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Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Monthly Archives: May 2013

Waiting for a Bed

31 Friday May 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

homelessness, women

One of my adventures involved being homeless for a while. Like so many other people, I got sick, lost my job, had no other resources, and we got evicted. For a period of some weeks, I stashed my daughter with a friend, while I . . . hit the bricks. This wasn’t some fancy-schmancy “Harvard and Homeless” thing where I could go home anytime I wanted to–it was the real thing. Most of it–seven months of it–we spent in a family congregate shelter which was as nice as such a place could be, but for about a month I was waiting for a bed. Always got one, thank God.

I was so naive I can’t believe it now–a product of my class, really–and when I was released from the hospital, I couldn’t believe they would just turn me out into the street. But lo and behold–there I was, shivering with cold and yuppie culture-shock. I had a blank book with me, and so I did what I do: I wrote about it. Not as much as I wish I had, but I chronicled a few hours, at least. Here it is:

February, 2008

It’s 3:50 p and Tyra Banks is on TV in the back of the Multiservice Center between Brookline and Green in Cambridge. I am waiting for the shuttle to St. Pat. These are 12 of us all told–which is good, I think, as there are reportably only 15 beds, But as some beds are supposedly long-term, I’m unsure.

As with other Cantabrigian poverty sites, this is split pretty evenly between races–5 white, 6 black, and me making up the difference.

Most of the women are “obvious”–in other words, if you saw them on the T, you’d know their plight. All of us have Stuff, ranging from the stereotypical black garbage bags to rucksacks and backpacks.

I have a backpack and the brown paper bag which announces my recent hospitalization.

Like me, most of the others appear to be mentally ill in some way or another.

The TV, now on Law and Order, shows the usual depressing commercials: “6 out of 10 Americans are now in debt!” And a new one, which brashly accuses, “If you don’t have a job, you shouldn’t be watching TV.” These ads are in fact at least slightly counterproductive: They are why I tend to avoid daytime television–and I can’t be the only one.

The woman next to me is asleep, her head hanging down to her chest, her mouth hanging open. One scarred and swollen hand tells the story: She’s probably nodding from a recent fix.

Another woman superficially appears very different: white, groomed, wearing generically preppy sweater, collared shirt, earrings, and hair pulled back under a narrow band. However, when I came in, she was busily sorting through thick piles of what looked like cash machine and other receipts, rocking slightly and muttering.

Quarter past. A slender, harried looking woman comes in and surveys the scene. She counts us and has the count affirmed. She zeroes in on the newbies and asks our names.

A man pokes his head in and asks if there is to be a lottery. I’m guessing he takes the losers to the big shelter in Boston on Albany Street. But our beds are safe today. We gather our stuff and move outside. The driver announces that those with wheeled bags will have to walk. She means a 60-ish woman who has a heavy wheeled suitcase among her traps. The old lady has been peering at all of us suspiciously from beneath her birds-nesty hat. Her purse is guarded by a large jingle bell: One wonders if modern pickpockets have been trained by 21st century Fagins to render such defenses useless.

As the white van slides through Cambridge, it ironically goes past my starting point at the hospital. A long hike for the old lady, I think, and indeed I don’t see her arrive later, though it’s not as if I were guarding the door.

There are eleven of us in the van, which is not unpleasantly scented with a Yankee Candle hangtag. “Baby Love” is on the oldies station and a couple of the women sing bits along. I hum a little under my breath. We pull up behind the Catholic Charities building I’ve passed so many times in the happily-unknowing past. We disembark and rescue our bags from the crowded space behind the back seat.

Another woman is looking as awkward as I am. We hang back, waiting to perhaps be invited or instructed, but after a moment, we follow the stream of old-timers into the house. We are greeted by a solid woman in tidily tucked-back dreadlocks, who exudes an air or warmth and command. She asks our names, and introduces herself as Michelle, case manager responsible for the Transitional program, which I learn later is a stable bed program for women with jobs.

The other newbie and I slide into the cozy living room–couch, chairs–TV–as much to get out of the way as anything else, and sit for a moment. We introduce ourselves. Happily for my atrociously porous memory, she has the same name as a favorite (if long-distant) relative. We are soon shooed out into the dining area. Cheerful kitchen curtains, lavender walls.

Six tables are in this room;  five inlaid with green tile in white pine and the sixth butcherblock. The chairs are assorted. Another TV is perched on one beneath the windows; the ubiquitous spinet piano is on the opposite wall.

There are already other women here. Thursday is the only night one can come directly to the shelter, in order to attend a weekly residents’ meeting. Cousin and I sit at one of the green patterned tables awaiting the next step.

