The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 18 trips to carry that many people.
I used to have Mikimoto pearls but now I don’t
I used to have a new SUV but now I don’t
I used to have a white picket fence but now I don’t
I used to have blue & white china but now I don’t
I used to have a poor sense of self but now I don’t
I used to have a diamond ring but now I don’t
I used to have to drink all day but now I don’t
I used to have a king-sized bed but now I don’t
I used to have a Persian rug but now I don’t
I used to have to unwilling sex but now I don’t
I used to have sex but now I don’t
I used to have to watch my mouth but now I don’t
I used to have to make excuses but now I don’t
I used to have to sneak to smoke but now I don’t
I used to have a riding mower but now I don’t
I used to have to walk real soft but now I don’t
I used to have to say I would but now I don’t
I used to have to wear stilettos but now I don’t
I used to have rental properties but now I don’t
I used to have season passes but now I don’t
I used to have an anxiety disorder but now I don’t
I used to have to apologize but now I don’t
I used to have a nervous laugh but now I don’t
I used to have to look away but now I don’t
I used to have a stand mixer but now I don’t
I used to have a sports car but now I don’t
I used to have credit cards but now I don’t
I used to have shaking hands but now I don’t
I used to have a constant observer but now I don’t
I used to have Waterford crystal but now I don’t
I used to have a tree house but now I don’t
I used to have an exaggerated startle reflex but now I don’t
I used to have a locked gate but now I don’t
I used to have to hide the phone but now I don’t
I used to have withdrawals but now I don’t
I used to have to live with fear but now I don’t
I used to have children who adored me but now I don’t
I used to have heart palpations but now I don’t
I used to have a washer and dryer but now I don’t
I used to have to wear my hair long but now I don’t
I used to have hold hands in public but now I don’t
I used to have to censor my writing but now I don’t
I used to have nice pots and pans but now I don’t
I used to have tremendous shame but now I don’t
I used to have health insurance but now I don’t
I used to have to hate myself but now I don’t
I used to have to have but now I don’t
I used to have to live a lie but now I don’t JGKing © 2011
The shocking thing is that after all these years I can still be shocked.
Imagine if you will the following scene from the twilight zone of daily life at my house just now.
I am sitting partway up the steep stairs to the suite that is my 15 year-old son’s bedroom and private bath. Much to his older brother’s chagrin, he has this room despite the obvious birthright/seniority issue because the room suits him better and I thought it would make him happy.
I was mistaken about that last part.
I have just threatened to call for backup or to have his punk-ass committed for erratic and anti-social behavior and he has just called me, I believe, a whore.
He is going to school tomorrow and is not taking it very well. “We tried it your way and it didn’t work,” I tell him. The online school he insisted was his only educational choice since I moved him to another state is not in my budget and so he sits in his room(s) day in and day out online and in full Donnie Darko.
So, tomorrow, I say. And school.
He hates me. I stipulate that I suck at parenting. That I pretty much suck at everything and that I can only work with what I have here so—sorry chief—you are school-aged and I’m the mom and tomorrow is a school day.
He disagrees. Violently. Cusses and kicks. Threatens to off himself. Learned that one from me. I launch into a monologue about suicidal ideation (my own theory) as an OCD thing for some of us when we hit frustration. That I call the suicide hotline instead of the tow truck when my car breaks down. That the threat alone requires me to respond by calling for help.
His brother intervenes and reminds us both about what help arriving did to our family before.
We knock it off then. I sit on the stairs, partway up. He goes to his corner above and plots my demise or watches Dr. Who or both.
The phone rings and it is my mom.
I am sitting on the stairs partway to his room and my mom calls and I talk to her. She proceeds to kick me in the gut by nonchalantly saying she is on her way back to Memphis from visiting her church friends in a neighboring town (my brother’s—one hour away) and that my sisters were there. She didn’t think to stop by and see us or to tell us she was going to be nearby. Nobody thought to invite us or to tell us they were all getting together.
“I guess your sisters figured you were working,” she says.
