Computers. And Balls.

Lonesome. Not in the big, drafted, and bluesy sense of the word. Just lonesome. Think allopathy here - not heroic medicine. Over to Martha's for the second of two days to photograph detritis that I've accumulated and now stands like money in a piggy bank. Or not. Savings Bonds, Treasury Notes and Fabric all have their expiration dates.

I photographed fabrics and trims at Martha's. Two days worth of running them through Corel Draw to be sure I'd have the supplements to list on eBay. Bugger. My computer (current copy running on a crutch) doesn't have a working CD/DVD Rom writer. When I grow up. I depend on the Alabamian Artist Extraordinaire Girl to hep me up.

There's no lexicon for fucked up computer. I keep programming for a NEW COMPUTER, but I forget to program the words NEW and never USED behind it. So. I am given the castoffs with good and loving intentions. The "I've left the country and will not need this system", setups. Balls. Martha Marshall fills in the blanks.

To let you know how incredible this is, consider that she awakes at 3:00 a.m. and writes on her blog - An Artist's Journal. Then she paints big or little canvases depending on what is in her want list that day. Intermingle the fact that she is mother to 3 rescued dogs with SPECIAL NEEDS and you'll get an idea of the enormity of the grace I recieved from her for using her 'puter and equipment. Ab Shalom and 'N Shallah, girlfrin!!

I'm supposed to blush now at the fact that I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth. Not. I just need to be more specific in my requests: I need a NEW, never used computer, built in the last six months, with updated software, t6hat has a slim LCD screen, a CDRom and DVD writer and a disk reader that does not fart upon insertion, all of which costs less than 600.00. Did I mention that all software would be included??

Tagged

I've been Blog Tagged. As an old heifer, I'm not really sure of the nuances of this form of social diplomacy. So. I will respondez via instructions:

samate said...
Hello, I am every day on your blog and so I want to tag you.The rules Start with 7 random facts/habits about yourselfPeople who are tagged have to write their 7 things on their blogThen choose another 7 people to get tagged and list their namesDon't forget to leave them a comment to tell them they have been tagged and to read your blogGreetings from Samatesamate.blogspot.com
7:00 AM

Seven random habits and facts about me. Jeez. Should I mention that I know how to drive a big truck - a five and a four - brownie and a main- 48 feet of intimidation, a race car and a motorcycle - which every woman on the face of the Earth needs to know how to use? (One) Should I let you know that I am the only one left standing in my birth family of four and that my extended family doesn't know where I fit in even when it goes back over to 1300? (Two) Do I tell you that I am a fiercely loyal friend that will guard your back until the bitter end or until you disrespect me so much that I drop you like a hot potato? (Three) Can I let it be known that I can track you when you head into woods or rock or swamp if you need to be found? (Four) Would you think me combatative if I told you that I can build my own bullets, figure the PSI when fired, and can fancy twirl, build my own leather rig and quick draw a gun so I could sub for a Wild West movie and yet believe that no thing needs to die without defense? (Five) I summon and thank the four quarters of energy every single day because I believe that the Earth as a planet is a living being. I try to make every step count, count on talking to every critter and plant that is put in my path, feed them where I can, and thank the Divine that I am given such oppulence where I live and try to spread it around. (Six) Could I admit to you all that I am clueless about being tagged, what it means and what I'm supposed to do next?? (Seven)

So. I am choosing the ones closest to home. The blogs I've enjoyed and their sprouts. You know who you are. Tag. You're it! And Samate - you opened Pandora's box.

Her Left Foot

No Cristy Brown here. Just a cat. My cat George. She came in from her early morning jaunt outside with a left hind foot dragging. Broken? Snakebit? Sprained? Worrisome because it was obvious to ignore and worrisome because I had $1.65 in checking. Did I mention I wrote a bad check for $56.00 at the vets???? This is the reality at the end o' the month for me here at DogPatch.

Ah. Well. Circumstances rolled in and allowed me to cover the debt with a few tuppence overboard. Not enough to entertain a bottle of wine, salad and a steak on an evening out, mind you. But one of the three post mentioned were to be had and uncorked.

Two shots for infection and inflamation. Aggravation at having to upset her on the jaunt. A smile from Dr. Marks. I would like to bill the despot cat next door for her med bills, or his owners who pay little enough attention to him that he feels he has to fight for rights here at Dogpatch. He beats the paen shit out of George on my very doorstep in his bid for dominance and I can only scare him away with insults and threats. I don't want to do physical harm you see. I'm not that kind of person.

I feed strays. Coons. Possums. Let outs on the roads for people who haven't heard that there is an ASPCA.

So. George endures shots of antibiotics, antinflamatories, and the bastard cat sashays across the fenceline. I am hoping that when the Vadamparampil's build their home on the lot between his and mine, the interloper will view the intercession as a foreign country and stay home.

Courthouse

Signed papers at the County Courthouse today. I'd rather have a root canal. Parking. Really? Is there anyplace that will allow a citizen due justice and the ability to get to IT without paying astronomical parking, a walk of a thousand leagues, or a convoluted journey three blocks over and one East? No.

My miasma started in 1996 when I was a struggling single mother of one trying to make ends meet in any fashion I could. I did arts and crafts shows. I worked a 9 to 5. I read cards. Let me explain. I displayed 90 percent extraordinaire fashions coupled with fabric art items. It was a good mix encouraged by my friend, Carol Gray.

I had just missed a sale that would have meant the difference between a pair of shoes and grocery money for the week for my still growing son. A man popped into my booth and offered me an out - accept credit cards, do it online and smile all the way to the bank. Trouble was, the company he represented had their heritage in the carpetbaggers of the post Civil War diaspora.

They leased me a machine that did not work, refused to fix it and sued me when I threatened to discontinue payments. I had a lien put against my old house.

Fast forward to last year - 2006. I'm trying to settle some realty issues and the lien comes up. I go online and find that the buggers are the worst of the worst! Their M.O. - to scoop in the stupid, sue their arses seven states away and then register a lien, knowing that the majority of the gullible will realize that money is of the essence.

Arrive the State Attorneys General from several states - the same embattled foes of today - who say that the company LEASECOMM has and had practiced unfair business miens. They were nasty and at fault. You can find the RICO findings online. I'm too tired to give them. So.

I disputed the lien. Filed for a Motion to Dismiss, and had to go to the Courthouse to sign papers. I call back Monday. I fought traffic. I got a parking spot. I'm hopefull.

On the way home, I passed one of those skeletons of businesses that open on a bad corner with high hopes. No one came. You know what I'm talking here. There are places on the Earth that no one needs to develop, put money into, dream and hope or strive. There are places that just need to be left fallow.

They can be fantasmagorically interesting in their decor. They can have money dumped into them from whatever source. There can be kleig lights and promotion campaigns and people putting flyers all over the city. But. Whatever starts there dies. And withers. No matter the involment or the enthusiasm.

I've seen these spots in many cities in every state of the Union (and some foreign) that I've visited. They are dead. Decapitated. gone from the cellular on down. I don't know what it would take to ennervate these spots. Maybe there's not enough energy on the face of the Earth. Maybe they are born dead.

So, Sign your papers and struggle with the nomenclature of law, the buggaboos and aggravati0ons of somehting else. But never bet on a dead horse that grows on a lot where weeds struggle. You know the ones.

Spring Fever

I have it. Both ways - figuratively and literally.

Went to see sweet old Dr. Torro Friday. He clucked and fussed and gave me a Z-Pack for my rampant throat infection and earache, along with the Sea Spray to rinse out my swollen sinus cavities. I've had a fever off and on over the weekend. Now I just feel like dick with fatigue and what the medicoes euphemistically term 'malaise'.

Malaise. Sounds like something to put on a sandwich between two slices of bread. Or something that could be cured with penicillan. Or the first part of a phrase which reads, 'Zee arse doesn't feel like moving off this couch.' But I did.

I went and snipped, and pulled Spanish Moss, and dead branches, and spoke to my front door plants who haven't seen much of me for at least a year. Depression and health have kept me indoors like a mole, or one of those recluses that live their entire life in a home with Reynolds Wrap over the windows and looking with fear from a peephole at the insanity of the world outside.

The day was one of those miraculous ones we have in Florida where the humidity forgets to roll in coating everything with hot, soggy moisture. It was balmy with the wind coming off the canal cooling the breeze. It was my first foray out. I'd hoped to go out a bit today but found my constitutioned cooled by the fatigue I'm feeling on my chest like a weight. My paranoid and hypochondriac side is whispering 'pneumonia', while my inner child yells, 'bullshit'.

