Memory map exercise

Posted on February 20, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Here is an exercise to dig down deep.

Choose a picture of a place where you spent a lot of time as a child. Perhaps this was your old family home that you moved from. Or a family friend’s house. Or your elementary school playground. It is important that this be a place that you have a lot of memories about.

Make a color copy of the picture and paste it into your journal. Don’t use an original picture or you won’t feel free to work with it like you need to.

You might be able to find a picture online of this place if you no longer have a photograph (you moved, for instance). Use Google image search and put in the address in question. You might be surprised what you can find, as real estate agents often take many pictures and leave them up even after the house has sold.

Write a map grid around the edges – evenly space letters on one side and numbers on the other side.

Use this grid to refer to elements in the picture. What happened in each place? What does that remind you of? You can go as deep as you want, and as off subject as you want. Nobody has to see this. Keep writing about what happened in that one area until you wind down. Move on to another area. Repeat. You can use different colors to help keep track of your wanderings – first thoughts, tangents off of that, for instance.

You don’t have to start at the top and work your way down. You can write about whatever catches your fancy first and go from there.

Many different things will come up while you do this – memories that you’d long forgotten. This is a time to cherish the beautiful ones and heal the hard ones. You are older now, and stronger, and better able to work with them. Events are tricky things when we are younger – they might be too heavy for us to carry. When we get older, we have more tools at our disposal. This is a special time that you have to work on them, a second chance.

At the end, thank yourself for giving yourself permission to do this work.

Tracy and Robin

Posted on February 20, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Tracy and Robin had joked for years before they got married that people never knew who was “he” and who was “she” of the two of them. They decided that it was nobody’s business, so they never let on.

Their friends had hoped to learn the truth on their wedding day. Surely they would wear the traditional clothes? They were in for quite a surprise when they arrived at the event. They wore the traditional clothes, but not in the traditional way. This was in line with everything they stood for, so it made sense after all, but it still didn’t answer any questions.

Tracy and Robin were drawn to each other not out of a sense of finding their other half, but in finding another person who was whole. Both were perfectly comfortable repairing a car or knitting a shawl. Both could mow the lawn as well as cook. They felt lucky that their parents had taught them both how to be people first and foremost. Their gender was never used as a reason for or against learning anything.

They both hid their gender, not out of a sense of privacy or shame, but out of a sense of rightness. They wanted people to relate to them as people. The first item of prejudice was gender. Sure, you could add race, religion, creed, national origin and a host of other things up to and including what football team they rooted for. People used any excuse they could to pigeonhole you, to decide who you were before you even opened your mouth. Tracy and Robin figured that the more you can avoid those markers, the more people would have to make up their own minds for a change.

They were mindful to shop only where the bathrooms were genderless. Sometimes the buildings were old and only had one restroom with a single toilet. Sometimes they had family restrooms. They didn’t want to have to out themselves if they could avoid it.

They shopped at thrift stores, getting whatever clothing that struck their fancy and wasn’t too snug. Both were equally comfortable in pants or skirts. They were pleased when they could find clothing that was from immigrants because it was often loose and ambiguous. Comfort was the most important thing.

It was always assumed that one was female, but it wasn’t a given. Both could have been. Or neither. Or one or both could be intersex. Did it matter? Nobody separates by eye color or height, so why separate by something as equally meaningless and random as gender?

Mr Michaels

Posted on February 20, 2016 by betsybeadhead | 2 Comments

Mr Michaels’ blindness was absolute. Born sighted, it had been 20 years before the cataracts had begun to form from the kiss of sunlight.

It happened so slowly at first, like a fog creeping in on cat’s paws. Every month the dull haze thickened, coalesced just a little more. It was so gradual that he never even realized his sight was being stolen from him until it was gone. It was as if his sight was a stone and the sun was the sea, washing it away to nothingness, no trace of it ever having been there.

It was nothing to Mr Michaels. His sight had gone so gradually that he’d forgotten he’d ever had vision. Just like that sea-stone, all evidence of its existence was erased. Just as slowly and just as insistently, his memory of sight had dissolved as well. He could no longer remember his mother’s face or the color of the sky in early November, could no longer even remember that he had ever known these things.

He didn’t think of his blindness as an absence. He didn’t think of it at all.

All his life he had worked outside. Perhaps it was an undiagnosed case of claustrophobia. Perhaps he was just set in his ways. His first job had been in landscaping, and every one after that had been related. Grounds crew for a municipal park, another one helping harvest apples, it was all the same to him, as long as he was outside.

His father never knew if he’d ever tried for anything more advanced. He never asked, but he’d been tempted to often. He wanted to encourage him to be his best rather than settle, but he remembered his own father doing the same to him and he still resented him for it. Perhaps this was his best? Perhaps he led a simple life because he was simple? Best not to dig too deeply.

