The Second Shot Heard Around the World- Part 4
Monica King
October 16, 2005
Colossians 1:15-19
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.
Here is the gist of it though;
"Always tell the truth, even if it appears at the time to hurt you. When you tell a lie, it sends ripples out into the world of consciousness that sends people in the wrong direction. If you actually respect those people, you don't want to do that. It retards their progress as well as your own. But worse from a selfish standpoint is that when you give people false information, it guarantees that they are not going to be able to help you, because what they give you back will based on your own lies. God knows the ripples in the world that are caused by lies are depicted well enough by all the blood and trauma we see every day, that we have become inured to. Each of us has accepted a relative level of necessary bloodletting as our very cost of doing business, so in that sense, none of us is any different from clever charlatans like Cheney, and realizing that, as Paul Levy has pointed out, helps us better understand the method to both their madness and ours. Study the Tenth Commandment (Exodus 20:17), and realize that men in black frocks insist that God told men only to above all protect their property, and only then to look after the females one had happened to acquire as property. These are the people we have let run the world for five millennia, and also the ones shouting the loudest that to fix what has been broken, things should be done their way. But here's the real curriculum. Since in a very basic way, man hates himself, it becomes a fatal step of twisted logic that his fondest dream is to gloriously destroy himself defending what he has chosen for himself to be worthwhile. To make his death count for something. He does this as an act of expiation for the price he cannot pay for a gift so great that it is way beyond his comprehension, a fact which he mostly chooses to ignore." This excerpt from the writings of Ted Kaminski. You can check him out at rense.com. Where he writes a regular column.
There are many of us clarion writers now on the web. We have seen the immense potential here for touching our brothers & sisters with our thoughts. We are writing because to remain silent is suicide at this juncture in time. And suicide is one of those acts we in mental health provision try desperately to prevent, not always with success. But we do attempt to avert this whenever possible. Because, bottom line, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how tribulous the circumstances, LIFE IS PRECIOUS!!!! Life is PRICELESS!
Of course there are those who disagree with this. Those who find it perfectly acceptable to enslave their fellow or sister men , women & children. They have been doing this for millennia. Selling humans like themselves to other humans.
Selling babies. Selling women as sperm receptacles & targets of hatred & disdain.
Because they are operating under the strong delusion that the material aquisition of vast properties, lands & staffs of sycophantic servants, worrying & scurrying after every whimsical need & desire their puny little dicks & egos demands is what the ?good life? is all about.
Kingdoms of the earth. Earthly kings. The radical teaching the Universal Anointed One came to deliver was a message those little egos are desperately fearful of. Because His message meant their death.
Don?t get me wrong. Death of an ego is NOT death of a soul, no quite the contrary. Death of an ego is actually the prerequisite to the ?fullness of life? in a body. Of a soul encased in a temple of flesh. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Where were we?
I had gone to Simmons to study what normal human growth & development looked like. No, scratch that. I have never had much respect for "normal". In fact, from the moment we could dialogue I began teaching my own precious little boy & girl NOT to ever aspire to being "normal".
Normal is nowhere I would toss over my shoulder on our road trips as we had our most significant, honest, probing conversations in a car going somewhere.
Normal is nothing but a dot on a bell curve indicating C level work. Like teachers who grade you in class. On exams. C work is middle of the road. You will NEVER be normal kids. It is not possible. You were born of parents who never got a C in anything.
Be your self! Revel in who your are!
Oh, & by the way kids, don't buy into this notion that you were born to die. I absolutely do not believe that at all. You were born to live on, & on & on. You were born to LIVE. Period.
These are the simple rules I want you to keep firmly in your minds no matter what:
Eat when you are hungry.
Sleep when you are tired.
Do what you want.
That's it.
Repeat after me:
Eat when you are hungry.
Sleep when you are tired.
Do what you want.
I went to Simmons because I fell in love. And in so doing, I derailed the perfect plan to follow in the footsteps of my parents, & to return to the college, Middlebury in Vermont, where they had met, fallen in love, & had me. I was born into a college life. In a hospital where the nurses murmured about WHO was the father, I had so many frat brothers visiting me & oogling me through the glass window of the nursery there.
Later at Simmons in a Sociology class I was introduced to the concept of imprinting through the writings of Conrad Lorenz.
