LOST AND SOUND

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I have a tendency to get lost.  Alongside my earliest memory of motion is the corresponding memory of finding myself at a destination well outside my original game plan.

The first time this happened I was in a large field behind the garden apartments where I lived with my parents until I was three years old.  That time it came at the lure of a train whistle.

The tracks lay on the far side of the field well beyond my view; standing as I was not more than half an inch taller than the dried grasses that separated us.  But the hypnotic sound of grating iron heaving and merging in a machined fit of rhythmic insistence was too compelling for my fledgling curiosity and roundly ordered my toddling march from the constraints of our patio towards enlightenment.

Being less sure-footed in execution than intention, I quickly found myself swallowed whole by the coarse and inhospitable reeds surrounding me and realized at the same moment that not only had I lost sight of home, but that the train had now become no more than a faint, high whistle on tin rails at a distance much to far to consider; even for one as intrepid as I.

The thought occurred to me that I should cry; that perhaps the crows above me circling for prey more suitable than a three year old in corduroys and Maryjane's, might alert my mother that I'd once more fallen from the nest.

But then there were also the very real fears of parental retribution to consider.  This usually involved my father and an unpleasant encounter with a flat "Beaver" paddle ordinarily used to beat rugs.  I was well aware that it's dual purpose was to tan the fannies of insurgent youth, and although my father's gentle hand, bent by the grace of fraternal guilt, mitigated the hostility of the act itself; it could not eliminate my own grief over having let him down or the fear that this time I might well put him over the edge and incite a heavier blow.

Fortunately on that day, my recovery came by another sound: That of my mother calling me in for lunch.   Calmly and with restrained panic I tethered my ears to the thin trail of her young voice and tracked my way back to the safety of home claiming only that I had been just around the farthest side of the building.

But when it happened again the following year, it did not go as smoothly.

Ironically, this time it also involved trains.  More specifically, the train station.  We had moved by that time from the apartment to a small, pleasant house on a kid-infested street, lined by clapboard dwellings of settled domesticity.  However, it was too far away from the parochial school where I attended kindergarten, and the perimeters of school-bus convenience were too taxed to warrant a school-sponsored ride.

The solution?  Those of us on the street attending St. Pius X took the regular commuter bus from the corner of our street to the train station in the heart of town where the regulation school bus would then collect us and complete the journey.

The train station was mesmerizing with its dizzying array of gray-tinted men in their suits and ties and colorful women in matching knits and Pillbox hats, their hands artfully-fitted with designer gloves;  all of them commuting into the city for adventures I was nowhere near able to comprehend.

 Theoretically, I was lost from the moment I disembarked at the station, and it was only by remanding myself squarely among the leather book bags left idling by the sixth graders (whose ritual it was to descend on the candy machine in between bus rides) that I did not float away entirely.

At least not until the day I spotted my first handlebar mustache.

There it was, strapped to the face of a bespectacled man by some invisible means.  Half hiding in the blend of blue shadows cast from the rim of his equally unique Bowler hat, I could see the hard wax bonding of hairs as they extended in ornamental curls on either side of his face like the wings of a rare and noble bird.

How far I had wandered to take in this sight and how long it engaged me, I could not say.  I knew only that when I returned to my safe haven; to where I'd last seen that field of brown leather book bags, there were no book bags.

Spurred by the hard crush of fear, I stood on the sidewalk in front of the station and began to cry.  I  pictured myself an orphan wondering whom among the hurried, rush-hour throngs would become my new parents.  It never occurred to me that I would be returned home.

My new mother arrived within minutes; her hair bound in sections to massive pink rollers all swaddled in a bright, silk scarf.   To me she appeared more comical than nurturing.  But hey, orphans can't be choosers.

While depositing my new father at the curb, she noticed my tears and came to my rescue.  Because in my panic I could not recall more than my first name and a vague rendition of my last, she escorted me to the traffic cop at his nearby post by the stoplight.

I had nothing for him either.  No return postage or known address.  Nada.

However, the owner of the Gristedes' Market where my former mother did all of her shopping happened to notice this scene outside the store window.  He recognized me and emerged bearing all those salient facts that I had deftly replaced with images of handlebar mustaches and bowler hats.

Within a half hour my former mother arrived with my former siblings in tow.  Noting that she showed more relief than anger, I bid a fond farewell to my almost-new mother, who favored me with a kiss and a Tootsie Pop, and I left with the mother I knew best.

