I AM A WRITER. RIGHT?

I am a writer.

In the seventh grade when Mrs. Spangler, my bespectacled English teacher, announced to my parents that I had a "gift with language"and predicted I would go on to do "great things" in the world of literature when I was grown, I heaved a sigh of relief. My quest for greatness and purpose had been resolved. I would become a writer.

But what if Mrs. Spangler was wrong?

What if I exposed my gift to public scrutiny and discovered I had no gift?

If Mrs. Spangler was wrong, I had no back up gift.

If Mrs. Spangler was wrong, that meant I was ordinary.

As long as I never tested her theory, I could mythologize this interior muse, this special something that allowed me to feel set apart and to get through the ensuing years of creative compromises and through the eventual, hapless mediocrity endemic to child rearing, toilet scrubbing and aging with at least a modicum of interior respectability.

Whether I was motivated by intellectual and creative hubris or by a need to effectuate a bohemian standard is not clear, but in my only year of college I enrolled with a double major in both art and English. While the professor in my creative writing class greeted all of my efforts with much enthusiasm, this was not so in the other more technical and rigorous English classes where I failed miserably. What is the point of diagraming a sentence? I could see the relevancy in breaking down the visual landscape if we were preparing for a bank heist, but these are words.  If you lay them out in a sentence and they don't sound right, you simply reorder them until they do.  Isn't that writing?

Evidently, I was alone in my approach to the craft and also soon realized, inflated in my belief that I had skills as a visual artist because on the dreaded evaluation day at the end of the year the head of the Art department suggested I stick with my English major. This was terribly depressing since I had just come from being told the opposite by the head of the English department.  I took this as a sign that I was simply not meant to go to college.

But that was okay. I was still a writer.

I moved to New York City and worked as an administrative assistant to the Vice President of Hardcover at the New American Library. I typed letters, filed pending book proposals, ferried endless vats of coffee to my boss and to the boardroom and learned that almost all authors of decent standing crave thin-sliced pastrami on rye with Russian dressing.

At some point during my brief tenure there and in an inexplicable fit of confidence, I sent some of my poetry to The Yale Literary Magazine. The upshot from that came as a visit from the editor and while he did not consider the poems I had submitted to be worthy of publication,  he felt differently about those he read during our visit and offered to publish one of them.  He also felt I should be writing full-time and sent a pleading letter to my father in Connecticut attempting to solicit his financial support on my behalf.

That letter alone was worth the price of submission.

It was a full page of gilded accolades, the sort that take your breath away and leave a self-deprecating, underachiever like myself convinced that surely this must be a mistake. It was a letter only another writer, a poet, could write closing with the flourished psalm, "I am doing this for Susan, no, for what she will one day write.   And let us hope that when she writes she mentions both of us -- for those poets mention live forever."


Oh yeah.

As an English major himself, my father was very proud. He made many copies of the letter and sent them out to all of our relatives. He then he sent me back to the city on the five o'clock train. After all, I had work in the morning.

After that I became a wife.

Eventually, I became a mother.

But I was still a writer.

And I did write.  I wrote hundreds of letters, Christmas cards and grocery lists. As a young mother, I wrote glowing accounts of baby's first steps in a scrapbook and reordered the table of contents and topic sentences in countless elementary-school book reports and science projects with the dedication and finesse of a Bronte sister.

After all, I was a writer and as everyone knows, if you don't exercise your gifts, eventually they will atrophy and go away.

And while those around me in the mundane hills of suburbia submerged themselves in the culture of ordinary with mindless but dedicated abandon, I calmly tolerated the tedium and carried out all of my perfunctory duties with the requisite posture of obligatory martyrdom. In spite of the relentless press of mediocrity against my soul I thrived because I would say to myself, "I am not like the others."

I am a writer.

For fifty-six years I have courted inclusion. I have raised three children, sheltered far too many animals and learned to speak husband fluently. I've designed lines of greeting cards, artist rubber stamps, and jewelry, had numerous freelance illustration jobs from corporations to co-ops, and sold my shrines, prayer dolls and paintings in galleries and specialized shops in four states and two countries.

Yet the brightest light shines in the darkest corner of my attic where there are several large boxes filled with copies of correspondences and lengthy emails to friends spanning four decades alongside several others stuffed with poetry, prose, sketches and the ritual notations of an ordinary life recorded on hand-drawn calendars.

I keep solid, leather journals in which I chronicle my exceptional interior delusions with a near pathological obsession. These words, held captive in my brain and assembled onto paper, are all I have with enough potential to distinguish my soul from that of the sodden lump it otherwise might be. I keep them safe and well fed.