Mr Michael’s hands became his eyes, showing him the size of the bulb or seed that he held. He then knew how far down to dig to plant it. His hands told him where the weeds were to pluck, told him what apples were ready to harvest and which ones were best left for the birds. His feet told him how far the flower bed was from the orchard, how far from the stables. His nose told him whether the horses were sick or scared. His ears told him whether a storm was coming, and whether it was going to be strong enough to warrant bringing the animals in early.

Watching him work, you’d never know he was blind. By tacit agreement, all the other workers on the farm kept everything where it had always been. That one incident with the misplaced hay bale had been enough to convince them.

It was only when you looked directly into his eyes that you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was blind. Very few people were brave enough to do this more than once. Looking into his milky eyes was like looking into a pair of mirrors set just opposite each other. All you could see was yourself, all of yourself, unto eternity, ever diminishing into meaninglessness. It was overwhelming and humbling. You could see all of your strengths and all of your faults, unvarnished, untampered by the usual lies you told yourself. This alone was unsettling, but the additional feature of his gaze was to leave you with an overwhelming sense of your utter insignificance.

Mr Michaels was completely unaware of this. He wasn’t bothered in the slightest that people tended to leave him alone. It meant he had time for his own amusements. That suited him just fine.

Growing in (poem)

Posted on February 20, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I’m no longer growing up
but in,
strengthening my foundation,
clearing out old misconceptions
and flat out lies
I learned
or was taught.

This isn’t housekeeping.
This is a major renovation,
a re-new-ing.
This is tearing out the floorboards and joists
and digging down to bedrock
to reseat the base.

There’s no plan for this,
no map.
There can’t be.
Each house,
each person
is site specific.
Nobody else’s plans will work.

How can you grow up
if you don’t have a strong base?
The tree falls over
if the roots aren’t deep.

So for right now,
I’m growing in.

One size (poem)

Posted on February 19, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

One size does not fit anybody.
Not even most.
We’ve forced ourselves into conformity
into complacency
into a mold that is not
of our own making.

We’ve shoved our feet into shoes
that don’t fit,
hobbling ourselves in the name of
getting along,
of making do,
of giving up our own power,
our own knowledge,
our own ability.

We thought by doing so that we’d have
more time
to be ourselves,
to do our own thing,
to think our own thoughts.
We thought that by giving up
everything
to the authorities,
to the experts,
to the corporations,
to the system,
that we wouldn’t have to worry
about it
about anything
anymore.
The professionals would do it for us.

Perhaps it is better said that they do it
to us.

Bigger isn’t always better.

We gave so much away.
Childbirth, daycare, school, medical care, funerals.
Our whole lives from birth to death.
Who raises our children?
Not us.
Professionals,
strangers.
Who takes care of us when we get sick, or old?
Not our family, not our friends.
Professionals,
strangers.

We stopped making our own clothes,
our own houses,
our own lives.
We gave away our power.
We stopped raising our own food.
We don’t even know what is in it,
thus we don’t even know what is in us.

We become sick,
and our sickness
is from separation
from our own selves.

Deep down,
we want the old ways back,
the community, the village, the self sufficiency.
We want to know
and be known by
the people in our lives.

We don’t have to do it all,
but we don’t have to give it all away
either.

Mixed messages (poem)

Posted on February 18, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

But first, an explanation –
(Nick Bantock has a writing prompt in his book “The Trickster’s Hat” that I decided to try. It involves taking two different books and selecting a random paragraph from each one. You highlight all the nouns in each paragraph, and then switch them out. This will produce two entirely new paragraphs. You’ll end up with some sentences that are useful, others not so much. You can edit it however you like, but you cannot change the nouns. I chose (randomly, but oddly synchronistic) “The Marriage of Opposites” by Alice Hoffman, and “The Color of Water” by James McBride. I’ve left most of it the way it came out, and used both paragraphs.)

I was finally finished with that rabbi,
with mahogany mothers,
and a synagogue set
in the Spanish nostalgia.

Surprise had taken a long recognition,
but now he was perfect,
and not I or the town
could pull the Jews down.

There was a low curved I
separating the
he from the I.
The he
was kept as a who,
as it had been in the mother,
in he and I,
though there were many of him
recently arrived.

Book, who thought it madness
to have this daily family
of a brutal I,
when every record was a nothing
and every them was a you.

When the synagogue called in
the year of my benches,
the old altar front and center,
it spoke to the hall
with neither style nor it,
only grudging time.

It had heard fire was in the storm.
Women knew men were black
and the floor knew
that my past was sand.

