Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 7

Happy. . .

—From CB—

Saturday, I attended a periodic writers’ circle and read a flash-fiction piece from my previous anthology. It was about waking up one morning “happy,” without any reason to be. In the story, the guy just waits for the day to close in and press him back to his usual funk. The only suspense is in his waiting. Not really a page-turner: turn one page and you’re done.

It’s made me think. If our life is full of incident, or if it’s flat-lined, there may be some concrete reason to be happy or sad, depending on which way the ball bounces. But I’m wondering why we’re moved to ask the reason for any emotional state. I suppose we feel the need to preserve it if it’s desired or to change it if it’s not. There’s always an expectation of what we want it to be. “What makes you so happy?” is probably a less frequent question than “Why are you so sad?” But neither is guaranteed to get a real answer. Or at least one that’s lasting.

In part, it’s a function of your point of view. A lava flow can be a thing of wonder and beauty or a catastrophe: it depends on where you’re standing. Though it also depends on whether you seeing a village wiped out and hearing the screams, and whether it affects you.

Is there a state of emotion without cause? Surely those who suffer from chronic depression would answer Yes, though I could imagine that some would feel an impulse to connect their emotion with a cause beyond pure body chemistry.

But is there happiness without cause? One can fancy a Golden Age, when shepherds frisked over the meadows and the sheep strummed lutes. Yet is there a state of good cheer in spite of the news? Despite the daily dose of famine, war, exploitation, disease, slaughter on the playground, and global disasters pending? Does a joy in simply being alive depend on simple-mindedness or on the privileges of affluence, whiteness, maleness, and the ability to pay low taxes to the empire? Do the streets of empire ring with the sound of music or with a hideous blare? Or can we patch together small achievements, from a birthday surprise to the Nobel Prize?

For myself, there’s only one life, and it’s starting to approach the vanishing point. I doubt that I’ll have too many cheery years forthcoming, at least no more so than it’s ever been, and I doubt I’ll look forward to new successes, new horizons.

Whatever blessedness I wake to does very little to ease the pain on Earth or the billions of souls who wander in mud. But still I hope to wake with an open heart, to be happy for no reason at all except the discomforts of being alive. I’d like to feel the sun and shout, or even whisper, Yes!

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Priorities. . .

—From EF—

Conrad and I are sitting with the Moon tonight, the dark one (we call it Horned Moon), as we have done twice a lunar month for nearly fifty years now, his Horned Moon, my Full Moon. We will be up late and tuning in with high energy, so I’ll be sleepy tomorrow morning. Doesn’t matter. I’m getting up early to go to a 9 AM meeting of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. I don’t know if I can add my voice, but I’m going to try. What’s at stake is the next decade or so of the health and availability of the Sonoma Coast.

I fell in love with California, not just this specific area, back in 1963 when we first arrived here from the Midwest. It hit me like a thunderbolt and I knew my heart would live here wherever I paid my rent. Conrad finished his Stanford PhD in 1966, we left for the first teaching job in South Carolina, and it took me 33 years to get back. I’m here for good. We went to the ocean today, as we do every Sunday, to have a slow quiet picnic on a bluff overlooking the rocks and the waves. I suffer from depression, and this is one of my life-giving resources that helps me stay afloat. It’s my medicine, and I’ll fight to keep it.

In the 1970’s the town of Bolinas underwent an epic struggle, beautifully told in a book called The Town That Fought To Save Itself. I found it somewhere not long after we arrived in 1999, and I read and re-read it often until I loaned it to someone. It made clear how ruthless and powerful the moneyed force of development is, but also made clear that the people of Bolinas had the grit and passion of a strong community. It was touch and go, but they prevailed, at the cost of having no other life but that struggle until they won.

In our twenty-three years of living here I have seen orchard after orchard fall to the juggernauts of vineyards and development. I like wine. People need houses. I wasn’t born yesterday: I’m eighty-three years old, and I read the news. I’ve seen the skirmishes of the past few years, the attempts to install Iron Rangers and charge for ocean access, and I’ve wondered what would come next. Now I know. The current push is here, and it will make its voice heard tomorrow morning.

