*EEB - Life Synops - Part One (12-09-2008)

I have a friend who has been writing fantastic blogs for a while now, most of it is off the wall stuff that makes you laugh your ass off but then there are others where he lets you have a peek into his life and you realize that there’s actually something pretty amazing going on inside that hard sun baked Aussie head of his. He’s let me/us see the building blocks of what has made him the man he is and I’ve always felt that knowing those beginning steps that people have taken are the very best way to know a person and in turn learn something about the rest of the world. So because of you my dear friend Addy, I open a vein and bleed my own life onto the pages for those who care to take the time to really get to know me for outside fantasyland… Hugs B! (Ah, and also by his inspiration since this is a long tale to tell I’ll break it up in parts, plus I don’t have it all written yet – hey, I’m still living my life, don’t have freakin forever to sit down all the time and write about it! LOL)....
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Frame of reference - Date: 1897 ....
1: an arbitrary set of axes with reference to which the position or motion of something is described or physical laws are formulated ....
2: a set of ideas, conditions, or assumptions that determine how something will be approached, perceived, or understood.....
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I was first made aware of this concept via a teacher I’d had in elementary school as early as the second grade. The teacher explained that everything we experienced, every person, place; event that touched our life would mold the person that we came to be. I remember being fascinated with the premise that the things around me, both externally and internally, would have such an impact of who and what I was to become. I think this is where I first started looking at people as puzzles, ones that’s had to be solved in reverse. You couldn’t really know them till you could take them apart and find out what it had been that had created who they were. The phrase and concept has stayed with me and served me for four decades since I first heard it used. Of course my understanding of it has greatly expanded over that time period. It has helped me to understand not only those around me but in turn it has given me insight into myself that I might not have otherwise had. Isn’t it funny how relevant terms that speak specifically to our own self truth can stick with us even before we’re fully aware of their impact. Another that I heard that relates to the previous defined term is ‘there is no such thing as reality, there is only perception.’ Another connective light bulb moment. There is no truth, no fact, no concrete anything because we will always place our own frame of reference filter over the lens of how we perceive all that is around us. That truly is the very best analogy of what we are – a camera looking at life through a lens that has a multitude of colored filters and those filters enhance or distort what imprints on the film of who and what we are. No two people will have an exact frame of reference; they can be similar but never exact. We often make the assumption that if someone is similar to us that they should think as we do, process life as we do, conclude as we do but when they don’t we have a hard time understanding why. The simple fact is that they aren’t us and quite frankly, they don’t have to be. Here’s a ponderer for you - what is the ratio balance of how you are perceived by others; how much is dependent on what you put out there by comparison to how others perceive you through those filters I mentioned earlier? What responsibility do we hold in how others see us and at what point is it beyond our control and in the conception or misconception of others?....

I have found that we are fanatic story tellers. We see something and from our own frame of reference we fill in the facts as we believe they exist. Now this doesn’t make it accurate or inaccurate. Our experience and judgment does count for something. How many times have we met someone and thought them to be of a character that perhaps they don’t turn out to be in the long run. Does this mean we were entirely wrong about them? Perhaps not. It may instead have been that we perceive them to be what they ‘could’ be rather than what they actually are. This doesn’t make us wrong but perhaps they can’t see their own potential as we do. Or perhaps we close our eyes to the whole person so as to serve the purpose of making them less than they are. Reducing them in our eyes so as to justify our negativity regarding them. The problem comes when we make the choice to believe ONLY those areas that we’ve filled in without probing further for what might not be so easily seen. Sadly we too often take our fleshing out of the unknown as fact/reality. We are all guilty of it to some extent though there are some who absolutely swear that they ‘know’ all there is to know about a situation or person and that’s all they need to know after having done nothing more than make a world of assumptions. They’ve told themselves a story to explain why things are the way they are and no matter how fantastic or fabricated the story is they are so self absorbed that they believe if they think it then it has to be true when it may not even be on the same planet as the truth. Sometimes the story isn’t interesting enough for us to want to create or probe for more so we ignore it and go on our way. Other times we crave to probe, to learn more, to fill the blanks with the other person’s truths but that person shuts us out so we’re left with a sort of emptiness and longing that make us feel vulnerable and we’re afraid to speculate why the information isn’t forthcoming. We shy away from the snub because not to do so means that the other person sees us as one of those uninteresting ones that they’ve ignored and moved away from. We’ve all been on either side of that scenario at one time or another haven’t we? Wanting to know someone desperately or knowing that there is someone who wants to know us desperately. Neither are comfortable places to be yet we still place ourselves and others in that situation knowing what it feels like to be there. A rather Sadistic/masochistic coin is it not?....

