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)

The Ballad of Darlahood

I

The great hope, from old numbers,
is that I will be able to pick out my own tanker boots,
toe-nail polish,
faggots,
and those in power will kiss my ass,
whose laws I spit
and dawdle.

Dingle me with laughing sandwiches.
Fear not the rape,
the masturbate.
Nothing is more powerful, lovable,
riot-incitable
as tanker boots and toe-nail polish.

Such passions quibble around my heart.
Your rings and clams make no difference now.
Stones and tyrants,
the same thing.
The same dynasty exactly!
I'm famous now; I've joined the groups of gods
(in my flip flops and painted fingers).
Ha Ha! I was caught red handed,
a noose slipped over my neck,
a stag on my shoulder and a penny in my pocket.

II

Seven hearses in a row,
and
a cloaked frog in the gunpowder box.
I reached my hand in the velvet bag for my set of orange pearls.
I rev up the engine to the speed of a few angry Achaeans.

And we roll onward to sunset west,
and wait for the next space light to hit tombstones
across the South,
navigating through the sea.

We are blessed with red,
red, red, red,
and deep blue waters
and crystal doorknobs
and necklaces.

No more furies for the oldest of warriors.
The mansions are brimming with great grandchildren.
A painting casts shadows on the wall.
A bare foot steps on the marble stair.
A hand touches my cheek, my lips.
Pink lace drawers,
and pink lace crinolines.
I sit on the bed alone, and wait for my blessings to start.

III

I walked through valleys of rosebushes,
"I'll never see that house again.
I'll never see that house again."
Even though doors and windows were left open for me to crawl through.
"I could still be in the palace, even now".
I'll never see that house again.
So, do I damn my own good fortune?
Wrap my feet in binding slippers,
cut my fingers and prickle my breasts,
for the sake of trunk rooms and secret closets?
This is the Narnian descent.
The Narnian intent.

Kill all those palace usurpers.
Kill them first,
then toss the virgins out the window into cold, hollow seas.
Fiends and villains will swoop upon them,
pick them up
and carry them home,
to boughs in trees
with moss for sheets and leaves for pillows.

Old Man Oak, why do you want her so?
She holds the whole band of house pirates in her pockets.

IV

If the prophet refers to one man that will come down upon her,
powerful he must be,
and callous
or kind,
depending upon the situation.

Apollo only knows what will happen once they fall asleep.
"Pray my champion, Godspeed inside me."
Frogs crept along the alleyways.
My yellow fog has turned to pink.

I come with prayers and offerings.

"O sweet Athene, I beseech thee to give me Apocalyptic daggers, swift and true,
and bullet proof vehicles with dark windows that can speed upon vacant highways
faster than sixty miles an hour.

I leave you with gazpacho color #51 red polish and Blue Lagoon #33.
Give me and my kinsmen best Armageddon wishes and set all good hoods free!~"

"This is the palace, stranger. She's inside.
But here is her king, her husband, and the father of her children.
What will you say to the man who found Darlahood in her overgrown tower and desolate city? What will you say to the one who uprooted her from one palace to set her gently in another?"

The Ballad of Darlahood, is a Gothic cautionary tale by Darla Nunnery.

Chasing Death Part I - Karmann Ghia

Tina Harwell Waterson was my mama's very best friend all her life up to and there on the day mama died. They grew up together, worked together at the Big Orange Drive-In as car hops in shorts, jaunty caps, and roller skates during WW Two as teenagers.

It's customary for Southern children to address a dear, close family friend as Auntie or Uncle. We're trained to be polite, honor elders, and use Ma'am and Sir when addressing adults to show respect. That bent of courtesy, charm and thoughtfulness sometimes gets us pegged as "slow".

Aunt T knew the power of a buck so she cut me a break and let me start young. I got some of my appreciation for hard work, independence and owning your own business from working for Aunt T. I watched and learned from her shrewdness in dealing with the vendors she bought from, and the way she handled recalcitrant customers who had the audacity to not pay their bills or give her a bad check. She drilled the sense of pride in ownership into me many times saying, "You never get ahead or find total joy in making a living until you work for yourself in something that you love doing". I took that to heart.

Christmas was always a busy season at my Aunt Tina's Waterwell Florist in Gibsonton, Florida. I had worked for her weekends and summers since I was fourteen, running errands, putting up the window displays, culling out less-than-perfect flowers, cleaning, selling the dry goods and cutting the cloth she also carried in the store. When I was older, I drove the big, white van with her logo on the doors to deliver flowers to hospitals and funeral homes.

I've never been scared of dead folks. I love hanging out in cemeteries. It's a family thing I'll tell you about another time. I learned early that it was the live folks that could mess you up. The dead just mind their own business in a solemn, quiet way. I didn't mind arranging the wreaths, floral casket blankets and sprays around the dead in the coffins. What DID bother me was funerals of children and infants. They always looked like waxen dolls in sleepy-bye mode, always false, always wrong no matter how much rouge you put on their pale cheeks.

