This P.C World

      I know many good people. The good people in my area of the rural South are usually self-professed Christians, go out of their way to help one another, wouldn’t say an unkind word to your face for anything, will bring deviled eggs and potato salad to a funeral gathering, and pick you up on the side of the road after you’ve had a flat tire. Salt of the earth people, good people. People who visit shut-ins, people who babysit in emergencies, people who wave to you in town, people who will give you $1.60 when you’ve come up short in the checkout line, people who go to church every Sunday and pay their tithing without complaint, people who rescue stray dogs, people who hug you after a loved one has died.

But these same good people sometimes have a problem with tunnel vision. They are unable to see the world from anyone else’s perspective from their own. They take their own experiences and their lives and superimpose them over everyone else. This is especially true if they live in a very homogeneous society. If you live and work, and go to church and school, and socialize with people exactly like you, then there’s never any opportunity for dialogue on how it might feel to look though the world though another set of eyes.

If you aren’t a white woman, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a young black male in an urban setting, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a Muslim man, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a young teen with two children out of wedlock, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a family seeking political asylum in the USA because it is too dangerous in your country to live, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t gay and had to struggle all of your life for some kind of acceptance, from not only yourself but from society, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t an older woman on a fixed income who lives in an apartment in the city, then you have no idea what its like.

If you aren’t a victim of sexual abuse, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a black woman, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a teenager coming to age in 2018, then you have no idea what its like.

If you aren’t afflicted with a serious illness or chronic condition, you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t Asian, you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a fifteen-year-old scared girl who has just found out she’s pregnant, then you have no idea what it’s like..  

If you aren’t a school age child who was in school during a mass shooting, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a young white male, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you’ve never experienced generational poverty, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t handicapped, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a person who has no health insurance, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you don’t have a mental illness, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t indigenous to this country, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a young couple trying to raise children today, then you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t confused about your sexual identity, you have no idea what it’s like.

If you aren’t a member of a particular group of people, then you have no idea what it’s like.

           

I’m going to go in another direction right now, but I assure you that it ties in which the above narrative. Bear with me.

The term “politically correct” gets thrown around a lot, But if we were break the term down, what does politically correct mean? Some synonyms, words that mean the same as politically correct are: unbiased, neutral, appropriate, nonpartisan. So to be “politically incorrect” is the opposite: biased, partial, inappropriate, and partisan. Those sound like negative attributes to have. Wouldn’t it be more positive for everyone to want to be unbiased and appropriate, and therefore actually want to be politically correct? To be politically incorrect is to be a person who doesn’t care about who they offend in society. Which are you? Politically correct (unbiased and appropriate) or politically incorrect (biased and inappropriate)? Believe it or not I’ve actually heard people brag that there’s no way in hell they’d ever be politically correct. They’re politically INCORRECT and damn proud of it. These are the so-called “good” people I started this essay talking about. The salt of the earth people.  Is there juxtaposition here? How can good people want to be inappropriate?

           

Why are some people going around yelling and complaining that the country is just too politically correct? Do they think being unbiased is a negative quality? I have a theory. The people stomping their feet and making snide remarks about how awful it is that “everything has to be politically correct nowadays” can’t get used to the fact that polite society no longer sees humor in jokes or comments that are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, or sexist. If a joke or comment or meme is mocking an entire group of people, then it is not appropriate and should not be posted or said. In other words, just be polite. We don’t get to tell people what they should and should not be offended over. It doesn’t work that way.   

             

As for the people who make fun of and deride the women marchers or the football players who kneel, you have no right to say what is right for that group of people either. You have no right to say how they choose to make their voices heard. You have no right to tell them that their fears and experiences are not real. The Civil Rights marchers of the 60s were beaten, killed, mocked, cussed, and murdered.  History now teaches us that the rights the Civil Rights marchers were fighting for, were the CORRECT rights to be fighting for. In other words, rights that any human being should have. And just like the Civil Rights movement, history will judge us for where we stood at this moment in time, but it will judge us harsher, and some of us, through the magic of digital social media footprints, will be found woefully lacking.   

!@@!%$!@ and %!@#$^%

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The Keeper of Secrets (a short story)

I am the Keeper of the Secrets in a town of a little over five thousand. Five thousand-two hundred and sixty-seven, to be exact. Secrets run deep in small towns and even deeper in the South beneath the suffocating summer heat when everything is as still as a corpse and the drone of mosquitos drill into your brain.  Secrets as deep and muddy as the Tallahatchie and Ocmulgee Rivers. Secrets as deep as December winter evenings when the sun sets at five o'clock and shrouds the world in a premature darkness. Secrets as deep and dark as the grave. I know the secrets. I keep the secrets.