Spain, remember your Portugal,
the Jews said.
Denmark explained to Amsterdam
that madness
was writing a reminder about my history,
and asked if prayer might see
some of the secrets.

The old house

Posted on February 17, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

The old saying is true – you can’t ever go home again. I decided to see if there were any images of the house I grew up in online. Turns out there are a lot. I’m a little freaked out, actually.

One – the house is no longer for sale, so why are the pictures up? This benefits me, of course, but do the current owners care if the whole world can see inside their home?

Two – what did they do to the house!? It looks so spare, so lifeless. Where are the books? They ripped out all the bookshelves. I’m a little suspicious of people who don’t read. The wall colors are a bit bland and noncommittal. Maybe these are “staging” pictures, and not pictures of the seller’s furnishings. It took me a while to figure out what they’d done with the half-bath downstairs. The yard! My mother lovingly landscaped it – and it has all grown over. So sad.

Three – it sold for what!? I sold this house in 1998 for $69,900. The couple who bought it assured me that they were going to live there a long time. I’d gone to school with the husband, and as he was a real estate agent, we were able to talk before the sale. The neighbors had all expressed concern that they didn’t want someone to buy it and flip it – they wanted a neighbor, not an investor. He assured me that he was here to stay. Well – turns out that was only for seven years, because they sold it for nearly double what they paid for it, at $127,500. I feel a little cheated, and lied to. Then it sold again two years later for $141,000. Eight years later it sold again for $155,000. Stunningly, that owner put it back on the market not two months later for $163,000, but it didn’t sell.

We lived in that house for 30 years. It was home, not a house. I still have dreams that are set in it. That was what defined “home” to me, and in many ways it was ideal. I needed to move because I couldn’t afford it, and I needed to get away from some bad situations that were happening in my life. But in some ways, I want that house back. I especially would have liked to have found a house that size (3 bedrooms, 1.5 bath, 1600 sq feet) for the price I got for it. My current house has the same number of rooms and is 400 sq feet smaller – and cost $30K more!

Here’s the info from the listing –

“A comfortable and charming 1920’s Dutch Colonial that is conveniently located. This well maintained home offers character and charm with original hardwood floors and two piece crown molding throughout. The large living room offers hidden wiring for wall mount flat screen tv giving way for more spacious living. The separate dining room and adjacent kitchen offer a great flow for entertaining; enjoy double oven plus gas range with microwave hood. The second level offers 3 bedrooms, one with an oversized closet and a full bathroom. Don’t miss the 1/2 bathroom off the kitchen and the large unfinished basement, great for storage with walk out access to backyard. Enjoy days and evenings on the side screened in porch.”

I’m amused that they did all that work with the house, but the basement is still unfinished. The basement is huge – you could live in just it. But, it is haunted, so there’s that. Wonder if they know? I called a friend to exorcise it before I moved, but who knows if the ghost actually left? Sometimes they don’t want to leave. Maybe that is why the house sold four times in 17 years.

Here are the pictures of the front of the house

Go in the front door and here’s the living room

Turn around from that last picture (this is to the left of the living room) to see the dining room

This is looking back towards the living room from the dining room

Here’s the kitchen as soon as you enter from the dining room

They enclosed the back porch and changed how you get into the bathroom downstairs

Here is the half bath that is attached to the kitchen.

Outside, the back porch area (this did not exist, nor did that immense fence)

The sad-looking yard

Back in the living room, go right to go out on to the side porch

Back in the living room, the stairs going up.

At the top of the stairs, looking towards the main bathroom

In the bathroom itself.

The bedroom on the Southwest corner (the one my brother had initially, and after he moved I took it.)

The bedroom in the Northwest corner (my parent’s bedroom)

The bedroom in the South – a dark, small room. This was the one I had, as the youngest.

Virtual begging

Posted on February 17, 2016 by betsybeadhead | 1 Comment

How have we gotten to the point that people are begging online? Instead of standing on the street corner, they put their hand out on social media. I’ve seen this more and more in the past year, to where it is becoming normal.

I doubt that they think of it as begging, but how can it be anything but? It is more sanitized this way, but the effect is the same. They want others to pay their bills for them. Their idea of financial planning is to tap into someone else’s financial plan. They ask to use other people’s savings, rather than saving up anything themselves.

Perhaps you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about? It is when people open up a Go Fund Me or a Kickstarter account, asking friends for money for things that they need, such as unexpected burial expenses or medical treatment for an accident or a chronic condition. Another one I saw was a plea to help a lady buy lapidary equipment so that she can expand her business. The further heart-string pull is that she is homeschooling her special needs child.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could all quit our jobs and do whatever we wanted, not worrying about our futures? We’d never have to deny ourselves anything, because we could buy whatever we wanted and not have to save. We’d never have to work at a low-paying job and feel chained to it because it provides health insurance. Then, when the inevitable happens, we can just go begging online.

