Lead-in to this episode is HERE.

When Charley and I were evicted for growing (legal) marijuana in our rented duplex, we started looking for another place to live.  This was the height of the housing shortage brought on by the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction boom.  Charley was working on the pipeline, two weeks on, one week off, making great money driving a belly-dump truck, but at the time he was between paydays.  My job didn't pay as well, but we were having no problems getting by financially -- until we started looking for housing.

There was nothing to rent in our price range, not in Anchorage, Eagle River, Peters Creek/Chugiak (where we'd been living), nor in Wasilla or Palmer, even farther from Anchorage.  If a place went vacant, it was rented immediately.  People were living in their cars, and there was a tent city in a park on the edge of Anchorage.  I had once lived in an MGB.  I supposed, if I had to, I could live in our VW bug, but where would I put those two 3' x 4' mirrors?

As the clock was ticking on our eviction, we were willing to take whatever we could find.  Finally, we saw an ad for a trailer for sale, "$2,000 cash."  We'd be able to pay that when Charley got his next check, and we had enough money to put half down immediately.  We called Mr. and Mrs. Blackard, then went to their house for the key and directions to find the trailer.  It was on the Hillside of South Anchorage's Rabbit Creek area, on Golden View Drive, which even then was becoming an upscale neighborhood with gated communities in the works.

The little 8' x 35' sky blue and dirty white trailer wasn't upscale at all, and neither were its surroundings.  It was in the only trailer park on the Hillside, a small place with about ten or a dozen trailers, on a muddy terrace overlooking Cook Inlet, where Golden View crested a steep hill.  It was owned by the Roehls, a Russian Athabascan family who kept the place despite its being in an area not zoned for such things, by virtue of grandfather rights, its having been there before the zoning ordinance was passed.

The Blackards had told us the trailer they were selling was in space number 3.  We drove in one entrance, saw no numbers on any of the trailers, went back to the other entrance and cruised through the other side of the park, and saw the number "28" on one of the trailers.  We figured that for an anomaly.  There was an "office" sign on the big house there, so we knocked and told the kid who answered the door what we were looking for.  He gave a grin, stepped out the door and pointed to the little blue trailer next to Golden View Drive on the first driveway we'd cruised. 

Walking across the yard, he mentioned that some people who had been there previously had been using it as a dog house.  The door wasn't locked, so we didn't need that key.  We walked in to look it over and the kid came with us.  The first thing I noticed was the moldy canine smell.  It looked better than it smelled, paneled in warm pine.  There was concealed lighting in shallow boxes all around the front room, a Panel-Ray gas heater in that room.  Across the front, south-facing, wall was a window the full width of the trailer, and under it, a trough wide enough to hold a six-inch flower pot, long enough to hold lots of them. 

Farther back were a fridge and gas range in the kitchen, a perfect blank wall on which to hang one of my mirrors beside the bathroom door, and, along the east wall of the bedroom, the wall that faced the street, a gap where the wall and floor didn't meet.  The kid explained that some former tenants, "drank a lot, and he threw his wife up against the wall."

Okay, so it wasn't perfect.  It was a real fixer-upper, but it had one thing going for it that nothing else we'd seen had:  it was available.  Back at the Blackards' house, we stood on their porch and talked through the screen door, offering them our $1,000 down payment.  Mr. Blackard reminded us that the ad said, "$2,000 cash."  Charley explained that he was about to go back out on the pipeline for 2 weeks, but that I would be able to bring them the other thousand dollars before then.

Mr. and Mrs. B, looked at each other, and in the silence that hung over that dubious look, Charley made a smart move.  He asked if they were related to so-and-so Blackard.  I don't recall the name, and don't recall whether it was their son, their nephew, or what, but when Charley started to reminisce about things they'd done together as kids, the screen came open and we were invited inside.

Charley still had some of the Texas of his youth in his voice, and my accent was California to the max.  They'd tagged us as boomers, but when they realized that we (or at least one of us: I kept out of the conversation) was an Alaskan, they warmed to us at once.  That's a funny thing about Alaskans.  Except for the Natives, practically everyone is a newcomer, but they don't tend to like or trust newcomers. 

