I am so sick of the sound of my own voice that I have a fantasy about becoming a character in one of my short stories. It is simple little story that begins like most life with some tragedy and ends with some redemption. If I were the actually character who walked away from her life and stopped speaking, stopped dressing, stopped interacted with other humans my story wouldn’t have to start with an act of aggression. I wouldn’t need to resort to a mutually beneficial suicide – I could walk out of my life and into hers. The mutually beneficial ending of course is not in my fantasy, it would be enough not to hurt anyone else. - Kim Stansfield


William Bradley Mason

I haven't said a word in nearly three years. I have not learned to sign. I have pointed for the things I need when as the last resort, I can't do for myself. I don't remember what my own voice sounds like. Sometimes I wonder if my inner voice, the voice that we all use to talk to ourselves, is what my spoken voice would sound like.

I haven't written or typed or communicated with anyone in three years. I have entered into this speechless place quite by my own hand. Until just this morning, I haven't wanted to tell anyone this story. I make pots for a living now. I mix my own clay and throw on a wheel, what would be dirt and make functional and sometimes-attractive pots. I glaze them and sell them through a local gallery. The gallery markets me as the Silent Artist of the Low Country. A public broadcast company came to do a story about me, but I sent them away. They interviewed my neighbors, and merchant's I shop with. I watched it and was even more convinced that I didn't have a single word to say to anyone.

The day I stopped talking should be a day I remember, but I just can't pin it down. I know that I stopped talking in late March and that for several months before that I had limited my conversations with everyone around me. Preparing everyone for my silence was never a consideration. I was not being thoughtful by pulling away slowly. It just happened. After the local community college produced a television show about me as the artist, I started getting cards and letters from
all over the country. Some of the people wanted to know what I stood for. Some people wanted to lecture me on how I was wasting the gift God gave me, speaking, and that I should be ashamed. Most of these I suspect came from the deaf or parents, spouses of the hearing impaired.

At first these letters humored me and I opened every one. Now I just put them into boxes, and put them into the attic. Maybe now that I am writing, I will start tomorrow and answer each one. It would probably take me three more years. Maybe I could just spread them and make a new handmade paper for the gallery. I am too tired to think about all that now. I am quite gifted at delayed thinking.

I understand from my fourth grade latch-key, prime time education that the great Maya Angelou stopped talking once, Oprah said it and that makes it true. She was assaulted. I stopped for an entirely different reason. I failed to speak on someone's behalf and a terrible thing happened. It was at once, the most crucial thing I have been witness to. A boy was standing in a park near my office. I saw him and thought aloud, “what an ugly child”. Bless his heart I thought. He had an upturned nose and red, red hair. He must have been wearing a pair of yellow overalls, but perhaps I only remember that detail from the news broadcasts that came later.

I was sunning and eating my orange and pretending to read a trade paper. I heard the boy scream and begin to cry. His father jerked him up by the arm and spanked him very hard. He was being scolded for wandering off. Several people looked at them and then looked away, but the boy looked at me, through the shock of tears and screamed louder and then he was being carried away. He never stopped looking at me and I couldn't look away. I was aggravated and happy not to be near many children.

Spoiled child, I thought. What a noise he made! His face was dirty. I thought that, if I had a child, my child would never be dirty at home for long, let alone dirty in public. I went back to my orange. Strange that I would remember exactly what I was eating the last time I saw that boy.

For a long time after the news that night, I was certain that I was the last person to see that boy alive. I was certain and certain that the only thing I was concerned with was a strand of pith in my teeth. I threw up just after the six o’clock broadcast and noticed exactly how the orange bits swirled away down the toilet. I haven't eaten anything orange, or orange flavored in three years. I may never.

His name was William Bradley Mason. But his family called him "Bo" for short. He had three older sisters and one younger brother. Bo was playing, wandered away from his family picnic for just a few moments and was abducted by the man pretending to be his angry father. His face was all over the news for the next several days. I went to police department that night and told them everything I could remember. Mr. Mason was at the station when I got there. He just looked at me in silence. His eyes betrayed the quiet way he stood there. He could have killed me and I could hardly blame him. I watched, with jaded irritation as a stranger jerked his boy up and walked off with him in broad daylight in the middle of the city.

I learned later that Bo Mason was a very gifted student, a loving brother, and according to everyone that knew him, "the quietest child anyone ever met". He was eight years old.

I stopped having anything important to say. I found my work as a broker, meaningless. Helping families' plan for their children's education and retirement just grated on my nerves. I wanted to tell them all to spend the money now. Spend it on something frivolous for your children. Buy a pony. I walked away from work one afternoon and went home to jerk the phone cord out of the wall. Letters came. They would have me back. The firm was concerned about my absence? Did I need some personal time? The police came to make sure that I had not been the victim of some gruesome or self-inflicted crime and then they left me alone. I called my only brother and told him that I was going to move. I never said where to or that I meant tomorrow. I sold my house and moved to the coast. I left no forwarding address. At first I just unpacked a few of my things. It seemed wrong to have any reminder of the comfortable person I was before. A few weeks passed before I threw it all away. Boxes and boxes lined the bright street. People were out on the curb, rummaging through my life and I could care less. I knew my money would run out eventually and the initial plan was to just stop buying food and paying the bills and just wither up and die.

As it turns out, I had more money than I thought. After all, my budget before accommodated normal expenses like six dollar latte’s, weekly entertainment, dry cleaning and dinner's out. My new, more Spartan schedule would allow me much more time. I healed into a hard scab. Tender to the salt water, but not to the air. I bought a potter's wheel and taught myself to throw. I realized after some time that I had stopped talking. Even to clerks in the store. When I realized that wordy exchanges weren’t necessary, a calm came over me.

I piled my back porch up with green pots, until I realized that I should fire them. I bought a kiln and at first a few commercial glazes. Then I learned to mix my own glazes. My only pleasure during this time was going to library to research glaze compositions. I would go late, late at night, least I get a glimpse of some young boy reading with his mother. Walking home, I would often see him as I do even now, just as if we were back in the park that day, his eyes looking toward me.

I came to a junction in my life that would bring me to realize that I couldn't just refuse to eat. The fully stocked fridge and garage freezer didn’t keep me from the store isles as long as I wanted. I ran out of food and I went for a day without any. I thought this hunger feels good in my stomach. Was Bo hungry during the last part of his life? I thought about it all the day and all the next and then it occurred to me, that if I starved to death, I would die. The thought of dying did not frighten me; so much as it made me feel guilty. I had turned my back on the notion that God cared what people did, and so I saw death as the flick of the switch that would put my lights permanently out. I could not flip the switch because then I wouldn't feel this hunger that was my penance for letting Bo slip away. I could not bring myself to put an end to his vigil.

I bought more food. I went shopping for clothes. To focus my energy on my pottery, I bought ten pairs of sweet pants and ten matching tee shirts and sweet shirts in a creamy buff color that suited my newly sallow complexion. I threw everything else away. In my self appointed work uniform I began to fire my pots on the back porch. Periodically I would see my neighbors. They didn't make too much fuss about me and my odd hours or behavior, so for me, they were perfect. From watching their comings and goings I gathered that the family on the left was a blended family with about six children on any given weekend and usually between two and four during the week. They seemed to be a normal, happy bunch of kids and they grilled out back and did the normal things that families do, bring in the groceries, argue about who was washing the minivan and who would clean out which part of the garage that faced my yard. My house never got more than a sideways glance, so I suspected that they were good mannered children with caring parents. To the right of my house was a bungalow that had impeccably neat gardens outback. The owner was a young professional man who was single and as I gathered at first from the frequency of his guests, very popular with the opposite sex. Later I learned that he was in fact an aspiring artist, who had beautiful women in and out of his house at all hours because he was a lawyer and could afford to pay college students to pose for his portraits. His name was Mark. I found this out when a stranger walked up onto my porch late in the day on a Saturday. He looked at me and said, "My friend Mark, tells me that you have pottery stacked up back here and that you just make it and make it and never do anything with it. He also tells me that you hear, but you don't speak and that I am a fool for coming by, but that pottery is very beautiful and could be just the thing for my next show." He talked slowly at first, and then when he realized, that I was listening and understanding everything he said, he sped up, probably to get everything he wanted to say out, before I pointed to gate. I listened to him and gestured that he could examine the pots if he liked. He commented on the pottery and I started to feel a bubble of pride, until I saw that he was turning the big bowl over to check the signature. He said, "Good, they're signed. Good girl." Though calling me a "girl" at my age was neither flattery nor mistake. He asked if Willie was short for Wilhelmina. I pointed to the gate, having as much of this as I could stand. He wanted to know if he could take some pots. I nodded and he grabbed the first ten that he could hold.