          

         Tessie Burrell has a grown child that doesn’t know that her real father is the insurance man in town. Gretchen Crown has a slight problem with kleptomania that has led to her being banned from the Family Dollar, no small thing in a town with only four stores. We’ve been working together though, and she swears she hasn’t stolen anything in a year. At least she hasn’t been banned by one of the twenty-six churches. Now if she would just talk about her addiction to prescription drugs, most noticeably Xanax and Percocet. She skirts that one every time I try to bring it up. Wonder if she’s stealing them?

            Then there’s Robert Hollister who had a complete melt down in my office one day and confessed to once having had a love affair with a horse that Old Man Frank owned; Chester Richards and his proclivity for peeping into the windows of teen girls at night; Mavis Fordham and her fascination with WebMD.com- yesterday she swore she had leprosy; dear perpetually white attired Bertha Noles who brings me baked goods and proceeds to cry over Fred, dead these past fifty years. They weren’t married. Bertha just had a crush on him. When he married Carla Morris and then two days later was killed in a farming accident, Bertha swore that Fred had been planning on leaving Carla and taking Bertha away from her father’s oppressive house. Our own Miss Havisham.

            I’d rather not know all the darkest recesses of people’s souls, but it’s what I’m paid to do. I am the only therapist within a fifty miles radius. A Licensed Professional Counselor.  I was born and raised in  this town. I am the equivalent of the old small town doctor who used to make house calls, except I don’t make house calls unless my patients have been carted off to the E.R after trying to overdose or slice their wrist with a rusty razor, they’re being held for psych eval at the local jail, or Miss Howard has a fresh baked apple pie she wants me to pick up from her house.  Miss Howard won the State Fair pie competition five years running. I do love pie.

             I went to high school in this town, drank myself into drunken teen stupors by the river, went to the prom, played pool at Howie’s Pool Pub, and ran up and down the streets in my ‘68 Camaro. That Camaro was outfitted with a 427 cubic inch engine and a glove box full of weed. I’m still scratching my head over the fact that the same people who knew me as a hell raiser in my youth can see me in another light now that I’m more than a few years past middle age. I guess because I’m one of them.  They trust me with their lives. I mean, literally their lives. I could ruin 65% of this town either through direct knowledge or indirect knowledge of their secrets. Just think of all the blackmail material I possess. I could cash out those secrets and buy a place in sunny Spain.  Te gustaría otra cerveza? But, my patients pay me, or their insurance company does, a pretty legal penny to hear their confessions. Enough to live on. In this Southern Baptist town I guess I’m the closet thing they’ll ever have to a Catholic priest. So I am the Keeper of the Secrets.  All the secrets. Go forth my son and sin no more. Fifty Hail Mary's and ten Our Father's. I've heard it all.

            Russell Overstreet was sent to me because he killed all of his ex girlfriend’s Vietnamese pot bellied pigs- all twenty of them- when she broke up with him. He told me that he a was bit “miffed” when he found out she had screwed Lester Mitchell while Russell was away at a job training seminar in Atlanta. He said he had every right to kill those pigs since he had bought all of them. Judge didn’t see it that way, so now Russell has to come talk to me every two weeks for an hour.  He’s over his ex girlfriend, in fact he has a new girlfriend named Fran that he met in Macon at a bar two months ago, and he was best man at his ex girlfriend’s marriage to Lester in October, but he still has nine months on his court ordered counseling session, so we usually just play a few hands of poker.

            James Winsome is the mayor and he sneaks into my office through a back alley door so no one will see him. James is what I would call a special case. He thinks the Mafia is after him and that if they catch him they’ll make him a sex slave. His story on why they are after him changes every visit. One time it was because he had impregnated the Don's daughter with a two headed cat and another time it was because he stole a shipment of cocaine from them, stuffed it up his rectum, and it’s still there. He says he can inhale with his rectum, so he pretty much stays high all the time. And this is the man running our town.

