This made my day…

Some of my readers already know that I have some websites besides this blog.  At my shaman site, I teach a simple “Brainwaves 101″ explanation of the shamanic state of consciousness and offer a few ways to attain it.   Susitnart started out as a catalog of my jewelry for sale, but degenerated into a photo gallery when I more or less lost interest in the jewelry (temporarily, maybe).   The first site I created when I came online is the PainSwitch.  There, I teach a simple, mind-over-matter technique for neutralizing pain, making it go away, not just ignoring it.  I don’t get much feedback from the email links on those sites, so I sometimes forget to check those email accounts for weeks at a time.  Today, as I sat here thinking about the questions my last blog elicited about “liberty”, planning what to write in response, I decided to check my mail.  I’m so glad I did.  Here is what I found from the PainSwitch site:

Hello ~ I stumbled onto your web site while searching the web for anything that could help me relieve the constant pain of Fibromyalgia that has been plaguing me for several years.  I had a number of serious health problems over several years after I retired at age 60 which my doctor said is likely to have caused the pain. 

 

I am now 65 and because of the constant pain thought about ending it myself when despondent in the middle of the night, but because of my family I could never take this action.  It would haunt my wife and 4 daughters and 5 grandchildren for the rest of their lives. 

 

I have been taking two different types of prescribed narcotics for pain and this interfered with sleeping and has resulted in constant fatigue as well.

 

Now, about two days after I discovered your painswitch web site the pain is mostly gone!  And so is the anxiety caused by the constant pain.  I never would have believed that following the simple instructions on your web site that such a change in such a short time would be possible.   I have not taken any narcotics for over two days and am mostly pain free!  I simple rub my leg and arm muscles, acknowledge the sensations, and tell my brain that it has delivered the message and now to quiet down as I know the pain will go away.    It is like a miracle! Thank you.

This (feedback such as this) is why I do what I do. It’s how I justify my life, earn my oxygen on the planet. This is what makes me happy.  I had to share it.

Update: Tuesday December 17

As you can see by the date above, I first posted this (privately) last week.  I stopped, and didn’t make it public, because I could not get more than about half the images to upload.  Monsur has offered to help me find out what the problem is.  Apparently, according to the error messages, Xanga doesn’t recognize some of my images as images.  Go figure.  Today, I still had some problems, but I persevered.  Enjoy.

Nobody’s childhood is ever all happy.  The frustrations and disillusionments of growing up are present in every young life.  However, I was blessed with loving, well-intentioned parents, and most of my early memories are happy ones.  Few of the pictures I have show anything but smiles.  Maybe my parents made a conscious choice to record only the happier times.  There are no pictures of me in bed with any of the severe illnesses that marked my youth. 

I get the impression from the collection of recorded occasions, that they were making a photographic record to remember me by, since I was not expected to live long enough to grow up.  That sort of sentimentality would have been very typical of my mother.

 Even without any photos to record them, I have no trouble recalling the episodes of high fever, weakness, transient blindness and incoordination and such.  The recent news about smallpox vaccine reminded me of my first life-threatening illness (following the trauma of my birth itself).  It was caused by my smallpox vaccination, when I was a baby, probably only a few months before the above shot of me cleaning the bowl after my mother baked a cake, quite possibly the same cake shown in this shot from my second birthday party.

Every time I see a lopsided sloppy cake at a potluck or bake sale, it reminds me of my mother.  Need I say that MY cakes don’t come out looking like that?

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This shot of me in sunglasses reminds me somehow of Bette Davis… dunno why.

In this shot and the one with cake batter on my face above, my mother has my hair up in pincurls.  Perhaps my subsequent preference for the natural look of my flowing wavy red locks was rebellion against the bother and pain of pincurls and the stink and frizz of perms.  On the other hand, since it really didn’t set in until my hippie years, and I slept in big rollers and ratted my hair in big bouffants in the early ‘sixties, fashion and not rebellion might have been what started me on the natural look.  What keeps me looking natural is just laziness, I guess–a preference for ease, comfort and other ways than my hair to spend my time and money.

The shot of me on the concrete lion in Los Gatos at left holds memories of anticipation fulfilled and frustration relieved. 

We drove past that builders’ business every time we went through Los Gatos on the way to the Coast.  I begged many times for my father to stop, before he finally did… and of course he got a picture of me on the lion.

I never knew the origin of the name Los Gatos (the cats) for that town, but for me it always meant the big cats I saw beside the road as we drove by.