There is a single specific development being proposed at Timber Cove by a New Jersey developer. His interesting tactic is to propose modification of the protections currently in place for the whole Sonoma Coast, not just his Timber Cove site. There’s also a threat to the prohibition of toxic chemicals used in agriculture, particularly vineyards.

It has been said, “The coastland has not been saved. It is ALWAYS being saved.” If Arizona can’t limit the Saudi alfalfa farm from draining their aquifers to ship fodder overseas, if Nestle is still draining California’s aquifers to fill little plastic bottles, it shows what we’re up against. It’s all too easy to lose hope. Bolinas, we need you, we need to remember what you did.

Tomorrow morning I’m gonna be foggy, but I’m gonna be there.

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Religion. . .

—From CB—

As a kid, I went to the Church of Christ when we visited my grandma, and most Sundays to a Presbyterian church when home. My mom was flexibly Christian: “It doesn’t matter what you believe, but you ought to go to church.” In Sunday School I learned that the Catholics have seven sacraments and we have only two, so we take ours more seriously. And once I caused tumult in the mind of a Sunday School teacher by asking, “Why are we down on Jews if Jesus was a Jew?” I didn’t consider myself a heretic at the time.

In my early teens, I was very committed, partly from kissing Janis at church camp, partly from reading the Bible start to finish—great stories, interspersed with lots of babble. And I had my own interpretations of their meanings—now, indeed, verging on heresy.

I began to fall away when our preacher left. His sermons were radical for Council Bluffs, Iowa. I was appointed the “youth rep” on the Search Committee. The way the Presbyterians did it, finding a new pastor, was to send out a squad to hear a nearby preacher, and if they liked him, they’d try to lure him away from his job and into our clutches. It was really my experience, listening to the conversations of that committee, that frosted me on the church. It had nothing to do with rejection of Christian dogma but with seeing the Elders’ violation of what I valued in it. Ironic that one week I received the Boy Scouts’ God and Country Award, and the next week I stopped going to church.

Jump far ahead. We’d left a teaching career to start a theatre ensemble in Milwaukee; at the time there was much anti-war activity, and many of our short pieces addressed that and other social issues. Liberal churches and campus ministries were heavily involved and were sponsors of many tour bookings, and our performances were the “sermons” for many congregations. For me, religion wasn’t about God—if he existed, he could take care of himself—it was about how you treated your fellow humans.

In Chicago we discovered Unitarians. They were very light on theology, very focused on social issues, as were we, and it was helpful to have coffee with “tribe.” Moving East, we gravitated to the Quakers, whose central premise is that “there is that of God in each person.” If you take that as a premise, you have to really listen to the guy you think is a total asshole and hear what’s a whisper of truth, even if it’s a debate on when to fix the roof.

(By the way, I use the term “premise” from our theatrical practice: given this, then what follows: the source of Hamlet’s, Medea’s, or Willy Loman’s acts.)

When we moved further East, to Philadelphia in the 90’s, we didn’t find Quakers who rang our bell, but we discovered neo-pagans. The theology was anything-goes. I don’t “believe” in Kali, Odin, or Inanna, but I believe the myths have greaat value. It was just the people, the songs, the rituals and even the stupid rituals. To be among seekers.

I think that’s the heart of it for me. Seeking. I grieve that traditional Christianity has been besmirched by the fascists and fundamentalist crooks.

I don’t really blame religion for its sins of enslavement, war, and suppression of thought in the past. The record is severe, yet no imperialist ever needed religion to justify aggression: any excuse will do.

I grieve that religions have become the refuge of people who lie in fear. Yet we’ll always seek to know, and in meantime we’ll have to make decisions: who to talk to, who to sympathize with, what to do. That’s a problem that’s persisted a lot more than two thousand years, and still persists.

