Welcome to New Mexico,
 white man!

As promised…

Yesterday, as I transcribed the final sentences of Episode Three in the continuing Adventures of Melody Andrewdottir, Lady Shaman on my Old Fart‘s site, I realized that our ditzy little Mel had provided a great opening to tell the story of what has turned out to be one of the more memorable moments of the early months of my marriage to Greyfox.

I wasn’t going to marry Greyfox when I went to Pennsylvania to help him pack up and move to Alaska.  I loved him, sure, but marriage has ruined more than one good love affair for me, and I didn’t want to marry again, ever, at all, period.  But he talked me into it with a lot of bullshit about “upper middle class values” and such.  Then, of course, he started regretting it before the honeymoon even started.

He got cold feet.  He said the cold feet business was all about moving to Alaska in November, but I think it went deeper.  Anyhow, I’ve told some of that story elsewhere, and this little tale is about a specific incident on that extended honeymoon that came about when he decided we would winter in the Southwest and go north the following spring.

We were traveling in two vehicles, with Greyfox following me in his SUV, while I drove his little sports car with nine-year-old Doug in the passenger seat.  Greyfox had gone over the maps with me as I chose the scenic route through the Rockies that had us crossing the Continental Divide thirteen times.  Later on, he said it looked flat there spread out on his bed in Harrisburg. 

We were at the memorial monument to the snow plow drivers who died in the line of duty, high in Red Mountain Pass, when he finally told me that he hated narrow mountain roads.  By then, the quickest route down to flat land was to just proceed on as planned.  That’s how we ended up in Gallup, New Mexico.

Oops, I’d better back up a bit, or this in-joke still won’t make any sense to the uninitiated.  If Greyfox’s name doesn’t clue you, I’ll make it explicit.  He’s Native American, calls himself “half-breed” though the actual blood quantum is unknown.  His tribe, Muscogee Nation of Florida, started adopting Europeans in the 1600s or 1700s when a Wind Clan woman married a French Voyageur.  Their last hereditary chief was a redhead named Alexander McGillivray.  The BIA doesn’t recognize the tribe (and they are still contesting that) because they have no distinct language or culture.

The result of all that is that I, a freckled redhead whose parents and grandparents preferred to ignore the redskins in their ancestry and pass for white, inherited more Native American cultural fragments than did Greyfox as an enrolled member of an unenrolled tribe.  To any uninformed eye, he looks and sounds like a thoroughly americanized descendant of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors, except for the southern drawl he picked up from his mother’s people.

Nevertheless, Greyfox is proud of his native ancestry, proud of his NDN heritage, whatever it may be.  He changed his name to make the heritage obvious to anyone inclined to evaluate him merely on the basis of the way he looks, talks, thinks and acts–like any other white man.  I think he had actually convinced himself, on the basis of that tribal membership card he carries in his wallet and the annual tribal dues he pays whenever I remember to write the check, that he is an Indian.  As a certified Indian shaman among a bunch of pagan wannabe Indians, he had gained a certain level of recognition from his peers, as well.

So, we’re walking along the skid row strip of bars and pawn shops across the street from the Santa Fe railroad tracks in Gallup, out of one pawnshop, and on to the next, ogling all the beautiful silver, leather, pottery, stone and wood carvings and weaving that has been hocked for the cash to feed the families or the addictions of the local natives.  Doug was grooving on all the pretty things and I was enjoying sharing what I had learned of the traditions behind some of the art in my many visits to the Four Corners area as a kid.  Greyfox was soaking up the ambience and empathizing with the old Navajo woman who buttonholed us and sold me a set of beautiful but non-traditional placemats she hadn’t been able to sell to any of the shops.

Suddenly, a door burst open, and two sturdy young Navajo men struggled out of a bar, supporting a third man between them.  He was obviously very drunk, was cursing and doing everything except cooperating with his friends.  The trio staggered and lurched down a step and into Greyfox, nearly knocking him down.  One of the young men let go his drunken friend long enough to steady my husband, then grabbed the drunk before his friend dropped him.

The bleary-eyed inebriate, weaving there between his friends, looked Greyfox up and down, and said loudly, with a laugh, “Welcome to New Mexico white man.”

Greyfox stood there, stunned.  The trio lurched away down the street, and Doug and I moved toward the next shop along the way, but Greyfox didn’t move.  He just stared, open-mouthed, after the three dark-eyed, brown-skinned, black-haired men.  I guess he might tend to remember the incident anyway, even without occasional reminders from Doug and me, but we like to remind him anyway, especially when he says or does something just too awfully white for words.  A little dose of reality never hurt anyone.

Trapper Creek

I had a meeting this evening in Trapper Creek, thirty miles or so up the valley.  I took both digital cameras with me, hoping to get some shots of the annular solar eclipse.  It was too cloudy for that, but I did get some excellent scenic shots.

Not exactly “scenic”, this pic of the airstrip at Trapper Creek is typical of the many small airstrips that help keep Alaskans flying.  One of the big surprises for me when I first moved to this quiet valley 20 years ago was the amount of air traffic.  It’s quiet here in terms of auto traffic, but the corridor following river, railroad and highway also carries air traffic.   Now I’ve gotten used to hearing the planes going over.

This shot at right, of one of the prettiest little campgrounds I’ve ever seen, was taken from almost the same POV as the airstrip shot above, just rotated about 180 degrees.  The campground is between the highway and airstrip, right in the middle of the town of Trapper Creek.  I have never seen this place with all the campsites full.  When I go up there to the nearby laundromat, I like to just wander around the camp… it is so peaceful and beautiful. 

