Slowing Down

When I begin to write a new piece, I find myself rushing to get my ideas down, to get the story in place, as if only getting the words on paper will stop the flurry of images in my head. Writing stories, as opposed to analytical writing, starts with these narrative images playing through my mind, flickering like an old movie. Capturing them and putting them into words on a page requires that I STOP my mind for a minute, choose one image carefully, then slowly, slowly play that narrative through, documenting the details, going back and adding more when the moment is replayed again in my head. Piece by piece like this, I end up with a story, a novel even.

It isn’t easy for me. It requires that I stay in my body for an unknown amount of time, letting my own body experience the setting and action of the story as it unfolds. I cannot stand back distantly and describe a scene or action. I have to inhabit the mind of one of my characters and experience what is happening, second by second. The darkness of the stories I am prone to write makes this very painful. After an hour of writing, ending with 2 or 3 pages of text, I am exhausted, physically and emotionally.

For someone with PTSD, being in my own body is difficult at the best of times, but being in my body and living someone’s fear or pain, their happiness or pleasure, is even more difficult. I want to race through whatever scene I am writing, get it over with so I can once again exit the world of feelings. Again, I have to slow myself down and ask myself, What am I (the character) feeling right now? What sensation in my body? What do I see? And then I tell the story to myself, to my keyboard, eventually, after much revision, to other people.

And so it is with life. Every day, to battle the numbness and dissociation of PTSD, I have to slow down and experience the moments I am in. I hear people flippantly say, “Be in the moment” and I think, Easy for you to say.  Not so easy for me to do. I go through life, flying or floating, rarely touching ground. I view my body and a thing of aches and pains, an incumbrance, a tool to get things done. I live in my head because living in my body seems dangerous and painful. But what a waste of life that is. So I force myself to pause and listen. Pause and look. Pause and feel. A kink in my neck. Sunshine snoring on the sofa. The sunlight reflecting off the metal of my neighbor’s air conditioner and into my eyes. I close my eyes and breathe deeply and ask myself, “What do you feel?” Content but sad. I am always a little sad, it seems. More relaxed than I’ve been in over 18 months. Almost peaceful. And this is a victory for today.

Christmas Musings

Dark nights, silver lights.

I baked cookies all day today with my 24 year old daughter. We made gingerbread dough yesterday and cut, baked, and frosted the cookies today. As usual, there are far too many but this year my both sons will be home so we will likely eat them all. They are not very pretty, but they are delicious, thick and smooth, sweet and spicy. We added little red hot candies to some of them for an extra kick.

I’ve made cookies for my children every Christmas for the past 30 years. It is hard to believe I have been doing it so long. I am not a cook, but I can bake, and everything I bake is not very pretty, but delicious. It is sort of my motto for life these days as I get older. Sometimes my life is not very pretty on the outside, but it is quite delicious.

On November 30, I lost my job of 17 years. That’s a long and unfair story for another day. But it means that at the age of 55, I am going to have to move from Chico, a town I have called home for almost 30 years. Not pretty. Still, I have a growing excitement at the possibilities ahead of me. Moving to Portland, Oregon, to live in a city, is both a frightening and a wonderful idea. I have a list of pros and cons and the pros far out weigh the cons. For one thing, I will never have to live through another Chico summer where the temperature hangs around 100 degrees for weeks at a time.  For another, from Portland I can explore the Pacific Northwest and even Vancouver, BC, places I have wanted to see for decades. I will be closer to the ocean, something my soul yearns for. The downtown branch of the Multnomah County Library is reason enough for me to want to live there, but there are also other lovely buildings. There is art and music and street fairs. The list goes on and on.
What there isn’t are my children. I am not sure how I will be working that out yet. And this is where the Christmas musings come in. While the Nativity stories are simply that, stories rich in symbolism, that symbolism has great meaning to me, especially now, right before Christmas. What does it mean to think of the Power of God being born in a lowly stable? Not very pretty on the outside, but wonderful on the inside, right? I am delighted by glass ornaments sparkling in the darkness, by smells of evergreen and baking, by ribbons and packages. Beauty surrounds me in my home where I am sitting surrounded by Christmas lights, with one of my dogs snoring nearby. I love shiny things, but what I really yearn for is the peace of a deep, dark night in the middle of Palestine 2,000 years ago and the strong but gentle presence of God. If I sit there, in that feeling, than somehow I trust that while I will miss my children, it will all be worked out for the best. They will visit. I will visit. And that is what is amazing about the Incarnation of the Power of God. God with us, Immanuel. Trusting that God is with me, a part of me, means that not-so-pretty things can be delicious.

