We Never Used the F Word

     I am 65.  At sixteen I wrote my first book.  It was 30,000 words and was entitled Balboa is Full of Beginners.   I still have the book typed on what is now yellowing paper (although then pristine white)  on the orange-cased Smith Corona typewriter that my sister had handed down after she'd finished nursing school and got married.  I've reread it recently and it is in a wonderful authentic teenage voice connecting what I wished my sixteenth summer could have been and my angst at how it was not so.  The characters are fairly fleshed out and the plot is surprisingly developed.  I wonder how I can weave it into a new book with the characters now facing medicare.  After that book there were three others written in my 20's, and then a gap of book writing, but writing that explored (poetry, and essays), and suited a particular purpose (school writing, dissertation writing).  But always, writing.  Then came the memoir in my 50's and 60's, and a fiction book about a baseball player in my 60's, and a current historical novel in progress.  And from 16 to 65 my writing (except for one short story) has been unpublished, sitting in drawers, occupying hard drive space.  As private to the world at large as my journals.  To be a writer, I somehow thought, meant being on a best seller list or at least available at Amazon.  I could not reach my lofty goals.  An MFA later, writing conferences later, a women's retreat at Ghost Ranch later, and a lot of thinking and reflecting and journaling and revising, and somehow it all is beginning to come together.  I write therefore I am a writer.  And, it's about time that I open the vaults and put it out there. I am ready.  I am still looking for an agent and wondering how I will get my books, particularly the one above that, I think, can help others who have lost a parent when they were children, available in print.  But I have found a way, imperfect though it may be, to validate myself as a writer.  Although it's a bit of a challenge to do, (formatting is a bitch and requires tons of patience) e publishing offers me possibilities.  Get rich possibilities?  No.  But possibilities that nurture me, the creative me.  The me who cannot help but tell the stories in writing, the stories that need time to evolve into a story.  I often say when I try to speak a story that I am a much better writer.  Likely has something to do with some issue from my childhood, akin to me not thinking I can sing at all.  I sing.  I do it best in my car or house when I'm alone.  I won't be singing in public anytime soon, but my writing is now public.  I am still savoring how it makes me feel when I see my name on the book jacket. For now googling the title and seeing it in the world is enough for me to understand---  I wrote that, world.  I am a writer.  Amen.

A mild summer here in sunny California had folded.  Triple digit temperatures had visited for a week, reminding me of what I missed, or in the case of excessive heat, did not miss at all.  My best friend and her son, my son and daughter and their girlfriend and boyfriend as well as my granddaughter and the girlfriend’s son had been planning for a week or so to head off to Disneyland. Then, my best friend had to cancel (along with her son) because she is having problems with her back, and while the percocet she is on may have made Disneyland an even happier place, her discomfort didn’t allow her to even experiment with that notion.  And then, the heat surge and I finally admitted that I just could not, would not be able to trek around Disneyland in 100 degree, or even 97 degree weather.  This California girl who loves the sun, is no longer able to soak it in like the high school years of cocoa butter and baby oil.  But, I did not want to miss the opportunity of everyone together for a day, so we worked out to go to Ventura beach where it was thirty degrees cooler.  We would go to have lunch.  After some snipping and sniping by me  not wanting to occupy a single car with 7 other people because I thought it was too crowded, I was told to get in, given the front captain’s chair, and we started to Ventura, tension taut in the packed car.  But hours later, after a more than cordial lunch where we ordered the largest pizza any of us had ever seen and only could eat half; large enough to draw the attention of passers-by who gawked and pointed, we ambled along the pathway next to the harbor, the sea breeze enfolded us, and somehow cemented the boundaries of family.  When I saw the smiling tugboat I knew we were in exactly the happiest place on earth right then.  Disneyland would be there for another time.  When we all got back into the car for the drive home, it seemed a lot less crowded.

Latino Insurance

  Driving in my area the other day I noticed some new signs in a strip mall.  “Art’s Liquor” was not new.  “US Post Office” was not new.  “Latino Insurance”, now that was new.  Latino Insurance?  I paused.   I know, I know.  The intent most likely is for people who are Latino to know there is a specific place where they will feel most welcome when purchasing insurance.  But then, what if it isn’t?  What if Latino Insurance is a special kind of insurance for bigots?  From my ultraconservative friends I often hear  about blocking borders and how “those people” need to find someplace else to call home.  Not in the US of A.  Maybe these are the people who would buy ‘Latino Insurance’?  “Oh, no, I don’t want them living on my block and now they can’t because if they try, well, I’ll just cash in on my Latino Insurance.” 

      And if the prejudice against Hispanics can fall under an insurance blanket, what about “Black Insurance’ and “Asian Insurance”, or “Elder Insurance”, or “Homeless Insurance”, or “Gay Insurance”, or “Female Insurance”?   No end to the types of insurance that would focus on NIMBY.  Trying to keep a place secure against ‘them’, outsiders, ‘not us’.  Insecure people looking for some security and projecting it on people who are identifiably different than themselves.  Through the lens of prejudice, however, security is not to be found.

     So, I’ll continue to think, to hope really, that the new sign names a specific audience to help, rather than the other alternative.  That alternative is worrisome to me because it speaks of division rather than unity.  The US of A is all about unity.  It even says so in the title.

Bridge from Then to Now

       Between childhood and old age is a bridge.  Beginning of the bridge, ending of the bridge.  Many off ramps to the span, off ramps that take us along mountains to climb, valleys to descend, beaches to walk along. But always, we return to the bridge.  For the beginning and the ending are invariably the same.  The routes taken are the variables.  Sometimes, I find myself sitting on the bridge, on the railing to the bridge, not contemplating shortening the bridge, but contemplating nonetheless.  What off ramp do I take?  Most recently as I sat there, on the fence, I contemplated the paths I’d taken, and wondered about the paths still to come.  Like salt and pepper, cinnamon and cloves, vanilla bean and cocoa bean, my mind became seasoned.