I know a woman who moved up here maybe ten years after I did, from somewhere in the Lower 48.  She wanted to come to Alaska, knew no one here, and just picked Trapper Creek off a map because she liked the name.  I guess it’s as good a way as any to pick a spot.  It’s a great spot.

The prominent plant in the foreground here is one to watch out for in these woods–our only poisonous plant, devil’s club.  We have no poison oak, ivy or sumac in this part of Alaska, nor any venomous insects or spiders, and no snakes, lizards or other reptiles at all.  We do have some frogs, neat, tiny little frogs that spend the winters buried deep beneath the ground.  They can survive down there for several years in dry weather.  In wet years the frogs’ spring chirping drowns out birdsong for weeks.  Last year was so dry I didn’t hear any frogs.  This year, I heard only a few, and only for a couple of days before the muskeg dried up.  I hope they all had time to find mates and do their little multiplication thing.  They are such cute, magical little things.

This is the river from which I took my Xanga nic:  the Big Su is what  we call it.  The full name is the  Susitna River.  There is a “little” Su river that joins it farther down the valley, too.  This place is maybe 15-20 miles from where I live, but we’re only a mile from the river.  In the area where we live, it doesn’t look like this, all wide and open.  Near here, it is a maze of braided channels and little islands, a couple of miles wide.

On my way up the valley, I noticed that the beavers had been busy on Montana Lake, one of the prettiest spots in our end of the Susitna Valley.  I stopped on the way back, drove as far off the highway as I could and walked the rest of the way, hoping to get some beaver shots . 

No luck, though.  They didn’t show up, but there was plenty of evidence of their work, such as the gnawed-off little stumps in the foreground here, and lots of new sticks added to the dam in this shot, and to the “house” mound out in the lake, visible in the middle distance on the right in the shot below.

When I posted the third episode of the Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaman on Greyfox’s site today… uuhhh, yesterday, I mean… I promised to tell the story behind the in-joke with which he concluded that episode.  It’s a good story.  Unfortunately, after my drive up the valley and traipsing all over the riverbanks and lakeshores, then saving and uploading these images after Doug went to bed, it’s already tomorrow and I’m pretty sleepy.  Go ahead, read the funny stuff, and I’ll come back in the morning… I mean later today after the sun is up… higher, I mean.  These long summer days can just sorta run into each other somewhere in the space or time that might be expected to be night.  Oddly enough, when we run short of night, I seem to run short of sleep, too.  I’m half asleep right now, just in case that’s not as painfully obvious to you as it is to me.  Later….

1954-’55

FIRE BUG

I have already mentioned that I took on the guilt for my father’s death when I was seven years old because I was angry over a spanking and wished, as the ambulance pulled away taking him to the hospital after a heart attack, that he would die.  I’ve also described how at that time of his death my mother switched her dependence for many tasks such as bookkeeping and auto maintenance from my father to me.  I have described some of my play habits that I have since learned are indications of OCD:  obsessive-compulsive disorder; and I have described the orgasm addiction that started the day of my father’s funeral.  Always a hyper-sensitive, “high-strung” child, now I was beginning to bend, twist and warp under the stresses of life.  In plain language, I was a sick puppy.

I kept the shameful secret of having killed my father.  Nobody knew that but me.  I don’t think Mama had any conception that it could be harmful for me to become her caretaker at a time when I was surely in need of extra care myself.  She has expressed the opinion that I needed extra tasks to ”keep my mind off things.”  Since it has only been within the past few years that I have learned to recognize OCD in the patterns of childhood play, I don’t suppose Mama recognized anything unusual there, either.  She has told me that she didn’t really start worrying about my sanity until I started playing with fire.

At the beginning, I’m sure it wasn’t my sanity she was worried about, either.  She was worried that I would burn the place down.  We were no longer living on the balcony at the back of the sundries store.  Our store was next door to a movie theater.  The theater had been closed when we moved there.  Before long, there was a new owner, the Walker family, and they became our friends.  We learned that there was a vacant 3 room apartment upstairs above the theater, and Mama decided to rent it.  That was where my fascination with fire started.

All I recall about the start of that obsession was that the smell of sulphur matches reminded me of Daddy.  He had smoked 2 to 3 packs of cigarettes a day, usually lighting them with “strike anywhere” kitchen matches.  Sometimes he would scratch the match on the seat of his denim overalls, and sometimes he would flick the match with his thumbnail to strike it.  In Halstead, I started striking matches just to smell that reminiscent scent.  At first, I made no effort to hide it.  When Mama saw me do it, she yelled at me to stop.  I was eight or nine years old, but she still used the term, “no-no”, as if I was a toddler.  It became clear to me that, just like masturbation, I had to keep the match-striking hidden from Mama.

I had difficulty striking a match, even on the abrasive surface on the side of the box.  Often, not drawing the match quickly enough across the surface would just rub off the sulphur at the tip, and the match would be spoiled.  I wasted a lot of matches that way.  Mama found burnt and unburned matches in the trash and scolded me.  Then I discovered that holding the match, even one with the tip worn off, in a flame, would cause it to flare and give me the scent-payoff I was seeking. 

At first, I would just strike one match and then use it, as it burned down, to light fresh matches or the ones I had already spoiled with my ineffective striking technique.  Then I discovered that I could open a little door at the bottom of the water heater that stood in the bathroom at the end of the big old claw-footed enamel tub, and stick my matches into the pilot light, by-passing the striking step altogether.