Happy Fourth. . .

—From EF—

It’s Tuesday, the Fourth of July, and this is the blog entry I should have written on Sunday. It’s a big-ass holiday, and everybody’s celebrating, but I’m just settling for being here with Conrad and the cats and being quiet and low-key.

Fun and entertainment for this morning: the washing machine malfunctioned and didn’t stop filling when it was full. I was at the other end of the house, blissfully ignorant, until I went in to put things in the dryer. When I found myself standing in a pool that covered the whole laundry-room floor I hit the machine’s off-button and grabbed a mop and dishpan. This was beyond floor-towels, and it took me four trips to the kitchen sink to empty what I laboriously wrung out into the dishpan. Luckily, the spinner part still worked OK, so I emptied the wash water, refilled the tank, spun it again and called it quits. The agitator didn’t ever kick in, so stuff was just soaked in soapy water and then rinsed. I am NOT going to traipse up to the laundromat today. The clothes are in the dryer and will be declared clean, whatever the Supreme Court would say.

Two days ago when I was scheduled to write, Conrad’s cellulitis (third bout) came roaring back with fiery red hot skin and a fever. 3 AM, Sunday, on a holiday weekend, he’d collapsed in the bathroom and couldn’t get up without assistance. Even getting his legs swung into bed was a major project. I kept him hydrated, bugged him with periodic thermometer readings, and waited for daylight. The on-call doc at our medical clinic returned my call quickly and was magnificent. She took me seriously about our desperate desire to avoid the ER, took time to read his on-line hospital notes from cellulitis #1 and #2, and agreed to give oral antibiotics a 24-hour trial with me wielding the thermometer frequently. She made me promise that if he went above 100.5 we’d go to the hospital, and told me to do the Sharpie routine again (drawing a dotted line around the red areas to judge whether it was spreading.)

So now I have new entries to the iPhoto album called “cellulitis” that started back on Apr 26. Amazing shades of red and strange Australia-shaped Sharpie maps. But so far we have dodged the bullet, his temp is back to normal, most of the red has subsided, and the pressure ulcer he got from the weeks in the hospital beds is starting to heal. It took me half a day to find a pharmacy somewhere that had MediHoney. Don’t laugh, it’s real, and has a solid track record. All honey has wound-healing properties, but this is unique, gathered from bees working on shrubs and trees related to the Tea Tree family. A sterile product in a tube, it’s effective in difficult wound care and I can already see the improvement. Once that open wound closes, CB will not be so vulnerable to further infection.

On July 11 the 10 days of antibiotics will be over, the wound should have healed, and with decent karma we’ll have avoided the clutches of the hospital. His physical therapy to deal with remaining balance issues will go through the end of July, and life could again be as normal as these weird days will allow. As they say—ground, center, breathe.

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Eighty. . .

—From CB—

Just found a blog I wrote at eighty (now staggering toward 82). I don’t intend to stop groping for new things to say, but for eight years of grade school I recited the Pledge of Allegiance daily, with scant effect, so a bit of repetition may be excused.

#

Last week I turned eighty. Though I received many congratulations, this was not entirely of my doing. In part, it was due to the medical establishment, who cured many discomforts for me. In part, to my wife, who’s cooked my supper for sixty years, paid the bills, and did services too numerous or personal to mention. In large part, it was the achievement of my mother, who did the hard work of labor and worked many jobs to keep me alive until I got my own job—and managed to survive my adolescence.

I did some work at it too. Beyond that, what’s left to say? I’m in good health, beyond chronic complaints which might kill me if something else doesn’t do it first. I’m a compulsive worker, though the work now serves only the purpose of keeping me out of trouble. I’m immensely proud of my wife and my children, both. I enjoy food and sex and the ocean and blessed sleep. I wish I could travel more and talk with people, but I’ve always been very shy. In a way I hate to read, because there’s so much to read that I’ll never read, and I’m so slow, which occurs to me every time I turn the page. I’m obsessed with all the great mysteries for which I’m clueless forever.