There is something very disturbing with children dying - as if you'd pinched green rose buds off the bush before they'd even had a chance to open and show you their stuff. An adult usually has had some time to attend a few parties, have a passionate love affair, performed a task they really hate, hurt someone they cared about, and have Life kick the shit out of them a bit. So I dreaded delivery of funeral flowers to children's rites.

My first husband, Bobby was just home a month from the Vietnam War and decided that we should have a beige 1958 Type 14 Karmann Ghia with a black convertible top that he fell in love with. Cars are having an impact on my thoughts and dreams these days. Can you tell? Having owned two Porches - a Cadillac Gold 1958 Speedster Convertible with all the charm of a rolling bathtub and tiny windows, and a red 1962 coupe, Bobby thought the Karmann Ghia was the next logical step in trying to own every exotic vehicle still rolling on the tarmac. He bought it just before Christmas, 1968 to make up for lost time spent in the Army killing people in another country in the last generation's version of War on Terror. That one made as much sense as this one.

The Karmann Ghia was the car I drove to work. Bobby was still looking for a job with not very much luck. But I was working full time for Aunt T that Christmas Eve. I woke up very late, panicked, called Aunt T and told her I was on the way.

After loading my Christmas gifts for T and the folks I knew in Gibsonton on the back seat, I spent about 30 minutes digging out the seat belt from under the front seat runners of the car. They were installed after-market sometimes as most cars back then didn't have to have them until 1966 when Congress finally got behind seat belts with the Automobile Safety Act. They were mostly just a strap across your lap. The fancy shoulder part came about later.

Our seat belts had been bolted to the floor before the car rolled off the dealer's lot. The guys in the shop left them under the seat sliders after re-installing the seats in their haste to get 'er done. I don't know why I decided to put on a seat belt for the first time in my life - ever. I don't know why I chose that day to start being conscientious about auto safety and digging them out, but I remember the day and date vividly. It never struck me as really silly at the time to spend time pulling out seat belts when I was already an hour or more late for work. But I did.

Seat belt finally on and happily tooling down the road, I'm thinking of how pleased Aunt T will be with her gift from me - White Shoulders perfume. It was the only thing she ever wore. I am also thinking of the flower delivery to Stowers Funeral Home in Brandon for a little girl of about three who drowned right before Christmas we had scheduled for that day.

On 56th Street just after the curve, a pink Cadillac pulled out of old myrtle Hill Cemetery and headed north to my south. Now. A pink car is something that catches your attention - especially in the 1960s before the days of Mary Kay cosmetic doyennes rolling down the road in their signature pink reward cars. The Cadillac pulling out of the cemetery posed a problem because she was in the inside lane - mine - on the wrong side of the four-lane. School bus on the right of me full of children, beer truck (big) right on my tail, I could not brake or move over. So I pulled the car to the left onto the grassy median. The only option left for me .

My front wheels and bumper caught the concrete curb of a turn around first and flipped end on end several times, hit another concrete curb at the next turn around and flipped sideways several more times. All in slo-mo, I watched dirt fly through the cab of the car, the roof peel back taking the canvas top and metal armature with it, the rear view mirror being lifted off the windshield and taken up and away right before the windshield disintegrated. I put up my hands in front of my face, which left perfectly smooth skin outlined in bloody pockmarks where the glass shards peppered my face and backs of my hands. I also felt the Karmann Ghia perfectly balanced on the top of my head with a crunch when I flipped over the concrete turn around. I kept saying "STOP! STOP IT" with each spin and roll as if words alone could make it so. When the Karmann Ghia finally stopped, I had an audience. The rolling had been lengthy enough so that the guy in the beer truck and several others were already stopped, parked and running towards the last roll that blessedly landed the car upright on what was left of the wheels on the other side of the road from where I'd started.

My left arm protruded at an awkward angle, my vision was blurry, looked like I was seeing the world through a fun house mirror, and obscured by something sticky, my feet and legs had pushed the brake pedal through the floorboard of the car where I had stood on them just to make it stop, and I had an enormous, horrible headache -the worst I've ever had. That was the only real pain at that moment. That was because my chin was resting on my chest, also at a very odd angle. The beer guy pulled me out of the car and was crying as he pulled a clot of dirt and grass and blood out of my mouth. I kept telling him that I was fine. He took off his shirt and put it over me since the sweater and bra I put on that morning was pretty much gone having unraveled into shreds exposing most of my torso. The good news was that I smelled divine as Aunt T's White Shoulders bottle had burst and coated me and the remains of the car carriage.

The woman who was driving the pink Cadillac continued on her way ignoring the fact that she'd just caused major catastrophe and put a really big hole in my day. Some boys from USF chased her down and forced her off the road before she could repeat the performance.

