September 25, 2002

• The Old Fart and me, part two.

  Edited, expanded, revised, updated and improved on Thursday, November 10, 2005, in preparation for a Featured_Grownups challenge.  The lead-in to this entry is here.

  Somehow, I’ve given Kabuki
  the impression that I really do want to tell this honeymoon
  story.  *sigh*  This one is much harder for me to tell than
  any of the “ancient history” I’ve dealt with thus far in my memoir
  blogs.  I could distance myself from those stories because I had
  put that stuff behind me.  The story of my relationship with
  Greyfox is NOW.  Our issues are still current, unresolved and very
  personal.  [That was in 2002.  He got clean and sober and
  diagnosed his own NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) in 2003,
  which resolved most of those issues.]  After yesterday’s blog, I
  knew I’d whacked a hornet’s nest and would have to deal with it. 
  I knew, first off, that I had to go back and clarify some things I’d
  glossed over in yesterday’s blog.  I can only hope this will end
  up being therapeutic, because it is in no way fun or easy.

  TheHorseYouRode questioned
  me on the “little Libran mind” statement, so I’ll start there. 
  Librans in general (and one must always beware of generalizations where
  humans are concerned) are much like their fellow-airheads, the
  Geminis.  It is hard to tell whether they change their minds a
  lot, or if they just never make them up at all.  There’s a lot of
  air in my chart, too.  Many things in life, to me, are one way
  or another, and I usually don’t waste a lot of time trying to
  decide which way they are.  When pressed for a decision, Greyfox
  will say something to take the pressure off, but he is unlikely to
  recall later what it was he said in such a situation.

  The “little” part of that “little Libran mind” crack is a
  family in-joke.  He started referring to himself, his mind, his
  clothes, etc., as “little” in our correspondence before we met.  I
  think he wanted to be sure I wouldn’t be disappointed when we met, or
  else he was just being cute.  Who knows?  Anyway, “little” is
  a word I often apply to Greyfox… but he started it.  His mind
  is immense and unfathomable.  Like me, he is a former member
  of Mensa and Intertel.  With Sun and Moon both in Libra, his
  mental and emotional scales swing wildly back and forth.  The
  more important the decision, the less likely he is to be able to make
  one and stick with it.  My remark referred only to him, not to all
  Librans, although decisiveness is not commonly attributed to air signs
  in general.

  The first bit I glossed over yesterday was the past
  lives.  That would be particularly egregious in this case, since
  that was what drew the two of us together.  The same night as that
  reading (his second from me) in which I wrote, “I love you,” I did a
  hypnotic regression to find out where I’d known him before.  The
  first association revealed was the oldest.  He was my sensei and I
  was his deshi and we were wandering warrior monks in Asia a few
  millennia ago.

  That time, he died bitter and unfulfilled because all his
  followers except for me had deserted him and I wasn’t enough of a
  follower to please him.  I took what he taught me and modified and
  expanded on it.  He was afraid that changing the teachings would
  destroy them.  After his death I went on developing and
  teaching.  His dying doubts and my lifelong desire to prove myself
  to him were the impetus for our entire series of joint
  incarnations.  It strikes me that this was a particularly
  male/male karmic hook, but we added a lot of different hooks in
  time.  The series of shared lives that followed served to create a
  more and more complex Karmic bond between us.  His fears regarding
  my handling of his teachings, by the way, were baseless.  Aikido
  and some other martial arts disciplines carry on those
  traditions.  The tradition of letting the teachings develop and
  change has kept them alive.

  We have been to each other almost every relationship people can
  have.  We’ve been each other’s parents and children, siblings,
  friends and enemies.  When we were together in the Roman Legions,
  he saved my life.  When we were together in Elizabethan England, I
  saved his life.  In late Mediaeval Scotland, he abandoned me and
  our five children and in despair I killed myself and the kids. 
  When he came back and found out we were dead, he killed himself by
  falling on his sword.  Greyfox says that no one who hasn’t done it
  can possibly understand how hard it is to fall on one’s own sword.

  When we first got here after our honeymoon, I wanted to start
  writing a book together, based on our reincarnational history.  My
  readings had told me that was the way we could make our fortune
  together.  I would not even have thought to ask the oracles how we
  might make our fortune, but that was Greyfox’s concern.  He had
  done some readings himself, and had asked his friend Silver RavenWolf
  for a reading on our prospects for wealth together.  Money has
  always been a lot more important in this life to him than to me. 
  Silver’s reading and all of his readings indicated potential
  wealth.  He never thought to ask “how,” and he apparently ignored
  other cautions contained in those readings, about the need for wisdom,
  discipline, patience, and transcending our addictions.