One winter up here isn't enough to cleanse someone of the pejorative name, cheechako.  If you can get through that first winter without fleeing southward, and stay willingly through another winter, you can begin to pass muster, providing you don't exhibit any grievous faults or egregious behavior -- and those things, of course, are all in the eye of the beholder.  Charley told the Blackards about the jeep trip up the Al-Can when he was ten, with his mom, step-father and 5-year-old brother, and about growing up on the homestead outside Wasilla, and we were IN.

Continued HERE.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you'd like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can't afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

I had a deeply, wildly, shamanic dream this morning just before waking.  I woke wondering about a detail:  there was something I was supposed to leave behind.  In the dream, I was unsure, and asked my shaman/guide just before I woke, just which of several things involved, I was supposed to leave behind.

I thought about it as I charged the coffeemaker and switched it on, and decided to ask an oracle.  I sat down here and picked up my most-used (recently) oracular device: a D6 -- six-sided die.  After several rolls, I knew that the oracle was toying with me.  The next roll confirmed that.

I reached out to the basket hanging at arm's length over my worktable here next to the desk, and picked up my rune bag... picked it up by the bottom.  The drawstring was loose, and a bunch of runes fell out.  I could tell by the sounds that some of the smooth rounded rectangular etched glass "stones" landed on soft surfaces, some on hard metal, some on resonant wood, and some slid and bounced several times.  One hit and landed on top of my foot.

That's the one I picked up first... set it on the mouse pad, read it -- very appropriate, for starters.  As I retrieved five more runes, eventually getting a flashlight to find the fifth one under a low shelf on the base of the desk, I lay them on the mouse pad.  They made a coherent but somewhat elusive, unfinished, reading.  Two of them even drew laughs, somewhat ruefully, from me.

With a feeling that I wasn't done with the search, I dumped the rest of the runes from the bag, and all of them fell face up except for one.  I turned it over:  blank -- another laugh.  I counted -- sure enough, I have 24 runes here; one is still missing.  It didn't fall into the basket; that's already been emptied and searched.  It could be in one of the baskets or trays of jewelry-making tools and parts on the table below that hanging basket.

It could also be on the floor, way back under the table, in which case I have to move a chair to look for it-- two chairs, really, because the chair under the table isn't going anywhere until I get this office chair out of the way first.  It could also have landed somewhere between the table top and floor, on one of the shelves of the bookcase, holding beads, crystals, findings, tags, labels, vitamins, pens, action figures and other talismans, between the end of the table and the window.

I have options.  I can drink some coffee and let the whole thing rest for a time while I wake up.  I can look at the runes I have and see which one is missing, or I can start moving furniture and crawling around under the table with my flashlight.  I'll give the whole matter some more thought. 

In Anchorage in 1975, I had been using marijuana for less than a decade - with about a 3-year hiatus in that decade for jail time, prison and homeless, largely smokeless, poverty.  Until Charley moved in with me, I didn't use it every day, even when I had it.  It was mostly for parties, for social occasions, for concerts, dances... not an everyday thing.  Living with Charley changed that pattern.  We smoked when we had smoke and did without when it was gone.

The two 40-Watt fluorescent tubes in my living room plant alcove barely supported photosynthesis for a baby avocado tree, a few other little green things either purchased in 2" pots or grown from fruit seeds, and half a dozen or so small marijuana plants grown in six-inch pots from seeds gleaned from Mexican dirt weed.  I didn't know much about horticulture, but was reading books, learning how to care for plants.

It was the time of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction boom.  Boomers had been coming to Alaska on the hope of finding high-paid jobs for several years before the actual construction started, making jobs and low-cost housing harder than ever to find.  Charley had the same talent I had for losing jobs or getting pissed off and quitting.  I had a decent, but low-paying, clerical job at Youth Employment Service when Charley's job at Replacement Glass came to an end.  Not finding other work right away, he decided to try for a pipeline job.

Before he had done his jail time, Charley had been a cabdriver and member of the Teamsters Union.  We scraped up enough money to get his Teamster's membership reinstated, and he started going to the union hall every day for job calls.  My basement apartment was dank, dim, and cramped with the two of us and, being furnished and downtown in the Anchorage bowl, the rent was relatively high.  We found a cheaper, unfurnished place, called a "duplex," actually just a house with a family living in an apartment in the basement, in suburban Peters Creek.