I’ve been all over the United States and Europe, a bit in Canada and Mexico, a week in Israel before the first Intifada. I’ve been part of the theatre community on many levels, plus public radio, puppetry, Boy Scouts, polyamory, Unitarians, Friends, neo-pagan circles, and the social-services realm—not all simultaneously (which is part of the virtues of being eighty—you’ve lived so many lives in so many worlds).

I’ve had a fellow traveler. We met when I was 19, she was 20, and it was a lightning-swift bond. We found a common career, like all my relatives (who were farmers), and nurtured each others’ growth into something reasonably humanoid. Many long nights, some ecstatic, a few otherwise.

What’s the result?

I have two grown children of whom I’m immensely proud, both creative, both well partnered, both human in most all senses of the word. I have a mate who’s more than I’ve ever thought possible in a mate. I have two cats, pure devils.

I vote, and sometimes post screeds on Facebook, but I’m more critical of my own tribe, their tactics and vocabulary, than of the dullards and monsters the next valley down. Not that I’m more offended by bad spelling than genocide, but frankly I’m too chicken to man the barricades, and I don’t consider posts on Facebook more than a hobby.

I have no apparent career. I’ve spent my life in theatre, directed about a hundred shows, written 50+, sculpted 18 bins of puppets, but that’s all dead and buried. We’ve done some very good radio work. We’ve renovated three spaces as theatres, but none are theatres now. We’ve written forty plays, two hundred sketches, ten novels and 60+ stories with very scant reputation or readership. Yet we’ve earned a living doing it, worked to the bone, and had fun. Right now, in relation to those worlds, I feel much as I did in high school: out of the center of things.

Getting past the age of fifteen, you start to think of death. At forty, it becomes real. At eighty, it’s a package you expect in the mail, though you can’t recall calling in the order. Nor have they sent the tracking number, but given deliveries these days, who can tell? I’m in good health, and other than groping for names and words, I’m sentient and ambulatory. Main worry is that no way can I leave my campsite cleaner than I found it, but I don’t want to leave a mess.

#

Both my parents are dead, and many friends. Oddly, I’ve never felt grief, just a sense of fate, maybe a trait of my farmer genes. I would hope to spare my loved ones pain, but the only way to be sure of that is to stay alive. Though I still aspire to wisdom.

 

 

Gleaning. . .

—From EF—

Yesterday I knocked off a few tasks that were toppling into toxic territory. One of my mental quirks converts anything I’ve let become past due into something that’s impossible to tackle and I have to work like hell to cross that icky boundary and start to deal with it. A few of them got done yesterday (more are looming) and I actually cranked my head around to getting some pleasure out of it.

I neglected my garden bed of chard when the last hot spell hit about a month ago and it bolted. By now the plants had converted themselves into very tall lacy things that looked very decorative but not particularly edible. Bolting is an amazing process. Chard is normally a large broad leaf, but when it starts to bolt everything changes. I swear that it even takes the oldest leaves, the ones I could have cut and didn’t, and converts them into long narrow shapes, then shoots the central stem upward at warp speed. It then sprouts a gazillion tiny narrow leaves and little fireworks-spray flower buds that will mature into seeds.

I’m doing my best to tend my garden better than last year, which was all-around gnarly. I’d like to clear that particular bed and put chard in it again, because the mostly-filtered light worked well for chard. The invasive berry-brambles had to be fought back and I bear the scratches that rewarded me, but I did pull every last tower of bolted chard and carried them in a bundle to the front steps. Then the gleaning began, and culminated in a basket of runt chard leaves that looked very silly and tasted really good at dinnertime.

The French filmmaker Agnes Varda has a late film focussed on this process: “The Gleaners and I.” (I think Criterion’s streaming it now.) Gleaners go through what’s left after the crop has been taken in, and take what’s been missed or ignored. (Trash-pickers glean, too.) It takes time and patience, but when you need what you’re gleaning, it’s worth it.

