Today I’m thinking of a little girl.  The world conspired to hold her separate from others, to find her own way through it all, to learn to love the silence.  Today, though, I’m thinking of a birthday party.  A “double” birthday party, to be exact.

This girl, of course, was I.  I was 11 and well into a year of being ostracized by everyone.  Everyone.  My parents, teachers, old playmates, all of the children who went about their childhood business who perhaps shunned me because everyone else did.   Maybe they actually didn’t see me.  More likely, they saw me and looked through me.  I disappeared.  I made myself as small and quiet as possible.  I believed I should cease to be, unworthy as I was of the world.  Pariah.

Sometime in the distant past, I had a birthday party with a little girl who was born on the same day and year as I.  We invited our separate groups of friends and everyone enjoyed.  I was thrilled to be surrounded by lots of people who liked me and, I thought, wouldn’t hurt me.

When we were 11, this lovely little girl’s mom called mine and suggested another double birthday party.  My mom accepted without my permission.  I had kept secret from my parents the crushing, grinding ostracism I faced every day.  I thought I’d be in trouble if they knew everyone had been determined I was  disgusting.  My parents didn’t much like me, either, at that time.  I didn’t want to push my luck any farther than I’d dared when I collapsed into myself six months or so earlier.

As the time grew closer, my mom kept asking for the invitation list.  I can’t imagine how I made it through that time without providing any names.  Time can sometimes be generous, pulling a veil down to hide the old subterfuges necessary to continue to exist in this world.

When the day arrived, I had no choice but to show up.  My parents would have known had I not gone.  Such courage for a little girl.  I went and her parents were puzzled about the absence of my guests.  I tried not to seem sad.  It didn’t really seem like an appropriate occasion to unleash my rage, though.  Always a wonderful fall-back strategy.  I tried to not exist.

After the party, I disappeared back into the void.  I was nothing again.  A curiosity to the adult, maybe even a little source of pity for the quiet quiet little girl.  I’m sure I made up a story for my mom.  Maybe I even said I had fun.  Excellent training for “preparing a face to meet the faces that I (met)”.

I carried on.  There was a long trip in store for that little girl who learned to be so alone.  So brave.  Who was so so sad.

So it’s a corona virus/Wall Street mind-fuck/Donald Trump is still the President kind of day.  Unfortunately, it can all get a whole lot worse than this.  And probably will.  Definitely will.

I’m not supposed to be opining on the state of the world as we know it.  This is the new “about me” examination to find a “better” me.  A lot of my days the past couple of years have been spent raging against the Trump Machine, raging about the slow death of the planet.  So I guess anything goes, really.

I spent my day today helping Mom with her bills, going to the grocery store twice and trying to deal with the needs of my beloved Andy.  It was all an enormous mind-fuck.  The vet didn’t wish to give me any pain meds for Andy.  He’s been my beloved husky for 17 years.  I will burn down the world for him.

Andy’s days get more and more difficult.  His vet (who, after all, did give me pain meds) gave me the names of some hospice vets.  Who even knew they existed.  So I guess that’s where we’re going.  I know Andy is leaving me soon, but I only allow that knowledge to hover on the edges of my consciousness.  Of course he will always be with me.  Just like Walker and the Toosk and Sheba and Togo.  I am also with them, loving them, remembering them, dreaming of them.

I  have yoga tomorrow and meditation with Lama Surya Das’ online group on Wednesday.  Plodding along, as usual, to find a clearer path.  Dzogchen is hard to conceptualize, though.  I think it may be because Dzogchen is inherently non-conceptual.  I can embrace the understanding that all form is empty.  If all form is empty, though, who is suffering?  For whom are we saying the Bodhisattva vow?

Just another beautiful, terrifying, heartbreaking day.

My brain seems to be malfunctioning in a new and disturbing way.  I spend a flot of time searching for recipes appropriate to the needs of an aged diabetic.  Wait.  There was a moment of attempted denial right there.  I almost said “aging.”  Sixty-six is aging the way the President has a slow learning curve.  So.  I’m searching the Internet, I’m bookmarking, I’m planning my strict adherence to my diet, all the while noticing that every casserole I see is reqired to include, at the very least, a hefty amount of butter, a pound of cheese and then a little more cheese for luck.