Imprinting was a phenomenon observed by Conrad Lorenz, where geese hatchlings attached themselves to the first object they saw upon exiting the egg. It was as if this object, man/animal/bird was interpreted to be the parent.
In my case, as a "hatchling" I imprinted on lots of guys. They all came to see me. They peered down at me in my plexiglass bassinette, & later the layette that was my first home in a tiny apartment in a frat house at Middlebury.
I came to be here on the planet on January 20th, 1955. Inauguration Day every four years for each President my whole entire life.
The first home of the first married couple to attend Middlebury as undergraduates.
I was properly baptized with a sprinkling of Episcopal water in the chapel of a Repubican Eisenhower White House Administration later that year.
Dr. Latch, the White House Chaplain himself a good friend of the family, sprinkled my head there. Truly a legit heiress to a mixed legacy of southern Confederate roots in America AND fierce Viking northern blood from the colder regions of Sweden. The Chaplain sealed these blessings on my then towheaded little body dressed in a pure white flowing baptismal gown, then carefully replacing the little white cap after delicately wiping the water off.
I am assured I was then bundled back into the car for a reception at Pops & Gigi's gracious home lined with other beautifully done professional photographs of my mother & her older brother & two sisters. A professional photo of my Mom & Dad grinning happily into the camera on the reception day, she dressed in a conservative white dress not exactly a wedding dress, but a debutante dress for sure, he with his pirate smile behind her, encircling his arms around her waist in the little garden just outside the screened in porch in the back. A lawfully wedded couple. Pops & Gigi made sure of that! As did Farmor & Farfar.
And processions of similar photographs as we all came along. The kind a professional photographer does. Air brushing the background away from our cute little selves, all dressed in white dresses & taffeta sashes, the little boys in cute little shorts with suspenders & white dress shirts. None of us would be photographed like that later on of course. That conservative Republican style & culture was just the way it was then though, growing up commuting from a sleepy suburb of Boston to the gracious nest of our maternal & paternal matriarch. I was born of noble parents.
My brother & I were only two years apart. We were the ones in the main, who were dressed in Lord & Taylor velvet & white clean dress shirts, I suffered the wide Madeline style hats with those stupid little elastic strings under the chin to hold it in place, along with the ridiculous little white gloves & new Easter outfit for several years on these predictable & exciting trips, because, well, it made the grown-ups so happy to see us dressed that way.
Doesn't the outfit make the person? We were simply the modern version of other little children that gazed at us in oil paintings commissioned in other times in the heart of southern gentility that hung on the walls of the art mueums we visited, the historic buildings of Washington, Alexandria, & Williamsburg as we were shepherded to visit all the important places that had been built by our ancestors on the backs of slaves, built with the blood of slaves. Little children suffering the same dress-up game, in clothes to make them too, look like little grown-ups. I saw the pained but enduring look in those eyes too, staring back at me.
I took it all in, but all along, it made me uncomfortable. I knew how to perform for these giants in my life as a child. I knew how good the food tasted, the fine things I was surrounded by were, & that these trips were good for me, my education, the expanding of my horizons & knowledge, but the houses seemed too big for me, the wealth just too much.
When it all became sensory overload, I was always relieved to just get back to Gigi's, her kitchen, her rocking chair & cozy bedroom with the four poster bed. With the white bedspread, & my own reassuring bed upstairs where I was watched over by ballerinas en pointe in pictures on the walls.
I was the catalyst for this change. Little old me! Coming along just a little too soon in the culture I had been born into. But as my parents both came from long lines of noble ancestors, a simple deception was set-up. My Mom would call it a "littel white lie". An error by omission. Oh by the way, the reason we never make a big deal about our anniversary, well, we eloped. We later told our folks; the Afghanistan diplomatic couple from Sweden, & the genteel parents from Washington about it because, well, we have a little one on the way. And uh, we aren't quite through school yet.
These days there is hardly anything at all scandalous about concealing an actual conception date from someone. Hell, children are abandoned regularly, pawned off on others, left on relatives doorsteps as immature procreants flee from the overwhelming responsibility of a fragile new life. Many children as they grow into adult bodies carry wounds & suffering from these kinds of abandonments.
So, so many children, wounded, wide-eyed children parading around in grown adult bodies, masquerading as "grown-ups", play-acting roles they have absolutely no idea how to carry out in reality. They are great pretenders. They dress in expensive suits, occupy prestigious offices, drive fancy cars, yet inside they are lost little children, thinking desperately in some twisted logic, that these outward accoutrements will bring them happiness, inner peace, & a sense of being loved, that never works.