My world is full of papers filled with words: handwritten, typed and computerized.

I am a writer.

And in all this time I have never published

one

single

word.

DINING WITH THE DEVIL

For the past couple of weeks I have been quietly ingesting a nightmare.  But because it is not one conjured from the depths of my own subconscious, it has taken me longer to reckon let alone attempt to reconcile; and because it will not go away, I continue to bend it into my every day in a way that might make its reality somewhat manageable.

I am not there yet.

Three weeks ago I received a phone call from my son in the state penitentiary where he has been an inmate for the past several weeks on prescription drug fraud charges.  During that phone call I was relieved to hear a certain buoyancy had returned to his voice, replacing the earlier version of abject fear that was so evident when he had newly arrived at the prison.  As he spoke, I felt my bones settle into a posture of calm to the point where they rallied almost on the cusp of normal.

It was an exhale moment.

I think I even had a smile on my face and laughed a time or two.  But that was before he mentioned in passing that he had been seated at lunch that day next to an inmate by the name of Denis Rader.  A man whom I knew from the newspapers was also known as The BTK Killer from Wichita, Kansas.  A man whose serial killing spree began as far back as 1974 and excluded no one; not even children.  A man who chose his own celebrated acronym as it boldly advertised his favored method of murder:  Bind, Torture, Kill.

I didn't drop the phone, although I felt the blood drain from my face and dip beneath the level of my ears making my son's next words sound far away and barely decipherable.  My son had gone on to talk of other things: the sweat pants he had on order for the coming winter months, the shoes that had just arrived allowing him the freedom to discard the state-issued boots that bound his massive feet like steel cables and caused his legs to ache unceasingly.

He had continued processing the steps toward survival.  I was on hold from a terror I had no vocabulary to articulate.

"Back up!"  I said.
"What are you saying?  Are you saying that these sorts of monsters walk freely among the prison populace?  That they are not housed in a separate facility for the criminally insane or remanded indefinitely to some annex or cell?  Are you telling me that they take their meals with everyone else?"

He seemed somewhat surprised by my incredulity and in a matter-of-fact tone responded that of course they did; reminding me that because of his detainers in other counties, it automatically mandated his term of incarceration be held in a maximum-security facility.  

Where else did I think the lifers were held?

Truthfully, I had never given it much thought because in my mind there was such a wide chasm between that level of calculated malevolence and pure evil and the pitiable but muted disgrace of a drug addict, D.U.I. recidivist or even the cunning greed of the white-collar criminal that I ignorantly assumed the legal system was aware of this, too.

"Surely," I thought, "the souls of the damned are considered despicable and vile enough that they require isolation from those whose self-destruction and terrestrial damnation has been the worst of their crimes?  Surely, a man bent on destroying only himself is considered redeemable and worthy of protection from those demonic psychopaths housed beneath blood and bone?  Surely."

I was wrong.

Immediately my mind corralled those darkest concerns, then neatly displayed them in full-color vignettes on that interior screen of potentials; funded as they always are by the sainted, thought-patrons of motherhood who share my best hopes for my children and brood over the possible losses with unquestioning solidarity.

I wondered of the juxtaposition in this Shawshank scenario:  Could their elbows have glanced one another while reaching for the salt?  Were they seated across from each other where the eyes of depravity could capture the image my son's face and retain it there along with the horrific visions it gleefully embraces?  Or worse still, could he have wooed my historically guileless manchild into conversation, disarming him with charity and implied camaraderie?

The suggested possibilities were overwhelming, but I could not bring myself to go there.

Our conversation ended with the usual petitions for letters and photographs from home and my assurance that, as always, they will be forthcoming.  But the words that were forming from my intentions and validating my promise were not the ones my heart begged me to ask.  Those simply would not come.

I have spoken to my son several times since that conversation, and with each phone call I detect a growing tone of cheer in his voice.  I should be comforted by this development, but I am appalled.  On the back of what I now know are the existing conditions of his incarceration, any indication of acceptance on his part terrifies me.

I want to hear in his voice the resonant confirmation of strength, confidence and courage; of resolve, fortitude and commitment to change.  But I also want the sad holdings of discontent to seep into even his happiest hours as long as he remains there.  I want to know that in spite of the routine and redundancy of his days, he has not forged an alliance with the terminally misbegotten and harbors a sense of belonging.

I want him to despise where he is.

To be a mother and yet wish that your grown child be steeped in days lined with despair and feelings of isolation from his surrounding environment is utterly at odds with every glowing principle of that nurturing estate.

To pray that the hunger for home and the company of those whose only interest is in loving him be so searing that it threatens nightly to bring him to tears, would border on criminal pathology were this an ordinary scenario.