I suppose I'll just have to give in to the fact that I cannot recoup the way that I did in my younger years. That means 'Yeild' just like the sign says, not 'Give Up' like I want to yell at those intersection hesitators who fear to enter that merge lane like a virgin holding onto her panties. Get out there and live, for hell's sake!

But before I give in, I think I'll go out and water the begonias and the daturas.

(The image above is by silk artist Leondard Thompson. His works just ripples with sensuality.)

Goodbye Mary Jane, Goodbye Heart

I’m changing the title of Rick Nelson’s song. Get over it.

You know the color of sun reflecting on water (fresh) about 6:30 on a June late afternoon? Yeah. That color. Goldy yellow. Imagine that color on near one hundred plus pounds of being, drenched in sun – nay, baking in it, sniffling the wind, guarding from terror that appears at the front door in the guise of a Zorro masked. A four-legged marauder or ratty tailed invader can’t get past her pest control at the door. Now. Amp it up to joy.

Joy at being able to go balls-out-to nothing, running with the wind at the park, loving the water so much that you have your own swimming pool where daily dips are de rigueur, in which you don’t so much swim as wallow in the cool – a necessity and nicety all wrapped into one – where you see your ancestry plying the currents before you in your mind’s eye.

Imagine that your Beginning Mother visits you ever so often in a benevolent sort of way, that you never lose sight of your roots, you know wherefrom you sprang. You great her with glee before she comes to the door. Think of loving. Think of routines so rota that they become ritual – cleaning out the cans before they go into the recycle bin, saying hello to Mr. Frogel next door, keeping the neigborhood dogs in check, paying special attention to the members of your extended family that you keep in your grace and help steer with your presence. You are, after all, a Rock.

Be reminded that you too have a child – wrinkled, wary, and foreign, a love child of mixed Continents. She is not to blame for the admix of a foreign daddy and further Eastern mother in her birth. She had no say in her begetting, her getting here. You just know that you love her as your own, your cub, and your offspring not gotten by pain, but by a red-haired woman, who absconded with her from a condemned life to bring her safely to you. Home. Like a loaf of bread tucked up under the arm and close to the heart. Home.

Blessed with many mothers, it was the wisest of these that let you know that this small outcast was your own. Not by heart, not by birth, does one become a Mother. It is in the doing of the thing. She told you that.

You waited for us to be to home from our jaunts. You collected us all together- the tawny haired woman who hugged you and gave you unbridled rides in the convertible, the doting and caring mothers who saw that your aging aches and pains were answered, the man next door that showed up in the nick of time as if called. All of us. You went on to check out the territory for all the rest, as always, our guide. Our greeter.

So. I will never forget your young and hopeful face that appeared at my door those fourteen or so years hence. I will never regret that I handed you over to two good and righteous and loving friends who had been on the lookout for you to come and came to retrieve you with biscuits and collars and without a doubt when I called and told them that I had their dog.

Goodbye, Mary Jane, Janie Marie, and all the other loving names that we’ve given you, lo, these years. I will miss your driveway greetings and the smiles you always had for me. We will ALL miss you.

May there be fields to run in, squirrels to chase, and no arthritis or strokes in heaven.

(Note: Janie was a huge and majestic Golden Labrador who found her way to my door almost fifteen years ago. I took her in and networked her to her new parents – Tary and Karole Peace. We spent yesterday and last night mourning her passing. If you don’t understand the bond between human and animal, go away. There’s no hope for you in the backlog of humanity.)

Panther

I was ten years old the first time I saw God. This huge canal I live on was then just a creek that meandered for six or so miles draining into the Alafia River, then into Cockroach Bay which shelters fish nurseries and scallop beds.

I spent many hours there in defiance of my mother who extolled the dangers of those wild woods . She warned me about escaped prisoners who sometimes ran from the county jail downstream and hid there amid the palmettos. To her mind, those men were more to fear than the gators and snakes that she had come upon there when she defied her mother to go visit the creek in her youth.

Never saw any escaped prisoners. Me and the neighborhood kids once saw a body floating down under the train trestle when we'd gone down there to swim. We found out later that it was a drunk that stumbled into the creek and drowned out behind the Six Mile Creek tavern upstream. But nothing live ever appeared moving on two feet with steely eyes the color of stones bent on murder and mayhem to a child . So I continued to go. Mostly by myself.

There were small springs and pools surrounded with Louisiana irises, elephant ears big enough to use as an umbrella when brief, angry summer storms came up. Paths wound their way around stands of palmetto and water oaks, the sand sparkled in the sun from quartz or mica flecks like diamonds beckoning you on. Huge woody liana vines were a favored pastime to play a wannabe Tarzan. One of my favorite trees was a huge magnolia growing formally in the midst of all the gangly oaks. I loved the glossy leaves and would fashion a crown out of the dinner plate sized blossoms. I sniffed in the heady fragrance of them until my face was yellow with pollen and I was almost drugged from the rich smell.

Sometimes, I would just sit on the banks of the stream watching fish or making stick villages on the sandy paths. I knew how to pull young palmetto shoots to chew off the tender pink-white flesh on the root end and there were huckleberrys and fox grapes aplenty. Whenever things at home got out of control, I sought the comfort of that swamp.

My sister Lynda and me once went to cross the creek at Masaro's cattle crossing - normally just shin deep. But there'd been a hurricane three days before and we were swept away by the clawing current that had undercut the sandy bottom. We swan diagonally to the bank, catching a branch and then quickly letting go when the current occupant - a cotton mouth mocassin - objected with a hiss. We finally made the other side at a steep curve in the creek path, me pulling Lynn out of the water behind me.

She laughed the whole escapade through. I was a bit more sober for my three years on her and knew that we had been very lucky not to have been pulled into a gator hole or an undertow. I'd had my share of stupid living playing chicken on the train trestle that spanned the creek as it blew a frantic warning to my skinny, small form. I would dive into the waters when I could feel the rails vibrate and see the dust snake up from the heavy ties sitting on their bed of quartz rip-rap. I only did it a couple of times. News of a neighborhood boy who lost a leg while trying to jump onto a box car and ride down to his road somehow sunk home. I used to wonder if they ever found the rest of his leg and what they did with it.

Crossing Masaro's Dairy pasture was another wag at danger. If you timed it just right, you could cut off a good bit of leg work by cutting through the back corner. You had to ease yourself through the strands of barb wire and mind you didn't tear your shirt or your skin, both of which assured a march to the switch tree in the back yard. Mr. Masaro kept Brahma bulls in his herd for beef and they policed the pasture with a vigor to be admired by any Green Beret unit looking on any intruder as a threat to their territory and dominance over the few heifers peaceably grazing .

The trick was to time it so that the bulls were on the other side of the big pasture with their asses to you. You had to get through the barb wire fence on the quick and silent, high tail it the long block to the other fence, then skinny your way through that one before you were spotted. I once spent a miserable afternoon in a live oak with Brahma's grazing and farting below until their simple cow minds wandered them off to the far side of the pasture and it was safe to shinny down the tree and out through the fence to home again.

It was on one of these successful shortcuts that I saw Him. I was slowly and silently picking my way through the late morning sun along my favorite path. On both sides, palmetto fans waved in the dappled sun filtering through Spanish Moss beards in the trees above. He came out of a palmetto stand on the path before me, all dusky gold and brown and shining. His eyes glowed like amber. A long, pink tongue panted out his rhythm between sparkling white teeth that looked about a foot long.

He was a big cat, fully grown, sleek and fat. We both stood stock still, regarding each other. Six steps would have carried me to him, so close I could smell the musky fur, but I was still, quiet. I do not remember being afraid. I remember being in a place of awe. The wind stopped. The trees and branches absolutely fixed. The air danced with an energy I've seen so very few times since. I don't know how long we stood looking at each other, but it seemed like forever and a second.

A blink, then two, he just melted into the palmetto stand across the path from me and didn't move a branch or crack a twig under His big feet. After all, I was nothing to concern Himself over. Aware that something very special had happened to me, I felt privaledged. Knowing it was special and had not happened to very many people, I knew I could tell no one. I was also positive that despite my knowing that I'd spent a moment in utter holiness and divinity, an ass whipping would have awaited the disclosure and would surely have spoiled that moment.

I became obsessed with religion, God, divinity, the spiritual path. Sometimes my reading was uplifting. Other times, it was dark and morose. Mostly, religion was confusing.

I asked to go to the Methodist church next to my elementary school with Patty Brian and was allowed. I found disappointment there when I would here the message of brotherhood extolled at the pulpit and the petty sniping and gosip aimed at a poor family from my neighborhood. I went a second time to be sure that this confusion of Christian message, Hades behavior was indeed not a fluke and quit.