The real definition of insanity is to repeat a behavior over & over again which has deleterious consequences, expecting a different result. War by definition, is insane. It has never brought peace. It never will. Lying never works either. It never saves anyone from anything...
My parents had met there, a coed private college far from the bustle of the urban centers of power-brokering America.
My Mom had come from Washington & was the youngest of a mortgage banker & his beloved wife who dabbled at teaching piano at one point in time. This was her only "job" as we would have defined it in our streaking, bra-burning days at Simmons.
Of course that is not true at all. Every mother is a working mother. I would repeat that over & over in my encounters with young moms in doctors' offices & clinics. "You are doing the hardest job you will ever love", borrowing from the Peace corps slogan I would tell them, as they brought in squirming yelling, tear-stained, rosy-cheeked toddlers, youngsters, sullen teenagers; with every sort of booboo, the usual bread & butter issues of a family practice; snotty noses, high fevers, ear aches, tummy aches, nightmares, won't go to bed when I tell him or her, broken limbs, holding in their poop, not toilet-trained on schedule... on & on & on the parade of the children came through our doors. Writhing toddlers with gashes needing stitches, always at just around 6pm, when the staff was tired, as were the parents & the wounded themselves, struggling to keep them immobile while breaking out the curved needles from the foil-packeted suture sets this particular physician "always" used...
To be a nurse you HAD to be a doctor-pleaser. You HAD to know THEIR magical formula for curing, for sewing up, for cleaning up, for measuring, for documenting. You had to know it all & do it all or you simply wouldn't last.
My grandmother "Gigi" as we all affectionately called her, was the quintessential matriarch of a gentile, genteel Washingtonian home in the Northwest section of town. Nestled into a tranquil side street just below Embassy row, walking distance from Villanova, but more significantly to us, easily accessible to our cousins' house an easy walk or run from Gigi's front lawn, through a small park, to the cul de sac where my Aunt lived with her six catholic children, our cousins.
Pops & Gigi. Gigi got her name from our oldest cousin Cathy who could not pronounce grandma.
We do not know how she was as a mother, of course, but ALL of her 18 grandchildren & 7 & counting great grandchildren adored her as the most bountiful, pleasant, loving grandmother any grandchild could ever have been blessed with. Her beloved husband Pops, our grandfather was likewise adored.
When the northern clan from New England, (that was us) went to visit Washington each spring & fall, we anticipated the good smells that came from her cozy kitchen. That she would have fresh baked chocolate chip cookies waiting in the cookie tin we all knew was in exactly the spot we had left it the last time.
We knew we could pull out the Chinese checker game from the old toy chest nestled in the corner of her kitchen, & that every morning she would be up getting Pops his corn flakes, slicing fresh strawberries on them, & preparing his grapefruit with that special tool she had to make each segment come out as you rotated the semihemisphere of it around with a spoon to dig the tart little pieces out. A special spoon too, with a slightly tooth-edged tip. Just for eating grapefruit halves. You could smell the coffee brewing, its seductive aroma curling up the stairs to our bedrooms. You would jump out of bed to run down there because you could also smell the Sara Lee coffee bread, the pecan coffee bread she had warming in her oven.
We knew we would be looking up at her nicknack shelves, a mahogany piece hung on the wall of the kitchen just above the old sturdy round maple table that was the breakfast nook.
That we could sit on the floor of the kitchen on the round, worn braided rag rug. That the same familiar "mammy" black maid door stop would be there to hold the swinging door open to the formal dining room, where she entertained graciously & formally during the holiday parties.
Later as a young mother myself, I would look at her, that "mammy", & feel shame at what she represented; slavery, but as a little girl she was simply a familiar, ground level, ample-bosomed mama figure I loved. She was part of Gigi's kitchen. She was a familiar symbol of the Washington scene, & the culture lying south of the Mason-Dixon line...
We knew she would be teaching us girls all about how to make those delicious cookies & mouth watering pies.
We could anticipate the smells that meant we were in Washington. It always smelled, well, like Gigi's house. Gracious, orderly, clean, rich, inviting, the homestead of our maternal branch of the family tree. The scent of Washington earth, more red clay than back home, permeated our playgrounds.
