Wave of Modulation_old

I grew up thinking that love was a life or death proposition

I take it all back

One day in the park, I found a little girl, about four years old, crying by the merry go round. Tears streaming down her dirty cheeks, long braids hanging behind her. I didn't know her; she must have been visiting the neighborhood. I remember the smell of cut grass, the twitch twitch twitch of the night sprinklers coming on.

I asked the little girl why she was crying. She said she was lost, that her parents were gone and her sisters were gone and she couldn't find them. She sobbed harder and louder as she told me her story. She gasped and stuttered, snot flew out her nose and she wiped it on her arm.

I'm not sure exactly how I felt... though I have thought about this moment many times in recent years. I think I felt sorry for her. But my disgust was stronger. And so was my anger.

I told the girl her sisters were gone for good, and that her parents were never coming to get her.

I walked home, leaving her all alone as the sun went down. All the kids were on their way home for supper or to watch tv. As the summer noise and heat dissolved into the twilight and quiet cold was settling in the desert grass.

I was eight years old.

- - - -

I was learning how to abandon myself.

I was passing it on. I was transferring my feelings. I didn't know I felt abandoned. I didn't know how to feel my own hurt.

I was hurting others, and numbing myself. I watched and learned. How to hurt. How not to cry. How not to feel.

I realize now that what I did was a reflection of how I felt inside. 

The lost little girl who wanted her parents. The tenderest, least powerful person I knew, my brother. I poured salt on his wounds, straight out of the shaker. I told him monsters were coming to kill him in the night. The sweet, retarded girl at camp I had befriended, Shannon.  My only friend that summer when I was ten. I took a fistful of fine ground black pepper and blew it into her eyes like a kiss. I knew I was like them, somewhere down in my shameful weak little heart. I wanted that tender, powerless person inside me dead.

I wanted all tenderness gone. From everyone.

I have forgiven myself for these things, mostly.

I need to say this loud and clear. I am sorry.

I came back to get me.

And I take it all back.

starry

I remember when I was a girl, daydreaming was the one thing I could always rely on. My imagination.

I remember imagining being a bird, flying beside the car along the night road.

I remember perching outside the window, seeing the sky stretch out and away.

A world that big, that diffused, is peaceful.

more starry pics

maps

Extending north from California, and crossing Oregon, the Cascade mountain range splits Washington into two unequal pieces. My grandfather told me before there was the possibility of humans making the water flow from the Cascades into the plains of eastern Washington, the land was “empty”. Now the land is being used to produce enormous quantities of hops (a main ingredient in beer), and fruits and berries of all kinds.

More than once, I crossed those mountains. When we were little, during harvest my grandparents brought my older sister and me to the orchards and fields at Yakima and Walla Walla in their RV. My sister and I shared the job of Special Fruit Picker, and Nana told us she was going to “can” the fruit when we got home. Like the jars of “canned” pears and peaches she brought up from the cellar to make her Sunday Jell-O. I loved to pick fruit, especially cherries and raspberries. I remember gorging myself for hours under the hot sun. The orchards were lush, extravagantly colored and scented. Everywhere we went, overfull trees seemed to spill fruit. We packed up all the fruit and drove back home across the desert emptiness and colorless heat. My sunburned face radiating into the vinyl car seat, my t-shirt and shorts stained red with cherry juice. My fingernails seemed drawn onto my blackberry picking fingers with black outlines, tangy and stubborn. I sucked on my fingers all the way home, trying to get them clean.

Grandpa told us stories about the east, before they brought the water. He told us about his family leaving Nebraska for Washington, that they left the dust behind. The name Washington had made him think of water. The way he said "Warshington", exaggerating the shhhh sound like running water, or maybe that's just the way I remember it. I thought his whole family had come west because they were thirsty.

Though the western region of Washington state is considerably smaller than its counterpart, it is naturally rich with vegetation and plentiful water. North America’s only rainforest is located in western Washington. So abundant is the rain that in many places, using water is free; unmeasured and unregulated. Or at least it was when I was growing up. There is no dust to speak of, nothing like the endless dust in the desert. The terrain of western Washington is diverse: forests, mountains, valleys, fields, beaches, rivers, lakes, water, water, water.

In that western region, between two bodies of water, stands a particular bit of jagged land. A place I know, or used to know.