  Unfortunately for him, when he got here he was far too involved in
  his fear of not having a regular income and comfortable home to
  concentrate on writing the book that our readings said could make us
  rich.  He chose instead to put his energy into blaming me for
  his insecurity and the money he “lost” by taking early retirement to
  join me here.  If I ever needed an object lesson in the futility
  and counterproductivity of letting one’s fears run one’s life, he
  provided it.  I didn’t really need it.  I didn’t need another
  difficult child, either; particularly not one with poly-addictions and
  a lifelong habit of lying.  The lesson he chose to find in the
  experience was that soulmates are bad news.  But I’m getting ahead
  of myself, aren’t I?

  The other matter I glossed over yesterday was our marriage.  I
  didn’t want to marry him.  I only wanted to be with him. 
  From that moment during the reading when I realized I loved this
  stranger, I wanted to meet him.  He said it was the same for
  him.  He has told many people that the first time he heard my
  voice on the phone, he said to himself, “I’m going to marry her.” 
  I felt I’d had more than enough of marriage in my life.  It is a
  meaningless formality for me, just paper and legal
  entanglements, certainly no guarantee of the permanence, fidelity
  or security it is supposed to represent.

  I told him all of that.  He countered it by saying that his
  “upper middle-class values” wouldn’t let him be comfortable living
  under the same roof, having sex (and especially with my young son
  there, too), without marriage.  He was lying.  For starters,
  any “upper” middle-class values he might have had at the time were
  recent acquisitions, since there is nothing “upper” in his family
  background.  He was just trying to come up with a good rationale
  that would convince me.  He was wise enough to realize that his
  fascination with my psychic ability and his greed for the wealth he was
  convinced we’d have together wouldn’t motivate me to marry him.

  I hated being in Pennsylvania.  I wanted to be with him, but I
  wanted to be home, where the air and water are clean and there is some
  space between neighbors.  He had already tendered his resignation,
  taken early retirement from his job before Doug and I arrived
  there.  It was a fait accompli and we were just there to help him
  pack up and move, he said.  He lied about that, too.  He
  thought if he got me there he could persuade me to stay.  The
  longer we were there, the worse I wanted to leave.  Each time we
  visited his mother, we headed west on an expressway for a few
  miles.  Each time, I hated taking the exit.  I wanted to just
  keep going into the sunset.

  Greyfox had lived his whole life there.  He was scared to
  leave.  I didn’t want him to do anything he didn’t want to do, but
  I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself and my son to his fears.  He
  went from trying to get me to stay there, to trying to get me to marry
  him and return alone to Alaska and wait for him.  I told him
  I’d return to Alaska, but wouldn’t sit on a shelf waiting for
  him.  If he ever made it back up here we would see how things went
  from there.

  That is how things stood when his Fiat was wrecked, and I asked him
  to give me the wrecked car instead of buying plane tickets for me and
  Doug.  He jumped at that since the insurance company considered it
  totaled and paid off on it because of the frame damage.  He’d
  save hundreds of dollars, and the car was driveable, especially
  after one fender was bent out so it didn’t scrape the tire except when
  I went over bumps.  Until now, whenever the subject of the Fiat
  came up, I’d referred to her as Greyfox’s “wedding present” to
  me.  Explaining it to strangers or casual acquaintances was just
  too complicated, painful and personal.

  But before I could get camping gear together and get out of
  Harrisburg, he had changed his mind again.  He talked me into
  marrying him by promising that it would never be a burdensome
  entanglement to me.  He said if I wanted out, all I had to do was
  say so and he would handle all the expense and paperwork of a
  divorce.  He lied, of course.  I would be very upset with
  myself, my supposedly psychic self, for not seeing through his lies, if
  I had not heard Sylvia Browne say that it has been that way in her
  life, too:  we know about the details of other people’s lives, but
  in our own life the talent doesn’t usually work.  I suppose
  it would be an unfair advantage otherwise, eh?

  Apparently, Greyfox’s fear of losing me was stronger than his fear
  of leaving home.  Or that “million dollars” his readings told him
  we could earn together was a powerful lure.  Whatever impelled
  him, he kept his rendezvous at Custer State Park and proceeded to
  follow me south through the Rockies.  I loved the drive.  He
  hated it.  I had not yet realized that he lied more than he told
  the truth, and he had not yet realized that I don’t lie.  So
  neither of us was operating on accurate information.  I thought he
  was telling me the truth when he was just saying what he thought I
  wanted to hear.  He thought I was making things up, kidding,
  exaggerating or being manipulative (because that was how he operated)
  when I was being honest.

  

  In this shot taken at Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde, Greyfox is
  second from left.  The small figure in the distance at right is
  Doug, making his usual stealthy escape, away from the ranger-guided
  tour and toward the ladder leading down into a small kin-kiva.