And we would run upstairs to our bedrooms, & spill our belongings out on our beds from our suitcases, after grabbing the stuffed toy she had carefully placed on each of our beds, always with a little surprise gift of money hidden there too. I will never forget the panda bear she had given me on one such visit in the spring. I loved that Panda until its fur was worn off. It had had a zipper in the back which contained a 5 dollar bill. What joy! What richness! Gigi always knew the things that delighted me, & that I would ALWAYS clamor at her feet jumping up & down excitedly to ask her, "when are we going to the zoo Gigi?"
Because the pilgrimage to the zoo was always a trip we had planned.
Along with a meal out at the Marriott to eat "Pappy Parker's Smoky Mountain Fri-iied Chicken". Oh how I & my brother loved that! As did my Mom. She loved returning to the bosom of her own family regularly to renew these moments of sheer bliss.
And in between these visits, my grandmother from Washington wrote. We loved seeing her careful, flowing cursive on letters with the Washington postmark come to our mailbox in Lincoln, Massachusetts at the little house we grew up in on an old road, a small little road called Old Winter Street.
She was the one who taught me the importance of our government & all of its structures & institutions. She was my tour guide to every Smithsonian institution. Always, always the zoo. She knew how especially important it was to me to visit the zoo in the spring, to see the new babies.
Over the years she would cut-out every article she found about the arrival of the white tigers, the arrival of the pandas, & the first births of the babies & send them along, tucked in a card she had picked out especially for me, again always with a "little something" as she would call it, tucked in too. A crisp note from the U.S. treasury. Always brand new. Hot off the press. it smelled good. It looked good.
It meant we had money to hop on our bikes with & make the trip into the little town of Lincoln's old general store & post office where on Saturdays we could spend hours oggling the penny candy counter where tantalizing Charleston Chews, fireballs, tootsie rolls, & wrapped caramels were lined up row after row for us to pick & choose from the safety of the glass. Red licorice, mmm, my favorite...
We had respect for the shopkeeper who could glide the inner sliding glass panel on her side to get each carefully chosen piece & place it in the small paper brown sack for us to scrunch together at the top & hang onto, gripped between a sweaty palm & the handle bar for the 3 mile ride home.
Such adventure & independence. All because of Gigi!
My grandfather Pops also was a wonderful, quietly diplomatic grandfather who taught us the value of money & savings. I recall how reverently we saw his regal mahogany chest of drawers in their bedroom directly off of that kitchen, where he kept Chiclets. Yellow packages of that pillow-shaped gum. Always peppermint flavored. Pops loved his Chiclets. And his golf.
He was the one who went to the bank for his grown-up important work. He was the one who brought home the little bank books we each had opened in our own names as each grandchild came, & had deposited some savings there we knew were for us. He was the one who gave these books, these very official looking ledgers to us to say that this family was planning for our future, & providing for it, a little at a time. Both Pops & Gigi taught us old-fashioned truisms, "a penny saved is a penny earned".
They gave me a portly porcelain piggy bank as a gift, a cute thing with a hole in the bottom, with a plastic stopper you could pull out when you needed to gut the pig for a cherished something you had been dreaming of buying, some item in a Sears catalogue, or Boys Life magazine. Or a new fishing pole. There was always something tantalizing & shiny & new to look forward to. Something to save those quarters, dimes & nickels for. And pennies too, Gigi would remind us. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Many of these fond memories flashed within the movie screen of my mind as I was negotiating both my & Daniel's survival out there in the wilderness of Angels' Landing that fateful day two years ago, October 28, 2003. The smells themselves came to my nose, each cherished image like a rapid slide show.........
My God, my God I screamed silently in my mind, he wants to rob me of the chance to be like Gigi!!! I always wanted to be a Mom, but even more so, believe it or not, I really wanted to be a grandmother in the fantastic tradition I had inherited through these truly great & gracious ladies. My grandmothers. My mentors. My friends. My exemplars. My warm shelter from all of life's storms, their ample laps always there for me to crawl up into. Yes I DID want to have that experience too.
NO, NO, NO! F____ you Daniel! You are NOT going to steal that away from me! You incredible asswipe!!!!!!! I am not DONE HERE YET!!!!!!
How DARE he try that!
How DARE he consider this was truly possible!!!!
The NERVE of this man!
