I am impressed by the writing and knowledge here. It is inspiring in a very difficult time. I would like to join in and I would like to become a better writer. I want to try to be relevant to more than myself, but I am no longer interested or emotionally able to write the long tedious research pieces I earned a living on. And boy, that's what so many of you do so well here. So you kow although these will end up touching on my political views, it will be more about what shaped them..my experiences, personal to me.
I am getting old enough to start thinking about what will I leave behind when I die? I hope some good memories for my family, but what else? Nada... so maybe you know a 'family' history of sorts makes sense for the kids. But if only I read it, well it won't be as good as if I am striving to get the attention of the really good thinkers here .....
I know the blog crowd moves fast and a once a week or so posting probably lost, except that it isn't really. I listened to a writer on NPR the other day, unapologetic for her perspective on her husband's imprisonment and later abandonment of her. She said simply, "Now it is written." I got that. For the first time I think.
I added a poll b/c well..it was just easy to do.
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When I was 25 months into this world my mother tried to leave it. She took a massive overdose of prescribed meds three years after the death of her young and upcoming first husband. Just a year after my siblings daddy died she married my father, the charmingly timid carpenter with the shoulders and winsome smile of a Scotsman. Her parents hired him to convert a floor of their downtown Victorian home into an apartment. The only choice for their newly widowed daughter and fatherless grandchildren.
Years later she would confess to me that in my father she saw a soul to rescue, to bring into the world and a way to get away from her mother. She would teach him to read and he would teach her to love again. They had planned together a life on a beautiful farm where her children and their new ones to come would flourish. They thought they found it on the banks of a river not far from Champaign and directly across water from her parents "Gentleman’s Farm."
It must have been a beautiful dream. In reality, the 80 acre farm they purchased did contain fertile bottom soils – that almost black loam of central Illinois - rich and deep and promising as fresh ground coffee beans. And, as they discovered with the first spring season, severe flooding had made these soils.
Fortunately, the old farmhouse was built on the highest terrace of the Salt Fork River drainage and it stood a lone sentinel – shimmering white flaking paint each day for 23 days before the waters receded completely. A One Hundred Year event the local farmers said. It happened again the next year.
The farmhouse turned out to need more of dad’s attention and time than they had guessed. Those old early 1900 farmhouses are drafty barns really. It must, Mother insisted, be brought into the 50’s. I only have one photo of Dad from the farm in which he is not looking up from his carpentering in almost every room and cranny of that old house.
Funny, that one photo is of him laid back on the grassy hill beneath the house smiling, hair caught by a nice breeze, eyes squinting his love for mom. He is surrounded by the Hundred Year Flood waters for the third season straight, the house now shimmering in new yellow paint.
Like zealots for a new hopeful land they quickly added to their family of five: a Jersey cow, a barn sour old Pinto mare, Rode Island Red roosters and chickens, Rambouillet sheep, a barn Tabby and litters of wild kittens, a snipey Fox Terrier house dog, and a bright yellow Caged Singing Canary. And then me.
Apparently I was too much, the proverbial straw. I was born dead, a blue baby the doctors sadly informed her. Perhaps my immortal soul had cold feet, knowing before passing to the physical world my future, and knowing my knowing would be lost at birth.
I miraculously survived, treated for days by doctors who had no idea why so many babies from the farms were born suffocated down to their molecular hemoglobin. I was returned to my mother an older and wiser baby. And the doctors murmuring to her it was not congenital heart disease.
It was a Hundred Year February winter storm that encircled them now. Along with the new blue baby were early spring lambs, frozen before they were cleaned of birth by their mothers. The story goes that I and the lambs brought in from the cold were laid on the hearth by the fire and given tastes of whiskey to keep our hearts burning. My mom knew nothing of scientific medicine, her world was ethereal and surreal. And poetic. And eventually psychotic.
Sometime during another dreary gray winter, my second year of life, mother in her rich debutant and artistic beauty and passion persuaded Dad to let her go. Or so she says. He loved her that much. But, it turned out he couldn’t. When he realized her life would slip away he called for help. A country hour later, in the middle of the darkest cold winter night, an ambulance came and she was taken away, for a very long time.
The doctors used the very best life saving techniques on her. The same doctors that had prescribed the drugs so everyone might avoid the unpleasantness her continuing grief caused and which everyone deemed no longer appropriate. She survived.
These family doctors would go on to imprison her for the next year in a Cuckoo’s nest of shock therapy and experimental psychotropic drugs in a far off hospital in Chicago. The new revolution of the pharmaceutical age would consume her. No wonder she had no respect for science. She entered hell for the next year. And then one day she was back.