Think-tank system Macbeth

I shall read from the book of Closed Captions. You know, the little CC icon one can click on in a YouTube video to generate automatic subtitles, if one is watching old, old movies late at night, many with British actors speaking at ludicrous speeds. 

You see, one is drawn into this alternate universe when one has no social life. And one easily forgives auto-title occasionally butchering dialogue along the lines of this email which promises me millions: 

Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise and may offend your personality for contacting you without your prior consent... 

One understands when auto-title mistakes "First of all--" for Festival, or "Just think," for Testing. But what situation in a 1930's film justifies the caption Think-tank system Macbeth? One is baffled when the blast of a cruise ship's horn translates to The moon. One suggests you watch movies like Cottage to Let or Ghost Train with the sound off to behold the abomination. 

Here we go. One has added only punctuation. 

That's not the way to lubricate my last statement, just minutes away.OK. Click on them for me. That's it. Baloney Department. Last month, Mom, I made the Eurasian beautiful. 

Thank you, ominous possibility 20. I'm at the Vatican, OK?

May we put one in the Yahoo group?

Paddington trendy pick from Pat the bat. You want static. No, no, no, he should've come home tonight. Yeah, I old.

Thank you, extremism up. You must spatter out to make room for me, because of me.

Missus Brendzen structures all that you want to consider yourself a guest.

I killed them, thank you very much indeed.

I might try to stay up six minutes and 42 seconds. 

Got tough, but what about men? Notably, no lunch.

28 couldn't look good enough

and has an assistant who is, shall we say, a little girl.

You get the gist. Really, I guess I'd like to find a hidden key to this secret language, some profound code.  After all, what's the answer to life, the universe & everything?... 42.  Coincidence? I think not. 

Give it a try. (Your results may vary.) If you need me, I'm at the Vatican, OK?

The View From January

On mornings when I can, I drink coffee by my kitchen window. In warmer weather, I drink it on my deck, with a view of my little pond. I have a rickety, cushioned reclining lawn chair I found for free on the way to Perry's a couple years ago. It's so comfortable, I keep it in the sunny corner of the kitchen all winter. I call it my Titanic deck chair. This was the view, last weekend.

The temperature was in the sixties F on Christmas day. My pond didn't freeze across until January 2, a new late record. I worry about climate change, but selfishly, I'm happy there hasn't been brutal cold and snow so far. I don't like mud, but it's easier to walk in it than on ice with my prosthetic leg. 

My leg's attachment mechanism (the lock that keeps my stump cinched into the socket with a lanyard screwed onto the gel liner) is currently broken. This means the leg can pull out of the socket, gradually, but enough to slow my walk to a cautious creep. This is on top of the increasing layers of stump socks I have to wear since my stump's been shrinking for months. I've started the process of getting a new socket, but I took the leg in to Hanger yesterday hoping for a new lock now. None on hand. Ordered, expected next week. 

So outside, I creep. Inside, the coffee's hot, the deck chair comfy, and the ship isn't sinking right now. The sun is even shining, today. Happy New Year from Holy Crow Farm.

Dream of the Long Walk: Solstice, One Year Ago

This is a dream I had one year ago last night, taken verbatim from my journal:

It was the End of Things. Society had broken down. There was lightning in the sky, and a cross between a comet and a bombing. There was an ongoing struggle against shadows. Fear shadows, pain shadows.

The choices: cower in the ruins of our homes in the woods, apart from everything we couldn't remember. Or start walking. Walking was an act of faith. Of surrender. 

At first, there was a veneer of camaraderie. Once you started walking, you found others to talk with as you walked. But as the stream of walkers grew, you lost touch with some, then forgot and met others. Then we just walked in silence.

We walked until we reached covered walkways like markets, but they stretched for miles. Some had people selling eggs, bartering. Then there were concrete paths, stairs through structures with objects on either side, on tables or just heaped. Clothing, watches, phones, shoes, for sale or barter. And also assembled in hopes that one of our steady stream of walkers passing by would see something they remembered.

When we were too tired to walk, we lay down next to the walkway. People gave us something to eat, and a blanket. Then when we woke, we'd start walking again.