I write “stands” because long before my father’s family, this land, our Peninsula, rose by the force of its own power. Lifted its ground from underwater, poured its ground from underground. I write “stands” because I both admire and fear that standing. Our little Peninsula is the only thing that “stands” between the eighty-mile-long Sound and an immeasurable, infinite ocean.

Mountains have grown up in its center, and stony hollows for collecting the rain. Before me, my parents were born and grew up there. Their parents cut away the wooded hills of Seattle to build their houses. Or they leveled a slope in Bremerton to add on to a shack. Our Sound is a channel. Our Peninsula is cut-into with harbors and water ways, with the things my father’s family built: first shipyards, and then ships. And nuclear submarines hiding in underwater caves, and ferries criss-crossing the murky green water above. New guns for the Missouri, fifty-something years after the treaty was signed on its decks. Now the water is flat where it was moored. There’s no visual monument anymore. And you can’t see the ships. Now it is a secret. You can’t see what is at the bottom of the Sound, the hearts of metal they made for us.

I’ve been gone from this place, the heart of my Washington. It's almost like I'd never been. The land creates and cradles the Puget Sound with its eastern edge. Meeting the Peninsula on the other side, the Pacific Ocean traces much of Washington’s western boundary and outermost shore. That is the farthest West I have ever been. Fishing off the northern tip, the men used to say you could see Hawaii. If you looked hard. Even when I was five, I didn’t believe that. I can see the water now, better, from this distance.

The land, the Peninsula, the ocean, the Sound… Sometimes, I think they are four parts of a whole, moving and still parts, all with different names. They are divided, but not quite severed. The Peninsula and its source remain rooted at Washington’s southern base. They are also rooted in places I can’t find on maps, places I can’t name, places underground. Places where there is zero ground. If you travel from one side of the Peninsula to the other, you’ll notice the water is the same color on both boundaries, and it is equally cold. Those waters are split by the land and yet, they are not really divided. Maybe there are only two parts: the rocky land and the cold water. It is a mutually defining embrace.

- - - -

I spent half the day cleaning the basement today. I was searching for old journals and some photographs along the way. The passage above was written in 1995 for a seminar I took called Environment and Citizenship, an introductory essay on "Sense of Place".

Lately, I've been feeling kind of lost. Not doomed like before, but ... just lost. I have enough knowledge or hope or self-preservative in me to feel that it's temporary.

When I wrote this essay, my grandfather had just died. He was the last direct link I felt to my father, and my father had been gone for 22 years. Truly, though, with what little I had of my grandfather, I knew more of him than I knew of my father.

It was a time of wandering for me, with so many memories and feelings creeping into my drawings and my dreams from the past already. I was looking for something, a history, a way to trace my beginning back to something safer than my mother. The best I could hope to gain was a mystery (I didn't realize that consciously back then) and mystery was what I found. Still, that didn't stop me from trying. Tomorrow I'll post the poem I wrote to my grandfather when he passed.

- - - -

In other news, I've chosen my pseudonym: Sheryl Stephen. I think. Sheryl because it is my real name; my mother chose the name Cheryl, and my father insisted on spelling it with an S. And Stephen, because it was my father's first name, and he didn't like it. My brother was named Steven after him, with the spelling he preferred. I've been thinking about this for over a year. My father may not have liked his name, but I want to honor it anyway. The way you honor someone when you are given very little, the way you honor yourself and honor them by creating something worthwhile with what you are given.

I am coming clean about this now because I think the connections will be clearer right now than maybe they will be again. And it may get deleted if I freak out about how personal this feels, or just because I may not want to explain it again in the future.

revision

I did some thinking this afternoon. There are going to be some changes around here. I feel somehow different about this space. Partly, I'm feeling more free as a result of a conversation I had with Carol last week about my anonymity. I've decided that I want to remain anoymous indefinitely. This feels like such a relief to me, I can't fully express it.

Unlike my journal notebooks and the emails I send myself, there's something about having WoM, which is almost like a scrapbook journal, that keeps me in touch with things that happen, thoughts and yeah, even feelings, as they unravel over time. I'm going include more journal entries, and on each one I am going to try to pick at least one emotion I'm feeling (like Jessie and others do). And I will likely link to another (private at the moment) site where I have some pieces from my memoir. I think I've been sitting on the anonymity fence and didn't even know it. Now I feel like I have some clarity. I had to think about what I need most from this experience, and from the memoir project, and then answers seemed obvious.