I was royally PISSED OFF.
Check back soon, for Part 5
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.
Here is the gist of it though;
"Always tell the truth, even if it appears at the time to hurt you. When you tell a lie, it sends ripples out into the world of consciousness that sends people in the wrong direction. If you actually respect those people, you don't want to do that. It retards their progress as well as your own. But worse from a selfish standpoint is that when you give people false information, it guarantees that they are not going to be able to help you, because what they give you back will based on your own lies. God knows the ripples in the world that are caused by lies are depicted well enough by all the blood and trauma we see every day, that we have become inured to. Each of us has accepted a relative level of necessary bloodletting as our very cost of doing business, so in that sense, none of us is any different from clever charlatans like Cheney, and realizing that, as Paul Levy has pointed out, helps us better understand the method to both their madness and ours. Study the Tenth Commandment (Exodus 20:17), and realize that men in black frocks insist that God told men only to above all protect their property, and only then to look after the females one had happened to acquire as property. These are the people we have let run the world for five millennia, and also the ones shouting the loudest that to fix what has been broken, things should be done their way. But here's the real curriculum. Since in a very basic way, man hates himself, it becomes a fatal step of twisted logic that his fondest dream is to gloriously destroy himself defending what he has chosen for himself to be worthwhile. To make his death count for something. He does this as an act of expiation for the price he cannot pay for a gift so great that it is way beyond his comprehension, a fact which he mostly chooses to ignore." This excerpt from the writings of Ted Kaminski. You can check him out at rense.com. Where he writes a regular column.
There are many of us clarion writers now on the web. We have seen the immense potential here for touching our brothers & sisters with our thoughts. We are writing because to remain silent is suicide at this juncture in time. And suicide is one of those acts we in mental health provision try desperately to prevent, not always with success. But we do attempt to avert this whenever possible. Because, bottom line, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how tribulous the circumstances, LIFE IS PRECIOUS!!!! Life is PRICELESS!
Of course there are those who disagree with this. Those who find it perfectly acceptable to enslave their fellow or sister men , women & children. They have been doing this for millennia. Selling humans like themselves to other humans.
Selling babies. Selling women as sperm receptacles & targets of hatred & disdain.
Because they are operating under the strong delusion that the material aquisition of vast properties, lands & staffs of sycophantic servants, worrying & scurrying after every whimsical need & desire their puny little dicks & egos demands is what the ?good life? is all about.
Kingdoms of the earth. Earthly kings. The radical teaching the Universal Anointed One came to deliver was a message those little egos are desperately fearful of. Because His message meant their death.
Don?t get me wrong. Death of an ego is NOT death of a soul, no quite the contrary. Death of an ego is actually the prerequisite to the ?fullness of life? in a body. Of a soul encased in a temple of flesh. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Where were we?
I had gone to Simmons to study what normal human growth & development looked like. No, scratch that. I have never had much respect for "normal". In fact, from the moment we could dialogue I began teaching my own precious little boy & girl NOT to ever aspire to being "normal".
Normal is nowhere I would toss over my shoulder on our road trips as we had our most significant, honest, probing conversations in a car going somewhere.
Normal is nothing but a dot on a bell curve indicating C level work. Like teachers who grade you in class. On exams. C work is middle of the road. You will NEVER be normal kids. It is not possible. You were born of parents who never got a C in anything.
Be your self! Revel in who your are!
Oh, & by the way kids, don't buy into this notion that you were born to die. I absolutely do not believe that at all. You were born to live on, & on & on. You were born to LIVE. Period.
These are the simple rules I want you to keep firmly in your minds no matter what:
Eat when you are hungry.
Sleep when you are tired.
Do what you want.
That's it.
Repeat after me:
Eat when you are hungry.
Sleep when you are tired.
Do what you want.
I went to Simmons because I fell in love. And in so doing, I derailed the perfect plan to follow in the footsteps of my parents, & to return to the college, Middlebury in Vermont, where they had met, fallen in love, & had me. I was born into a college life. In a hospital where the nurses murmured about WHO was the father, I had so many frat brothers visiting me & oogling me through the glass window of the nursery there.
Later at Simmons in a Sociology class I was introduced to the concept of imprinting through the writings of Conrad Lorenz.
Imprinting was a phenomenon observed by Conrad Lorenz, where geese hatchlings attached themselves to the first object they saw upon exiting the egg. It was as if this object, man/animal/bird was interpreted to be the parent.