He came back the following weekend with an envelope full of cash and a flyer that advertised among other things famous low country pottery by Willie Mason. He smiled when he knew that I had gotten through the first part of the flyer to read the bio of Willie Mason. Willie Mason, according to this flyer was an ill educated black man, raised in the gulla country of South Carolina who learned to make pottery in the basement of the First Baptist church. I couldn't help but smile and then Scotty said, "I knew that as shy as seem you wouldn't want to be famous and I will market Willie Mason to death."
Then I didn't know that his name was Scotty or that he was a marketing genius. He came and went with more pottery three times before he actually told me his name and the terms of our agreement. I didn't care much about the money, but I began to expect his visits, which were never announced, since I had no telephone. He was at my house for little more than a few minutes, just long enough to give me the envelope and load a box of pottery in his car. He would tell me what pieces were selling well and which glazes were most popular and he always brought me any printed material about Willie Mason pottery. I was developing quite a following.

Gulla people in South Carolina will not let you photograph them; saying that they believe the photo takes part of their soul away. I am not sure if they fear losing their soul or their shirts to the tax man. Gulla women weave the famous low country grass baskets and I am sure that they don't pay taxes on all of their wares. Either way, it proved a simple solution to not providing a photo in the biography of the newly famous Mr. Mason. And so the months came and went.

I enjoyed the labor of mixing the clay. It felt good to work my body hard in the outdoors. Before I left the firm in the city, I had several assistants and barely took the stairs when the elevators were crowded. I had lunch delivered almost every day. The only reason I was outside the day that Bo Mason was kidnapped, was that my newer, bigger office was being fitted with my name on the glass door. The etching compound was making me nauseous. It was warm that day and my assistant handed me her orange, saying that I should sit outside for a bit and enjoy the weather. When I went back in that afternoon, she asked if I enjoyed myself and I must have commented that children behaved badly these days. Later she would come to me and apologize, as if her sending me outside somehow made things happen the way they did.

In late December a private investigator came to the door early in the morning on a Monday. He knocked incessantly until I opened the door, determined I was sure, to not go away, since he could see that I was home. He held up a picture of me that barely looked like the woman I had become. I had lost nearly fifty pounds and the color had grown off my hair. I no longer wore the short and stylish "power cut", but usually pulled my graying hair back into a ponytail. I had only cut it once since I moved and that was when I fell asleep in the chair with some gum in my mouth. I didn't have the patience to rub it out with peanut butter or mayonnaise, so I just cut it straight across. For a moment, I considered speaking. I considered telling him that I hadn't seen her. My delay betrayed me, He knew that I was scrambling inside to think of something. "Your brother will be pleased to know that you are alive, but I am afraid he will be disappointed that you have been able to call this entire time and haven't. He has been understandably worried about you." The man was tired. He was probably tired of chasing some man's crazy sister and disappointed that he didn't find me living with some cult somewhere. I missed my brother, but couldn't say why. Before I left the city, I had only spent a weekend with my brother and his new wife, once in nearly five years. Did he feel morally obligated to find me? Did he burn with curiosity about my life? Our parents have been dead for years and we have no extended family to speak of. Did he long for a relative that I could never be? I shut the door in the man's face. I took a hot shower and realized that this was all going to be spoiled soon. My brother would write here, then he would come here and I would leave. He was so predictable that I knew he would send a telegram before dark. I would enjoy one more scalding hot shower before I had to go back to being me or before I decided to go be someone else. What was the point of my isolated exile? Did it do one thing to bring Bo Mason back to life? Did it make his parents feel better that I have been here, alone for all this time. No. I didn't even feel an ounce of absolution. That had never been my goal in the first place. I ate, I slept, I worked in solitude, asking myself the same questions for all this time and I was no closer to an answer than the day I moved into this house. So when the knock came and I jerked the door open to accept my telegram, I was shocked to see my brother and the private detective. My brother was angry. I could see it in his face. I never expected anger, so I was immediately on the defensive, why would he be angry? What harm had I caused him? Was he nostalgic for our childhood? Did he remember the same things I did? Did he know that I didn't even like him much back then? “How dare you do this to me! How dare you walk away from me, from your life! What were you thinking? Do you work now? Do you have a new family? Do you remember me?" The private eye suddenly looked embarrassed and I realized that my brother was shaking, he obviously didn't mean to come here and rant and rave this way. "You need to pack a bag, we are going home. Don't look at me that way this isn't about you. God damnnit, Belinda, there is a trial. Don't you watch the fucking news?" The man that molested that Mason boy is on trial, but he might get off because the prosecution has failed to provide an eye witness to identify him." The world suddenly spun faster, just under my feet. I came around with my brother's face so close to mine that I could smell his after-shave. I would have known it was him, even if I were blind. I stood up, ran up the stairs and threw several sweet suits in a brown paper bag. I ran out back to check the kiln. It was in the final process of a fire and I just unplugged it. If the pots were ruined, no loss, but I didn't want the house to burn down. I just may need a place to live after all. I tapped a note to the floor of the porch for Scotty to keep up as usual, but keep the money until I come back. I didn't say when that would be. Scotty was smart enough to check the kiln, if the stock at the gallery ran too low. How long would I be? I was vaguely excited.

My mind was reeling. The first thing to hit me was the word “molested”. I winced at the thought of it, and then I was aware that my brother had not used the word "murdered". Bo Mason might be alive. I couldn't bring myself to hope, and would not ask. The disappointment, were I wrong, would be too much. I sat in back seat of huge rented car and watched my neighborhood disappear in a blur. Soon we were turning into a small airfield. When we were children, my brother Kevin and I used to play near the hanger of a crop duster that lived up the road. Every once in a while we would muster up the courage to sneak in and sit in one of the planes. The smell of fuel and dust mixed with summertime was at once in the car, as if I could call the past to me in an instant. Kevin must have taken lessons and purchased a plane after I left. Good for him. He always wanted to do that. Climbing aboard was very much like it was when I was a child, awkward and exciting. I half expected someone to shout for us to get down out of the plane, but no shouts came. Kevin and the detective were as quiet as I had been. I wanted to ask questions, but couldn't imagine how to begin. It didn't take long to get going. The ground below was quilt of haphazard stitchery, flowing this way and that. I noticed as we began to land that my bladder was uncomfortably full, I wondered if the men would need to stop by the restroom as we walked through the lobby. I touched Kevin's arm and stepped toward the restroom. The detective blocked my path, and I realized, they both thought I might flee. I pointed to the restroom door and stepped around the man. Oddly, I didn't think of running away until it occurred to me that they expected me too. I would never give up the opportunity to redeem at least part of my soul. Whatever fate had befallen Bo Mason was surely terrible, but if he was alive, he had a life to salvage, and I would try to help him any way that I could. As I approached my brother, he turned his back to me and finished his phone call. He hung the phone up and spun around, "well we are not too late. The district attorney expects to meet with you in an hour. You will have to talk to him and probably a shrink. They will need for you to identify Roger Nelson and you will have to be a credible witness. Bo hasn't been able to go near the courtroom or police station. He is very fragile and his doctor will not allow him to testify. Mr. and Mrs. Mason have been relying on the testimony of another victim, but that boy hung himself with belt six days ago."

I was stunned. There had been others. This man had done something so terrible that a child took his own life. The anger in Kevin's cheeks was red and spreading. His forehead was creased and white. He grabbed both of my arms and shook me for a moment, he pushed me away and I nearly fell. The detective moved to steady me just as I felt the white-hot sting of Kevin's hand on the right side of my face. He was actually furious enough to strike me. All the rage and injustice I had passively submitted too in the last three years erupted into my throat. I wanted to cry. The anger in me, kept the tears in their place and I steadied myself. The idea that he thought I wouldn't cooperate was an insight to the opinion he had of me. He did not miss me. He did not love me. He was here only for the boy and my leaving had been the right thing to do in the first place. I took a deep breath in, held it for just a moment and answered his anger, with that of my own. "Raising your hand to me again, will be the last effort you ever make. I will help. I see now that it is the only business I have here. Go back to your life." I walked quickly through the door and raised my hand for a cab. Sliding into the cab, I shut the door on my brother's approach and motioned for the driver to go. I had spoken to him. He heard me. I heard myself, and though it sounded like a recording, it was my voice. It wasn't my old voice, but it was my voice and I had spoken when I needed to. I wanted to yell to the world, but thought then that in my haste I had no idea where I was going. I would try it again, right now, "district attorney's office please." The steps were shiny and new. I entered the building on the heels of my brother, undetected. I would follow him to the office and wait. The other man was gone. I must have looked out of place in the hallway. I was in sweat pants, carrying a brown paper bag. Maybe these people would think I was making a take out delivery for some office that was working late. I hoped so. I hoped they didn't think I had a bomb. This was the first time I had thought about other people's opinions in so long, that I felt embarrassed. I hoped at once, that my face wasn't red.