The gray sky had cleared and I sat in the late afternoon sun taking bunch by bunch from the stack on my right, snipping the little leaves off with my fingernails, dropping them in the wicker basket to be washed, and piling the now mostly-bare stalks in the next step down to be taken to the yard-waste bin. Every stalk had at least a few thumb-sized leaves, a courageous few still had palm-sized ones, and when I finished I had a respectable basket’s worth. I think the job took half an hour, and it was a sweet sunny brainless meditation.

I took the basket to my kitchen’s deep sink, sprayed and shook, and left it to drain. I love using my woven baskets as colanders; they feel friendlier than cold metal. The baby chard steamed nicely and joined the bowl of cannellini (big white Italian beans), savory roast pork and fresh buttermilk cornbread. And now I have a garden bed empty for tilling and planting welcoming the next generation of chard.  

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Writing. . .

—From CB—

Why do you write? Not a stupid question—one that comes up endlessly in online writers’ groups—but generally one to be dodged. You can contemplate it for hours, or you can write.

I’ve always found my own answers flippant or bloated with profundity, sometimes both. But I guess my reluctance to face the question stems from the fact that I don’t want to be limited by my answer. I don’t only want to entertain or to change the world or to kill time or to express the inner Me or to get famous—from time to time I may want any of those, but in the words of that esteemed cowboy/country song, “Don’t fence me in.”

Lately, though, I’ve found myself thinking about it more. Into my 80’s, I don’t want to accumulate more clutter for my survivors, and words are pretty lightweight and easily herded. There is that, but something more. If you vowed—if you dedicated your life—to posting on Facebook every cat photo on earth, people might intuit a purpose (to amuse, to assert feline rights, etc.), but your focus would be on your task.

We sometimes take a trip out to Grass Valley to see a John McCutcheon concert. He’s a prolific songwriter and superb performer, well worth the three-hour drive each way. Now in his 70’s, he says, it’s an extremely fertile time. And I wonder, whether it’s songs or stories or cat photos, if part of the urge is simply to proclaim that we’re still alive.

Maybe it’s not much different from the kid who gouges his initials into the school desk or leaves his chewing gum stuck to the underside. We cause less damage with these assertions of existence than with mass shootings, though we garner fewer headlines.

For about the last six months, maybe more, I’ve been writing “flash fiction,” now collected in three thin volumes—seventy-four stories in all—and another thirty in process. What is flash fiction? Anything under a thousand words, the shorter the better.

It’s yet another stage of an inexplicable urge to tell stories. It began, I suppose, with a vision of being able to condense Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR to forty minutes and to convince my high school drama coach to let us do it for the state drama contest—later to do the same with Ibsen’s GHOSTS, despite the fact that plays about syphilis were rarely done by high schools in Iowa in 1959.

The urge went through multiple stages. I thought the career would be in college theatre‑teaching and directing—at the time the growth of regional theatres was only beginning—and the stories that compelled me as a director were the great playwrights—Strindberg, Wilde, Buechner, Marlowe—until a new challenge beckoned. We formed a theatre ensemble.

Our first show was a hodge-podge of five- or ten-minute plays. Most were created through improvisation, but someone needed to write the stuff, polishing and structuring, and that fell mostly to me. Jump ahead, and I’d written about twenty shows, sometimes based on improvs, sometimes out of the blue, before I ever considered myself a “playwright.”

That came when I wrote the first play I’d ever written that was not for our own production. WANNA was accepted for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, and suddenly I was a playwright. That play was never produced, but it led to FULL HOOKUP, which got a fair amount of national attention, an agent for our plays, and an abominable review for an abominable staging in New York. I learned several things: very talented people could make great mistakes, and the commercial theatre wasn’t where I wanted to be.

