Missing Persons

On the morning of February 14th I went missing.  My first thought was that this would be a temporary disappearance; the kind of sensorial vanishing that often accompanies the fallout from a striking epiphany or a grave shock.  So I continued in my daily routines with conditioned fortitude and watched for my return like an anxious commuter awaiting the next train.

Unfortunately, after an exhaustive search over many weeks, I have yet to be found; and although none of my alter egos has had the temerity to say so directly, the internal consensus is that I will not be coming back.

All it took was that one phone call.

Before my son called home from the penitentiary to tell me that because he had violated several rules, he would be spending thirty days in solitary confinement, I had been having a good morning.

For the first time in a long turning from bad to worse, I was beginning to glimpse better. I had even begun to sustain laughter for prolonged periods and to believe that at some point in my future life, I would be able to reclaim the joy I once felt knowing that I had done a good job as a mother, along with the attendant pride in knowing that other people could see that, too.

Instead, on the morning of February 14th, I followed my son into the hole. It was not a literal hole.   This was the retributive kind endemic to prisons and medieval novels of torture and bondage; the kind that shuts out the buzz from every distraction apart from that of your own mind and holds you inside of yourself until the voices in your head sing like a chorus of wayward angels heralding your own personal apocalypse.

Of course, mine was a theoretical confinement.  I was still able to go to the grocery store and stand in the gently greening backyard to watch the dogs play.  Books were available to me, if I chose, and so was television.  And even though my level of grief and distractibility made it very difficult to do so, I could also communicate with other people.

I just wasn’t able to leave the choking confines of my own sorrow.
Clearly, I had not anticipated this measure of worse.


Nine months ago in my initial, blind scramble to find redemption and then to somehow normalize and infuse hope between the shame and sadness of my son’s latest internment, I had told myself that because this was the worst of his hard lessons, it would surely be the last of them; that he would finally learn and would do all he could to be a model inmate and  prove just how sincere and anxious he was for that second, third, fourth chance.

After all, this was not just another jail.  This was prison.

That morning, fingering the edges of the receiver I tried to distill his voice through the roaring in my ears as the blood drained from my skull - picking out a word here, a syllable there - I stared hard into the white porcelain surface of our small kitchen table, attempting to establish a cadence to my breathing that would not betray my disappointment - or my terror.

After the bald revelation of this dark, new circumstance, the air that surrounded me became alarmingly thin and unbreathable; and when he said good-bye, I felt the last vestigial scrap of hope; the bit I had safely stashed beneath my heart, break loose and disappear with him.

Very soon thereafter, I went missing.

Exactly what he had done to deserve this harsh requital was never fully explained, but having endured the fallacious nature of his troubled, drug-addled soul for the whole of his adolescent and adult life, I am used to such evasiveness.

However, now, in the wake of this grave pronouncement, I struggle to court the naïve conviction that once enabled me to believe with absolute certainty that he can change.

He has always been a sweet young man.  Sweet with words, sweet with promises and I do still believe, sweet with intentions.  But there seems to be a failed connection between the greatness of those qualities and an awareness of the consequences for not upholding or for acting against them; and it is in this in-between where he is often trapped and becomes mildly predatory and highly manipulative; the exception to every rule, the guy who will say or do almost anything if it enhances the moment or advances his aims.

For twenty-nine years I have chosen to ignore this.  I have strangled my discouragement and turned my heart to face only the very best in him.  I have justified his continual lags of conscience as the unintentional by-products of his diagnosed A.D.H.D.; and as they grew more sinister and more frequent with age, I blamed them on his drug abuse.

He always seemed so alone.  I wanted to make certain he knew that he was not, and I stood by him resolutely.

The first time I scolded him, he was not quite two years old.  I remember standing in the hallway chastising him with all the requisite guilt, insecurity and sadness of the young, first-time mother that I was.   I had never before played the role of disciplinarian but expected that at any minute he would begin to cry, tell me he was sorry and curl into my arms where I would fully and achingly forgive him.   Instead, he looked up at me, turned away, slowly toddled into his nursery and gently closed the door behind him.