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The condition of that sad, decomposing jack o’lantern suggests that I was trying to extend the Halloween fun well into November.

Every time I smell the mingled scents of candle wax and scorched pumpkin, it recalls to mind a bunch of childhood memories, of masks, costumes, scary walks up to strange front porches, and big bags of candy dumped onto the kitchen table or my bed for sorting and gloating.

Halloween was my favorite holiday long before Greyfox and I married on that day 12 years ago and it became my wedding anniversary.

I remember how that mask smelled and tasted, too.  It was red and black, a demonic thing I picked out myself.  Made of starched and painted gauze, by the time I was through with trick-or-treating the area around the mouth was wet, soft and deformed.  Being inside the mask was a lot like sticking one’s head into a paint can… intoxicating fumes.  That was the 1940s.  Needless to say, they don’t make them like that anymore, or if they do they’re not allowed to sell them in this country.

“Bubble stuff”, the  jars and bottles of soapy liquid for blowing bubbles, was a favorite plaything.  I still have fun with it, and many times in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, long after I had supposedly grown up, I took bottled bubbles to rock concerts and music festivals, doing the Hippie thing.

Beside me on the crate at left is a puddle of spilled bubble stuff.  What’s left in the jar in my hand is barely enough to wet the wand.  My mother had heard me crying over the spill.  I was frantically using the wand to scrape up the stuff and blow bubbles before it soaked into the wood.  If Mama didn’t summon up the old saw about not crying over spilled milk that time, she made up for it a thousand other times, but I seem to recall a bit of discussion then of it’s not being milk… always the picky literal-minded Virgo, me, demanding precision and accuracy.

My first movie heroes were cowboys:  Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Bob Steele, but more than any others I loved Lash LaRue.  Bob Steele was so heroic, and I loved watching him jump from rooftops onto his horse and ride after the bad guys, but the man wore lipstick, fercrissake, and that was a baffling anomaly to the child I was.  Autry was a good singer, but his movies were kinda hokey, something I recognized even then but probably couldn’t articulate.

Roy Rogers had the same mixed Native American heritage as my family and looked a lot like some of my uncles and cousins, so he was like family, and Hoppy was just a chubby, friendly older man, but Lash Larue was SEXY.  I don’t know if I even knew the word at that age, but I felt the attraction.  The rope I’m holding in this picture was meant to be a lasso, but for me it was a whip.  I might have spent a few minutes trying to learn to swing a loop, but I spent days and days learning to crack the whip.

I’ve always loved to get up high so I could see farther.  That includes ferris wheels, airplanes, and elevators to the tops of tall buildings, but often throughout my life has simply involved climbing rocks or ladders. 

When Doug was little, I got a small taste of what my mother went through with me.  I say “small” not because he didn’t climb as much as I did, but because my parenting philosophy is a lot less anxious and protective than my mother’s.  When he was about four or five, he climbed a tree above the spring (you’ve seen it in “water run” blogs), fell from it and rolled down the slope.

After the old lodge at Sheep Creek burned down, while the new one was under construction, Doug went to the top of a 40-foot ladder before someone noticed and called my attention.  He didn’t want to come down, and no one wanted to go up, so we had a shouted, not-so-brief parent-child conversation as I persuaded him that I knew he was perfectly safe and competent, but that his being up there was scaring some of the other adults, and might lead other, less competent, kids to try it.  Then there was the time after the lodge was completed, when he found enough hand-and-footholds to go up the outside wall.  When I saw him, he was up under the eaves, looking down on a small impotent knot of kids on the porch who were trying to find the first handhold.  

I always find it hard to remonstrate with him for such stunts, because my predominant feeling in these instances is admiration for his courage and competence.  For me, in childhood, courage and competence were always asserted with defiance.

I had my parents’ practical example to follow when Doug was an adventurous toddler, and I didn’t hesitate to harness and put a leash on him.  My harness and leash were brown leather.  Doug’s were all the colors of the rainbow, like Mork from Ork’s suspenders, and the leash had a Velcro band that attached to my wrist.  Harnessing kids was unusual when I wore one, but no longer.  In an earlier blog I mentioned going off the side of the Santa Cruz pier.  I think, on reflection, that I already had the harness then.  It was an incident in downtown San Jose, when I slipped away from my mother, between parked cars and into honking traffic, that motivated my mom to harness me.