Moves to Chicago, to Lancaster PA, to Philadelphia, to California, were an enormous shedding and redefinition of the work. The work wasn’t everything, but it was our center, the way the farm is the center of farmers. Yet always we retained and added to the short stuff: the five- and ten-minute plays that had spurred us along this path. The path added up to about forty plays and a couple hundred short pieces. Possibly the greatest challenge was when we essayed Family Snapshots, a radio series of 65 ninety-second dramas: think of the stories that you imagine from hearing a half dozen words in the supermarket line.

Moving westward involved losing all our theatrical funding and facing an utterly changed touring environment. We continued to write and produce plays—many collaborations—but eventually began to learn to write prose fiction. Nine novels later, five self-published (with scant sales), and a handful of published stories, I started to write flash fiction. It suffices. I don’t need to get famous before I get dead.

Like all the work, heavy and light, the comic and grim—I’ve described the work as “hairpin turns on the street where you live.”

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What If . . .

—From EF—

My father owned guns, mostly shotguns for bird hunting. I suspect that the sport mainly gave him an excuse to ramble around in the Michigan woods with his hunting dogs, but he did indeed sometimes bring home grouse and woodcock, sometimes quail, and invite friends for a fancy dinner.

I was taught to shoot a .22 rifle at tin cans, but I wasn’t very good. I was more proud of using the gizmo that hurled clay pigeons into the air for him to do target practice.

The closest I ever came to gun mystique was when I played Belle Starr (The Bandit Queen). Back in 1989, when we had our theatre in Lancaster PA, Belle Starr was part of an enormous solo piece I did: eighteen women from an amazing book of character-poetry by Pamela White Hadas. Onstage, Belle spoke aloud her letters to her estranged daughter Pearl while taking care of the mundane task of disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling her very large pistol.

I learned to do that so well I could work by touch and still keep my face toward the audience. I still remember the smell of cold steel and oily rags, but the strongest memory is the pain of bittersweet words never spoken to the girl/woman who was once a part of her.

Belle’s pistol was a necessary tool, not a fetish. My father’s gun cabinet was not an object of worship; he taught me respect, not reverence. He used ammunition appropriate for his purpose. I think he would have mystified by today’s weaponry: an AR-15 would have left nothing at all of a grouse, quail, or woodcock, but the NRA has asserted that the AR-15 is the most popular rifle sold today. Last year, the business site Bloomberg stated that there are more civilian-owned guns than civilians in the US.

Those weapons are not evenly distributed, since many gun-owners have very large collections, but it’s still a lot of heavily-armed people. If I were writing dystopian fiction, I would be tempted to speculate about a grotesque what-if: what if a majority of those folk all got pissed off at the same people at the same time? What if they realized they are empowered to rid their beloved nation of a vile toxin? What if they’d been taught how to recognize those Others and what to do about it? What if?  

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Death. . .

—From CB—

To start with: I have no idea what’s going to happen with Ukraine or the debt ceiling or the election. No one else does either: that’s why these things are called crises. Most voters have the attention span of a turnip, so we can only wait and see what happens, dependent on pundits who’re paid to warn us what might.

We’ll likely survive this stuff, but how and with what consequences, I don’t know. We’ve survived obvious scams, no different from the obvious scams that are out there now. Can’t blame the scammers, really: most of us will take those bucks, if offered. Our flexible brains will find a work-around.

But that’s not what I’m thinking about. Right now it’s more personal.

One of my friends is diagnosed with brain cancer, another with Parkinson’s, and others are dropping like flies. I’m 81 and have just had a concussion and brain bleed. I’ve learned at this late stage to walk again, and I feel just fine. But one is led think a lot about the time for checking out. Not so much an obsession, but just as a thought of, “Oh, it’s getting to be that time.”

You can whisper it, “You’regonnadie…” You can speak it out boldly, “You are going to die.” You can scream it out screamingly: “YOU’RE FUCKIN’ GONNA DIE!!!” But it pretty much means the same, no matter how you say it, and it will not truly register. How can it? Nobody wants to hear it, not even the cockroach scuttling over the counter.