            Poor Mrs. Tippley, who was my fifth grade science teacher, believes that very well endowed aliens kidnapped her one night and did sexual experiments on her. She suffers from PTSD. Seventeen- year-old Logan Kitchens is a pyromaniac who burnt down the American Legion, and I suspect the storage shed behind the First Baptist Church  He didn’t get any jail time because he is the son of the richest man in town; Buster Kitchens, the owner of the paving company. Ken Unger, the local undertaker, thinks he’s a donkey; Mrs. Marshall, the librarian, believes that there is a very tiny man living in her head; Bill Carswell, the president of the Farmer’s Bank, is a coke addict; Fanny White, a housewife, has nothing wrong with her. She just likes me because I actually talk to her- her husband is a deaf mute. June Reynolds, the secretary at the elementary school can’t stop herself from sleeping with every man in town who asks, me included. Don’t report me to the state licensing board. It was a very long time ago in high school and involved a pony kegger at the river after a football game. I have lines even I won’t cross. Anyway, when June sleeps with a man once she loses complete interests. It’s the chase that thrills her.  

            I can’t even look half the town in the eye if I see them in the grocery store. I have the drug store deliver my prescriptions and I hired a lady to do the food shopping for me because I truly dread running into my patients outside of work and having to make small talk. I mean what does one say?

             “Oh, hello, Mr. Browning! Smoke any meth today?”

             “You look perfectly lovely today, Janice. Remember, don’t binge and purge!”

             “Great to see you, Billy Bob!  I see you got another White Nationalist face tattoo.”

            My job has its dangers. J.C tried to choke me to death at the jail when I went to evaluate him. Damn near killed me. And I still have to see the bastard when I go pay my water bill. He’s the clerk at city hall. Two years ago Nathan started stalking me because he thought I had stolen his soul in one of our sessions. He stopped when I gave him a Ball canning jar filled with antifreeze. I told him that I had taken his soul in order to clean it for him and now that it was all shiny and clean I was returning it. He left me alone after that. Glenda Victors fell in love with me, and it might not have been so bad if she hadn’t been eighty-nine years old. When I gently refused her offer she took a .45 from her purse and held it up to my head.  Another patient knocked on the door and scared Glenda so badly she dropped the gun. I kicked it under the table and then bolted for the door. After Glenda bonded out of jail she felt so bad that she baked me a plate of chocolate chip cookies.  Ernestine Whitehead roofied me when I left the room for a minute and she stirred Rohypnil into my sweet ice tea. I came to about three hours later and she was gone. I staggered over to the E.R and when I told them what had happened, they tested me. Seems Ernestine had tried that shit before. No one warned me. I stopped seeing her as a patient and thank God I don’t remember one thing that happened after I took a few sips of that tea.  I don’t want to.

            I’m sitting here now waiting for my four o’clock to show up. Benjamin Garrison. I always schedule him last because he has dementia and half the time he forgets he has an appointment. I’ll wait for an hour, catch up on paperwork, and then go home if he doesn’t show. He’ll phone tomorrow and apologize profusely and I will tell him not to worry about it. If this were the city he’d be charged for the appointment anyway, but this is my town, my people so I forgive and forget. At least he hasn’t tried to kill me.

            I smile because I am the Keeper of the Secrets. I smile because no one told me when I received my LPC license that the people in my home town were so much like the text book cases I had read. It’s rather disturbing how people can hide behind masks. Maybe I am Keeper of the Masks. The masks get ripped off in my office and then carefully put back into place as my patients, my friends, my townsfolk end their sessions. They go home, they eat, they play with the dog, they take a bath, they watch T.V.  And all the while their mask is set firmly in place.

            Believe me once you’ve seen behind all the masks you can never forget. I wonder, when I die will the town bury me in a spot near the very back of the city cemetery under the old magnolia? That area is carpeted in soft bermuda grass and it's hidden halfway by a wall and great sloping branches. Hidden in the shadows.

           

           

           

           

Eulogy For My Friend Barbara Asbell Bryan

On March 11, 2018 my best friend for the past 40 years, Barbara, passed away. She had been ill with heart problems for some time but we truly thought she'd pull out of this latest hospitalization the way she always did.  When I received news of her death in the early morning hours of March 11, I couldn't even cry. I tried to cry and couldn't do it and felt like I had betrayed her because I was unable to shed tears for her.  My mind refused to believe what my ears had heard. 

Later that afternoon I got in my car and drove down a back country road with the music blaring "I'm Still Breathing" by Green Day, I screamed and I cried and I yelled and I finally allowed my heart to feel her loss. Today was her funeral. It took me three days to write her eulogy. Her eulogy from a friend. I just hope I did justice to Barb and her memory.  Here is the eulogy for family members who might like to have it.

 My heart goes out to her family:  Mike, Phillip, Becky, Will, Miss Sue,  Angel, Andrew, Alex, Emily, and KatieLynn. 