As I cogitate about the day’s menu, I beakfast on cinnamon bread.  My lunch break from house cleaning is penut butter crackers.  As in Keebler’s.  Dinner?  I abandoned chicken about two months ago after eating nothing but for months on end.  The very thought of chicken makes me a little queasy.  So we’re having healthy meals of beef, pork and, yes, some fish.  Does this sound healthy?  Probably not

I recently lost 12 pounds out of the blue.  I had no idea, but I think the endless energy required to care for my puppy and my 17 year old huskie probably have a lot to do with it.  I was pleasantly surprised when my doctor asked me about it.  Losing weight is always dangerous.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hovered on the ragged edges of an eating disorder.  How little can I actually eat and still be in denial about how close I’m getting to anorexia?  Once I start losing weight, I have a quiet little intention to never gain it back.  Maybe I should lose a little more?  Maybe I’ll cut back on calories.  Just a tiny bit.  Nothing wrong with that, right?  I’m keeping it all a secret from myself.  Someone may have an eating disorder, but that person wouldn’t be me.

It’s vicious.  I think about healthy, I eat more carbs and sugar, I work out more, I think about healthy food, I eat more carbs….  I have a cardiologist appointment this week.  I may have to explain myself.  Unless I’m feeling combative.  I think I need a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Scientific American asks the the well-worn, “What advice would you give to your younger self?”  I’ve always thought this is a useless excercise in navel-gazing.  Things were what they were and are what they are.  I don’t believe in free will.  The universe has led me here, via the stringent path I’ve stumbled down.  No need to question why.

I’m going to give it a shot.   The metertricious hint, “Love yourself fiercely, as soon as you possibly can.”  Good advice, but utterly ridiculous in my case.  I loved myself as much as I could whenever I could.  There was so much to forgive, to heal from, such breathtaking anger…no, dazzling rage.  I look on my young self with love and sorrow.  That love and sorrow makes younger me enraged and scornful even still.

“Her” attitude towards the world was that most people lived in some delusional universe.  She had seen the truth about life–family exists to beat you down, the nation exists to patronize its citizens, other people were for the most part sheep who were incapable of seeing the truth of things.   She would not allow anyone to patronise her steeliness.

I feel that old rage surge through me.  Thirty years of therapy and I still carry it around with me.  What would I say to my younger self?  You were right to be enraged.  You were right to feel rejected and lonely, after many long years (beginning at 11) of total ostracism.  Adults made judgments they had no right to make.  They deseerved every ounce of derision you could muster.

Younger self jumped into the fire.  Burn, baby, burn.  She dismissed her peers.  I recall a dorm-mate I didn’t even know asking me why I was afraid to love.  She offered a helpful tome.  Here’s some advice–make her listen to the real explanation as to why. Kiss my ass, young lady.   Younger me was contemptuous of  institutions of all stripes.  Hell, yes.  She tried to learn as much as she could, write some acceptable poetry and try to find some meaning in all the suffering.  These are not unworthy goals. Go for it.   Younger self drank a little, smoked more pot and tried to open the doors of perception with a couple of hits of acid and some peyote.  No doors opened, but no harm in jiggling the doorknob.  Oh, one big important piece of advice would be no quaaludes.  Quaaludes led to indiscriminate fucking.  Really not healthy.  Otherwise, try to free yourself from the prison of child abuse.  Fuck away, but not under the influence.

So I guess the advice comes down to that, really.  Stay away from the quaaludes and carry on.  You were meant to be there, just as I’m meant to be sitting in my living room, refusing to see how anthing could have been different.

“A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.” – Barack Obama (president of the United States)

“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” – Will Rogers

There have been five so far:  Walker (the Wonder Dog), Ruskie (the Mighty Tuskie), Miss Sheba Woo, Andy (Bear) and, finally, Togo (Wogo).  They have all been and still are greatly loved and admired.  Courageous, loving, always in the moment, forgiving.  I always wish I could be like them.

My beloved Togo left us on January 17.  Togo was a shelter dog who was surrendered by his family when he was 7.  What could be wrong with people who would give up a family member?  So he came to live with mine.

We always believed he’d been abused.  He sometimes flinched when you touched him.  He steadfastly refused to get into vehicles (a source of many problems).  Sometimes, out of the blue, he would attack (generally me, his primary person) for no apparent reason.  I have six scars to attest to his fear.  They’re permanent marks of his presence in my life.  I loved him anyway and he loved me.  We both always understood that.

However, aside from his anxiety, he was a remarkably sweet dog.  When being given treats, he would sit promptly, put on his best “am I the cutest thing you’ve ever seen” face and gently take the treat making sure that no fingers were nipped.  When we came home from being away (five minutes or two hours, didn’t matter), I would sit on the step to the dining room and he’d cover over to sit by me so I could put my arm around him for a big hug.  How he loved his hugs!  So did I.

When it was time for a nap or bedtime, Togo would always sleep right by me on the floor by my bed.  If he didn’t make it into the bedroom immediately, he would greet me by touching any available flesh with his nose.  Then he’d settle in on his bed to keep me company while I slept.