But nothing about this is ordinary.   Nothing comes close to acceptable.

My only hope remains that the system, which is so flawed as to place my son and the others like him who are desperately in need of psychiatric and rehabilitative counseling into a cesspool of impenitent iniquity of which they have no likeness to, will at least be able to protect them while in custody.

But who will protect them from themselves?

Today I received a letter from my son.  He has made friends with a "lifer."

"He is a former Hell's Angel and a really good guy in his mid-fifties.  He is an incredibly smart individual, and I don't know whether this is good or bad, but he says he sees a lot of himself in me and often times wonders where his life would have gone had he not made the bad choices that lead to his current state of affairs.  And another crazy thing is that he has got almost identical eyes to myself, which is something I have never seen before.  You know, how they are blue-green with a golden ring around the pupil?  Crazy."


I want to grab his beautiful face in my hands and shout,  "Griffin!  No one has eyes like yours!  NO ONE!  Please!  Keep them focused inward just a little while longer!"

Just a little while longer.

CHANNELING HELEN

I have a small, half-moon scar on the underside of my chin.  It came from my mistaken belief at nine years old that whatever was hung on the handlebars of my bicycle would remain separate and apart from the spokes of the front wheel.

In this case, an umbrella became my disfigurer, confidently hooked as it was over the gleaming steel bar of my bike while I blithely cycled around the neighborhood after a light, summer rain.

I could feel the grainy contents of the asphalt road embedded in my chin as I landed face-first in the middle of the street and the weight of my beloved, red two-wheeler resting along my back after flipping us both "ass over teakettle," as our Scottish housekeeper used to say.

Our housekeeper's name was Helen O'Neill, and she was a stoic.  A petite, grizzled and graying woman in her early fifties, she came to live with us through an agency after my mother had applied for a "mother's helper/housekeeper" to assist her in running the house and managing her three young children while she was experiencing a very difficult pregnancy with her fourth.

Helen was a widow and former decades-long member of the Royal Air Force with a thick brogue, a love of Robert Burns and a distracted grimace that perpetually hounded her face until all evidence of joy was stricken.

Even on the occasion when duty called her to proffer a more nurturing countenance toward my sister, brother and I, it was clearly a strain; as though by showing us any signs of affection at all, she was violating some generational, blood oath of emotional impenetrability and would be damned to course the foggy hollows and moors of her native land for a deathless eternity.

Clearly, I could not turn to her for comfort as I stood in stunned embarrassment next to my slightly- mangled metallic steed, cupping both hands under my lacerated chin in a futile attempt to curb the profuse bleeding. She would have regarded my teary-eyed state with distain and remedied the situation with a perfunctory efficiency so dismissive it would border on abuse.

Our house at the time backed up upon the ninth tee of Winged Foot Golf Club course; a club where my grandfather was a founding member and one my own father enjoyed in the summer months with dismaying regularity, if you were to ask my mother.

Sometimes the universe shifts in funny ways.  It lands you in a field of surreal dynamics that would be likened to a miracle if the outcome were evident at the time; but in that landscape and at that moment, it just seems odd.

It was on that odd landscape as I gingerly groped my way around the back of our house, that I glanced out towards the golf course and saw my father.  He was with a group of men, all obviously taking advantage of the break in the weather and just teeing off when I spotted him.  Although I knew that the likelihood of his welcoming the intrusion of his bleeding offspring while in the midst of his golf game was not high, the alternative of facing Helen compelled me toward the course.

While it is true that in this instance he would not qualify for Compassionate Father of the Year, he tended to me with a balanced concern, cleaning my wound with his golf rag after dousing it several times in the ball washer provided at every hole.  After giving me a clean, white hankie from his pocket,  he sent me home to apply Bactine and Bandaids on my own.

Evidently, stoicism is not confined to Scottsmen alone.

The following fall and winter were difficult in our house.  My mother's pregnancy had grown more tentative and remanded her to bed rest for the duration.  This, of course, left Helen as the active and sole matriarch of our slightly-derailed clan.

Her work ethic was peerless and in spite of my genuine fear of her, I watched with admiration as she not only maintained her daily workload of housework and laundry, but effortlessly added to it the duty of tending to my bedridden mother, cooking all meals and taking over the task of delivering the three of us in a timely fashion to the bus stop, supper table, bath or bed.

Homework hour was overseen with the attentive devotion of General Patton and usually accompanied by cookies and milk, which she would brusquely deposit on the table then turn away in a manner so swift that I often suspected she was hiding something.

I suspected it might have been a slight smile.