Mama discovered some charred match ends on the floor by the water heater, and some blisters on my fingertips.  She screamed at me, slapped me, called me, “fire bug”.  In tears, screaming  hysterically, she tried to frighten me with the prospect of burning the house down.  The “house” was a solid row of brick buildings along Main Street, that I was pretty sure wouldn’t “burn down”, and I had always been careful to extinguish any matches that fell to the floor.  I “knew” she was “wrong” about the dangers involved.  But I knew I had to find some better, more private ways to indulge my obsession.

At first, I took a few matches from the box she had “hidden” on an upper shelf in the kitchen, where I had to climb up onto the countertop to reach.  I lit them in the area adjacent to the alley behind the store and theater, where I often played.  She eventually missed the matches and found the charred evidence of my play. 

Then I bought my own box of matches.  It only cost 5 cents, and I found the nickel on the sidewalk.  By smashing the box’s corners, I could fit it into the compartment on my bike that was meant to hold the batteries for the headlight and horn.  Mama had said it was too expensive to keep replacing those batteries and I would just have to do without a light and horn.  I had resented that at the time, but then it turned to my advantage.

I found quite a few isolated places to strike matches.  There was one spot on the bank of Black Kettle Creek near its confluence with the Little Arkansas River either within or close to Halstead’s Riverside Park.  I sat there often, just watching the water, which flowed very sluggishly and was green with algae.  I remember once there, seeing a snake sunning itself half in and half out of the water.  As I approached, it reared back its head and opened its mouth to show me the white inside:  cottonmouth water moccasin.  Sometimes, when I was sure no one was near to see me and tell on me, I would strike a few matches.

I was training my black cocker spaniel Spooky, and Mama suggested that we teach him to find me, wake me in the morning, track me when I was out on my bike.  It didn’t take long before all Mama had to do was open the door, let him into the apartment and tell him to, “Get Kathy,” and he would lick my face until I woke and wouldn’t stop tugging at my clothes until I stood before my mother.

I would leave him with her and ride away on my bike.  She would wait for increasingly longer periods of time before releasing him and telling him to “get” me.  One time, I rode straight to the Scout Park and, while I waited for Spooky to catch up with me, struck a match and lit a small collection of twigs on a bare patch of ground at the base of a big tree.  Someone in a house near the park saw me and called my mother to tell her I was playing with fire in the park.

To her, that apparently was much worse than anything she had caught me at.  That someone else would find out her kid was a fire bug seemed much more serious than the mere fact of my being one.   She whipped me with a paddle, screamed at me and shamed me, told me how ashamed of me she was. 

The closest thing the town had to a cop was the “night cop”, a watchman and door shaker who walked Main Street after closing time, making sure that all the stores were locked up.  She got him in on the act and he told me there was a law against arson, and that I could go to reform school just for setting a fire in the park, even a little “campfire” as I had.  I think it was a lie, because campfires were set in that park all the time, and I had used a spot where there had been plenty of previous fires.

Whether it was true or not, it scared me out of playing with fire.  The scent of sulphur matches was no longer associated in my mind with my father.  Now it was associated with fear, shame and danger.  I still hate that smell.

Self-Assertion

I wasn’t taught how to assert myself, my needs and ideas, as a child.  What I learned about self-assertion, I picked up from my family and culture, by the natural processes of seeing someone else do something, mimicking it, and then adapting and refining the behavior on the basis of the feedback I got.  By this method, I learned not to assert myself directly.

It became evident to me at an early age that coming right out and asking for something was NOT the way to get it.  My parents’ favorite response to such requests was, “We’ll see…”  I suppose that was easier for them than just telling me “no” and facing my arguments and tantrums.  Thus, they taught me by their examples to be indirect, to avoid saying precisely what I meant, but to say, instead, something that would arouse no resistance.  As a strategy for meeting my needs, that was less than ideal.  Although it often kept me from triggering angry responses and outright refusals, it also kept me from getting what I needed most of the time.

I was almost thirty when I became aware, through my work in the counseling field and my experiences in group therapy, just what a sick puppy I was.  Having learned that self-assertion was wrong, selfish, bad, and ineffective for getting what I wanted, I had become an expert manipulator.  Having had strong (and contradictory) parental programming against dishonesty, and also having a personal distaste for it, I was continually having to choose between repressing my own needs or damaging my self-esteem by lying and manipulating in an effort to get the needs filled.

There was nothing unique about my situation.  Nearly every woman in our culture faced the same bind I did.  Around that time, in the 1970s, feminism and women’s liberation had brought about the phenomena of the consciousness-raising group and assertiveness training.  I found myself in the position of teaching other women to assert their own needs and desires openly, directly and non-violently at the same time I was learning to do it.  Few people (notably some male chauvinists who thought we should just shut up and do as we were told) would disagree that it was better than coyly practicing feminine wiles and/or denying our needs and bottling things up until we exploded into aggressive self-assertion.

Now, I can go either way.  On good days, when I’m feeling energetic, self-confident and brave, I speak right up and express my desires.  When they involve things I believe I have earned or to which I am entitled, I am capable of demanding my due.  I can issue ultimatums, usually something like, “treat me with respect or get out of my life.”  It doesn’t always get me what I want.  I still sometimes must deal with disrespectful assholes, but at least I keep my self respect.

