This week's subject is suggested by Fetherland.

Texture:

The tactile quality of a surface or the representation or invention of the appearance of such a surface quality.
In a photographic image the frequency of change and arrangement of tones.

Fifty percent of Americans polled recently said they believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Saddam's Iraq.  In fact, no WMDs have been found, and no convincing evidence has turned up to indicate that they ever existed there.  I mention this only to introduce my topic:  how do people feel when they learn that they have been deceived?

I don't suppose there is one universal answer to that question.  I have learned that people differ in their beliefs regarding the importance of honesty and truthfulness, and even in how they define those words.  I seem to be in the minority in my conviction that truth and accuracy are always important.  Many people think it is not only acceptable, but actually preferable to telling the truth, to lie to children about such things as Santa Claus and where babies come from.  There are people who regularly and habitually tell lies, who feel betrayed and become angry when someone lies to them.  There are parents who teach their children, by their example, to lie and then punish them for lying.  Other parents punish children for telling unpleasant or inconvenient truths or revealing their secrets.  None of that makes sense to me, so I'm weird.

Some people don't object to "little white lies" about insignificant matters, while others think it makes no sense to lie about something unless it really matters. Some lie impulsively and capriciously while others are calculated and Machiavellian in their deceptions.  A number of factors can influence a person's attitude toward factual reporting and full and honest disclosure.  These include, but are not necessarily limited to, religion, culture, parental programming, life experience, and astrology.  Some signs are more likely to be liars than others, and each of them for different reasons.   Sex matters, too:  men are more likely to lie to make themselves look better, while women lie more to avoid hurting others' feelings and being rejected.

Some cultures accept nudity and sexual openness, while concealing things such as financial circumstances.  Some cultures that tend to keep physical bodies under wraps think nothing of men and women openly weeping and publicly displaying grief, a sight that appalls and repels members of some other cultures.   America has long been a confusing melange of these traditions, and almost everywhere in this era of global culture we can find conflicts over what to reveal and what to conceal. 

I personally have a problem with determining where to stop.  My memoirs are loaded with detail, much of it more or less irrelevant but maybe interesting, while some of the really relevant stuff in terms of its impact on my life might not be at all interesting to a reader.  Since I know that I don't know what other people might find relevant or interesting, I tend to err on the side of inclusion.  This makes for a long story. 

Another problem of mine is in reconciling (so that others might understand - no such reconciliation is necessary in my own mind) the fact that while I unconditionally will not knowingly deceive my child, for example, I find it acceptable in some cases for anyone to lie under oath in a court of law, my reason being that in my reality, "so help me God," is a phrase without meaning and governments and courts usurp authority that is not naturally theirs, while parents lying to their children betrays their trust and warps their minds.

I had some interesting discussions of that last idea with a friend who is half Rom and half gadjo (gypsy and non-gypsy, for those who don't understand the Romany terms).  His Euro-American mother married a Rom.  He was cross-enculturated and as a result of that is willing to reveal a lot more about gypsy culture than one would who had only their strong enculturation to secrecy.  He cited the example of his father, who would occasionally during his youth, out of nowhere and for no reason at all, knock the kid down.  He said it was to keep him alert and teach him to trust no one.  My friend also said that he would not do such a thing to his own children.  He hated his father and made it a point to expose all the gypsy "secrets" he knew.

My tendency is to keep other people's secrets while having none of my own.  On the one hand, professional ethics are involved and I need the trust of my clients.  Some of the things I know about acquaintances and friends could imperil their lives or freedom if revealed, so I choose not to reveal them.  For myself, all my "deepest, darkest secrets," the things that stain my reputation and cause some people to scorn me, are criminal matters of public record for the most part, and otherwise are simply things of which other people might be ashamed but I am not.  I accept the maxim of twelve-step programs that, "We are only as sick as our secrets."

Being duped is troublesome to me.  It arouses a mix of unpleasant feelings.  I don't know whether to blame myself for believing or the liar for telling the lie.  "No blame, no shame," is another principle I accept as a healthy alternative to the normal cultural bullshit of blaming and shaming, so eventually in every such case I manage to let the whole incident go... or at least I do if the liar confesses or the lying stops.  Ongoing institutional deception and misinformation from governmental sources and religious authorities continues to piss me off.  For now, it's just something I have to live with.  Maybe I'll get a handle on it someday, before I die.  If not, I may have to come back next time as a liar so I can see how it feels.  I think I'd rather just die.