Several of the pictures I have of me as a child show me in the harness or being restrained somehow, such as this one with my cousin Duane “Buddy” Scott in my grandparents’ yard in Redlands.  I really don’t know how much influence the restraint in childhood had on my current love of unbridled liberty.  I tend to think that my innate love of liberty had more of an influence on those around me to try and restrain it.  In the days before fast films, there were no action shots.  It was either hold the kid still or get a picture of a blur.  I’m a blur in more than one of the pictures I have.

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I have by no means exhausted the childhood photo collection, but getting these things uploaded to Xanga has exhausted me.  For now, this shot of me with my cousin Linda is the last.  Her grandpa, my Uncle Hubert AKA “Unkie” is the one in the pith helmet.

Anchorage Daily News | A moose in the manger

An urban Alaskan Christmas scene–this is Vern Hickel’s front yard, in Anchorage.  The moose isn’t part of the display, but just bedded down there.

Responses to comments:

To clear up an ambiguity from my latest blog:  I have not yet tried the new camera.  All the contemporary pics so far were captured with my “old” Kodak DC3200, a Xmas gift from two years ago.  The old family shots, BTW, were virtually all taken with my father’s Kodak “folder”.  It was almost an antique when he was using it, and I still have it, although cracks in the bellows made it useless as a camera sometime during my childhood.

I’m waiting for the arrival of 256 megs of memory for the new camera before I start fiddling with it.  It has the capability to capture movies with sound, and the 16 MB memory included with it is inadequate for a full tryout of the camera’s features.  I ordered the memory even before I placed the order for the camera.  The two 128 MB cards got all the way to Wasilla (from Tennessee) before being sent back for an “incorrect address” (which wasn’t incorrect, but then it’s winter and how can any reasonable person expect Fed-Ex to drive all the way up this valley, eh?).

On the subject of winter’s joys and going to the spring for water, some of my readers correctly divined my feelings.  I love this life here.  With my multiple chemical sensitivities and lung disorders, clean air and water are very important to me.  With my empathic sensitivity, the behavioral sinks of cities quickly become unendurable to me. 

I love people, and hate crowds.  Even when my neighbors gather together, there are so few of us it’s not much of a crowd.  I enjoy those chance meetings at the spring, the lodge, or the general store… or, as more often happens, at the supermarket or mall in Wasilla, 50 miles away.  It’s one of the oddities we often remark on:  we live in the same neighborhood, but most often see each other on those long shopping trips to the city.

Now, on with the memoirs:

This backyard swing my father built for me didn’t last long.  I love swinging… the rhythmic sloshing of my middle ear fluids gets me high.  As a kid, I was never content just to swing.  I would stand up on the seat, try to get high enough to go over the top (never made it, but had some spectacular spills), twist the ropes and spin, and bail out at the top of my arc to see how far I could fly.

My overprotective mother hated that, of course.  First, the swing came down.  Then later, my father built me a playhouse in that corner of the yard where the fence on the west met the garage/workshop on the south.  I helped him build it.

He hadn’t had much carpentry experience.  He was an accomplished “grease monkey”, a shade-tree mechanic, and by trade was a machinist and welder.  Woodwork hadn’t been his thing, but he was always up for a new challenge.  I don’t know whether the idea of building a boat came first and the playhouse was a practice project, or whether the boat idea came later.  The playhouse was built first.  He collected used lumber at the dump, and my job was to pull out the nails with the claw hammer, and use the other side of the hammer’s head to straighten them for reuse. 

I’ve looked unsuccessfully through my old photos for a picture of the playhouse.  It had two rooms.  The kitchen held this set of wicker table and chairs I’d been given on my second Xmas, and a sink and stove my father fabricated from scraps of sheet metal salvaged at his job.  The stove had knobs that turned, but I had to imagine the fire.

An antique overstuffed love seat from the dump was in the front room of my playhouse, and in one corner my father hung a length of pipe horizontally to hold my “dressup” wardrobe.  The caption on the back of the photo at left, in my mother’s hand, says, “This is ‘Mrs. Brown’ bringing her baby to ‘Grandma Douglass’ while she goes shopping.”  I remember having four similar suits of different colors, in styles from the era of World War I, definitely pre-Roaring Twenties.  The skirts had been hemmed up but still had to have their waistbands pinned up under my armpits in order not to drag the ground.  They smelled of mothballs.

Dressing up was one of my favorite forms of play.  Sometimes I’d even rope my friends into the game.  This “first wedding” shot predates my first real marriage by about 9 years.  That’s my playmate Donald in the hat.  My “veil” is a beautiful old lace curtain.  The flowers were wax roses.  How many of you knew that artificial flowers were made of wax in the time before plastics came into use?