It has long been my perception that if someone wants to know me then they’ll ask. I’ve never been a big volunteer of information about myself. I told myself that if someone REALLY cared they’d want to know more and therefore would ask. Well, this idea has gotten me a life with few people who know me at all because most people don’t ask. They again assume that their perception is fact and that’s all they need to know. I’ve decided to take back the power of my own story, my life by offering it up. Now talk about vulnerable! To write is to open a vein and bleed on the paper, at least when writing about one’s self. Perhaps that’s why I never before gave up the information readily, to do so was to give a part of myself that I protected from the outside. So why do it now. Because I want to. I want to make that connection with those who are open to it and the only way we can do that is to share our thoughts and experiences. This won’t be for everyone, it doesn’t have to be; but for those who can muster empathy, even compassion, then a door that once had been unseen is now open, a connection is made. To allow you entrance and to pave that path I must prepare the way by working at becoming more exhibitionistic about my life and my thoughts.....
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The best place to begin is the beginning… Pre-me… My mother, ‘Jean’, 16 year old high school girl in love with 18 year old Kenny… They were tragic lovers on the scale of Romeo and Juliet… Or at least they thought they were. As passionate about this brand new thing love that no one had ever experienced as they had. Well, they maneuvered themselves into somehow getting married at such young ages - thinking that playing house would be like some romance novel rather than the reality it was. She quit school, he went into the Army after he got out of high school, was stationed away from his young bride who went through most of her honeymoon induced pregnancy with the support of her mother, my wonderful grandmother (known as Katie to her friends). I was born 10 days before my mother’s 17th birthday. She was no more ready to be a mother than she had been to be a wife or an adult but she had my grandma, which was my salvation, at least for the short 13 years that I had her in my life. My father soon went his own way; due I’m told in great part, to the influence of his mother who never wanted the two together in the first place, not long after I was born. The last I remember seeing him was when I was 5 years old at his father’s funeral where he picked me up and cried. He still made the choice to step out of my life all the same. I don’t know where he may be or even if he still is alive. There are times when I wonder what my life might have been like if he’d been there, wondered if my battles with my mother might have been lessened and my life might have been happier. I wondered if he ever thought of me, remembered my birthday, wished he were a part of my life or even wished me well in my life without him. But then I may be better off for his being absent. I’ll never know and you can’t truly miss what you’ve never had can you… At least not entirely. ....

I do remember much of those very early years as being happy and being loved by the only person who at that time mattered most in my world, not my mother, but my grandmother. She was one of those rare souls who had the wisdom of ages, a heart that was open to all who needed it and extraordinary ability to make me feel that I was the most precious thing to ever set foot on this earth. My childhood in her home was like living in the Garden of Eden. Everything she ever touched flourished. My favorite place was the backyard. All along the fences there were peonies, small roses, poppies, morning glories and of course my snowball bush that I’d lay under when the tiny petals fell off so that I’d be covered in their soft snowy flakes. There had once been a small wading pool near the garage that was shaped as a giant’s foot with a small bridge built into the sidewalk at the arch of the foot. By the time I was growing up there it had been filled with dirt and in the larger side every year my grandmother planted it full of multi colored marigolds. In the heal side was one of the two apple trees in the back yard. The idea of ....Eden.... continued in that there were not only the two apple trees but there were also two different kinds of cherry trees, rhubarb and a very large grape arbor that formed an awning over the sidewalk before getting to the giant’s foot bridge. It truly felt magical. Her pride and glory though were her roses. There was a huge red rambler that grew beside the porch as well as on the other side against the house. Behind the porch which contained the swing that was always in use was her peace rose. They were gorgeous huge buttery yellow blossoms that were the envy of any who saw them. I remember when the roots from the rambler connected to those of the peace rose and caused the most amazing red streak through the yellow petals, as if they’d been smeared with blood but they were still beautiful. At the front of the house was the large porch where I spent so many hours on a hot summer afternoon. Oh and when it would rain there was nothing more peaceful for me than to go to sleep on the glider as the rain sheeted off the roof like curtains of water or thrill as the lightening split the sky and thunder shook the ground. Those days are why I still love rain storms so much, why they relax me so when they are downpours and excite me so when they create such a ruckus. It’s little wonder with this entire sensory stimulus that I grew up to so wholly appreciate the wonders of the sensuality of all the ways we take in the world around us. There was nothing my grandmother couldn’t do. I grew up watching her paint her own house, plant gardens every year, process most of our food for the winter, do her own carpentry, work on her own car, roof her own garage. She had a heart of gold. Every morning that I would get up while she was able I would walk into the kitchen where she was always sitting on her stool in the corner with her coffee and smokes. She’d immediately get up to hug me and ask how her girl was doing today. There was never a question I couldn’t ask her that she didn’t have an answer for. No mistake that I could make that would ever make her love me less. She did discipline me, even made me cut my own switch off one of those fruit trees if she deemed it to be my punishment but unlike my mother, who would actually laugh at my panicked pleading when she would spank me, my grandmother truly hated the deed. I also don’t believe that I was an unusually bad child but I specifically remember one time digging in the heel of the giants foot with Grandma and proudly piping up that I hadn’t been spanked that day to which my grandmother with a smile reminded me that the day wasn’t over yet! Most often I was trying to help. Looking back I’d say that it was the adults who got me in trouble most, not being clear or careful about what was being said around children. One prime example of that is when my uncle, who had his own room in the basement of grandma’s house, bought a Thunderbird but said that he didn’t like the color so he wanted to get it painted. I was all of four at this time and because I loved my uncle and wanted to help I proceeded to go out to the garage, find an old house painting brush, some white house paint and yes, did the deed all over the one side of the car I could reach. I proudly walked back to the house, covered in the paint myself and when they asked what I’d been doing to get paint all over me I told them I’d did his car for him! I then remember him tearing out the door and of course my getting into trouble yet again… *grins* Another of the multitude of tales that followed me through my life was that of when I was very small and I first noticed that there were people of different colors and asked her why. *smiles* Her answer to me remains with me to this day as an example of the kind of heart she held - “God made people like cookies ..Vicki.., some he just left in the oven a bit longer than others.” That’s just how she was; fair, open minded and generous with herself and her life. I can only hope that I am in some way a fraction of the woman she was… ....