Last night, in one of those delightful after-nine, off-peak phone conversations that keep our relationship alive and well, I was relating to my husband my latest concerns about Jumbo, the largest of the tadpoles at Rana Ranch, the only one as yet showing significant development toward froghood.  Greyfox always gets a laugh out of my activities with the tadpole ranch.  His amusement contains not a hint of ridicule.  While I cannot imagine him ever rescuing a bucketful of frogspawn and attempting to nurture a herd of tadpoles to adulthood, he is amused and bemused at what he terms my whimsical behavior, and I enjoy hearing his laughter.

I explained that on several occasions I had scooped Jumbo into my hand for closer inspection because it is hard to see details as he swims around in the North 40, camouflaged against the background of sediment in the pan.

A few days ago, when I had asked my son, Doug, to follow me out with the camera and capture an image of Jumbo floating in my cupped hands,  I noticed that the tadpole no longer fled from my hands as he had previously.  Then, after I released him, Jumbo uncharacteristically hung at the surface for a while, instead of returning to his usual haunts at the bottom of the pan.  I reached in with a finger and gently tickled the tadpole on his belly, and he smoothly swam down to the slimy rock below and started sucking up algae.  His movements were leisurely, very slow compared to those of the smaller tads in the pan, and compared to his own past behavior.  Doug said maybe he had been stunned by the photo session.

I considered that idea, and felt some concern at the thought that my interest in his (or her - how to tell?) development, and my attempts to document it, might be harmful or even traumatic to him.  I also felt it was possible that through familiarity the little froglet had come to trust me, or at least to accept me as a benign part of its environment.  As I related the story and my concerns to Greyfox last night, he broke in with, "You're the Gentle Pink Giant.  Generations of frogs will pass along the legend of the Gentle Pink Giant...."

I cracked up.  I laughed so hard it hurt.  I started coughing, lost my breath, and had to grab the nebulizer. (I'm still hosting a respiratory virus.)  When I recovered my voice enough to say, "Ow!  That hurt," he replied, "That's too bad.  I was just working up a riff on the topic...."

I caught my breath, composed myself, and begged him to go ahead.  "Laughter is therapeutic," I said.  So he riffed a while on the Gentle Pink Giant:

That's the gist of the story.  There was a little more, and it suffers on the page from the lack of vocal expression and intonation.  Even so, my cheeks have started aching from my grin as I have been writing this.  The Gentle Pink Giant -- that's me.

Five years or so ago, I blogged an abbreviated version of some of my adventures on the road after I'd gotten out of prison.  The story of my freight yard epiphany and the follow-up, a loaf of lettuce and a head of bread, were what really opened the door to memoir writing for me.  Back then, I was just telling stories, hitting the high spots, and I left out a lot of details.  The story below will fill in some of that stuff I left out previously.  It fits in the middle of this one.

I was still "Stony's girl", and Robbie and I had been no more than friendly traveling companions up to the point where he got left behind as the train pulled out while he was on a mission to buy a few candy bars with the collected pocket change from everyone in our boxcar, half a dozen or so riders.  Rocky and I and the lanky hobo who had adopted us were waiting in El Paso as the next train rolled through.  We watched and called out to Robbie as each open boxcar passed.  We were watching dejectedly as the end of the train passed us, without a clue how we might hook up with our friend again, when he walked up behind us.  He had jumped off on the edge of town as soon as the train slowed enough, and had followed the sound of my voice to find us.  He had saved some candy bars for us, too.

That separation and reunion was the sort of experience that tends to create bonds between people, and there was another one the following day as we were running to catch a slow moving freight headed toward Houston.  Robbie boosted me from behind so that I could get on the train.  He was lagging behind, almost out of reach of the door on the accelerating car, when I leaned out with one guy holding my hand inside the car, and grasped Robbie's hand to pull him aboard.  We sprawled on the dirty floor of the empty car and laughed away our tension as we caught our breath.

Houston was the end of the line.  Our hobo guide said we would have to leave the freights and hitchhike on the highway to Galveston where we were going to seek jobs in the shrimping fleet.  First, before we could catch a ride, we needed to get clean.  We were filthy and grimy from riding the freights.  It was more than just ordinary dirt.  Our complexions were silvery gray from graphite machine lubricant that had sifted out of shipping crates.  The hobo (I wish I could recall his name) told us there were coin-operated showers in the bus depot downtown.  We started walking in that direction.