Our furniture was sketchy, at best.  My big 3' x 4' mirrors were hung, one in the front room and one in my bedroom.  I made a bed by piling up several layers of foam carpet padding we found in a dumpster.  There were some built-in shelves and drawers, and we supplemented them with crates and planks.  For living room furniture we bought a camp bed: nylon stretched over a tubular aluminum frame, and hung up the rattan swinging settee I'd had in the basement apt. (The child in the photo is Shanda, daughter of my best friend, Mardy.)

This is where Irwin Ravin comes in.  He was a lawyer, in partnership with Robert Wagstaff.  Both men were dope smokers and decided to challenge the constitutionality of the state's marijuana laws.  Alaska's constitution guarantees our right to privacy, and that was the grounds for their challenge.

The late Mr. Ravin, my hero and the hero of just about everybody I knew at the time, set himself up to be busted for pot possession.  He drove around with a baggie of weed in his pocket and a broken taillight on his car.  When he was stopped for the equipment violation, he refused to sign the citation, which got him taken to jail, searched, and busted for possession.

His partner, Bob Wagstaff, represented him, and they won!  Private possession then was technically legal in Alaska, and stoners were so giddy with the joy of it that there was an awful lot of public smoking going on.  I'll have more to say about that later, but for now I'm sticking to my chronology here.

Charley went to work driving a belly dump truck at Pump Station 8 on the pipeline.  We splurged on an 8-foot fluorescent fixture, and I potted my 5 wee plants up into 5-gallon buckets, the size of pot recommended in The Cultivator's Handbook of Marijuana (first edition) for growing potted pot.  I lined them up under the lights, in the part of the kitchen intended for a dining table, nurtured them, talked to them, trimmed them carefully and gave them praise and thanks for what they gave us.

Charley would fly out to the pump station for two weeks of work and come back for a week off.  I continued the commute across Anchorage from Peters Creek out east of town, to the YES office in Spenard in west Anchorage.  One sunny summer day when Charley had just gotten in from Pump 8, the landlord knocked at the door.  He'd been watching for us, and left his house headed for ours when he saw us drive past.

He gave us an eviction notice.  "Why?" we asked.  "You're growing mary-jew-wanna in here," he said.  "But it's LEGAL!" we protested.  He explained that our place shared a common ventilation system with the apartment downstairs and our neighbors down there were worried about the health of their children, breathing our smoke.

I looked at Charley, and saw him looking back at me.  I was no Irwin Ravin, willing to sacrifice my freedom for this principle.  I'd already done time in Oregon for simple possession of less than an ounce of Cannabis -- spent about seventeen months locked up, out of a 3-year sentence.  Charley was only recently out of jail on parole after serving six years of a ten-year sentence.  (Details of this are HERE, the same link as the "cabdriver" one above.)

We gave up without a fight, and with 30 days to vacate the premises, started looking for someplace to go.

CONTINUED HERE.

Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you'd like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can't afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.

For a few years, I was posting episodes of my memoirs here almost daily.  I started in the middle of my life, wrote about a decade-and-a-half's worth of it, up to 1975 in Anchorage, then focused on filling in my early years.  About three years ago, I drove my Golden Spike, linking the childhood and youth to the already written 'sixties and 'seventies, with an episode set in Tacoma, WA, 1961.

That stuff that happened fifty years ago turned out to be easier to remember and write about than things that happened more recently.  I got stuck, not only on memory but on the sensitivity of some of the material -- or, rather, the sensitivities of some of the people involved.

I couldn't figure out how to go on being as frank and honest about my life in that time as I had been about the previous part, without risking getting killed, or at least maimed, or maybe only despised and ostracized, for it.  I backed off, scared.

I can't change the three years of memoir writing time I lost that way, but I can face the fear, blow a big raspberry in its face, and get on with the job.

Stay tuned for further developments.  I'm back.

It is important to me to illustrate my memoirs with photos whenever such photos exist.  Many do exist for the period of time I'll be writing about next, but I have no scanner now, no way to get them onto these pages.  If you would be so kind as to contribute a little something to the purchase of a new scanner, please drop a little something in my old purple PayPal hat, below.

I have proven to myself, by a circuitous and deeply thoughtful process, what I already knew.

Last night, when I told a new online friend that I had been waiting for a pie to come out of the oven, he said that he is a cooking and baking fanatic.  There was a time, I realized, when that description would have fit me, but it no longer does.

I didn't really give it much thought at the time.  It was late in a long busy day, I was mentally tired and physically fatigued, and focused on that keyboard conversation.  This morning, it lurked in my mind, a puzzle to unravel:  Why do I no longer derive the joy I once did from my kitchen creativity?