I am also saddened that such a majestic creature should be in the twilight of their lives with diminishing numbers hovering around 100 of them. Texas cougars have been introduced into the gene pool in hopes of replenishing the species. The offspring are lighter in color and much smaller than the big male I remember. Maybe it is because I was so small and thin.

Over the years, this sacred and special moment when I was indeed in the presence of something both graceful and divine has become incorporated into my spirituality. I don't think I've ever told the tale whole to anyone. It is my miracle, my introduction to sacredness. Now you have it. Trying to explain how and why I was so affected at such an early age would also somehow sadden the colors of it. Perhaps it will recall your first discovery of something sacred outside of yourself. So I'll leave it to you.

The art above is by Edward Bierly and can be puchased from the National Wildlife Federation.

Waiting Room

I had a wonderful thing happen the day that I went for my laser surgery. Amazing that in the midst of all the angst about loosing half my eyesight that wonderfulness could happen, but it did. See. I'm taking you back to make up for the things that happened in February that I should have posted if I could.

The torn retina was diagnosed in Brandon and my Opthomologist sent me to Lakeland Regional Hospital eye clinic for the laser process. I called Phyllis McEwen to drive me. If you've had your eyes examined, you know the 10-4 on waiting around with the eye drops to dilate, or numb or both. So. There we were in the waiting room with me dilating away. We were in the waiting room with three middle aged women and one ancient charmer.

Miss Connie was 83 years old, she informed us. Her still dark hair was done up in huge Marcelle waves plastered close to the scalp making her look like Josephine Baker from the 1920s. Phyllis began it all by asking Miss Connie what she liked to do.

"Why, I cook, baby!" Miss Connie said. "But not just cook, I like to fix it up, make it look special, decorate it with apples, celery sprigs, and parsely and radishes!"

"Can you cook greens?" Phyllis asked as culinary explorer and emcee. "I've been craving me some greens. How 'bout sweet potato pie?"

"Absolutely! The secret's in the washin' and the seasonin' and what you use for it." A note here to the Northern Provinces - 'seasoning' in the South when greens are in the same paragraph bespeaks meat and fat - ham hocks, pork butt roast or shoulder, streak-o-lean, bacon.

"I'm hungry for soul food, Southern food. What you gonna cook me?" Phyllis pressed on.

"Well, let's see now. 'Sides greens - and what kind of greens you want, baby - mustard, collards, or turnip?"

"Oh, collards, of course, please ma'am!" Phyllis was really getting us all into this now. We Southerners are truly mindful of our manners and respect for our elders.

"Well, 'sides greens, you got to have you a good old ham baked up right so's the crust is dark brown and crunchy and the insides are just juicy as you carve off the slices."

"Deviled eggs!", chimed in one of our group. "I want some potato salad!" , chirped another.

"Corn bread made in a black iron skillet on the top of the stove before you pour in the batter to make a good crust!", I offered for my contribution.

The third woman added, "Buttermilk biscuits, big and flaky and loaded with real butter!"

"Speaking of butter, how 'bout corn on the cob!"
"Baby limas with some of the ham!"
"Field peas with snaps!"
"Or zipper peas!"
"Fried chicken with a good scald on it!"
"Fried green tomatoes!"
"Fried okra!"
"Fried anything without a commercial telling you it will clog your arteries!"

We were all running with it and laughing. We discussed fried catfish and hush puppies with grits, the merits of sweet potato pie, the perfect pecan pie, and other mouth watering morsels women have been cooking in Southern kitchens for centuries.

I asked Miss Connie how she fried her chicken. She stuck out a bony hand, palm up and said, "It'll cost you, honey." Then she proceeded to tell us how she fixed gator tail, "And you do chicken the same way!"

"I sew. What kind of dress you want, ma'am?", I asked Miss Connie.

"Baby, I want a pink frock that fits with an A-line skirt! And a jacket."

"You want sweetheart pink, or bubble gum pink?", I'm getting my details in order, don't you know.

"A good pink, not pastel or baby, not hot and all neon. A good pink."

A design is emerging. "How long do you want the skirt, mid-calf?"

"Laws, no, honey! I want it to come just to the middle of my knee cap. I got some good legs and I like to show them off!" And she did show off extending a still shapely calf. "And I want pretty work on the cuffs of the jacket."

I designed two more dresses for other women and discovered we had a racy sex goddess sitting with us in the guise of a 50 something housefrau dressed in the most sensible shoes you've ever seen.

We all joined in with comments about shoes, hose, girdles, how we never used to leave the house without a pair of gloves or a hat.

"I wear me some hats! I spray paint them ole straws and glue decorations on them. If it ain't tacky enough, why I just glue on some more stuff until it is. Then I wear it to church." Miss Connie animated all of this in mime and finished with a flourish, hand on hip, a remarkably spry and flirty sashay as she walked down the aisle to her imaginary pew.

Then we continued designing dresses in our minds until we were gotten to continue the process, one by one.

This is a familiar phenomenon I've observed throughout my life: Women get together as strangers in a laundromat, at the doctor's office, the hospital waiting for news of a loved one's surgery, and we talk. We seem to know from some long entrenched gene that we group together and pull the wagons in. The chatter helps entertain us, passes the time, let's us know we're not alone in this Cosmic Cottilion. We usually touch topics that tribe us up - cooking, kids, the drill.

And Phyllis did exactly what she'd set out to do with this ancient custom. She distracted me from the worry I was feeling with a baked ham, fried gator, and a hat.

Brushing Starz

Wearing sunglasses a lot while recuperating from this eye business makes me feel a bit like a movie star, going incognito among the nameless people who haven't a clue who I am, and could flatly give a damn. And sometimes, I wear them inside trying to disguise myself from my cat, who knows who I am and doesn't give a damn either. Movie Star.

I've brushed up against a few in my years. Some of them were before your time or just names barely recognizable except to the few aficionados of Hollywood hoopla and hype. When I say I brushed against them, I'm talking close encounters of the third kind without much interaction for the most part.

I spent the night talking to Fran Allison of Kukla, Fran and Ollie fame telling her story about how she lost most of her face on the windshield of a car when she was younger and how she became the doyenne of the toddler set during the 1950s with her puppet cohorts. She talked about radio and mourned it's passing. We talked about how radio made the listener being entertained use their imagination. She said it was often more inventive than anything that t.v. had to offer by showing you the action. I was a make up artist in Las Vegas at the time, living in a house on the Sahara-Nevada golf course owned by the president of the company I worked for. Buddy Hackett was the next door neighbor. Jerry Lewis hit errant golf balls out of the back yard by the pool, there were stacks of painted canvases by Leroy Neiman, Chris Rosamond, signed Norman Rockwell prints. My boss who owned the house, had a wife who was a serious art dealer and atelier back in New York. Various celebrities would stay at the house in one of the many bedrooms.

Rock Hudson was perfectly groomed, very polite, generous when he tipped and surrounded by a bevy of the most beautiful men you ever saw when I was a cocktail waitress in Atlanta during the late 1960s. The Midnight Sun restaurant was a posh and exclusive restaurant with a Scandinavian theme, since closed. When I served drinks to Forrest Tucker , he was flirty, funny and stood up next to me so the restaurant owner could take his picture to add to the celebrities wall. I remember how big and tall Tucker was.

When I was a make up artist based in Las Vegas in 1976, I was invited to do a demonstration of chiaroscuro makeup for a local T.V. show. The guest was Bob Crane, best known for his role in Hogan's Heroes. I 'aged' Bob, 'broke' his nose, turned him slightly femme and then stuck a makeup brush in his eye for a finale. He was murdered a few years later.

I got to go back stage to the Green Room and hang with Tom and Dick Smothers. Tommy bit my bosom in a bit of vaudeville shtick. I got to meet their father - a rather rakish ancient specimen with a girlfriend a fifth his age.

Bill Cosby stuck his nose in my face at a Las Vegas hotel lobby. My ex-boss thought it would be funny to get me stoned on some hallucinogenic drug mixed into a cocktail to see if I'd 'relax' a little. He didn't bother telling me what was done. It wasn't funny and it wasn't relaxing to watch pancakes in the restaurant get up and dance on the plates to Camelot music.

I also met Jimmy Carter before he was President of the United States at a barbecue fund raiser in Marietta Georgia. He tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. I had to look down a few inches because I was a bit taller back then and had on ridiculously high platform heels. He looks you straight in the eye when he talks to you and his face becomes mostly teeth when he smiles.

