August 27, 2002

• Back in April, Yahoo made one of their formerly free services, email forwarding, into a “premium” paid service.  I didn’t use that service, but Greyfox did.  If they sent him any notice of the change, he didn’t notice it.  The result was four months of email accumulated in his box.  Then I forwarded something to him and it bounced, making me aware, finally, of the situation.

  
  

  I had been wondering why he never responded to anything I sent him, even when I put him down for a CC of the email I sent his sister explaining why I want to divorce him.  I figured it was only because of his usual reticence.  Well, he wasn’t reticent about thanking me for dealing with four months worth of emails for him yesterday.

  
  

  Last night I resigned myself to writing using a text editor instead of a word processor:

  
  

  I’ve been learning from writing my memoirs.  One of the most important discoveries I’ve made concerns how I have changed over the course of the these years.  Except for brief allusions to childhood, the story I’ve been telling here began with my marriage when I was fourteen years old.  I have been relating anecdotes, sharing experiences, and revealing some of my feelings about things that happened.  Now I want to describe the person who lived that life, made the choices that led to the events I’ve been reporting.

  
  

  
  Oddly, though all along it has been perfectly natural to write in first person, now I find myself beginning to think about my younger self as “she”, and not “I”.  I think this illustrates how much that young woman has had to change to become the old woman I am now.  Just then, I typed, “old”, and then stopped to think about it.  Am I old now?  I was old before my time, wise beyond my years some people said.  I’d be more inclined to dispute that, than to deny that I am now old.  I’ve no idea how much older I’ll get, nor if I might some day read those words and think how relatively young I was when I wrote them.  If that happens, it will be ironic, eh?

  
  

  
  I was a cute kid.  Being bright and articulate did not detract from the cuteness in the earliest years.  Adults generally responded to me with approval.  When my father took me on his shoulders one day before I was a year old and carried me the few blocks down Fox Avenue and across the bridge to Food Machinery Corp., where he worked, the work almost came to a stop.  My mother had a fit when he brought me home with my frilly white dress and pink ribbons smudged with carbon and grease.  Every welder, cutter, grinder and press operator in the place had held me up and grinned into my laughing face.  The overhead crane operator had set me on his lap and given me a ride across the enormous shop.  I remember the levers and knobs of the crane, the sparks flying from grinders, the flare of the welders, as if it were days and not decades ago.  I remember being cute.

  
  

  
  Much of our self-concept, once we start thinking of ourselves as separate individuals, is based on feedback we get from others.  They told me I was cute, smart, clever.  They applauded.  I got my first standing ovation at age three, after I recited “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”, at a Teamster’s Union Christmas party.  I had a pretty good public image.

  
  

  
  At home and among my playmates, I didn’t rate so highly.  My rages and tantrums have always been hard on my closest relationships.  My best friend Donald, when we were preschoolers playing in a chair-and-blanket tent, accidentally kicked me in the face and I bit his toe hard enough to draw blood.  Another time, in a struggle over a pail in the sandbox, I whacked him in the head with the toy shovel, and it required stitches.

  
  

  
  I have been a sarcastic smartass since I started to talk.  Okay, I exaggerate… have always done that, too.  I was early to talk, slow to walk.  I took my first independent step on my second birthday, in pursuit of a neighbor kid who was playing with one of MY new toys.  By that time I was already using complete sentences.  Most of them ended with question marks.  I recall my mother slapping me, sticking soap in my mouth, shaking me, all on account of things I said to her.  I’m going to have to work on recalling just what I said that pushed her buttons so.  My father had a very different set of buttons.  He could laugh and call me a smartaleck if I wised off to him.  But he would sometimes groan at the questions I asked.  It became too much for him.

  
  

  
  He had taught me to read by the time I was three, and then he took me to the library and got me my first library card.  After that if the questions went beyond his capacity to answer, he’d make a note of it and on our next trip to the library we’d look it up.  Later, I took the notes.  There were not many of my questions he couldn’t answer.  Often, they involved things like gravity or time, and what we found at the library didn’t really answer them.  Questions and smartaleck remarks he could deal with.

  
  

  
  What he would not tolerate were lies.  I had lied about something, to my mother, the day before he died.  She had told him when he got home and we made the obligatory trip to the basement for the over-his-knee spanking with the leather razor strop.  He shed almost as many tears over it as I did, but I was mad at him for it anyway.  Still enraged over the whipping the next morning when he had a heart attack and left in an ambulance, I wished him dead.  My own unbridled anger did me in that time.  Life turned to hell, immediately.  And it was all my fault.  Of course, I was afraid to tell anyone.  Twenty-three years later I’d tell my therapy group, but I kept it secret ’til then.

  
  

  
  People have told me I have a sharp tongue.  Between angry invective and sarcastic humor, I have gotten myself beaten up innumerable times by men who couldn’t compete with me in a battle of words. When some of them have tried, I’ve even had the temerity to say, before I turn and walk away, “I won’t engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.”  More than one has shown me how mighty fists can bring meek contrition.  I’ve plotted and visualized murdering some of them, but never lost my inhibitions to that degree.  I continue to do my best to avoid doing in my fellow man.

  
  

  
  One of the ways I have changed as I’ve grown with experience, is that I am no longer as provocative as I used to be.  I’m still confrontational, won’t back down on any matter I deem important.  But I’m much mellower and more tolerant, less openly critical of minor imperfections.  As I have grown to tolerate many petty pet peeves that used to irk me and end up with me irking others, I’ve become even more open and emphatic in confronting big issues.  I used to get right in people’s faces with unsolicited advice.  Now I do it from afar, and more rarely.  That there are people who solicit my advice, and the passionate focus I give to answering their questions, make it easy to cut back on the gratuitous picky-pickiness.

  
  

  
  One of my favorite comebacks used to be, “Who cares?”  It’s always delivered with a shrug.  The answer to the question, of course, is that I care deeply.  Nothing that didn’t touch me deeply could elicit that physical and verbal shrug.  I only rarely ever ask who cares anymore, but sometimes I catch myself starting to shrug when something really gets to me.  It’s a useful “tell”, an easy to read signal to look more deeply and acknowledge what I’m feeling.  As I have grown more able to see my own denial, I’ve found that fewer things now have the power to hurt me to the extent that I feel I must deny them.

  
  

  
  I spent much of my life under the influence of fairy tales and soap operas.  I was a drama queen de luxe.  It was make believe, a role I played, but I made myself believe it.  I made it real, until I realized it and made myself become more real.  I used to spend a lot of time and energy rationalizing things, making myself believe that it really was the way I wanted it to be, or at least it would be someday.  Now I know that today is all I have, and I know that I want it to be just the way it is.  By paying attention to what is, I’m better able to deal with the changes and surf the timewave.

  
  

  

  • 2:47 pm
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