What she doesn’t say is that everyone knows we are flat broke and probably didn’t want me to feel bad about not being able to pony up gas money to get us there and that she wanted to see her friends more than she wanted to see me (us.)
She hasn’t seen the kids since she and my sisters came to help me for a day or so when I got out of intensive care in 2007. They visited the kids in foster care then. Hubby was in jail on attempted murder charges.
One of the main reasons I wanted to move to Kentucky was because I wanted the kids to have a grandmother and aunts and cousins. Even before our family imploded, we were separated from them all.
In the years since and while the kids were still being “helped” by a system that took them but didn’t know how to give them back, I came to Kentucky for visits and dreamed of what it would be like someday when we were all one big happy family. I made allowances for them all for letting the kids stay in foster care even though it must be hard for the kids to buy into any version other than “didn’t give a shit.”
Kicked in the gut.
Sitting on the stairs partway between Connor and my Mom.
So I wrote a mean rant:
“Put my fist through some face someplace (I did not see this coming) and keep thinking it does not matter that I don’t/didn’t matter but then–shit!–it hits and I let the motherfucker wash and then comes the back wash. Bitch. Me man I am Pavlov’s bitch. Gonna have to get a brush and paint and learn how to take that after-rage and put it on a page because OTHERWISE I don’t know how to put that damned dog down. Got to get it to quit before I get bit. Shit! Just shit.”
I filled my tub and soaked.
Mom was raised by her grandmother who was way older then than grandmothers are now. I believe Granny did her best but I also know Mom didn’t get that special something that mothers have to truly be able to connect with her own children (okay, a couple of them she seems to have hit it off with but I digress.) Not having “that” meant that I simply don’t have that capacity either. I love my children—fiercely! And I do my best but even before I succumbed to my demons, I was never quite right.
I have made peace with this of late.
When the other little girls were playing dolls, I simply didn’t get the attraction. I would go play Tonka trucks and climb trees.
But I do love my children and I have a deep sense of responsibility toward them and I want to protect them and teach them and I want their respect and admiration if not their doting affection.
I have made peace of late with the fact that I suck in the mom department. I believe that peace has opened the door for me to become what they will really need now that they are taller that me—one hell of a good dad.
Still, I am shocked that I am capable of being shocked by the fact that she refuses to play along with my fantasy of her as a mom. To at least step up and be a grandmother! That she didn’t even want to see her grandkids.
Whore.
(I am certain my grown daughter in Oregon, pregnant just now and with two babies already, will read this and laugh. She will, I’m certain, wonder if I connect the dots to how she feels with me here in Kentucky instead of in Oregon with her.)
I love my children. They are wonderful and me not giving them what they need has absolutely nothing to do with them. I simply don’t have it to give because it was not given to me because my Mom didn’t have it because she didn’t get it either.
Mom not giving me what I need likely has nothing to do with me which means I can (half a century into this relationship, kiddos) stop trying to win her favor.
Come to think of it, Granny was deaf as a post and crazy as hell so Mom’s Mom probably wasn’t holding out on Mom any more than Mom holds out on me or that I hold out on my kids.
I am doing the best I can with what I have to work with. We all are. Hell, we all do.
Just got an email from my son. He will take college classes if I pay him. I am not above this. Here in the twilight zone, we call that success.
Stay tuned.#
“…rigorously honest…”
I had made the decision to drink myself to death. It wasn’t that hard of a decision to make at the time since I was already on that path and since I had already lost everything and everybody I claimed to care about in the world and therefore any reason to try to stop drinking.
At the end of the day, I had what I wanted most in the world which was for everybody to leave me the hell alone and let me drink.
So I was living in a furnished lakeside house in Tennessee all by my lonesome with nothing on my “to-do” list other than to drink until I died.
(Let me say right here that if “Leaving Las Vegas” had been anything like true to the subject, Nick Cage would have spent the entire two-hours of screen time in the bathroom.)