- - - -

Today I decided to dig out an old super small "pen" digital camera I got as a door prize a few years ago at a conference. Mr. Sweet took our shred camera to the babseball game and I was going for a long walk and I was jonesing. While searching through the old jumbled computer and electronics stuff, I came across some diskettes I had been looking for recently. On the disks, there are quite a few old journal entries and poems from years past. There were a couple of pieces I was VERY excited about finding. The poem below wasn't one of the pieces I had been searching for. In fact, I realized I had forgotten that I had ever written it. Interesting how some memory gets edged out. Revised.

revision

Your revision was thorough.  I stood quite still
I remember your injured face
looking into me
I remember how sick your eyes were
Searching, cutting

nothing is left
but a scar
-I had forgotten-
This.

This. is the nothing
that paralyzed me
when you revealed
your knife.

I remember you
left me
spilling on the ground
my organs, your wood carvings

halted in the dust from your saw

they have been pressed back together
into my flesh
intact with spaces where you were.
inside my heart
I can no longer feel
what your fingers touch.

I laid down
in a fire
after you
left me

Your fingerprints are gone

- 1997

the place where I get lost

Found these flowers in a fairly dangerous part of the latin hood in Chelsea, MA on one of my long weekend walks. I was hurrying by and happened to see them. I paused to snap a couple of pictures of these two miniature trees with gorgeous, colorful huge blossoms. Irresistible. Looks like they were taken in the dark, no? It was broad daylight...err, sunset. I used flash.

I heard a low cackle that jiggled a bit and then bubbled up into a full phlegmy old-person laugh, getting louder and louder. I saw a white-haired, deep brown-skinned man rocked in his chair on the porch that belonged to the yard with these wonderful trees in it. I looked up at him sheepishly, and he smiled with a lot of movement - the huge dentureless smile getting wider and wider. He waved at me in such a way that i knew I was forgiven. Sometimes when I'm walking I lose sense of time, and awareness of others who are also observing in the stillness.

Click on these flower images - they're worth a closer look.

You, yeah, you always haul my ball and chain right
To there, the place where I get lost inside of
You, yeah, I see your face and hear your voice right
Through that which seems so hopeless and confusing
Sometimes I try too hard to separate the
Good times from sadness that we've had together
Balancing, I need to keep it all in some perspective
Calm me down, I need you more than you will ever comprehend
I don't want this to end / I can't lose one more friend
I go through my regrets and I return the compliments and
Hope I find that innocence, I've got to be here no matter what happens
-- excerpt from New #1 by Bob Mould

- - - -

For the past few years, whenever I hear this song, I get choked up. Tonight when I put my iPod on shuffle and it came on, I had a full-blown outright cry. The last time I heard this song was the morning after Suka died, riding the bus around Boston. It makes me think of my sister. It makes me think of my brother. How much it meant for me to have them in my life. Without them, I wouldn't be here.

And it reminds me of the deep, deep friendship I had with my ex. We grew up together from age 18 to 30. I'll never be that close with anyone again - and that is probably a good and healthy thing. And now, the past couple of years, it makes me think of M, and how much his love and presence means to me in my life. How differently I feel about being alive, the fact that I can now imagine next month, next year.

The song makes me think of all the friends I've lost along the way. And all the parts of me that I lost before that. It reminds me of the long thread which has been my life. That I have more to look forward to, to reel in. Why is that scary for me still? Why does it hurt sometimes, thinking of the future?

The song makes me feel overwhelmed with thankfulness, and also sadness, at the same time.

california light

Traveling to California recently on vacation, with M, was a good thing for me. The state no longer holds many shadows from my past. Or, at least the shadows that are there don't frighten me anymore.

About a year ago, I had my friend S. read the passage below, taken from my notes for the memoir project I've been working on. She wrote that she liked "...how it goes from light to dark to light again... that is human truth, how beauty and tenderness and meanness and ugliness are all mixed together in this life."

And that is true, that's how life is. I've spent so much of mine in transit. I sometimes feel as if I'm on one of those long car rides that never ends, past the staccato verticals of trees and hills that cast a rhythm of light and warmth across my eyes, then shadow, then light again, and then shadow...

a little warm with the cold

Tonight as I was uploading some pics, I remembered my trip to work this morning. On the way, I sat down next to the some flower beds to snap photos of pansies which were being beaten up and blown down in the harsh wind. And I remembered feeling sort of sad while I was sitting there, and sort of nostalgic. A little warm with the cold.