Getting lost is routine business for me.  I get lost in my thoughts, my words, my art, my affections and regularly, lost in my travels.  But because for all these years I've always managed survive the trek, my faith in the joy and necessity of exploration remains sound, and I am not afraid.

If you value what you've left behind, you will always find your way back to it, even when you don't remember how.

This is a fact; with or without Tootsie Pops.

UNRAVELING IN REAL TIME, What Will The Neighbors Think?

They came again this morning.  It was early; just after eight a.m..  

But I did not hear the metallic creak of the wrought iron gate at the top of the steps outside our front door; that rusted yawn that signals to me the presence of friend or enemy; the sound I count on in the absence of a working doorbell.

The dogs, whose Bremen Town-substitution is unreliable, were scattered about the house and yard and failed to alert me.  And so I continued to strip the sheets from our bed and to carry on my mundane ritual with the drowsy acceptance of early-morning normal.

It wasn't until I reached for a dropped pillow slip and glanced out the window of our upstairs bedroom that I noticed them.  There, lining the arc of our horseshoe driveway like a convoy of mutant, navy-blue beetles, were four police squad cars.

To someone else this sight might be alarming.  It might seem extraordinary or in raw juxtaposition to their experience of a sane reality.  They might immediately assume there has been a horrible mistake or that a faulty address had led these misguided officers of the peace to their door.

To someone else this scene might seem surreal, and although I still have empathy for and a distinct memory of that innocent and flustered reaction, it is remote .

It has been a long time since I have been like someone else.

In the eight years that my son has been a prescription-dependent drug addict, scenes like this one have unfolded with uncanny regularity.  The felony of prescription fraud is not lightly regarded among those sworn to uphold the law and to protect the righteous, nor should it be.

I don't fault them their obligation to carry out their duty.  They are following orders.  I just wish they would get their facts straight and perhaps exercise a little more diplomacy and tact in executing their job.

But this morning I did not make it to the door in time, and because it took me too long to notice them and to answer a doorbell that does not ring, all but two of the six officers had scattered to surround the house; leaving the two who did not to the task of ringing the door of the neighbors who live directly behind us.

Why?

In the past I have dutifully accepted the attendant shame and humiliation of such public maneuvers because I had no choice.  My son was guilty and plagued by felony warrants for his arrest.  This was his last known address.  This is where the police and probation officers, where the swat teams and detectives routinely surfaced.

Of course, the shattered irony of today comes because he has been in custody for the past ten months!

 I was hoping that the days of high drama and the sweeping, public method of execution were behind us.  Do they not have the same computer access that I do?  Could they not attempt to uncover this fact before they rushed my home and badgered my neighbors with questions?

Although our neighbors have no doubt witnessed and wondered about the frequency with which we were graced by the local police in the past, they have had the decency not to query us about it.  We maintain a friendly and polite relationship, purposely downwind of intimate.

But now they know the truth.

By the time I opened the front door of my house, the two uniformed spokesmen were returning to their vehicles.  They told me they did not think anyone was at home, which is why they had gone on to question our young neighbors about what they knew.

They told our neighbors that my son was a felon with three warrants in two states.  They asked them if he had been around; if we were sheltering him.  They admonished them on the severity of consequence for withholding information should they think to do so.

From my drawing table as I look through the French doors of my studio, I have watched the young mother as she played with her small son and toddling daughter on the greening carpet of their front lawn, and with every observation I am taken back to that time when my son and eldest daughter were those exact ages.  

In the temperate months, seduced by the fresh air and earthy pleasures outdoors, they frequent their yard with its colorful scramble of plastic balls and battered toys.  I am lured by the high, pebbled laughter and my eyes follow the trail of their chatter with my heart in sound conspiracy in spite of my best efforts to shut them out.  They are a window to a past I hold onto with fierce but weary pride.  

It was a past that perhaps held the best of me and of what my life could ever be.

Several times the young mother and I have spoken of the difference in age between her son and daughter and their dispositions bearing a striking similarity to mine so many years ago.  We shared collusive chuckles at how easily smiling came to our sons and how innately protective they are of their younger sisters even at that fledgling age.  

I assured her that this propensity for watching over both of his younger sisters still remains paramount for my son all these many years later.

Now that the facts of his iniquity have been made known to them, I will not mention this to her again.  I would not want to face the awkwardness that will exist between us as she silently prays for an end to any such similarities between her little boy and the recollections of my own. 