Drinking oneself to death is not actually as fun as one might imagine. Add to the physical torture the amusing punch line of no longer actually being able to get drunk. For reasons simply not important by this point, a real alcoholic of the hopeless variety can’t even enjoy the ease and comfort of the constant companion. No oblivion. No ease. No temporary peace.
It’s a hell of a thing. Can’t get drunk and can’t get sober because if that was even possible, I certainly would have done so before I became caught in the cycle of dependency my affliction imposed that demanded I stay put in an otherwise intolerable relationship until our family imploded.
Imagine my surprise when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to tolerate the pain of this self-inflicted death after all and that—despite losing everything already—I was going to HAVE to find some way back to health.
As my sister in Kentucky likes to say, “Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit!”
Suffice it to say that three years into the process, I have had other rude awakenings. Sure, I can blame my ex, my family-of-origin, the medical community and society at large, my genes and my God. It may not in fact be my fault on some level but it sure is my problem.
I remembered me recently as so little I was wearing footie pajamas. It was Saturday morning and I am the only one up in the house. I have the TV on low and am watching something dreadful in black & white about how ants eat each other because it is too early for cartoons. I am up because I couldn’t sleep for reals because of the counting going on in my head. Just counting. Just nonsense intrusive thoughts. It still went on like white noise in front of the TV but sometimes I could forget to listen or otherwise be distracted for minutes at a time when I was in front of the TV or running hard outside or seeking something sweet to eat or…
Drinking quieted a part of my brain that seems to exist for the sole purpose of agitating me like a fly in an otherwise dark and comfortable bedroom. Sure, it’s awesome there but how is anybody supposed to rest with the constant and insistent buzzing all the time?
Drinking became my solution. It was the snooze button on the alarm that is my brain. Other people use other things and I have too but, mostly alcohol has been my ease and comfort.
Except that my brain doesn’t give a shit about my body. My body will die an ugly death trying to satisfy my pain-in-the-ass brain.
Which bring us to the point of today’s lesson: SpongeBob SquarePants.
We were a Barney-free zone when my kids were little. Could not tolerate the purple menace on my eardrums and IQ so I had to concede to the SpongeBob.
While I could see the attraction to SpongeBob, the maniacal laugh was enough to send me into a seizure. I would let my wee ones watch this in another room but they would still tease me by imitating the laugh of what I liked to call “SpongePants SquareBob” just to tease them back.
Good times.
This was while Mom’s drinking was still working for us all with a spotless house and gourmet dinners and my relentless pursuit of perfection according to some OCD ideal. So what if I had to drink myself into a blackout every night? Hubby liked the blow-up doll I became after midnight or so. A lot.
I was the perfect mom and wife.
You know that lie fell apart.
So here we are, now. Hubby is on the other coast and the kids are taller than me and I am insane out-loud and coping the best I can one day at a time. Every day I wrestle with the reality of the damage I did (not “anybody but me” but ME) to innocent lives and what that looks like despite my best efforts to repair the damage.
Rigorously. Honest. This is one of the requirements of me these days.
My daughter, Bin, tells me at the sink the other day that all the characters on SpongeBob are actually based on “The Seven Deadly Sins.” I am down with this. Patrick (you know he is a stoner) as Sloth, I can see. Gary the Glutton, sure. But then she says that SpongeBob is Lust.
Huh? I would have thought of him as co-dependent. He is always trying to improve himself or help others to get what they want and he is downright (outright!) annoying with his sunny and positive disposition. How is that lust?
What exactly is lust?
Wanting. Craving. One definition says, “The sin of excessive thoughts and desires.” Needing something to make a body feel satiated and satisfied and comforted. Quiet. Still.
Lust. Damn.
Not very attractive when you put it that way. I can see why SpongeBob would have to be so hyper-vigilantly grasping all the time. Lusting for that possession or plan or purpose or something somewhere out there to make it all okay. I happen to be a sponge type myself.
This may be as good as it gets. Damaged kids and broken dreams that were never based on any truths to begin with and not enough Humpty-Dumpty glue in the universe to put it all together again.