Then I was struck... sort of quiet inside. By a memory.

Dwellings and other places

I'm wiped out today/tonight. Been slipping and falling into pools of anger (I think) this evening. I would manage to pull myself out and then somehow, slip back in every time. Too tired to write about it. I think I needed a bit of a break from the feelings. I am overwhelmed. And I can only recognize some of the feelings, so this must be what it's like to be possessed.

Possessed. OK, that's sort of funny, and not really funny, considering the times my mother said I was possessed. (If my sister is reading this, or rather when she does read this, she'll be laughing a wry survivor's laugh much like my own right now.) Someday I'll share my story here about the time she kept all three of her children awake for two days whilst performing a group exorcism on us.

- - - -

These are all the dwellings and other places I can remember, I think. And they are in roughly the correct order, I think. For the most part, this list does not include the periods of time we lived in our car or in motels.

1. The House before I can remember – Seattle, WA
2. South 133^rd, Renton, WA
3. Hadley Lane, Redondo Beach, CA
4. Fillmore Street, Taft, CA
5. Hotel in Olympia
6. Brown House on the hill - Bremerton, WA
7. Burwell House #1
8. El Camino De Real, ?, CA
9. Grandma Mc’s house, Bainbridge Island, WA
10. Treehaven Summer Camp, Tucson, AZ (9 weeks)
11. East Fort Lowell, Tucson, AZ
12. Burwell House #2
13. House in Bakersfield, CA
14. Harvey and Linda M’s family house in ?, WA
15. Mobile home, Ashland/Talent, OR
16. Gregory Way house, Bremerton, WA
17. Huntington Avenue townhouse, Redondo Beach, CA
18. Grandma Mc’s house, East Bremerton, WA
19. B & F family house, North Kariotis Housing Development, Silverdale, WA
20. Grandma Mc’s house, East Bremerton, WA
21. Uncle D's house, ?, WA
22. McPherson Foster home, Kariotis Housing Development, Silverdale, WA 1981
23. Lake Symington Foster Home, Lake Symington, WA 1981
24. North Kariotis Quads, Silverdale, WA 1981
25. California Street House, Brownsville, WA
26. Claire Street, Bremerton, WA 1982
27. Motel in Red Bluff, CA
28. Apartment #1 in Red Bluff, CA 1983
29. Lou's house in Red Bluff, CA 1983
30. Ernie P's house #1 in Red Bluff, CA
31. Ernie P's house #2 in Red Bluff, CA
32. Apartment #2 in Red Bluff, CA 1984
33. Lou's house in Red Bluff, CA 1984
34. Marconi Avenue Apartment in Sacramento, CA
35. 12th grade Silverdale, WA 1984
36. Michelle W's family's house in Silverdale, WA 1984
37. Brian K's family's house in Silverdale, WA 1984
38. Nana & Grandpa's house in Bremerton, WA 1984
39. L Family House in Silverdale, WA 1984
40. Shawn M's family's house in Silverdale, WA 1985
41. T and his sister's house in East Bremerton, WA 1985
42. Sandy M's house on Callow, in Bremerton, WA 1985
43. Mom & J's house on Grove Street, Del Paso Heights, Sacramento, CA 1985
44. J's parent's house in Del Paso Heights on Del Paso Blvd 1986
45. Apartment near American River College 1987
46. Studio cabin in Ben Lomond, CA 1987
47. Fern Street house in Santa Cruz, CA 1988
48. Capitola Duplex - Earthquake house 7 miles from Loma Prieta epicenter 1990
49. Aptos townhouse 1991
50. Ex's parent's house in Rancho ___, CA
51. Linden Street House in Rochester, NY 1992
52. Campus Housing at U of R, Rochester, NY 1993
53. Meigs Street apartment, Rochester, NY 1996
54. Dart Drive House, Ithaca, NY 1996 - 1997
55. Tareyton Drive House, Ithaca, NY 1997
56. My sister and her partner’s house in Everett, MA Feb 1997 – May 1999
57. A boyfriend’s apt, C__, MA 1999
58. F__ Avenue apartment, C__, MA 1999 - present