At some time after the playhouse was complete, my father spent a lot of time looking at blueprints spread out on the kitchen table.  Then he nailed up a carefully-spaced set of boards and blocks on the fence on the east side of the yard.  Next, he brought home several long planks, wet them down and forced them into the mold he’d built on the fence, to bend them to the shape for the bottom of the boat.  I participated in every phase of construction, fitting out and painting.  I don’t know how much real help I was, but I was THERE.

At left is the boat at it’s usual dock at Willowood Resort on Weatherbee Lake.  In 1950, the San Joaquin flooded, and the owners of the resort rowed out on the rising waters, undocked our boat from its little pier and took it back to their living quarters in the resort’s lodge and store building, and lived in it until their rooms dried out.

 I recall the floods.  We visited the lake to see how things were, but couldn’t get close because of the National Guard.  Our friends the Hoisingtons, the operators of the resort, had left a message for us at the emergency center, explaining that they were living in our boat.  For the duration of the emergency, we did our weekend fishing elsewhere.  Besides the San Joaquin, my father also fished many of the trout streams in the Sierras, at Lake Tahoe, and on the coast, usually around Santa Cruz.

I especially loved our trips across the Coast Range to Santa Cruz because we usually stopped at Big Basin State Park.  The park ranger there encouraged me to pet and feed the tame deer.  I’d be willing to bet money that policy is no longer in effect there, even if there are still deer in the area.

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Our houseboat can be seen between my shoulder and my father’s head in the shot at right, and I think that light colored car on the right was our old Dodge.  My mother’s handwritten legend on the back says that this is the, “last picture that I have of Clyde.”  He’d have hated that.  Few people knew that his name was Clyde, and virtually no one ever heard that his middle name was Wilbur.  His signature was “C.W. Douglass” and he introduced himself as “Doug”.  This photo appeared in an ad for the resort, published in California Sportsman Magazine.

I have another bunch of photos of little me to illustrate another self-indulgent “cute kid” blog, and then I’ll move on to my travels with Mama after Daddy died, and get into some shots I took with my own first camera.  Unless inspiration hits and I do something different, I think I’ll just go on and get the youth written down before continuing with my early years in Alaska in the ‘seventies.  The long hiatus since my last memoir blog has been partially the result of my bouncing back and forth between ‘fifties and ‘seventies.  I’ll get more done, I think, if I try to do one thing at a time.  Who knows?

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3:30 PM Alaska Standard Time, December 7, 2002

The sun’s down, but it’s not full dark yet, even now at 4:30 as I write this, but it’s dark too early for me.  Just a couple more weeks before the turnaround.  I’m wrestling with the question of how to celebrate without feasting.  I had a severe glycemic/inflammatory response to lunch today.

It was a small salad and about three ounces of enchiladas (cheese, corn and spices), probably only marginally too much food, but I waited too long before I ate, let my blood sugar crash, then it spiked when I ate.  I hate when that happens.

This is one of the hazards in improved health, and something I’ve been learning about myself all my life.  I have this ADHD thing, and whenever I can be up and about, I am as up as I can get and about whatever catches my attention.  A little thing like hunger has to be extreme to get my attention… and clocks?  Forget it.

The same activities that kept me from eating, and a similar amount of busy-ness with the rest of the family, were also responsible for our doing a water run just at sunset today.  Koji didn’t get into any of the pics but he was right there on his leash at my side, being a good dog most of the time.

Only weeks ago, I wasn’t up to this much activity.  Today, Koji and I walked across the highway and around the big turnout parking area, refreshing his go, stop, and heel training while Doug filled jugs.

Neighbors Sam and Henry were there when we got to the spring.  Sam and I schmoozed while Henry filled jugs and Doug unloaded empties from our car.  When their job was done they split and we got ours done.

Earlier today, There was rain, sleet and snow, one at a time and in all combinations.   When I learn how to navigate all the menus on my new camera, I’ll be able to get closeups of water droplets and willow catkins and such, but for now you’ll have to take my word for it that those white spots are both confused pussywillows and dangling droplets of condensed fog.  With my old 35mm SLR, I did a lot with closeups and zoom, and I’ve missed that with my simple little digital shooter.  I got a fancier camera, a Fuji Finepix S-602 Zoom, for Xmas.  I opened it early… maybe I’ll know how to use it by Xmas.