The other women swirl and bustle around us, clearly completely at home. The news is on the TV; the bad reception shows an unusually friendly moose ambling up to delighted motorists. We learn the youngster’s lack of fear probably means he has a fatal brain worm, and cries of dismay ring out from several. I’m silent, but feel just as sad. I later realize that at least for me the feeling stems in part from kinship: Both the moose and I are banking on a deus ex machina; by conventional wisdom, neither of us has a hope in hell.

Cousin and I are called into the big room in front which old-fashionedly combines office and kitchen. We’re given packets of paperwork to fill out: vital statistics, why we became homeless, where we spent last night. Where did we spend the majority of nights last week? Month? Year? Who referred us? Which of several single and multiracial options do we choose? (White/Black/Indian is never listed; even in these enlightened days, I’m an “other.”)

Have we ever been incarcerated? A yes from Cousin; apparently the name of her origin which I hadn’t recognized was a prison. Involved with the Department of Youth Services? And so on. I am unsurprised to see on the last page a request to disclose basic stats to funder CDBG.

****

At that point, they served dinner–I remember basic American food, and enough of it. You could get seconds. Then everybody lined up and was given linen–sheets and blankets and pillowcase. I also got a big T-shirt for a nightie which depicted Somerville’s annual Cleanup/City Pride Day from the year before. The people explaining what was to be done with what were brusque. I almost cried, but I was too numb.

I was put into the smaller room, with only four beds. I slept listening to “Mama” in the next bed. The classic bag lady, she would go through all of her stuff, the soft rustle of the bags almost soothing.

The next morning we were awakened at 6 and fed breakfast, and everybody left to go be homeless people on the street. I made the mistake of seeing somebody still in the bathroom and taking my time until 7:10. I was leapt upon by this horrible woman who screamed the information that the other girl had a job and was allowed to stay later, and that if I ever did that again, I would never come back. I sobbed and begged in terror. Another employee ran out and calmed me down–apparently this other woman just had a random streak of bitch.

It was a random streak, because she stuck up for me a couple of weeks later when a roommate kept awakening me for snoring. (At my peak weight I snored like an apneac hippo.) This was made worse by a horrible lingering messy cold. That same roommate got offended when I stopped letting her use my laptop to check her email–I think it’s a sort of code that one hands out random cruelties to one’s mates and expects automatic shares in any spoils–a sort of tribal culture, I guess.

Anyway, some other time I might share an entry or two I made at the kinder and gentler homeless shelter, where we had a room that was ours. But on this summer evening, with both my now-grown kids playing video games, and me being allowed to loll in bed with my badly sprained ankle instead of being dragged up for chores–this is an evening for home.

Waiting

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

custody, family, home, homecoming, trauma, waiting

My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.

As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors.  But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.

That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant.  No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.

My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst.  I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.

I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)

I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.

But is Zen *fun*?

26 Sunday May 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

Plinky prompt: Tell us about something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail (and tell us why you haven’t tried it yet).

Well, that could be a long list: Go on craigslist and get a kitten. (Due to two weird experiences with craigslist I am now phobic of it.) Join my friend Jacques' writing groups and make some contacts. (Am (a) spacy and (b) shy.) Get back into life drawing. (Severe shortage of people willing to sit still for long periods without being paid). And so on.

But let's go for the pertinent, the looming: I need to clean my room.

I have several room-cleaning issues piled on top of each other. My room is very small and what furniture I have is very big. You have to move the desk chair around in the aisle to pass, and let's hope you're not really fat if things catch on fire, because the angle between the desk and the nightstand to get to the fire door is a bit on the narrow. (And please don't knock stuff off my desk with your butt as you pass.)

And oh yeah, the stuff on the desk: I make jewelry. Not very complex; it's not like I have a bench or even an anvil. Just a bunch of beads, findings, Lego, stretchy string, polymer clay, gold leaf, empty vials of beads, torn packets, a box of Asian newspaper pencils I got in my stocking, two or three broken or old pairs of reading glasses in the wrong prescription, watch parts, sorting bins, empty water glasses, my mouse, a hand-pieced & quilted coaster rescued from a project not meant to be, tiny ziploc bags of the sort used for illicit drugs, a wafer cookie tin filled with polyhedral dice, my keyboard tucked to one side on top of a cookie tine now holding more Lego and the like, a paper clip holder, loose earrings without mates, scissors . . . we are now squarely at the obvious issue as to why I haven't tried it yet, which is that I have less organizing skill than the average small animal who steals random things.

I wanted–want–a Zen desk, but that little cardboard box with the teeny rake and the sand and the pebbles got knocked off the back.

The closet is piled with clothing I have worn, might wear, and might wear again if I can Do Something To Fix It. Very little of this is the canonical five-more-pounds, as I have recently lost ten and am thus faced with but-it-was-pretty/pricey/I might gain it back and then what?