I Can Relate

Since the election, I have seen too many people writing about how “disappointed” they are with Hillary Rodham Clinton: how she ran her campaign, how she didn’t win over the media, how she is spending her time and money now.  They (mostly, sadly, women) want her to be at the front of the crusade to stop Trump and protect us from tyranny. Or at least, as one woman wrote, donate her money to charities who will do this.  My response to these comments has been rage.   Hillary Clinton has done more than any other woman to forward both women’s rights and children’s rights.  She has ensured healthcare for thousands of First Responders and children.  She spent over 30 years in public service, and another 15 or 20 behind the scenes fighting.  She has put up with more misogyny and brutal hatred than anyone else.  She has had her marital problems made into a criminal process.  She has been criticized for not taking her husband’s last name and wearing glasses.  She has been criticized for her bad haircuts and for spending too much on a haircut.  She has been criticized and called a bitch for trying to get universal healthcare for all Americans.  She has been criticized for not having a chocolate chip cookie recipe.  She has been the victim of so much name calling and disrespect that it is pointless to enumerate it all.  My point is that in the public forum this woman’s grace, strength and high intelligence have rarely been discussed, but her pantsuits are, and still she used her gifts for others.  She is a smart and successful woman who has been held up to impossibly high standards for most of her life.  I can relate.

I am not financially successful, like HRC, but I love my job and I am good at it.  I have a full, mostly happy, life and that makes me successful, I think.  And I am smart. But still, I have spent the bulk of my life trying to live up to impossibly high standards set for me by my parents, my ex-husband, my bosses, and Society at large.  Growing up, I struggled to connect to my father, who was a highly intelligent, emotionally distant man.  School was the most important thing in his life, it seemed, since he was a professor, and so I excelled at school.  By 2^nd grade I was reading at a 5^th grade level.  In 5^th grade, I began my first novel, and then my second, to be like my dad, a writer. In 6^th grade, my team won the Math Olympics at my middle school.  In 7^th and 8^th grade, my stories were published in the school newspaper.  In high school I tested into GATE (which wasn’t even called GATE, but Mentally Gifted Minors [MGM] that first year of its existence).  As an undergraduate, I made the Dean’s List almost every semester.  When I graduated with a BS in Psychology, no one in my family commented.  But when I was pregnant with my first son and told my father I was going to stay home to raise the baby, he exploded in rage at the waste of my degree.  In my master’s program, I had 2 short stories published and graduated with distinction.  And for all my trouble, I got very little recognition from my father, or anyone else in my family.  I had only done what was expected.

My mother held me to different standards.  Like my father, she expected my siblings and I to behave like proper adults when we were in public or at people’s houses, even when we were very young.  She insisted on proper table etiquette and bemoaned the way I sat and crossed my legs.  She expected me to be the best at everything.  I was the Most Beautiful, I was Perfect, I was the Most Talented.  And if I wasn’t the best, she didn’t comment at all or she criticized.  As with my father, any achievement I made in my life was either ignored or given momentary attention and then forgotten.  It is harder to put into words the standards my mother held me to, but I would imagine most women my age can relate.  I was supposed to be exactly like she wanted me to be.  I was supposed to make up for all her failings and her mistakes by not having any of my own.  And most difficult of all, I was expected to respond to her in such a way as to never hurt her feelings, never go against her, give her all the attention and control she wanted over me and my children.  I was never enough.  I didn’t visit enough.  I didn’t let her see my children enough.  I didn’t call enough.  I didn’t listen to her enough.  I didn’t work hard enough.  When I was living with her, I didn’t clean the house enough, or correctly.  When I was living on my own, I didn’t even organize my own cupboards well enough and she had to reorganize them on one of her first visits.  I didn’t stand up straight enough.  I was not graceful enough.  I did not acquiesce enough to her will.  I did not praise her enough or meet her needs well enough.  And on and on.