As a small boy, he did not like to be held, cuddled or carried; although every night he asked me to pat his head and sing him to sleep. So, before the world let go of his restless mind and stilled his sturdy bones came the lullabies:  To Dream The Impossible Dream and The Rainbow Song.

Often this took over an hour but finally, drowsy from the childish labors of his day, he sleepily promised me that he would do great things in the world when he grew up.  I believed he would, too.  Sitting on the edge of his small bed in the warm dark of his room of picture books and toys and plastic imaginings, I stroked the coarse curls feathering his head and wed my heart to those promises and to his brilliant mind, fine humor, perceptive nature and curious ways.  This was my chance to bond with this lovely but unusual child of mine - Perhaps my only chance.

Rarely would he ask to sit on my lap when he was a toddler.  I have a photograph of he and I sitting on the raised flagstone of our fireplace; he at one end, myself at the other.  This was where he chose to be.

“I suppose he is just a very independent little boy.” I consoled myself.

Even today I cannot look at that picture without experiencing a grief so large I could journey across it for ten years before reaching the other side.

Yet he remains my beloved son whom I adore and in spite of the great difficulty he appears to have in reaching the sort of love, morality and empathy that we identify as empirically noble and true, I cannot shut him out, deny him or send him away.   I cannot abandon hope.

But with that phone call on the morning of February 14th and from a desperation so malignant I was not certain I would be able to survive the day, I was forced to tally the current facts against his years of destructive behavior - replete with deception, manipulation and rampant self-interest - and when I was done it, became obvious that one of us would have to go.

That was the last time I saw myself.

These days I fill my body selectively, allowing only the highest functioning ghosts of my soul to return.  I cannot afford to be brutalized any longer by the soft maternal blindness and relentless optimism from natural breeding that encouraged me to pluck out normal from the broken shards of dysfunction and pretend that this was good enough – that it would make me good enough.

Today my son was returned to the hole; another infraction, another punishment.  And just as I did the last time, I will write him every day and tell him of my love for him and of my sure faith that he will make his way to a better place one day where he will fulfill the promises from his boyhood and do great things in the world, and I will do my best to believe this.

I will tell him that one day he will find himself.
Perhaps when that day comes, I will find myself, too.

POINTE of DEPARTURE

My younger sister always ran in first, her delicate fingers tightly scrolled around the flimsy handle of the patent leather case that held her change of clothes:  A flounce of pink tulle, black leotard, tights and the soft, leather sippers that made no sound against the polished wood floor of Miss Hertha's ballet studio.

Like most of the other little girls our age, we spent many of our best days draping our tender frames in sequined castoffs from our mother’s wardrobe then prancing about the house with the dramatic carriage of immured aristocracy awaiting rescue by the Prince.

But lately I had begun to detect unfortunate disparities between my awkward deportment and the sweeping grace of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella; and on this afternoon, at six years old I would be told something that would inform my self-perception for the rest of my life.

"Watch where you're going, Suzi!"  I heard the mild concern and frustration in my mother's voice calling out from the car in the parking lot as she grappled to release my infant brother from his car seat.

“How many times must I tell you to stop looking down at your feet when you walk?  You'll develop a hump!  Now hurry inside or you'll be late for class!"

Looking up I watched the winsome flock of diminutive dancers enter the building ahead of me in an animated flutter like a covey of black and pink sparrows; and with one exception they were all exquisitely dainty. 

The exception, a larger, black-haired girl whom I suspected was also a bit older, was a sweet but rotund cherub of a dancer with enormous cheeks and dimpled elbow’s, whose hefty steps even the soft, calfskin of her slippers could not adequately muffle.

“Whatever else I’m not, at least I’m not her,” I considered in mild consolation, as I removed the orthopedic shoes I wore to correct my knock-kneed alignment.