When I am fatigued, depressed, or otherwise not up to the effort of self-assertion, I can clam up, bag my feelings and let them fester for a while, until I just can’t stand it any more.  Those times are rare.  Even rarer are the times I resort to manipulation to get what I want.  That last tactic is just too hard on my self-esteem.  Repressing myself is not quite so hard on me, but hard anyway.  As I get older, I don’t think it is getting any easier to speak up for myself, but it seems to be getting harder not to.  Yesterday, I had to force myself.

I have been enjoying the self-discovery and social warmth that has come from my new AA home group in town, and the one out here nearer home that meets less often (and I’ve learned that there is a new NA group in Talkeetna that I plan to join, too).  It has also been fun to get in on Greyfox’s euphoric “pink cloud” at the start of the current round of sobriety.   The first time he insulted me, I was able to let it pass with just a comment that indicated I took some mild exception.  He wasn’t so lucky, poor man, the second time.

We were in the laundromat.  We had just, jointly, confronted a neighbor who had more than just inconvenienced us by failing to show up for a date she had made to buy us dinner in exchange for some services I had performed for her, making her travel reservations with my computer.  Her irresponsibility cost us $40 out of pocket and I lost half a day’s work.  It was a frustrating con-frontation.  She gave us $40, but acted affronted and went so far as to state outright that she would not accept the responsibility.  It is typical behavior for her, and I walked away, but was still a bit steamed when Greyfox repeated his earlier insult.

We were conversing pleasantly as we folded laundry together, discussing our plans.  He was telling me that he’d decided to change clothes each time he closed his stand (2 or 3 times a day) to go to a meeting, and then get back into the “work clothes” each time he went back and set up the stand.  It means not only packing and unpacking merchandise, loading and unloading tables, etc., but now that extra step of disrobing and dressing each time.  I said, “It sounds to me as if you’re setting yourself up for just more frantic hustle-bustle.”

He stopped, looked thoughtful, smiled, and responded, “You sound just like my sponsor.”  It was the same thing he had said to me earlier when I had warned him against taking on too much stress.  I’ve been saying similar things to him as long as we have known each other.  He has a tendency to over-extend himself and then seek relief in drugs when he fails to cope with the routine he has set himself.

I knew he meant it as a compliment, as an acknowledgement of my wisdom, but after thirteen years of wise counsel, and of holding the privileged position of wife to this man, I resented it.  What I heard was that all those years of cautioning counsel meant nothing to him and that my words had never gotten through to him until some stranger, a drunk like himself, said the same thing.  I do not like it when that happens, and it happens too often.  I told him so.

I unloaded on him.  To his credit, he did not withdraw into isolation as has been his habit.  But he didn’t respond, either.  I had to ask for feedback.  He expressed his bafflement.   He couldn’t fathom what my problem was.  So I tried restating my position.  I said I resented the disrespect.  I reminded him that I have been warning him for years against setting himself up for failure and relapse.  I said that just because I didn’t use the damned AA buzzwords, the “easy does it”, “first things first,” crap, he wouldn’t listen to me, but when some fellow-drunk said to him the same thing I’d been saying all along in different words, suddenly I was sounding like him.

He still didn’t get it.  He wondered how he might have expressed himself without setting me off.  He said he had been trying for years to find a “map to the minefield,” so he could express himself without triggering my temper.  Breakthrough!   “So,” I thought, “that’s what he has been trying to do.”  Great metaphor, that.

I told him that there was no map to this minefield, that no matter what words he had used to tell me that he respected his sponsor more than he respected me, I was not going to like it.  I expanded on it, told him that I thought we’d made a breakthrough there.  If he could get it through his head that the “minefield” is like one of those dungeons in an advanced video game where the map is different each time you enter it, we might have better communication.  It wasn’t his words that triggered me, I said.  It was the idea, the knowledge that my advice has less value to him than that of his sponsor.

We talked all the way home, and more as he loaded his car for the trip back to town.  We covered ground I had tried to cover many times before, only suddenly this time I had his attention, his willing participation.  We established that I had indeed earned his respect and that I did indeed know my beans when it came to both psychology and addiction.  I hadn’t been angling for or anticipating it, but he decided that staying here and working on his marriage was more important than making two AA meetings yesterday.

He came in, called his sponsor and left a message on his machine that he was going to stay here another night and work on our marriage, “First things first.”  We had a wonderful evening and night of communication and love.  This morning there was more of the same before he left for town.    I’m so glad I went to the trouble of asserting myself.  This time it really paid off.

Hi there!

SuSu hasn’t been around here much for a day or two.  I was busy over at KaiOaty’s place today, doing readings for FlightsOfWhimsy and ShadowofHel.

Greyfox survived a couple of days in town without me and kept his sobriety intact.  He came home a few hours ago for clean clothes and to make the local AA meeting.  Since this group out here only meets once a week, I expect to see him every Tuesday for a while, even if he’s working in town the rest of the week.

He got on totse a while ago, and let his friends there know why he hadn’t been around.  He posted that since his latest “near death experience” he and I are “more in love than ever.”  I have to agree with that.  Something is gone from him, some mental shield that has shut me out of his heart and soul from day one.  I really like this new guy, and I am very much liking what I have become since the recent intensity with Neptune, Mars and the Full Moon/eclipse.  The deeper I go the deeper I get.

I appreciated all the comments I got on my latest blog, both the one out here below and the one I put in my comment box after it.  There is one comment that gives me a beautiful opening to say something I think is very important, so here goes:

Well from my own personal experiences AA is not a cure.  My mother went to AA many times, only to fullfill her obligation.  It was amazing to me that the meetings were held inside an old bar, in which the other 3 street corners were occupied by bars.  It was actually ironic that the peeps in the meeting were professing there weaknesses and then 10 minutes later were at the bar.