It is always possible, on city sidewalks, to find a coin here and there, and we did find a few.  It was near noon and we were in the financial district, surrounded by big buildings out of which crowds of men in suits were streaming for their lunch hours.  I asked the guys to drop back and follow along at a distance as I held out my hand and started approaching these men, saying, "spare change?"  I circled a single block that way, dropping coins in my pockets as I went the four blocks, getting a few started looks and a lot of pleasant smiles along with the money.  Some of the men handed me paper money, too.  I suppose a young woman was a welcome relief from the run of the mill old rummies who usually begged there.  That had to be part of it, but I know that my voice was part of my appeal, too.  I was giving my plea the sweetest and warmest inflection I could manage, no whine, and a smile.

If memory serves, those four crowded blocks of busy sidewalks got me about forty dollars.  Whatever the numbers were, it was plenty to pay for our showers and some food, with enough left over for another meal or two.  I had been carrying a spare outfit of clothes rolled up in my sleeping bag.  It felt heavenly to slide clean skin into clean clothes.  By mid afternoon, we were out at a highway interchange where we quickly caught a ride to Galveston.  A day and a half in Galveston was all we needed to determine for sure that there wasn't any shrimping work, and nothing else available to anyone without an established address and ready transportation.

We parted company with the man who had led us there and had taught us some tricks for riding freights.  I don't remember where he was going next, but Robbie, Rocky, and I decided we would head back to California.  My mother was living in Santa Margarita, my father's Aunt Goldie lived in Morro Bay, and I had aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Redlands area.  Christmas was coming and I figured someone might welcome me.  I was weary of the roads and rails, tired of being cold, hungry and dirty -- just plain tired.

I was falling in love.  Somewhere between El Paso and Houston, Robbie and I had started holding hands sometimes as we walked.  The anxiety and loss I felt when he had been left behind, and the joy I felt when
we were together again, were no less than they would have been for a
brother or a lover. We spent a lot of our travel time sitting side by side talking, sharing personal histories and various thoughts and feelings.  He had come to the U.S. from the Netherlands for school, then dropped out to wander.  One of his objectives when we got to California was to find a consulate and straighten out his immigration status.  His green card had expired.

One night on the snow-dusted desert of West Texas, when there was no one else in our boxcar besides Rocky, and he was snoring, Robbie wrapped both arms around me, said to me, "You are my desert rose," and we put our sleeping bags together and made sweet love for what I'm sure both of us thought was only the first time and neither of us knew would be the last time as well.

Stopped on a siding somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, the train was swept by INS agents looking for undocumented aliens.  They rounded up a few Mexicans, and Robbie.  Rocky and I continued on to Indio, got off the train and hitchhiked north to San Luis Obispo.  Our ride dropped us and  we had just been picked up in a light drizzle by a man driving an old Cadillac with no seatbelts when, rounding an on-ramp to the freeway toward Santa Margarita, the car skidded, flipped, rolled, and landed on its top with me pinned underneath Rocky and the driver.

I regained consciousness on the roadside under a pile of men's jackets.  They belonged to a highway crew that had been working nearby.  I was in incredible pain, couldn't get a breath without agony in my back like I'd been broken at the waist.  An ambulance took us to the hospital where X-rays didn't show any damage.  A photo of the wreck, and the pile of jackets that was me, appeared on the front page of the local paper the next day.  I think that's the only time I've ever made the front page.

I phoned my mother from the emergency room, and she picked us up.  She offered us food as soon as we got there.  Rocky took her up on it, but I wanted a bath first.  It took three shampoos with dish detergent to get all the graphite out of my hair.  The bath cooled and I ran more hot water and soaked some more.  I nodded off in the tub and Mama was sure I'd drowned when, first, she didn't hear any sounds from in there for an hour or so and, then, she had to pound on the door and scream at me a while before she could rouse me.

I haven't said much about Rocky.  He was a jerk and a clod.  He whined all the way and never quite managed to carry his full share of the load.  On the eastbound leg of our trip, when one of the drunk Mexican riders had pulled a knife and moved toward me, Rocky backed off with his hands raised palm-out, saying, "she's not my girl."  I had my own hunting knife, which stopped the drunk in his tracks when I pulled it from its sheath.  That night, Robbie and I kept watch in turns at one end of the boxcar while Rocky snored, with the three other men huddled together at the other end, passing a bottle.