As always, Miss Hertha stood in the vestibule dressed to perform, her gray hair pulled back against her scalp with theatrical precision folding into a tight chignon as smooth as polished silver at the base of her long neck.

We regarded her with awe; how her pale, seasoned arms wafted above us in greeting like the dual fronds of an exotic palm caught in an extraordinary breeze and the way her toned back bloomed up from her slim hips with only the slightest arc. 

This was the poise we sought and the excellence that set her apart from other women.

Even our mothers whose bodies, broadened by childbirth and weighted by the drudgery of domestic life, outwardly displayed their indelicate compromise with perfection in spite of their hope that we would aspire to more.

Along one side of the dance studio on a small platform affixed to the wall was a bank wooden chairs in which our mothers, siblings, or other guardians would sit and observe the class.  The facing wall accommodated a large mirror and the ballet barre, both extending the length of the room.

At the beginning of each class, Miss Hertha would position herself at the front of the room next to her accompanist on piano; and as the music began, she would call out our names one girl at a time.  This was our cue to dance across the room to our place at the barre from where we stood in front of the seated spectators - arms raised, palms facing in, toes pointed.

I waited my turn, anxiously observing the winnowing dancers before me, hoping as I did every week that I would measure up.  

“Excuse me, little girl.” I heard a voice at my back.

“Little girl,” a woman said tapping my shoulder with her thick fingers.

 “Your tutu is not fastened.”

I turned and saw the wide outline of her broad face from her seat behind me; a pearl necklace sitting high on her throat wedged neatly between generous folds of powdered flesh. 

Drawing me backwards with a sharp tug she zipped up my costume and began to hook the small clasp at the top when she stopped abruptly, chuckled and said, “My goodness!  We are a little chubby for our tutu, aren’t we?”

WE ARE?

In that instant my lumpish reflection appeared in the mirror across the room and I now saw clearly just how unlike my fellow troupe members I was.

I was horrified, and as Miss Hertha called out my name, I was certain she must also regard me with disgust, and all I could feel was the hot color of failure burning to the surface of my skin while the grim connotation of those words continued to sear my reality like lye. 

And as I struggled to raise my arms above my head - arms that suddenly felt lubberly and graceless, I made what proved to be a terrible mistake - I believed her.

It is a sad but curious fact that we often let casual remarks or incidents have so much power in our lives.  We let them define us rather than the other way around.  This was so for me that day.  My desire to belong, to fit in, to excel, and my hypersensitivity regarding every perceived flaw and inadequacy led to years of eating disorders, drug abuse and other destructive behaviors.   

Of course, my days with Miss Hertha came to an end that afternoon.  I petitioned my parents for other options and refused to return to ballet; and while my father held fast to his argument that, "All the best athletes are broad-shouldered, knock-kneed and pigeon-toed." this was clearly an advantage that did not apply en pointe, and I no longer wished to shove my square frame into that particular delicate, round hole.

Fifty years later I see the obvious absurdity of that moment and of the thousands of other innocuous moments I vested with corrosive power.  I’d like to think I am much stronger and wiser now.  I’m still rife with insecurities but no longer to the point of destruction or abnormal despair.

In fact, most days I am quite content and happy.

Just don’t ask me to dance.

Little Lori Blue

Little Lori Blue

Never felt at home

Thought she had to roam

Make her dreams come true 

It would be well over a year before we learned anything at all about what happened to her; before forensics and coincidence joined forces to end the speculation about her disappearance and to validate the upright despair that consumed her family – especially her mother.  But for her friends, those of us who had known her since high school and who had understood her insatiable craving to shine and witnessed the depths she would dive to summon awe to a glamour she did not naturally possess, there was no question that Lori would not be coming back.

“Lori was such a little scamp.”  Her mother said with a smile to no one in particular as we moved toward our table in the noisy café, bustling with the impatient rumblings of midday hunger.

Tried to touch the sky

By a desperate leap

A height she could not keep

Still she had to try

Her mother had phoned me the day before asking if we could meet for lunch.  “At a nice outdoor café.  Someplace sunny and full of light.” 