In my case, as a "hatchling" I imprinted on lots of guys. They all came to see me. They peered down at me in my plexiglass bassinette, & later the layette that was my first home in a tiny apartment in a frat house at Middlebury.
I came to be here on the planet on January 20th, 1955. Inauguration Day every four years for each President my whole entire life.
The first home of the first married couple to attend Middlebury as undergraduates.
I was properly baptized with a sprinkling of Episcopal water in the chapel of a Repubican Eisenhower White House Administration later that year.
Dr. Latch, the White House Chaplain himself a good friend of the family, sprinkled my head there. Truly a legit heiress to a mixed legacy of southern Confederate roots in America AND fierce Viking northern blood from the colder regions of Sweden. The Chaplain sealed these blessings on my then towheaded little body dressed in a pure white flowing baptismal gown, then carefully replacing the little white cap after delicately wiping the water off.
I am assured I was then bundled back into the car for a reception at Pops & Gigi's gracious home lined with other beautifully done professional photographs of my mother & her older brother & two sisters. A professional photo of my Mom & Dad grinning happily into the camera on the reception day, she dressed in a conservative white dress not exactly a wedding dress, but a debutante dress for sure, he with his pirate smile behind her, encircling his arms around her waist in the little garden just outside the screened in porch in the back. A lawfully wedded couple. Pops & Gigi made sure of that! As did Farmor & Farfar.
And processions of similar photographs as we all came along. The kind a professional photographer does. Air brushing the background away from our cute little selves, all dressed in white dresses & taffeta sashes, the little boys in cute little shorts with suspenders & white dress shirts. None of us would be photographed like that later on of course. That conservative Republican style & culture was just the way it was then though, growing up commuting from a sleepy suburb of Boston to the gracious nest of our maternal & paternal matriarch. I was born of noble parents.
My brother & I were only two years apart. We were the ones in the main, who were dressed in Lord & Taylor velvet & white clean dress shirts, I suffered the wide Madeline style hats with those stupid little elastic strings under the chin to hold it in place, along with the ridiculous little white gloves & new Easter outfit for several years on these predictable & exciting trips, because, well, it made the grown-ups so happy to see us dressed that way.
Doesn't the outfit make the person? We were simply the modern version of other little children that gazed at us in oil paintings commissioned in other times in the heart of southern gentility that hung on the walls of the art mueums we visited, the historic buildings of Washington, Alexandria, & Williamsburg as we were shepherded to visit all the important places that had been built by our ancestors on the backs of slaves, built with the blood of slaves. Little children suffering the same dress-up game, in clothes to make them too, look like little grown-ups. I saw the pained but enduring look in those eyes too, staring back at me.
I took it all in, but all along, it made me uncomfortable. I knew how to perform for these giants in my life as a child. I knew how good the food tasted, the fine things I was surrounded by were, & that these trips were good for me, my education, the expanding of my horizons & knowledge, but the houses seemed too big for me, the wealth just too much.
When it all became sensory overload, I was always relieved to just get back to Gigi's, her kitchen, her rocking chair & cozy bedroom with the four poster bed. With the white bedspread, & my own reassuring bed upstairs where I was watched over by ballerinas en pointe in pictures on the walls.
I was the catalyst for this change. Little old me! Coming along just a little too soon in the culture I had been born into. But as my parents both came from long lines of noble ancestors, a simple deception was set-up. My Mom would call it a "littel white lie". An error by omission. Oh by the way, the reason we never make a big deal about our anniversary, well, we eloped. We later told our folks; the Afghanistan diplomatic couple from Sweden, & the genteel parents from Washington about it because, well, we have a little one on the way. And uh, we aren't quite through school yet.
These days there is hardly anything at all scandalous about concealing an actual conception date from someone. Hell, children are abandoned regularly, pawned off on others, left on relatives doorsteps as immature procreants flee from the overwhelming responsibility of a fragile new life. Many children as they grow into adult bodies carry wounds & suffering from these kinds of abandonments.
So, so many children, wounded, wide-eyed children parading around in grown adult bodies, masquerading as "grown-ups", play-acting roles they have absolutely no idea how to carry out in reality. They are great pretenders. They dress in expensive suits, occupy prestigious offices, drive fancy cars, yet inside they are lost little children, thinking desperately in some twisted logic, that these outward accoutrements will bring them happiness, inner peace, & a sense of being loved, that never works.
