PART ONE: INDETERMINATE COORDINATES
“Brevity is the soul of wit. “
Maybe if I am as witty as possible, I can be brief. I think that’s how it works.
When I sang this one evening on the street here in Pai town, a man from Finland, a father missing estranged wife and his child, fell onto his knees, crying. Music is powerful. When performed for reals, with soul. We became friends.
That wasn’t the first time I passed the Hank Williams test.
I WAS BORN, as most of us are. I was born of a woman’s body.
I’ve met some who may have been hatched. A birth it is, nonetheless. I was fully birthed. Never have needed any “re-birthing. “ I’m here. Ask anyone who wishes I weren’t.
SHE CAME, SHE SENSED, AND SHE EXPRESSED, INCESSANTLY
Who was that masked man? The one who drugged my mother and then dis-attached my ankles from my feet while holding me, drugged also, upside down by the ankles and slapping me into life? Who WAS that masked man, Kimosabe?
What an introduction.
I was born into a family in grief. A brother two years and three weeks older had been run over and killed by a car just five weeks before. My birthing took place in the same hospital my mother had listened to her baby’s end of life screams for his mother as she was kept from his side by the doctors trying to save his life. His death affected so many people’s lives. The man who ran him over, not knowing, died of grief one year later, leaving a young family.
Listen
I went through all that with her, my body, heart, mind, soul felt everything. She wasn’t happy with me at birth. I was not him. She wanted him back, bad. If I’d had the penis, she could have believed. If I’d had the hair color, her hair color, or blue eyes, her eyes, she could have believed. But as she told me, “You were dark haired with brown eyes, like your father and brother (eldest), so I didn’t want you. I wanted to leave you at the hospital. But the doctor came in and told me I couldn’t, that I had to take my baby home. “ She told me this suddenly one day when I was about to leave for uni. Still, she never told the entire truth. It’s hell to lose a child through momentary unconscious neglect.
Number One Son was Daddy’s son, of course. Number two son, with her lighter hair, was of course her son.
Grief and self-recrimination made her insane, and she took it out on me as if I had been responsible for his death.
She was in the habit of tying him on a rope in the yard, like a dog, while she did housework. That day she was doing laundry, one son three and two thirds years, one two and three weeks old, and in her last five weeks of pregnancy. She was 25 yrs old. Nursing was obscene to them. It wasn’t done.
Their diet was meat, potatoes, pasta, a few veggies and fruit, often canned. Vitamins weren’t a “thing” yet, and when they were, well, they did nothing I’ve ever noticed. White flour, white sugar, and peanut butter were staples. Only “nut butter” I ever knew of, until 24.
They knew little about contraception. The Church wouldn’t allow it. Roman Catholic. They met and married after dad returned from end-of-war, didn’t see any battle or horrors, other than one idiot doing what he was warned not to, and dying from it. They looked happy in pictures as a young couple and parents . I never knew them that way. Everything changed five weeks before my birth.
The boy on the rope was crying so much , as his brother was out playing with the kids on the sidewalk. So she felt sorry for him and let him go to play with them. They had no adult supervision, and from what I could learn later, I figure the oldest child there that day was my cousin Louise, who would have been five and a half at the time.
Number One Son was very involved in his death, also.. It was so hidden he had to have a regression , as an adult, to figure it out. He made his bro “it” for the hide and seek game soon as he got out there, and then proceeded to bury him under autumn leaves , in the side of the street, just in front of a car, and told him to “count to twenty”, tho I’m sure he couldn’t himself.
We were always told that the boy was “playing in a pile of leaves” and the driver just didn’t see him. So….we’ll leave that Cain and Abel story right there. I’ve witnessed the aggressions of older brothers toward their younger brothers, and it was males who had to teach me that it was a happening thing with most of them. In the past years I’ve had to learn how this older brother has long planned to see me also dead rather than see me get my inheritance, and his younger brother with him, whom older bro hates for being “mom’s favorite”. Uhmmm, seeing me dead is what unites them, so, at least there’s that. The two year old had just had his birthday celebrated, grandly I’m sure, three weeks prior.