It had been more than six months since that day in late December when she watched her only daughter back her Toyota down the driveway and head toward Chicago to visit her cousin over winter break.  Six months since that phone call from her panicked niece a week later telling her that Lori had not been seen or heard from in two days.

Too close to the flame

Always getting burned

Yet she never learned

On whom is laid the blame?

Although we were more than two years out of high school by then, even at twenty-years old, few of us were prepared for the burden of convention that comes with maturity.   And for as much as some of us had been the law-breakers and the drug-takers and viewed ourselves as the exceptions to every rule we did not initiate, Lori had been so a hundred times more.

Lori and I became friends when we were both fourteen during the second semester of our Ninth grade year.  She had just been returned to her parent’s after her third attempt at running away from home.  Unlike the previous two, which took her no farther than the ladies room at the local mall, this time she left with a boy; a pimply-faced speed freak, AWOL from the Army and had hitchhiked as far as Colorado. 

She said she loved him and proudly described to me how she watched him inscribe her initials in his arm with a shaving razor and a ballpoint pen“Practically like the professionals.”

 “She was just such a little scamp”, her mother repeated, “a little daredevil and so restless. We’ll probably get a phone call from her any day telling us she’s joined the circus.  Lori always loved the circus – the clowns, you know – and it would be just like her to up and take off with some carnival.  Just like that!   That’s the kind of scamp she was, always wanting to try something new.”

When we were in high school I envied Lori’s freedom.  She had no curfew, there were no conditions or restrictions put upon the frequent visitors to her attic bedroom at all hours and there was never a shred of suspicion or alarm from her parents as we bundled our blue-jeaned, bedraggled and drug-addled bones up the stairs to see her; almost always to get high. Often her mother would offer up plates of homemade cookies from the bottom of the stairs, readily passing them into the spindly hands of whichever stringy-haired teen was straight and sober enough to retrieve them. 

“I still have this little copper relief she made for me when she was in the second grade.”  Her mother said as she looked at me across the refined chasm of table, her face blanched of all sorrow by the smile I rarely ever saw her without. 

It was not the sort of smile that conveyed a joy that was lived in.  It was the sort of smile that read “With every ounce of my being I am trying to believe what is on my face over what is in my heart.” 

It was really not a smile at all.  It was a fortress.

“Oh, it is just the sweetest little copper relief of The Big Top with a wide-mouthed clown and an animal I’ve always assumed was an elephant, but I never did ask her.” She continued.  “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings if I had guessed wrong.”

She patted the cloth napkin on her lap, tenderly smoothing the creases, flattening the edges and tugging each end gently up towards her waist as though she were tucking a small child into bed for the night.

In those years there were many of us boldly crossing that tightrope of iniquity, climbing to drug-induced heights under a canopy of unrealistic expectations that rivaled any three-ring performance.  That one of our numbers would go missing was not surprising; especially that it was Lori.

“I can’t imagine why she hasn’t called home, but I’m certain she’ll have an explanation.  She has always been so very independent.  Always.” 

I smiled but didn’t know how to respond.  What I knew of Lori, of her recklessness, her promiscuity and her lust for attention at any cost was not something I would ever share with her mother.  

With that she looked past me while the silence between us continued to expand from our respective inabilities to be truthful until it was as though a third person had joined our sorry table.

Where were all of you?

Did you not hear her call?

Did you not know we all

Could have been Loris, too?

More than a year later we would learn that Lori was dead.  She had left her cousin’s apartment alone one night to listen to a band at a local bar and never came home.

A week later a trout fisherman would discover the naked body of a young woman underneath a bridge in Sauk County, Wisconsin; her only distinguishing feature being a small mushroom tattoo on her hip.  She had most likely been suffocated, her body put into the trunk of a car then dumped under the bridge in this rural and remote location so far from the city of Chicago.

Without any immediate means of identification, she was buried in the cemetery of a nearby town.  Eventually, through dental records and detective work her identity was discovered.