The real definition of insanity is to repeat a behavior over & over again which has deleterious consequences, expecting a different result. War by definition, is insane. It has never brought peace. It never will. Lying never works either. It never saves anyone from anything...
My parents had met there, a coed private college far from the bustle of the urban centers of power-brokering America.
My Mom had come from Washington & was the youngest of a mortgage banker & his beloved wife who dabbled at teaching piano at one point in time. This was her only "job" as we would have defined it in our streaking, bra-burning days at Simmons.
Of course that is not true at all. Every mother is a working mother. I would repeat that over & over in my encounters with young moms in doctors' offices & clinics. "You are doing the hardest job you will ever love", borrowing from the Peace corps slogan I would tell them, as they brought in squirming yelling, tear-stained, rosy-cheeked toddlers, youngsters, sullen teenagers; with every sort of booboo, the usual bread & butter issues of a family practice; snotty noses, high fevers, ear aches, tummy aches, nightmares, won't go to bed when I tell him or her, broken limbs, holding in their poop, not toilet-trained on schedule... on & on & on the parade of the children came through our doors. Writhing toddlers with gashes needing stitches, always at just around 6pm, when the staff was tired, as were the parents & the wounded themselves, struggling to keep them immobile while breaking out the curved needles from the foil-packeted suture sets this particular physician "always" used...
To be a nurse you HAD to be a doctor-pleaser. You HAD to know THEIR magical formula for curing, for sewing up, for cleaning up, for measuring, for documenting. You had to know it all & do it all or you simply wouldn't last.
My grandmother "Gigi" as we all affectionately called her, was the quintessential matriarch of a gentile, genteel Washingtonian home in the Northwest section of town. Nestled into a tranquil side street just below Embassy row, walking distance from Villanova, but more significantly to us, easily accessible to our cousins' house an easy walk or run from Gigi's front lawn, through a small park, to the cul de sac where my Aunt lived with her six catholic children, our cousins.
Pops & Gigi. Gigi got her name from our oldest cousin Cathy who could not pronounce grandma.
We do not know how she was as a mother, of course, but ALL of her 18 grandchildren & 7 & counting great grandchildren adored her as the most bountiful, pleasant, loving grandmother any grandchild could ever have been blessed with. Her beloved husband Pops, our grandfather was likewise adored.
When the northern clan from New England, (that was us) went to visit Washington each spring & fall, we anticipated the good smells that came from her cozy kitchen. That she would have fresh baked chocolate chip cookies waiting in the cookie tin we all knew was in exactly the spot we had left it the last time.
We knew we could pull out the Chinese checker game from the old toy chest nestled in the corner of her kitchen, & that every morning she would be up getting Pops his corn flakes, slicing fresh strawberries on them, & preparing his grapefruit with that special tool she had to make each segment come out as you rotated the semihemisphere of it around with a spoon to dig the tart little pieces out. A special spoon too, with a slightly tooth-edged tip. Just for eating grapefruit halves. You could smell the coffee brewing, its seductive aroma curling up the stairs to our bedrooms. You would jump out of bed to run down there because you could also smell the Sara Lee coffee bread, the pecan coffee bread she had warming in her oven.
We knew we would be looking up at her nicknack shelves, a mahogany piece hung on the wall of the kitchen just above the old sturdy round maple table that was the breakfast nook.
That we could sit on the floor of the kitchen on the round, worn braided rag rug. That the same familiar "mammy" black maid door stop would be there to hold the swinging door open to the formal dining room, where she entertained graciously & formally during the holiday parties.
Later as a young mother myself, I would look at her, that "mammy", & feel shame at what she represented; slavery, but as a little girl she was simply a familiar, ground level, ample-bosomed mama figure I loved. She was part of Gigi's kitchen. She was a familiar symbol of the Washington scene, & the culture lying south of the Mason-Dixon line...
We knew she would be teaching us girls all about how to make those delicious cookies & mouth watering pies.
We could anticipate the smells that meant we were in Washington. It always smelled, well, like Gigi's house. Gracious, orderly, clean, rich, inviting, the homestead of our maternal branch of the family tree. The scent of Washington earth, more red clay than back home, permeated our playgrounds.