This isn’t to say that I didn’t love my mother or want her attention and approval; it just wasn’t mine to ever have. I suppose I was a tangible reminder of her bad choices as well as the life she’d given up in favor of a tragic fairy tale. My mother had the gift of an amazing voice and might have easily had a career as an opera singer if she’d have followed the guidance of her vocal teacher but of course she was hell bent to do what she wanted because the young simply aren’t able to properly predict the outcome of their choices. She had my sister almost 4 years after I was born during a brief reconciliation with my father, my sister’s name is Debbie. Then mom married Bill, a man who had no interest in the two daughters that preceded the birth of his son, my brother Scott, five years younger than me. That marriage didn’t end any better or last any longer than her first had. Bill was equally as involved with Scott after the divorce as my father had been, not at all. Mom was great at always choosing the wrong men but at least Bill was the last one she actually married. So, except for a few months here and there we lived at my grandmother’s for the first 15 years of my life. ....

Mom had a natural talent for retail. She was fortunate in that she had mentors in the field who trained and guided her into a career that made her happy as a retail manager but it was more her life than we were. She spent long and varied hours working. I remember before I’d turned ten I strongly felt the need of her attention but she was never home and even when she was she wasn’t a maternal figure ever. I was such a sad lonely child where she was concerned. I remember being so desperate for her attention that I wrote her letters, put them in our mailbox because I was too afraid to approach her directly and just hoped that she’d talk to me about them. I’d see her bring them in, look at them but she never said a word, never even acknowledged they existed or I suppose that I did either. Needless to say my self value as an older child and teenager was non-existent. Hell, if the one person in my life who should value me didn’t then no one else could… For all the help my grandmother was to my mother I think mom was often jealous of the relationship that my grandmother and I had. They would get into arguments and mom would drag us out for one of those torturous rides in the car where she’d blow off steam by regaling us kids as to what her life could have been had she not had us. Mercifully my brother and sister were too young for these trips to stick in their memory but they were carved painfully deep into mine. The ride would always end the same, mom would drive by the children’s home, point it out and say, ‘That’s where you kids would be if it weren’t for your grandmother…’ Gee, can’t make a kid feel any less wanted could she? Yes, she was emotionally and verbally abusive and for me that was just the way she was. She was poisonously negative and seemed to feel better about her misery if she could make others/me in particular, just as unhappy as she always seemed to be. Mom gave my sister and brother hell as they got older too but in different ways. She drove my sister to be perfect and was damned cruel if Debbie didn’t measure up. Sadly my sister holds herself and others to that standard on her own today. My brother was forced to be the ‘man of the family’ which meant mom was up his ass and always in his business to the point where it was just un-natural and my brother HATED it. I often wonder if perhaps that had a hand in his being gay even though I do believe someone is born that way. I’m sure it didn’t help him to view women any better at any rate. Of course after living with her all those years after the fact I found it was little wonder our fathers had escaped and not looked back. We had no choice but to live with her, no one who could choose would have stayed. I was never really close to my sister but my brother is still my best friend even to this day. Whenever there were family fights it always paired off to myself and Scott against Mom and Debbie. My sister has grown to be much like her and even though she’d piss and moan about Mom behind her back as we were growing up she now sees her as some sort of saint. I think its guilt. Mom was fantastic at laying loads of that out on all of us. My brother left the state to join the air force to get away from her attention and control right after high school and has only come back to visit.....Got sidetracked – back to where I’d left off… The situation didn’t improve when my dear grandmother first had a heart attack while I was with her at the store when I was 12 or died when I was with her alone but for my brother and sister when I was 13… I can’t begin to tell you how hard that part of my life was. To see someone die is hard on anyone. To see the person you love most in your life die when you’re so young is just scarring. It’s still a painful memory… I can be pretty dispassionate in relating the other instances in my life, way too much heartache and tears spent on them already, but never about her. Grandma had come from a family of 13 