a Tuesday, in Farmington, close to our old farmhouse that disappeared in Temple, and where my sister now lives with my niece.   Brett was born with a hole in his heart, which was repaired when he was around age 14, and which was never completely fixed.  Unexpectedly, his heart failed him at age 29.   When my father called with the news, I was in the midst of baking cookies with Daniel.  Notably, I had removed the family photo that included Brett from our fridge weeks earlier, because he had asked my sister for a divorce.  I was remotely, but not actively, peeved with him.  I'm sure anyone reading this entry is familiar with the experience of tragedy, and how one's own overblown, righteous indignations fizzle into ridiculous and petty residues.  Once a life has become finite, we pay tribute, we compile the list of decent acts, glorious accomplishments, the struggles that have led to triumphs.   We gathered and told our stories of Brett, the decent person that he was.  This is as it should be, for most people anyway.

There is nothing that reinforces someone's absence more than that person's uninhabited body.   The lost person is present almost everywhere but there, in that waxy, sunken facsimile.  Certainly there is something still present where the person lived and worked, in the personal objects and friendships left behind. It speaks volumes that dead bodies in movies can't approximate this absence---because for real people, something was in there that left.  I'm not sure why some people find open caskets comforting---I prefer to remember people as they were.  That's just me.  I shrink from death. 

Someone in cyberspace recommended this email service called FlyLady.  Ever heard of it?  I liked the idea of getting daily 15-minute assignments that, over time, if followed, would help me get the house generally clean enough for surprise visitors.  I think I've had unexpected company once in the five years I've lived in this house.  But still.  Just 15 minutes a day in a zone of your house, and always cleaning the sink before bed so you're not met with dirty dishes in the morning.  This is an approach that I can get behind. I love following instructions, and I like having tasks that are compartmentalized and limited in scope.  So what's the problem? 

What follows is just a portion of the most recent FlyLady testimonial that landed in my inbox today.  This sample lacks the triple exclamation points at the end of every line that I've come to admire from the testimonials, but it's chock full of the kind of womanly wisdom I thought died with the advent of "women's lib" and "the pill".

We SHEs get sidetracked because life is so full of goodness; we just get pulled in so many good directions, but we also get distracted by uninteresting stuff.  I can't count the times I ventured to the mailbox with every intention of getting the mail, and ended up at The Craft Castle or The Permanent Solution (my hair dresser's shop).  On one trip to the mailbox, I noticed the cable guy drilling a hole in the neighbor's yard and ended up at the mall, getting my ears pierced??  Go figure.  (The holes have since grown back in.)

Who are these women?  Are they living in Stepford?  I'd unsubscribe, but it's so weird and horrible that it's getting addictive.  


   

August 17th, 1981     Tuesday

[elaborate and florid illustration that can't be reproduced here]

Things have been happening that leave me very changed.  Maud visiting me from New York, sharing my private space and even my bed with the long-legged beauty has been a challenge and a relief.  It's a challenge to share my solitude and also a relief not to be alone ever.  I think we spent every second together for 5 days and 5 nights.  I was worried about Maud and Sydney, but they really hit it off---so now I'm happy.

I saw Charlie yesterday.  He finally invited me somewhere.  To the boat-launching on Saturday.  Friday's my birthday.  In the usual fucked-up way he is busy, busy, busy all day and all night.  Oh well.  He said he might surprise me.  Just for him to say that is enough.  I really love him more and more every time I'm with him.  I adore his accent, his voice, his words.  I pray and pray he doesn't mind my age.  It just wouldn't be fair.

There is something about him that is awesomely unique.  That shyness.  He's almost bashful.  I adore that.  But that's not it.  There's just a special quality inside him that thrills me.  I can't possibly attach words to it.

I'm a different person every day.  Every morning I wake up feeling completed in some way, with a fresh ignorance about life at the same time.  I never wake up depressed and I don't have bad dreams anymore.  I used to have nightmares about being mentally and physically paralyzed, unable to do or say what I want to but usually the opposite.  Out of control and alone with my terrifying situation.  I was never able to communicate my fear to anyone.  Then in one dream I told Julie T., who in waking life I look up to as a future version of myself, the kind of fulfilled person I imagine myself to be some day.  So it served some kind of purpose to tell that part of myself and end the struggle between the two self-images.  Because I don't have those dreams anymore, and I have even more control than usual in my dreams, I'm more able to complete them.

I've realized something right now.  Even though I'm not doing anything in particular that I find fulfilling in my life, my dreams are becoming more practical.  I feel like my spirituality and my intuitive knowledge is growing rapidly.  Insights and deep knowing arrive and keep arriving.  I feel pretty good, really.  My only real dissatisfaction these days is being alone.  I need company.  I enjoy my solitude, especially during the day.  Having time and space to myself can be very centering.  It gives me a chance to discover my real feelings.  It gives me a sense of self and I can allow myself to be any way that feels like me.  I need that time to reacquaint myself with my personality, to find new directions, to overcome fear.  But at the same time, I don't like to be isolated at all, and I hate to sleep alone.  There's something so intimate about 2 people dreaming together.  I like to sleep next to somebody, whether the relationship is platonic or sexual.  It's even better sometimes when it's your best friend and not your lover.  It's comfortable and trusting.