And we would run upstairs to our bedrooms, & spill our belongings out on our beds from our suitcases, after grabbing the stuffed toy she had carefully placed on each of our beds, always with a little surprise gift of money hidden there too. I will never forget the panda bear she had given me on one such visit in the spring. I loved that Panda until its fur was worn off. It had had a zipper in the back which contained a 5 dollar bill. What joy! What richness! Gigi always knew the things that delighted me, & that I would ALWAYS clamor at her feet jumping up & down excitedly to ask her, "when are we going to the zoo Gigi?"
Because the pilgrimage to the zoo was always a trip we had planned.
Along with a meal out at the Marriott to eat "Pappy Parker's Smoky Mountain Fri-iied Chicken". Oh how I & my brother loved that! As did my Mom. She loved returning to the bosom of her own family regularly to renew these moments of sheer bliss.
And in between these visits, my grandmother from Washington wrote. We loved seeing her careful, flowing cursive on letters with the Washington postmark come to our mailbox in Lincoln, Massachusetts at the little house we grew up in on an old road, a small little road called Old Winter Street.
She was the one who taught me the importance of our government & all of its structures & institutions. She was my tour guide to every Smithsonian institution. Always, always the zoo. She knew how especially important it was to me to visit the zoo in the spring, to see the new babies.
Over the years she would cut-out every article she found about the arrival of the white tigers, the arrival of the pandas, & the first births of the babies & send them along, tucked in a card she had picked out especially for me, again always with a "little something" as she would call it, tucked in too. A crisp note from the U.S. treasury. Always brand new. Hot off the press. it smelled good. It looked good.
It meant we had money to hop on our bikes with & make the trip into the little town of Lincoln's old general store & post office where on Saturdays we could spend hours oggling the penny candy counter where tantalizing Charleston Chews, fireballs, tootsie rolls, & wrapped caramels were lined up row after row for us to pick & choose from the safety of the glass. Red licorice, mmm, my favorite...
We had respect for the shopkeeper who could glide the inner sliding glass panel on her side to get each carefully chosen piece & place it in the small paper brown sack for us to scrunch together at the top & hang onto, gripped between a sweaty palm & the handle bar for the 3 mile ride home.
Such adventure & independence. All because of Gigi!
My grandfather Pops also was a wonderful, quietly diplomatic grandfather who taught us the value of money & savings. I recall how reverently we saw his regal mahogany chest of drawers in their bedroom directly off of that kitchen, where he kept Chiclets. Yellow packages of that pillow-shaped gum. Always peppermint flavored. Pops loved his Chiclets. And his golf.
He was the one who went to the bank for his grown-up important work. He was the one who brought home the little bank books we each had opened in our own names as each grandchild came, & had deposited some savings there we knew were for us. He was the one who gave these books, these very official looking ledgers to us to say that this family was planning for our future, & providing for it, a little at a time. Both Pops & Gigi taught us old-fashioned truisms, "a penny saved is a penny earned".
They gave me a portly porcelain piggy bank as a gift, a cute thing with a hole in the bottom, with a plastic stopper you could pull out when you needed to gut the pig for a cherished something you had been dreaming of buying, some item in a Sears catalogue, or Boys Life magazine. Or a new fishing pole. There was always something tantalizing & shiny & new to look forward to. Something to save those quarters, dimes & nickels for. And pennies too, Gigi would remind us. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Many of these fond memories flashed within the movie screen of my mind as I was negotiating both my & Daniel's survival out there in the wilderness of Angels' Landing that fateful day two years ago, October 28, 2003. The smells themselves came to my nose, each cherished image like a rapid slide show.........
My God, my God I screamed silently in my mind, he wants to rob me of the chance to be like Gigi!!! I always wanted to be a Mom, but even more so, believe it or not, I really wanted to be a grandmother in the fantastic tradition I had inherited through these truly great & gracious ladies. My grandmothers. My mentors. My friends. My exemplars. My warm shelter from all of life's storms, their ample laps always there for me to crawl up into. Yes I DID want to have that experience too.
NO, NO, NO! F____ you Daniel! You are NOT going to steal that away from me! You incredible asswipe!!!!!!! I am not DONE HERE YET!!!!!!
How DARE he try that!
How DARE he consider this was truly possible!!!!
The NERVE of this man!
I was royally PISSED OFF.
Check back soon, for Part 5
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