Just a girl sitting on a stool in an otherwise empty house reading some nonsense to her Mom at the kitchen sink washing the dinner dishes while one boy in the house mopes in his room and the other chases the dog around in the back yard of a house in a different state where I brought us all in an attempt to make it all okay for everyone but I don’t have all the things like a new car or new shoes for that matter or a good job to get the stuff to make them happy so now I am wondering if maybe I should have brought us instead to somewhere else…
A pineapple under the sea?
Is there any way I can just be okay where I am without lusting after some other way to be?
Stay tuned.#
“It’s not just something you can, you know, just cut out. Depression like that,” he says and I know the grown man working on my fridge is speaking to the little boy he used to be and for the mother who no longer speaks for herself.
All I had said was that I had been meaning to call him but was kind of in a funk of late and hadn’t the energy to do even that small thing.
He understood, he said.
I woke up and realized today was trash day. I jumped out of bed and ran outside in the clothes I’d been sleeping in and headed toward the sidewalk dragging the big-wheeled can with me. My buddy Craig the fridge guy was driving by at that exact moment. I have not been in any state that allows for speedy neuron activity so I wouldn’t have even recognized him without his truck or if he hadn’t asked after the fridge.
Been meaning to call you…it broke again…my brother-in-law looked at it…defrost timer at nearly $100 online and I’m as broke as the fridge so…
Nonsense, he said. Had a timer in the truck and could fix it in a jiffy. He came right in.
I apologized for not calling him before to ask about the part. Been in a …seasonal depression of sorts, I guess. Not getting things done…
“It’s not just something you can, you know…”
He tells me then that his mom was bi-polar. She would be high as a kite for months, he said but then the depression would set in. He shakes his head, remembering.
“It’s a real gift to her that you got it,” I tell him. I need to tell somebody. I need this to be true in my family. For them to know that I would be different if I could. “That you could understand she couldn’t do anything about it—didn’t ask for it. Didn’t want to make it hard for you.”
“It was hard for her,” he shrugged. “Just hard.”
He fixed the fridge in no time at all. If I hadn’t already decided there was no God recently, I might be tempted to think a fast and free fridge fix and a kind word was a God-thing.
Stay tuned.#
I would pray but there is no God today. I am embarrassed that I ever thought there was a God or miracles or healing or even a point to all this dross for that matter. Silly girl.
My head hurts from crying. I have cried my eyelashes off and should make for an interesting spectacle at work if I can manage to show up there later today. Like it makes one bit of difference to them. Hate to see the looks from the kids, though. The boys have been waiting for the shoe to drop but Bin was buying it.
My depression is tangible and hangs over the house and fills the rooms like an acrid smoke that clouds the eyes and stings the throat. It is too dark and too quiet and I cannot summon up my usual sun-self that is required to manufacture the suspension of disbelief to make a happy home. I have no money so I can’t order a pizza or take us to breakfast or to a movie or anything to distract and amuse and change the mood. I could make cookies except that for I can’t make myself make cookies.
Apparently all I can do is cry.
I have never let myself just be like this, ever.
I have treated my depression with sheer gumption and denial but I can’t seem to find any just now. I have treated my depression with alcohol and drugs in the past and that stopped working and ruined the lives of everyone I loved. (Theoretically, of course, as a good argument can be made that you can’t love and also ruin.)
I hate this. I have been taking my vitamins and going to my meetings and praying my stupid head off. I have a job and a great house and am on track for the dream life I myself ordered up and have moved mountains to set into motion.
I know this will pass. My task today is to not undo what I have worked so hard for just because my brain hates me.
I am so mad! So mad that I am this way. If there was a God, I would tell God to kiss my ass.
Depressed me hates not-depressed me who would tell me to just turn that frown upside down! To walk it off and to know this will pass. Depressed me wants to take a hammer to the head of not-depressed me and then, like the song says, just smoke a cigarette and wear a hat.
Whatever.
Even depressed me knows that polarity is probably not the best course but, damn.
Acceptance. Surrender. What does that even mean?