I think I'm the kind of person who could enjoy being married.  I don't think I'd get restless.  I love to live with people.  I desperately want people to know me and love what they know.  That's important to me.

One thing I'm feeling bad about, or confused about, is that I can't stop gossiping about other people.  It's like so many people confide in me and I always go and tell someone else.  I don't do it viciously.  Usually it's something I think the other person wants to hear, like "she thinks you're sexy" and stuff like that.  Or when people are having difficult relationship problems or personal problems---that's the part that bothers me.  Why do I feel I have to tell Maud that Sydney's mother is an alcoholic and why do I feel I have to tell Happy that Maud's boyfriend hits her?  Usually I'm trying to explain something.  I was trying to explain to Maud why I'm afraid of Sydney's mother.  I was trying to explain to Happy why Maud came to Maine to get away, and what she was getting away from.  I don't say things for no reason, and I'm not trying to be exciting when I gossip.  Even when I think I'm going to keep a secret, the moment I see Sydney I'm all mouth.

Sometimes I regret telling everything.  I have a running report of everything Charlie says to me.  Then everybody knows what's going on between us and it ceases to be as intimate.  It's no longer just between us.  Everybody now watches us to see if we're flirting and all that, so the experience is not as private. 

See, I'm excited by people and problems we all confront.  When I tell secrets it's because there's something meaningful about it, to me at least.  The person I gossip most about is myself.  In other words, I don't have a single secret I haven't told at least one person.

Still, I think I could curb my appetite for sharing such information.  Three's always something lost in the shuffle.  I don't feel trustworthy.  I think I shall always tell Sydney everything I know, because our relationship demands complete expression.  When we really get down to talking it's all stream of consciousness.  But when you're dealing with individuals you have to be careful with their secrets or private lives if you happen to by privy to the information.  When you learn of something you are automatically responsible for the knowledge.

Oh SHIT!  Charlie was at our house yesterday.  I remember him looking at my mom's sculpture which was sitting on the table.  I just looked over and noticed a piece of scrap paper sitting there on which I had written "Charles N., I love you".  He must have seen that.  Talk about secrets.  I can't believe I panicked at the thought of him reading that.  After all, I say it all the time with body language.  It sure isn't a secret.  I've told everyone except himself.  If he did read it, I guess it didn't fuck up our situation.  Actually, he seems more self-assured when he's around me.  They do say honesty is the best policy.  Well I think you have to be honest with the situation rather than the information.  Sometimes being honest with the situation is to keep certain information to yourself.

An evening, draping
     stars confuse
I wonder waitingly
        where you are...?
Behind the pale blue moons
      that quiver searchingly like
restless oceans
      But rush the other way
            again

And the fire, in hush with
        speechless flames
gathers upward, insanely,

And I, in the heat of moments, have
a silent touch for you, and then a thousand flames
feel out toward you, but
           I can't complete my reaching,

my hand
      stays in my pocket
           like a private joke

(Did you hear the one about...)

(I could use a little help here!)

... I have to keep writing and posting.  My scanner was fried by a power surge months ago;  I went to scan some photographs for the next post I had planned, a montage of Maud, and discovered that the thing wouldn't even power up.  For some largely unexamined reason, that took the wind out of my sails. 

When we were 16 and I was taking a photography class at high school, I took some black and white photographs of my former best friend on a rooftop in the garment district in NYC, where she lived with one fragment of her ruptured family in a fabulous loft.  New York was completely over the rainbow.  Traveling alone on a greyhound from rural Maine to the big Apple (my first such voyage was at age 12, with a change of buses in Boston) changed me fundamentally, as did those shocking, thrilling, surreal and sometimes revolting experiences Maud and I shared while wandering the city without supervision.   This particular visit by me to New York followed a visit by Maud to my family's squalid, no-plumbing cabin in Arundel, Maine, and during these visits our relationship was partially healed, in unspoken but palpable ways, from a previous trauma.  Her visit prompted one of my favorite diary entries to look back on a quarter century later... it seems possible that I can keep this blog going with stories and no photos after all.

Current Mood: hopeful

I imagine you
still standing where shelves of stone descend like ruins
to the sea; cinematic,
Roman, looking out and away believing nobody sees you,
or that cityscape on fire in the sun's abysmal plunge,
where your Helen with thoughts of you insinuates
in her husband's ear, oh what is love, what is it?
you stand heroic, and this is what I see
hospital scrubs rolled neatly to the knee,
colossal feet in greenblack seaweed which
seeps between your toes like oiled fruit
when you take that walk,
into the welcoming waves of morphine sleep,
you and your twenty-three years in this world
and the water would be warm

Strange tattoo, the years have diminished you
but there you are in my skin
the same as when i needled you in

You would be an architect if you could stand school
except life is too short to spend sitting
in Syracuse
assembling toy cities; life is too short
too short to spend sitting,
unless by a fire with Steely Dan
defining the brink of your history
the tide with its measured hungry breathing for your time
and the snow outside down-whispering its compensation
just you with your soapstone
and something to carve with
and something to carve
a pipe for your dope