At the end of January we experienced a blizzard that was so fierce we were without power for several days.  My father was away on business unable to get home, and as we kids moped about the house in frigid knots, draped in layers of knitted wools and thermal blends, Helen was outside in the blinding curtain of white winds shoveling the front walk.  Coatless.

She knew the fragile state of my mother's health and that an emergency birth might be forthcoming and was blazing a generous trail from the house to the street just in case.  Because of the unrelenting nature of blizzard snows, the path needed constant re-shoveling.  So, every two or three hours Helen would take off her apron,  grab the snow shovel where she had propped it against the front door, and in nothing more than her snow boots and pink uniform, begin the clearing process all over again.  This went on for days.

 She kept all of us warm and fed us hot meals of Mince 'n Tat'ies by preparing them in the large, stone hearth in the room my mother quaintly called "the keeping room;" continually running fresh hot tea and homemade soup up the stairs to my concerned mother throughout the day and frequently plying her chilled, gestating body with warm blankets throughout the night.

In the middle of the night on the second or third day of the storm, I awoke to a blue cold and went down to the kitchen where I hoped to find my winter coat.  Instead I found Helen, sitting in a chair at the kitchen table still in her uniform, her head bent low and resting on the table, nestled in the makeshift pillow that I recognized as her apron.  She was snoring soundly.

Next to her on the table was a miniature book, bound in a plaid, cloth cover embossed in gold with the words:  Poems of Robert Burns.  I recognized its shape being that of the small bulge I would often noticed protruding from her apron pocket.

Terrified but too intrigued to walk away, I picked it up and was mesmerized.  I sat there next to the slumbering body of Helen absorbing not only the heat from her skin but the mysterious words from her little book for what seemed like hours:

Oh, my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve's like a melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.


I could not get enough.


The following day my mother was rushed to the hospital to deliver my brother, nearly three months prematurely.  My father, who was finally able to make his way to my mother's side, later told us that our brother was so small his whole body fit neatly in the palm of my Dad's hand with room to spare.

No one was certain whether he would survive.

No one except Helen.  She was not only convinced that he would live, but also that she would be his nurse.  Suddenly, this woman without a smile found a lightness in her soul and it was wound around the idea of daily coddling this small baby boy.

But I had a different obsession lighting my soul.   For days I pestered her for the meaning of those alien words in her little book.  Who was this man?  What was this language?  Why did I want to understand them so desperately?   But even as she shooed me away in her blustering haste to prepare the house for my brother's homecoming, there was a palpable ribbon of sweetness behind her gruff tone; and I knew that in spite of her harsh demeanor, calcified by years of forced tenacity, she liked me.

"Go'n me wee Hen!  Y'r a bother ta me now!  I canna tale ya of da t'ings ya do'in have tha age ta knoo!  Be off we ya, Lass!"

My brother did live.  Only when he was brought home to us, it was necessary that a full-time nurse come live with us, too.  He was so very small and susceptible and my mother was still quite weak.  They both required specialized care.

Although she never said a word, Helen was devastated, and as the days passed into weeks, I watched her fold back into that granite resolve until the very act of making eye contact was too painful for her to manage.

One day she came to my mother and announced that she would be leaving the following morning.  She'd taken another job and felt it prudent to start immediately.  My mother was startled but had no wish to retain someone who was that unhappy; and although she was quite naturally sad to see her leave, she wished her the best and said goodbye.

After a few days I found that I missed her profoundly, and so I took myself up to the room that was hers off the kitchen for consolation; hoping, perhaps, to pick up some faint remnant of her pressed into the walls and bed linens.

Instead I found on her nightstand that familiar small, plaid book of poetry.  She'd heard me after all!  Opening it, I saw that she had circled a verse:

"Then catch the moments as they fly
And use them as ye ought, man;
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not aye when sought, man."


Helen was a stoic.  And I am proud to say, "So am I."

And whenever I feel the underside of grief or turmoil threaten to bring me to my knees, I have only to trace that scar on the underside of my chin to know:

"T'will be a better day a'morrow.  Aye."

Thanks, Helen.

REINCARNATION; COME AGAIN?

Until I was ten years old, I believed a simple truth:  We only live once.

It was a reasonable assumption that perfectly supported and promoted the idea that living a good and honorable life was the only worthy goal.  This was accomplished by placing the emphasis on the everlasting bliss that is possible after our terrestrial stint is over.

Simply stated, the quality of the next stop is equal only to the quality of your behavior right here and right now.  Karma in a nutshell.  A life well-lived and one devoted more towards the care and service of others, would reap a greater reward in the afterlife than one lived solely for personal interests and gains.