I realized that I was self-conscious because I would see these unknown people minutes after Kevin would tell them that I wasn't stable enough to be any use. He would tell them that I could blow their case. He was probably doing the right thing, but the fire from before was being tendered by these thoughts. As it turns out, he didn't think I would be coming and he told them that I had been through a taxing ordeal myself. He didn't think I could hold up on the stand. These were the things he whispered to the receptionist. A buzz let the attorney's know that Kevin was in the office and when the door opened the attorney addressed my brother by his first name. He must have been in constant contact with this office, during his search for me. I wondered at once, if they were paying him to help find me. I was again furious.

I stepped up to the receptionist just as Kevin was leaving. He looked at me just long enough to confirm my suspicions. The surprised way he glanced back at the door, made me keenly aware of how incompetent he thought I was, yet he would not stay to see if I needed a hotel or a ticket back to my home. He would offer me no supper, no apology. Just as well, that I wouldn't have to refuse.

A short man in his fifties came out, extended his hand and very kindly said, “You must be Belinda, right this way please". He was kind enough without being condescending and seemed to be judging me on his own, he seemed to be quietly evaluating whatever Kevin had told him as Kevin's opinion. I liked him at once. He explained the details of the kidnapping and case at length and I was content to listen. He paused often for questions, but I had none. He placed ten glossy photographs on the desk and I pointed to the man from the park without hesitation. He said, "Belinda, that isn't the man on trial." I stood up, turned around and walked to the window. Not sure what to do, I said, "Then the wrong man is on trial, because this is the man that took Bo Mason on December 28th at 2:15 in the afternoon, from Bradbury Park, just near the fountain on Forte street. This is the man."

Fierce words spun in my head. I wanted to scream. "Of course this is the man, his name is Roger Nelson, Belinda, I just had to be sure that you were certain. Can you tell a jury what you saw that day?"

I would I said. I was tired and needed a place to rest. A reservation had already been arranged, including two under cover cops to guard my hotel room. It seemed that the most powerful mob boss in the city had a pedophile for a stepson and several of the people that were going to testify, couldn’t or wouldn't come forward. Bo Mason was found nearly dead in a warehouse, during a drug raid. He had been abused for nearly four months and had been drugged so that when he was recovered he was suffering the ill effects of LSD. It took four months of intensive therapy for him to even visit with his family and another month before he could actually return to
his home.

At the hotel I took the hottest shower a person could take and ordered room service. Chewing the soft bread was all the work I could do right now. My head was full of images that had not been there for so long. I thought about my apartment here and my job. I remembered that there were places that I liked to go, restaurants that saved good tables for my clients and me. There was a grocer that always gave me a hard time about not buying healthy food. My co-workers tried to be so kind to me as I fell apart. My boss had offered a long leave of absence. Does three years exceed the definition of long? I could come back. I hadn't considered it until now. I wouldn't be a partner. I wouldn't even be a member of the junior staff. I would have to start again at entry-level. Throwing my Rolodex into the dumpster the day I left meant, I had no contacts, no means to begin again from anywhere past the starting point. Then I thought about my little house. How it felt to have clay run smoothly past my hands forming bowls and pots. I thought about mixing glaze and how it felt good when a new formula did something unexpected or different. My house had hard wood floors that I kept polished. My walls were all the color of white butter and though free from any borders or prints or painting, had a rough texture that could be imagined into monochrome pictures if the shadow were just right. My bed was a mattress and box spring that was directly on the floor. My bedding was white, but I afforded myself the one comfort of pure pima cotton in 600-thread count. I had two lamps, one in the bedroom and one in the living room next to my chair. My chair was actually a wooden glider rocker that was slip covered in plain canvas. It was spare. Some people might even say that my house could be described as stark, but I found a quiet calm in the white, that did not require thought or attention. I didn't have furniture to dust or carpets to clean. My kitchen was a simple, but thoroughly equipped room with the same walls and a heavy whitewashed table and bench.

Could I walk away from that house? Did I want to? Probably not at all, but certainly not now. I noticed then that there was a television in my room. I would catch up with the madness of this world before I left again to my own. The leading story was about a tanker fire on one of the commercial piers. Fireboats and trucks littered the harbor. It had just been upgraded to a four alarm fire. Several dockworkers were killed in the initial blast and the impending danger stemmed from the close proximity to a fully loaded oiler. The oiler was being pulled to safety out into the harbor by several tugs. The cause could not be determined at this time, but unofficial sources close to the port authority are leaning toward arson at this point. Blah Blah Blah.

Sleeping seemed an impossible option. Opening the door connecting to the suite I shared with the police officers startled them more than it should have. Something was up but neither man would say. I asked if they could drive me by the Mason home so that I could get a glimpse of Bo. The answer was an immediate and stern, "No". Apparently, the men didn't even know where the Mason family had been relocated. They were members of the witness protection program. Ties to the mob made this a particularly sensitive case. The city was nervous under the drum of motion that continually beats day in and day out.

I would not see his face. I would not wipe clean the image of his screaming in the park that day. Perhaps when this is over, I will be able to at least see a picture of him, something to help erase or at least blur the image I have of him. Sleep would not come. The trial was set for nine days away. I would go crazy in this place. Could I go home and return for trial? No. It wasn't safe.

Only I did get to go home the next day. The kind short attorney came in and gave me the news. Roger Nelson had been executed in the early hours of the morning. There was a single gunshot to back of his head. He was sleeping. The police do not have anyone in custody but suspect that his own family may have arranged to avoid the possibility that Roger would turn states evidence in return for a plea bargain. There would be no trial. The Mason family was safe and would not be bothered, I could return to my home and no one would know I had even entered the city. The state of New York would fly me home.

Feeling the cancellation of the trial was a blessing would have been the easier thing to do, but I couldn't help but feel as if I had been robbed of the opportunity to help Bo Mason, even if it were more about me than him. I wanted to avenge a part of my life that had been taken from me. Over several days, I lie in the bed and watched the shadows move over the butter colored walls, mulling it over.

Scotty came and went as usual and I bought a radio. Somehow word about the silent potter got out and people started coming by. They would just open the gate and walk into my back yard. I never spoke to them. Scotty drafted a brilliant story to cover my use of the ghost bio for Willie Mason and the world loves a lie, a story, a secret, so the letters come and come. I still read them, I don't have a television yet. Maybe I will buy one. Probably I wont. I put a lock on the gate. I do talk to Scotty sometimes. We sit on the steps on my porch and drink iced tea. Mostly I have learned to listen.

I do have one special letter that I read almost every day. It came about a month ago. It read:

"I have been thinking of you. I have wondered how what happened affected you. I saw the show about you on cable and I wanted to let you know that I haven't ever blamed you. I will get my driver's license one day and I may try to come see you, if you wouldn't mind. My parents are fine. I will be in the eighth grade next year and I am enrolled in a ceramics class. I wish only the best for you and hope you find the peace you deserve."

William Bradley Mason


I put a bell on the gate that afternoon. I will answer it every time it rings until the day I meet you, Bo Mason. That one letter has changed my life again. For the first time in so long, I have hope that I will re-enter the world. I bought fudge ice cream. It is a small place to start, but I
used to love fudge ice-cream. Writing this down has helped. If you are ever in the area, please drop by. I would love to talk to you.

Belinda

Our civilization will reach a point in the future when we expect technology to work, but we don’t keep up with learning of how or why. Information will climax with critical mass. Will society break back down into master/worker? Would a large-scale pandemic save us from over-population, wanton consumerism and general debauchery? The biblical Sodom and Gomorra did have at their disposal every depravity known and unknown in their homes, one mouse click away. The nightly news spews fear and gore and we are so desensitized that we barely notice the gross. We talk about atrocities with the same cavalier attitude that we discuss a car accident or a celebrity death. It is so easy to stir the masses and sway the opinion of many with the drumbeat of one. I don’t know where we are headed or what the future holds, if we are even entitled a future. There are commissions on light pollution, noise pollution and ordinances to regulate dog ownership and the height of the grass in your yard but we are so divided by all these special projects that we have lost some common sense. Yes it is great to fund and maintain animal shelters but until there are not any hungry children in homeless shelters, the dogs can starve or be put to death. Recycle, absolutely but how about having felons be responsible for trash and recycling in lieu of going to jail. Decriminalize hemp and improve the economy. That we live in a nation that has made prisons a profitable industry and that prison towns rely on a constant influx of inmates is wrong. The healthcare and pharmaceutical machine make a living on the sick, dead and dying. It is economically irresponsible to cure heart disease, cancer and obesity because without them, healthcare would fail to make money. The single largest employer in Greenville County is Greenville Hospital University Medical Center. Hospitals should be free, medicine should be free and until we have seriously regulated medicine the big three will not be cured. All these foundations, all these marches, all these ribbons and tee-shirts and what real progress has been made?