The moment that I hit upon the phrase, "kitchen creativity," I realized that although I still like to cook and to eat my own cooking, there is just one aspect of cooking that still fully engages me and gives me great joy.  It's the improvisation, and the tinkering to perfect, then record and share, new recipes.  Last night's pie was a version of my apricot, pepita, oatmeal, quick and easy gluten-free pie, made with a different, not better, crust recipe, and too much oatmeal -- still tinkering... still having fun with it.  The fun, I realized, comes not from the process nor the product, but from the challenge. 

How long have I known that I thrive on challenge, that this is where my joy comes alive?  I don't think I'd reached that realization yet when I came to Alaska around the end of my twenties.  I already knew it by the time my youngest son was born, eight years later.  He turns 30 this summer, so it has been roughly close to half my life that I've known I live for challenge.  The knowledge has been a saving grace through three decades of parenting this challenged and challenging man, but in only one way is he still a challenge to me.

This leads me into the answer to the next questions I asked myself today:  Where now does my joy reside?  What's the big challenge currently engaging my consciousness?  As soon as asked, those questions were answered.  The task that puts the smile on my face each morning is nothing more than mere survival, to live another day.  The secondary one that draws me toward this machine is challenging indeed:  human relations.  Ironically, after spending most of my life becoming the hermit and learning how to survive in relative solitude, I'm facing the challenge of relating to other people. 

For this joy, I am grateful to those who developed the web and social networking sites, and to the flaky southern man who asked me to move in here on the grid and house-sit for him while he went south for the winter, more than a decade ago, and then never came back.  I certainly would not give up my life out here on the edge of the fringe of the back of beyond to undertake the challenge of people. 

May 1st is International Labour Day.

In Russia, it is Spring and Labor Day, a national holiday.  Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, each May Day troops would march and tanks would roll through Red Square in Moscow, as in this image from 1963:
 

This year, they are again holding rallies and celebrations, and in Russia most are peaceful.  However, May Day celebrations in Germany this year are more violent, as shown in this news photo from Hamburg today:
 

Some NeoPagans and less traditional Pagans celebrate Beltane today.  Even less traditonal ones, and/or those with conventional jobs, will celebrate over this coming weekend, while more traditional ones will wait until the Sun is at fifteen degrees Taurus, next week.

In England and the United States, non-Pagans used to celebrate this Pagan festival to a much greater extent than they do now.
 

In Hawaii, this is Lei Day.
 

In Alaska, we are still waiting for the official start of Breakup, the season that passes for Spring hereabouts.  The Nenana Ice Classic is an annual event in which people buy chances to predict when the ice will go out on the Tanana River at Nenana.  This year's jackpot is $303,895.  A tripod embedded in the ice is connected to an alarm that sounds when the tripod moves.  Last year's breakup on the Tanana was at 3:47 PM on April 27.  As of this morning:  "The Nenana River went out in the late afternoon of April 28, 2008. The Tanana River is still frozen from bank to bank with no open water showing. The Tripod is still standing firmly in place."  The confluence of the Nenana and Tanana rivers is shown below, in a photo from the Ice Classic website.
 

On Xanga, it's my sixth anniversary here.
 
(Originally posted May 1, 2008)
UPDATE:

/^That was then, three years ago.  This May Day blog has been going on since my First Xangaversary, when I posted a triumphant picture of the finish of that year's roof repairs, and shots from several of our water runs to the local spring, which my readers have seemed to find interesting bordering on bizarre, and we consider just part of the routine, like splitting firewood and fixing the roof.

In '07, I had included some of my mother's recollections of maypole dancing, and the usual report on the Nenana Ice Classic.  This year ('11), the jackpot for guessing the time that the ice goes out on the Tanana River at Nenana has reached a record high of $338,062.00, and breakup is running a bit late.  The tripod was still in place at last report.

Nine years on Xanga, and still here -- occasionally.
  

I heard on the radio that this afternoon after school is out, all over the country, kids will be toking up at 4:20 PM.  The reporter suggested that because of the unofficial holiday many young people who had never tried marijuana would be smoking for the first time. This thought scares a lot of people.  It doesn't exactly thrill me, but I can't honestly say that it worries me, either.