I was happy with this philosophy and felt it entirely manageable.  I was going to be a good girl, focus on the welfare and happiness of others in my life, live long and die peacefully. After which I would be liberated from this bucket of dung and move onto a place more suited to one whose only real interest is finding peace among other like-minded souls and basking in unconditional love.

That all changed after my mother discovered some books by Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet, and came to me with the ridiculous concept of reincarnation, telling me that not only would I in all probability have to return again to this earth once my present life was over, but that I had likely also lived several hundred previous lifetimes before reaching this point.

Come again?

In my ten-year-old brain it meant that in addition to my having to endure being a knock-kneed, blundering wunderkind in the here and now, I could also look forward to the same fate, or perhaps worse, at least another six-hundred times before winning my wings and a place in the 'Good Human- Being Hall of Fame' in the sky!

Suddenly being alive was far less palatable.  I felt like a small salmon having nothing to look forward to but hundreds of centuries more making those God-awful swims upstream against the current only to fertilize my eggs and die.  And then forget that it ever happened.

But my mother had spoken, and I trusted her, so I listened.  I also spent the next five decades attempting to reconcile myself with that daunting possibility even to the point of having several times met with various psychics and seers to obtain a 'life reading'.

I gave it my best shot.  But I'm not buying it.

For one thing, it is self-defeating.  It would be like spending the summer helping your child overcome his fear of the water by teaching him to swim and then giving him a potion during the winter to make him forget all that he learned yet expecting him to swim competitively the following year.

For another, I have known far too many duplicates.  To date, I know of three living women who were told they were formerly Marie Antoinette,  two Cleopatras, at least a half-dozen Guineveres and four biblical Rebbecas.  My own mother was told she had previously been Queen Esther (A lifetime she evidently must have split with Cher who was also told the same thing) and that my father was once Blackbeard.

Come on now.  Blackbeard?  My father?  He won't even plunder his own treasures let alone anyone else's, and the idea of him wearing a beard divided into braids and laced with colored ribbons is, well, simply not within the boundaries of his conservative Republican conventionality.

And then there is the "ick factor."  According to those in the reincarnation know, I have been my grandfather's husband, my husband's sister, my brother's wife and my mother's father.  Ick.

Supposedly, I have lived most of my lifetimes as a high priestess and prophetess; a healer and a medicine woman from Egypt to Arizona.  As far as I am concerned, these reputed facts alone blow the lid off the reincarnation theory, which posits that as we move through each lifetime, we progress towards enlightenment and perfection; that our wisdom expands as our experience grows and our successive lives evidence the accumulated accomplishments and refinements of the ones that came before.

If this is true, then would someone mind explaining to me how an adherent to the High and Holy, an elective celibate and servant of the Divine, and a sacred feminine vessel of untold wisdom who was revered and honored by kings and commoners alike lifetime after lifetime has wound up a disconsolate, middle-aged hausfrau, scrubbing toilets in a Kansas City suburb, living in total anonymity and abject normalcy?

The only time I come close to being regarded with reverential deference is on the one day a year I spend in the sacred bowels of the kitchen manifesting a Thanksgiving turkey.   Where is the logic, and for that matter, where is my torch bearer?

Thankfully, the theoretical physicists have postulated the idea of the multiverse, which lends itself to a belief I can more readily assimilate.

 Briefly, the theory proposes that there are as many worlds or universes as there are possibilities and choices and that we exist (or not) in all of them in accordance with the choices available to us from moment to moment.  So, in some parallel universe you married the other guy and drive a BMW or finished college and wrote that book.

But the point is that if the theory of the multiverse is true and you add to it Einstein's theory of relativity, which states that the past, present and future are occurring simultaneously, then everything that you ever were, are or will become in every single variation are all happening right NOW.

Bingo!

It also explains how all these wires can become crossed and entangle themselves around seven Marc Anthony's and twelve King Arthurs.  As the worlds exist in parallel dimensions, so does all that energy making it fairly easy to access impressions that are not our own.

I know this is a simplistic explanation and that there are arguments and areas I have not touched upon, but this is not the time or the place.  I don't want to write a thesis.   I just want to vent.

The important thing to consider no matter which side of the reincarnation debate we are on is that the only thing worth investing with your time, heart and energy is this moment.  We can do nothing about what has already been done and have yet to encounter what is to come.

What we do have is NOW.


Invest in it wisely.  Your past, present and future depend on it.

And if you happen to know the version of me that eats only whole grains and vegetables, give her a thumbs up.  I'm the one deeply attached to french fries and processed sugar.

But just knowing there is a better version of me out there somewhere gives me hope.