Barb will be greatly missed.

                                              Eulogy For My Friend 

I met Barb when I moved to Cochran in my eleventh grade year. We become friends almost immediately. In our senior year, due to my dad being transferred from San Antonio to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, I found out I would also be moving to attend Biloxi High School. I remember telling Barb in school during second period class. She ran out of the classroom into the bathroom and I followed. She was crying her heart out. When I asked why she was crying she stammered, “Because you’re leaving.” As an Air Force kid I had never had anyone cry when I moved away. She had my heart from that day to this. Before school was over our senior year I was able to come back and graduate from Bleckley County High school with Barb and the rest of the class of 1980.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I never wanted to stand before you and talk about Barbara, I still don’t want to, but I do want you to know who Barbara Elizabeth Bryan was.  I want you to know what she was like. I want you to know what she loved. What she was most proud of. What she dreamed of. What she hoped for. The things that made her human.

Things like what a huge wrestling fan Barb was in high school. She came to school one day clutching a photo of herself with some wrestler named Ric Flair. I had no clue who he was, but she was so excited you’d have thought she’d met all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. She kept that photo in her notebook for awhile and then tacked it on her bedroom wall.

Barb somehow acquired an orange and white Bobcat car in her senior year. She’d pick me up for school in the morning and we’d always be late because I am NOT a morning person. We’d be late for school and Mr. Smoot or Mr. Harmon would get onto us. Barb would get mad and threaten to stop picking me up, but she never carried through on her threat. That old Bobcat was something else. We thought it was kind of cool. I look back now and realize it was one ugly car. We’d turn the radio to Q 106 and drive around after school to see who was in town, try and run into our crush of the week, and find who was riding around with whom. At night we’d park at Bohannon’s or across the street from the old Otasco. Everyone would. There’d be eight or nine cars parked side by side with us kids milling around talking. There wasn’t much else to do in Cochran on weekends, except hang out at Bogies, the local quasi arcade, and play Space Invaders or Pac Man, or go the river.

Like most of girls in the late 70s, Barb wore her hair in the famous Farrah Fawcett hair style. She always had a can of AquaNet in her purse and she’d spray her hair every so often throughout the day so not even a single feathered hair fell out of place. The wind would gust and her feathered wings would stand straight up then lay back down like nothing had ever happened. There was an art to wearing that hairstyle and Barb had it down to a science.

 People keep telling me how sweet Barb was. She was that way even in high school. The word sweet is used so often that it has become a cliché, but she WAS sweet. She never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings. She would allow people to hurt her before she hurt them. I saw that happen many many times over the years and it drove me crazy. But she didn’t know how to be any other way.

When I moved back to Cochran from Biloxi in 1983 and became a mom, Barb was already a mom, and she’d babysit my oldest son, Adam, while I worked a few hours a day. Adam and Barb’s son, Phillip, became close. Barb called Adam Adam Bomb and to this day Adam still calls her Ma Barb.

 I know many of you remember when Barb was the librarian in town at Tessie Norris. She loved her job because it allowed her to connect with people. She loved having the children come in for story time. I’d go by the library after classes when I was attending college and we’d talk. I miss those talks. We talked about new books coming out that she should order for the library, raising kids, stretching our meager budgets, problems we were having in our personal lives, and how to effectively get rid of stray mustache hairs. I insisted plucking was best. She preferred bleaching. She’d throttle me if she knew I’d told you that. But I always warned her that if she went first I would tell one tiny little secret. I thought maybe if she knew that, she’d try to outlive me. So there, Barb, told you I would do it.

 Many people don’t know this, but Barb was an excellent writer. While working as the Acquisitions Supervisor at Mercer University she earned her degree, and she was published in the Mercer University Literary Magazine “Regeneration.” She blossomed at Mercer. I remember how proud and energized she was about writing then. Last year she talked about wanting to write again, but didn’t know how to get started. I told her, “Just write, it will come, I promise.” I don’t know if she tried. That was about the same time she started having a lot of problems with her eyes and couldn’t see well enough to know when to step over a curb, much less write, so those stories probably went with her and we’ll never  get to read them.

One of the highlights of her life was when she traveled to Guatemala as part of a Mercer University Mission program. Her and other Mercer students and professors visited an orphanage in Guatemala to lend a hand in whatever was needed. While she was there, Barb became enraptured by one little boy. His name was Pablo. She wrote to him for a long time.