For one thing, I tend not to worry about things I can't control.  I can control my own behavior, however, and after over three decades of growing and smoking Cannabis, I quit almost eight years ago. That doesn't mean I've gone over to the hysterical anti-marijuana camp.  I don't think the fields should be poisoned with herbicides.  That's bad for the environment.  I don't think growers, dealers and/or users should be imprisoned.  The socioeconomic costs of this are unreasonable.  It should not be viewed as a criminal justice problem.  If it is a problem at all, it is a public health matter.

One of the persistent myths about Cannabis is that it is a gateway drug: that it leads to the use of stronger drugs.  All the extant research of which I'm aware indicates that most of those for whom marijuana became a step on the way to cocaine, heroin or some other hard drug, had used alcohol and/or nicotine first.  If Cannabis leads to the use of illicit drugs it is not because of any inherent quality in the herb, but because of its being illicit, bringing the user into contact with the illegal drug trade.

I'm not aware of any research that focused on whether refined sugar came before the booze and tobacco, but I'd bet the farm on it.  It is in the nature of the unbalanced brain chemistry of addiction that one drug leads to another.  With continued use, most drugs will eventually stop providing a euphoric high and will at best only relieve the pain of withdrawal.  That is when most users either go into toxic overindulgence or begin seeking something that can bring back that good old feeling.

The issue of whether weed is addictive is controversial.  Users disagree, as do those who have investigated the matter scientifically. My own experience and anecdotal research agrees with the opinion of orthomolecular medicine: the addictive character of Cannabis (as well as that of alcohol) depends on individual brain chemistry.

In 1935, when Alcoholics Anonymous was founded, they called the mysterious difference between the social drinker and the hopeless drunk the "X-factor".   Since then, researchers have identified some factors in brain chemistry such as prostaglandins and essential fatty acids, that account for the addiction, and orthomolecular medicine has found ways to treat the imbalances nutritionally.

Orthomolecular medicine acknowledges that Cannabis affects some people differently than others.  Some of us are stimulated by weed, while for others it acts as a relaxant or sedative.  I have known people who had once used pot for stimulation to help them get going in the morning or to facilitate their creativity as artists, writers or musicians, who later found that it was spacing them out or putting them to sleep and they could no longer work under its influence.  Most of them blamed the weed, saying that the new stuff was getting "sleepier."  I don't think so.

Weed has a stimulant effect on those whose neurotransmitter balance is relatively high in serotonin and low in catecholamines.  A high level of catecholamine and low level of serotonin makes pot act as a sedative, putting the user to sleep.  Anecdotal evidence and personal experience suggest that when a person experiences a change in the way the weed affects him, it usually goes from being stimulating to being relaxing, and not the other way round.

Anecdotal evidence and personal experience also suggest that those for whom the weed is stimulating do not tend to become addicted to it.  This group includes me.  I was always a morning smoker.  Most days, one doobie or a good bong hit would get me going and I wouldn't want any more until the mid-afternoon blood sugar slump.

During the decades that I used pot, there were three periods of about a year each when I abstained totally.  At no time did I experience physical withdrawal symptoms, no cravings for weed, no drive to smoke.  The only thing I missed was the companionable feeling of smoking with my friends. Each time I resumed smoking it was as part of the social bonding ritual, the pass - the - pipe - and - party togetherness thing.

My husband calls us the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of marijuana. I was always of the Gallagher school of dope-smokers.  The wild physical comic said, "Kids! Don't smoke dope... after you're already stoned."  For me, toking up in the evening was a waste of good weed.  After I got together with Greyfox, we wasted a lot of dope.  He was one for whom the herb was a sedative, and he did most of his smoking alone.  He always tried to get his important work done before he got loaded because after he toked up... forget it.

When he'd smoke with me in the mornings, it would wreck his whole day.  If I got down with him in the evening, it wrecked me totally.  I didn't like the feeling of getting too loaded.  The stuff stays in the body so long that I spent years uncomfortably stoned, spaced out, with raging munchies all the time, just because when he smoked, I smoked with him.

When Greyfox got clean, there was no question of my continuing to smoke dope or to grow it.  Quitting wasn't just easy.  It was a relief.  No munchies making it more difficult to adhere to my healthy diet and avoid food allergies, no more paranoia about the law, none of the itchy red rash on hands and arms from handling the resinous plants... and this leads into my theory about the addictive quality of Cannabis.