Rocky couldn't tell a joke properly to save his life, and often failed to get the point of jokes that cracked the rest of us up.  In other words, not the world's best traveling companion.  To top it off, he was butt ugly.  It was awkward for a few moments at Mama's house as she assumed he was my boyfriend.  Her trailer was small, and the only place for us to sleep was a couch across the front end that folded flat.  The pain in my back wouldn't let me sleep, so I listened to Rocky snore all night.  He left the next day and I don't think I even asked where he was headed.

Mama and I grated on each other as ever, and I ended up house sitting for Aunt Goldie while she traveled that winter.  My back hadn't gotten any better, and she hooked me up with her excellent Chinese chiropractor, who fixed me up promptly... temporarily.  There are still times occasionally when I feel as if I've been broken at the waist.

This morning when Greyfox called me from the free phone at the library -- that's how we supplement those nightly calls after nine when the cell phone minutes get cheaper -- he shared with me something from today's paper.

A recent poll revealed that, on the war in Iraq:

5% of Americans trust George Bush,

21% trust Congress,

and 65% trust the military.

It is situations such as this that, in the Third World, lead to military coups.

Just a thought....

Oh, the irony, the poignancy, the needed reminder to watch my words!

Yesterday, I wrote:  "Charity is a form of contempt."  What was I thinking?  The most charitable thing I can say is that I was unconsciously trying to exemplify these words I quoted from Simone Weil:  "A mind enclosed in language is in prison."  But rather than try to weasel out of it that way, I will try to explain what I meant. 

My error was pointed out by mailboxhead in this comment:

Well, luv, it was very early in the morning when I formulated that thought that I expressed so poorly, and I know that I did not make the sense I had meant to make.  I had forgotten that the main usage of "charity" is synonymous with philanthropy, and that philanthropy has degenerated in the common mind, from the original impersonal love for mankind and promotion of human welfare, into charitable giving, and in this society that often means responding to public appeals that line the pockets of the charity's administration and their ad agency.

Real philanthropy, such as that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing in Africa and elsewhere, has the power to save individual lives and enrich world culture.  Yaay for charity, hurrah for giving of one's bounty to those less fortunate than oneself, three cheers for robbing the rich to give to the poor, and I am totally behind comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. 

My door is open (literally: there's no lock on it, not even a latch) to the occasional homeless friend or acquaintance who needs to share my leaky roof for a while.  He can sleep on the broken-down old couch, and I will cover him with one of the blankets Greyfox scrounged from the dumpster at Felony Flats.  Whenever Greyfox scrounges food or other useful items for which he or Doug or I have no use, we pass them along to others who may use them.  There are times when the hand of charity can make the difference between life and death.  Sharing enriches me as much as it assists my fellow beings.

My cursory online search this morning could not turn up a definition of "charitable" that expressed the nuance I was attempting to give it yesterday.  The closest I could come was, "a kindly and lenient attitude toward people."  While I don't want to be unkind, I do know that lenience implies superiority to and authority over others:  "lightening a penalty or excusing from a chore by judges or parents or teachers."  A charitable or lenient attitude toward one's supposed "inferiors" is inconsistent with the unity consciousness and universal unconditional love I seek to practice. 

My charitable urge to "help" a correspondent out of her delusions and dysfunction was presumptuous and condescending.  Furthermore, it would be pointless, unproductive, and unkind to try and do so unless she asked for my help.  Of course, I know that even if she were to ask for help, what she would actually want would be reassurance, which I could not give without being dishonest.  Ah, well...  Living in society can be complicated, can't it?

Anyhow, mailboxhead's comment reminded me of Ayn Rand.  Here's the standard disclaimer I neglected to issue on yesterday's Simone Weil quotes:
Opinions expressed below are those of Ayn Rand and/or fictional characters of her creation, and are not necessarily those of SuSu, her sponsors, or the Xanga gods.

Pity is not compassion.  Charity is a form of contempt.  To whatever extent I am aroused to pity, or inclined to feel charitable, that is how far short of love I have fallen.

^These are my words, my reflections as I watched my own thoughts bounce around today.  First, the defensiveness I noted in someone's reaction to something I had said had triggered in me the same response that unwarranted, excessive, or habitual defensiveness almost always arouses.  My first knee-jerk response is an "AHA!"   If I were in a therapist's role here, this would be a starting place, the dangling end of a thread that might lead to a therapeutic breakthrough if I worked at it.