I was a new wife and mother in the mid-80s.  This meant that there was no way I was going to live up to anyone’s standards.  As a stay-home mom, I didn’t work hard enough.  My ex-husband, on more than one occasion, would come home from a long day at work to a clean house, his laundry washed and put away, the cupboards full, his children bathed, driven to various places, entertained, taught, ALIVE and without injury, and he would ask, “What did you do all day?”  And he was more understanding than most at that time.  Being up all night with sick children did not mean I got to sleep all day.  Weekends were not my time off.  I loved being home with my babies and being there for my school-aged children when they needed me, but it was hard.  Society told me, along with my ex, that I wasn’t earning my keep.  Society also told me that as a stay-home mom I was not a success.  I was wasted.  When I went back to school and then to work, that same Society tried to shame me for not being home with my children enough.  I could not win that one.

I could go on and on, lamenting about the expectations my work has of me to volunteer hundreds of hours a semester to teach to their standards or the friends who expected me to put them ahead of my children (wtf?), but none of it is as bad as the standards I held myself to.  Even as I typed that sentence, I told myself not to end it with a preposition, but I did, in defiance.  Probably before I was even able to think for myself, I was finding ways to push myself to be what I thought everyone wanted me to be.  It isn’t so much in outward achievements that I push myself.  For example, I love learning and school was never a burden.  The clean house with 3 kids, yes.  That one was.  But more so, I held myself up to impossible standards internally.  Much like HRC, it seemed I did not smile enough and so I learned to force a smile.  I was too serious and thought too analytically, and it made people uncomfortable, and so I tried to stop.  I am an introvert in an extrovert’s world and so I pushed myself to be outgoing.  I am a person who needs a lot of time for rest and contemplation, but that did not fit with the busy schedule I kept.  I could not allow myself to be sick, and rest to heal myself.  I felt shame at my weakness.  In fact, I felt shame for almost everything about myself.  Outwardly, I had it all.  On the inside, I was tired and sad and lonely.  I spent so much energy trying to live up to the crazy standards for women in our culture, including being thin enough but making my modest bust seem bigger, that I exhausted myself to the point of a breakdown.  And when I sat in the hospital, I thought, as I breathed a sigh of relief through my depression and anxiety, “No one can expect anything from me in here.”

Every time I see my mother, who is rapidly slipping into dementia, she comments on the gap I now have between two of my teeth near the front of my mouth.  “Your perfect smile is ruined,” is her usual refrain.  I did have perfect, straight, white teeth after 2 years of braces.  I was proud of my beautiful smile.  But at 53, after decades of clenching my jaw in my sleep, those teeth have moved a bit and are not so straight nor so white anymore.  But, quite honestly, I am okay with that.  Steve tells me I have a beautiful smile all the time.  And, more importantly, I have a genuine smile now.  I am learning to set realistic standards for myself in many areas of my life, and I am working on not paying attention to other people’s expectations of me.  It is not easy and it does not make me popular all the time, but it is gratifying.

So, I can relate to Hillary Rodham Clinton and the impossible standards she has been held up to (there is that preposition at the end of a sentence again).  And I admire and love her more than any other public figure.  She makes me think of another public figure I admire, Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to face hatred and criticism and did so with such grace, as has HRC.  #imstillwithher

Speak Out

Yesterday I posted the following on Facebook:

So, Trump's top cabinet picks so far: Stephen Bannon - white supremacist, misogynist, over all pig; Jeff Sessions - supporter of the KKK (white supremacist); James "Mad Dog" Mattis - hyper-aggressive general ready to stomp out the world; Ben Carson - neurosurgeon who knows nothing about housing; Betty DeVos - pro-vouchers for private schools with no education background or experience; Steve Mnuchin - Goldman Sachs hedge fund guy (what? Didn't Trump bash Hillary...); Reince... Preibus - a strong member of the swamp Trump swore to drain, a Washington insider; the list goes on...each appointment terrifying. And I wonder what the people I know who voted for Trump are thinking now. How are they denying his racism and misogyny at this point? What do they think of the broken promises about going outside of Washington and Wall Street for his team? And what do they think of the rest of their team - Paul Ryan's sacking of SSI and Medicare, for instance? Are any of them suddenly worried about their own disability checks? Their own jobs with the public school system that will be phased out? I doubt any of them are reading my posts at this point, but I am honestly curious about these things.