There have been others, minor and major names I've brushed against - some literally, like peeing in Hillary Clinton's toilet at a local political rally during an early 2000s visit. Having asked staff for directions to the ladies room in a maze of sectioned off corridors and locked doors, I saw the sign for the women's restroom and went in. Didn't realize it had been specifically set aside, gussied up, and secured for Mrs. Clinton until I was stopped on my way out by three Secret Service men who told me that I couldn't be in that part of the hotel and who let me go when I explained my errand was to search for a restroom. I didn't have the heart to tell them that I had already been there and done that when they told me I couldn't use THAT one.

I haven't had any celebrity's love child, nor have I had rendezvous, my pictures taken with them on the cover of the National Inquirer, intense friendships and communications on a daily basis with them. No one has asked for my DNA in connection with a movie star or celeb. I'm actually not sure of the reason that I've met so many of these people. I believe everything in our lives is put there for a reason. But what I can tell you honestly is that I've never been agog about them. I like to think it's due to my observer mentality.

We're tempted by the siren's song of being entertained by celebrities as a substitute for experiencing life ourselves. What I think is that we really are all somebody already. We're asked by our culture to live outside ourselves in a fantasy of entertainment and media mania where we get to live someone else's lives as voyeurs while hardly ever living out our own. Life by proxy.

Being truly engaged in your own life is something really stellar. When we give up that engagement with life and ourselves for the plastic and ephemeral glamour and allure of the famous, fame and near fame, I believe we are giving up on ourselves. Not dealing with one's own shit while being distracted by the famous may be easy, but in the end it's a paltry substitute for personal growth. And unlike crying at the movies, real tears brought on by real crisis is a 3-D, Panavision and Technicolor experience.

Shine at what you do and do who you are well. Even if you never get to see your name up in lights or win an Oscar for it.

Seeing Things

I've had a torn retina since mid-February. Not much fun. A torn retina is when the viscous gel inside your eyeball shrinks and the retina pulls away from the back of the eyeball. A tear sometimes happens and if this tear lets some of the fluid out between your retina and your eyeball, the retina detaches and you're seriously screwed in the vision works department unless it's caught early enough for surgery.

Symptoms are bright flashes of light that may appear as a line, a curve or dots. And floaters of blood that are released into the gel from the tear. Mine was very dramatic, accompanied by pain in the eye, and what appeared to be tiny flakes of pepper between a load of filaments of blood. It's all blood actually.

I called the optometrist the next day and they got me right in, diagnosed the tear and sent me for laser surgery. Not much fun either. I was assured by the doctor that it wouldn't hurt. He had that on heresay and not as a first person experience. The laser welds the tear back together. I've had two followup visits and another one this week. I will tell him that I'm still light sensitive and seeing flashes. The good news is that I can see again and the floaters seem to have settled to the bottom of my eye.

So. Computer was out. Outside was out. OUT was truly IN unless I wore my total wrap-around shades using my hands as goggles. But there are many things that you can see in the dark. Like the raccoon that has become so bold with me that he pulls the dish out of my hands if I try to move it back from the edge of the steps and gets impatient until I fill a bowl with cat food. I do this so that the old outside tomcat, Skitty can eat his evening meal in peace. If I don't feed the coon, he'll take the old man's food.

Skitty is recuperating, too. He borrowed the car and snatched ten bucks to go court some cat woman. Another suitor had the same idea and Skitty came home with a cauliflower ear that was terribly infected and required stitches. I got him stoned on catnip and put him in the cage. Catnip in the cage is a good trick, by the way. My cats really don't care much about the travel to the vet if they're sufficiently stoned on kitty nip.

Anyway. Skitty had a bunch of stitches and a super-douche clean out along with a drain. And several shots. I watched the whole thing. His ear. My eye.

The above brief on retinal tears/detachment is a public service announcement. If you see disco lights and you aren't in a nightclub, see about it immediately.

Hopelessly Grotesque Earth

I found the image above when searching for an appropriate one for Tary's woods. I know the kind of place she talks about. I grew up in Florida before the days of over-development and the trickle in economy.

There were palmettos and oak trees, pines and wild magnolias and scrub enough to fill a void, landscape a paradise. White and black sand paths wended their ways through palmetto stands and huckleberry bushes vied for sun light alongside paw-paw shrubs.

The image above is from Edward King, 1848 to 1896 and James Wells Champney, 1843-1903. They called it: : "Some Tract of Hoplessly irreclaimable, Grotesque Water Wilderness of Florida". Really. Seems like the archaic macho bit of dominion over the Earth is still alive and kicking in Florida.

I call it bullshit. But it is still the prevailing train of thought for developers for the state of Florida. Our lands, like many in other states is being over-developed and overrun by an influx of refugees from other countries and other states. They gather here for the weather.

The result is a diminishing habitat for the indigenous wildlife and sinkholes as the water table is sucked dry in the northern part of the state to supply the southern part of the state with potable water.

Another symptom of the overpopulation is the destruction and encroachment into the Everglades - a natural weather buffer for hurricanes in the state of Florida.

Scientists have predicted a several foot rise in the sea level due to global warming. So come on down from whereever. Float in from Cuba and Haiti. Run the fence from Mexico and South America, all you would be new Floridians. Flush your toilets. Shower. Cook. Pave your bit of Florida Earth. Shit. Have kids. We will swim and drown together.

When the last gopher tortoise and the last Florida Panther and the last Florida Brown Bear and wild turkey and boar and red fox have succumbed to loss of habitat, we can salute each other on a job well done of developing the state. i'll be on my inner tube.

My Little Woods by Tary Peace

There were days I ran from a glaring fluorescent white world of the corporate tundra. I didn’t have far to run. The developers weren’t successful enough to smother the whole area in concrete. Because of the trees…the standing people… and the marsh and creek and scrub next door, they left some wooded acres. The land was too problematic to sell easily.

So there I would run. I would hide in that tiny remembrance of how things were. It was there I would go to cry and pray and make bold attempts to regain a sense of self without a computer or a production report or co-workers that chitchat about J-Lo’s ass.

Those woods were full of Floridian things I hadn’t seen for a long time. Florida fence lizards, hooded merganser ducks, and hawks just to name a few. There were gopher tortoise holes spread all about in what are called colonies. That’s a rare thing.
After I tiptoed in the first time to those little woods, I was addicted. I had to go. I had to partake of the wildness there and l always tried to leave an offering of sorts. I left leaf lettuce for the tortoises and pecan halves or plain brown rice for anything else that might want it.

One day I found a turkey feather. Then another, I saw where it had dusted itself in the sand. I knelt down and could still smell the essence of her birdness there. I felt blessed that day and many more that followed. I was always looking for more feathers and spoor and more proof of that wildness I craved. One hot, hazy day she revealed herself to me. The turkey-hen saw me and saw me seeing her. She just stood in the shadows of the live oak and palmetto, watching me watching her. And then she moved on. That day I felt chosen. Just like the day I saw a 3 inch tortoise eating the lettuce I’d left as an offering the day before.

Those were golden days. I wanted to share those days with others but they just looked at me with disbelief and urged me to be careful and saying, “It’s not safe in those woods”.

A couple of months after I was granted release from going to that cold, stagnant building to work I began a battle with the Dark Man of depression like no other battle before. I came so, so close to laying down my life to join him. I knew how and where I wanted to die. I wanted to lie down in those little woods to rest for as long as the universe would let me. I went there to make sure... to pray...to pick the place.

On that cool, golden day I entered the woods crying. I saw the beauty of the earth and sky there and knew that in my leaving I would be giving up on all that I loved. I begged for relief. I shed my clothes and waded into the cold little pond. The sun was gold and quicksilver on the water. I pulled the water-moss all around me and could feel the heat from it. It was so alive. I was so alive. I was baptized in life.

I left the woods that day feeling spent and grateful and for the first time in weeks I knew I could once again overcome the Dark Man’s beckoning. I also knew that he would call again. But for now, I have a respite.

Three weeks later the bulldozer came to the little woods. It left no tortoise hole. It left no palmettos. It left nothing for a turkey or fence lizard. It systematically covered everything that walked or crawled. The trees…the standing people… were the only witnesses of the tortoises that were buried alive. The tortoises would remain buried alive for months, until they finally were granted their long awaited death.

I will not die in those little woods and I could not stop their death.