As I walked, I realized I had a real left leg, though it should have been an above-knee prosthetic. I began to understand that the people at the sides of the walkways had already remembered, and, more importantly, had found objects that were clues to themselves and what they needed to do now. Gradually, I realized some of them were resistance fighters. Guerrilla warriors fighting for memory, fighting amnesia, on missions to fight the shadows. I identified with them. I wanted to help them. I knew I should have been too old (fifty-three!) and an amputee, but I was neither.

The farther I walked, the more patient, knowledgeable people I met waiting beside the tables to help us remember. I knew the ones who were afraid to remember and discover were still outside this place, clinging to the ruins they couldn't identify anymore. You had to be willing to walk. Everyone walking was ready to consider and confront what they might find.

Then I saw forks in the walkway that led to woodsy, rural areas with animals. There were bears in some enclosures along with cows, and I think the bears had forgotten too because they weren't especially dangerous. There was the potential for us to find the animal we needed to be paired with, like a totem, or an actual individual animal. These people who identified their animal-partner could join with the animal and go fight the shadows, understanding that you both could be obliterated in that battle. Then you'd have to start the walk again.

I found a table of t-shirts, I I shuffled through them. One said Tioga Park [where I exercised racehorses in the 1980's] and I said, This means something... At another table, a phone rang: an old, black phone with a curly cord. Whenever this happened, the person closest had to answer it. It was my boyfriend, Perry. But he wasn't sure where he was. I wasn't sure whether he was walking yet.

Then I passed through a building built on a pillar. To clean it, everything was secured and the whole structure tipped on its side so the wind could blow through, then tipped back.

Then I reached a farm with ponies and cows and pigs in a field. I said, THIS IS ME! We crawled under the fence and I put my hands on a chestnut pony that looked like Cupcake, the Shetland I owned for twenty years who taught my daughters to ride. I started to cry. The people helping me said, Good! This is good! 

They took me to see more horses. I remembered Laredo, and I fell down in the grass and clover and sobbed. I saw an appaloosa that looked like her, but wasn't, then another that could have been her just as I was different, with my real leg. I put my hands on this Laredo-mare, and I sobbed. The people with me said, This is your spirit partner! You'll both join the fight when you're ready. You don't have to walk anymore.

***

So this was my Walking Dream, solstice 2014. My journal entry ended, I'd like to put a photi of Laredo  **HERE**   but tonight the blog just gives me a frowny-face. Alas. You'll have to use you imagination. Happy Solstice. Tomorrow the daylight starts to increase.

The Stories We Need to Tell

This week I heard storyteller and writer Regi Carpenter speak about her craft & upcoming memoir at a Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators meeting in Ithaca. The most powerful moment for me came when she described how her bother died and she realized many of his stories could never be known.

Then she asked, "What story are you not telling?"

It pierced me in two ways. While I've been writing down events in my life I used to be unable to even think about, other topics still make me hesitate, though I know that's one characteristic of interesting writing. To meet the hardest, most personal stuff head-on is to share elements commonly hidden at our core.

The other part is that I've been grieving the unknown stories of my boyfriend, best friend, lover and partner, Perry, who died last August 9 after a week on life support. It still seems impossible he's gone. 

I helped write his obituary, which seemed ludicrous, impossible that I was doing it, even as I did. I never used to understand why you would write, "passed away after a brief illness." But that was the line I used. Everything around his death was impossible. I included the basics (grew up in Blauvelt NY, educated at New England College & came to manage a rock back in Ithaca in the early 1970's, before managing a grounds crew at Cornell Plantations until his retirement) but I had to leave out the details that made him so complicated, funny, resilient and fair. How he married a millionaire, flew planes, drove race cars and traveled the world, but eventually divorced her. His heroin addiction in his late twenties and the arrest that probably saved his life. How he and I drove around various Finger Lakes in his '62 Corvette or his Porche, discussing families, love and breakups, depression, religion and atheism. On weekends, at his house twenty miles from mine, he grilled steaks or salmon, steamed vegetables and baked potatoes, and we watched NASCAR, golf and horse racing. With our gang at a pub called The Rose, we watched American Pharoah win the triple crown. Now every memory is a push-pin in my map of our last months, designating a decreasing distance to the end of my time with him. 