I got the following comment from a friend:

I still read your posts. Not worried. I don't comment because I feel you are too entrenched in your view point and you really don't want to hear another side. That's fine, I still adore you. I think everyone at this point is sick of the bickering - we agree to disagree and let's go get a chai and call it good.

No answers, so I tried again:

I respect you choice not to answer my very real questions, but I am disappointed. You said I an entrenched in my POV and I am, indeed, but here I have made an attempt to find out how these things are being explained (and so much more) by the people I know and value and you don't want to tell me. Maybe you don't know. These are some of the things that frighten me most about Donald Trump - racism, sexism, war, education.

She has not answered me.  This is what I cannot seem to accept.  If you vote for someone, you should be able to answer basic questions about that person, but Trump supporters will not.  They seem to have taken their stance of silence from their leader, a man who offered no policy answers, no financial answers, and no answers regarding his personal beliefs.  If you, a Trump supporter, ignorantly thought his racist and sexist rants were a campaign strategy, then by now you should see that they were not and perhaps question your vote and yourself. But I am not seeing that.  What I am seeing is people so deeply entrenched in their privilege they will not see the threat to others until it hits them personally.  And still they deny their own hidden racism, their own privilege, while appropriating the cultures of those very people they have turned their backs on.  I find that hard to forgive.

Pastor Niemoller spoke, famously, after Hitler's fall:

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

Do You Like Me? - A Post-Thanksgiving Question

Is it just me or do other people wonder if their family likes them?  After a holiday spent with my family of origin, I always seem to ask myself that question.  I have come to accept that they love me in their decidedly dysfunctional fashion, but do they like me?

Steve and I arrived at my sister’s house in Berkeley just after 1 in the afternoon yesterday on Thanksgiving.  We were welcomed warmly by my sister and my nieces.  The house, a lovely 1930s bungalow, upgraded just enough to make it gorgeous and comfortable, was full of light and warmth and autumnal beauty.  Mums lined the mirrored coffee table in short, glass vases; small fairy lights graced displays of decorative pumpkins and gourds.  Brown, burnt orange, gold and white blended with the bright sunshine streaming through the large front window, reflected off the light wood floors, and glimmered against the backdrop of mirrors and gilt trim to encase the rooms in elegant comfort.  Soft jazz played in the background and there was laughter coming from the kitchen.  Holidays at my sister’s home are always beautiful and fun, but for me there is also always an undercurrent of worry present. 

How do you measure if someone likes you?  My therapist tells me to notice how curious they are about you.  Do they listen when you speak?  Do they ask questions about you or your life, your job?  Based on those criteria, I would have to say that perhaps my family of origin, including both my parents, my siblings, and their children, only like me a little.  My father and stepmother were not at the holiday meal, having chosen to live in Italy most of the year.  In fact, I had not heard from my father for two weeks, despite having responded to his email about the death of Leonard Cohen (which was actually a copy of an email he had sent my sister) with news of a recent physical illness I had suffered brought on by the stress of the election results and also mentioning this blog, which he has not yet visited.  So, that’s my dad.  Not very interested in me at all.