It has been thirty-five years since her death but each year her parent’s still make the long drive from Kansas City to the town where she was laid to rest; the town of Baraboo, Wisconsin; formerly the winter headquarters of Ringling Brothers, and home to the Circus World Museum; a town that is also known by the name of Circus City.

Her murder remains unsolved.

Little Lori Blue

Finally climbed too high

And Little Lori died

As Little Lori’s do

A MATTER OF LOVE AND DEATH

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up - my stomach ratcheted by the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother clutched the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

The wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw and all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I'd written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk, awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the end of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference.

All night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed applicable only to the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh .

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris was now girding his pacifist sensibilites preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent.  I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl's school -missing him - and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned; and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

Still, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters.  Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon.   It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have nothing.

Chris was learning to fly.  I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams.

Of course, there was a positive element:  We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Cognition and impetus now surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes.  I even did my homework.

I was no longer escaping today but living for my day of escape.

As I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching my room, I looked to the floor and my history book lying next to the nightstand where I'd tossed it the night before.  Even in the early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the letters that spelled out C H R I S in soft, bubble forms on the torn bookcover I'd fashioned out of a brownpaper grocery bag.

I remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily.  I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would.  I glanced at the clock.  It was nine-twenty-three and although I still needed time to finish my work, the letter could not wait.

So, I wrote.

I would always write.

I would always be there.

He would always be there.

"Suzi."

It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother - though weighted and slow - her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi." She said it again, this time with a sharp gravity - like a chisel against stone.

My parents were now sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them.

I don't know how.

I didn't know why.

The lights in my room remained off; but it seemed that the darkness clung to them as though they were holding it there - away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment.  They were crying.  My father was crying.  My father.

"Suzi.  We have something very, very bad to tell you."

"Chris has been in a car accident."

"And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it.

If there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in.

And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to?  Who am I going to love?" I wailed.

Who will love me?

In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that - there was no after that.

After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for many years.  A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting.  To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything.  It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

But Twenty-eight years ago in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child.

After a decade of forgetting, I remembered.

I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in that same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me.  His great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time.

If he has any intention of coming for this one, he will have to go through me.

And trust me, he will be in for one hell of a fight. 

WHAT I HID FOR LOVE

Landing on that one decrepit wooden step was always the risk.

One misguided footfall and my parents would awaken to derail my nocturnal plans.  Such was the downside of harnessing liberty as a teen while living in an old home on the precipice of one hundred.

It never occurred to me that I was not in every way deserving of these post-curfew flights, nor did I believe that I was doing anything wrong.  This was a matter of survival and a necessary step in eradicating the invisible and loathsome blob of animated nothing that had sought custody of my self-regard for the entirety of my nearly- fourteen years.

However, this was a new game and while it may have taken a cross-country move to improve my standing,  I now held the cards - a purgatorial flush where the presence of sin ranked equally with hope and guaranteed me a draw.  Certainly, it was a gamble but in the heat of the game I chose to ignore all threat of punishment and creep silently out of the house to meet the boy who saved me.

He was three years my senior and his early interest in me was predicated on the false belief that I was nearly sixteen.  Months later when I revealed to him my true age, it was of little consequence.  We were committed to one another with the shared and rabid impetuosity of a dark adolescence that was crumbling under its own depravity but still innocent enough to believe in the lofty pledge of true love.

It didn't take much to sweep me into blind collusion.  I had sworn off my treaty with loneliness and was done being bolstered up by the knotted veneer of being different.  The need to belong to a person or peers outside of my family was all that mattered because at that age my worth could only be measured against the fine distinction of choice.  Who would choose me? Would anyone?  Ever?

And to this end I traded my Catholic-school-girl decency and severed all ties to the worthy aim of being holy.

Sneaking out of the house became routine.  So much so that by the fall of my fifteenth year I was hospitalized for a month with Pneumonia and Mononucleosis and under some concern in the first week that I might not even survive.  