I have talked to a lot of dope smokers and former smokers.  The ones who consider it an addictive drug also say that, like Greyfox, for them it was a way to unwind and relax.  The ones like me, who used it to get going and enhance their imagination and creativity, don't consider it addictive.  If they quit, they had less difficulty quitting than did those for whom it was a relaxant or sedative.  Many of those who acknowledged having been addicted to it, recalled that in the early years of their use, it had at first been more stimulating and then had become "sleepy" for them.  This suggests to me that some part of the serotonin cycle is responsible for Cannabis addiction.

Up to about eight years ago, through thirty-some years of off and on use, Greyfox hadn't been able to stop using weed, tobacco, or alcohol without experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms and strong cravings.  All periods of abstinence had been followed by relapse and escalating addictive use.  When he quit all of them at once in 2003, there were no cravings, no desire to indulge.  The difference that time consisted of orthomolecular amino acid supplements to balance his brain chemistry. I had previously used similar supplements to kick my lifelong sugar addiction -- just a different mix of aminos -- mine supplemented catecholamine production and his supplemented serotonin, among other things.

Whether you're using weed or not, and if you are, whether it gets you going or mellows you out, whether it is a pleasant indulgence or a troublesome addiction, HAVE A HAPPY STONERS DAY EVERYONE, and let's LEGALIZE IT, quit making criminals of ordinary people who just happen to have chosen a drug that just happens, for no good reason, to be prohibited in this nation where drug use is the norm.  Its being illicit makes it more attractive to rebellious adolescents, too.  Over the past forty years, I have changed my opinions and my tune on a lot of things, but I am still saying now as I said four decades ago:  END MARIJUANA PROHIBITION!

My mother, Dorris, was born in northeastern Kansas one hundred years ago today.  Happy birthday wishes would not be in order: she survived only three quarters of that century.  Even during her life, birthdays were not happy events for her.  She didn't like growing older, and often cried on my birthdays because she hated to see me grow up.  Time, apparently, was never her friend.

This isn't a sentimental occasion for me.  Mama had enough sentimentality for both of us, and even if I wasn't generally unsentimental I don't think I'd get misty or maudlin over anything involving her.  The mere fact of my still being around to take notice of the hundredth anniversary of her birth is astounding.  Nobody, least of all my mother, expected me to live this long.

Jim, the young man beside her in the photo above, from 1926 or '27, was her first love.  As the story goes, my grandfather, "ran him off" because the two teens were, "getting too serious."  Was that a euphemism for sexual activity?  Who knows?.  Given the personalities involved and the tenor of the times, my mother might have had an illegitimate child and nobody ever would have told me.

They parted, and the Great Depression and Dustbowl era took Mama out of Kansas, to Pueblo, Colorado, where she met the "man of her dreams." She had,

dreamed of my father before they met, recognized his face the first time she saw him.  A fortune-teller had also foretold the circumstances of their meeting, seeing "plates with a big red 'M'", which turned out to be the "W" for Woolworth's, the lunch counter where my mother was working.  Daddy worked in a salvage yard, and lived there in a trailer he fabricated himself from old car bodies.  I recall his telling of having one fork and one spoon which he licked clean after each meal, and one plate, which he would wipe clean with bread and turn upside down over the "clean" fork and spoon, until the next meal.  He was working for a dollar a day, plus a commission on the parts he removed from junk cars for customers. (memoir segment, "Parents and Early Memories")

After he died, and particularly whenever she was comparing him to her then-current or recently former boyfriend or husband, she said she had been very happy with my father.  I recall seeing her in tears many times during those early years of my life.  I recall hearing her complain about a lot of things.  I remember sharing jokes and laughter with my father on various occasions, but my mother didn't joke around or laugh much.  After my father died,

my mother got an exciting phone call late one evening.  Jim Henry had been her first boyfriend when she was about sixteen.  My grandfather had run him off.  My great Uncle Walter, Mother's father's brother, and his wife Lilly had been traveling through Arkansas when they had a flat tire.  They ended up in a tire shop in Pine Bluff near Little Rock, where they saw a familiar face:  Jim Henry.  When he found out that his old time sweetheart was newly widowed, he got her number and called her. (memoir segment "San Jose, 1952")

Around that time, she sent him her copy of the photo of the two of them at the top of this entry, writing on the back of it, "How about this--ain't we a handsome couple?  I'll bet we were about the happiest couple in the country.  I know we were certainly in love.  Please don't let this get away.  It's the only one I have.  Maybe you have one.  This was taken about 1926 or 1927.  I was about 15 or 16."