 Barb had a kindness in her that was a quiet kindness. She didn’t toot her own horn about it. She didn’t draw attention to herself. She just acted. When her son, Phillip, was stationed in Iraq, all three times, she started a coloring book and crayon drive at Mercer. She would collect the books and crayons and ship them to Phillip’s unit and they would give them out to the Iraqi children. She did it for the children, but she also knew that if a U.S solider handed a coloring book and crayons to a child, then the relatives of that child might have a harder time shooting that soldier.  And Phillip just told me about that the other night. I never knew. She never told me. When Phillip drove to Houston after the most recent hurricanes, Barb supplied him with toys to take with him. Some of those toys ended up in the hands of a seven year old little girl who was having a birthday and had lost everything she owned.

 Barb liked to rock out to Molly Hatchet.  Just listening to the song Bounty Hunter took us both back to the old days and even as recently as two years ago we jumped in the car one day and went for a drive while we played that song full blast.  She loved The Walking Dead television show and would tell me about the latest episode while I listened in bewilderment, trying my best to figure out why some dude named Negan carried a barb wired covered bat. Barb also loved her cats, Jack and Grayson. She called them “The boys.” One day her and Mike said something about buying some food for “the boys” and I thought they meant Phillip and Will. Took me a second to figure out that they were talking about the cats. A few years ago the black cat, Jack, got really sick and Barb phoned me in tears worried, she might lose him, but somehow Jack pulled one of his nine lives out his cat bag of tricks and he lived.  Barb talked to that cat as if he were human, and he listened as if he were human.

Barb and I traveled to my mom’s cabin in Hiwassee a few times. Once to see Bad Company and once to see Molly Hatchet, both at the Georgia Mountain Fairgrounds. We actually met the members of Molly Hatchet who, when they found out we were from Cochran, started peppering us with questions about people they had once known in Cochran. This past November we went back to the cabin to spend time together without real life interfering. When we left Cochran that day I told Barb I had a new Green Day CD and would she like to hear it. I knew our musical tastes were different, but she said sure. The song started playing and after the first verse I looked at Barb and she was crying. She grabbed my hand and clutched it tight throughout the song while she cried.

Some of the lyrics to the song are:

I'm like a child looking off on the horizon
I'm like an ambulance that's turning on the sirens
Oh, I'm still alive
I'm like a soldier coming home for the first time
I dodged a bullet and I walked across a landmine

Oh, I'm still alive

As I walked out on the ledge

Are you scared to death to live?

I’ve been running all my life

Just to find a home that’s for the restless

And the truth that’s in the message

Making my way, away, away.

Am I bleeding am I bleeding from the storm?
Just shine a light into the wreckage, so far away, away

'Cause I'm still breathing
'Cause I'm still breathing on my own
My head's above the rain and roses
Making my way away

My way to you.

When the song was over, with tears streaming, she turned to me and said, “I’m still breathing.”

That weekend we ended up watching comedies, cooking, grilling on the covered porch in the rain, eating, junkin’, and laughing. A storm hit the third night we were there. The wind howled and shook the cabin and we went out on the covered porch and watched the trees sway in the moonlight and the wind chimes go sideways. There was so much energy in that storm and Barb and I just stood there and took it all in.  We didn’t talk as the storm rose and then eventually died out.  We didn’t need to talk. I didn’t realize what a treasure the memories of that trip would be one day. 

         

She and Mike went to the cabin last month for their third anniversary. There’s a chaise lounge in the cabin that I bought that I always claim as mine. Barb knew this. So what did she do? She texted me a photo of her sprawled on that chaise lounge claiming it as hers. The last time I saw her, the Friday before she left us, we talked about going back to the cabin in April after she got her strength back.

Barb had so much love inside of her. So much optimism. She always believed the best of people. She always had faith that things would work out. She hid her health problems so well that a lot of people had no idea that her health was as precarious as it was. Barb took care of everyone and put everyone else before herself.  When she had her first heart attack at age 36 it was the middle of the night, but she didn’t want to bother anyone, so she waited until morning when she knew her mom was awake and then phoned her.

Barb adored her mother so very much. They had a very quiet, loving relationship. Barb was Miss Sue’s number one caretaker until her own health wouldn’t allow her to care for her mother anymore, but she went and saw her often and would always fill me in on how Miss Sue was doing. One of Barb’s greatest achievements was being a mother to her boys, Phillip and Will. She always talked of “my boys” (not the cats), how worried she was when Phillip was deployed, how happy Phillip and Becky were together, how they had given her a granddaughter, KatieLynn, her little “mini me”, how well Will was doing in his job and how very grown up and confident he had become. Whenever I’d see Will at his job I’d text Barb and she’d text back, “Hug him!” Will remembers when he was a little boy and had trouble going to sleep how Barb would lay down with him until he drifted off. Phillip told me that his Mom instilled in him the belief that you don’t give up. You keep fighting for what you want, just the way she did.