We were fixed up by a mutual friend the summer after my amputation in 2007. We hit it off, and spent weekends together for eighteen months. Perry called me almost  every single night, though I told him I knew he'd start slacking off the routine...but he didn't. After a year and a half, I was struggling with our age difference (he was 60 then, I was 46) and what I felt was a class difference. I was very aware he was semi-retired, and divorced from the millionaire; it struck me as a different world from my starving-artist/homesteader scramble of a life. I knew his background involved chainsaws and backhoes, rural as mine. I just couldn't quite see it.

I broke up with him. I call this my Three Year Brain-fart. But we still exchanged birthday cards. (He was a Gemini, like my horse.) I turned fifty in January of 2012. Got over myself. Got Perry's  birthday card, and decided to take up his offer of having coffee.

The last three and a half-plus years were wonderful. Solid, dependable. The kind of adult partnership I've never had. Even if conflicts twitched me off balance, I reveled in it; it was part of the relationship. I kidded him he might be too young for me. We talked about traveling to Scotland someday. We joked about trying to see if we could live together. We were happy. I feel like I let my guard down. Me, of all people, usually expecting disaster. I was content.

Perry hadn't felt well in a long time. Yeah, he was a lifelong smoker. He'd been seeing doctors for various symptoms, awaiting test dates for CT scans, MRIs. He kept playing golf, but we never did rent a houseboat in the Thousand Islands like we planned. It was impossible that his shortness of breath worsened so suddenly that I drove him to the ER, where he was put in the ICU, then on a ventilator by midnight. A "spot" on his lung x-ray two weeks before had massed into a hurricane filling the picture. Perry stayed on the ventilator for a week. This is what they mean by "life-support," by "medically-induced coma." Then it was removed. They gave Perry morphine. He was too weak to speak, semi-conscious. He died the day after. He was 67.

Going through his belongings with his relatives, we found a stash of photographs, the ones Perry had told me about, assumed lost in various moves.  My puzzle picture of Perry had been filling in gradually, with big empty hollows. Some  gaps filled in when his family arrived at the hospital where I'd camped out all week. Then a flood of photos in the hidden boxes... Some matched stories I'd heard from him in detail. Other offered questions and incidents. Except I can't find out now. I can't ask him.

 Death is still new to me. Rindle, the pony I raised, owned, loved and eventually put down, described on this blog, has been my only preparation. She taught me to grieve. It helps now.

I've deactivated my facebook account for now. I'm trying to sort things out in my head as I work on my fences, give some smart-lessons to my new mini-cayuse, write another novel in verse, pursue publication. And sort things out in print right here. It's been a strange lesson, losing Perry after I'd finally relaxed into a relationship with no more restlessness. When I took him to the hospital, I was sure there would be time to discuss and approach the events, good or bad. When they were about to put Perry on the ventilator, I was afraid of being over-dramatic, but I was also just plain afraid. I said, "Wait--" and slipped his oxygen mask down so I could kiss him and tell him I love him. 

I'm so glad I did. I miss him so much. It's hard when the phone doesn't ring each night at ten.     

Perry's obit is here, if you're interested. Perry Huested

What We Do

A long time ago I began telling myself, Things might look different in the morning. It was when I'd left my first marriage and moved with my toddler daughter and our animals to this hilltop, and also begun to leave Christian Science, the religion that warped and defined my whole life.

It was the first glimpse of doubt permitted in what had been an absolute, iron-clad faith. But the ability to doubt is an underhanded stealth-skill everyone should learn. On some of my worst days I've been able to cast doubt on whether events could actually get any worse, and therefore might improve. It can be a back door to hope.

Last winter was snowy and bitterly cold for two months straight. We never did have a January thaw around New Year's, as we almost always do in central upstate NY. One of my daughter's old 4H goats died, but the other hung on through the sub-zero temps. I got over my goat-craze long ago (I drove here from Boston in 1982 with my first goats in the back seat) but this year I caved. I got the old goat a heat lamp, then a blanket. I bonded with the old girl, one old goat to another. (If the British Horse Society examiners could have seen me blanketing that goat...) Spring was a long time coming, and I struggled through my worst depression in years. It was directly related to my interactions with my elderly parents, who live ten miles away. Our relationship has varied wildly, and seems determined to zigzag some more now that I thought my emotions were neatly sorted.