Intellectually, I recognized this person's defensive reaction as an indicator of vulnerability, self-doubt or guilty feelings, and self-image problems.  My remarks had been of a general nature, and the person in question took them personally.  This, too, signals some emotional issues.  I know very little about the person, except that he adheres to a religion  whose major tenets are based on fear and denial.  My next thought, which I realize I might have skipped altogether if I had not been feverish, sleep deprived, hypoglycemic and cranky, was annoyance that he had laid his insecurities and dysfunction on me.

Even in my weakened condition, I didn't hold that position for more than an instant.  I understood that he wasn't laying anything on me any more than I had been aiming at him specifically those general statements to which he took exception.  Logically, I figured out that if he had enough self-awareness to recognize his own defensiveness and the pathology it signaled, then he probably wouldn't have laid it out there for me and all the world to see. I felt sorry for him, for whatever trauma and/or delusion got him into that vulnerable, self-protective condition.

When I observed that I had moved into a stance of superiority from which I could magnanimously dispense my pity and pour out my compassionate thoughts, I laughed at myself and decided that, despite my strong urge to play therapist, this one is not my battle to fight.  Then I got back on the course I had been on before I inadvertently stepped on that guy's toes.

I had been looking for a quotation I half-remember from a college philosophy course, about how repetition of wise and true sayings reduces them to meaningless slogans.  Thus far, I have neither identified the philosopher nor found much of anything that addresses that topic.  I did, however, as usual, find a delicious selection of quotations.  I'm cutting it down to the words of just one philosopher (at this time--more later).

The French political activist Simone Weil was active in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance to Nazi Germany in World War II.  She died in 1943, and most of her work was published posthumously.  Albert Camus called her, "the only great spirit of our time."  She said:

In response to my latest memoir episode, butterflyxlife commented on, "how society concieves notions of 'what is best' such as breastfeeding or not," and mentioned that her grandmother had been advised to take up cigarettes to lose weight after the birth of a baby.   Lupa, erinelizabeth_thebeautiful, and soul_survivor also expressed some degree of incredulity or indignation over my having faced medical opposition to breastfeeding my first daughter.

This set me to thinking about when and how the fashion for bottle feeding developed.  I knew part of the story, and wanted to know more, so I did a web search.  I found The Baby Bottle Museum and a reference to the mysterious Celtic mummies found in China, which included a mummified baby who had been entombed about 3,000 years ago with a feeder made from a sheep's udder.  I would suppose that maternal mortality had necessitated the invention of artificial means of infant feeding long before then.

Birth defects such as cleft lip and cleft palate, which make it difficult or impossible for an infant to nurse normally, also require the use of artificial feeders.  What had been a necessity did not become a fashionable luxury, however, until Victorian times in England, a strait-laced and buttoned-up era when people preferred to pretend that such things as breasts and thighs did not exist.  One particular design, that was marketed under a number of patriotic and socially trendy names, came to be popularly called, "the killer," or "the murderer."

The bottles were designed with a integral
glass tube, and a stopper. Attached to the glass tube there was a length
of Indian rubber tubing, which ended with a bone mouth shield and a rubber
teat. This design of bottle was impossible to keep clean and even though
openly condemned by much of the medical profession of the time, continued
to sell well into the 1920's. Much of this popularity was attributed to
the fact that the baby could be left unattended to feed, even before the
baby was old enough to hold the bottle. (babybottle-museum.co.uk)

Ancient Greeks, about two and a half millennia ago, fed a mixture of wine and honey to babies, using spouted terracotta bottles with animal shapes. (babybottle-museum)  Milk replacements or "baby formula" apparently started in Switzerland with Henri Nestle in the 1860s.

The timing of the cultural craze for bottle feeding in the U.S. suggests to me that it blossomed during World War II, when many women took the civilian jobs formerly held by men who had gone to war.  To reassure working mothers and to recruit more of them to build tanks and airplanes, the government and the medical profession claimed that "scientific" baby formulas were as good as or better than breast milk.  Add to that the fact that public display of a bare breast was stigmatized, and even unlawful in some places, while bottle feeding could be done any time, any place, and it's easy to see why more and more women chose the artificial feeding.