I took an anti-depressant once. It was a baby-dose. Right away, I broke out in hives and my throat closed up. I was advised that all of this sort of medication is off-limits.
Acceptance. Surrender.
Does it mean to admit that I am a train wreck and simply inappropriate for life on this planet? That I don’t have the stuff to hold a job and make a home and care for children? Do I need to just admit this and get on with the business of disassembling?
I know being a 50 year-old single mom is hard by definition. My past choices (made from this same place–BTW) have resulted in a game of catch-up of an epic scale and I also have big dreams. The fact that I don’t have a lover or partner or friend willing to provide any tangible ease and comfort is testament to my unlovable nature and abrasive personality. I get that. I am alone because I deserve to be alone.
It’s not “them” as a smart lady I know says.
Maybe I should just admit what not-depressed me bites off is more than depressed me is able to swallow.
So, then. No job for me. No home—no kids—no stuff.
Sounds like a plan but then that sunny hopeful bitch will show up soon and spoil everything. She will be baking cookies and paying bills and telling the kids lies about how their days of sleeping on the floor are almost over and that at least we are all together and…
Where is my hammer anyway?
Stay tuned.#
“To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”—Isaiah 61:3
We are walking around town, Bin-Bin and her Ma. It is a blindingly beautiful summer day and the first whole day in our new house. We have walked to the library for no real purpose other than because we can. As hoped, the library inside lives up to the promises made by the impressive exterior. I had already judged this book by its cover and I like being right.
I am so pleased with myself about the library and I am especially proud to have remembered my camera. I aim to snap a shot of the whimsical balloons-light in the foyer. Bin moves around me and stands in the center under the display and strikes a pose. I snap.
The night before, she and I had been sharing a square of carpet covered with one of the simply sumptuous comforters given to me earlier in the day.
Right after getting the keys to what I have begun thinking of as “The Miracle Mansion” (or M&M –the green ones are the best!) It hit me that I didn’t have a pillow or a blanket to put the kids down when bedtime came.
Lately I have been experiencing something like a decision tree. I will have a moment and time will screech to a halt. Inside this moment are divergent trails of possibility. One of the trails is very familiar, although I didn’t know this until not very long ago. I also had never noticed that a different trail existed until I realized my beaten path was not the only one out there. So time stops and I get the opportunity to make a decision.
The familiar path is paved with fear and self pity and because of the downward trajectory is easy to take. I can choose this—still do from time to time—and then decide to get off at any point but the trip back is uphill, plain and simple.
That path is a lie. It calls itself reality of pragmatism or some such but it is not that for someone like me. It is a path I no longer seek.
The other trail sparkles with dappled shade but is a little misty. I have no idea where it goes. I never do. All I know is that when time stops and I get the opportunity to choose, I’m gonna wind up back here time and again until I take the dappled trail.
I never leave without telling the kids where I’m going and when to expect me back but this time that is exactly what I did. I turned my back on self-pity and fear and got in the car and drove down the dappled trail.
I felt calm and interested and curious as to what came next now that I had left the fear behind.
An hour later, I drove up and the kids came running out, happy from their exploration of the new house that there was simply no way we could get but where—strange road that—we happened to be living. “Hey, where’d ya go?” turned into “What’d you get?”
And then, “How?”
What I got was four complete “King-Sized” comforter sets and matching zillion-thread count sheet sets and new pillows still in the original Bed, Bath & Beyond packaging.
How I got it was by driving down the road. Seeing the Salvation Army. Asking. Being directed to the Red Cross across the street. A nice lady who was leaving for the day got the call from the nice lady at the Salvation Army and so waited for me.
When I answered “…none?” to her question about what size beds we had, she didn’t miss a beat, “King, then.” She walked me upstairs to large rooms with aisle after aisle of new bedding and directed me to start carrying stuff to my car.
She didn’t so much as ask me my name.
Even thought the house is large, when night fell we were all sharing floor space with nests built in Mom’s room. Soon one boy and then the next felt comfortable enough to pull up stakes and mosey to his own room. Bin abandoned her own nest and snuggled in close to me in mine because, she said, mine was way more comfortable.