          What are these seasonings in life?  Those parts of me that color the me of today with the crayons of yesterday.  I am awash in internal color.  I am flooded with feelings. Mostly feelings I’d confined to the depths as a way to survive their terror in earlier parts of my life when I dare not feel them because in doing so I would understand hopelessness, I would not want to go on.  Now, I feel their intensity.  How could a child deal with feelings such as these?  Bury them deeply with grief and hopelessness.  And now, when they return, they return to tantalize me with thoughts that I am today, further along this bridge, as hopeless as that younger part of me who had no voice, no choice, no choice but to bury the feelings and to go on, to survive.  I am in awe of that younger me who went on, who survived, who flourished with achievements, who made a way in the world by connecting to school, to baseball, to friends.  Awesome. 

         I look behind me down the bridge and see this feeling me who did not deny life and the hope in life, but went forward as best she could, growing in strength, burying the feelings.  I sit and pause and feel and understand.  We are all those parts of us further back down the bridge, no matter what off ramps we have taken.  The beginning of the bridge is anchored in bedrock.  We cannot deny that child of ourself who has, to varying degrees, carried or buried our feelings for us for an entire lifetime waiting for us to connect so that we can be whole.  Often not an easy task, but one necessary for self-acceptance. 

       I still sit on the fence, because I am still pondering, still contemplating.  I’m not ready yet to move along intentionally, but I will be moved along as the world moves me along and I will react and then sit back on my fence.  I keep looking backward and waving, urging her to come along.  You contain my feelings, I tell her, I need you with me. After all, the bridge, for me, has always been about words and as I look forward I see many paths to take.   I may have the words, but you have the feelings and we are one.  The Alpha and the Omega. 

Rainbow Writer

   Two years ago I lived on Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, soaking in the creative and peaceful energy that abounds.  I came for a semi-annual writers retreat sponsored by A Room of Her Own Foundation, AROHO.  I walked to my own pace, moved to my own rhythm, broke from what I must and should do, and for seven days I lived, as much as possible, the life of an artist, a writer.  I learned that writing is not only producing words on a page.  Writing is allowing my mind to be free to think, to let the unconscious bubble through to consciousness, without the filter of the day to day rhythm imposed on me in suburbia.  I talked with women who wrote poetry and novels and essays and memoir and creative non-fiction and short stories and chapbooks and published books and unpublished books.  I listened as well to their words, to what was under their words, to what surrounded their words. To what encapsulated us all, containing us together, enriching us.  And on the wind, in the sky, in the earth I saw evidence of connection.  Unspoken often, at other times understood as serendipitous. We spoke of our connections. And in the speaking,   I received a room of my own, a room within my soul that is engraved, writer.  In the summer of 2013 I am excited to return to polish up that engraving.

Voluntary Deportation Program

     Lots goes on in a plant.  Growth and withering.  Flowers blossomed and flowers to bloom.  A mirror of the human spirit, I think.  Often the plant is filled with the detritus of times past.  It hangs on to the plant but eventually time helped by wind and water and the inability to hang on any longer will drop the withered pieces to the earth where they’ll contribute to the richness of the soil.  Surrounding this past, though, is the future, the bulbs not quite ready to burst into flowers. Standing stretching towards the sun in their finest greenery.  An obelisk of potential and kinetic energy.

      I read about the failure of a voluntary deportation program wherein undocumented aliens could turn themselves  in and be deported. Free of charge, apparently.  No one would take them into the desert and tell them to cross the river or climb back over the fence. No.  These immigrants who had risked their lives to come to America and perhaps paid a large sum of money that they’d saved for years would be driven back over the border, or at least to the border, free to go back to whatever had driven them to leave their homeland in the first place.  The article was lamenting the loss of the efficacy of the program.  The article was serious in its tone.  That it was a failure...Duh!

     Seven or eight people had actually turned themselves in, a sad testament to a life lived in poverty in the United States.  Life in the United States worse than life from wherever they'd come?  Perhaps instead of returning to their land which held more promise, they were self-sacrificing decoys to prevent capture of other undocumented family members .  Perhaps they were thrill seekers who want once again to test the system.  Maybe they are those that understand that the cycle of immigration is like a plant.  Or, perhaps they are planning to come back soon, bringing along some friends,  now that the voluntary deportation program is over and they won’t have to face that decision again.  My larger question is what bureaucrat is paid a government salary to think up these programs?  Perhaps we need to ask that person to volunteer for voluntary deportation from that job.  Geesh! Missing in the obelisk of potential and kinetic energy department to be sure.

Sunsets

        I take many pictures of sunsets and few of sunrises.  Perhaps this is my  unconscious way of learning to deal with endings.  I don’t deal with them too well, but in photographing sunsets I learn to enjoy the beauty of endings.  Otherwise, I don’t see much good in them. Beginnings, on the other hand, are times of possibilities.  Yet I don’t photograph sunrises over and over again.  Perhaps I don’t need to be reminded that beginnings are often beautiful.  Or maybe it’s just because I usually don’t rise before dawn.

       I don’t suspect too many people deal with endings so well, even while realizing that the ending of something often gives room for the beginning of something else, something else which is another necessary part of growing and life and part of the journey.   Maybe the best we can do is to recognize endings graciously, if not gratefully.  I’m going to work on the gracious part, because I am way too far away from the grateful part. Until then, I’ll keep photographing sunsets to appreciate the beauty of endings. Sunsets far away.  With plenty of shadows in between.