When Greyfox read me some of this story from today’s paper, I had to share it.  What really got me was the quote, “Well, that went better than I expected.”  The man was SO Alaskan… it’s an attitude.

Anchorage Daily News | Kasilof loses colorful character with a big heart

When I searched the ADN site, I found another story that mentioned him:

http://www.adn.com/iditarod/history/2001/race/story/764186p-817188c.html

I’m back, friends.  And I’m sitting pretty, so to speak, on my “new” used ergonomic office chair.  The old one was bent wood and worn out upholstery, cushioned with pillows.  It was a solid thing, set flat on the floor and not easy to scoot around.  This one is steel framed, with padded seat and knee rest, wheels on the bottom and a swivel seat.  I am getting a lot of shameless materialistic bliss out of this.

I took Doug to town yesterday because we couldn’t put off getting his new boots any longer.  He squeezed into a back corner of the Salvation Army store and found my chair.  We hit two thrift shops before starting the round of the shoe outlets and department stores.  He scored a pair of great insulated winter boots, plus a cheap pair of low-tops with good traction.  He can slip into them for quick trips out to the woodpile or outhouse.  Everything was on sale and we did great, I think, price-wise.

I also did some Xmas shopping for family and bought myself a new long flannel nightie at a great sale price.  It’s ‘way long and flowing, roomy, a quality fabric with woven, not printed, hound’s tooth checks in two shades of blue, with white lace and blue velvet ribbon trim.  I slept in it last night… love it.  I did fail in my quest for new boots for me, so I’m going to be forced to apply duct tape to the old ones, I guess.  No problem:  been there, done that.

The whiplash from my fall on the ice is all better now.  I managed to heal it in about four days.  My chiropractor commented once on how fast I healed after a car wreck.  Some of that may come from practice, long experience at illness and recovery.  But not all of it is that.  There is intention involved here.  I’m a healer and have ended up with myself as my primary patient.

I encountered an old friend in the mall yesterday.  She was amazed to see me bouncing along with the old spring in my step.  She admitted that she had been expecting a call to my funeral.  It had been three years since I’d been well enough to get out to social events, and about that long since I’d seen her, but we’d talked on the phone and she had heard from Greyfox and Charley about how sick I was.  We had a great little gab fest, and she gave me the email addy of a friend of hers who apparently needs a dose of some of the same medicine I’ve been getting.

And here is where I segue into the health update.  I am into the second month on my amino acid supplements for the food addictions.  The only problem I’m having to watch out for continually is anorexia.  A doctor when I was a kid stated the problem as a “defective appestat”.  I don’t notice I’m hungry until I get weak and shaky from hypoglycemia.  Then my tendency is to overeat.   Healthy hunger and addictive food cravings are two very different things.  Now that the cravings are gone, I must try to remember to eat regularly.

I’m eating small portions, only enough to sustain my blood sugar.  I’m shrinking (as witness my pants hanging off my hips) but not losing much weight.  Where does it all go?  I know that a lot of the girth was bloat from yeast in my gut, but still it’s amazing to see the difference.  It’s not all in my belly, either.  My face isn’t all puffy now, nor my hands and feet.  I could probably start wearing rings again, but not now.  Why bother?

Since I started the new regimen, I’ve had only one glycemic response.  I had bought three big ruby red grapefruit, and ate the first one two or three sections at a time over the course of four days.  When I started sectioning out the second one I was already weak from hunger, and as I worked, cutting the sweet juicy red sections from the membranes, I ate one occasionally.  I probably nibbled half a grapefruit that way, and soon felt the telltale flush and rush, then got sleepy, and then got the not-painful-but-scary sensations in my feet from diabetic neuropathy.  Now I need to section that last grapefruit, but you can bet I’ll do it on a full stomach to avoid temptation.

The guys largely get by on quick-fix prepared foods or leftovers from things I have cooked in quantity for that purpose.  We still have Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge, and another turkey outside in Mother Nature’s cooler, usually a freezer this time of year, but El Niño is making it important to cook it up and bone the meat to freeze for later.  No way will that 24 pound turkey fit in our little freezer compartment, especially since I found a good price on bay scallops yesterday and bought five pounds.

Can you tell from my topics here that I’m hungry?  It’s still before breakfast for me, since I need to wait an hour after taking my morning meds before I eat.  I’ve spent more than that hour here, so I have to go now, get some food and get to work.  I’m percolating two more memoir blogs, one the continuation of my childhood, and the other in the ‘seventies after I met Charley.

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