How have we gotten to this point? Why aren’t people saving money? Why aren’t they thinking ahead? How did they pay their bills before these online begging options arrived?

I remember that it was once considered shameful to beg. Is that over now?

The Village

Posted on February 16, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

The Village had no place to hide. They’d planned it that way from the very beginning. Decades later, the influence of the Company could still be felt.
They’d laid out the streets in an arcane pattern which would have been instantly recognizable to ancient alchemists. It was reasonable after all, since the Company were modern alchemists. However, they were no longer trying to convert base elements into gold, but into bombs.
The Company was all about control. It had to be. What with such volatile elements under their purview, control was a matter of life and death. The only problem was that they did not know when to stop.
They thought the same about their employees as the elements that they worked with – unknown, potentially dangerous. The Overseer decided early on to keep them isolated from the city at large and then to further segregate them by function. It was best to keep the workers from mingling with the supervisors, and both from regular citizens. Explosions could not be ruled out. Separation was for everyone’s safety.
They’d done their job too well. Even now the people who lived in the Village, no longer a Company town, still were isolated from the rest of the city and suspicious of anyone who had not lived there for at least 20 years. Even that wasn’t a free pass, with any aberrant behavior transforming a “friend” to a “foe” at the speed of a post on their neighborhood watch’s Facebook page.
The layout of the neighborhood created invisible walls that focused energy and attention inwards. It was a feedback loop. It was a closed circuit. Day after week after month after year it built up with no release. Like crabs in a pot, they clawed at each other, keeping the whole group down, preventing escape. Little did they know that they were all doomed.
Only the Overseer could have predicted this.
It was his plan all along.
On the surface it seemed like a great place to live. All the houses were built by the Company for their workers. The school, the library, even the gymnasium were provided. All the workers had to do was show up to work and put in eight hours every day excepting Sundays. Everything was paid for through their wages. They didn’t have a lot of money left over for personal needs, but they felt it was a fair trade-off to be able to live in a model community. They were told that here their children would be safe, protected from the dangerous elements of the rest of the city.
This inward-facing community was their undoing. With no new information, no variety, no challenge to the status quo, the Village stagnated and degenerated. It became inbred, where aberrant and defective ways of thinking became the norm rather than the exception.
They never saw it coming. The wall surrounding their village and their minds was invisible but no less effective because of it. Perhaps it was more effective because it was invisible. They didn’t know they were trapped, thus they had no reason to try to escape. Why would they? It was perfect here, they all agreed. Those that didn’t agree were silenced in the way that works best – by declaring them crazy. Why martyr someone by forcing them to leave the community? Excommunication wasn’t just for the Church. It was far better to keep them as an example of how not to behave.

Smile lines (a very short story)

Posted on February 16, 2016 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Paula was older than everyone, but only chronologically. Sure she’d lived longer than everyone else in the department, but you couldn’t tell by her actions. The only evidence of her greater age was in the deep wrinkles around her eyes. They looked like smile lines, but the smiles had to be for show, or from another period of her life. Perhaps she smiled out of habit, because even when she was telling very personal, very private stories about herself, she smiled her brittle smile at whoever had the misfortune of being stuck at a task that required they stay in the room with her.

The other staff had taken to looking forward to any task that involved being away from the back room after she arrived for the day. Normally these tasks were completed by whoever felt like it, and whenever it was convenient. Now they took turns, working around her shift. Every day one lucky person got the blessed reprieve of not having to listen to her yammering.

She needed a therapist.
Or an exorcist.

She’d been counseled by her temp agency to not share personal details, but she ignored those censures, choosing to run over her coworker of the week (or month), or however long the assignment was (or however long they could stand her) whichever came first, like an 18 wheeler over a kitten. It was merciless and bloody, with no regard for the emotional and psychic carnage she left in her wake.

One employee, unlucky enough to be forced to work with her three days in a row, even considered homicide. This gentle soul, a vegetarian for six years, a person who marched in peace rallies, a weekly volunteer at the domestic crisis shelter, had gotten so overwhelmed with Paula’s incessant complaints and bizarre observations that she started fantasizing about how she would make her be silent. Strychnine in her water bottle was considered. Loosening the lug nuts on her tires was a possibility. Anything that involved a painful end that was preceded by terror and confusion – the same as she had endured but more focused, more compact. That would do nicely.

Asking Paula to be mindful of others didn’t work. Neither did complaining to her supervisors. Flat out telling her to shut up seemed cruel, but perhaps it was the only way to regain peace at work. Mindless blather and too-personal comments was cruel so why not fight fire with fire?