UNTIL IT IS CHRISTMAS, AGAIN

And so it is Christmas, again.  

Depending upon where you live the winds may have grown decidedly colder with front porches and backyard patios forced to shed their hospitable design. 

From the facing window at my drawing table, I look out and see the wrought iron furniture laced with icy tendrils of frozen white, as if they were spun to crystalized symmetry by some Nordic god. The snow-laden clay pots, stacked against disorder in a dormant corner of the yard, hold the grayed, brittle remnants of summer's blooms; and seeing them I am drawn to consider the benefits of hibernation and the power of seasonal glee as it arises through music and song.

There are only a handful of Christmas songs I look forward to hearing, songs whose notes resonate with an earlier version of my life and can entice my heart to linger a while amidst the memories of simpler days .  

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas is perhaps my favorite, and I willingly revel in the sentimental chords that place the wounds of the present into festive, wrapped boxes decorated with bells and bows and delivers them to a place where I am able to open them as the gifts that they inherently are.

I know that there is no such thing as useless suffering if wisdom is valued above discomfort and the dual meaning of the word present is not lost on me in this season or in any other. It is a gift I wish more people understood and one whose value I must continually reassess myself.  

It is not hard to become morose when caught in the lyrical grip of Silent Night or The Christmas Song while your own nights may feel anything but silent, and far from helping to make the season bright, a turkey and some mistletoe only remind you of who is missing from the table and why.

But that is the perfect time to open one of those festooned boxes of unresolved emotion and try it on for size. Turning ill-fitting grief into a bright garment of resolution and illumination is the most incredible gift you can own and once it is yours, you also have the option of re-gifting that wisdom to someone else. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

And so it is Christmas, again.

A few days ago I stumbled upon an old home video, one that was taken by my husband on a Christmas morning seventeen years ago and featured the very young editions of my three children. At first I watched it with bemused interest, laughing at the stridency of my youngest who at age three was already managing our household with the conviction of a five-star general and at the lithe and dreamy character of my middle daughter and her relentless determination to float above the chaos of the morning bundled in little more than optimism and her new sweater.

What parent would not be moved by the delight of an enchanting moment held in the celluloid grasp of a better time?

Then the camera panned to my son. At twelve years old he struggled mightily to subdue his obvious elation at the gift he received of a pair of roller blades, no doubt believing that because he stood on the precipice of his teens, any marked outburst of joy would betray the serious estate of his young adulthood.

Yet however much he tried to neuter his outward response, he could not erase the truth of it in his eyes, and as the camera lens closed in upon them, I saw what I have not seen in them for the better part of the past ten years:  I saw happiness and I saw peace.

As the camera recorded him eagerly fitting his feet into those cumbersome wheeled boots, my mind quickly flashed to the young man today where he resides in a state penitentiary and to the addiction, diffidence and collapse of integrity and hope that brought him there one ill-fated choice at a time.  

Frozen and almost unable to breathe I stood before the television screen and watched the grace and strength of his movements as he exercised his new gift in the driveway along with his sister; the two of them laughing with the unbridled giddiness known only to the young, as they circled the lumbering body of our ever-patient Newfoundland, Frodo.  

It is difficult to imagine such darkness could evolve from what seemed such brilliantly privileged beginnings. Privileged not in wealth or in trappings but in love and belief - in family and intentions.  

Yet it can and it did, and as long as he has remained in this state of broken, these sentimental songs of Christmas have not been easy to hear.

Still, some part of my soul craves them, and I have to assume that it is the same part that holds out hope for a happy ending; the part that is willing to unwrap these pretty boxes of pain and model the contents until they fit like velvet robes of acceptance and peace.

The part that thrives in every season and simply will not give up-

Until it is fully Christmas, again.

Merry Christmas, One and All............

IMAGINE THIS

I was profoundly grateful the day John Lennon died.

As I stood in the center of my own hell absorbing the news from the scrambled and faint signal of our battered, borrowed television, my immediate shock and despair were quickly displaced by a clean wave of relief.

It was not that I celebrated his death.  I was as stunned and devastated as anyone else.  It was a gratitude for the promise of a slight respite from the abusive fists of my husband of four months and of the terrifying isolation housed body and regret in the small home we had rented deep in the verdant woods of a remote Vermont enclave.

This news would find my new husband disturbed and distracted.

This news would turn his attention away from his now routine need to flesh out his demons without marring his own skin.

This bitter fist of calamitous news would loosen the hate balled tightly in the center of his angry hands and give me a moment to think, to recover, to justify.