  While we were at Mesa Verde, Greyfox had vivid recall of a life he
  spent there hundreds of years ago.  He had starved himself to
  death, fasting for a vision to help his people deal with the crisis of
  changing climate and hostile neighbors.  As we left there it
  started snowing, and that was when the skunk was moseying along the
  white line of the road, looking over its shoulder at him.  We had
  a lot of conversations about the Trickster, Heyoka, Coyote, and
  such.  Greyfox was frightened of the whole idea, while Doug and I
  found a lot of humor in it, and in his reactions.  [2005
  update:  Greyfox took a lot of narcissistic injury from our
  laughter at his expense, and as those with NPD usually do, he plotted
  and exacted revenge for every perceived slight.]  Coyote is one of
  my shamanic power animals, and I know that if you don’t invite
  Trickster to the party, he will show up anyway and will be pissed off
  to boot.

  
  Chaco Canyon was intense for all of us, too.  (In this shot, Doug can
  be seen reading the guidebook in the window at upper right in the Great Kiva
  at Casa Rinconada.)  I kept seeing familiar vistas in the desert
  skyline, and Greyfox had a detailed regression to a life when he had
  been a young woman chosen for a symbolic role in fertility rites, whose later
  death in childbirth represented a dire omen to her people.

  
  This shot of Doug and Greyfox trying to both be at the precise apex of
  the Four Corners at the same time records one of the few happy,
  pleasant, friendly moments they shared on that trip, even as it
  illustrates their continual rivalry.  My husband, who said he
  loved my son, actually hated him.  My kid, the Leo born in the
  year of the Cock, has always been so wrapped up in himself that he
  isn’t particularly worried about what others think of him, but he was
  traumatized by Greyfox’s unjust accusations, sarcastic sniping and his
  temporarily somewhat successful efforts to drive a wedge between Doug
  and me.

  Then we put Doug on the plane home and discovered once again that
  Greyfox and I were not on the same page.  In Harrisburg, we had
  discussed a honeymoon “traveling
  in the Southwest”.  When we needed an address for forwarding mail,
  I suggested general delivery, Prescott, Arizona, because Prescott was
  one place I definitely wanted to visit.  From that, he had gotten
  the impression that I intended for us to settle down in Prescott for
  the winter.  He thought we would find jobs or something there, and
  make money.

  Since he hadn’t verbalized any of these assumptions I was under the
  impression that we were going to travel and have a honeymoon.  All
  of this came to light when we were in Canyon de Chelley and he asked me
  where we were going next.  I said, “I don’t know.  Where
  would you like to go next?”  He asked me when we were going to
  settle down in Prescott, and my answer was a blank look and something
  like, “Settle down…?  Prescott??”

  After I had made it clear that I didn’t consider Prescott a good
  place to settle, and had protested that he hadn’t said a word all along
  about settling anywhere, we got down to figuring out where to go
  next.  I said that Spirit was pulling me, “that way,” and I
  pointed sorta south-southeast.  He asked, “How far that
  way?”  I said, “I don’t know… just THAT way!”

  We were standing in the parking lot at the Visitor Center in Canyon
  de Chelley, with my Crystal Oracle and the Auto Club of Southern
  California map of Indian Country spread out on Gina’s roof.  With
  the help of the oracle and a pendulum, we settled on the Mimbres area
  of Southwestern New Mexico as our destination.  I still did not
  understand that he intended to stay there, but by the time we got there
  he had made that clear to me.

  I let him know that his expectation that I find a job was
  unreasonable.  I consider myself hardcore unemployable, and it is
  with pleasure and pride that I say that. I had a vocation, a
  profession, and I arranged to have my mail forwarded so I could do
  readings, got him to buy me a typewriter to use for them, and had
  business cards made up so that he and I could do psychic and shamanic
  work while we were there. 

  
  We found a trailer for rent cheaply in the little town of Bayard near
  Silver City.  He started looking for work and soon discovered that
  the area was economically depressed.  The only job he found was a
  gig a couple of evenings a week as a nude model for an art class at
  Western New Mexico University.  Then he discovered that he could
  teach a shamanism course there in the continuing education department,
  and
  he did that, to two cycles of students in the course of that
  winter.  From the business cards we tacked up on bulletin boards
  all around the college campus, at the food co-op, herb shop,
  laundromats, etc., we also got some shamanic work such as entity
  release (ghost-busting, exorcism).  Through my efforts to include
  Greyfox in my work, he also
  discovered that he does even better past-life readings than I do.

  There is more to this honeymoon story, but it will have to
  wait.  I have blogged previously about some of our past lives
  together.  The one when we were twins is here, and the one when we were star-crossed young sweethearts and I ended up haunting him after my death, is there.  Another blog, about past-life recall generally, is elsewhere.

  The next installment of this story is Part 3. 
  The movie shown below as “currently watching” was filmed in the part of
  New Mexico where we were, during the time we were honeymooning
  there.  Greyfox met the director and some of the cast and
  production crew, but doesn’t remember much because he was in an
  alcoholic blackout.

  

  • 9:20 pm
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