But they remain our neighbors, and as they exist in all their burgeoning happiness, it is with an incursive and galling shame that I am necessarily confronted by the realization that although my early walk through motherhood began with the same sure-footed and deep nurturing; that I sang to my children the same mild lullabies and blanketed the close of each day with the gentle grace of bedside prayers and soft kisses,  I am at this moment not able to bath in the peace of having successfully completed that passage nor in the joy at seeing a reflection of those years in the young family next door.

Every time my eyes wander through those doors, my heart digs into the soft cache of remembering the bedtime stories and bruised knees and whiffle ball games in the summer twilight of the backyard, and I am reminded that the present end does not fit my past dreams for it and that my son is not the only one whose body and soul are now confined.

He is confined by law.
I am, by love.

This morning I told the police of their mistake; that my son is currently in prison and will be so for some time.  I watched them watch me and wondered, as I always do, what were they thinking?  Did they look for the cracks within my maternal countenance?  Did they assume that surely I must have some radical deficit that would yield or enable such a damaged offspring?  Were they suspect of my veracity based on this present circumstance?

Where did I go wrong?

Routinely, I ask myself those questions and I certainly don't fault anyone else for doing likewise.

Regretfully, I don't have any answers.

But blessedly, the neighbors need not know that, too.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA'S WOLVES?

Twenty-five years ago my newly married state was threatened with extinction.  There were schisms and issues and liberal smatterings of defensive indifference that brought my husband and I to the intersection of Unilateral Dissolution at the corners of Its Not My Fault and We Have Nothing In Common all within a brief two and a half-year span of time.

Somewhere cradled in between the reactive impulses of love and loss a wolf lies waiting.

The three trips we invested to consult a marriage counselor concluded with her suggestion at the end of the fourth that, although she did recognize a certain affection between us, the disparities were wide enough to make the Grand Canyon resemble a spider vein by comparison.

She could offer us no solution other than her recommendation of two reliable divorce attorneys who were both local and affordable.  Since it was known that we had a two-year old child at home and obvious that I was seriously vested in the gestation of a second, I was grateful for her consideration of our fledgling familial and financial estates.

We drove away from the grey-shingled bungalo of her cozy home office in separate vehicles.  I needed to collect our son from my parent's home, and my husband needed to return to the trampled graminoids and black mud of the high school football field where he spent his free time as the coach for defense.  As if linebackers needed to be taught how to be large and immovable.  But denial and convention as they funded his ability to ignore the obvious and focus on the unnecessary, served him well in coaching such a brutally redundant game.

It was mid-autumn in Connecticut; chilled and raining.  Being at home offered a misguided glaze of peace as the weather outside threatened to drown the wolves at the door; because inside I had my child, my things, my sanity and my protection from the elements.

The wolves could howl and scratch at the walls of my domesticized fortress for as long as they pleased, but they could not consume me.

I am a chronic ruminator, which is the introspective equivalent of The Terminator.  There is nothing that wedges itself between the seams of my soul that I have not inspected, dissected, re-orchestrated and validated at least a dozen times.  Nothing.

On this particular night, as I waited for the late arrival of my husband home from practice in order that we might begin to discuss the practical aspects of terminating our mutually misguided attraction to one another, I had the television on and was drawn into, of all things, the movie Who Is Afraid Of Virginia Wolf?

Whether I remained fully present in my body or not, I cannot to this day recall; but as I watched the celluloid scramble of vitriol, vengeance and vituperative bantering, I had an epiphany:


Fear is the wolf.

I am  prideful out of fear that no one will like me as much as I feel I deserve to be liked.
I am greedy out of fear of not getting or having enough.
I am envious out of fear that I am not as good as.
I lust out of a fear of being unlovable and untouched.
I am slothful for fear of failure.
I am angry because I fear not being heard or understood.
I am gluttonous for fear that I will starve.

I am indifferent and inattentive to my deepest prodding for fear of learning the truth about myself.

And that night I realized that in my relationships, particularly those whose commitments make me vulnerable, I hate because I fear the risks attendant to loving that much.

When my husband finally arrived home, he came outfitted with smiles and congenial persiflage and flush with denial over the inadequacies of his teenaged linebackers.

And as he praised my over-cooked dinner, I knew also that he had chosen to ignore the clinical conviction of our therapist: that perhaps 'parting's sweet sorrow' trumped the potential for murder/suicide.