(Ed's note: There were many discussions of Tary's Woods. She called the various 'green' agencies that were supposed to protect endangered habitat. They were all too busy to help. It wasn't the lack of bitching and activism. Tary did all that. I, for one, will vouchsafe for her in that. This was a personal, shared, and archived attempt to get the people who SHOULD be interested in what was going on in Tary's Wood. Maybe we should all take a hint from the 1960s activism - lie down in front of the bulldozers, call the press, strap ourselves to trees. But. Will it be enough? ...... Love, Dina)

Molly's Gone

I read that newspaper columnist and writer Molly Ivins passed from her bout with breast cancer. I'll miss her. She was a hellraiser that managed to get the ridiculous antics of politicians everywhere across for what they were with humor and satire.

Martha sent me this link that has a film clip on it of Molly's "Dildo Diaries". There is language and images that may be offensive to some, but no matter what your bent, she will show you the idiocy that passes for government.

Visitors

Sasha called me from Valdosta. She is on her way to visit a friend in Tampa and wants to see her old Auntie while here. Anastasia Lynda Maria Kerik-Coglianese is the only living reminder I have that I had a sister - viable and real. She is called 'Sasha' , a nod to her Siberian ancestry that lies atop her Italian paternal surname. Her mother was murdered and left in the Yuma River in Arizona like so much flotsam in 1986.

I haven't seen Sasha in four years since she called me from 2 miles up the road four years ago to announce that she was bringing 'friends' ...which consisted of two gay men, one a transvestite, and a young woman of questionable bent. They stayed at Dog Patch a varying amount of time up to 2 months - except for Kent, who really wanted a change from his background of managing MacDonald's restaurants. Kent stayed two years and continued to find a life in Florida. The rest went home in dribs and drabs, Sasha included. She tired of the slow cotillion here at DP.

Such are the vagaries of youth. I used to do the same thing at their age - my early 20s. I was footloose and could go where the wind carried. No longer. Age seems to have weighted me down in ways hard to describe to you. But you know. We no longer can pick up and waft away on the breeze like an unfettered dandelion blossom when we age. We seem to need more than the iron in Geritol to hold us to the Earth. It's as if our fractious bones are ready and able to pick up and fly without leathered flesh to the next realm at any moment.

So. I am looking forward to seeing my Baby Girl. I fell in love with her at the Tampa International Airport in the 1970s when her tiny squirm of a body was thrust at me for the first time. Lynn and Ed had come to meet me at the airport. I wished that I had been around for her growing up when she was without her mother. But I was engaged with struggles of my own and could not afford forays out to rescue anyone else.

Now, she is grown up. I can tell her stories of her mother, including confirming that her bent for travel comes from her mom. Lynn was always up for an adventure, including an unexpected trip to Columbia that happened on the way to college classroom. She came home with an incredible emerald, stories to tell and no homework.

Possum

Wouldn't you just know it that as soon as I say I have nothing new to report that there is, indeed, something. After my entry last night/early this morning, I return to the living room to do my rendition of straightening up. Which is, sit on the couch and become interested in a book on Early American costuming.

I leave the door open on the water side of the house for George, the cat until we go to bed. She likes to go in and out and I don't have a proper pet door. At the moment, she was sitting up on a shelf above the door entertaining a bolt of fabric. Fabric bolts and beads and laces and trims and mannequins and machines are everywhere in this house. They're the detritus of my day job.

George looks down at the floor by the door as I hear this tiny rattle, rattle. I stand up to see what she's looking at and see a big possum standing just inside the living room trying to pick up a plastic box of beads left out from tonight's project. Maybe he was looking to embellish a quilt.

"Nothing there to eat B'rer Possum," I say. He looks at me and then turns around, ambles out the door leaving the beads behind. I am not insulted by his disinterest. Most of the critters tame and wild have this attitude with me. I'm nothing to be intimidated by, at least in their diaspora.

You see. I have left most of Dog Patch in a state of wildness remarkable on my country street of manicured yards. The neighbor men knock down the grass next to the doors and in the driveway so I can go in and out, but the balance of the yard has become way overgrown by default. My depression and disinterest in the avid gardening I used to do has become a tumult of cultured things gone wild. There is a Blue Skies vine with it's garlands of lavender-blue flowers growing up and over the house and into the trees above. There's the Chinese honeysuckle that has grown bored of it's tree and has escaped into the yard. Pandora vine looks aloft from a June orange tree and a purple passion flower vine happily shakes hands with it from a plumbago.

My wildness has become the last refuge on the street for critters who have nowhere else to go. Development all around me has grown concrete and warehouses in place of the trees and woods that were cut down to make room for them. So. The denizens of the woods moved over here. I share grounds with raccoons and possums, some snakes and birds of every description that appreciate the fact that I took them all into consideration when I did my planting once upon a time. I put in things that seed, nut and fruit: A veritable supermarket for creatures looking for a quick stop for dinner fixins. They have their choice of passion fruit, several kinds of oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, sunflowers, rose hips, pineapples, mulberries twice a year where they gorge so much that you can see possums supine with distended bellies for weeks, elderberries, flowers with edible seeds and roots, acorns, palm nuts, fruiting cactus, plantain and bananas. There's a really good produce section here at the Dog Patch Ashram and Hot Flash Hotel.

Over on the meat aisle, we have every conceivable kind of bug and moth, lizard, and frog. The caterpillars who take over the mulberry trees every six years or so bow to me in unison, all the thousands of them at once. If someone knows what this phenomenon is, would you let me know?

My payback is the general disregard for my presence. I interrupt possums and coons sharing the cat food bowl out back with Skitty, the partially feral outdoor cat with red pants who lives outside in a little house I built for him because his indoor manners border on the unsanitary. I put out extra and look the other way. But sometimes, I have to stand there to be sure that Skitty gets his share. "Doesn't your mama cook for you?" I say to the littlest ones who barrel off the porch at the sight of me. They have yet to learn what their elders know - that I'm a harmless old dumpling that welcomes them and talks rough. The birds will alight just above my head in the same passionless disregard.

But the coming in the house is a new behavior. Although, I've seen many a black paw and arm feeling under the large crack at the bottom of the door and a ratty tail or two swishing contentedly there as a possum cosied up to the cat food bowl. Curiosity to see if there's a wildlife version of aisles with cans of possum food may be it. Well. The tree that I grew from a little nut just outside the back door, now 30 feet tall is showing promising signs of fruiting. I'm happy to report that this year I'll be adding avocados to their fare.

Nothing to Report

There are those mariner's logs, left behind on a ship with no inhabitants with several vague entries. the last few ominous notes hold nothing but a bit of pocket change for detectives. I am one. A person of pocket change. I have nothing to report today.

Yes. There are stories of women, poetry, writing, art and all the news that is fit to print sitting in a box on the floor to be entered. But tonight, on this Monday, I have nothing to share with you other than a good night's sleep. I watched "Passion Fish" with Phyllis. Had chardonay and popcorn (a good combo by any standard). I worked on Rainbow Mountain Woman's ritual gown in between comments and chews, and bought a day planner online that had the days of the week along side the dates so that I couldn't falter when I made appointments. Called a Country Woman's Diary 2007. I've written in such before and appreciate the large spaces that allow me to sketch in a design or idea.

Maybe there will be poetry or art tomorrow.

(Portrait above of 'Ghost Ship')

The Afterlife of Sam the Dog

Pam asked me if I believed if dogs had a place in the next world. Pam, my answer is that dogs have a place in ALL worlds. And cats. And horses. And dolphins, spiders, crickets, birds – especially birds.

I have a story about dogs reincarnating. You knew that I would if you’ve been reading the blog posts about my life. I just about have stories of one of each thing from vibhuti/vibuti to trucks and panthers. You’ll see.

My story about reincarnating dogs involves a chocolate colored creature I called Sam. He was a poodle/wire haired terrier mix; called a terripoo by the breeder who’s female papered poodle got a midnight visit from her not-so-papered wire haired terrier neighbor dog. I called Sam a ‘pooter’. He had a propensity to fart. It suited his personally.

Anyway, Sam came into my life shortly after the Kharman Ghia rollover. Bobby and I were captured by a box of puppies outside my Aunt Tina’s shop in Gibsonton. Sam was laying on his back in the corner, oblivious to the fawning behavior of his other sibs who were wiggling and widdling all over themselves and yelling, “Pick me! Pick me!” We took Sam home.

He caught on pretty quick to the housebreaking thing almost at once. Sam was a bugger about chewing up underwear and socks until he bit into an electric blanket, which straightened him out like a sail cat and spun him across the bedroom. He kept his teeth to food and items he was given to play with after that.

Sam could catch a Frisbee in mid-air like an athlete and would drive you nuts to throw it. He also had this amazing ability to cruise over tall grass between leaps, ears flying as he surveyed the turf below for mice, balls or sticks. Water was another passion. The dog actually leapt out of my car window at a stop sign to dive into a roadside pond! He could dive under water for rocks or sticks that sank and was a veteran traveler.