What about my mother?  She sat enthroned at the end of the sofa in the living room for a good deal of the afternoon.  I sat next to her for a while, petting her dog, Katie Casty.  For a time I had my mother’s approval because Katie loves me.  My mother’s deaf ear was towards me, however, and she could not hear what I was saying most of the time.  And for some reason, the photo prints of myself that I had brought her seemed to agitate her more than please her.  “Where is this?  What is that?  Is that the water?  No, then what is it?” she kept saying, pointing to a snap shot of me sitting on the pier in Bandon, Oregon.  She did not comment on whether the pictures were pretty or not, and I am not sure she could see me well enough to judge, because she was obsessed with the backgrounds, “That’s the Golden Gate.  And that’s Marin, right?  Here? That’s Marin?”  The pictures were set down.  I chalked her confusion up to her worsening dementia. I sat and petted the dog while my mother watched the young people.  One of my nieces came up and perched on the arm of the sofa and leaned in to talk to her Nana and the pleasure on my mother’s face made me jealous.  I have never received that kind of attention from my mother.  But I have also never fawned over her with so much affection.  Later, I started telling my niece a story about when I was 13 and stuck in the car with her mother, my sister, and my sister’s new boyfriend as we drove around Idaho and Washington.  I was describing how awful it was to see them all lovey-dovey and kissing when my mother hissed, “Stop talking like that!  That is disgusting!”  The look on her face showed the disgust she was feeling as she looked at me.  “It isn’t disgusting,” I countered, still speaking lightly.  “It’s funny.  I was 13…”  She glared at me, “It is disgusting and I don’t want to hear it!”  I shrugged and walked away.  I have finally learned not to engage with my mother at family functions.  I don’t know what she actually heard me saying.  Her hearing is bad and her dementia worsening, but I know that at that moment she did not like me one iota and I have no idea why and it cut straight through my breastbone to see her looking at me like that.  A few minutes later, my niece hugged me from behind in the kitchen and whispered, “I love you, Auntie Erica.”  My mother did not even look at me again the entire 4-5 hours we were together.  She was very busy laughing and chatting with my nieces and my sister and my brother-in-law, and even the family friend.  She sat and enjoyed the show while they all sang and danced to “Hamilton” tunes.  I took that opportunity to slip out front to be with Steve as he smoked a cigarette and talked to my sons and nephew.  My son Andrew’s dog, Ares, was in the car and my nephew’s dog, Roxie, was in his car, and we let both dogs out to play and sniff.  At one point, Katie Casty snuck away from my mom to join the real dogs, but she was swept back inside quickly. 

Ares (left) and Katie Casty

Roxie

After dinner, I sat on the opposite end of the sofa from my mom most of the evening, getting up and dancing for a few minutes, after which she spoke to me briefly to say I danced well.  When she got up to leave half an hour later, she didn’t look my way.  She hugged everyone goodbye, except Steve and me, and left without seeming to notice that I was standing there, waiting for my hug. I didn’t force the issue.  Again, I don’t know if she was simply tired and senile, or still disgusted with me, but I certainly did not feel liked.  Poor Steve, he was treated as if he was an extension of me and unfairly ignored, too.

What about everyone else?  My brother asked to say goodbye to me when he and my sister and mom were Facetiming with him, although we had not yet said hello.  My brother-in-law listened to me for a few minutes when the room was discussing Trump.  I learned things about my sister and her daughters’ lives that I had not known about.  They shared of themselves on a surface level to me with affection.  But, thinking of what my therapist said, I realized that none of them asked a single question of me and when I tried to share of myself with them, I was usually interrupted and talked over or simply ignored.  This is not entirely because they don’t like me, I know.  It was a busy house full of noisy people.  But I felt unseen much of the time.

This has been a year of re-evaluating the relationships in my life, trying to surround myself with people who value me and appreciate me, or at least accept me in all my glorious craziness, so dissecting how my family treats me falls into place in my thoughts.  Does my family like me?  My children like me.  That is of utmost importance to me.  I think at least one of my nieces likes me.  The other likes me in a more distant “crazy Aunt Erica” way.  My nephew?  I’m not sure.  My brother no longer even knows me, so I can’t say he likes me.  He likes his memories of me.  My brother-in-law likes me in a general way, but he likes almost everyone.  I think I irritate the crap out of my big sister, to be honest.  She tries to like me.  And my parents, well, at 53 I think I am going to have to give up on trying to make either of them like me.  I know my family loves me.  I know they don’t understand me and I make many of them uncomfortable with my intensity and my honesty and my darkness.  My rejection of material things and financial success has made me a puzzle, as well.  But if my therapist is right, and you can judge whether a person likes you from their interest level in you and your life, then I am afraid that, no, my family of origin does not like me much.