Just cuz AA didnt work for my mom, I guess it would be naive to think it doesnt work at all.

I just think you have to be strong in spirit within yourself to make a change.  if you dont believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to…right??

DaP

In my far from humble opinion (and if I’ve ever left you a comment with “IMFFHO” in it, that’s what it means–I don’t have humble opinions, like George Carlin doesn’t have pet peeves) what it takes to make a change in oneself is intention, a real motivation, dedication.  I don’t really know what it means to be “strong in spirit.”  Maybe DaP means courage there.  I think courage is another requirement for doing the hard things such as transmuting oneself into a higher form.

AA isn’t a “cure”, fershure.  Statistics I’ve heard recently say that of every four people who go through the doors of the rooms of AA, one will never drink again; one will eventually, after a number of slips and relapses, quit drinking; and the other two are dead ducks.  A fifty-percent success rate, in the addiction recovery field, is above average. 

Unfortunately for the statistics, judges send people to AA instead of to jail for drunk driving and/or domestic violence.  Those people, there as DaP’s mother, “only to fullfill her obligation,” have little chance of success.  Even if one wants to quit drinking, the dice are loaded against us.  As we say, ”it works if you work it.”  If you are willing to call for help or go to a meeting instead of picking up a drink, AA can help you get sober.  Even God himself can’t stop you from picking up a drink if that is your Will. 

I quit drinking yeaars ago by switching to other drugs and now I’m using AA as it was never intended, to stay off all my addictions.  Food Addicts Anonymous was just too tame, too clean, too straight for me.  Not enough junkies and jailbirds in there–I just didn’t feel at home.  I have found a group now where I do feel at home. 

I have worked all but the last of the 12 steps, all on my own, just me and my Higher Power.   Now I’m preparing to do the twelfth step.  I plan to study a pile of books and pamphlets designed to prepare me for this, and then I will get clearance to go into a local jail once a week and attend an AA meeting with the women in there.

That’s it, that’s all there is to my 12th step work, just going to meetings and sharing my stories.  You Xangans who have been hanging around with SuSu for a while might know how dreadfully hard it is for Kathy to tell her stories.    I can’t imagine anything that could be much more fun and rewarding for me than to go to jail–and to be able to get out when I’m ready to leave–just to tell my stories and listen to other women’s stories. 

I need a shower before that meeting, so I’m stopping this right here.  I’ll be back.

UPDATED (in “comments”)– I’ve blogged in my own comment box instead of yours, for a change.

My First AA Meeting

I have never had much respect for 12-step programs.  The sticking point for me is the “powerless” bit right at the beginning.  That won’t square with my HP, my personal Higher Power, the influence I usually call, “Spirit”.  This god of mine helps those that help themselves.  Transcending my own addictions has been a process quite the opposite of letting go and letting God.  I had to take control of my life and take responsibility for myself.

Mind you, I had never been to an AA meeting.  I had been to several NA meetings, and had belonged to Food Addicts Anonymous (not the Federal Aviation Agency).  I had watched many alcoholics trade in their alcohol addictions for an addiction to AA.  When I was in the counseling field, we often discussed that business of becoming addicted to a program.  Programs from which clients don’t graduate, upon which people become dependent for life, are generally felt to be less valuable, less valid as a treatment modality than the programs that empower people toward self-sufficiency.

In one sense, though, my self-empowerment began with a letting-go.  I “let” Spirit speak to me… LOL, as if I could stop it.  What I did was choose to hear and heed that voice within, to accept my power as a child of God, and to willingly and wholeheartedly follow where Spirit leads.  But I enjoy trying to be as inclusive as I can in my philosophy, to say yes wherever I can, to exclude no possibility.  I’ve been growing steadily in that direction, toward all-inclusion, universal acceptance.  In recent weeks my personal growth has made a quantum leap, opening me even more to acceptance and inclusion.  In other words, I was primed for yesterday’s discoveries.

I had been out of touch with Greyfox since the beginning of the week, when he left the message on my machine that he was drinking.  After months of sobriety, in the midst of economic hard times and being forced out of his usual place of business in Talkeetna by a new zoning ordinance, he fell off the wagon, yet again.  I was, frankly, ready to let him go. 

He said he would call me at a certain time, and I stayed offline at that time so that his call could get through.  When he didn’t call, the next day I stayed online so that the machine would take any calls.  Enough is enough and too many years of his relapses had burned me out.  I have walked the tightrope between compassionate forgiveness and offering a hand up, on the one hand, and, on the other, enabling his indulgence.  I have wanted off that merry-go-round for years.

He didn’t call all week.  I’m familiar with his patterns.  I know the way his drinking escalates during the course of each binge.  I adjusted to his absence, went out and got the essential items he had been going to bring back from town.  Doug and I started discussing “life after Greyfox” and what we need to do to fill that gap in the household.  I was feeling relieved and liberated.  Concerned that he would run up a debt on my credit card that I wouldn’t be able to pay off, I was checking the card activity online every day.  There was none, and I wondered whether that meant he wasn’t spending money, or whether he just hadn’t run out of cash yet.

On Friday, shortly after I got up and fully awake, Spirit signalled me that Greyfox was in trouble.  I tried to tune in to him, his vibes, his consciousness.  When we are in sync, I can view the world through his eyes, so to speak.  I can pick up on his perceptions and feelings.  I was getting nothing.  As usual when my questing consciousness doesn’t receive clear impressions, I consulted an oracle for insight.