Being fearless and convinced he was 100 pounds bigger and heavier than he was led him to attack much bigger animals. I have a picture in my mind of 45 pound Sam hanging headless out of the mouth of a huge military German Shepard named Pax in California. Sam's engulfed head was still barking and growling. This is how he came to have a black spot of fur on his back. Sam chose a pretty irascible Sheep Dog named Moose to pick on. Moose bit a mouth-sized chunk out of Sam’s back. When it finally healed, the hair grew back in extra curly, wiry, and very black.

Sam stayed with me after Bobby and I split up. Sam and me were great traveling buddies. He rode all over the United States and Canada in vans, cars and trucks as I explored the highways and byways of America. We traveled to California and back and he made it up the East Coast, around Mystic Seaport, over the Bay of Fundy, around Nova Scotia and through Quebec. He had his frequent flyer miles.

An old cheerleader’s sweater complete with letters that I found at the thrift store that he wore with pride was his prize possession. He would wear it, put his right elbow up on the armrest, and survey the countryside with interest as we rode. He was very protective of me and tried to take the arm off of a burglar who dared break into my bedroom window in Atlanta.

Sam was with me for 15 years. He spent his final days in Salt Lake City, Utah. His last years, he reverted to chewing up my panties and shoes. He dug a hole into a Bassett sofa cushion and spread the innards all over the house. He couldn’t see very well and would run headlong into walls and the furniture. I’d had Chris by then and Sam took to biting and growling at him. When I was in the second big accident of my life and couldn’t take care of baby or dog, a friend took Sam to the shelter and Chris was taken care of by my friend, Kathy.

About three years later, Becky, Kathy, Mary, Wick and I took the kids to the Japanese gardens in Austin, Texas. We were coming down into a little meadow and there on the top of the next hill was a couple with a dog on a leash. The dog broke the leash, came barreling down the hill, threaded his way through the group, and about knocked me down! Yep, a chocolate colored poodle terrier mix the spit of Sam down to the black spot of hair on his back! Even Wick and Becky said, “It’s Sam!!”

He squealed, barked, spoke, licked and loved all over me until the couple ran up all apologies. He was trembling against my legs, trying to tell his new owners all about me as they explained he had the black patch of hair from birth. We compared notes on Frisbees, water diving, attacking much larger dogs, and his love of travel. I told them that he needed an old cheerleader’s letter sweater and they promised to get him one.

With some final hugs and love, I left Sam with his new owners. He looked back once, barked and wagged his tail and was off to new adventures. The experience was the topic of discussion for days.

So, Pam. Yes, there is a place for dogs in the afterlife, and other lives. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

(The poodle terrier mix is named Chico and I found him on the web. Sam was a bit curlier and a lighter color of chocolate. - Dina)

Psychic

Did I tell you that I am a fortuneteller? One of my many personas in a full house in here – so much so that friend Rocco Zanino brought me back a small plaque from Sedona, Arizona that says, “Please allow me to introduce my selves”. I embrace all of my parts joyfully, defend them raucously.

The ‘parts’ of me comes from an assessment when I was guest at Charter Hospital for the Blessedly Questioning of life out in the real world. That’s those of us that can no longer make sense of what happens out there. You know the ‘real world’, the one passing for sane that’s full of wars, graft, pedophilia, anger, murder, hate, terrorists, illicit affairs, back stabbing, jostling, liars, mutilation, car crashes, bigamy, muggings, rapes, bombs?

One segment of my personal Persephone Journey, dark night of the soul, happened full tilt in a state of grace at the funny farm. I fought going in and fought just as hard when they wanted me to leave. It was safe, protected, and they read bedtime stories every night. Someone prepared every meal, gave me crafts and art for my hands to do, actually listened and took notes when I spoke, made sure my bed was made, saw to it that I rested and took total care of myself, and marveled at the things they found out about me as I peeled back the pain of my wounded soul.

My doctors handed me my records when I left. I must have made an impression. On the induction interview page, one of the rule outs was ‘multiple personalities’. But now, don’t we all just have multiple personalities, different faces – one for the public, one for our in-laws, our bankers, the holy man, the cops? So. I sought out and embraced all of mine.

I read fortunes for the Zodiac Club tonight. No. They’re not into astrology, but affiliated with the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg across the bay from me. Me and friend Teresa Olsen were hired for the evening’s entertainment. She’s an intuitive. I read cards. No. Not Tarot, but a regular deck of 52 – the same one you play poker with.

I became psychic at birth. We all are. I believe that the ability developed along with our efforts to walk upright, our skulls sliding on our spinal column to align with a larynx that allowed us the ability for speech. We had to have some form of communication when we were lying there in the grasses trying to stay away from the tooth of a predator. Was it safe to run? Should we stay put? There’s a big Saber Tooth over there. If we walk downwind, we can get around him with no problemo. Animals have IT. We're animals. We’re no different. I believe science will catch up with the idea of psychic phenom someday because the new physics that is finally discovering Divinity in the realm of mathematics makes me hopeful of many things.

Being from a family of believers that listened to the gift and embraced it encouraged me to accept my own. My ancestors on both sides of the gene had examples of IT – my dad had a sister that died at a very tender age who was born with a veil over her face, the caul of skin that his people told him was a sign for second sight. She supposedly foretold the manner of her death. My mother’s side had readers, tales of the goings on of the afterlife; dreams of the passing of loved ones. My mother read cards, my grandmother read tea leaves, my great read from opening a bible, one before her was a scryer with a bowl of water, yet another was a ‘root woman’ with no legs who healed a black man with advanced gangrene during the Civil War.

Teething on the knowledge that the entire spectrum of life that is visible to a child was very all right. It was expected that we children listen to our dreams and intuitions. I thought everyone had full-blown psychic experiences of the world and remember being very confounded when I found that was not the case. Speaking with entities not entirely ‘here’ happened frequently. There was a state of mind I got to when I ran where my feet never touched the ground. If I could do that today, I’d fly. Magic was the norm.

I settled on the deck of cards because that’s what my mom used and a friend and mentor who was an old North Carolina mountain man used the same and taught me to see past the numbers and faces on the cards. When I lay them out in the three standard patterns I use, I see sentences, words, pictures, and I let you know.

One of my early visions involved sitting on the horse staring at the water down at Six Mile Creek. I was lost in some daydream when the water took on an eerie, smoky glow and I saw my father grab his chest. He fell down in the bedroom trying to steady himself on the bench by the dresser. I KNEW the movie I was seeing on the water was happening real time in some sentient part of myself, turned the horse around and galloped pell-mell back to the house almost jumping a car on the county road out front.

We hit the front yard; I bailed off the horse and ran inside flinging open doors as I went. There was my father, lying just as I’d seen him in the water pool by the creek. I pounded on his chest, blew on his face, and watched some color return to his blue lips. I called my mother at her work and the ambulance was there very quickly.

Other episodes saved teenaged girlfriends out on a night’s cruise. I just finished telling Donna Jean about this dream I’d had of a girl with long, pale blonde hair in a black dress sitting between us on the front seat of Donna’s dad’s Ford Fairlane and how a car had run a stop sign and plowed into the side of us. The results were bad. Here we were at the Dog and Suds in Brandon and our friend Janice Blanton came over. She’d been with her dad and had asked him if she could ride with us. So there she sat, long, pale blonde hair, black dress and all. Of course, Donna had to tell her about my vision. We quit laughing when a car ran a stop sign and only that second of Donna being jokingly and elaborately cautious saved us from what would have been a terrible death. He didn’t have his headlights on. Just as in my vision.

So I grew up with it. Any woman who has children knows what I’m talking about when I say that you just know when something’s wrong with one of your kids. How many times have you thought of so-and-so and picked up the phone to call only to find them on the line trying to call you? Ever thought of something and it appears right in front of you? Have you men had a gut feeling that you should drive a different route and find out later that some idiot was driving a tank through town right on the road you were supposed to take and didn’t?

I have an elaborate discussion involving Doppler sound and Einstein’s theory of bent space that I could give you where I could debate that there is a mechanism we have to see or feel the other side of the loop of time. I also know that there are charlatans who film-flam an unwary public and give the gift a bad name. Think Ghost with Whoppi Goldberg laughing it up. It doesn’t matter if you believe or not. It doesn’t matter if you laugh and think that I’m half a bubble off. It doesn’t matter if you chalk it up to coincidence and probabilities that I’ll get some of the stuff right some of the time. I can’t see love either. But I know it’s there. Am I trying to convince you to believe? Nope. I don’t care.