She married Jim twice.  It's a long story.  This link also contains a lot of info about my relationship with her.  We had a complex relationship.  I depended on her for food and shelter.  She depended on me for emotional support, personal validation, menial services such as foot rubs and hair brushing, and mechanical or mathematical tasks that were outside her capability.  The most important things she gave me include some basic cooking skills and the motivation to perfect them.  Another revealing post about Mama and her relationship with me was done on the day before Mother's Day eight years ago, in response to readers' questions.  It is here.  It brought up more questions, which are answered here.  Eventually, after all that, I felt I needed to set the record straight,

I love my mama.  It isn't the respectful and/or dependent filial love of a daughter looking up to the superior maturity and wisdom of a parent.  My mama turned me into her caretaker when my father died.  Any remaining shreds of filial awe were dispelled when I was 25, homeless, just out of jail and soon to be on my way to prison, and she was 58 (my age when I wrote this) and confided in me about her man troubles and asked for my romantic advice.

My love is not a euphemism for guilt or obligation or gratitude.  I don't think I owe her a thing.  I consider our mutual karma balanced, null and void.  She wanted a baby, to fulfill her need to be a mother.  She stated that in so many words.  She tried before and bore another girl who lived a few hours.  I was her last chance at motherhood.  She could have adopted one or two of my cousins, but wasn't interested in that, neither before nor after I was born, though my cousin Buddy and I were closer than many brothers and sisters.  Buddy and I both wanted him to stay with us, but just as she did with a long succession of dogs, cats and various love objects of mine, Mama wouldn't have it.  It had to be her own baby, and only her own, and the baby was not allowed to have other love interests.

Mama and I didn't bond properly when I was a neonate.  Both of us had separate surgeons working on us as soon as the obstetrician got my foot pushed back up so my butt could come out, and I managed to back into this life.  I don't know how soon it happened, but Mama became the odd one out, unable to fit in the tight, companionable rapport between me and Daddy.  It didn't help that she lacked the native intelligence of his family.  She was a little bit slow.  We both thought, talked and ran rings around her, laughing at her the whole time.  I think that after he died she decided to make me pay for some of that.

My love for mama is composed of empathy and compassion.  I know how hard she suffered for her errors and I know intimately the cultural and family history that led her into error.  I love her as I love all the rest of the people I know intimately.  It's really just the same love I have for the entire Universe, only intensified by the intimate contact and knowledge.  The better I know someone, the better I love them.  And I know my mama very well.  I was her confidant, the one whose shoulder she cried on, whom she blamed when the latest man moved on, and who was sternly admonished when the next one started coming around that, "children are to be seen and not heard."

I have made my peace with mama, though she never made peace with me.  I was a gross disappointment to her 'til the day she died, though she always spoke of how proud she was of me.  As paradoxical as that sounds, she did have both pride and shame in me, simply because she tried to own me, control my life and live through me.  To the extent to which she got her way with me, she was proud.  I was smart and pretty, brave and capable.  To the extent that I did not conform to her ideal, she was ashamed.  I was independent, irreverent, headstrong, and promiscuous, as precocious at sex as at the intellectual stuff.  She was mortified.

It drove me nuts and drove me out of her reach.  I don't have to pretend that she was anything she wasn't in order to love her because I love her unconditionally.  She was just exactly the mother I needed.  She showed me the error of hypocrisy, dishonesty and denial, gave me something worthy of rebelling against and made me who I am today.  

A hundred years... is a long time.

  Literal translation: "Northeast region Pacific Ocean offshore earthquake"

In response to prompts from Featured Grownups, I am sharing my thoughts about the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  I have been given the following helpful questions to get me started:

The immediate effect on me when I heard the first news bulletin about it:  just the quake, a magnitude of 8-something that was later upgraded, and, "possible tsunami," was like hearing the other shoe drop.  I'd been waiting for it.  I woke that morning feeling that something big was going on somewhere, and turned on the radio to find out where and what.

My old friend and longtime client, Kozue, was near enough to feel it.  She contacted me the same day, on an entirely different matter, but I am thinking that she knew I would be wondering about her welfare and wrote to let me know that she was all right.  She said that her home was safe, but that the shaking had been, "horrible."  I have other old friends in Japan, about whom I wonder, but I have no way currently to contact them.  I am still working on that.