I propose that the shear amount of information in this world is increasing at the rate that we will reach a point sometime in the future. When this happens I would like to subscribe to the hope that we will have an evolutionary leap and the community memory and recall will be part of a nurtured collective knowledge. We will see knowledge that will be both ancient and brand new. I imagine the placental automatic transfer for all knowledge to all babies, like the knowledge to breathe or the knowledge to beat one’s heart. I fear that if this evolutionary hiccup happens that there may be a segment of the population that doesn’t get it. Doesn't just "know" the things everyone else knows. The enlightened population will become a ruler class enjoying the knowledge, the power and the fruits of the labor of those not evolved. Could we experience a world with the normal and the enlightened, just as some suspect the Neanderthals shared the countryside with the newer, improved homo-sapiens? If the lesser of the two populations took advantage and behaved as dominant cultures generally behaved, it would not be outrageous to think that there would be an uprising and the potential for loss of knowledge. Great civilizations have come and gone before us, failed without our understanding completely how they slipped away. Children of 2009 know more by the time they are twelve, their brains crammed full of ideas, computer prowess and political and religious knowledge. More I think that twenty year olds from decades ago. Is the information age, the dawn of the last age? Will something like a pandemic or evolutionary leap make it possible to continue at this pace? If an uprising caused the manufacturing to cease, how would American households cope without paper-products, prepared food? I am excited to see where and how far America goes but I am not at all under the delusion that our lives are guaranteed or that comfort and happiness are rights we are entitled to.

Pink and Green Hippo On a short bridge to nowhere

Friends are only friends so long as you know them. There is an awkward gap between when you knew everything about someone and not knowing very much at all. Not knowing their schedule, their new habits, their new ambitions, their troubles, their interests. Since when did Evans become the most decorated underwater basket weaver in Vegas? The gap between knowing someone and not knowing is a tricky thing. It starts slowly, like ivy over a bridge. You barely notice the ivy and then it has covered the bridge and your yard and is coming up the porch steps. Days turn into weeks into months or seconds into hours into days. Your connection is changed and by the nature of the change is difficult to fully appreciate. An everyday update is weekly check-in and suddenly a year or two has past. What do you say? Say I forgot you. Say we forgot each other. I am changed and you are changed. Say hello. Say I have missed you. The longer you or I wait the faster the ivy grows. Soon we will not even remember to look. I love my friends, I miss them and I mean it. The tragedy, humor and stupidity of my condition is that some days I see perfectly and clearly the solutions to troubles like these and it is 5:00am in the morning and John is scowling at me for staying up and my friends are all asleep. My own brother wanted to know why I never called him. It was in part because when I thought to call he wouldn’t appreciate being woken up with my intentions or ideas. My best ideas and intentions come when I am least prepared to follow through in any tangible way. I say I will call and I don’t. I forget and get embarrassed. It is difficult to explain to the one person who knows me best and most. If he doesn’t get me then the people that do or did or will are rare indeed. I write, but not as much as I should to hone any craft. I am prolific if nothing else. I try to imagine what would be appropriate or usefull to anyone. I try to imagine how or why a blog would be anything other than an archive. It will be an electronic conjoin of the binders and binders full of stuff here, going unread and unfinished. I wonder if I am ever going to be brave enough to be useful to anyone else. I am very good at trying. I am very good at noticing opportunities to make change. Sometimes I am very good at knowing what to say. I am very good at connecting to a disproportionately diverse number of people. I fit it. I find an in. I find a way when I am cornered with real people in public in unavoidable situations. I make friends easily and lose them often. I am diametrically both shy and outgoing. I talk louder when I am nervous and have never managed to back down from a confrontation that required bravado or potential bleeding. I am not afraid to die but terribly afraid of failing to live. When it comes to being behaved I can offer that I am always behaved. Sometimes badly behaved, but what is it the HAVE in behavior? Can I have all of me? Every part, even the terrible bits and the grisly parts? Is it possible to roast the whole beast and enjoy every bit? Can I let you see me, hear me and expect that you will be anything but disgusted? I have intimate conversations with people that I know are just listening to me go. I understand that I am often much more invested in my idea of a relationship than the other party. It used to torture me. With some help I have learned to accept what happens. I have also learned to enjoy every bit of happiness I get from people. Though I am married and happier than ever with my husband, I have had the distinct honor of being in love over and over. I find myself drawn to people as powerfully as I am disgusted by them. Stupidity, cruelty, waste, excess, sloth, abuse, racism, sexism all the isms – those are the things that make me angry. Those occasions when I see my worst in others I am openly disgusted, with them and myself. How will I ever dim down my eyes and live in the shade? I don’t crave the white lights of hyper reality and beauty and bliss and I certainly don’t want to live in the dreary, dreamy, dark without hope. How can I hate people and have so much optimism about their possibilities? I dream of indifference. I would love to not notice. It would be nice to be an emotional amputee. I would love to not see jowls and feel hatred. I would love to hear the voice of man and not be moved by his words, or timber, or cadence. I would love to smell smells and just notice, not smelling something and being slingshotted into the past into a past place or hurled forward into the oblivion of possibility. What life is this that I live in the never still between? I take a moment to feel sorry for myself and then the opposite comes as certainly as a coin has three sides. Tales negative, heads positive and the narrow rim of the coin is neutral. I wait for my coin to land on the edge. I type and get excited by a new descriptive way to say the same ideas. I repeat myself in frustration, with fear that I will not be heard or accepted. I feel sorry for myself just long enough to make another way to describe what is happening. Then I realized of course that I am truly more blessed than any one single woman I have ever or will probably ever meet. Healthy, pretty children who are quick-witted and not retarded. My husband gets angry, gets scared, gets disappointed, gets sad for me but then he does the one thing I can’t imagine anyone else doing – he gets over it and we keep going. He sees me and hears the things I say when I am really mad. Angry mad and mad mad. The mad mad can be terrifying and exciting. If you jumped out of plane most everyone would be terrified, unless you could slow your life way down and notice that you are falling out of the sky. You might be able to respect and appreciate your position in the world. You might be able to appreciate your ability not to freak completely out. My life is not like jumping out of plane or like a box of chocolates. I am still finding new ways to describe my life. Why would I try? Because I want to hear from someone else that they feel like me or hear like me or smell like me. Perhaps there is another person who can describe a thing without using three dissimilar adjectives and two ors.
My hippos are pink and green. On the Omara Reserve in Kenya the animal that is more feared than any other is the hippo. Yet the hippo is often displayed in our culture in a cute, endearing manner. Hippos are nocturnal creatures that seem in many ways to be polar their environments and polar to their expected image. Hippos spend all day in the river resting while other animals are out and about. Hippos spend most of their lives in rivers up to their ears and eyes but do not have the ability to swim even if their lives depend on it. Hippos when pressured to be out in sunlight excrete a body fluid that acts as a natural sunscreen. They make their own sunscreen! It is an amour against the African sun. Hippo jaws can exert 1800 lbs of pressure and have razor sharp teeth. With all of this fierce ability hippos do little beyond kill more people every year than any other predator and nap. They can sleep semi-submerged. Still these hippos protect their young with such devotion and determination that you can’t help but be drawn to them. They are enormous, fat, discolored ugly and all things I generally disapprove of in humans. At first they seem to be lazy and slovenly and fat and just useless. When looking further a person learns that hippos aren’t lazy, they conserve energy when it’s hot out and go out at night when there is less chance of incident and more opportunity for food. Fat hippo bodies are perfect for river life and their shear girth gives license to behave any way they want. If you don’t believe me imagine a big fatass black lady eating at the mall with her kids acting up. Are you going to correct them, aggressively? Imagine being annoyed with that woman and not saying anything. Imagine seeing some conservative guy telling her to pay attention to her rowdy kids. Imagine her on the rise up out of her chair all wild and crazy. That is sort of how I see hippos and sort of how I catalogue events in my life. Was the calm green hippo handling business or did the crazy fun pink hippo come out and play? In blood? Where was I going again? I just drifted and spent a few moments watching tv. A character just said, “Success is the best revenge” I don’t have much success so I can’t say how I’d like it. I can’t imagine I wouldn’t like it but failing a good bit seems to be working out for me for me, right now, today. Goodnight, good-day and good God I started on ivy covered vine and ended up here. Right here.

What to teach my children please.