I pulled out the runes and asked the Norns if Greyfox was alive.  Three runes, one yes, one no, one maybe.  Thinking, “fuck the Norns,” I put the runes away and got out the Crystal Oracle, which does not lend itself so easily to ambiguity.  A series of castings of the stones told me that he was alive, but barely.  He was in deep trouble and there was no certainty one way or the other whether I would be able to help him or not.  This seemed perfectly logical to me.  I know the limitations of outside “help” when one must take responsibility for one’s own actions.

My final casting was on the question, “Is it in my own best interests to go check on Greyfox and see what I might do to help?”  The answer was a yes, but with the qualification that it would be a massive pain in the ass.  So, what else is new?  After a long career in the “helping professions,” I’ve experienced plenty of those pains trying to help people detox.  In such situations, the helpers tend to find what comfort we can in knowing that the detoxing inebriates are in more pain than they are putting us through.  I put away the crystals, woke Doug to tell him I was going to town, and hit the road.  What had finally made me decide to go was this thought:  “I would do this for anyone, stranger, relative or friend–anyone who needed my help.  Since this was no more than I would do for anyone, how could I do less for my soulmate, my spouse?”

I found Greyfox in a puddle of urine amid a litter of empty vodka bottles and beer cans.  First I checked for a pulse.  Then I started clearing up the clutter so there was some floor to walk on, and emptied his pockets of car keys, cash and my credit card.  I looked around for firearms and found none, but I knew there might be one under his mattress or behind it.  After a couple of trips out to my car and the dumpster, his eyes opened as I came through the door.  I asked if he was conscious and he said he was.

I talked a little and listened a lot.  He spoke the front end of a few sentences, “I’ve been seriously thinking about…” and, in an ironic tone of self contempt, “See how I coped with…”  Eventually, I managed to encourage him to finish the sentences:  “cutting my throat” and “killing myself,” respectively.  Then, he started on another one of those hard-to-finish sentences, “I’ve been seriously thinking about going to…”  That one really had him stymied.  After the umpteenth repetition, I resisted the urge to offer “hell” as a concluding word, and offered, “detox,” instead.  He said that was it.

When he started a blubbery boo-hooing pity party, I left him there and walked to a phone and called the local detox and rehab center, the only such institution in this valley the size of a medium-sized state.  They had no bed available.  They had no waiting list ahead of him, either.  I got his name on the list and was told, “maybe three to five days,” before he might get in.

I was on my own little personal high, saying exultant prayers of thanksgiving, blessing spirit and myself for thr healing journey that has empowered and enabled me to cope with this task I had taken on myself.  I was walking back and forth, a long city block, between Greyfox’s cabin, the rental office where the man would let me use his phone book but not the phone, and the bar at the other end of the block where there was a pay phone but no directory.  I couldn’t have done that, even just a few weeks ago.

Two of those trips, and no success at finding a friend to come help me get Greyfox dressed and out of there, and to drive his car home, I went back and talked to Greyfox again.  He was tracking a little better, finishing more sentences.  One of the sentences he finished was a request that I “take him to AA.”  I said, “to a meeting, you mean?” and he said yes.  So, I made another trip to the phone book and then down to the phone, to find a meeting.  What I finally got, after listening to several recordings and feeding a few dollars to the pay phone, was a real live man on the other end of the valley AA hotline.  He listened, and by that time I was needing to talk it all out.

My voice was shaky at the start, but it steadied up, and I finally arranged myself and the cord on the receiver so I could sit on the floor and rest my shaky legs.  I told the man as much of the story as I thought he needed to hear to have a clear picture of the situation, including the fact that a wound on Greyfox’s wrist looked as if he’d tried to cut himself.  He asked me if Greyfox had any weapons.  I answered that he is a knife dealer and has a car full of knives and swords.  I said he owns several handguns and could possibly have one with him.  The man recommended that I call the State Troopers and get a Trooper to go in there and disarm him, take him to Valley Hospital where they would put him on IV fluids and Librium for an emergency detox.  After that, when the hospital said his blood alcohol level was down far enough, the troopers would collect him again for the trip into Anchorage to Alaska Psychiatric Institute for 24 hours of observation.  If they cleared him then, by that time the bed in the detox center might be empty.

I mentioned that Greyfox had asked me to take him to a meeting, and he said there was a 5:00 meeting not far from where I was.  It was about 20 minutes to five.  I decided to find out if Greyfox could manage to dress himself and walk to the car.  I figured I could handle the situation better my way than doing it by the book with the troopers, the hospital, API and all.  The man said if I was sure I wouldn’t be in danger of getting shot for my efforts, I was probably right.  By this time, what with the backing and forthing and consulting with an ever-more-coherent Greyfox, I think I’d called this man four separate times.  He said to let him know what happened next, and I said I would.

Greyfox dressed himself in the same rather smelly clothes he had worn all week, and walked on his own to the car.  I drove toward the other end of town and that meeting.  We were nearly there when he noticed we weren’t headed toward home and asked me where we were going.  I told him I was taking him, at his request, to an AA meeting.  He started acting panicky, crying again, begging me to take him home.  I started dealing with the urge to reach over him, open his door and push him out of the car.  Some of that was a purely physical reaction to the combined odors of shit, piss and that nasty alcohol-recycled-through-the-pores smell that reminds me of countless beatings and other insults at the hands of several drunken men.  Yeah, the oracle had been right about the pain in the ass.