She fought for her college degree, she fought as a single mother, she fought paying her bills, like so many of us. She fought her health problems, she fought trying to stay at her job at Mercer even when she was so sick and worn out that she was nodding off while driving to Macon everyday. She fought the feeling that she would never have the love of a partner who cared for her the way she should be cared for.  Then she found Mike.

Or should I say, refound him?

Barb loved Mike. He’s been her rock.  I was teaching in Nashville GA in 2014 when she phoned me one night and asked if I remembered Mike Bryan. Remember him? He spilled red punch on my dress at the prom. He had been her date at that prom. Of course I remembered him. She told me that they had started emailing after she had found an old email address of his while she was cleaning out her inbox. She didn’t know if he had the same email but she wrote anyway and much to her surprise he answered. Next thing I knew they were dating and she was gushing and calling him Yogi to his Boo Boo nickname for her, and then he asked her to marry him to which she replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

 I was at their wedding, and when I saw her standing at this very altar with Mike as they exchanged vows, I knew he’d take care of her and love her, for better or for worse. And he did. To the very end, he did just that. They went on trips together and dressed up silly every Halloween. They double dated with me and my husband to a concert by an AC/DC cover band. Mike made sure she took her medications, he took her to doctor appointments, he sat with her hour after hour every time she was in the hospital refusing to leave until she went to sleep. He put a smile on her face and gave her the safety and security she had always longed for.

 I love Mike because he loved my friend.

 Barb tried to warn me that this day would come. That one day I’d lose her. I didn’t want to believe it. I still don’t want to believe it. What Barb failed to tell me was how I was supposed to live my life without her being a part of it.  Barb and I shared secrets that no one else will ever know. I kept hers and she kept mine. I will still keep her secrets because that’s what friends do.

 I told her that I was supposed to go first so I could donate my heart to her. She would protest and say, “No, I don’t want you to go first.”  Then I’d try and joke and remind her that my heart was in a lot better shape than hers and she better grab it while I was offering. She would always cut the conversation short and change the subject. Well, it turns out she took my heart anyway when she left all of us here to figure out how to live the rest of our lives without her.

I love you, Barb. BFF and always. I promise.

The Monster That Lives Inside of Me

Once again I have completely sunk back into the hole where the monster lives. . I’ll have one or two days of feeling almost human, almost normal, and I’ll think,

            “Maybe I can do something.”

            “Maybe I can go somewhere.”

            “Maybe I can clean out that closet today.”

            “Maybe my brain is clear enough to actually write a short story.”

            “Maybe I’m getting well.”

            And then I feel it.

           

            Slowly, like a sharp claw reaching underneath my rib cage and sternum, drawing its talons down against my muscle, my tendons, and my bones, it travels quickly. The claw closes and rips at me. It tightens its grip and my body drips into weakness like someone has encased me in concrete, and then I begin to tremble like the last fall leaf on a tree. 

          Try to take shallow breathes because it hurts too much when my rib cage expands. Little sips of air. 

          Tiptoe into the back yard at night, slip down into the dew grass, and cry where no one can see me. 

          Curl up into a tiny ball and rock myself in time with the pain that pulses with every beat like a toothache in my body. 

          Tell myself I’ll feel better tomorrow. That the doctors will call me and shout, “Eureka! We know how to treat you and give you your life back!”

            One day I’ll go back into a classroom. I’ll teach again. I’ll stay late after everyone has gone home, creating lesson plans that will turn literature into magic for my kids. After we read Of Mice and Men one kid will take his time gathering his books when the bell rings and then shyly come up and ask me why, with tears in his eyes, Lenny had to die, or her eyes will flash when she howls  her anger after Jack has killed Piggy, or he will pretend to be Mercutio sword fighting Tybalt.

            But none of that is ever going to happen again, and I open my eyes. I am in the backyard alone. The moon is a slice of a fingernail and the stars are teasing me with their sparkle. They mock me. The night air smells of tea olive flowers and the world is still and beautiful, and I am trapped in my own pain. It is wrapped around me like a thick quilt that suffocates. I want to breathe in the tea olive. I want to swim in the white beauty of the stars against the inky sky. Star light, start bright, take my pain away tonight. But I can’t unwrap myself from it. The pain beats like dead drums. Thump! Thump! Thump! The pain encapsulates. My brain is one entity. My body another. They are forever battling for control. Little sips of air, always tinier sips of air.