14 years ago, riding back to Chico late one evening after a holiday spent with my family of origin, my son Andrew, then 12, leaned forward from the backseat and asked, “Mom, why are you so different from everyone else in your family?”  Out of the mouths of babes… 

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

It bothers me when I hear people condemning Millennials for acting entitled, especially when those people try to blame it on something as superficial as receiving too many trophies for just showing up.  Millennials act no more entitled than their parents.  They simply act differently.   I spend a lot of time with Millennials and I speak from experience.  All three of my children are Millennials and they are good, decent people who work hard.  And they got lots of trophies.  And I have been teaching Millennials since they first graduated high school and can vouch for the fact that while a few might expect to get an “A” simply for sitting in their seats, most will work to get their grades. And if they don’t, it is usually because the school system that created them as students has beaten the desire to learn out of them with standardized testing and memorization.

It is role modeling, and not trophies, that has created any perceived problem with the Millennials.  Role modeling is the most influential means of teaching a person how to behave.  If children have good role models, no number of trophies can hurt them.  And these young people have had some crappy role models when it comes to feelings of entitlement.  The Baby Boomers came and conquered.  As a generation, they have consumed more and left less for others than any generation before them.  They are the original “Me Generation” and gave us all the self-indulgence that was the 1970s.  And the same people who went out there and marched for peace and lived communally for a while are often the ones who currently drive around in their fancy cars and live in gated communities, protected from the scary world they helped create.  They worked hard and earned money and seem to have no empathy for the following generations who do not have the same opportunities they had.  If I never hear the phrase, “You have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps like I did” again, I will be happy. 

And don’t get me started on Gen-Xers.  We are almost anti-social in our self-absorption!  We have barricaded ourselves behind walls of independence and angst.  “I will do it by myself, for myself,” is the motto of Generation-X.  “No one helped me and I’ll be god-damned if I will help you.”  The other cry of the Gen-Xer parent is, “I sacrificed my youth for you and now it is time for ME.”  Barf.  We Gen-Xers have had to fight a lot harder than the Boomers for our place in the economy, but most of us found a place.  We had to struggle to buy that house, but we finally did.  We had to fight for our jobs, but we had them, at least until we got down-sized.  The Millennials have not been given these opportunities, but still feel entitled to the benefits they grew up with.

Feelings of entitlement are a tradition of White America.  They are a legacy handed down over the centuries.   It is easy to point to the young people, clamoring for the newest technology, and see entitlement.  But it is not limited to this generation.  Case in point:

Last weekend, I took my dogs, Riley and Sunshine, up to what we here in Chico, CA, call Upper Park – a vast wild parkland on the edge the city limits.  I walked along the old fire road, taking it easy and enjoying the warm sunshine and the quiet.  Upper Park is a canyon with a large creek running down the middle and I could just hear the roar of the water from where I walked down the road.  To my left, a copse of trees, a unique mixture of oak and pine, opened onto a large area of grassland, yellow, with bright green new grass peeking through, that dropped off abruptly in the distance to a deep canyon of steep, black Lovejoy basalt walls around the creek.  To my right, a grassland scattered with oak trees placed haphazardly throughout the grass and large brown lava rocks climbed, first gently and then steeply, up the other side of the canyon to the peeks of the startling buttes.  There was a slight breeze and birdsong and after the horror of the election, I lost myself in the pleasure of nature.  That is, until a middle-aged man on a mountain bike flew past me on his way down the hill, so close that my hair and my t-shirt sleeve fluttered in the breeze he created and I could feel the air-pressure difference on my arm.  I stopped walking abruptly, my heart racing and my breath labored from the near miss.  He flew on by.  But my dogs were off leash and ahead of me and my black male Pit Bull mix, Riley, does not behave himself well when mountain bikes fly by.  He jumped out of the ravine he had been sniffing in and hurtled all 76 pounds of solid muscle at the bike, causing the rider to almost lose his balance.  The rider righted himself while Riley ran back to me at my call.  As soon as he saw he was safe from attack (although Riley would not have actually attacked him), the biker stopped his bike and yelled, “You should have your dogs on a leash!  He almost knocked me over!”

“You almost ran me over just now!” I yelled back, amazed that after such a close call, he was not in the least contrite.