I live a relatively reclusive life here, with little direct experience of what's going on in my Alaskan Railbelt neighborhood or in either of the little towns that bracket (loosely -- I'm midway between two towns fifty miles apart) this sparse settlement.  I can only assume that my neighbors' reactions are similar to those I am seeing in my online community and hearing on public radio.

Many people are reveling in the drama and novelty.  Some of them and many others are having Chicken Little reactions, fearful verging on panic.  A large segment of the population is rallying to send aid and relief.  Some of them and many others are calling for decommissioning of nuclear reactors and an end to constructing new ones. 

Another segment of the population sees no personal significance for them in what occurs at such a distance, and won't have a reaction until the impact begins to reach them. 

The "larger global community" is, at bottom, a collection of individuals.  Those who respond to this crisis with love and hope will find spiritual growth through it.  Those who respond with fear and despair will not.

The world economy is already feeling the impact as Japan's buying power diminished and they began sucking in massive amounts of disaster assistance.  We are losing the ability to bounce back from such things as one disaster follows another.

The political situation hasn't shaken out yet (no pun intended), and the ones who will make the decisions that will determine how it shakes down (now I know I'm punning) have other things on their minds.  There's some Chicken Littling going on now in seats of power, too.

Geophysically, enough stress was relieved locally that they have little cause for concern over more than aftershocks, but after such a shock even a small shake can cause plenty of concern.  PTSD is a reality for residents of Nippon and many living in Pacific coastal areas where tsunamis washed ashore.

The plates are still moving.  If we are lucky, these events will halt the defunding of tsunami warning systems and prompt the establishment of more and better ones.  To whatever extent that awareness of risk will increase preparedness, we may be able to minimize losses from future events.

In a very real sense, that genie is out of the bottle.  Early on, I heard speculation that Fukushima Dai Ichi would end up encased in concrete as Chernobyl did.  What I have not heard is speculation about what a massive quake can do to a concrete box.

Radioactive materials used to be dispersed relatively harmlessly throughout the earth's crust.  Exceptions include places such as the three counties of Pennsylvania's Reading Prong, where radon gas seeps into basements and must be vented.

Mankind has sought out, mined, and concentrated the stuff into dangerous masses.  We are living with the consequences, as must our descendants.  We shall evolve to deal with it, or go extinct.

I chose to live in one of the most seismically active areas on the planet, because the population is sparse here and the air and water are relatively clean.  I bought property far from cities and coastlines, at an elevation over 300 feet above sea level.  If a tsunami is bigger than that, I'll just kiss my arse goodbye.

There are no gas or water pipes to burst and cause problems.  A quake in winter could turn our woodstove into a fire hazard, and we'd have to deal with that.  I'm accustomed to living rough, and I share my home with my son Doug, who has, ever since he was a small boy, shown a remarkable talent for quick thinking and crisis response.  We know the risks, and our resources.

Worst case scenario:  a quake levels our mobile home and opens up some of these faults we know are here because we can see their traces on the ground surface after small quakes.  If one or both of us is critically injured, that's a problem, but we've got adequate first aid supplies and skills to deal with minor injuries.

Not being able to get out to a public shelter is not a problem.  They'd be full of germs and bad vibes, and leaving home would leave our place and our stuff easy prey for looters.  If the trailer was uninhabitable, and the storage cabin still stood, we'd be able to shelter in there.  Otherwise, we'd rig tarps elsewhere on our land, probably in or by the woodpile -- right now, it's a cozy cave in there after a winter of mining firewood from it.

We always have firewood for heat.  I don't let the woodpile dwindle to nothing, and there are fallen trees all around to be cut up if needed.  Our emergency kits (plural, stashed in various places, "just in case") include waterproof matches, particle masks (dust, mold, volcanic ash), socks and gloves for both of us, and other useful items.  Food and water stockpiles are kept up routinely.

We'd cope... or not.  We'd have a better chance than most others I know.

In a new series, someone is showing me how easy it is to frame somebody for terrorist activity by framing me.

If I act one way, I implicate myself.  Inaction or the only second action option I can think of will implicate another innocent person.

So far, the only acceptable option I've come up with is to wake up.

I'm awake.

Sleep deprivation is an option of limited viability.  I wonder what I'll do next.