What a good shelter huskie he was!  His absence is a hole in my life.  We were forced to euthanize him at home on January 17 around 9:15 in the morning.  As the candle burns by his photo and his collar, I know that wherever he is, he knows I still love him and miss him.  Just as he does me.

“Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” –Robert Fulgham

Some things never die.  They lodge in the brain and spring forth unexpectedly like a startled rattlesnake.  The sight of a stick in the yard, lying there, seemingly harmless.  Blood is on the stick.  A towel on the floor.  The towel is soaked in bood.  Looking forward to a special event, you walk in the door and the walls are spattered in blood.

Movies take up residence in memory.  A father attempting to set a mother on fire as she’s tied up in the living room.  Screaming in another room that leads to a knife held at a mother’s throat outside in the wet grass.  Blood.  Blood everywhere.

I was a little girl when these nightmares curled inside me like a snake.  The snake knows when it’s time to strike.  I was always the child who tried to step inside the violence, to stop the onslaught.  I was the child ready to put my own small body in peril so that my mother might be spared the fist, the knife, the fire.

Funny how it was, really.  My father always seemed to think that if horrors occurred behind a closed door or outside on the lawn I would somehow fail to notice the danger.  The reality was that I always tried to keep track of them, where are they?  Is there danger in the tone of my father’s voice?  Can I distract?  Can I walk into the danger?  In the middle of the night, where are they?  where are they?  How terrified should I be?  I stopped breathing until I could determine the level of threat.

I heard him once, brutalizing my mother while I was marooned in the living room.  “I’ll kill her.  I’ll kill ggirl.”  These are hard words to hear and harder to lose even now.  I heard him knock her unconscious once and, thinking he had killed her, he suddenly had a change of heart.  He was really really really sorry.  Yes, I was panic stricken.  Later, I discovered my contempt for him.

So here we are.  I’m 65 tomorrow and my father died by his own hand a couple of decades ago. (I’m actually not sure.  I’ve never been good with dates–just terror). I could say I’ve forgiven him and that, is in fact, the truth.  I’m not certain what I’ve forgive him for, but that’s not necessarily important.  There are so many things to forgive.

As for me, at 65 my dreams are still anchored in that nightarish past.  I live it evry once in a whie, when I least expect it.  When the snake decides to uncoil and strike.

Looks like I’m re-upping with my personal trainer.  I’ve been training with him for 25 minutes a day 3 days a week.  I’m fine with that.  Yesterday we discussed my trepidation about a one hour session three days a week along with my usual two days of yoga.  I’m not giving up yoga.  He believes I can do it.

I said,”Hey, remember me?  I’m going to be 63 in 2 months.  I need recovery time.  You kick my butt every time I’m in here–and that’s great–but I’m going to be 63 in two months.  I don’t recover automatically.”

“After a while you’ll get used to it,” he tried to encourage me to spend some extra money.  He’s  clearly unfamiliar with the concept of old.  Also my obstinacy.

“Let me add that I’ve had a couple of rounds of strong chemo, extended radiation, a mastectomy and reconstruction surgery.  These events are exhausting, among other things.  The fatigue hangs around forever.”

He nodded his 30-year old head and said consolingly, “You’ve been through a lot.”

That’s it.  End of conversation.

There actually are some good things about being geriatric.  Not being able to work out at the level I once did is not one of them.  Listening to a veritable youngster trying to convince me I’m not old (thereby rubbing my face in my ever-diminishing abilities) is most assuredly not one.

I’m what’s known as a Breast Cancer Survivor.  It’s now in remission.  I really hate it when people give me a perky smile and tell me that’s great.  They believe it’s gone now, but breast cancer is incurable.  My little friend is always with me, waiting to pop up and say hi. I have a blog in which I described my cancer journey.  It’s here if you’d like to follow along.

Given my general unwillingness to deny that presence, I’ve become highly motivated to find the gift.  They are many.  One of them is a need to always be as physically fit as I can for a woman of my age.

To that end I’ve retained a personal trainer.  All of the people I know who have one are a little snotty about it, so I’m a bit nervous about how this is going to affect my usual self-effacing manner.  Our first meeting was on Monday and my good man, Duy, pushed hard.

I love that.  Do not waste my time with exercises that are geared for old people.  There is spiritual redemption to be found in physical movement, I think.  When it’s time to leave, I find a clarity and openness to other people.  I am profoundly immersed in each moment as it passes.  I’m happy even though my little friend has taken up residence.

So now I have a personal trainer, a guide to a new vision of the world.  Time to also avoid snotty, if I can.

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