Onward
My dad was a regular fairy tale dad. Quiet, loyal to mom and church and state, and totally in denial of what was going down with cinderella, hansel and gretel,or snow white. His dad had gone off with another woman when he was fifteen, the oldest of three boys. So he had to quit school and go to work. So he had one overriding principle, and that was stay with the woman and kids no matter what.
He turned his back on me when I begged him as a child to stop her abuse. He had to deny it. I recall the last time, as a very litlel girl, that I sat in his lap for a couple of minutes. It felt so wonderful just to feel another body’s warmth and hearbeat. The only hugs I ever received were one at my birthday, and one at christmas. Hugging mom was torture, for both of us. She hated touching me. Soon as mom saw she came right over and told him to go do something. I was her vengeance bucket, that’s all. She couldn’t get back at “god” so she got back at what “god” sent her way instead of what she wanted. Pretty simple.
I cried myself to sleep many nights begging “God” to tell me what was wrong with me, so I could fix it. Mom told me incessantly there was “something wrong with you”. All I ever got for an answer, once, was “Hang in there. It’s going to be a very interesting life.”
The year dad was shipped off to Fort Bragg for one year over Cuba was brutal for me. It couldn’t be denied when I showed up in sixth grade one morning. late as usual because I had to wait for my bros to finish their breakfast, and then do the dishes before I coud leave. Mom worked full time, to “hang onto the house”. That morning, I had fresh bloody scratches all over my face and arms. What happened, I was asked. I dropped my head, cried, and answered, “My mother”. She had just come into my room when I was getting dressed that morning, and started wailing on me. Never had a single clue as to why, that’s just how it was. It was hell. She completely ignored my birthday. I got a card from her sister, not a word spoken. My 11th birthday.
She insisted I’d never have friends or a husband, and absolutely hated it when I did have friends. She’d treat them like ice. They never wanted to come back.
She’d had a shirley temple paper doll set when she was young. of which she was enamored. So she tried to make me into that. She wanted to name me Shirley, but my dad wanted Anita, so Shirley was the middle name. Forced my hair into a short permanent every six months, looked horrid. When I said “no more” at twelve, she viciously said, “you have to keep your hair short until you leave.” It was a patriarchal household in which only one WOMAN was allowed. I was not allowed my femaleness.
I’ve had a hard time ever wanting to cut my hair since then. My breasts didn’t fill out until I was away from her for two years. It took about five or six years for my eyes to become my eyes, green hazel. I was/am the assigned family scapegoat. They made up the most outrageous stories about me, for all they knew nothing of. My brothers hated me for being the smart one who got awards. They could have cared less about learning. I workded hard at it. By eighteen life was a job so they could get married and laid, and the rest came with the formula.
The catholic parish school was great with opportunities at that time. The nuns taught piano, they had a few of them in their convent there in the school-church-convent-rectory yard of it all. We had summer programs with all kinds of cool sports and stuff. Baton twirling; trampoline; large rhythm sticks, through which we danced while others moved them incessantly. Of course, we grew up in the neighborhood playing jump rope, Africa, ball against the wall games, all that stuff. occasinal rock throwing fights. Rover rover. Simon says. Rushing on winter afternoons to stuff a peanut butter marshmallow sandwich down while dressing for sledding in the park until dusk sent us home. Mad days of sledding and ice skating. New Hampshire, fifties and sixties. The Irish Catholic church at the other end of our street had the great summer fair.
There was a roller skating rink out on another edge of the city, and our mom brought my older bro and myself there for lessons and skating on Saturdays for a couple of years. Lots of stuff I was never able to do for my kids. The swimming pool was my summer place for a few years. From the time I got my one and only bicycle at 11, I lived on that bike, when I wasn’t walking. My parents worked incessantlyk, and saved and saved and did provide me with many wonderful opportunities. I ‘ve always expressed gratitude for that, but it means nothing to them unless you follow all the way through, and make money and have a regular life like “everyone else”. It wasn’t about educating the self so much as educating for the future job. These long-oppressed and shy French Canadians considered artists to come from another planet.