While I was gritting my teeth, busy enduring winter, I got a phone call: NUMBER UNKNOWN. I almost didn't answer, but decided I had strength enough to chase away a collection agency one more time...except it was a fellow with a British accent, hesitant and stumbling. Was I Liz Heywood? I probably thought he was crazy...but he'd promised his wife he would call me after she died, to thank me for my blog.

I hadn't touched this blog in eighteen months at that point, and only posted a few times the previous year. I don't know the statistics on blog abandonment, but I'd guess there are more blogs in arrears than not. I felt I should apologize about this to the Brit (his name was Mark, apparently calling from England) but he told me his wife had loved reading my blog, that she too was an amputee and horseman, and that she'd made a list of people for him to call after she died, to thank. I topped the list.

I've thought before about the incidents and anecdotes I've come across all through my life, way before the inter-web universe, music and writing, photos, stories and cryptic observations, mental burdocks that cling tight. I've known I've been able to touch others just as I've been touched. But it's amazing to find out the pebble I dropped in my pond has rippled so far beyond the water I see.

It would be great to say my depression ended after that phone call. It didn't. It limped on unil it was smothered by sun and leaves and grass. I can be a world-class blog-procrastinator, claiming I hate the pressure of even a self-inflicted deadline, but I've just spent weeks working like a fiend, fencing in my pasture for my mare. She's been boarded at a farm the past couple years since I put my old pony, Rindle, down. A week ago, Laredo and the mini I bought as her roommate stepped off the trailer into the head-high jungle of pasture. Part of my self slid back into adjustment better than my best visit to my chiropractor.

Today was my pony Rindle's birthday, back in 1984. My horses have always pushed and pulled me into action, gotten me up (out of bed or off the ground) to continue. I had no intention of building fences in my fifties, but what the hey. 

It's summer, and we're still kicking. I'm getting ready to send another novel in verse manuscript to my agent, and who knows?  Life might not be as bad as we fear. If you'll excuse me, I have to go chase the goat off my porch.

Though the Moon Be Still As Bright

A year ago today I said goodbye to one of the finest equines I've had the privilege to know, one of the horses closest to my heart, a pony named Rindle. She was twenty-nine and I wasn't sure she'd survive another snowy NY winter, at least not without being cold and miserable. Her hoofs weren't even growing. I owed her the best, easiest transition I could give her. 

It was hard to call the vet, hard to call the backhoe guy. I've put down more than a few horses, helped others with the euthanasia and burials. But this was Rindle. 

Rindle was the daughter of the red road appaloosa mare I brought to upstate NY with me from Massachusetts in 1982 when I was twenty, the mare I rode bareback, sometimes with only a piece of twine around her neck.

Her sire was the cute-as-a-button pony colt I got for forty bucks at an auction, a hellion disguised as a rocking horse. This was Rindle's breeding: by Clever Opportunist out of Sanity.

Rindle was foaled in 1984 when I was an impossibly young twenty-two, about to begin work as an exercise rider, about to marry a dairy farmer, and years away from the birth of my human fillies.

She never grew past thirteen hands. It made her big enough for me to ride but too small for me to compete and possibly overwhelm with my overeager competitive nature that lasted into my thirties (riding her taller full brother.) Instead I rode Rindle on trails, in hunter paces, and led daughters or lessons from her. She taught dozens of kids to ride, sailed over Pony Club jumps, loped around 4H rings and marched down Main Street in the Spencer Picnic parade. 

She was a master of the center-of-the-ring shoulder drop, a classic staple of lesson ponies. (She pulled this on me when I was demonstrating a canter transition and I hit the ground so hard I sprained my ankle. That was only ten years ago.) In a wild and wonderful hunter pace, Rindle and I, with my nine-year-old daughter and her pony, Cupcake, rode a blistering round over the jumps to catch up with our friends on horses. Our friends cam in first; we were penalized to second place for going too fast.