I don't like riding in ambulances. They came really fast. I guess the rollover took longer than I thought. The sirens blast above you and you sway and bob on the gurney. To this day, if I hear them close by I cover my ears.

When I got to Tampa General Hospital, I was told I had a broken neck and a concussion which was why I felt no pain from there down, several broken ribs, a broken leg and arm and my left eye had been forced out of the socket a bit when the skin was cut open and the bone rattled. Everything was bruised up inside and jumbled around like scrambled eggs. Outside was a dirty, bloody mess. I lost teeth where some metal pushed through my left cheek and broke them off at the gum line. After I'd been in the hospital a while, my mother found a piece of chrome antenna sticking out of the top of my head. They cut it off rather than pull it out of my scull and it's there picking up Cuban radio stations to this day. And alien radio signals via the SETI program.

And you know how your mama tells you to wear clean underwear because you never know when you're going to be in an accident? Well. Listen to her. I had on a pair of lime green see-through panties with black elastic and a spider on a web strategically embroidered that I acquired at my bridal shower. It was the day before laundry and they were the only clean pair left in the drawer. They had also shredded into silly little, lime green strings suspended by two strands of elastic. I asked the nurse to cut them off and throw them away so when the State Trooper who was in the waiting room came in to question me wouldn't see. Thank the Divine for nurses.

It took months of recuperation being strapped into a metal harness that gave my ramrod straight posture yet another notch higher up. Early in my recovery, I tried to take a bath one foot in the tub and the other one connected to an electric heater. I'm convinced to this day that the body and spine straightening jolt I received is the reason my neck healed without huge packages of excess calcium deposits.

Keith Olbermann on MSNBC tonight featured a new test method to measure the stability of vehicles in accidents with rollovers. This is where a vehicle flips over onto the roof once or more. I learned that rollovers in car crashes, while in the minority of all accidents, contribute the majority of deaths in all accidents by some 80%. That is, if you roll over in an accident, you have only a 20% probability of walking away alive. If the vehicle is a convertible without a rollbar, your chances are akin to a handslap stopping a bull elephant - i.e., almost none.

So. I feel that Death made a drive-by then for me. I knew I must have something important to do because I didn't jump on the back of his horse. Now, I don't mind a struggle to get myself together to leave, having to deal with an annoying, can't-get-away-from phone call, wake up late or procrastinate when the clock is running low on batteries and seems to give me all the time in the world. I feel it's someone looking out for my end run.

I ended up having a really good excuse for being late to Aunt T's shop that day.

'56 Buick

I dreamed I was a 1956 two-toned Buick convertible last night, all chrome and lines and weight and portholes down the gills. I was hard to steer and a train to stop. Both are metaphors for me and my life. From one location to another, I gathered up wads and rolls of money and stash them in my car.

Steering one direction or another is not an easy task to get me to do. Neither is stopping. These are functions I must decide to do on my own. I am intractable.

We had a 1956 two toned Buick hard top when I was growing up. It was red and black. My sister Lynda and I would climb out of the bedroom window after my parents went to sleep and put it in neutral, pushing it from the carport down our shale driveway to go for a ride. I was 14 and knew how to drive. Donna Jean taught me in the 1952 Chevy stick-on-the-column daddy had souped up for my mom. He and mama would stand at the kitchen window and laugh as the Chevy lurched and bumped up and down the road while DJ tried to show me the finesse of using a clutch. And daddy had let me drive the Chevy all over the palmetto stumped back acre of our land before that. Lynn was 3 years younger than me and was always up for a good time.

Sometimes, Lynn and I would go to Harold's Drive-In on East Broadway in our part of town and buy just one cherry coke and share it. Those were the days when the cherry syrup had to be added by squirting it out of a deep metal soda well. Sometimes, we just drove around the roads in front of and around the house. Once, we heard of a party that was way too old and dicey for us and went anyway. It was over at the lake by the old Agricultural Fairgrounds off of Orient Road and Buffalo -- all woods then. I got the rear tire of the Buick sunk in a deep ravine which threatened to dump all the Buick's tonnage into the lake. Some really big highschool boys came over, lifted the car out of the ravine and sent us home. We were already headed that way since we saw that this party was way out of our league.

Daddy must have caught on after several of these late night cruises because our old fashioned windows were replaced with crank open Miama (sic) windows soon after the car lifting ceremony.

Me and Lynn had other rides as kids. Bobby and Billy Tilly purloined an old mule from the Cattleman's stock yard auction lot and hid him in the white sands that were behind our property. We -- all the neighborhood kids -- had spent the day fetching and toting grass and other edibles by the handsfuls to make him at home and gave him enough little red apples out of a sack in the refrigerator to give him a good case of the fruit-shits. We were delighted with the company of the mule.