We construct elaborate systems to deal with this. Concepts of an afterlife. Values like patriotism to convince folks to go to the slaughterhouse. Naming rights to art museums. Entry onto the lists of best-sellers, award-winners, classics, geniuses, or bankable movie stars, charitable foundations, football trophies, halls of fame. Some such strategies are harmless, some have good effects, some reek with blood.

But what I feel like saying to myself right now is, “It’s time.” Time to recall what I’ve always known from song and story: I’ll die. It’s time to think what that means. Whatever I believe of an afterlife, this one will be kaput. Those knickknacks on the mantelpiece, someone will have to sort them, give them away or keep them or junk them. That stuff I thought might make me live forever, it won’t. I’m toast. If not now, tomorrow. No more triumphs or stinky reviews. I’ve known that since childhood, but now it’s real.

I’m okay with that. But it takes some adjustment. Other than wanting to live forever and forego the hospital indignities, I want to see the next installment of the news. I want to know what’s happening with my kids and my wife. And I still want to have an effect, meaning I want something to persist, even if it’s on the shelf gathering dust.

Which isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said—many times before and in luscious words. It just occurs to me to say it. In my case, it doesn’t radically affect my worklist—I still do my song and dance. It doesn’t affect my mood—I retain my sense of the comic. But it makes life much simpler, I think.

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Never Too Late. . .

—From EF—

I’ve been fascinated reading about ADD and Executive Function Disorder and seeing some of my own lifelong struggles mirrored. I don’t like to define things through buzzwords, but it’s been illuminating to recognize patterns that have dogged me all my life. I am trying to find what I can do to shift the balance of power with what I have always thought of as my Demons, or my Opponent. I used to think I was uniquely weird, and finding that others are like me has been a revelation.

Some of this probably began with my mother’s well-intentioned program of breaking my will when I was little. (Child-rearing theory from the early 1940’s is ghastly.) I was adopted as a newborn by a woman who was nearly fifty and had no previous experience with children, but who was certain it was something she should do. Having married later than the norm and not having conceived during her remaining years of possibility, she considered adoption.

They were rejected by a respected agency, probably because of age, and turned to private adoption. They did extensive research and found a good candidate, a young intelligent white Episcopalian college student who found herself unintentionally pregnant. Discreet anonymous overtures were made, money changed hands, and a relocation from the Midwest to Brooklyn was facilitated, avoiding scandal. My mother bore me, named me, and said goodbye. Then I was on my own.

My adoptive mother had to adapt to the primitive needs of an infant without either instinct or guidance, and as I became an actual person, I think I scared the shit out of her. I had a fierce intelligence and a spontaneous creative nature, and she didn’t know what to do with me. At first she trained me like a pet, and I could recite all the state capitals by the time I was two. Like any two-year-old, I also began to assert my right to say no. She followed the prevailing child-rearing theories, set out to tame me, and I quickly learned that it wasn’t safe to do anything but learn instant obedience.

Everything was a test, fear was my tutor, and excellence was the minimum standard. I learned to achieve, but it wasn’t my choice, and I never was allowed pride in it. The words that echo are “What’s the matter with you?” and “You don’t know how to follow through with anything.”

Now I’m eighty-three and still make a list of intentions, don’t follow through, feel lousy, and stew about it. But writing my memoir has confronted me with the fact that I’ve spent decades surviving, making a life and doing impossible things. I need to learn to feel good about what I do, moment by moment.

I’m trying to do at least a couple of things each day that I can finish, look at, smile, and say “Good dog.” Best of all is if I do something that my Opponent has labeled impossible, that’s been shoved into my mind’s black hole and avoided. The silly key is that these are not arcane challenges, they’re simple things that didn’t get done on time and became pockets of black mold.

That little girl learned to live with fear and depend on it for adrenaline. I need to give her the grace of change.

Never too late.

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