What To Teach My Children Please
If I have succeeded as a mother it was to teach my children to do the following things:
1.) Swing wide of nature, go gently on the earth and its creatures.
2.) Trust their natural feminine human instincts and not to be deluded by the nonsense of “stranger danger” and/or the modern notion of different is wrong or bad. Doesn’t discriminate based on appearance. Ugly, blind, crippled, or crazy- everyone has something to offer. Unless they feel wrong. Then you stay the hell away from them. Or knock them out. And swing hard. Fight like life depends on it; it does.
3.) There is no fair fight. Ever.
4.) Being a bully can haunt you, so don’t throw a punch you don’t want to keep in your back pocket.
5.) Marketing is a con and tv lies. Watch the art, like the art show but don’t drink the kool aid on the way out.
6.) Suck it up! Be a culture, wisdom, interest VAMPIRE. If it remotely interests you, learn something about it, anything. For this reason only USE your friends and their friends and their friends.
7.) Don’t censor. Every bit of knowledge can be passed to a child, just toned down. Human body parts, sexuality, drug abuse, religions, belief or non belief in their scary ideas about aliens, werewolves, witches, God.
8.) Tell the truth. The shoes are ugly. The needle will hurt. But it will only hurt for few moments. If you lie about the small stuff there is no trust. Trust takes years longer to earn than lose. So start telling the truth immediately.
9.) Be willing to bet. Taking risk instills personal accountability and the willingness to pull your hair back and lay your neck bare to execution.
10.) It is O.K. to be silly. Especially in public. It confuses people and gives them something to talk about.
11.) Get up early.
12.) Never duck, make faces or run amok because it is raining. You will likely get just as wet and look stupid to boot.
13.) The girls have learned the importance of being on time – because I am always late. I suspect they will be early to everything as soon as they can drive.
14.) Art is never wrong. Not your taste, not your taste – but when you are making it, art is not wrong. No one can tell you, your artwork is bad. Period.
15.) That we know everything we have ever known. Once we learn something we KNOW it. Memory is just a retrieval system with some useful tricks for faster service. Get to know those tricks but always trust that you just KNOW something. On standardized tests, and in life – KNOW what you are doing.
16.) A Southern Woman’s favorite color is Shiny followed by Tight then Fuzzy. (It goods to know how to laugh at where you’re from).
17.) If it calls for margarine use butter. If it calls for shortening use lard. The better the fat the better.
18.) How to rack, break & play billiards.
19.) How to drive a manual transmission car.
20.) How to load and unload, properly handle and adequately fire a handgun and rifle.
21.) How to swim.
22.) How to call 911 and use the phonebook.
23.) How to properly identify authority figures and genuine EMS, rescue and other safety workers from impostors and rent-a-wreck folks.
24.) How to respect their teachers and schools and still remain true to their values. Understanding that we would always support them as parents so long as they used good manners and followed a chain of command. Even kids in the second grade need to know they have the right to really get up and go pee if they have to. I hope my girls know that.
25.) Gimme three steps: The right to ask 3 Times. Mom can I? No.
a. But I really want to and it is a good plan see. I decline again.
b. She has once last chance to go gather her evidence, rally dad or convince me –
c. Three Nos and you are out. Done. Not an all day struggle of ideas or new ways to ask the same question over and over.
26.) To be discrete.
27.) To be modest. Ok a bit modest.
28.) Virginity is a gift you only get to give yourself – ONCE.
29.) Independence is freedom and a union is a bond but they are not mutually exclusive.
30.) When you think of getting married take out a cheap plastic twelve inch ruler and look at it, hard. Now think of how many years you intend on being married to your spouse. Me and John agreed to 70 years way back in 1991 when he gave me the ring. Now put however many marks, say seventy on a piece of paper and look at it and imagine your married life. Happy. Now imagine a bad year. One whole bad year in seventy, imagine the reason? Look at it on paper. How tiny it looks it that long year. Seem hard to imagine? If ever you find yourself with marriage trouble put it to the seventy year test. Really seem hard – stretch those tick marks – all the way out, one for every month of your marriage and keep asking? A piece of paper with 12 month sections for seventy years is longer than you would think. Is this a deal breaker? I married my best friend and we made a deal, a promise. 70 years. A few bad months or even a bad year is easy to put into perspective with the proper ruler.
What I have yet to teach my daughters and would love help with:
1) How not to worry about opinions.
2) How to perpetuate motion or put toilet paper back on the role.
3) How to see what I want them to find/retrieve the first time they look.
4) How to not get personally involved with other peoples hurts.
5) How to tell me when I have made them angry.
6) How to spell or care about spelling/grammar.
7) How to see/hear/understand those slippery symbols that are math.

Like Punching Jesus

Fucking Him Was Like Punching Jesus – very dangerous and wrong. Altogether as selfishly as it was gratifying. I’d wanted to do it for years but waited on principal, finally giving over to carnal knowledge and pushing everything toward our pelvic entanglement. Pushing downward and struggling like mad to receive that one glorious drop of sweat from his face or hair. One single drop of proof and nourishment; full in the knowledge that it was real, it was happening. His sweat into my mouth quenched all that was ever missing and poisoned me with the relish of taste that would linger but not stay. One drop as a magical elixir holding time; a halting, to bind him into me, more even than the traditional fluid of lust. I licked the air below his face and pushed with all might to meet him, accept him and then hush the reasons to leave sooner. I think I always knew that if ever I would have him in me, the beginning would turn into the ending, counting down and backwards the going away. Now it never hurts to think of him, us, there conjoined, now if my arms fold and I think of him, my hips clench into a happy smile, remembering sweating secretly away. Punching Jesus would be the terrible thing, the dark thing I’d wanted. Getting away with it was glory and happy and memory and white light. Withdrawal and sorrow have long since faded and I select the perfection to review, hold high.

Klaxon Calling

Klaxon Calling

Oh to hear the klaxon call
The blaring naw to announce, beckon
A siren singing a nagging song
Come this way, do this thing
Right away, right now and sharply
It irked me then as I shuffled or ran
To fill my cup with duty or watch
That dark drink warming, waking
The long deep underneath thing
Never ceasing, never known, trusted
We ride in the sloshing belly of this mother
Abliged to follow the klaxon call
Mostly now I find I stand directionless
Waiting for the wind to blow
An order to move,
How holding fast has made me old
Abliged to wait for a call not coming
I was never patriotic, never really
I did my bit without paying attention
To how the rules gave me something
To whale against, to rage against
The sea rages against the break, the wall
The sailor in peace rages against the rule
My sailor is home waiting to hear
Any one thing that will compel
Action, service, creativity
A boundary to break, a parameter to push
I am a prisoner without a prison
Diseased with delusions of reminisce

Parentless, museless, drifting

Hurt Girl, Sister, Mother

Hurt Girl, Sister, Mother

You will never be the apple of his eye
You never were and never will be
But neither will she and never was she
She was stranded there just like you
Only pressured by your jealousy, fear
Your failures have been lust, greed, pride
Lust for the golden star sticker, a wedding reception
Greed for attention missed and otherwise
Pride for the ordinary, the trivial you make important
Yourself promotion is effortless and ceaseless
I weep for your progeny and the pressure you pound
I too was pummeled by a proud mother
I survived and will while you wallow, mourn again
Over and over making her death less important
Than your grieving life, proving life
You child is smart but not exceptionally so
Your degree was hard earned but not exceptionally so
Your marriage was rich but not exceptionally so
Your divorce was tragic but not exceptionally so
Your engagement was simple but not exceptionally so
Your life, your drama is interesting but not exceptionally so
Your gratitude was demonstrated but not exceptionally so
Live within the confines of your ability
Spend with the boundaries of your ability
Promote others with the passion you give yourself
Rest in the bliss of the ordinary wonder that is life
Your life, your gift, your impact, your true impact
Do something, other than parent, other than daughter
Other than sister, be something unlike your companion
Your environment, your status, your purse, your car
Be honest if for only with yourself, be honest
Who are you – Why is it so very important to please
To impress, to charm, to outmaneuver with regret
Your bribery of sadness and prideful boasting
Leave me nothing about you aside your way
Poor girl, sad girl, hurt girl, daddy didn’t this
Daddy didn’t that, husband didn’t let me be this
Husband didn’t let me be that, art girl, skater girl,
Cut girl, tattoo girl, pierced up, passed around then
Buttoned down, conservative Born-again republican,
a true chameleon so truly engineered fully
Undercover in a better imaginary world
You’ve been too long forgetting where the
Wallpaper leaves off and yourself begins
You are too covered in labels and diversions
Your are too consumed with your resume
To notice you already got the job

Touch Bases, Are We On The Same Page?