That night, after bedtime, we snuck out of the window. This was BEFORE the Buick episodes by some years, so it really did take daddy a while to catch onto our adventuring. Daddy came in to check on us and picks up the story from here:

"I called for Diane and Lynda, looked all over the yard, and am about to run up the path to the neighbor's house when I see these two heads bobbing up and down over the tops of the palmettos in the moonlight. I get closer and could hear Diane singing 'Tennessee Stud' to the top of her lungs and Lynda joining the chorus.

Here they were, riding a mule that looked like it was a runaway from the soap factory."

Daddy sent us home after paddling our asses and tied the mule up in the yard. The Sheriff came and got the mule the next day along with rounding up Bobby and Billy.

When I was a little older, me and mama were headed out to the clothesline with baskets when here came the Sheriff with Bobby and Billy pushing a long race car across the back lot to the road. Bobby and Billy grinned at us and said 'Hey', and the Sheriff tipped his hat to mama, "Mornin', Miz Von". We didn't get to ride in the racer before the Sheriff found it hiding in the palmettos. The Tilly boys weren't very imaginative about their hiding places for pilfered goods. You could find just about anything missing from our end of town in the palmettos behind our property. And one of the Tilly boys were usually involved.

In my dream symbols, cars are always ME, my vehicle, my path, my next adventure. So I guess that I'm about to be set up stubborn on something in my life again. I don't know what it could be because I am currently filled with that inordinate bliss, cheerfulness, and contentment that is my normal state of being when not dealing with death, destruction, illness, or other aggravations of that ilk. Until I find out what I'm getting ready to ride on that requires hard steering and two feet on the break pedal, I'll bob along with the mule.

DREAMS

ALL THE NIGHTS I SPEND ALONE
WRITING ABOUT MY LIFE
THE QUIET THAT MAKES ME GROW DIM
AND LATELY I'M ALWAYS COLD

I SAY TO MYSELF
ONE DAY I WILL WRITE A POEM
A POEM THAT WILL RAISE MY SOUL AND FLY

ONE THAT WILL WASH AWAY
ALL THE MADNESS
THE FLOWS FROM ONE RIVER TO ANOTHER
FOR THE MAN THAT WILL
NEVER BE MY LOVER

ANGERS EATS AT MY LINING
CAUSING ME TO VOMIT UP
ANOTHER DREAM
WHO WILL BE MY SAVIOR?

CROWNED THORNS AND MIDNIGHT GLORY
BRUISED VIOLENT NIGHTS
STARS WILL NEVER SHINE
IN YOUR MIDST

AND I CALLED TO YOU BUT YOU DID NOT COME
SO THE RAIN BEAT UPON
MY NECK AND MY SHOULDERS
DROPS OF YOU RECEDED
AND THEN ROSE AGAIN

YOU COME TO MY SHORES
ENGULF ME ONLY TO RAPE AND PILLAGE
LEAVE ME FROZEN IN YOUR WINTER
TRAPPED IN ICE WAITING FOR THE THAW

TAKE ALL YOU CAN FROM ME
LEAVE NO TRACE
OTHER THAN ALGAE
STAINED SHORES

Demetria Wilson, 1999

(Painting is "Ophelia" by Arthur Hughes)

Untitled

My muse is a house older
than liniment and icebergs.
Covered in cobwebs, someone distant hands me some drink.
And I read some book.
And wait for the boy in the paisley shirt to come rushing back,

"I never should have left."
"You never did actually leave", I say.

Stop torturing me, muse!
(I retrace a little, after all, the muse has been mostly kind;
It is Eros who remains distinctly anonymous).
My own house is my prison,
A flagship of apathy.

Dammit. I can't think straight anymore.
I remember when I first heard about the place.
My Mother described how the old woman kept
two grand pianos in her living room.
It isn't frivolity to want,
to need
two of the best things.

Darla Nunnery 1999
(The painting is "Mariana", by John Everett Millais

Daddy's Coal Lessons

I am a coal miner’s daughter. Like Loretta Lynn, I started my life in the sooty shadow of a coalmine. I lived farther up river from Loretta’s Carolina home. It was at the northern head of the Appalachian Mountains in the Shenandoah River Valley where my parents spawned my sister and me.

An aunt tells me there were three of us but my mother refuses or forgets to acknowledge the loss of an infant boy before me. I am the oldest by succession then.

Daddy met mama at the Sweethearts Skating Rink on East Broadway when he was stationed at Macdill Air Force Base in Florida during the War. He married her two weeks later in the frenzy of joy and enthusiasm that often follows conflict once the Germans were defeated. Sweethearts is on the east side of Tampa, but we always called our part of town Six Mile Creek.

Mama was skate instructor and official peacekeeper for Uncle Benny, the affable Italian who owned the rink. It didn’t have anything to do with kung fu. She was simply fearless. She would tackle anything and anybody. Mama went after the bullies with her mouth and the toughs with an RC Cola bottle. Both got results. Like the rest of the women in my bloodline, I have inherited this mouth and arm response when the thugs in the world beset me.