My mothere’s mother was never a happy woman. She had been sent down to the US to help a distant cousin whose wife had died, leaving him with two children. They of course ended up married, and that’s how my mother and her sister were born. And Memere never spoke english except to get her citizenship. She was very shy, and couldn’t take being made fun of at all.
Dad’s mom was great. Corinne, happy woman. Never complained. Had friends she went out and enjoyed life with. Never remarried. Drank one glass of wine every night at bedtime, did a bit of snuff. Let me come and hang out and read her “True Story” magazines. Loved her. Happy woman. Left the church thing behind. Mom didn’t like her. Mom didn’t like anyone. She had no friends. Never once saw her with the neighbor moms.
I loved being in water, the more the better. So took lifesaving lessons for three or four years or more, so I could be at the local pool in the mornings, too. Junior and senior lifesaving , earned both , one of them twice. My sinuses were in trouble big time for a few years after that.
I sang Gregorian chant in the church choir from the age of maybe …nine or ten until fourteen. I loved it so so much. That’s where I learned to sing I guess. Tho I was always a bit “flat”. In the meanwhile, the transistor radio took us on a journey we’ve never returned from.
Oh, the music. Always more coming, always so amazing and life affirming. The entire nation was rocking. It really was. We had dances at one high school or another in the city every Friday night, we’d walk there. Miles. Live bands, always. It was an awesome time to be alive. The first girls who dared to dance with each other or just alone, rather than wait for a boy to ask them to, gave me a ticket to dancing bliss, tho it took me a while to really use it. Years. When you are interested a bit in a nice guy, and he dances the two of you “in a bucket”, well, that’s a bit too young for “buckets”.
So it was good in many ways. I was given a lot of opportunites and was glad to learn and do a lot. Some of them were ripped from me later, and still cause a lot of grief, but life is life.
My eyes turned hazel after leaving home, several years it took. She never noticed. They disinherited me at twenty one. I was not into wars, and I wasn’t engaged to be married. I’d quit Six Year Med, and they didn’t want to know why. It was bad, so I was bad. I’d asked for the abuse to be acknowledged, it was utterly denied, and in the next ten years my four front teeth finished dying from the damage of a lifetime. She knocked my teeth out, basically, when I asked , with a counsellor present, for acknowledgement of what I suffered. Denying abuse is itself abuse. She also told me , before I left for uni: “I left you lying alone in your crib, in a separate room, and only went in there every four hours to change your diaper and give you a bottle, for several months. Then I got interested in dressing you in girls’ clothes, but by that time you were too independent, and wanted nothing to do with me. “
Independent. At four to six months old. Right. When they dismissed me heartlessly at twenty one, I was living at home with them, working sixty hours a week two positions. I had begun working the week after I turned fourteen. You could not step off the straight and narrow ever with those people. They were always ready with the knife to cut out cut out cut out. So, I had no choice but to “cut out”. I just wasn’t “cut out” for those kinds of “families”.
As a child I loved books, mother goose rhymes, fairy tales, and school. I loved music and dancing. I did well in school, which made them “approve” of that at least, but it’s the way it is. They hate you if you’re clever, and they despise a fool, No affections shown.
The only “bad grade” I would get on my report card would be “conduct”. I was always being asked by the other kids, what’d she say? what does it mean? how do we do this? and I would just naturally answer, show them how, I could explain it to them easily, in our language. Teachers didn’t like that.
I got slammed by one fourth grade nun, very dark woman , with a text book, hard on the crown shakra. Never forgotten that. I’d turned to the student behind me and whispered do you have a pencil?