            Years and years of internal cuts and slices that lap over one another like waves on a shore, a nightmare time-stumble that is circuitous. One year bleeding into the next. Doctors. Xrays, MRIs, injections, infusions, toxic medications. Hopes raised, hopes dashed. Family and friends:

            “But you don’t look sick.”

            “I saw you yesterday and you were fine.”

            “Aren't you well yet?”

             Fuck them. Fuck them all.

            I want them to slither their brain into my body and tell me how to live, how to continue, how to open my eyes each morning.  I want them to show me how to not feel the pain, how to ignore it, how to get my life back. Against all odds, against all I think I can do, I somehow wake up. Each morning I am ripped from my dreams where there is no pain and where I am able to breathe deeply and run among wild colors and clouds and I can hop off deep cliffs like an astronaut on the moon. I am free.. until I open my eyes and then my body engulfs me and my brain screams as it registers the sharp pulses under my skin.

            Another day. Another day trapped.

            The pain and exhaustion and trembling and weakness will not kill my body like cancer or leukemia or any other number of fatal illnesses, but it chips away at my brain. It clouds my thinking and makes me sink into deep chairs and stare out the window for hours. It saddens me. It angers me. But there is not one damned thing I can do to control any of it. Maybe pain is supposed to be my life lesson. Maybe pain will bring me to some sort of enlightenment or actualization. Then again, maybe it will just chip away at me until there is nothing left but a sliver of bone with a bit of rotten tissue attached.  

Bang bang, that awful sound.

I was getting caught up on the daily news yesterday, like I usually do a little before 4 p.m, when breaking news of an active shooter inside a high school in Florida was announced on abc news. I watched live footage as law enforcement stormed the high school. I saw kids running out with their hands over their heads. I saw a sheet covered body being loaded into an ambulance. I saw EMS checking over the bodies of teens for injuries. I saw shaken teens running to their parents in tears. I saw raw fear and incomprehension on the faces of not only the high school students who had been in that building and heard the screams of their classmates in between the loud pop pop of the rapid fire gun shots, but I also saw fear etched into the faces of teachers, parents, emergency personnel, doctors, and law enforcement.

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     But I also saw anger. Anger at a system that would continue to throw up its hands in resignation and say, “Well there’s nothing we can do about it,” when there IS something we can do about it.

     The shooter in Parkland (17 dead) yesterday, like the shooters in the Aurora movie theater on June 20, 2012  (58 dead), Sandy Hooks Elementary school on December 14, 2012 (27 dead), the Pulse Night Club on June 12, 2016 (49 dead), San Bernardino on June 16, 2016 (14 dead), the Las Vegas concert on October 1, 2017 (58 dead), and the church in Sutherland Springs on November 5, 2017 (26 dead), ALL used an AR 15 due to its ability to fire rapidly. But the AR 15 has been used in lesser publicized American shootings:

·         Oct. 7, 2007: Tyler Peterson, 20, used an AR-15 to kill six and injure one at an apartment in Crandon, Wis., before killing himself.

·       June 7, 2013: John Zawahri, 23, used an AR-15-style .223-caliber rifle and a .44-caliber Remington revolver to kill five and injure three at a home in Santa Monica, Calif., before he was killed.

·         March 19, 2015: Justin Fowler, 24, used an AR-15 to kill one and injure two on a street in Little Water, N.M., before he was killed.

·         May 31, 2015: Jeffrey Scott Pitts, 36, used an AR-15 and .45-caliber handgun to kill two and injure two at a store in Conyers, Ga., before he was killed.

·         Oct. 31, 2015: Noah Jacob Harpham, 33, used an AR-15, a .357-caliber revolver and a 9mm semi-automatic pistol to kill three on a street in Colorado Springs, Colo., before he was killed. (Source: USA Today February14, 2018).

     Is there anything we can do to help slow down gun violence in this country? Yes. We can outlaw rapid fire weapons like the AR 15 so that civilians can’t own, buy, or sell them. Those guns are meant for one thing and one thing only: to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. Will outlawing rapid fire weapons solve the problem immediately?  After all, the NRA estimates that there are some 8 million AR 15s in circulation in America, other less conservative figures put that number at 15 million (and that doesn’t even take into account other types of rapid fire weapons). So, no, outlawing those types of weapons for civilian ownership won’t solve the problem immediately, but in five years there will be fewer of these types of weapons on the streets, in ten years there will be still fewer, then in twenty years still fewer. We have to start somewhere. 