When it got still, she whispered to me, “I am so happy. So happy… So…” and drifted to sleep. I saw her there whenever I rolled over and she was sleeping with the biggest smile on her face. All night long.
So happy. So.
Isaiah 61:3 is the bible verse my mother used to say to me when I was on my knees willing myself dead and grieving the loss of my children and their loss of each other. “Beauty for ashes…” she would say. “The oil of joy for mourning…” like a promise. “The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness…” when my heart was so heavy that I couldn’t imagine what supernatural strength it would take to make me put one foot in front of the other and attempt to build a life if living meant I had to live with such loss. Such unspeakable loss…
So happy.
The picture I snapped may have been of a neat feature in an awesome library with my lovely daughter, Robin Joy, perfectly positioned in the frame.
The picture I got—and the one that keeps coming to me over and over and filling my heart up to the top—is of…Exuberance! Exaltation! Celebration! Of beauty and joy and praise!
Stay tuned.#
“Don’t give up before the miracle…” my good friend likes to say.
I don’t. I can’t. It’s an ongoing miracle. I get that much for sure.
It’s never really about the conditions and circumstances and occurrences. I am not made of stone, of course, and can be/will be/am/ swayed by what happens (or doesn’t) on any given day but the trick is to come back to center right away. I find that my ability to do this is pretty much determined by how far off from center I already may be when life shows up at the door with muddy feet and dragging baggage.
God willing, I keep it close(r) to the center these days.
Stay tuned.#
Got a visual right before sleep of what it was like to compare to what it is like today. Way worth everything that happened to make this happen and could not have been any other way. I am watching the pup wrestle a vine–she’s winning–out of the opened window. Just over 70 degrees in my bedroom and my comforter feels like a hug. Bin is at school and boyz are sleeping safe and sound under the same roof. No gas in the car-no dog food (Spaghetti-o’s. Pup thinks she’s been especially good.) No fear. Not even holding my breath until some idealized mythic place is reached to be happy. Happy. Now. lovelovelove…
If you want to know exactly how tall I am, measure my bathtub. It is deep and fills quickly and I can float on the surface just so without touching anything. The acoustics in the room are perfect. I spent a good hour there last night and I sang and sang, “Amazing Grace! …I once was lost…was blind but now I see!” I had to get into the bath with the intention to be present–in real time–and experience the relaxation and healing there without feeling the need to get anything done or be someplace else or hurry. I had to step into the warm bubbles not knowing what came next and letting go of my associations with a big tub. No lover and bucket of champagne? Then what?
Here’s what.
I float. I feel the warmth and then the gratitude for the ample supply of hot water and the smooth surfaces and the way the light is dimmed above the tub. I float. I feel the gratitude of hearing the kids together on the three stools at the kitchen counter—the only furniture in the house and suddenly the only furniture we need because of how this causes this fractured family to be together. I float. I raise up to sit after a while because, yes, I want to sing. I sing and sing and sing.
Didn’t see that coming.
After a time, I get out and send the bubbles on their way and dry off. I dress and join them in the kitchen. We were given a ripe cantaloupe that I had put in the freezer that I remember to slice and then cube. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for one, ramen for another, soup for the last. Puppy gets the spaghetti-o’s. I cannot recall having a sweeter melon in my entire life. We all agree on this.
Bin says she thinks she will take a bath in my tub too. I tell her she should. And that she should sing while she’s in there.
Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound!
Later on the bed on the floor somebody gave us over the weekend and under the comforter that is so heavy Bin grunts to cast it off after she is sleeping, I am slipping into sleep when an image come to me unsolicited.
Earlier in the day as I was cleaning something or the other, I scolded myself in my head as usual in a voice I suddenly realized was not my own for my “standards” of keeping everything clean. This time I talked back. I like clean. Bite me.
The image I had was of unclean. Of rage and violence and ugly and filth.