I suppose it is also probable that medical doctors, who were predominantly male at that time, would believe that their inventions were an improvement upon Mother Nature.  Aren't such attitudes still hanging on in a number of other arenas, despite ample evidence to the contrary?  Whether it was universally believed or not, it was widely accepted and aggressively marketed.  It appears to me that doctors gained some prestige and ego gratification from that belief, and women gained the same sort of liberation they were gaining around that time due to "instant" mixes and processed foods, automatic washers, dishwashers, etc.  When told what you want to hear, it is easy to believe.

The same holds true for the false health claims made by the tobacco industry in the middle of the twentieth century.  It was easy to put that bullshit over on the public because we were idolizing fictional characters like Doctor Kildare (Richard Chamberlain in a too-tight white jacket displaying his muscles) and Ben Casey (hirsute Vince Edwards with his top two buttons always undone to show chest hair).  In commercials, handsome men with soothing voices, wearing similar white coats, told nicotine addicts just what they wanted to hear, and the addicts, having experienced the way cigarettes relieved their withdrawal symptoms, believed that they were beneficial.

I'm a renegade in my profession, for not telling people what they want to hear, and I'm less successful than many of my less truthful colleagues.  I declined to join a professional association after reading their code of "ethics" that forbade questioning or criticizing the work of other members.  It is much easier to sell a lie that reassures someone or validates his fantasies, than it is to give away an inconvenient truth.

 
We lived in that little house through the winter.   At Christmastime, the local newspaper offered free "Santa Claus photos."  Kids were invited during certain hours to come to the news office to sit for a photographer.  Parents were given one 8x10 portrait and encouraged to buy a package of other sizes to give to grandparents or mail to distant relatives.  All the kids' photos were published in a special holiday spread, with captions that included what they wanted Santa Claus to bring them, along with their parents' names and home address. 

My mother had clipped the picture from the paper.  She gave it to me the last time I saw her, when I went to Kansas for my reunion with Marie in 1979, along with a lot of old family photos and pictures from my childhood and from Marie's, and I scanned it.  The blemish on her cheek is on the photo, not on the baby.  She was flawless.

That publication was probably how the insurance salesman found us.  He called on us one evening after dinner.  We sat at the kitchen table, where he spread out a bunch of papers and talked about security, budgets, and estate planning.  Along with a handful of insurance brochures, he gave us a free budget book, about the size of the school workbooks I was accustomed to.  He left, disappointed, after he'd established that our budget wouldn't stretch to cover insurance premiums.

I remember sitting at the table later, laughing with Ford over some of the columns in that budget book, such as "vacation and travel," or "college fund."  He was earning $40.00 a week, before deductions.  Take home pay was a little over $30.  Each column in the budget book had a suggested percentage.  The only one where our real budget approximated the suggested percentage was, "housing."  It recommended 25%, and our rent was $35.00 a month.  My food budget ever since he'd gotten that job and we had enough money to budget for food, was $10 a week, somewhat less than the suggested percentage.

Beans, cornbread, pasta and potatoes were the staples of our diet even before we had the added expense of canned milk for the baby.  I bought a pound of cheap fatty ground beef each week, and divided it into fourths before freezing it.  A quarter pound of beef could make spaghetti sauce, gravy to serve over bread or potatoes, or meatloaf when stretched with oatmeal and boiled barley.  Once in a while, for a special treat, I'd broil a couple of patties to get some of the fat out, and serve them over a slab of cornbread, smothered in chili seasoned beans.

One evening, I had two hamburger patties in the broiler drawer under the gas oven, and Marie was in her seat on the kitchen table behind me as I started to pull open the broiler.  Ford was in another room.  Marie started to fuss, and I turned to quiet her.  When I looked back at the broiler, the drawer had slowly rolled all the way out, assisted by gravity and the slope of the floor.   I reached to catch the drawer, an instant too late.  It fell off its track, hit the floor and splashed hot grease onto the insides of both of my wrists and halfway up my forearms.  Blistered second degree burns made everything more difficult, from changing diapers and washing dishes to brushing my hair and hanging wash on the line.  I kept bumping or scraping the blisters, and they took a long time to heal.

Ford invited three of his old buddies over for a New Year's Eve party at the end of 1959.  The Fabulous Fifties were coming to an end, and the 'sixties hadn't gotten into their swing yet, but those times when the nines click over to zero are always something momentous.  Joe, one of the cutest guys in town, on whom I'd had a crush in school, and two other guys, came over and brought beer and wine.  I served popcorn and homemade cookies:  cheap refreshments.