Strange tattoo, the years have diluted you
although, I make you lifelike
by standing naked in the light just so,
and there you are
you and your two hundred ten pounds of chunky doom

this one's for you
1959 to 1982

I don't talk about him, but not out of disinclination.  It was just so very long ago, and not something you bring up at parties more than 20 years later.  And while I refer to him as my boyfriend, that's a subtle but loving revenge on my part, as John Eddy would never have referred to me as his girlfriend.  This is so much the case that when he died I didn't find out until after he was buried.  He was deeply in love with a married woman, and she him; they corresponded frequently but rarely met.  And I had other boyfriends throughout our association.  So in truth, John and I were very young and very good friends with conflicted hearts; we were kind to each other always.

He died of an aggressive form of cancer that invaded every organ of his body.  He believed he had the flu, until he woke up with paralysis on one side.  Three weeks after his first visit to the doctor, he was gone.  It's astonishing to realize this could happen to a 23 year old.  It still baffles me. 

Initially, after getting the news, my intellectual life derailed.  I stopped writing in a journal (and never kept a journal again).  I frequently saw him in crowds and as the driver of a car going past.  I went to where he had lived and looked in the windows.  5 years after his death, I was still thinking of him daily, and wrote a series of poems that I just found while going through those boxes in the basement.  I'll post the best of those in a day or two.  But for the moment, I just want to record some things I remember about him.

When he was a tiny child, his grandmother would sing and rock him to sleep, and while doing this she would trace patterns in his ear.   This was so deeply comforting that it formed one of his first memories.

You know how bathtubs have built in soap holders?  John insisted that soap not be left there during showers, as the soap would disintegrate much faster with the water running on it constantly.

He attended university for one year in Syracuse, studying architecture.  While he gave that up to become a chef, he retained the style of handwriting one commonly sees on architectural blueprints.

There was another John Eddy in his hometown, and the other John Eddy died in a fiery crash the night of high school graduation.  A lot of confusion resulted from the media reporting of that crash, to the extent that his parents received sympathy calls and cards during the next week. 

If someone ordered steak well-done, he would choose the worst cut of meat and say "burn it!"  or "ruin it!"  His apron strings were never tied.  His favorite outfit was hospital scrubs.  He called himself fat.  His biceps were so large that my fingers couldn't enclose them.

At the restaurant where we met (I washed dishes and bussed tables), John would send the gay waiters into paroxysms of mirth and flirtation by putting a mayonnaise jar in his mouth. 

He liked Steely Dan music and marijuana.  He liked solitude.

I have no photos of him, but two sketches I did from memory.  I still have the one letter he sent me. 

I'm unearthing a lot of academic material as we clear the basement to create George's studio.  I finally decided that I can part with the notebooks I used during college to take notes during classes.  I've been carting those from house to house for close to 20 years.  It's ridiculous to think I'll read through those as an octogenarian, when I have all those letters and diaries that I'll prefer to reread.

I am keeping the papers I wrote.  Glancing through, I now can't believe I read all those books and had such organized thoughts about them, books I can't remember anything about now.  I can't believe I wrote entire papers in Spanish.  But here's the evidence.

And I wrote loads of poetry from age 14 through college---then just stopped.

Tracy Pinkham.  I see the name on everything that is packed in boxes. I wonder what ever happened to her?

Saturday, the family went to Farwell, MI for our rare visitation with George's stepmother's family.  Eddie is George's dad's second wife and is his only living parent figure.

The hosts of this reunion/party were Barb (Eddie's daughter from her first husband) and Barb's second husband, Jim.  Jim is a recovering alcoholic turned evangelical who wears a diamond earring and owns his own Karaoke machine, which he had set up outdoors on the back porch, with speakers going into the pole barn and house so that nobody would miss any of the performances. In other words, he's awesome.  I really like the guy.  He weeps when he hugs you, and does everything with gusto, sincerity and charm like it's his last day on this earth.

With all the to-do I've been making about karaoke, George laid the pressure on big time.  From a book that consisted almost entirely of Patsy Cline, Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka and Elvis Pressley, and oddly, a few things thrown in for the grandkids, like Love Shack,  I chose to destroy Crystal Gayle's "Don't it Make My Brown Eyes Blue". My only consolation is that I *think* I was adorable while vacillating between inaudible, wavering falsetto and off-pitch droning.  I'm tempted to tape over the video George lovingly recorded of this particular debacle, but the potential to make thousands on America's Funniest Home Videos keeps me from doing so.  I'd want to highlight the part where some relative named Tina shouts:  "Get her a Jack and Coke!"  It's very funny, as long as I pretend it's not me.

The best performance by far had to be Jim's heartfelt rendition of "I Did It My Way".   He worked the crowd like a pro.  He sang with so much feeling that my eyes were welling up with tears, just as George sat down and grunted, "And we thought we didn't have a life".  The cognitive dissonance between my emotional reaction to the sincerity of the performance and my husband's dismissive, long-suffering remark made it a moment in time that I'll never, ever forget as long as I live.