I parked outside the meeting hall and discovered that the meeting started at 5:30, so we had some time.  Greyfox had said something about needing to eat sometime, so I went to a nearby mini-mart and got him a sandwich and a pint of milk.  As he ate that, I walked another block to a pay phone and called my new friend at the hotline.  I asked him what the policy was about going to a meeting drunk.  He said it was sort of an unwritten thing, but would be acceptable if he wasn’t too disruptive.  He said if Greyfox got out of line someone would quietly suggest that they go out in the parking lot and talk.

He wasn’t truly willing, but he let me lead him into the hall.  I sat him down and got him a mug of water.  The meeting started, about fifteen people, all strangers to both of us.  When one of the men who was reading the script off a laminated sheet asked if there were any… this, that and the other:  members with so-many years, days, or hours of sobriety, etc., Greyfox introduced himself at a completely inappropriate point and interrupted the flow of the script several times to repeat that he had once had seven years of sobriety.  When the man got to asking if there were any “AA visitors from out of town,” I picked up on the out of town part and introduced myself.  At the end of the meeting I corrected my misstatement by explaining that when I heard that I didn’t know (since this was my first meeting) that the next question would be whether there were any newcomers/outsiders.

The group dynamic was wonderful.  It felt like home, like family, like my beloved group therapy.  Greyfox alternately smiled and cried.  After some well-suppressed initial responses of revulsion at his smell and rejection of this drunken stranger in their close home group, the routine kicked in and someone told him that he was the most important person there that day, and they made us both welcome.

By the end of the meeting, I was wishing that I were an alcoholic so I could go back and be part of that group.  It’s what I have wanted and needed since ’74 when I got kicked out of group therapy for my threesome with Charley and Hulk.  On the way home, Greyfox and I talked about that.  We talked about it some more after we got home.  I talked to him some about how alcohol had made my life crazy, gotten me raped, precipitated several addictive cascades through various series of different drugs, brought on health crises and auto-immune flareups.

Greyfox thinks I qualify for AA.  I don’t think I can honestly get through steps one and two, not with my spiritual perspective and the importance I place on personal responsibility.  But I am going back.  I will listen a lot, and when the time feels right, I will tell some of my stories.  I will admit that I’m not sure I qualify, but that I want very much to be part of that supportive and diverse family.  Sensitive to the anonymity at the core of AA, I asked Greyfox if it would be appropriate for me to blog about this.  I said this was something that belongs in my journal.  He gave me permission to breach his anonymity.

I have been writing this on the laptop, as Greyfox tries to get some sleep at the end of a long wakeful night for all three of us here, during which Doug and I doled out small drinks from his remaining few unopened beers when the shakes and hiccups got too bad.  He is detoxing.  We are detoxing him.  We will not resort to the troopers, the detox center, API and rehab–not yet, anyway.  We will be going back into town in a few hours, to catch a noon meeting.  Then I will shop for groceries and Greyfox (if he’s not shaking too badly) will open up his stand for a few hours, before we go to the 5:30 meeting. 

I need to save this to disk, carry it over to the other computer (the one with the modem) now that Doug has restarted it for me and crawled into the sack, and post it.  I’ve got to get ready to go to town.

Seeya later.

Wa-hoo
 and hoo-raay,
 with a yippee thrown in
for good measure.

Feed the white dog,

The latest of my FAQblogs at KaiOaty got into this week’s ZangaZine.

Natena, the young woman my grandson Alex loves, is a member of my daughter Angie‘s group at msn, PeaceSeekers.  She had written on the message board,

“I have been really strugling with solvin issues on a postive note. I’ve been noticing lately that I get really mad or upset really easy. I need some advice on focusing my negative energy on something else. I’ve tried cleaning or relaxing it just dosent seem to be cutting it…..

Morgane decided to include it in ZangaZine this week. 

Thank you Natena and Ren and Marian and Mel and Angie and everyone else who has been reminding me lately that this needed to be written.  Here’s an excerpt:

Some Native American traditions say that each of us is accompanied by two Spirit Dogs: a fearsome black dog and a friendly white dog.  They say, “Feed the white dog, not the black dog.”  They don’t say kick the black dog, run away from it or try to make friends with it.  They only say, “Feed the white dog.”  The black dog feeds off fear and hatred, on anguish, anger, anxiety.  It’s more fun to be loving, so feed the white dog. 

In case you missed it, I transcribed Episode Two of the continuing Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaman at Greyfox’s site yesterday.  Our Mel is always good for a few laughs, so if you could use a chuckle or two…. 

That’s it for the old business, but in current news, today is…
Koji’s birthday.
The pup of my heart is three years old.  He is named after one of my favorite video game characters, a martial artist/archaeologist in Ehrgeiz.  I’m told it means “ancient writing” in Japanese.

Around here he is affectionately known as Puppums, Doctor Snewt, the Snootmeister, the snoot that walks like a dog, and occasionally when we’re feeling really affectionate, Ko-jello.  The words we use most often to describe him to others are:  excitable boy.  It is an understatement.

He becomes agitated when I start brushing my hair and putting on my boots.  When I pick up my purse to go out, he goes wild.  He wants to go, too!  In the car, he whines and howls and gets so stressed out that he gets stress diarrhea.  I routinely plan a stop a few miles down the road to walk him around and let him relieve the pressure.  That changes the pitch of the howls, anyway.