Folks who have never held the memo or read the minutes or contract documents cannot use the phrase, “on the same page” similarly folks who have never worn a uniform or gone to practice or held a ball should not use the phrase, “touch bases”. Come on. Saying stuff like this does not make you more important than you really are! The only base I ever encountered was second base in high school and flew right past that into being the kind a woman truly annoyed by this type of posturing.

Afterbirth, My Wrinkled Hands

Sometime in the night or yesterday in last few days while I was distracted with noise and blather the last husks of my chrysalis fell heavily down away from the last place I held them firmly, my hands. Oh my hands were even and silky and hidden in this shroud. I look down now and know that some time recently that old, harbored, same guarded afterbirth must have fallen away and dragged down the sheath of time that kept my hands. I feel a light and emptiness in my cradle and I see a light and emptiness in my hands. These hands are not plump with youth, they are thinning and telling. They are her hands and I am glad to see her. I just need to take time to really notice this falling away.
3/16/2009 1:49 PM

Afterbirth
Orphaned again but not dropped in the floor of the hospital
Left with the swing of a slap, but not the sting of a slap
A calloused face has no feeling during manners undone
The most useful and peculiar motion of this dropping
Is that during the fall she can only notice the event
She wasn’t not nauseous or confused or afraid
Only noticing that it was beginning, this end
How clever, clear and certain she felt feeling
About not feeling, not fearing, no anger
No lost standing or waiting, just done.
Kimberly L. Stansfield –

Moving To Costa Rica

In the early parts of 2009 my family planned to relocate from small town, Greer, South Carolina to points unknown in Costa Rica. I don’t remember the exact day or date that John suggested we move our family to a third-world country, but I remember distinctly how excited I was with the notion. We were going to travel much of Costa Rica before deciding where to settle. We began to plan and prepare. We talked about how to go and what we would take, how long it would take to be ready to actually board a plane. We discussed what we actually needed of our possessions and then we long talks about what we wanted to own, had we become just objects in our own home? Were we over-consuming, were we complaining about the very lives we’d made for ourselves. The more we examined how much excess we held on to, the more clearly it was to us that we needed to change our lives so that we would be more in line with our values. We started saving the large amount of cash necessary for our travels. Our two daughters began to mention how much money we could put in our Costa Rica cash box if we skipped the fast food and made sandwiches. We wanted to explore and travel, we wanted to more respect our community and respect the childhoods of our children. We had discussions with the children about what five things they would grab if the house were on fire. We asked what each would grab if they could take five things for the other members of the family. How many boxes of holiday cards did we need to reassure ourselves we’d had good birthdays and good Christmases? How many handprints and elementary school papers do we need to feel like good parents? Were we held captive by gifts accepted long ago, or photos and letters we didn’t intend to enjoy? We wanted to narrow our possessions so that our most beloved treasures would fit in a cedar armoire we own. The very best of all our things, based solely on our personal feelings; objects made special by our conditions, not by a price-tag - that is what we kept. A tiny wooden train car, less than size of an egg, it was left in our V.W. Bus. John loves it. I discovered that more than art or any other thing, I treasured a green beaten up wooden tool box. It had been used long ago by John’s grandfather at the textile mill. Riley had to have her blankie and Finley wanted to keep something my mom gave her. Our plan was to store that armoire at my aunt’s house and go to South America with just a suitcase each. We planned to send for our treasure when we were ready to settle. My husband came to me in January or early February and put us on the track to move. We did hundreds of hours of research about individual cities, towns and we even started learning to speak Spanish. We followed blogs by other American ex-pats in Costa Rica, we made it our full time job to read material about our new land. It was very fun practicing with the girls and discussing whether we wanted to live on the coast or in the mountains. We decided that it would be interesting and good practice to try to live without some of our American comforts, or at the very least we would jump well out of bounds of our comfort zone before we actually moved. We cut off cable just around the time that digital signals became a requirement and without cable we had no television. We still had the laptop but no service without short trips to the Wi-Fi hot spot. It was a very educational experience for us. We learned that we liked to play scrabble and we learned to exist together without electronic distractions. We learned to use our television to watch movies on purpose, with intention and as an occasion not as background noise. We started eating together and eating unusual meals, different varieties of foods, off brands, different brands. Knowing the likelihood that we couldn’t get Duke’s Mayonnaise or Jiff peanut butter in Costa Rica we were practicing to choose differently and notice the good and notice the unpleasant. We stopped using paper products and started walking more and more. We began to frame our lives around being in Costa Rica. Our girls were excited about not going to school at first or homeschooling. We were very keen on moving about freely, lowering our cost of living and improving our chances of mere contentment. “When we get to Costa Rica…” It was so common that it became bigger than our family. “Going to Costa Rica” would make all of everyday’s trouble go away. We were evolving yes, for certain, but not fast enough to realize that we were delaying some of our Costa Rica ideals until our passports were stamped. Sure we had sold eighty percent of our furniture, clothing, kitchen items and toys. Sure we had gone without TV and creature comforts, but saying that we would spend more time with each other when we got to Costa Rica was just silly. We could spend any amount of time we wanted together in Greer, S.C. The upside of really focusing on our family dynamic and planning in this way is that you have time, time to dream, time to plan and for us most importantly time to change our minds. Time to change our lives was ours, ours alone. Some friends upon hearing that we would move to Costa Rica were so limited in their imagination were compelled to ask what we were running from. These accusations were hurtful at first and then somewhat funny – we questioned ourselves. What we were running toward and away from and the short list was the religion of consumerism that is so prevalent in our part of the world. We wanted to get away from the fat people at the buffet, stuffing themselves in oblivion, unaware of how sick they made others. We wanted to get away from our own stagnant routine, our lack of enthusiasm for the lovely farmhouse we lived in. We wanted to be away from racism, stupidity and spoiled kids. We wanted to change and so we did, all the way up to the passports. We changed our entire family and decided we would move, but stopped just short of going. We would enjoy a new house, newly built and in a community we truly love. We decided we could ultimately control what happened in our home and choose if we wanted to look away from the buffet table. We chose to accept the simple impending truth that John would eventually be unable to continue to stand for work. We accepted that his limitations would make Costa Rica less than what we wanted. We came to understand that for our family alone, Costa Rica and this trip we had planned had really turned into a journey. We could imagine, plan, implement and concede and build all in a short time, without checking in with each and every family member, friend and acquaintance for permission or acceptance. People that know me have heard big ideas from me before and perhaps one day I will have heard another – the Costa Rica idea was actually something that my husband came up with and I am so happy he did. So excited in fact that I told everyone I knew and everyone I met about it. How incredible it was to think about being in third-world paradise that was mostly bi-lingual, where the schools are taught in English and where our dollar was worth more. I was incredibly chatty about our trip, our discoveries and our intentions. I was also childishly embarrassed when we changed our minds. I was convinced that my friends would think I was crazy. Crazy for planning the trip, crazy for telling people and perhaps crazy for thinking we could do it. I was embarrassed and still stung from the skeptics that doubted our motives. I didn’t get over the initial embarrassment until we started building a home in Taylors. Our values are never constant and neither is our situation. Life changes and being comfortable with the fact that it does is very, very cool. I can’t imagine where life will actually take us, but I am thankful we are here and thankful for now. I can idle or throttle or fly, so long as I pause to take a bearing and navigate for myself. I still want to travel to Costa Rica. I feel like the notion of going there was more rewarding than the trip.

Blessed Bathrooms

John wants to know why everyone in the house can't have an individual bathroom. I am just grateful that in our modern age and prosperous country we can shit indoors. No ala Green Mile outhouses!

"During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called 'money.' It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can't bake a cake because she doesn't have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just doesn't have any ounces, any pinches, any pints." - Tom Robbins

I found this quote while reviewing some of my favorites. It sums up how I feel right now. Quit being stingy and do your patriotic duty - go buy something! You might not live long enough to your ever-pending rainy day.

Notice

Sometime in the night or yesterday in last few days while I was distracted with noise and blather the last husks of my chrysalis fell heavily down away from the last place I held them firmly, my hands. Oh my hands were even and silky and hidden in this shroud. I look down now and know that some time recently that old, harbored, same guarded afterbirth must have fallen away and dragged down the sheath of time that kept my hands. I feel a light and emptiness in my cradle and I see a light and emptiness in my hands. These hands are not plump with youth, they are thinning and telling. They are her hands and I am glad to see her. I just need to take time to really notice this falling away.
KLS

Whiteness
Amazing how nine pictures of a stretch of land could take my breath a way and almost make me cry and how such a white hot bright light existed on the day they were taken and I wasn’t even there in the right side of the picture but it’s right there, right there in the right side of the pictures a bright white light just like light outside today that I sat outside in today and had my lunch. Today I sat outside in it and let the breeze blow right over me and loved being in it and came up here to get back to it and saw the one last thing that I hadn’t deleted because it had the those nine pictures and there was the bright white light. So distracted by the weather, the beauty of it, I left my orange bag under the table where I was eating and walked away with just my phone and the Bella paper I was reading, got all the way to the back of my building when a smashing white smile attached to a suit and a beautiful man grabbed my arm, “Ma’am – you left your bag”. I thanked him and neglected to say anything charming or worthwhile or flirty or memorable. He was gorgeous and I can’t remember what he looks like. All I can see is the bright white light in the nine photos of my tiny island and the day around me, behind me out of my office and I know that I am forgetting everything and it is suddenly, suddenly so very very very sad on what was such a happy happy day. Fuck. fuck. It is really slipping away from me.