French-Canadians moved to US for work two generations back. Very narrow lives. Didn’t raise any objections ever to the agendas of the state. The knew the brutality of their ruling brit masters and their church masters. Daddy was an office clerk at the National Guard Armory. He and one other man. Lonely job. Uniform on every morning. Gentle man, naturally, but had his issues held in secret. They spoke of nothing. Every ancestor disappeared behind some sin or other. It was another lifetime.
When I complained in my first year in high school that all the other girls cared about, was who they were going to marry..and I wanted to go to college…I was given the opportunity to change schools. The local public high school, or a new diocese-wide all girls’ school that would open in the fall. Perfect, daytime could be about learning. That was a great gift, and you know in those days the nuns got involved if they knew you were going somewhere, had the work ethic and all. They really did care about educating us. I mean, my grammar school had half a day in French, everything french. Religion, french history, geography, language, all of it. In the afternoons, all of that plus math and stuff in english. Us history and the Bible and it was a lot more than they did in public schools.
The parents had always had to pay for private school, but now I could at least pay for all my own expenses, clothes and such. I worked from one week after I turned fourteen. I was offered a job soon as I turned fourteen. Again, the man went first to the nuns, and asked “who’s responsible?”, and then asked my father’s permission to hire me. He was a very fine man, like my dad, quiet, hard working, Mr. Gregoire. He had a small dry cleaining and pressing shop in an alley by their home. I was “girl friday”, took in stuff, cleaned cuffs, read David Copperfield, and drew Mr.Gregoire in profile while watching him press clothes on that big steaming press. He told me I wasn’t like the other girls who wasted their time walking around chasing after boys. Well, yeah, I knew the boys weren’t interested. And weren’t all that interesting. Yet. Besides, I knew life could be magical, and I wanted a magical life.
So I soon made an appt. with the to-be principal, Sister Benita, went over to meet and talk with her, and told her I wanted to start a school newspaper. Great, she said. I’ll assign some nuns to work with you. That was awesome, and the first edition featured my interview with…….Leo Smith, the janitor. Yep. I wanted to interview the janitor. The girls loved it. So did the nuns. He was hoping he wouldn’t have to deal with plugs in the kotex machine.
They had uniforms for the first couple of years, you can imagine how that fell apart. Uhmm, were were rolling up the waists for shortness, leaving the buttons undone on the blouses, yeah, didn’t last long those uniforms. We played with them and they became unrecognizable.
We got to ride the city bus to and fro with boys going to the boys high school down the block. Went to dances there, they were the most boring ones of all the city, Sorry, guys. Just were.
There were chaperones present at every dance in those days. It was all good.
Next thing I knew, I was a yearly student rep, the litereary editor of the newespaper, in the art club, glee club, the play also. Latin club I abandoned early and left to Lydia Symchism, who’s oral class report on Moby Dick was something I’m sure we all recall, tho not a word remembered.
My three years as student body rep taught me all I needed to know about politics. Father Kelliher, the only male present, was boss and his word was final. Didn’t matter one whit what the students voted for. So I’ve never registered to vote. Don’t vote, it only encourages them, said Utah Phillips, and I agree. Not In My Name.
And I worked jobs. One school year I didn’t because I had too much going on. Then I worked Dunkin Donuts for three months in the spring for the money to go to that special summer program for gifted students throughout the state at the elite academy in Concord, St. Paul’s Academy. We’d been “invited” each of us individually.
So after junior year I got that taste of what the wealthy want the intelligent for. Uhmm, well, how they entice. The dining room was like a church. The food was outrageous. We got served. A bit embarrassing, but we had to behave. The grounds were sumptuous. We were taking two courses. It was super. Tennis courts, soccer, which quickly laid me out as an aggressive type who took it seriously slammed my ankle right on top of the ball. Ouch. That night was pure misery. The next week too. Suddenly, one year later, the pain of it came back for a while. While I was cashiering for 32 hrs a week.