Excitability is a common trait in his “breed”, the Alaskan sled dog.  That breed is so mixed that no kennel club recognizes it.  Around here they are generally known as “huskies”.  They love to run and they love to pull.  We don’t try to walk him when it is slick and icy out–he goes right onto his chain.  The clip for it hangs on a hook outside the door, so all I have to do is open the door and hook him up or unhook him to let him back in.  Very convenient, that.  Mark had that ingenious set-up for his dog, Leroy, when we moved in here.

Koji’s true ancestry is questionable.  The couple who gave him to us apparently didn’t know, or didn’t want us to know.  They said his mother was a husky and his father was a collie.  He was part of a litter of eleven, nine of whom were males.  The females had been spoken for when they brought a big box in here with the nine boy dogs.  I lifted each pup out onto the floor, checked for obvious defects and found none.  Five pups were black and four were a honey-tan.  I think the tan ones might have been the offspring of the collie, maybe.

Some of the puppies just lay there, whimpering.  We wanted one of the more active, curious ones.  Of that group, we chose the one who just walked around sniffing things, because all the rest were whining or howling.  Doug and I went for quiet and cute.  The pup we picked, finally, had an interesting face and curly black fur.  As he grew, his mask changed completely, and that curly undercoat was covered by the coat you see in these images.

As Koji matured, we saw no evidence of collie ancestry.  His bone structure and behavior suggested doberman, and his coat looked like alsatian.  Where he got that insouciant little flop to his left ear, I don’t know.  As a pup, both ears were floppy.  As they started to perk up, we waited, and waited, but only one of them ever stood up straight.  The other one does come up occasionally when he is startled.

Koji’s favorite posture is curled nose-to-tail like a giant netsuke.  His favorite place to curl up is my bed.  He slept beside the bed when he was a pup.  He soon learned that if he waited until I was asleep he could crawl onto the bed with me.  Then I learned that I liked having him there.  He is curled up asleep on the bed now, but a few moments ago I noticed that he had alerted and was looking out the window.  I grabbed the Kodak and got this shot.  Beautiful, isn’t he?

Happy birthday, Puppums.

FIRE HAZE

I searched the web today for a weather map to illustrate what’s making our sky as murky as LA on a bad day.  I didn’t find one, so I grabbed the Kodak and went out to capture some more immediate illustrations.

Forest fires in Russia are sending a plume of smoke across northeastern Asia and the Bering Sea.  Local weather reports here are saying, “Sunny but hazy.”  That is a clear, unclouded sky in the shot at left.  This weather pattern is expected to last through Memorial Day weekend.

Pidney and Grammy Mousebreath apparently thought I needed their protection, so they went with me.  In the week or so since my last photo blog, the muskeg dried out enough for us to walk across it, first time I’ve been out there this year since the ice melted.  Some close inspection of the strip running from center left to upper right below will show that the marsh grass out there is beginning to produce new green growth.

This weather has been going on for a few days already.  The cats and Koji, and Doug and I, keep accumulating crud in the corners of our eyes.  We sneeze and cough–though it’s hard to tell, with us primates, whether the cough is more from the smoky air or from the effects of that cold we’ve had all month.

This time of year the sun does go down below the northern horizon for a few hours of twilight each night.  The long hours of sunshine usually keep things warm, but this haze has brought a chill.  We had let the fire go out in the wood stove last month, but had to rekindle it recently.

These shots have only been resized, and not manipulated any other way.  That’s the way the sky looks to my eyes right now.  It would make a good setting for a post-apocalyptic epic… or an apocalyptic one, when you factor in the news of the day.

My Pollyanna-positive attitude is taking on a bit of tarnish lately.  I understand this.  My detachment is not there any more.  For the last couple of weeks, I have not allowed myself to pull up the shields when what I sense psychically or see on TV makes me want to weep.  I weep for my world.  I weep for the Russian forests, the beached whales, the bereaved mothers and children.   When my tears have washed the neurochemical traces of grief away, I surround the planet in white light and count my blessings.  That takes a while, and pretty soon I realize they are countless.  Then I get back to work.

Local Alaska news:

 Some man in Anchorage is hoping that Fish and Game officers will come and “move” the mama moose and her twins from his yard before mama perceives him or his family or a neighbor as a threat to her babies.  I’m hoping mama and twins mosey off on their own before Fish and Game gets there, because they have an annoying habit of shooting annoying city moose.

Some questionably humane person “liberated” five dogs from their cozy compartments in Iditarod musher Debbie Moterow’s “kennel truck.”  She had parked on an Anchorage street to have dinner in a restaurant.  Four of the dogs were rounded up quickly, but Reno was on the loose for about 24 hours before a citizen called animal control to complain about the stray in his yard.  Now Debbie and Reno are happily reunited and out of the city.

I’m so glad I got out of that city 20 years ago.  The feud between the Tongans and Samoans there has claimed another victim.  A 15-year-old Tongan boy was shot to death Sunday night, caught in a crossfire during a shootout.  Makes me appreciate my quiet subarctic suburban neighborhood that much more.

In more personal news, I’m not taking it personally.

The Old Fart called last night and left a message on my answering machine.  It was his usual style, the good news/bad news ploy to soften the blow.  The good news was some irrelevant-to-me thing he dredged up for the purpose, then:

“The bad news:  I’m drinking… gonna look into AA in Wasilla.  I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

That he’s not living here now really helped to soften the blow for me.  I’m not terribly upset about this, as I had been so many times before.  Maybe my uncharacteristic neutrality has something to do with the fact that my own addictions are under control currently.

Whatever may be contributing to my sanguine mood, I appreciate it.  I’m not even worrying over whether he will actually call today.  If he does, he will talk to the answering machine again.