I often imagine my parents meeting each other for the first time. I see pictures of them as they looked then. They were beauties. Mama smiles at the camera looking like a young Ava Gardner. My dad looks like a dark and rakish Clark Gable. His teeth glisten from under the stylish moustache he was to keep all of his life. They were movie star handsome.

Mama swears I was conceived on Southern soil, but they moved back to daddy’s home town in Pennsylvania after the war so he could go back to work in the mines. The post-war boom was slow to start up in our part of Florida. When we moved back to Florida, he became a fisherman. But that’s another story. There was water for daddy to fish in Pennsylvania, too.

We lived right on the banks of the Monongahela River in Fredericktown. I watched the paddle wheelers pushing the groaning barges loaded with coal and riding low in the water up river. They hauled them down river empty and spent. The paddle wheelers looked like giant mechanized toys. You know those ducks where the wooden feet go round and round as you pull it along on a string? They were like that except they shalooshed instead of quacked. I can hear the sound of the big wheels sluicing the water even now if I shut my eyes. It echoed off of the hills across from our house.

I dragged a big metal tub to the steps leading to the water once. My sister Lynda and I wanted to float out to the paddle wheelers to get a closer look. Mama caught us so we didn’t get to go out very far.

We lived in a two story duplex with a basement built into a hill on our side of the river. The Bartoshes owned it. They were the Ukrainian family who lived in one half of the house. They rented us the other half.

I see very little color in these memories. They are sepia-toned photos and grainy black and white home movies someone has taken colored pencils to in my mind. You know the ones where everyone’s lips are the color of brandied cherries no matter how pale their skin is? The color is never quite right.

My mother labored with me for sixty hours. It was touch and go. I fought her insistence I be born by kicking and pushing back at every contraction. Mama often reminded me of how horrible her labor was with me so I should be grateful. My punishment is these skinny arms and legs that refuse to put on much weight no matter how much the rest of me gains. The excess clings in odd clumps and packages of flesh wherever they can. It looks like they’re forever threatening to fall off as I bounce over the rough roads of life.

My other birthmark is a spine that is crooked and misshapen. It is curled in upon itself as if wishing to hide in the fetal position of my womb self. My spine is shaped like a sideways question mark; the ess of a burrowing snake trying always to twist away from the rigors of life and asking major questions as it goes. My spine gives me good posture by default. I stand sort of defiant, militant. My chest leads. My head and shoulders are ramrod straight and squared, my face pointed straight on and chin up to the world.

Daddy’s spine was like that. He must have fought his birth, too. His body reflected his Siberian ancestry by remaining true to the ground. His spine was only slightly more crooked than mine. He didn’t blame it on his birth fight. He said it was from the Great Depression days of digging through the garbage behind the A & P in Fredericktown when he was a kid.

The neighborhood children would go back there to find the edible parts of the fruit heir parents couldn’t afford on coal wages. The market casually threw away the fruit that sat rotten in the bins rather than lower their prices to the miners’ families. Don’t let politicians fool you. This is what they really mean by ‘market economy’.

Daddy’s crooked spine could also have come from bending over to climb the steep Pennsylvania hillsides in search of wild garlic. His mother would crush and rub the cloves on lard she spread their homemade bread with. It gives the grease some flavor. Her folklore told her it would keep her children from getting worms. It suppose it worked because my Dad never looked wormy.

Daddy also bent down when he looked along the railroad tracks for anthracite coal. Anthracite coal is better for heating than the softer bituminous coal. Both were formed in peat bogs like the Dismal Swamp that doesn’t pay any attention to state lines and government jurisdictions. The Dismal straddles Virginia and South Carolina.

Mud and sand and mountains fell over the peat bogs way back in the Devonian and Carboniferous ages. That slowly put the squeeze to the partly decomposed peat, which converted it to combustible coal. The mud and sand became shale and sandstone.

The mountains remained for the miners to have something to dig down through to get to the coal. Anthracite coal has most of the impurities driven out so it burns better after you manage to get it lit. Some of the choice chunks fell off the trains that hauled the coal cars to and from the mines.

My dad and all my uncles and aunts would scour the railroad berm for lumps of coal to heat their row house with. It doesn’t make sense. The miners back then often didn’t have the money to buy enough coal to stay warm with even though they were the ones who dug it out of the ground with a pick and shovel in the first place.

Maybe the bend in his spine was because daddy lied about his age and went into the mines to work beside his pap when he was fourteen and his bones where still trying to grow. Miners forever duck their heads even when they’re not down in the Hole. It’s a learned response to keep from being beaned on the low ceilings of the rooms they gouge in the coal. This is their penitence for digging around in the body of the Earth like boys going through their mother’s pockets looking for loose change.

Daddy showed me their peculiar bobbing and hunched over walk. It took him a long time to straighten up when he walked, but his shoulders humbled over whenever he forgot to pay attention to his step.