I was interested in a red haired boy at the summer program. So I asked my computer class girlfriend there to make sure, make sure sure sure she got his “computer matching survey” which was gonna tell us who to dance with. (?)
So she did, he immediately fell head over heels for her, and they got together for a few years, I heard. Nice of me, huh?
I worked it out with my fellow poet friend Nancy on the tennis court. I was playing like a pro that day. I usually did my best to have fun avoiding the ball with home style ballet moves. Something changed. Nancy and I would hang out in my gothic room at night and write and read poems. One evening, I went over to the snack machines at one building. Lots of kids were there buying snacks, and at one point the machine quit working. They all began to fuss, and I said “kick it”. They looked at me like I was nuts, so I just walked up to it, gave it a real good kick, and damn if the candy didn’t start coming out for free. That’s the only way to talk to a machine. They don’t teach that in school. You have to be “psychic” and “intutitive” . You have to “grog” the Machine.
Sometime in high school, the row about John Lennon claiming that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus…well, yeah, worldwide….I wrote a letter to the editor about that. It drew the attention of some guy who worked at the Manchester Union Leader, you know who owned that one, arch conservative there, William Loeb. That writer had published a book called “Please Dont Eat The Daisies”, which was fun and funny. He invited me, as a budding writer, to come have dinner at his home. So I did. It was a bit strange for me. He was nice, his wife was “cool” and distant, and that was my first time in an upper middle class home like that. They had no children, so it was that kind of feeling.
Eveeryone wanted me to write, but after leaving high school when they ‘d say ‘when are you going to write” , I’d answer, “when I’ve lived and have something to write about.” I knew I didn’t know much.
Yes, I was a scholarship student at Boston University from 1968 thru 1970 in the Six Year Medical Program. The way I decided to become an MD was that one day in sophomore year chemistry, high school, I asked my lab partner, what are you gonna be? She said a doctor, and I thought, yeah, why not? In my thirties I had a dream, of another lifetime, I was a male physician.
So doing that summer course, which cost me money, was part of getting into 6-yr. med. Also, I had to have two Calculus courses already, so during my senior year, while carrying a full load and working 24 hr. a week as a cashier, I attended two semesters at night uni extension and did Calculus one and two. Loved it. Two A+.
Working four hours, six to ten, four nights a week, eight hours on Saturday. There was an International House of Pancakes right next door to the Zayre’s we worked at, so lunch on Sat was good. We got one hour in those days. My great leaving pay after a year and a half there, full time in the summer, was 2.40 an hour. My first job started at .90 an hour.
But when it came to those complex crazy equations they began to throw at us in advanced physics at BU, I was not that interested. The prof was a gas, tho. He looked like a cross between Bert Lancaster and Jerry Lewis. He was tall, gangly, his hair stood up on his head, and he had that mad happy look in his eyes every time he mentioned the “bathtub analogy”. Loved him but couldn’t keep up with that more and more abstracted math.
It was very intense, we went to school all summers to fill in BA credits as our year was all about super condensed advanced science courses, before we entered Med School in our third year. I composed my first song ever that fall coming into christmas. Me and the girls sang it for Professor Prock, our dear little inorganic chemistry professor who wore a suit and a polka dot bow tie every day. It was a version of the twelve days of christmas, wish I could remember it all. “On the first day of chem class, Professor prock gave me, PV equals NRT. “
“On the fifth day of chem class professor prock gave me, “ The Mean Path Is Free”.
Very fun. In the summer of the first year, I was offered a job at Cambridge City Hopital. I applied, was accepted, and they needed me….mind you, I was only eighteen years old, okay? no experience in the field whatsoever, but a great work rep….to reorganize the entire booking system for the Blood Bank. It was a chaotic mess.
And I did. Now you know about hospitals.
In the second year things began to add up that sent me flying out of there. (No, not the very weird dances we went to at MIT once and at Harvard once. Not that. )
The year before had brought the truth that many had bought their lab results from former students, while laughing at those of us who had to redo the labs to get it right. They were the “my son the doctor” guys from New Yawk, and such. Then the second year bio prof said as we were leaving class one day, “we’re going to start cutting up our cats next week”.