None of the guys brought a date.  They sat around drinking, bullshitting, and playing records.  I spent a lot of the evening in the bedroom, soothing a fretful baby and getting her to sleep.  After she fell asleep, I drank a little wine and started bopping around by myself to the music.  Ford was always a reluctant dancer, and I have always been unable not to respond physically to rhythm.  Joe liked to dance, so we did some bopping together and got into some older dances, the Charleston and Swing.

Ford drank himself sick, staggered into the bathroom to puke, then collapsed across the bed.  The other two guys passed out on the couch.  Those three had been drinking while Joe and I were dancing, so although we were both drunk, they had gotten way ahead of us.  A record came to its end, and Joe flopped onto the straight dining room chair that was the room's only seating besides the old horsehair chesterfield.  I stood there a while, swaying on my feet as I caught my breath after a fast dance.  Joe asked me if we had any slow songs, and I put on my favorite album, Only the Lonely by Frank Sinatra.

He stood up and we danced through several of the songs.  Then he sat back down on the straight chair and pulled me onto his lap.  We talked quietly, and I cried and told him about how scared I was of Ford and why.  He held me and I cried on his shoulder.  I have always been a cheap drunk  One or two drinks is enough to get me impaired and nauseated, and I have never been a happy drunk.  Alcohol is a depressant, and I don't need any help to get depressed.

Sinatra was singing Where or When and Joe was kissing me, when Ford came storming out of the bedroom.  He yanked me off Joe's lap, shoved me out of the room, woke his other two buddies and threw everyone out, then came into the bedroom and beat me up.  Until then, there had been half a dozen or so incidents when he'd slap me or punch me once and then stop.  That was the first extensive beating.  I stifled my cries, terrified that if I woke Marie he would hurt her, too.

The next day, when Ford woke and found me on the couch, he expressed surprise at my injuries.  He didn't recall beating me up, but he did remember seeing Joe and me kissing.  He said if he'd beaten me up, I'd deserved it, and if that Joe ever came around again, he'd kill him.

Here I am, up in the middle of the night, and Doug has gone to bed before 9:30.  That's a complete reversal of our usual patterns.  He isn't a total night-owl, but he's up all night a lot more often than I am.  When we have work to do together, such as fixing the roof or going to the spring for water, sometimes it takes several days of trying to get our schedules to overlap so that both of us are up during daylight hours.

I think it might be a while before we get any more roof work done.  His glasses got broken today when Koji's head collided with them as Doug worked to disentangle his leash from some bushes.  The weld broke that had attached the little arch across his nose to one lens and nose piece.  We taped the frames back together, but they flex and flop around without that rigid bond.  Now they tend to slide down his nose, and it has messed up his depth perception.

The Lions Club might help us get him a new pair, but that's going to take paperwork and time.  The man I talked to wanted me to come by his house and pick up the forms, and seemed miffed when I asked if he would mail them to me.  He lives about seventy miles away, and like many other people he apparently doesn't think that's much of a trip.  For me, it is, especially just coming out of that virus or whatever it was.  For my car, with all that noise from the throw-out bearing, and the new noise from the power steering, it's more than I want to risk right now. 

Doug says he's willing to wait.   All my maternal instincts and parental anxieties have kicked in, and I feel like shit for not being able to zip right into the optometrist and buy him new glasses.  He earns more than just his room and board around here, but doesn't get much more than that.  The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend will be here next month, but if we have to wait that long to get his glasses it could snow before we get the roof fixed.  One alternative is for me to do the rooftop work and for him to provide ground support.

Such weighty thoughts and real-life puzzles to solve might account for my wakefulness, at least in part.  Another part is the page-turner I just finished reading.  It was Tripwire by Lee Child.  I kept forcing myself to put the book down, walk away, and do something else, just to make it last longer.  I hated to see it end, because now there are no more Jack Reacher novels for me to read until Mr. Child writes a new one.  I had read the latest one, Bad Luck and Trouble, as soon as it was published this spring, and Tripwire was the only remaining one of the series I hadn't read.  Now, I have read them all, and I want more.

I guess it is time to get back into the Jack Whyte book I started months ago and misplaced in the clutter, now that it has turned up again.  I know that, even though I am not sleepy, it is time to crawl into bed.  I'm tired, fatigued... if I get over there and read now, sleep will come eventually.  If I stay up, who knows what kind of messes I might make and what damage I can do?  Better to be immobile when I'm as impaired as I am right now.  G'nite.