The miners have to dig because there are bigger boys who own the mines. Those Owner Boys never have to dig the coal out themselves. They demand the black treasure from the Earth they lay claim on. It is blasted out of the synclines where the miners work miles below the Earth’s surface and the sun. The Owner Boys will trade the coal dug out for them by others for coins and bills. The coins and bills will carry the Owner Boys far, far away from the hills they strip bare and scatter with their middens of overburden and inferior lignite coal and pollution to the streams and groundwater around the mines where the miners live.

So the Eath beans the heads of the miners they hire for low wages because they are the ones most handy to Her touch. She’ll squash them like ants on occasion when She’s really had enough of the gouging. Daddy told me that this usually happens when the miners are back-mining the supporting columns of the rooms they’ve stripped of coal.

Now. THERE is a swat for you! Coal dust blowing everywhere as the Earth’s body collapses over the miner’s heads to mash them flat in their boring tunnels. Since the mine shafts are so deep beneath the surface of the ground, you can feel the shake and hear the rumble for a long time before coal dust blows out of the mine entry like a whale blowing water as it surfaces. The dust is the backdrop for the vigil kept at the mine entrance by the families of unaccounted for miners until they’re found alive. Or otherwise.

The Owner Boys never show up at these vigils. It’s just a glitch in the flow of money from the coal for them - an inconvenience in the production schedule that will mean a few less stock purchases and a bottle less of champagne for the day or until the insurance pays off. Usually, there is some Suit who acts as the public face of the Owner Boys standing in front of the reporters and radio mikes trying to convince the public that theirs was a safe mine and all precautions are always taken. Times haven't changed much.

I remember daddy coming off shift from the mines. He was totally black except for his teeth and the whites of his eyes. Daddy was dark skinned to begin with. Not the rich coffee and tea of Africa, but the swarthy, dark ocher and olive of Siberian stock.

My sister inherited his straight blue-black hair and black eyes with their picanthropic fold. It gave them an odd, Oriental look. Lynn was dark skinned too, but the admix of one or another of my mother’s more colorful relatives blended the best of all worlds on her palette. I guess coal was in daddy’s blood since anthropologists have found evidence of ancient coal mining operations where his ancestors hailed from. Maybe the coal helped stain the skin of his people dark in that part of the world.

I inherited my mama’s sea green and turquoise eyes and just enough of her auburn highlights to keep my thin hair from being a nondescript mousy brown. I have olive skin. Not olive enough to look truly exotic even though I am euphemistically called 'Eurasian.' I’m neither East nor West but stuck somewhere in between like avacado in a sandwich. My coloring makes me look like the outside of a hard-boiled egg yolk when the white comes away with the shell. You can really tell it when I dare to wear yellow.

I’ve taken to fading as I age like an old rose that’s kept around in water too long. I see pictures of me in the seventh grade class of Ben Franklin Junior High, Section Seven. I’m the dark little being who would look more at home on the streets of Bangalore instead of the Six Mile Creek girl I am. I was the darkest one in my seventh grade class, but not as dark as daddy.

One time daddy came home after sunset while I was at the window waiting for him. I could see him walking down the lane, a darker shadow in the gloom swinging his lunch pail. He saw me looking at him through the window and grinned at me. The effect was not unlike the Cheshire Cat that appeared in the Wonderland tree above Alice’s head. Maybe mama anticipated this scene when she gave me my middle name. I’m called Alice, too.

I could also smell the coal dust on daddy when he came home from the mines. I wanted to hug him. He made me wait until he’d had a bath. The coal on daddy smelled like rock and earth and something a step down from sulphur. Kind of like when the teacher used to put your nose on the chalkboard ring when you were a bad kid in school.

I always got my nose in the chalk-drawn ring because I was a daydreamer. I didn’t mean to. I just forgot and got caught because I couldn’t help myself from following the stories that would just appear in my head. The teacher said it was daydreaming and daydreaming was NOT allowed for little girls in grade school. So the teacher drew a circle high up on the blackboard so I had to stand on my toes to reach it and stretch to put my nose in the circle. That’s how I know that the blackboard smells like. Daddy told me that the blackboard is slate and slate is a close step to coal.

Daddy earned good money working in the mines. The Almanac says these were boom years after World War II and a good miner could take home good wages for the day. Daddy was the best. He could easily load several boxcars of coal with just a pick and shovel and a mule. He held the record of loads at Bailey Mine for a long time.

Daddy bought one of the hard to come by post war cars that were rationed out with some of his mine money. There’s a picture of toddler me standing at the back bumper of a shiny new, coal black 1950 Oldsmobile squinting up through the sunlight at the camera. I’m squinting because the directions on the Kodak Brownie camera said the subject should always face into the sun. There’s another one of me in the same pose at the bumper of an old Model “A” Ford. I don’t know if coal money bought that but it was my mama’s car. I remember waking up once in the back seat of the old Model “A” with mama and Aunt Betsy singing, ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’ as they drove into the night. I added the dog’s part and they laughed.