Still, no amount of self-inflicted suffering could convince me of the danger in the lifestyle I had adopted.   I had a boyfriend.  A loyal one who called me every night, loved me every weekend and took me to places with pills, pipes and powders that were so otherworldly my body could not follow.

My body had other uses.  

Within weeks after our family’s summer move from New York to Kansas City the rumors began.   In the typically defensive wake of the 1970's Midwestern clannishness, the sudden presence of a prematurely-voluptuous, blonde-haired interloper could mean only one thing:  I must be a slut.  

By the time classes began in the fall, the reputation that would follow me throughout high school was sealed and all I did to deserve it was step off a plane.  

Ironically, this unwholesome notoriety preceded even my first kiss by a good ten months.   

Yet by the advent of that kiss and after months of abiding school-hall taunting, prank phone calls and exclusion, taking that next step seemed a fait accompli, and the benefits that were proffered upon proof of loyalty trumped all hesitation.   

True love would accept nothing less.

True love demanded sacrifices. 

True love provided refuge. 

I dressed for school dances like everyone else but while my classmates whirled under colored lights to the awkward throbbing of local bands and made plans to meet for pizza after the dance, I was folded against the ignominy of sin in a fetal clump as I hid on the floor of my boyfriend’s car while he signed for a room at a crumbling truck-stop motel in a neighboring town.

Now, in addition to the entertainment value, getting high became a necessity providing a buffer against the fear, guilt and shame.  So did the treats:  the promise of a burger and a movie, candy, Crackerjacks, or novelty toys purchased at 7-Eleven on the way to the motel.  

These became my rewards for a loyalty well-proven.  But until that last gasp of evening when they were mine, I was a quivering, disembodied hull pining over a Disney-colored innocence that would never exist for me again.

Those were the early years.  The tip of the iceberg, as they say.  Declivity would soon become my specialty.  Fortunately, so would survival.

Of course, I grew up and I moved on, but the tendency to see myself merely as one whose every favorable gain comes at the feet of deplorable compromise is hard to shake even after time and the wisdom of age have softened the memories.

I thought I had long ago put the worst of these to rest, but when my son was arrested for the last time and sent to prison, the purveyors of my darkest recollections put on quite a spread; a banquet of remorseful expurgation in my honor  - an invitation that in all good conscience I could not refuse.

Now, as I again taste the bitter morsels of these ancient misdeeds with a clean and healthy palette, I search for forgiveness – and for the wisdom that can only be earned by candid appraisal.

So don’t mind me.

I’m just pushing through it like everyone else.

In the end it will all be for good.

It has to be.

I will not accept anything less. 

Uploading My Offline Self - The Hard Truth

In a few days I hope to receive the first of the journals that my son is writing while incarcerated.  We have conceived of and taken on a project that we hope will reach and benefit a much larger audience than just the two of us as we each write candidly about our drug abuse and specifically about our addictive natures and how they have irreparably altered our respective sane destinies.  This is my first public admission. It has perhaps been the most difficult step I have ever taken. 

It wasn't the first time I had tried it or the last time I would regret it.  But early in the winter of 1969 it became clear that regret would be taking a backseat to risk if I were to ever make it out of my teens alive.

So when my boyfriend slipped that frail needle into the raised blue arc of my fourteen-year-old veins, I smiled with compliant trust and a virginal anticipation endemic only to children and the clinically lost.

At that fledgling age redundancy is unknowable and ignorance, unimaginable.  That any of us survived the repeated missteps of our youth at all is ample evidence of divine intervention.

Initially, you might assume that my addiction began right there; as a rebellious, self-loathing newcomer to autonomy caught in the volley between conscience and need.  I was, after all, an impetuous, distractible, second-rate firstborn whose choices swayed decidedly to the far left of consequence with a desire for external validation so insidious it was an addiction in and of itself.

But that would be a false assumption.

Addiction is not seeded in desire or in its object but in their respective abuse, and I cannot remember a point in my life when the abuse of both has not been my reality.

