the new jerusalem

And so it is that we are now in full Olympic mode. Beginning Friday night at 6 pm the little red light on the DVR has been in constant glow, reminding me that even as I go about my daily chores, or sleep for three or four, somewhere in London (or thereabouts) someone is competing for (and drugging for and doping for and arguing for and protesting against somebody else) winning a medal.

I always watch the first and last day, without fail, and up until this year have actually recorded the broadcasts for posterity, with the rest pretty much up for grabs depending on what the telly tells. But this year NBC has for all intents and purposes turned over its entire schedule to broadcast the eighteen days of glory.

Now, I’m still a sucker for watching those young gymnasts fly around the parallel bars, and seeing a 15-year old touch the pool wall first to win gold does more than just tug at my heart strings. But, frankly, I’m just not that into kayaking in a man-made pool or watching the river sculls or beach volleyball (how the heck it made it into the games is way beyond my ken).

But as the days wear on, even though I feel myself drifting toward Olympic overload and find myself turning away from the visuals on the flat screen (no, we can’t call it the tube anymore, the tube is underground in London), I am still, in my minds ear, drawn back to five minutes during the opening ceremony, when a positively delightful young man in a yellow shirt stood up and sang the words of William Blake:

And did those feet in ancient time.

Walk upon England’s mountains green.

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire;

Bring me my Spear, O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green and pleasant land.

not for me

For the past couple of weeks I have been scanning pictures of my grandchildren and posting them to facebook albums. The comments from viewing friends have varied from a simple like to a big omg. The responses from the gc have made me laugh, and a couple of times, cry.

Truth be told, most days I’m never very far away from tears. Depression is ever present and some mornings it’s all I can do just to get out of bed. Oh, I get up, all right, kitty is relentless, and if I don’t respond to his initial attempts, with a gentle paw on my face and a “mom mom mom” from his hungry maw, then he goes on to other methods, all of them involving something that will without doubt get my attention. First, usually, he hops up onto the bookcase headboard and tickles me with his tail. If that doesn’t work he leaps to the bedside table and proceeds to knock over anything that’s not nailed down, particularly relishing the resultant crashes as items hit the floor. And if that doesn’t work, he lays down across my feet and (not too) gently nips my toes. By then I’m usually inspired (?) enough to kick off the covers and stumble to the kitchen, mindful of course that he’s dogging my footsteps as I trudge the length of the house.

But once he’s fed, the predawn envelopes me and I have to make some decisions about how I’m going to handle the rest of the day. I’ve learned not to turn on the television, because in the weeness of the morning the newscasts focus on either the terrible or the terribly mundane, both of which serve only to heighten my sense of unease. Listening to my best deejay is better, but barely. And yet the silence of the house is the least fave, because alone is bad but alone with my thoughts is awful.

Before the accident there were always good days and bad days but for the most part the good outweighed the bad. Since the accident, I experience way more of the latter. And when the memory hits, it’s a six flags ride and all a downward spiral. Trauma is trauma, however it comes into your life. Going back to bed is not an option, because dreams are almost as bad as reality. A pill might make things better but what do you do when the dose wears off? I understand why some people start the day with a drink or a drug, needing something, anything, to numb the woulda coulda shouldas. But neither is viable for me. And so the darkness closes in and the voices in my head sing the dread refrain. I was an ugly evil child. I was a bad wife. I was a horrible mother. Mistakes are always remembered and never truly forgiven. All the lights in the house turned on do nothing to assuage the bile in my gut. And there is no wounded warrior program for me.

my kids

There are lots of pictures and photos in my home. Some of them are fave repros, Monet or Van Gogh or Remington or Russell, depending on the décor du jour, but the majority are of people, places, and things, gathered along the way throughout the years. They are, for the most part, mounted in albums or stored away in a bug-out bag in the office. There are two on the staircase, however, that I look at several times every day, each time I climb to the office. Neither was taken by me, or a result of a personal contract. Denise, in a wisdom way beyond her years, paid for them with her own money and gave them to me as a present when she graduated.