My other dog story concerns Baba Bartoshes’ dog, Lady. Remember, the Bartoshes owned the duplex we lived in? I used to love to pet Lady’s soft, gray muzzle and long ears. She was always so slow and gentle with me and wagged her tail when I would pop around the corner squealing with delight when I saw her. One morning when I was three or four, Daddy put Lady in the back seat of the shiny new Oldsmobile for Baba. Baba cried as she shut the door and went back inside her part of the house. Lady just lay there with her head down on the seat. We drove out to the country with her and stopped at this shallow stream where it ran over some rocks. Lady used to come with us to wash the cars out there sometimes and she loved splashing in the water and chasing the drops.

Daddy carried Lady out and laid her next to the stream because she wouldn’t walk. She looked very sleepy. Daddy sat next to her talking to her and petting her ears and head like I did. He even sang this lullaby to her in his deep voice.

Go to sleep, Lady girl,
There are angels around you,
Go to sleep, Lady girl,
You’ve been a good friend, too.

I thought that was real nice the way he made the words for Lady. I played by the stream with the rocks. We left a long time later without Lady. I asked daddy why we were leaving her and he said because she was very, very tired and had to go to sleep. She must have been really sleepy because she didn’t jump up or even move when we got her out of the car like she usually did when she saw me and was all wiggles.

When I got a little older, I remembered daddy singing to Lady. I thought that he had sung her into the long sleep. It is natural for me to think that the woods are some place you go when you are very tired and need a long sleep yourself.

I have other memories of Fredericktown. I remember winning a silver dollar for my Little Red Riding Hood costume one Halloween. My sister was a clown and she won a silver dollar, too. Mama made our costumes. My love of thread comes from her. I used to sled down the hill by the Moose Hall. One time, Ina Rae and I danced the polka. Everyone cleared the floor. They thought we were cute but I got really self-conscious because I just wanted to dance the Polka with Ina Rae.

My grandmother bought a clown doll for my third birthday. I wouldn’t pick it up and love it because she wouldn’t let me touch the beautiful Victorian doll she had on her bed that was all green and blue satin. She must not have thought much of the clown doll because she tossed it to me from across the kitchen when she came in. I couldn’t catch it and it landed on the floor. I guess I didn’t think much of it either after that because I went back to toting around my ratty little rag dog mama made me while the clown doll stayed on my bed. Mama said Grandma Kerik didn’t know how to give things to people because she had grown up hard and had to help raise her eight brothers and sisters and didn’t have time to learn such things as tenderness.

I was in the hospital once for malnutrition or pneumonia – I don’t know which is fact. The room was green and the bed was made out of iron. My dad was not there.

My parents won the first television set in Fredericktown at a raffle. The screen was round and it didn’t have color. I talked to the television screen when Howdy Doody asked which toothpaste us kids used. I thought that he lived in the back of the television set.

I also remember eating green grapes that made me sick from the coal shed next to the driveway and red cherries from the tree out front by the river. They were sweet until you got to the pit. Then they were a little tart. I have good memories of the little log cabin daddy built us to play in. He cut the logs from the forest along the river and dragged them home one by one until he had enough. He put a swing in the tree for us, too. Most of all, I remember how hard daddy worked.

My grand pap taught daddy about the ways of the mines. He called my dad ‘Yonco’ even though daddy’s name was really John. Pap would ‘blow the hole’ like a crazy man. Preparations were always the same.

Daddy and pap would bore a hole into the coal vein and then they would tamp dynamite sticks down in there. Pap attached the fuse and sent daddy back down the tunnel to wait. Instead of regulation lengths of the gunpowder-permeated line, pap gave new meaning to the term “short fuse”. He lit the fuse and ran like hell laughing like a madman back to where daddy waited. Pap always timed it so the concussion wave lifted him and threw him flying out in front of the blast. Most of the time, he would land at daddy’s feet. I guess he missed the excitement of bear baiting, riding horses, and fleeing the Pogrom in Russia and needed the edge of danger to make him feel alive in the darkness and monotony of the mines.

I once heard daddy say that the only time that his pap showed him affection was when he was drunk on vodka. Since this was also the time that pap chose to belt them around, daddy, his brothers and sisters, and my grandmother had to lay low until they saw which way the wind was blowing.

Papa took a bottle of homemade vodka in his lunch pail to wash down the hard bread and meat he and daddy brought for lunch. The doctors told him he’d have to give up the hand rolled cigarettes with Turkish tobacco he favored and the daily bottle of vodka if he wanted to best the black lung and live a long life. Pap said, “The hell with you!” and kept drinking his vodka. He lived until he was nine-two. I guess he was willing to give up the long life for some quality time.