John Lennon was my favorite Beatle.  Like me, he was a Libra.  Like me, he first set out to become a visual artist.  Like me, he employed an often acerbic wit to trim the edges off his innate vulnerability; and like me at the time,  there was not a drug or mode of cerebral transport he would not try if it fostered an escape from his barbed encounters with reality.

I wondered in the confusion of the moment and without benefit of the complete backstory of his death, if perhaps it was his particular and public version of chasing happy that led to his violent demise; just as I knew with certainty that it was my own need to escape the grim destiny of ordinary which led to what could now potentially be mine.

John Lennon and I were both artists; both of us in mad flight to a plane of existence that was far away and well above humanity's declivitous stride towards the indifference it seemed hell-bent to reach.  I watched the approach for decades and mourned the collective thrashing of society as it heaved in the death throes of compassion.

 I recognized anger and experienced the consequence of unacknowledged familial violence and neglect in fierce blows against skin and bone.

My skin.
My bones.

This was the price I now paid for seeking escape in the folly of bohemia and the marital promise of a fierce young man who was anything but ordinary.  


Much like John Lennon, I quested peace and the tenuous distinction of unique;  and like him, what I ultimately found was the brutality of envy and the dangerous estate of the scapegoat.

His end came at the hands of a deranged assassin whose transference exited through the bullet of a small handgun.

Mine would likely come shrouded in the silence of the surrounding woods at the grip of a man whose self-loathing could only be purged through the fisted arc of his meaty hands as they bludgeoned the face and body of someone whose will and promise he believed exceeded his own.

John Lennon once said, "A dream you dream alone is only a dream.  A dream you dream together is a reality."


Being an impulsive and reckless altruist, I took his words at face value not bothering to first learn that a dream is no match for unyielding bitterness and that without dual wills and much effort it would not heal or erase the consequential brokenness of childhood neglect nor harvest compassion from within the deep roots of misogyny.

I was a lone dreamer.

Then John Lennon was shot and killed, and I became a fighter.

I had given peace a chance long enough.  I was not going to risk dying for the wealth of a dream I alone held.

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."  This was perhaps his most well-known and oft-quoted saying.   I doubt he knew what end life held in store for him when he uttered those words.   I doubt anyone did.

But this was not my life, and I was not going to let the barbed edges of my husband's chronic dsyfunction control and consume my dream.   God damned plans were going to be made.

The random and frequent battering continued, but after December 8th, 1980, it was met with strong resistance.  Of course, this precipitated only greater abuse until blood was being drawn on both sides.

By the middle of February I had managed to mastermind our move away from the protective solitude of the mountains to the public and familiar territory of a small Long Island community where neighbors lingered in yards and on porches long after dusk.  We stayed in the summer home my parents owned in a town I had known since childhood.  I was visible and would be heard there.

By the First of May and at my urging, my husband was gone; seeking employment out of state while I readily agreed it was best that I remained behind until he was settled.   Happily, I doled over the keys to my car, although he still left with my favorite sweatshirt and all of my cash; both taken without my consent.

The following day I found a job managing a cookie shop, as well as an attorney willing to accept payments over time, and I filed divorce proceedings.

Later that evening I learned on the news of the proposed plans by Yoko Ono, the widow of Lennon, and some of his many fans to designate a quiet section of Central Park as a commemorative garden to the man and to his music.

They would call it Strawberry Fields.

I listened, and I still believed.

That night I slept.

And I dreamt.

And I continued to live.

"You may say I'm a dreamer.  But I'm not the only one."


And I am not.

Thank you, John Lennon.

No Where Is Here

Writing is not at the forefront of my days right how.  There are too many images burrowing deep in the grooves of my brain.  I'm going with the flow....or the manic state.  Whatever works.

An editor from Rootspeak, another online magazine, contacted me last week and asked me to contribute some pieces of writing.  Evidently, they canvass sites like Open Salon for writers.

They are running the series of posts I wrote about my son.  The first one went up yesterday.  I'd give my life not to have such a thing to chronicle.  The situation, not the person.  I adore him.

Working with an editor in this way is sweet.  They proofread, edit and post.  I don't have to do anything but write.  Nice.

I'm working on a series of drawings.  I don't know where they are going yet.  But that is par for the course....and I don't play golf.

There is a great deal of attitude in the air.

Only K. would understand that.

Other than that, I'm not saying.

I've been ill.  The left side of my head has been on fire since Thanksgiving with a fever on and off.  My gland is swollen on that side, as well.  I finally went to the doctor yesterday.  Turns out I have shingles.  It takes a month to go away even with these massive antibiotics. Evidently it is stress related.  Stress?  Really?  

And I thought I was doing so well steeped in denial and escapism.  

Darn.

But another day will still come.

And I will be here to greet it.

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.