and she’d had 7 of her own children so when she’d been alive there was always family nearby, cousins, aunts, uncles. But when she died the divisions that I’d not even had any idea existed were exposed so not only was she gone but the rest of the structure of my life crumbled along with her. The only light that ever shone in my life was then gone and I really was lost. I look back on it all now and as sad as it was I realize that none of us are promised some utopian existence. As a matter of fact from what I’ve learned from others there are very, very few who have something even close to what is portrayed as being ‘normal’ childhoods. We do what we can to take what we’re given and make sense with it. Hopefully we learn along the way and make better choices, or at least adjust our attitude to make it as pleasant or as unpleasant as we think we deserve. When Grandma died it became my responsibility at age 13 to do all that a mother would have done in our home for my brother and sister and our home while mom continued to escape life in the one place she found it easy to succeed. I had no choice in the matter, it had to be done, I was there and no one else was going to do it. Eventually the family sold Grandma’s house, much to my heartbreak, and we moved to a small town, the first time my mother had ever really been out on her own alone… Well, she really wasn’t because instead of grandma she now had me taking care of all the things she couldn’t bother with…....

*EEB - High School Reunion (08-30-2008)

What an odd evening we had last weekend! It's rare that I find myself in a situation that fills me with such a torrent of so many poignant emotions all at once.

It was the all class reunion for the high school my husband graduated from and I should have had we not moved out of the city after my freshman year. We had only found out it was to happen nine days before it took place but we'd looked at the web site the alumni had set up and I'd found that there would be people there that I'd gone to school with during my grade and middle school years that I hadn't seen in literally a lifetime so we decided to go, really looking forward to it as well.

Now let me add that all my life I have had more male friends than female. I do have female friends; I just get along with males too. They really aren't all that difficult a creature to understand as many women would want to portray. As long as you understand they are male, are meant to be male and don't have to be like females then you're good to go. (I personally prefer them to be whom and what they are because I absolutely don't believe females are the apex of perfection by any stretch of the imagination either. I've worked with them, it's a wonder men can ever stand them!) Anyway, in my youth I spent more hours tromping around wooded trails exploring the world, playing games, riding bikes with my guy pals than I could ever stomach playing store, board games or listening to music with my girl friends. (Dolls were strictly out, had no use for them) I'd seen on the roster of those planning to attend this reunion one of my best school pals. His name was Anthony and I remembered how it had broke my heart when his family had moved away when we were in the forth grade. As it happened I had run into him once for a few minutes not long after I'd gotten out of high school, the one I had moved to later. My brother and I had gone to my uncle's house to pick something up one night and I had waited in the car. While I sat there a guy my age had come from the house and asked if I'd remembered him. It was dark and by that time my eye disease had already stolen my night vision so I could see nothing more of him than as a darker shadow against the night. He didn't seem to mind that I didn't recognize him because he enthusiastically told me he was Anthony; we'd gone to school together. Of course I remembered him and I asked him how he was, what he'd been doing and the obvious, why was he here at my uncle's house. He was in the military, stationed in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Alaska and somehow in the course of life had met and married my distant cousin. They were there visiting with his father in law, who was closer to my uncle than he was to any of the rest of the immediate family. Anthony was getting ready to go back to Alaska with his new wife. He blurted out that he'd kept all the Valentine's Day cards that I'd given him that we'd all exchanged in elementary school and I was so surprised and flattered. Oh my dear readers, if you'd have known me then… I had no self worth, was so painfully shy and introverted… The fact that he'd remembered me no less saved anything from me was a concept I just couldn't perceive. My brother returned to the car and I had to give fast goodbyes and best wished but to this day I regret not having made sure I knew how to keep in contact with him before we'd left. I'd asked my uncle soon after if he had any contact information for Anthony but he hadn't. So I lost touch yet again. When I saw that he'd be attending the reunion I was excited that finally I'd get to talk to him again!