I decided to roll in the direction his disposition suggested and have been doing so ever since.  The wolves still come and go and more often than I would like, one or two threaten to blow my house down.

But as long as I can name them, I can tame them; and although they will then be registered to me, I will make sure to keep up with their shots through heavy doses of integrity.

Now if only I knew where to get them microchipped.

SON SHINE, The Next Step

Yesterday I made the last of my long drives through the Kansas flatlands to a rural, Dairyqueen-town and to the dilapidated detention center where my son had been in residence for the past five months.

The sun was high and seemed to rally around my subdued consternation with an early-fall display of buttery light.  Even the scattered bunches of Lazy Susan's stacked in wiry clusters among the high and faded jade grass flagged my passage on either side of the highway with a cheery, yellow reception of solicitous regard.

Had my destination been of another sort, this would have been a felicitous seasonal homage to perpetual optimism, which I would have wholly appreciated.

But yesterday I was neither going to visit my son nor to reclaim him.  I was simply going to collect what personal possessions were mandatorily left behind when he was transferred to a maximum security prison last weekend.

The institution housing him presently is run by the State Department of Corrections.  In addition to being used as a Reception and Diagnostic Unit where every inmate received into custody is evaluated and processed before being sent to another facility to serve out his sentence, it is also where they house those inmates facing capital punishment before sending them to another facility where they will be executed.

Whether a prisoner is to be remanded to another penitentiary to serve time on earth for his crime or to be summarily banished to another dimension altogether, is of little consequence to the system itself.  Either way, each man will commence his earned castigation from within that same violently indifferent fortress.

In this facility evil, ignorance, addiction, avarice, the weak and the misbegotten are all treated to identical doses of distain and cowed into subservience by guards with a brutal and detached mastery years in the making.

Provocation is a necessary tool.  It identifies the potentially violent offenders from those whose psychology limits their destruction to the bewildered contents of their own souls.

This eclectic mix of criminal dysfunction is handled the way the human species always handles the detritus that is necessarily a part of our lives through the balance of light and dark:  It is separated and contained.

Within the cycle of a twenty-four hour day, twenty-three of those hours are spent solitarily in a small cell.  In that way the risk of cross-contamination or injury to one inmate by another is greatly reduced.

Because compassion and consideration are no longer extended to those whose choices have led them to this constructional purgatory and because their loved ones are regarded as merely an extension of the bane these men have become, no notice is given to families when an inmate is moved.  It was only through the two letters I received from my son three days ago that his whereabouts were made known to me.

What I now also know and wish I did not is the harrowing demographic of this particular facility.  I learned this through my own exploration but did so after his letter revealed that upon orientation on his first day they were shown a video on how to avoid prison rape as well as being asked to sign a "corpse release form" against the possibility of an "untimely prison demise."

From the small window in his cell, he writes that he can see only the "razor white walls topped with gleaming coils of barbed wire."  He writes that the facility is massive and the noise level becomes almost intolerable towards the end of a long, restless day of pacing, ruminating and regretting.  He tells me that he is terrified.

This is not summer camp or boarding school or a protracted stay at a youth hostile.  This is not even the blackened but tolerable inconvenience of a county jail.  This is hell.

And the sun that shone down on me, however brightly, as I drove along the highway and that shone down on the docile fields of thriving crops and on the vibrant wildflowers peddling their organic nobility and on every free individual who has brokered a better arrangement with life, is not able to penetrate the thick walls of his prison cell or to alleviate the rattling instability of my own apprehension and the abiding despair over both his broken psychology as well as his immediate safety.

I was planning on writing another narrative today; one that surveyed a more confectionary landscape of  normality with gleeful injections of humor.  I tried repeatedly, but the potency of these images and the complexity of my emotions were insistent and unwilling to step aside until I gave them their due.

I suppose my best hope is that if I write about these baleful passages as they unfold, I will one day reach a point of great strength and acceptance and that beneath these sobering fibers, a new and resplendent tapestry will unveil itself;  a tapestry that can hold up under the revelatory beams of the sun and reflect the successful conclusion to our lives, spotted as they have been, by challenge and imperfection.

I am on the outside now.  But like the sun, I will do my best to hold the light and to process my startled maternity until it resembles a bright orb of resolute promise.

My son is depending on me, and I am not going to fall from the only sky providing him some measure of daylight.

And on it goes.