Please do not come at me with religious folderol about conversing with the Devil. I don’t believe in that. There’s nothing evil in what others and I do. It’s natural. I’ll quote you passages from your bible that will tell you it was a part of life at least that far back. And it was accepted as an okay thing.

How long have I read for people? My first reading was when I was about 13 years of age for some of my mother’s friends. I began being paid for it in my 20s during the rocking 1960s where psychism became chic once again as it has throughout history. It helped put bread on the table for my son when I was a struggling single mom. I still read for clients that have been seeing me for up to 25 years. I read on the phone for folks living in other states and they stop to see me when they travel. I’ve read for corporations and businesses that would cringe if the news got out. I’ve read for cops and doctors, professors and lawyers. I even have a reading name – Madame Zucchini.

You know those signs on the sides of the road of a palm face up, usually in lurid neon? Yep. Those. One day in the early 1980s, my friend Alice Halverstadt was talking to me in her garden in Aspen, Utah. I was down from Montana on a jaunt away from the cowboy I was dating who was driving me crazy. Alice always let the word out I was in town and the folks lined up for readings. Paid for the trip and my gas. She decided that as such a big hit, I needed a professional name. Picking up and waving a large, green fruit in the air, she declared, “I got it! You’re Madame Zucchini!” Sounded right. It stuck.

So. Back to the future. I spent the evening reading for the gentry from the Dali Museum. Tomorrow, I have a gig at the St. Petersburg Pier in their semi-annual Psychic Faire to attend tomorrow. Gack! That’s in less than four hours so I need sleep! Or I predict that I’ll be a bleary eyed psychic for the folks!

Gallery Opening Tonight

After angsting with Martha Marshall the past few weeks -- I was the one in angst, she was just speeding along at her usual Mach 10, hair afire -- all her paintings were reading, shipped off to one gallery in Key West and hung in the Lyssa Morgan Gallery in Tampa for another show with tonight's opening. Martha shared the spotlight with another artist, Antonio Puri.

So I trotted out my finest uptown artist's togs, picked up Phyllis McEwan, and we puttered downtown to the show. Great art, saw some old friends, drank some wine and ate wonderful food from Cellini's. The photo above is just one of the walls showing some of Martha's awesome work. I love the little boxes on the left. They can be purchased separately or in groups. The texture is amazing in them! I wish you could really see the depth in them.

Martha is a working artist. Phyllis is a poet, actor, librarian and is teaching a class at the University of South Florida on Zora Neale Hurston. I haven't decided what I'm going to end up being yet. I've had lots of hats in my closet. The one for costumes is about to come to a close. I'm burned out on it. Forty five years is enough to stitch rags. I want to devote more time to my writing, drag out the several book manuscripts that lay gathering dust under my bed in need of just a final editing and then sending off, and want to research and finish the book I'm writing on the Civil War.

I'm also trying to get enthusiastic about the last few mortgage payments on my old girl of a house and how and what I'm going to need to do to get her refurbished and spiffed up. I'll be paid in full in a few short months. I've been struggling to send in mortgage payments for so long that I think the void of not having to do that will trip me. I know the look I want in here -- clean, white with blue ceilings, a wainscot of bead board and furniture for a beachy look, but you would have to see the condition of the house now to know how terrifying the aspect of remodeling is.

I've been watching BHG t.v. for inspiration, but am trying to figure how I'll juggle having my one bathroom torn out and rebuilt. Do I pee in the yard? Shower under the garden hose? Or do I have a small extra bath built first for the apartment that I want to add on the water side of the house? My kitchen is almost non-existent and there are many signs of the hurricane damage that happened two years ago: Sagging ceilings deluged down being held up under the prop of a 2 X 4, kitchen cabinets that 'float' because the rain dissolved the bottom boards and warped the doors, a hall that has every bit of wall cladding stripped out where I can see the underside of the roof from rain. The back end of the house that contains my utility and bath are sagging at about a 10 degree angle having been picked up by a tornado and slapped back down pulling away from the house.

Can I do this? Can I really make it through the remodel to have a house with real closets, a real kitchen and a bath that works? Time will tell. Until I have to deal with the nitty-gritty, I'll attend art shows and forget about it.

Karma

Criticizing and judging are dangerous, I have found. It's the reason I don't steal and am a terrible liar - although I am a great bullshitter. I sit here on this end of my life and look back over all the times I have found an aspect of what I considered in my rash youth as someones "terrible" appearance I subjected to eye rolling, declared some behavior as abysmal, or proclaimed that a health issue was deserved by anyone daring to be ugly to me or a loved one.

For the following reason, I'm very careful nowadays to not point the finger or poo-poo others, their little afflictions, or my naming what I see in all my wisdom as faults in others. I've learned the value of being accepting and also had large bits of my own brand of hubris dashed by Fate. You see. I get Instant Karma as well as the Not-So-Instant variety.

Every single fault I've found in others, every snigger at what I perceived as other's hypochondriasis with their illness, every eye roll at fat people, all of the various haughty judgements I proclaimed on others has come home to roost in me. I truly get to wear someone else's shoes for much longer than a day. This has been a great equalizer. My life and my body has become the literal Portrait of Dorian Gray, only I have to wear mine and can't hide it in an upstairs closet.

Fat. Nasty word. Our culture abhors it while all the time executing the sales pitch from Wall Street on the virtues of our fast food culture (You gotta eat - Over a billion sold - Hot and juicy - Piled high with real meat - Five Pizzas for five bucks apiece) extolled in mega commercial campaigns flying over the airwaves and the Internet in a come hither siren song burying desire for the high caloric and cholesterol busting fare deep within our collective psyches. Then out roll the diet ads with aids and programs so varied as to bewilder. So.

I weighed 118 pounds soaking wet most of my adult life until I contracted Graves Disease at 41 years of age. Could eat the north end of a south bound mule and never gain an ounce on my 5' 7" frame. Double whammy here. All those gross fat people and the unkind comments I made over the course of my earlier life about them settled in my ass and thighs. I can hear them whenever I catch a glimpse of the ponderous pounds my disease gave me. I see my lips curled down disapprovingly when an obese person ordered any prodigious meal in the soft, fleshy folds that now adorn my once svelte body. I've gained almost double my body weight over the 17 years I've battled Graves.

Then there's the thyroid issue. I heard folks blame their pudge on a malfunctioning thyroid. "I eat like a bird and still gain weight", and said under my breath that if they'd just quit stuffing their faces with the ENtire sack of bird food in one sitting, they'd have an athletic body, too. Pish. Tosh. Here it is. There really IS a thyroid issue and I believe that it's pandemic in the U.S. because of all the chemicals we've subjected ourselves to in our food, the sedentary lifestyle our affluence has led all of us to, the pollutants that lurk in our water, soil and air. Rich and poor, we, the majority no longer keep ourselves active for the most part preferring to experience life vicariously on a t.v. or computer screen .

Every proclamation I've ever made on another person in my life has come home to roost. I once made faces about various person's housekeeping, or lack of it. Now I slog through a happy melange of fabric, paper and the detritus of living in a century old house that was built in the day before there were closets. I dodge dust bunnies so big they have their own zip codes.

Every fiber that enters my house exits with lint, cat hair (and dog hair back when), or fuzz of some stripe. I have become what I proclaimed as a lazy housekeeper after many decades of having OCD tendencies about cleaning and decorating my various lairs. No more. Let me be perfectly frank about my latter day housekeeping: The Health Department would shut me down for more than a few corners, lo, these past ten years.

Did you ever say, "I'll NEVER do things like my mother/father!!" Yeah. Right. I succeeded in making some of the same mistakes as they and actually embellished creatively on quite a few of my own in child rearing and slogging through life. I had a small warning of this when I looked down at my hands one day in my thirties and said, "Gack! I've got my mother's hands, wrinkles and all!" I should have seen it coming.

Let this be MY cautionary tale to you all. Let this be the case in your life where you do NOT have to stick your own paw in the fire to learn the lesson of hot. Do not try this at home. Take care when you squint down your nose at others for whatever reason and have the good sense to feel guilty about it when you fall off the horse. Be kinder to people. If you can't be kind, ignore them and move along.

(Ed. Note: I don't know the name of the charmer in the above photo, who to give credit for it, but let me say unequivocally that I think she looks just fine. - Dina)

Lagoon

If you've been reading the other blog entries, you'll know that my dreams are rich and wonderful for me. This is last night's installment.

I am on a huge, white ship that is hurriedly being loaded for a migration to another shore. The ship is enormous and has several levels and multiple decks. It seems to be the size of a small city and is a composite of ocean liner and masted tall ship.