Rindle's last day was mild and sunny. She spent it grazing with her best horse friend, my mare Laredo. All week, snippets of a poem had run through my head: Lord Byron, quoted by Ray Bradbury in a short story I read back in my pony girl days:

So, we'll  go no more a roving, 

   So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

   And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

   And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

   And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

   And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a roving

   By the light of the moon.

I was raised in Christian Science, where death and mortality are "unreal." I floundered through the deaths of pets, but I never had to contend with losing a relative until I was an adult, and by then well-trained to freeze my emotions. It's fair to say that Rindle's loss was the first death I faced head on as a human being. I raised her and knew her for twenty-nine years. She was a family member.

I stayed with her as she breathed the last time. I bawled like a baby. I clipped hair from her mane and tail. My friends saw to her burial while I loaded Laredo for the ride to a farm six miles away where I board her now. Where I'm riding again after a five year hiatus. I owe this to Rindle. 

I kept Rindle's photos as my desktop computer wallpaper for the whole year. I think about her every single day. I miss her, and I let myself feel this hurt. She's taught me to grieve. I'm glad her transition out of life was as smooth as the one into it, both in a meadow in clear, warm weather. I'll always remember riding her at night, July or January, with crickets or the crunch of hoofs on snow, by the full moon.

Miss you, Rindle-kid.

Voting myself off the island

OK campers, my six-month blogging sabbatical is over. Last spring was tough. My writing  was going well, but my mental health, not so much. Usually my depression is worst in the dark months, but last March I had a Funk that wouldn't quit.

Around that same time, a documentary maker who'd seen me speak in New York last year contacted me. He wanted to make a film about me & the fallout, physical & emotional, from my surviving untreated osteomyelitis as a kid in a Christian Science family.

This filmmaker has excellent credentials: director, producer & director of photography for many projects including a documentary examining prayer in school. He was enthusiastic about the benefits publicizing my story could have on public awareness of the state laws that allow parents to pray for seriously ill children. He was straight about my time commitment and the hassle of having him follow me with a camera for weeks.

I told him I had to think about it. Part of me was thrilled. Cue the music: SURVIVOR! Outwit! Outplay! Outlast!

See, I started watching the show a year ago on DVD. (I don't have a TV signal, and for this I am truly thankful.) I confess: I've been a secret fan of Hell's Kitchen for its sheer operatic, overblown qualities, so when I ran out of Netflix discs, I gave Survivor a try. Hey! what fun! People left on islands, hungry, sleep-deprived, exhausted, eating bugs & running obstacle courses, no-phone-no-lights-no-motor-car, in a race to make friends and control enemies, with the goal of voting off everyone ELSE without alienating them to the point they'll vote against you when the million bucks is at stake.

I really like the rawness of this show. People behave badly or nobly, rising to or falling short of individual potential. They come through and Do the Right Thing, or they get scared and selfish, and betray.

Self-awareness plays a big part. After my many years of therapy (especially groups) I'm very big on self-awareness. It's never safe to be sure you're in control, or assume you know exactly what's going on. I know from experience that the failure to imagine disaster does not immunize you against terrible events. (This is a real problem in politicians & talk-radio hosts but I won't go there right now.)

Survivor's entertainment is created in the editing. It needs heroes and villains. I'm sure some (many?) contestants watched the show appalled at how they seemed on camera, and probably some families and friends would agree they aren't really like that.

However, they surrendered all control to the game, the editors, and the camera.

Did I want to do that? Yeah, no. Maybe I'm a vain, selfish control freak, but one thing is certain: I'm a control freak with an emotional balance more precarious than on my bottom-of-the-line prosthetic knee. 

I told the documentary fellow thanks but no thanks. I did the right thing for myself: I took as much pressure off my limping brain as possible, hoping the funk wouldn't hang on too long. I cancelled speaking events and started riding my horse again. Over the summer I painted my parents' house and worked in my garden. I swam across Cayuga Lake as part of Women Swimmin For Hospicare. And I feel better now.

I want to do more speaking about child religious medical neglect, and I don't mind being videotaped. I want to improve my speaking as I close in on being a published author. But I know my limits. I'm a lower-case survivor, more castaway than outlast-er. I do my best work without an audience. I'm my own tribe, and I have spoken. 

Too bad that filmmaker isn't named Wilson.Wilson