Kimberly Lenora Stansfield
When Emily’s ring had to be returned.

Touched, Touching

Touch, Bet With James

I heard a man named James say that shaking hands more than three times with anyone in any given day is against his personal code of conduct. He doesn’t do it because it just means the person is full of shit, that the person is insincere that twice is plenty. Once upon arrival, again when you leave is enough. He says that anything else reeks of a used car salesperson; smarmy. Dis-endeared by repetition. Dis-ingenuined by the nature of touch. I can not agree but it is my nature; I am apt to touch. I long to touch, need to touch others as a way to accept or deny their genuine nature. Some read eyes, some search in others for clues to their nature in words but I reach deeper in a very tactile way to seek that which gives me clues to the very character and temperament of the person.

I was trying to talk or rather make a bet with James and I shook his hands twice, he would not shake three times. I declined the bet which was a good idea in fact and no reflection in any negative way on James, just a fact after the fact of this little idea that was at that very moment beginning to grow. As an aside the bet now I know I would have lost.

I want to touch and feel people. It is a very real need not met in my existence nearly enough. I hug my children. I touch the hands of my husband. I kiss my aunts, hug my uncles, kiss them. We kiss. Our family kisses. I kiss my friends hello and goodbye. The connectivity of humans has long evolved I think into a place where Americans talk too much and touch too less, we call, we email, we leave hollow messages and never touch anyone that touches our lives; feel out lives, handle our lives. Touch, feel and handle all words with the similar meaning that incorporate in a way the verbiage we use when speaking also about living at all. We touch others’ lives with our own. We feel life and we handle life hopefully with care and regard. When we die we automatically think to tell our co-workers, our acquaintances, even our family when the last time we saw the deceased, or what we said to them or what they said to us but almost never about the last tactile encounter. Did we touch their hand as we left their door? Did we touch them? Do we even stop to remember that detail?

I am often reported to be a flirt. I have, when happy, an easy wide smile and open arms for those I barely know ready for hugs of greeting. I endear myself, perhaps feel too much publicly and strangely appear to others to invade personal space. I however am very perceptive and rarely have crossed an unwelcome personal boundary, though from a distance one watching might observe what they perceive to be unusual or overly familiar.

So a personal rule about not shaking hands more than three times? What other personal rules have we established? How much personal space do we need, what are our limits? How do we block those out that we should allow in? Perhaps I touch too much for most of the personal taste of others. I will not stop my quest for tactile knowledge, acceptance, and inclusion, proper or improper. I will be a participating party in the race of humans knowing that we are animals first and evolving much to quickly to forget our recent evolutionary leap from which we slept together huddled barely clothed or fed for warmth in caves and now we huddle together in droves over-fed, over-stimulated, technically wired but still longing for warmth of a not altogether different warmth than that of the cave. Simple human contact, one hand, one embrace, some exchange one at a time.
Touch someone you love. Touch someone you simply like or be revolutionary and touch someone you barely know.

Kimberly Lenora Stansfield

Emotional Braille

A few days ago I typed the words that I didn’t want anything for Christmas and I didn’t want to give anything to the kids. I meant that when I typed it and I mean it now in that I don’t have a burning desire to run out and ply the girls with anything specific and I don’t long for the money to buy them what they can’t have, on the contrary I could buy them what they want. This year I am just neutral about it. They will have a nice Christmas but not a ridiculous one, not one mortgaged on next year’s car payment like so many children in so many homes. What is ironic about having written about that is this; my mother is dead and now Christmas is gone and my girls didn’t get much. The actual holiday for girls was great. It would have been great for me, too if I’d gotten my gift a day late. To say that my mother and me had a tenuous relationship would be a polite way to get started. To know fully that your mother hates you if even for a moment changes the way see everything about yourself and everything you see in the world. To ever want more than to change her opinion of you, to have any higher aspiration seems pointless and when you realize that she is unyielding makes you for a time see that everything is pointless. Before my mother died we did come to terms with one another and she did finally find a way to embrace me fully and make me feel it. In the end my mother did love me again, more, better and harder. We always loved one another. Just hard.

Her beautiful lake house in Greenwood has been empty for a few years as my father remarried his ex-wife Sally a half a year after my mother died. Since he remarried my half-brother Sean’s mom and since she’s a decent person I didn’t protest. Now I wonder if I was just in shock because when I first saw Sally and first found out about her she was walking out of my mother’s house.

I visit my mom’s about every five month’s or when it’s nice enough to fish. My mother had a garden that would rival any in Southern Living. Sadly it withered right away, so only the hardiest flowers remain. Each time I arrived at mom’s house something would be different, removed, changed a piece of her more gone, more dead, even more dead somehow. I don’t know how to explain how your mother could be more dead, but when you have been loved, abandoned, rekindled, aborted, and taken up again it is very hard to take your tangible mementoes disappearing. I made the same rounds I would make with my mother when I would come down to visit from Virginia, she would on those occasions show me new flowers or new purchases or new projects in the garage.

In one of her fits of unrest my mother burned every single photograph she had of me even my baby pictures. My mother disowned me several times for reasons that were sometimes mine and sometimes hers. She stopped speaking to my aunt because she hosted my daughter’s baby shower. My mother hated as passionately as she loved. Does this sound familiar to anyone? My mother is one of the few subjects I am both the most qualified to discuss and I am left utterly in the dust of a mystery about. If my mother is a mystery then my father is the elusive carrier that delivers the riddle and slips away. I know so little about him or his family I am not even qualified to ask questions. My brother is the thinnest strand of a bridge and I cling sometimes too fiercely to him. In many ways I fear that my mother’s past and her life hold keys to my future, hints to what may come. There are many holes. Entire years in her life that are missing or do not make sense with the rest of her life. I wonder things now and am convinced that at times she left me because she had to, because it was the better thing to do. I see her differently than the way I have been told. I look from an older, more knowing perspective. She revealed to me some things I did not know before she died but not everything. What I look for when I go to her house is not written on a piece of paper or captured in a photograph. It will not fall from the page of worn book or come from the pocket of a coat. Peace is not tangible. It is not a commodity.

I certainly will not find it in my father’s living room. That became clear today.

When I go to my mother’s furnished but empty house that we’ve been told to use for fishing, swimming and weekends. I open the silverware drawer to see that the forks have the same pattern. I look to see that the plates are the same unimportant brown ones that held pork chops and rice and gravy. I open all the drawers to see that her socks are not there, that her gowns are not there. I look to see if there is a page in a drawer with her signature, her handwriting on the top sheet of the page in the drawer. I do not dig. I just look. I smell the closet but it doesn’t smell the same. I go to the garage. During the first visits after her death I would put my hands on her paint brushes and her sponges and her paper plates and her other art supplies. I would reach into the neatly obsessively labeled rows and drawers of nuts and bolts and screws. I would touch all of the tools as if they would speak to me in some system of Braille, some genetic memory language of organization. I touched everything in some intuitive hope that it would tell me unknown things about myself or confirm an un-given message left by my mother. I was always quite rhythmic and systematic about the way in which I listened for my mother on these visits. I waited for my mother. I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel something other than loss other than sadness. I wanted to feel comfortable with what was happening. It was my intention to continue that ritual until I felt at peace. I took the same steps each time through the house, through the garden, through the garage and then down to the dock always alone. By the time I made it to dock I was usually just tired and needed to rock. A few weeks ago I was making the familiar rounds and John happened into the garage perhaps that is why it happened. He distracted me and I turned around. My aunt Sandy had mentioned that my mother had saved my baby book. I had never even known or seen my baby book. I looked up and noticed something I had seen as a child but hadn’t seen since. My mother’s Army foot locker was in the rafter of the garage. I just instinctively asked John to bring it down for me. I opened it and there was a mangled squash of cheap Christmas garland mashed down in on a few boxes of ornaments. Under that mess however was a pale blue seventies style book. I touched like it might be rigged with electricity or have Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket hidden inside. I was amused my baby book was blue. If I know my mother that meant it was probably on sale. I asked John to put the trunk back in the rafters. I went inside to sit and look at the front of my baby book for a long while. It took me an hour to get up the nerve to open it. John forgot to put the trunk back. I will not describe the night looking through photos and reading names in my mother’s handwriting. I could write for hours about that experience but that’s another time it is enough to say I was excited and sad. The anniversary of her death was a week away and I had just left her house – I’d been back in Greer about thirty minutes when my father called me to demand an explanation for why I was rifling through his house. He wanted to know what I was looking for. It was only time he’d ever talked to me in that tone of voice that I could remember as an adult, he might have been mildly upset with me or Sean as kids but this was shocking. So I could not make the explanation I made here about my blind fingering search for peace. I could only mumble something about a rumor about my baby book. He told me he knew exactly where it was and would have given it to me. I apologized and hung up. I didn’t meet my father until I was sixteen. He couldn’t have even seen the book before then. I still don’t know which of my parents put in the rafters. That was the last time I talked to my dad.