Darling daughter, if I never before said thank you, I’m sorry it took me so long to recognize your efforts, and I’m saying it now.

vhs vs dvd

Shortly after we married we stopped going anywhere besides work and Church. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of it, since my job kept me flying in and out almost weekly, but when we were home at the same time almost all of it was spent viewing television, either from the home projection system in the great room or the table model in the bedroom. And we were constantly recording something, from old Three Stooges comedy movies and loony tunes shorts to opening and closing Olympics ceremonies and extensive coverage of what turned out not to be the Y2K end of the world. When we got a free weekend for HBO or Showtime or Cinemax, we kept both recorders going nonstop. When we moved from the beach house to the country, we packed the tapes into three duffle bags and schlepped them down the four flights of stairs and then upon arrival at the new house arranged a cement block-and-board bookcase for them. Each time something went on tape, I faithfully typed the addition into the alphabetically arranged library list, showing the subject/title and author/star along with any other relevant info. As the collection grew, I started numbering the boxes. But soon even that wasn’t sufficient to quickly find whatever it was Jim wanted to watch, and so began to log not only the number of the box but also the color. Eventually I put the whole shebang on the computer so he could open the file and find stuff when I was out of town. By the time we moved from NC to Texas our obsession had garnered six hundred plus VHS tapes. There were over a hundred red (2 hours 40 minutes playing time, which we used for Kevin Costner epics), yellow (2 hr 10 minutes for the majority of telecast movies), and gray, black, white, and blue (2 hours each) for all the rest. I don’t even remember how many copier paper boxes we filled with tapes but it seemed the stream would never end as we packed the Ryder truck.

Once we got to Allen, Texas, and the rental house, I carefully stacked the boxes in the spare bedroom, close to the door, so they were easily accessible to Jim, who had decided he didn’t want to work for a while and was staying at home, and he insisted he must be able to find things quickly when I wasn’t there to do it for him. Six months later, at the end of our lease, we packed up and moved again, to our current home. This time we built a brick-and-six-foot-wide-six-board-high shelving system in the office. I just about crippled myself moving all those boxes up the stairs, but once it was done I was quite proud of the effect. The tapes were arranged by color, with the numbers facing outward, again, so Jim could find whatever he wanted with a minimum amount of effort. And since the shelf was located adjacent to the computer desk, and the library listing had a shortcut on the desktop, it was one-stop shopping.

Fast forward twelve years. I’m tired of hearing him gripe about how none of those old tapes will play on either of the current players. I’m sick of looking at (and dusting) the shelves. And, I’ve become firmly convinced that the DVD format is head and shoulders above tapes, anyway, not to mention they’re way lighter and take up half as much space. And so, three weeks ago I asked him to spend a bit of his midnight hours going through the tapes, and if there was something he really really really absolutely positively no doubt in his mind could not live without to put it into a storage box I had conveniently placed on the office floor, reason being because I intended to trash anything that was still here after he left on this latest deployment.

Are you surprised that he said he didn’t find anything worth saving? Well, I wasn’t. Sooooo, I went through them all, discarding with gleeful abandon, then toted that barge and lifted that bale and after six hours there were only fifty tapes remaining upstairs. (You couldn’t walk through the garage, the floor was so full of trash bags, but the upstairs looked fantastic!) And then, on Friday, early in the morning, I wheeled the city-supplied trash bin (which was by then full to overflowing and almost too heavy to move by myself without getting a hernia) to the street, and made eight trips to pile up all the garbage bags, waiting for the green monster to pick up and haul away. By noon it was all gone and the trash bin was back in its place just outside the garage door. Sooner or later I’ll get around to making a new list of what was retained, but because I know from experience that you never need something until after you throw it away, I didn’t delete the old list. For comparison purposes only, doncha know.

P.S. He asked two days later if I’d kept Stephen King’s “The Stand.” Well, no, honey, darn my hide, but that was one he’d tried to watch about a year ago and discovered a whole hour was missing from the middle of the series when evidently the cable went out, as it was so wont to do in coastal Carolina with our way less than satisfactory cable provider. Guess I’ll just have to search Amazon dot com for a DVD of it. But it won’t be any time soon, I guarantee.

July 4, 2012

Fourth of July has always been my favorite holiday. Because it’s not about giving gifts or wrapping presents or fixing a turkey or ham or going to extremes to decorate the house and yard in extravagant displays that will be enjoyed for a day or two and then taken down and stored in either the garage or the attic for another year. Really, there’s not much special that I do on this day. Other than hanging out the flag and then just simply showing up and letting somebody else do the work. And, maybe, if I’m fortunate and feeling fine, marching in the Duncanville parade. Ah, Independence Day, with the right to just be me, on my own terms, and the freedom to celebrate with all the other Patriots in this Fair Land.