Good God what a fiasco it was! Oh yes, it was a huge turnout. So huge in fact that people filled and spilled out everywhere from the out of the way restaurant/bar. I saw some people I'd not seen in 30 years and we talked of old times and how things had gone for each other in our life. We saw people we remembered and were remembered by some who we didn't. "I don't remember" and "I do remember" were overly used phrases all the way around. Since my father, mother, aunts and uncles had all graduated from the same school there was an odd feeling of family because graduates were generational among many there and even though I'd been hoping to run into anyone who might have known my mother or father that never came to pass. We did meet one woman there who had graduated before either me or my husband but she wasn't there as much for herself as she was for her brother who had been killed. She said that she came to the reunions to hear stories of her brother from those who had known him. Both my husband and I had although his was more knowledge just by name. I told her that at one time I had a crush on her brother and that he had been a nice guy and he had for the most part. I told her that I'd met him when he was running around with some friends of mine riding trail and mini bikes in some of the trails that ran through some of the wooded areas around our neighborhood. As I said earlier, if there were trails to be explored I was often out in them. She was so happy to talk to someone who had known him that I didn't have the heart to tell her that what I remembered most about her brother was that he had been very aware of his good looks and what many other girls were willing to give him because of them but that when he was about 17 and I was 13 he'd once taken me for a ride back into the trails, stopped the mini-bike, tried his damnedest to get me to go further than I was willing to go beyond some kissing and petting, became angry that I didn't find him so irresistible then left me to walk back out of the trails when I'd refused to play his more than practiced game. No sense in tarnishing her obviously glowing memories. I really didn't think her brother had been a bad guy. He'd just been a young man being a young man and hitting the proverbial brick wall with me. *grins* I do understand her grieving though, I'm very close to my brother and if something were to happen to him I would be devastated.
While we were out walking about two groups of people had come up to us trying to place me amongst their memories. One group of guys all echoing the comment, 'You would have come out with me', yet they couldn't remember who I was but made it clear they'd like to now. As I said, I'd been very shy and introverted so I'm not really surprised by their not remembering me but then I hadn't been invisible so had they made the effort then to know a young girl who they'd made a point to over look then they would have known me now but since they'd not had the time for me then neither did I for them at this point. The other set was a group of obviously still very cliquish women. "You look so familiar to us but we can't place your name…" Again I explained that I had been very quiet and shy in school and I hadn't graduated with the class so perhaps that were the reason why. They, on the other hand, weren't familiar to me at all but then again, not surprising since I never was one for cliques. I had my friends but we hadn't gone through school all connected at the hip.
Through the chaos I did manage to get with my class for the pictures. Not everyone was there because the only way we had heard the announcement was that we'd been inside when it was made and none of the announcements had long been cut off to the outside revelers. It was already deep night so I'm not sure how the pictures will turn out but I did stand next to one woman I remembered immediately because she had been on of the tallest girls I'd known. Since it was so dark I wasn't able to recognize or even see anyone else. I kept thinking, I wonder if Anthony is standing within arms length and neither of us knows it… I'd been looking for him but I'd yet to find him.

There were many who didn't attend that I had really been hoping to find again and many who may have been there that we just missed among the throngs. (Even the organizers said that the next one will be in a much larger place) We met up with some old friends and talked of the past. It's funny how some events are so fresh in your mind it's like they just happened yesterday. Still others slowly walk into the light of memory after lurking in the shadows of remembrance and others are somehow pushed completely out of the hard drive of our minds for need of space for storage of more important matters. It's also amazing just how much most people change over a life. You somehow think that those you know in high school will retain at least most of their features so that you'd know them when they crossed your path again – believe me, they don't! Very few looked like they did then. It's just the normal cycle of life of course but fascinating to witness. We learned of the fates of some who were no longer with us, favorite teachers and classmates alike.The evening was winding down, at least for us, so we went inside for a while to watch the 'door prize' drawings. No winning for us and as much as I'd looked – no Anthony was ever found. We left for home. I spent that night as well as the next day flooded with all those emotions that I'd mentioned before - excitement, contemplation, sadness, surprise, happiness, nostalgia and disappointment. Perhaps one day I'll find Anthony again, perhaps not but I know that I certainly don't regret going to this reunion and hope to do so again with even better results next time!