“You had plenty of warning!  You should have gotten out of the way!” he yelled in reply, revealing his deep-seated feelings of entitlement.  The fact is that given a warning yell from a biker, I always step out of the way, knowing it is far easier for me to move quickly than it is for them.  However, this man had not called out to warn me.  We were not at a corner, so it was not that he had come upon me in surprise.  He had simply not cared.  He had assumed I would move to make room for him on a road he seemed to think he was entitled to use more than I was and when I did not, he felt entitled enough to blame me for his near miss. 

We ended the exchange with a few “Fuck yous” and he rode off, muttering threats.  Riley was circling me a bit anxiously and Sunshine, our ginger and white Bully Pit, scampered up to me, happily oblivious to the drama she had missed.  After a few days of feeling victimized, I had to admit that my own entitlement had reared its ugly head, too.  I love dogs and do not fear them and while I am much more careful with my dogs in populated places, in the wilds of Upper Park I feel entitled to let them run.  Dog lovers will agree with me that dogs need a place to run free.  Bikers will think that dog owners need to make sure their dogs don’t knock them over as they hurtle down hills.  Entitlement stretches throughout our culture.  Every time a car cuts me off on the freeway the drivers are exercising their feelings of entitlement to being wherever they want to be at any given time.  God only knows, merging is a lost art because drivers all feel they are entitled to being first in line.

Speaking of lines, every time I get impatient when standing in line at a store and start rolling my eyes and sighing or muttering under my breath about morons, I am showing my own entitlement.  I am exhibiting behavior that says, “I am more important than you and my time is more valuable and I am entitled to going to the front of the line at worst and to all of you peons disappearing out of my way at best.”  Sometimes I break into giggles at myself when this Royal Princess exhibits herself.

We all think we have a little royal entitlement due us, so the next time you hear yourself, or someone else, complaining about how entitled the Millennials act, remember that they are only behaving as they were taught to behave. 

                                                           Riley and Sunshine

7 O'Clock Friday Morning

 I gave him the last ½ ounce of Jack at 7 o’clock on Friday morning.  He had tried to kill himself with whiskey over the previous 6 days and when I got to him, he was at least 20 pounds lighter than the last time I had seen him a week earlier.   His face was gray – the ever-present roses in his cheeks gone – and his bright blue-green eyes were sunken into deep shadows and glazed over.  He had bruises on his arms and a cut on his face.  And there were odd, fist-shaped red roses on his stomach where he had punched himself repeatedly.

When he came to the doorway, a wraith, and said in a shaky, child-like voice, “Erica, will you help me?” I immediately rose from the sofa and followed him into his dark bedroom, sitting next to where he had stretched out on his unmade bed.  Out of love, I took the bottle away long enough to keep him from killing himself, slowly weaning him off the alcohol with small shots and sips throughout the night.  In between shots of Jack, his ever-changing emotions encompassed giggling at the thought of his upcoming reward of the next taste of whiskey and abject terror from whatever his detoxing brain was revealing to him.  At 24 years old, he had already lived a long life in which his true soul had been annihilated by those who should have loved him unconditionally.

When I first met him, just four months earlier, his shining façade had been full in place.  But like recognizes like and I knew the wounded boy in him immediately.  In months of talking while consuming frozen yogurt and pitas our strange friendship grew.  I wanted him to know that I saw his anger and his pain and that it was okay.  I grew to love him as if he were my son.  As if he were an old friend I had just met.  He liked to say, “I feel like I’ve known you all my life.”

It was a long night.  I held him when he cried, whispered to him when he was frightened, wiped his brow and held his hands like the small boy he was.  When he said he wanted to die, I told him I loved him very much and did not want him to die.  When he said he was worthless, I told him how precious he was to me.  When he said he was evil, I told him he was a beautiful child of God.  He asked why I was doing this for him, sitting up all night and talking to him and holding him and I said, “This is what people do when they love one another.”  And he said, “I have never been loved before.”

At 7 a.m. I entered the bedroom with the promised ½ ounce of whiskey.  “This is it.  This is the last one.  The bottle is gone,” I told him.  He took the shot glass from me and drank its contents greedily, his breakfast.