I like it - doesn’t matter what · i like it. I’ve lost track of the continuous days that i have sat down to write a 5 paragraph daily and am conflicted about checking. If i were to verify how many continuous days it would introduce an ego component into something i work hard at partitioning, for that is an aspect i find distracting from what it is i want to accomplish - fluid logic that remains outside the strictures of “stream of consciousness” writing (seemingly an oxymoron) - orthodoxy has never been my long suit. What i was chewing on prior to commencing this late in the day essay was opening with a litany of my fears in search of Pema Chodron’s description of “our” soft spot she posits, i think quite accurately, which lies directly behind the fear we all front as foundation for our aggressive behaviors. My family is known for its paunch; i say family, but i mean the three sons (& and daughter, but that’s too scary a prospect for this essay). Pop carried his birdlike frame and ham hock hands pretty much most of his life, save a period in the assisted living facility where his “belly” seemed to fit the Pasha roll he took on the couch with some lady’s hand in each of his mitts.
Ma really was a desert rat to the bone, her itinerant miner father - my namesake resides deeply in her makeup, though her Steel Magnolia, Alabama mama will ever be her North Star. Grandma Maude, and Grandpa Joseph met in the wilds of Nevada circa late 1920’s - She a single woman 1918 UCLA graduate, school marm in a one room schoolhouse Mina; he passing through. From what i recall, they met at a dance - he 20 years her senior · she escaping an obligation to return to Los Angeles and put her elder sister Eula through school as she had done Maude. I’m sure it was not that simple, anymore than i am certain who was the elder of the two; But within 4 years Maude was married with 3 children and 20 years later her middle daughter, my mother - a checker at the new Von’s Supermarket, met my father with whom within 8 weeks of meeting married and then bore him 4 children within 6 years - i be # 3 of 4 ·
Ma has now turned 92 and though i don’t fear her as she would seemingly desire - i do respect her. She locked me out of the home i’d grown up in at age 15, then changed the locks. This happened after she’d “kicked pop to the curb” citing his ________ fill in the blanks. Her last constructive comment to me during a reunion i had arranged for her with the husband of her deceased college chum was “you are so obsequious;” this was just prior to my departure for the country i now live in, and though it was over a year ago - i am still smarting from her gratuitous cruelty. I accept that it is as much a feature of the dementia for which she was cloistered as integral to our troubled relationship, but i do not hold with the segregation of meaning that the “experts” like to promulgate. I stayed close to pop to the end, though my siblings placed thoughtless and cruel impediments in my path. Pop lived the last 10 months of existence with a broken thigh knuckle and was stewed to the gills on “the magic patch,” but like the “exceptional children” i had the privilege of serving in one of my career incarnations as a Psych-Tech intern, communication is where you find it.
Now i hammer a keyboard in a Covid-19 locked down commune of a world heritage site chomping at the bit to pulse my blood better on my bicycle in this flat bicycle heaven while doing my level best to do what my mother’s sister advocated “leave the world a better place than you found it.” I loved my Aunt Jane, and she loved me - i love all of my family, but as Bob Dylan said better than me, “I’m not ready to pull down my hedges.” This morning i sent a photo to the eldest brother, who sadly strikes me now as a bad version of a proletariate Martinet having reigned over the looting from our mother’s flat files of over 4 years of drawings i had made while in seclusion in the high desert of the Southern Sierras. The photo was of a city and a time when ma had been “farmed out” while the maiden Aunt and my grandmother consolidated there forces in pre-war Los Angeles. My mother’s banishment to the perimeters of Death Valley in the custody of her father wounded ma deeply, but also provided her with the gumption to survive to 92 in a plague infested inner-city convalescent home - a fine point i’m sure will have been lost on the eldest brother who i hope would place the photo in front of our mother just for the endorphins it would produce, but i sadly doubt his wounds would permit such a kindness.
Still that is not my problem - my problem is to frame my history in such a way that it permits a loving orientation to share with the world about the unique history we are all abandoning to a corporate putsch · mid stride. I am not strong like i used to be and it seems even the universe is conspiring to weaken me further by the rainy season and a general proscription from unnecessary travel in the hamlet i reside. So i go where my mind still allows me access where due to the irrepressible joviality of my sire is a loving place; ma too, but her’s is more the torture of an ambition that never quite joined with the wounds she has suffered. I can pray for her comfort with confidence, for she is a crafty soul who has peeked out at me kindly from time to time, me her offspring nemesis. She even had the gaul to proscribe me from accurately describing myself as a two-eyed cyclops so deep is her vanity about birthing “perfect” children. What she regrettably did not, but maybe somewhere deep in her being understands, is it is was not obsequiousness that prompted me to arrange a visit from an old friend, but deference to her feelings which i cannot begin to understand, but value for their depth and complexity - she is a grand dame and i am grateful to have been her son · that is as close as you will ever get to my “soft spot”, until next time . ..
jts 15/08/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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