I was seeing green as I gathered my books and headed out. Cats were the only occasional cuddle I’d ever had, and mom hated them. The guys in the aisle ahead of me, one of them turned to the others and said “And next year we get a real cadaver. “
I hit a brick wall, there. My entire being said NO. NOT DOING THAT.
So I quit. They said, “You can’t quit. “ I did. Others had. I didn’t know then the word “holistic” All I knew, gut wise, was dead diseased bodies were not going to teach me how to help people be healthy.
Later, while living with my school mates as they continued on, I learned that the entire first two years of “med school”, after which it was straight onto the wards, were basically all about memorizing the pharmaceutical dictionary. And I got to draw blood a couple of times, at the hospital, for my housemate, to fill in for her while on vacation. That taught me a lot. Not good. I’ll have more to say about that medical nighmare further on.
I stayed in uni for a time with an english/psych major. Then something happened. Everything inside began to melt. All I could describe was this: “I feel my nervous system was put together wrong, and needs to be redone right. “
Twenty two years later or so I would learn that I had perfectly, with no knowledge of this at the time, described a Neptune transit to Mercury. Neptune was directly conjuncting my Mercury. Neptune is known as “the Great Dissolver”, as is water. No , actually water is known as the UNIVERSAL DISSOLVER.
Two and a half months of asked for transition, getting my psych degree, in the Bullfinch Seven Ward at Mass General Hospital. Where myself, and Stuart, a brilliant sixteen year old who’s nutty upper middle class parents had put him there cause he was too smart for them, would be regularly called upon by the head of the ward, Dr. Bernard Levy, to talk common sense to and settle the inane cluelessness of the apprentice shrinks. When he couldn’t take anymore of their crazy back and forth about someone during open rounds every morning, he’d say, “Anita, Stuart, what do have to say? “
We were kids, living with these people, open heatedly, you know, and it wasn’t hard to see that the ones who were really out there had been really damaged. One third went sideways, you could converse with them until suddenly …they went sideways. Something just wasn’t working right in there. One third were just emotionally destroyed by society and/or family. Kept trying to kill themselves. The other third were thrown in there for drug use, or for the pleasure of wealthy parents who were dismayed their brilliant son had taken LSD once. He must be crazy now. I wouldn’t take any of their offered pharms. I had no clue at the time how those were affecting the folks around us. I saw Linda held down and injected for calmness. I lived with Linda after, along with three other girls. She was an older, mid to late twenties, black lady who taught at Smith College when she wasn’t going out there. Very intelligent. Her mother had been Dr. Levy’s maid. So I don’t know what was going on there, but…LInda was an wonderful person.
She taught me a lot, and was there to laugh at and with me, and make a big batch of chocolate chip cookies for us to ear raw, when I was sitting sorely, gingerly and spacily the morning after my “first time”.
Naw, Larry, the guy from Stanford who’d taken LSD, he was born crazy, and good crazy, too. His parents were both profs at Harvard, that was hard on them I guess. They had us, his friends, to dinner once. Damn, I’ll tell you, I don’t care much about money, but that chocolate souffle that woman made, I’ve never forgot. Yummy. Their son was an absolutely delightfull and brilliant and funny person.The best of both of them if they could have lightened up and seen it. His gift, of course, was to not take himself seriously.
That entire experience alone was an education you can’t plan or pay for. I washed my hands of “psychiatry” the day I was talking with the cool hip nurse there, who had clued me in like lightning one day to my main context. I was pointing out that it was our societies that were very ill and murderous/sucidal, not the people. And she said that as we cannot change that, we just have to “adjust”.
No, I said, just turned nineteen. NO, I will not accept that. Never.