There are other ships loading though none quite as large as the one that I’m on. There is some sense of hurry to get to the destination. Once everyone is loaded, there is a race where several of the ships almost collide with ours. Our ship has some kind of enormous engine drive and picks up speed so fast that several people fall off of the masts, which have been divided into areas for different clans as is the decks and levels below. I remember one mast was for ‘pirates’, another for Irish bands, and one for friars with tonsures. It far outdistances the other ships and arrives at this beautiful cliff faced lagoon with turquoise waters.

The ship is at the destination so rapidly that the brakes have the same effect of dislodging riders. My group is called the Sea Maidens and we scurry off the ship and lay claim to a grotto with fresh water right on the mouth of the lagoon the ship lands in. The water is very clear, fresh and cool. We get hogsheads of ale and plop them into the grotto to keep cool in the water. They were stored in one of the wooden coolers of a tavern group on the ship we’re associated with.

We have to fight for our claim to the huge grotto and surrounding rooms when men come and put soap in the water of the grotto to make it foam up and challenge our right to be there. A ‘Grandmother’ is consulted as judge and determines that the soap is a temporary pollution and will clear up, which it does. She also grants our claim to the grotto and the rooms around it carved in rock because the Maidens have put our items in them, and because it’s our job to help off-load ships coming into the lagoon, defend the port, and to keep watch on the seas. It’s fitting and proper that we have the quarters and not the big warriors who challenged our claim.

Our leader determines that the big room just off the grotto would make a good sleeping chamber for the Maidens and has our bedding put in there. Candles are lit revealing a sparkling rose-colored room carved out of the living rock with a wooden door that leads to the side of a tavern – the same ones who stored our hogsheads of ale. There are chairs and tables put out and a musician is already playing. We are delighted to have a gathering place just outside our door with friends we know.

We discover other rooms and assign them their uses – one with a huge natural chimney will be our kitchen and dining quarters and small alcoves are used for storing food and supplies. It leads directly out to the beach just outside our door.

After our quarters are secured and our things put away, I go exploring with our leader. Everyone else has been busy as well. The land seems to have been divided much like our own into clans with their various affiliations and functions. There are several taverns with National themes like Ireland, England, Italy and France where the clans dress very alike and very colorfully.

We pass by scenes of celebration – one is a group of Warlocks and Wizards who are holding some kind of stage show complete with fog, blue demons with red eyes, and caped Wizards dancing in what I can only describe as very New York choreographed. Beautiful colors and lighting and a Warlock snaps lightning and colored orbs overhead throughout the production in a weird rendition of Warlock’s “River Dance.”

We walk outside and see that there are vast areas that are still untouched and uninhabited. It is beautiful and wild and seems to follow the one huge river that inlets right from the cove we landed on. Our leader is up ahead of me and comes to a place on the path that seems to be over grown. Her/our gown is a wench type outfit with long skirt, apron and blouse with a weskit laced up over it and our hair is tied up in a caul. Very practical in earth toned shades. But her outfit seems to waver as she does on whether to go on. She starts to look like a Hershey’s Kiss that has been elongated and curled. Her gown is now dark lapis blue with gold in wide stripes curling down to the belled bottom of her gown. I encourage her to push past the bushes and see what’s beyond and she morphs back into the plain gowns we usually wear.

As we clear the overgrowth, there are even more clans going busily about their day. Some are merchants selling various kinds of wares – jewelry, dry goods, foodstuffs, cheeses, spices and cloth. Some are making drums, shoeing horses and smithing. We decide to go back to our grotto and then will make a more thorough exploration later.

Back at the grotto, the other Maidens are checking charts and looking at timetables for ships, cooking, pulling small children away from the river, which is inhabited by these huge grouper-like fish. Men are pulling them out as fast as they can and carting them off to be salted. Further down the river from the inlet, there is a yellow-gold water grass that makes the surface of the water look as if you could walk across and it is here that children are trying to walk out on it, but we know that they will fall through and catch them setting up a guard to keep them out until they can be educated about the dangers. One of the large fish could swallow a good sized child whole.

The dream was very colorful, very vivid in detail down to the weave of my skirts, the textures of rock and sand and wood. It’s very exhilarating to be part of this effort to move all of my history to another land. Because that’s what I believe the various clans are – my history, bits of me. All of them represent some part of me from protector of children and the sea to standing up to the bullies to the pirates and gypsies I come across. Even the warlocks dancing with their demons are part of me.

Water always represents my spirituality in my dream symbology. I enjoyed traveling with the Sea Maidens and liked their energy. If travel was as easy and instantaneous to a destination, it would be wonderful. I’m not sure what the migration means but maybe I’m taking my act on the road.

Close Encounters of the Culinary Kind!!

Following my nose via a comment from Jann, I mosey on over to her blog and discover a wonderful treasure trove of beautiful photographs and recipies from all over the world! Both are interesting, her travels and comments AND the glorious recipies she shares from all over the world. I'm adding her to my favorites list and you may wish to do the same. Just check out the recipies!

Resolution Revolution

I'm at the age where I can look back and touch bedrocks of my life to see how far I've come. This and making New Year's resolutions is a sure fire way to set yourself up for failure. Can you chart a new course with novel things to do this year? Can you remember what you vowed to do last year? Did you accomplish all of those lofty goals? Were they complete and fast and satisfactory, checked off like a tick list?

Mine weren't. I used to write a letter to myself on the last night of the year to be mailed and opened the last night of the next year containing what I hoped to accomplish on the clean slate and blank days of the coming year. I poured my heart out in a bid to be a better human being hitting the ENtire holy trinity of body, soul and spirit. Yes. A few of those were attained in a Sydney Omar sort of way. That is, if I said that I wanted to be a better friend, I could point to general instances where that was true.

But I also lost friends over that year via attrition, dying, moving away, not living up to the high expectations that they had of me - the reason I've refused to be a guru to anyone. It looks like there are going to be more in the 'gone' column because I'm aging, as are the friends I've made. I mourn those that have gone and celebrate the ones that are left.

The 'left' list is long, so I'm happy there. My Aunt, Lee DeCesare once told me that I had an uncanny knack for moving to a new town and assembling a sterling support system there. I moved a lot in the course of my life and have been lucky to retain many of those I was closest to in whatever State of the Union I happened to plotz down in. I moved so many times when I lived in Salt Lake City that I had T-shirts with Paradise Trucking Company printed up for the stalwart group of friends that helped me pack from one apartment to another. Having gypsy feet is one of the reasons I know people scattered all over the place.

So. Resolutions this year? Not to make any. I want to quit setting myself up for failures of any size, especially the lofty goals usually flying about this time of year. If you don't think it's not a national pastime to make New Year's resolutions, just count how many weight loss commercials are on the tube this week. The geeks of Wall Street and corporate monkeys just roll their eyes back to dollar signs at us this time of year with one type of self-improvement racket or another rolled out for hooking into those goals.

The other revolution is that I want to quit saying what I need to accomplish by such and such a date or age or time. This is what the looking back over my life has garnered: That no matter how honest the intent, I will not be famous, ridiculously wealthy, will not have written the Great American Novel. I'm discovering the fact that to have reached any age after fifty is a Herculean task given the way life beats the hell out of you. Maybe life's intent for all of us is just to be the very best self you can be and get through the days allotted to us the best that we can.

Maybe having friends and a roof that doesn't leak and food in the pantry and a good time or two is all any of us can look forward to or strive for. So instead of carrying around the weight of all those resolutions on my back as I putz through this next year, and having to deal with the guilt of not having met all those high bars, I'll just give myself props for having a good support system. Maybe I'll just be thankful for the simplest of things in my life. Maybe I'll just be surprised by what turns up as the days unfold and be grateful for the little graces that fall in my lap.

TITS

"I'd pay more attention to them

if they were BIGGER"

That's what he said.

"They're so small I forgot about them."

Uh-huh, that's what he said.

Too small to fill a B-cup and

Way smaller than my ass.

He forgot two babies grew fat

and sleepy because they suckled

my half pint breasts.

They only knew that it was warm,

sweet and felt good in their bellies.

He forgot about my tits even

after seeing my blue-white milk

under moon-yellow cream

in bottles filled from the leftovers.

He forgot about them when he
fucked me.
My tits did all they were supposed
to.

He didn't.




by Tary Peace. Cracker gardener with a magic touch. Queen of fishing. Worm hunter. Songstress. Glass maker. A shock of reddish hair and a beautiful face hides one of the most glorious souls I'm privileged to know.





Painting is "Psyche" (Fredrick Leighton 1830 – 1896)