     And don’t give me that Second Amendment bullshit. If you are one those people who hold your “rights” to own a rapid fire weapon higher than the rights that American children have to live and breathe and grow, then you are part of the problem. And if you continue to insist  that you need those weapons to protect yourself from your government in case it goes rogue, then you are deluding yourself if you think you could defend yourself against military tanks, Apache helicopters, or weaponized drones. If you distrust your government that much then maybe you should get off your ass and actually DO something constructive, like staying in touch with your senators and representatives, and voting (half of voting age Americans didn't even bother to vote in the 2016 presidential election). Maybe you could actually DO something that would help make you feel safer, rather than just stockpiling weapons. The NRA has spent billions since 1975 to lobby in Congress. Recently their lobbying efforts succeeded in scrapping a CDC proposal to study gun violence in America. The NRA isn’t protecting your rights. They are protecting gun manufacturer’s, seller’s and buyer’s financial interests. They don’t care about you. And they damn sure don't care about American children.

     What can we do to help make America safer for kids to attend public school and for you to go to a mall? We can make our existing gun laws stricter. We can increase the wait time to own a gun. I don’t mind waiting longer to buy a gun if it will save the life of a child (and yes, I own a gun). We can establish a federal database to keep track of people who have histories of violent crimes and domestic abuse, and make it illegal for them to own, buy, or sell a gun. We could raise the federal age to buy, sell, or own a gun to twenty-one (if we won't let people buy alcohol until they are twenty-one then why the hell would we allow them to own a weapon?). We could make it illegal for anyone on a terror watch list or no fly list to own, buy, or sell a gun.We can do away with the “gun show loophole.” Most states do not require background checks for firearms purchased at gun shows from private individuals -- federal law only requires licensed dealers to conduct checks (Source: governing.com). My youngest son sold a gun four years ago in the state of Georgia through a want ad in the local sales paper. This type of gun transfer should be illegal. We can hold adults fully responsible when children gain possession of guns owned by adults. And finally, we can create stiffer penalties for people who break gun laws. 

     I am a retired teacher, and way back in 2000 when I was student teaching in a small rural Georgia town, three police officers walked into my classroom and asked that I take my ninth graders across the hall into another classroom. I told my students to gather their belongings. One of the officers stopped me and said, “They can all go, except for those two,” as he pointed to two students. Later I found out that one of those students had had a gun in MY classroom. The other kid had known about the gun. The officers escorted the students out and I didn’t see them for the rest of the semester.  

    

     Thanks to that experience, the entire time that I taught high school, in the back of my mind, I was always on the look out for any sign of guns in the school. The only time I never thought about guns in my school was for a brief period when I taught in the United Arab Emirates. That was the only time I ever felt completely safe in a classroom. There simply were no guns to be worried about. I am glad I am retired now. I don’t know if I could teach in the current atmosphere of fear that permeates our public schools. And I damn sure don’t support arming teachers. Teachers in this country are overworked and over stressed and underpaid and over medicated. You want to give teachers guns to keep up with when most can’t even keep up with their cell phone in class? My cell phone was stolen from my classroom twice in my career.

     I have six grandchildren who attend public school in three different states: Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of my grand kids and hope that for one more day they will be safe at school, that no one will run into their schools shooting, that my grandchildren won’t die by a bullet tearing into their bodies. And what about the other members of my family? Will one of my grown children be shot down while shopping at a mall? Will my husband be shot and killed in a movie theater? Will I be shot at a concert? Who knows anymore? Not me and not you. Thirty years ago I could never have imagined the state of fear that we live in in this country in 2018.  If we don’t do something proactive to solve our gun problem, and we do have a gun problem, what is it going to be like in thirty more years? I shudder to imagine.

And for those who say that now is not the time to talk about this; They’re right. We should have been talking about this after the first school shooting. We should have talked and talked and talked, and not stopped talking until something was done. Maybe if we had, there wouldn’t have been eighteen school shootings in the past seven weeks. Maybe if we had talked about it back then, the people in that Aurora theater wouldn’t have died or the people at the Las Vegas concert shooting wouldn’t have died. Maybe the 17 dead teens in Parkland would still be alive. Maybe we would actually feel safer. Maybe there wouldn't be grieving and shocked parents in a Florida town making funeral arrangements for their children as I type this.