The object of my desire has always been more accurately, an objective: escape; but until the winter that followed our family's relocation from New York to Kansas City, all means to that end had been ostensibly innocent, organic and internal.

Previously, escape had been facilitated by the vagrant chords of music and song that drowsed endlessly through my head from infancy.  Music that would later speak directly to me throughout my childhood compelling me to rock back and forth on the floor or on the edge of my bed for hours as I ruminated over which of the four Beatles I would marry or how to best get the attention of the boy down the street.

The further away in thought I could get from the clumsy, unexceptional, pudding-faced, non-entity whose spirit felt trapped by circumstance and cursed by a conscious awareness of soul and self, the more graced I became with a forbearance to take her sad visage into the following day.

But the radical shifting that occurs in both personal and family dynamics after a long-distance move provides unusual opportunities for reinvention, and I took advantage of all that were available to me.

The non-entity was vanquished and in her place came the maddening rebel whose lack of respect for her host purged the odds of all restraints.  There was little I would not do for attention or liberation from the cloddy and cumbersome introvert shackled to my past even if that entailed censoring my conscience as I navigated my present.

And so at fourteen years old I began an intimate and dependent relationship with hallucinogens, amphetamines, barbiturates and heroin that lasted well into my twenties.

Unfortunately,  it is not over.

That deadly barge of desire and myopic obsession for quick passage to Anywhere But Here still yearns to sail every single waking moment of my life, and although I have not yielded to its darkest cravings since the birth of my first child twenty-eight years ago;  I have only to think of that child - now a man - to understand that the worst part of any addiction is that we never self-destruct before taking hostages.

Every single person who has ever loved us is an innocent victim of our deliberate indifference.  I know this because as my son now suffers the retributive justice of succumbing to these same ruinous impulses from his small cell in a state prison,  neither can I see any further than the mortar and brick that close him in.

If anyone doubts the genetic probability that constitutional discontent can be transferred from parent to child, think again.

It is from guilt, shame, separation and grief that I write and for liberation from the malignant assumption that it may never be any better than this that I long.

Words have become my current addiction.

Blogging, my rig.

Divine intervention may still be my best hope.

In the meantime, I write.

How Do You Spell Flaws? M-E. Ann's Open Call

Annie, are you sure this information will not be held against us at some future time?  How about now?

My stomach is beginning to tighten.

Where to begin?

1.  I am chronically late.  It is now 9 p.m..  You requested our Open Call lists over twelve hours ago.

2.  Forgetful and scattered.  When my youngest was in preschool I was terrified I'd forget to send her in with her teddy bear on Teddy Bear Day just as I had forgotten to put her older sister in pajama's on Pajama Day and pack her older brother a sack lunch on Picnic Day.  I was so proud of myself when I remembered to put the bear in the car and felt like celebrating when I arrived at her preschool.  That was before I noticed that I'd left her at home.  (Don't worry.  Her father was at home at the time.  And besides, I'm sure the Statute of Limitations applies here, I'm quite certain.)

3.  I loathe talking on the phone.  It requires spontaneity and good verbal communication skills.  I have neither.  Last night I watched the movie 'The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter' about the life of a deaf mute.  I was jealous.

4.  I never look at the expiration date on perishables.  Today I brought home and orange juice from the grocery store that had an expiration date from last Thursday.

5  I hate confrontation.  I would never return to the grocery store to complain that they sold orange juice today that had an expiration date from last Thursday.

6.  I'm emotionally lazy.  Rather than work on standing up for myself,  I married an overly-assertive man was because HE would return to the grocery store to complain that they sold orange juice today that had an expiration date from last Thursday.

7. Frequently I mail letters without stamps.

8.  If solitude were a state of being that paid by the hour, I'd have enough money to buy my own island.  Coconuts do not have expiration dates.