When pap made his own vodka down in their basement, he flavored it with cherry pits or fennel seeds. He also baked his own bread. Both my parents have passed that catechism of diverse talents on to me, a ‘Renaissance Woman’ as a white haired storyteller once called me.

Daddy could tell a good story. He told me about his sister, Lara who was born with a veil of embryonic skin over her face. According to daddy’s people, that gave her the gift of seeing the future. She foretold her own death under the wheels of a hit-and-run driver when she was a tender six years old. Daddy told me of being sent to find her with his brothers and discovering her crumpled body and little wagon on the railroad tracks below the road. He would find himself laying on the same tracks for two days in a twilight sleep after being hit by a car close to the same spot where they found Lara. They put a steel plate in Daddy’s head. He was forever sensitive to the heat of the sun on it after that. His sister was beyond steel patches and help when they found her along the tracks lying like the coal they scavenged for to heat their house.

I guess kids were expendable then because the two men who hit daddy and his sister had something or other to do with Owner Boys mine management and weren’t any help with the hospital or the undertaker.

I also think the plate in daddy’s head helped him tell me such good stories. It was hot in the mines because it was deep in the earth. But at least the sun wasn’t shining on the top of his head to distract him so he could remember what he heard and saw.

Daddy worked the mines until he was sixteen. He lied about his age again and joined the C.C.C. Camps set up by President Roosevelt under the New Deal. The conservation camps were set up to deliver some relief to poor people in the way of jobs and to keep groups of hungry young men from attacking and eating the wealthy and the government. They built dams and cleared brush from the roads for room and board and a small wage.

At the Company Store, things did not come cheap even though the mine wages were, so all daddy’s brothers and sisters had to contribute in some way. Daddy gave his mine check and C.C.C. wages to grandma Kerik to feed his brothers and sisters so they never went looking for politicians to eat.

Daddy explained to me the difference between anthracite and lignite coal. And I loved hearing about pap and the dynamite. I even liked the stories about the company row houses that he grew up in that were covered with tarpaper that blistered in the summer heat. Most of all, I liked daddy’s rich, baritone voice that he sang Lady into the long sleep with. He taught me another song he learned from the other miners. He said they would sing it while they worked the coal down in the mines.

Come all you young fellas
So young and so fine
And seek not you fortune
Way down in the mines.

It will form as a habit
And seep in you soul,
‘Til the streams of your blood are,
As black as the coal.

For it’s dark as a dungeon
And damp as the dew,
Where the dangers are doubled,
And the pleasures are few.

Where the rain never falls
And the sun never shines,
It’s dark as a dungeon
Way down in the mines.

When my life it is spent and the ages shall roll
My body will blacken and turn into coal
When I look from the doors of my heavenly home,
I’ll pity the miner that’s digging my bones.

Daddy died in 1984, his mustache still as dapper as it had been as when he was a young man. He’s forming coal of his own.

Dina Kerik, 1999

Not Your Mother's Disiderata

I shamelessly stole this off of Lesly Finn's Art Blog because I almost peed myself when I read it. Anything that gets a rise of emotion from me these days deserves to be tucked under the arm and absconded with like a fat goose before Christmas. Enjoy. - Love, Dina

DETRITUS

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
And remember what peace there may be in silence.
Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead,
Do not walk in front, for I may not follow
Go over there somewhere.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly.
Be open minded,
but do not lean forward or your brain may fall out.

Know that there will be good days and bad days
And this is one of them.

Always dismantle and clean the dog before going to bed,
But avoid the use of spot remover or you may never see him again.

You are a child of the universe.
It is only a small world if you don't have to paint it,
So do not wish for everything unless you have a really big cupboard.

Do not worry about the pace of life,
concern yourself only with its sudden ending.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons.
Sleep well.
If you cannot sleep well, practice more often.

Borrow from pessimists, they don’t expect it back.

Remember, if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day,
Teach him to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink himself stupid.

It is always darkest before the dawn.
That is the time to steal your neighbour's newspapers.

Be gentle with yourself.
Bear in mind that depression is anger without enthusiasm
And good health merely the slowest way to die.

Never argue with a fool for he is doing the same.

Know that if at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not a good idea
And that timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.

Always remember that all is not lost, though I haven’t seen it for some time.

Be yourself.
If you cannot become wiser, try to be older.
Aim as I do, to live forever;
so far I am doing all right.

Never stand between a dog and a lamp post
And never hit a man with glasses, always use something larger and heavier.

Remember that some people are only alive because it is illegal to kill them,
A closed mouth gathers no feet and nature abhors a vacuum cleaner.

Be cheerful, strive to be happy
And remember that your sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

Go far ...... and start as soon as possible.
Adieu.
----oooOooo----
For the original see Max Ehrmann

Balance

we struggle to
find the balance between
fault lines and forgiveness

by C. Robin Janning