All I can say in retrospect about the timing is good thing I wasn’t out and influenced to go to that Stones concert at the stadium. I wasn’t ready for that kind of energy, and they couldn’t even get tuned for a long time that night, I’ve seen the video. The energy was hella bizarre there in old beantown in late ‘69, post Woodstock and Altamont. New York may have enjoyed displaying it’s wealth and power, but the old money and power ensconced in beantown is not spoken of, tho Ghislaine understands well, eh? If I could have known at the time, I was also wiped out from the intense electrical load of living in a big city, in eight and twelve story dorms, and all that. Also, at sixteen to seventeen ,over the course of a year, every old filling was taken out of my mouth, lots swallowed in those days, and refilled again. It’s a miracle I survived. That began at six years old. I was raised on sugar coated pacifiers, that’s what kept us quiet.
So thus my life went off the “beaten track” and never quite returned to it.
When I got out, I worked at Peter Bent Brigham hospital, in a little cage, processing money papers and appts. for out-clinic patients. And drinking horrid black coffee from an aluminum urn, eating m&m’s, losing my front teeth to that, and starting a very radical new life. That is, after working a couple of weeks at a restaurant attached to the ball park stadium. Fenway Park, Red Sox and all. They really didn’t need me, and when that ball chaser and his handler came in and I served them, I guess I wasn’t showing enough interest or awe. I went back to reading my book and we all agreed I wasn’t really needed.
I began smoking the holy herb at nineteen and a half. I was not a drinker. Only ever went to one party someone took me to, drank and made out with someone. Not so interesting, I don’t really like how people are when drinking. I don’t like how it poisons me.
I became sexually active, tho not very, also at that age. Once I broke out of the mind cage. Our apartment was in Cambridge, a lovely little side street with cobbled stones on the sidewalks, which were like silk to walk on barefoot in the rain. Walking out and about on the weekend guaranteed you a contact high. That town was tripping in the early seventies. Just tripping. The 6 yr. med student from Holland turned us on one night to some mescaline. Dang, that stuff made everything look like disneyland. That was pretty a nice night there in Cambridge City Park. The trees were all dancing and it was all pretty nice.
@thestandells6986
Our song Dirty Water was used in a campaign to clean up what was one of the most polluted rivers in the nation. Today it is one of the cleanest. We are proud of that.
Next installment:
Christine Hoffman and The folks on Fort Hill.
Jay Giles Band and Rod Stewart and Small Faces
Kent State. Hitch hiking. New Jersey kids. Weed Jail. Seaside heights.
The protests in Washington. The highways, Utah and California. A surprise dangerous night in Las Vegas. My first airplane ride.
And so much more.
I’m gonna pick up that guitar now, and let it sing me into the night.
We’ve been so blessed in the music.
If you’ve never seen this one, you must. This is a true story. A documentary.
Settle back. The power of music, that international language that birds and beasts know and respond to, is about to blow you away.
If it doesn’t, something’s wrong in there.
Please forgive any typos or errors, this has been an eight hour labor of love.
Thanks for writing this. Always loved Bonnie R doing Montgomery. Sending to a friend, there are so many of you, victors over that one wrong turn. Glad your intuition and self- righting instinct are strong!
Always interesting to read about the childhood Catholic adventure and its associated torments. Often it leads to people who produce creative work later. I don’t know if the suffering causes it. I have a theory that when suffering seems to be “thrust upon people” by “karmic?” Life circumstances, it makes for a kind of “involuntary tapas” (tapas as in austerities, not snacks lol) Tapas produces siddhis. (Known to yogis) Creative talent could be looked at as a siddhi. The same might apply on the population level, the enslaved blacks developed or received an enhancement of the phenomenon of “soul” from their involuntary tapas as a population.
There is an element of “involuntary tapas” in Monarch Programming also, I suspect. The preacher “Marjo” was forced into being a “child prodigy” by his parents. I think something similar happened to Michael Jackson. Then the movie “Crumb” shows the crazy environment that RCrumb came out of, that his other two brothers were in some ways destroyed by.