9.  Wherever I am, I dream of being someplace else.

10.  I'm insecure about everything of, in, on, and about myself.  When I receive praise for something I've done, I feel undeserving.  When praise is withheld, I feel I deserve to feel undeserving.

11.  I am a sloppy artist.  Rather than aim for perfection, I spend more time working out how to cover up all of my mistakes.

12.   My attention span is severely limited and I bore easily.  Although I have a boatload of flaws left to list, I'm already eyeing my colored pencils with disturbing intensity.

Besides, my stomach is still a bit queasy.  Probably from drinking the orange juice I bought today that had and expiration date from last Thursday.

It is not THEM. It is US.

It begins here:
"You get your temper from your father's side of the family, not mine."
"Whatever problems you have, you can blame them on your mother."

It progresses:
"If your generation were not so irresponsible and selfish, there would be stability in our future."

We acquiesce:
"Were you a jock in high school or a nerd, hipster,  Goth, R.O.T.C. or Jesus freak?"

Soon, we learn that there is safety and comfort in numbers:
"It is the Republicans that got us into this mess and the Democrats who will get us out.  Vote for our side."


And finally we decide that if we are right, then they must be wrong:
" What does he know?  He's just a fear-mongering Christian, a greedy Jew, a terrorist Muslim." 
"I'm glad I'm not one of them."

I don't believe in coincidence.

On 9-11-2001 Christine Green, the youngest victim of the Tucson shooting, was born into a world that was paralyzed by grief and polarized by fear.  She was too young to choose sides or to comprehend the insidious emotion of hatred.  She simply was.

On  1-9-2011, Christine Green was taken out of a world that was paralyzed by grief and polarized by fear.  The numbers in those dates remained the same; only their sequence had changed.

There is a need right now to look beyond the obvious and read the signs of the times.   The date of her birth and of her death each add up to the number Five.    In Numerology Five is the number of change;  more specifically, change in the midst of chaos.

I don't believe in coincidence.

The drawing that accompanies this text was finished on the day of the shooting.  I had originally intended it to be for my son, an inmate, and for all of the men and women locked behind penitentiary walls.

But on that day, as I watched in disbelief while the various camps circled their wagons and hurled blame at one another,  I realized that we are the inmates and that as long as we swaddle our apprehensions in cunning layers of division and blame, we will remain sentenced for life to a prison of ignorance, rage and loss.

Inside each of us there is a wall bound together with a mortar composed of fear and pride whose bricks are the unexamined detritus of our prejudice.  They are those hard-baked thoughts that tell us that all Whites are imperious racists, Blacks are inferior,  Hispanics are lazy,  Jews are greedy,  Christians are simple-minded,  Liberals are Socialist radicals,  Conservatives are self-righteous,  Muslims are terrorists, Atheists and Pagans are evil,  Homosexuals are depraved,  Foreigners can't be trusted,  Priests are pedophiles,  Athletes are stupid,  Actors are superficial,  Intellects are arrogant,  the Humble are weak,  the Wealthy are indifferent,  and the Poor are ignorant.

But most of them just say,  I am right and you are wrong."


I don't believe in coincidence.

And I don't want to believe that a little girl who was slain by a madman; a product of our collective indifference to unconditional love which is the object of our humanity, on a date that mirrors that of her birth, both pointing us to the message that the separatist paradigms within tribes, classes, races, religions, political parties and ideological casts have got to change- has died in vain.

For my part I would rather be taken out of this world while attempting to love and understand my supposed enemy than to remain alive attempting to prove that I am right.


Christine Green was only nine years old.  Nine, the sacred number of harmony, Divine Will, eternity,  creation, completion and endings.  She was a ballerina, a daughter, a big sister, a friend, a student and a bright little harbinger of hope.

She was not one of Them.


She was one of US.


We ALL are.


I don't believe in coincidence.
It is time to wake up.


Illustration text:  Freedom is a state of mind.  Peace cannot exist around you if it does not exist within you.  Forgive all, especially yourself.  Happiness is a choice.  The only way out is by going within.  Now matters.  Listen to the silence.