My nightstand is filled with everything I could possibly need from getting into bed until waking (except the wand that pees for me, which is lost). My stuffed animals take up half the bed–and we're not discussing under the bed, because we had a surprise inspection six months ago by some agency installing some sort of little white plastic thing that does nothing, and it all had to be very quickly hidden.

And no, I don't have bugs or anything. Just . . . stuff. Lots of . . . stuff.

Worst of all, I have to move soon, and as always I am determined to somehow have a room like my exceedingly organized daughter, with many charming little tchotchkes and everything in the places she designates as if it's *easy*, damn it. And it's never going to happen. But . . . what if it could? As a guaranteed success?

And there's the rub: That room could exist; but I'm not the non-ADHD person who lives in it. I do too many things at once. In the process of writing this essay, I have washed out two shirts (nuking the mysterious carbon stain on the linen vest YES Mr. Billy Mays!), made 17 polymer clay beads with the gold leaf, hennaed my hair, eaten two small meals, watched 5 episodes of The Vicar of Dibley and gotten most of the beading stuff into the very nice organizer thing I got for it last month. Traces of this day are spread throughout my house.

But it's only been four hours. Daylight remains. I will rinse out my hair, scrub the henna out of the measuring cup, make the bracelet with the beads, and (I think) throw out at least three bags of junk. I have to now. It's in print.

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Trigger Happy

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

cats, moving, triggers

I was once adopted by a stray kitten whom we named Mathom (which as many Tolkien fans knows means “one of those objects you just can’t throw away and pass around,” and as far fewer Old English students know means “treasure”). He was patient, gentle, and brilliant even for a cat, with a large command of understood English; the kind of cat one can talk to. He would listen, and he understood the logical progression of things: One evening, he lounged nearby while we completed a jigsaw puzzle. He watched us admire it–and then his eyes bugged when we began to take it apart once again. We had clearly fallen off the interspecies ledge of mutual understanding–we had taken so much time on it! Had refused his help so politely! I have never seen that expression on a cat’s face again–not even on the Interwebs.

Mathom hated the vet. Far beyond the average vet-hating of hiding and swearing and an occasional irritable swat. He would turn into twelve pounds of tabby predator, snarling and screaming and lashing out at demon speed.  It took at least two people (one of them me) to pin him down long enough to give him his shots; one vet announced that he was clearly quite healthy and no exam would be needed! And the head of UW’s vet department looked very, very concerned as he washed off his wounds while looking at my load of two-week-late Annie.

“I’d keep the cat away from the baby. Just to be on the safe side.”

We followed his advice and shut him out of the nursery the first night we brought our daughter home from the hospital. Just in case.

Well, Annie coughed. Or something. Not even a fuss. But I had brand-new-mommy-ears, and off I went. OK, that sounds speedier than it was, considering I was clutching my cesarian staples as I lunged out of bed. The nursery was next door, and I was there easily within twenty seconds at most–

–and there was Mathom, pawing at the door and yowing that I had better get my sorry ass over there and see what was amiss with HIS BABY. We didn’t bother shutting him out after that.

But Annie wasn’t The Vet.

At long last (too long, really), after too many visits of them taking out the Dangerous Feral Cat Equipment (carpeting, gloves, and the stick with the gizmo that traps their heads) we all decided to just shoot him full of la-la while he was still in the carrier and come back the next day. Wayne, the vet who came up with this, even cut us a deal on the overnight–it was the best solution for everybody. (And it gave him bragging rights on what a nice bellyrub our jaguar allowed him in the morning.)

Somewhere along the years I found out that there was a word for this: Triggered. It was just that when Mathom went to the vet, he fought for his life–because when Mathom was at the vet, that was where he fought for his life, vets being the places where fighting for your life tended to happen. And so forth. He was triggered. He was already four or five months old when he found me–and intact–so God knows what vet experience had done it. Then again, I suppose being put into a box and taken out by strangers in scary smells and having a cold glass rod shoved up your butt isn’t a primo day for most of us, so maybe it was just business as usual that he was voting against.

Psychology is a horrible, desentientizing thing, to turn such a noble soul into a frantic killer, at the mercy of a fear that not even I could save him from. The vet trying to kill him was in his head, out of claw and hiss range. Nothing to be done.

What made me think of Mathom was that I’m about to move. I have all reasonable ducks in a row–no real shortage of apartments in our comfortably large area, a sufficient chunk of the ready saved up for the exorbitant expense, a now 24-year-old Annie willing to do the anxiety-provoking things of looking and calling and making arrangements–but I’m terrified. I have a huge life change happening right before then (baby #2, now 22, is coming to live with us) and it’s dwarfed by The Move. Because I’m triggered.