My eyes popped open and I started to reject this as an affront but there was no pain there. No regret. Just revulsion and a well-timed reminder of what it was like, an appreciation of all that had to happen to for this particular now to be realized. Unclean. Clean.
A moment of grace. I once was lost but now I’m found. Was blind, but… Now. I see.#
Green light, GO!
Push down on the accelerator and, no matter the years and the untold miles driven, the sigh of release comes for me every time a red light turns green. It’s like red bad—green good which is, of course, silly. Both are simply states of being while on a journey.
Besides, if I ever want to get anywhere ever, I need to understand that my red lights are someone else’s green. Some days I seem to hit all greens but others…not so much. The combination is in place to keep the flow. (Kind of like what my eldest son likes to say about time—that it is an illusion created by the human mind’s inability to experience everything at once. Einstein? Koontz? Dunno.)
Everything ultimately is a system engineered with a function. My experience in that system is much more agreeable–to me–if I remind myself to go with the flow.
The light turns green. I go with the flow. And oh I like to go! My Dad used to call me “Go-Jo” when I was a wee gal. He said he’d have to look for me before any car that had come to our house drove away again in case I was bumming a ride, unbeknownst. He said I didn’t care who was going and where, I just wanted to go.
Green light, GO!
When I got my own wheels a smidge younger than was strictly necessary (or legal for that matter) I kept the roads hot. I learned to drink and that was about going too. Pure ecstasy? Cutoff’s and a tank top, shoes in the passenger floor and a beer between my knees—just banging down the freeway with the windows down,Van Halen blasting and not a cop in sight. Traffic lights? Not on this road.
Red light, STOP!
By the grace of God, no one was injured by that insanity. (Not in a freeway crash, that is. That same reckless and self-centered character caused plenty of other wreckage.)
Green light. Go.
Release of the tension. Waiting does try my patience sometimes, but it takes precisely as long as it takes and I may as well use that time to practice non-resistance. To take the spiritual high road best embodied in a quote by Peter Griffith, “This is happening. Make peace with it.”
So I wait. Alert and practicing a peaceful acceptance that goes against my diaper-baby-crawling-in-the-next-car-out personality. I wait.
Green light! GO!
I must become even more alert now. I have to notice other cars as they merge on and off the road. I have to become one with the flow and adjust my speed to match the others around me and leave ample space for sudden stops. I have to look for my exit and hit the off ramp at the correct speed and merge without taking anyone out or getting run over myself. If I take the wrong exit or get lost, I have to be willing to ask for directions and to make my u-turn like a big girl and backtrack to that place where I knew where I was before I got off on the wrong road.
Sometimes I hit a sweet spot and cruise for miles and miles and miles but other times I come upon freaking construction underway (I HATE THAT!) and I have to sit in traffic or go really slow for miles and miles and miles (I HATE THAT!) but today’s construction is tomorrow’s smooth pavement. (“Make peace with it.”)
The yellow light is a spiritual thermometer. Am I mellow on the road right now, going with the flow and secure in the knowledge that I’m on my way and it’s just a light and I can slow down with full knowledge and acceptance of the red light that follows and the wisdom-nay!-faith I have today that the next green light is a given?
Or, foot to the floor! Not willing to give up my momentum quite yet and, hell, I stopped for the last two yellows so I DESERVE this and I am Mario Andretti, bitches! Get out of my way!
Blowing through the caution is fun and all and perfectly allowable. Doesn’t matter in the long run. That same car I blew by at the last light will be sitting beside me waiting at the next.
The road is the road. The journey is the journey. The lights are disinterested tools designed to help insure we all get to our destinations. Just the lovely choreography of a clock works or a river heading for the sea. How I behave on the road, my outlook and attitudes and road rage and and whining and rest stops and how I address machine malfunctions and…determine the quality of my trip.
I love the drive. I love green lights and the open roads and a smooth patch of pavement. I “get” the red lights and am learning to use that time to enjoy the scenery and other high-minded spiritual metaphors that are more true some days than others. Red light-green light? All good. All part of the go.#