Moves have been places where I’ve fought for my life, albeit behind a cheerful nervous smile and hidden tears. Horrible screaming matches. Not being packed. Friends coming and going grim-faced through teetering walls of one’s crap as if plunging through jungle in 100° heat. Annie needing stitches in her eyebrow when crashing her tricycle onto the ramp of the truck. The humiliation of piles of debris that really, really, really should have been dealt with before other people had to catch you in the midst. The truck being too tall for the overhang. Rain. The inevitable mountain by the trash of didn’t-really-need-it, no-room-for-it–but DAMN IT still my STUFF!!! (Although I will always cling to the snapshot of pulling away from the curb as a happy man stood strumming our second-best guitar, already gone to a new home.)

None of these moves were presided upon by the sheriff, but a couple of them only beat him there by a couple of days–those occurred when I was at my most ill and thus most vulnerable, and so those triggers are the deepest of all. It doesn’t help that my best friend is moving too, and is in the midst of her own eddy of uncertainty about what and who goes where when. As I write this, I can barely look at my own possessions without wondering if I will ever find them after we pack and unpack, or wondering which bits will end up on that pile by the dumpster, of being afraid I’ll cry.

But I make myself remember the last move, when I visualized already being moved into my perfect apartment. (Not this one. Trust me.) And . . . my life was still my life, for good or ill. And that’s how it turned out. Unpacking happens, and there are worse things than driving home with somebody who got a good bellyrub and a clean bill of health and is sharing a loud still-drunken purr.

Got any for me, Dr. Wayne?

 

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jig

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by lionsofmercy in Blog

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Tags

literature, writing

No fat pigs purchased, though.

It’s been 16 months. I am embarrassed; I feel I owe the two or three of you who were reading me an explanation. But I have none. Somewhere in the beginning of last year I became unplugged from Nova Terra. I’ve missed it; I’ve missed the tiny piece of my identity that said blogger, which snuggled up to writer. Where did it go?

Every time it would slink through my brain that I had this blog thing to do, I would wring my mental hands in panic, exclaiming that I had nothing to say! No, nothing! I knew that I could well enough foam out of the corners of my mouth about the on-going clusterfuck that was the Earth-grazing meteorite named Mitt Romney–but I was doing enough stress about all that. (So much stress that I spent Election Day in bed trying not to vomit. I didn’t realize until a recurrence several days later that I’d merely been reacting to an new medicine I was trying–I used to get sick over excitement all the time as a kid.) This election threatened to make dramatic changes to my life–I’m on disability–and I don’t even want to feel that powerless, that terrified ever again. So writing about that would have salted the wound–and I am sure sooner or later I would have moaned over its pretentiousness and redacted it.

(Think about it: Isn’t a good thing that Facebook keeps scrolling our momentary faux pas into the past where we don’t have to see them with more dispassionate eyes?)

But on looking into my documents folder, I see that the big thing sucking down my writing energy was trying–and failing–to make something real, something an agent would like to see, out of Monsters. I’d started writing this book back in 2005 and then when my life fell apart in various dramatic ways, I’d just kept writing the damn thing. And writing, and writing, and then when the story was finally finished in all its badness, I had 300,000 words. I was shocked. So I split it into a trilogy. All I could do, really, not being an established writer who can get away with that sort of overkill.

The problem with the first book of a trilogy–well, mine at least–is that unless you have Peter Jackson and New Zealand to distract today’s audience, you only have a third of a plot. And the first third, yet. I sat down and said, “So much for that.” At some point I’m going to take it apart–there’s a lot to take apart, as one of its flaws was that the structure was too complex–and see what just one of them looks like. I majored in watercolor, and every so often my professor would mosey behind me and tell me I had too many paintings going on in my painting. It was sort of like that.

I just had all this STUFF exploding out of me! Characters and backstories and biology and history and culture and . . . it was fun, but it wasn’t a novel, and that was the job I decided I wanted to do. So I iced it, and went on to Book #2. That one also started being too many books at once, so I took the advice of my ever-patient editor (he’s a beta tester software engineer, proving that skills transfer) and knocked it back to a single one. It’s a decent length right now, and we’ll see where we are by the end of the summer. As I get better at writing, and he gets better at editing, we ask more of what I pull out of my head and fingers. (And yeah, sometimes other body parts too. It’s science fiction. Give me a break.)

But it occurs that the more one writes, the better one gets, at least a little bit, so I’ll start trying to keep Nova Terra up to date. I might tuck in a longish story here and there; might have some painful recollections. It might devolve to crappy journaling and whinging upon occasion, but whacks to the head with the dead fish are acceptable, and I suppose practicing my writing is better for me than doing the 3 am squirrel o’ obsession thing.

At least from my point of view. Welcome back!

 

 

Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

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