He called today and told John he missed me but he didn’t know what say to me that he never knew what to say. He said that times were tough and we just shouldn’t exchange gifts. Times are not tough at my house or his. I bought gifts for them when I was on vacation. So the notion of not wanting anything for Christmas the other just gave me a high karma karate kick.

I went to see my dad after that phone call just to talk. I stayed about fifteen minutes and couldn’t really do more than make small talk.

He came over on Christmas with Sally and brought gifts for the girls as well as a gift for me and John and came in with a big box for me. He told John on the way in not to let me open it because it would make me cry or upset me so I waited until they were gone. It was a box of photo albums with some pictures of my mom’s students and her teacher of the year award and some other photos of my two other step dads in California and some pictures of her in the Army. I really wanted these pictures and am glad to have them. It was really not good timing though.

Dad called to talk and I wasn’t home so told John again he didn’t know what to say to me. John told him I love him very much and I do. When I heard for the second time he didn’t know what to say to me, for the second time I got in the car and went to my dad’s house hugged him on the way in the door and told him I love him. I wanted to talk. Sally sat down right away and I realized I was not going to talk to dad alone without directly asking her leave. I didn’t want to be rude. I should have been rude.

She asked if we were still going to buy a house. I told her about the plans to go to Costa Rica and wondered to myself why dad hadn’t mentioned it since I had told him last week. I said I had heard that he had more of mom’s stuff for me and I explained if he had stuff I wanted it all at once, in one lot, not piece meal because though I wanted all of it, it was exhausting to process some of it. I wanted to grieve and then enjoy it. He then asked me if I found my baby book and essentially all hell broke loose.

All I wanted to do was explain and apologize. Apologize for any misunderstanding and explain that I was not snooping in the house and Sally had to keep chiming in. Then she had to shout that it was not my mom’s house that it was HER house. I’ve never been shot from a cannon but I can imagine now very clearly what it might feel like because that is how I got to my feet. A person I am utterly unfamiliarly with took over my body and I watched her look at my father and focus solely on his words and when he said, “That is the law.” My mother was finally dead. The full weight of her little dead body and my body slammed into me. She wasn’t in the house in Greenwood. Her dead body wasn’t in the truck that he drives where she slumped over dead. Mother wasn’t in any ashes he sprinkled at beach or at the lake house. My mama was made more dead by my father saying “that is the law.” If my father couldn’t give my mother the respect and reverence of her own empty house that she helped him build board by board then surely she was dead. Not in the ground, not in the sea, just gone. Gone away. Completely utterely dead and gone. My father asked me before I got married if I loved John more than I loved him and mama and I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I couldn’t imagine loving someone more than my mama. My father said if I didn’t I should get married because the person you marry is who you have to live with. My mama was gone.

I stood there locked on my heals, afraid of the consequences of moving. I told my father I didn’t care what the law said or what Sally got when he dropped dead that the house was my mother’s and I didn’t want to hear anything else out loud. Whether she said it again, I am not certain, because all I could imagine was grisly and not fit to write or think or hear and all I could do was focus on not moving and staying on my heels. My father told me something about his will and everything going to me, Sean and Kevin and he wanted to know if I wanted to see it. I told him no and I didn’t. If he said it, it is true but he fails to understand that most men die before their wives and then I would have no rights to what my mother worked all her life for. Though we weren’t on the poverty line, there were times when we hovered just above in that awful place where just make a bit too much to get any help and my mother spent a good deal of her time paying her other husband’s child support payments. I never got to live in the suburbs. I never even got to live in a neighborhood. Though I don’t envy Sean for it, a swimming pool or private school or a child support payment might have made an incredible difference for me. It also seems to me that Sally is living my mother’s dream, in my mother’s dream house. So why is it that she is so prickled by the notion that my mom could keep one house in name only– isn’t hers enough – or does she need everything? How dare her be offended.
She has no idea, no idea what kind of lobbying I have done on her behalf.



The day she walked out of mama’s house I could have turned my shoulder and never spoken a word to her. But – MY MOTHER – asked me – ABOVE ALL THINGS PUT YOUR DADDY FIRST- so I didn’t do or say what I wanted to. I was very conflicted because part of me thought that my mother would have me do something quite different.

A real gift would be to know something about the Crocker family or to have them know something about me. I thought Sally might one day be able to share information with me and Finley and Riley. Dad doesn’t share many stories; he doesn’t talk [naturally] openly about his past like Uncle Fred.
I am disgusted that what was my attempt at an apology and explanation went so awry. I will not however stand in the presence of someone being so openly disrespectful of my mother’s memory or her belonging. I’d rather see it at the bottom of the lake then laid claim to by blasphemous ingrate that doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut and accept an apology – had she done that I would have gotten to point where I said “if it bother’s you so much I just wont go back.”

pink and green aggitation act

Agitation – stir, rouse, move – cause to act.

If I have caused you to hate me I don’t mind. If I have caused you to be disgusted I don’t mind. I have caused you to be unsettled I don’t mind. If I have made you dislike me I don’t mind. If you never want to see me again I don’t mind because it means I have agitated you enough that you are now in such a state – and for whatever reason and for whatever purpose I caused it. I made you do something. I like to make people do things. Especially things they thought they wouldn’t or couldn’t ever do. I am great at that. A very smart man once told me that my true gift was the mastery of simple chaos. Making a hurricane appear in a soup-bowl and then riding the surfboarder’s lip of that storm while everyone else tries to have Sunday lunch.

Awaken – know that I do what I want in a perpetual whirl of whiz bang boom and then cool deflate float swirl and if I bump into you and you are roused or bumbled into action by me then welcome into my world for a moment. However please understand that because I told you I love you does not mean that I love you anymore than in thirty second increments, that would be a lie, you see. I do really mean it, and deeply for thirty seconds. I fall in love with bark on the trees and the particular way a stain on bus boy’s apron looks like a Dali face propped up on stilts. But telling you, any of you, anything about love or hate or devastation or sadness is really silly. How could anyone tell anyone how they feel? I can not use black shapes on a piece of paper to make you imagine some of the things I have felt and felt compelled to do to people and to do for people. Words are just little shapes that make you think of sounds in your mind and how could I make those things make you feel what counting a man’s freckles from across a conference table in full view of coworker’s, or murderous rage so rampant that you spill you own blood in fury over a confused look, how could these little words make your hands tremble or your mouth water or your heart pound? I can not make you smell the copper film of lobster bubbles evaporating into nothing the way it always does after lobster flavored bubbles melt in your mouth, kissed away by the man satisfied by the favor of it all. Words are stupid. I am stupid with them. I wish I could upload selected images, good ones, make movies of good moments. A man in a blue suit in July. Standing under this twisted oak tree. Being out to sea on the deck, rigged for dark, no moon. Having a heavy baby sleep on my chest. Making plans.

I dreamed of what love was every day of my life and every few days I find it. Mostly in my house or around my house in some small kindness; or some exhaustive effort of friendship the likes of which I hear few stories to rival. My best friend is not an anchor to which the ship is tied to, he is not a stanchion on the pier holding the anchor – if I had to make one dumb inadequate description of a simple symbol of what my best friend is. It is this. He is the very earth, sand, salt and water that holds the pier in place for the fleet to come home. He is the shore that my hurricane breaks against. He is the dry earth that soaks me up and the wet sea that washes me off. He is the salt that knows the salillum in me. He is the cold hard ground with bits of mica I must bare down and see myself in. Really see the gritty pieces of myself. The only real mirror. All of my other mirrors, all my other friends held at odd angles, odd times, odd wonders, off but incredible. You are held at whispers away, lips close, arms length or half a world away; some I pull to and some I push hard away. But he is the true mirror. My best friend. John Patrick Stansfield - He can tell me no, he can tell me to be still, he can tell me to be quiet, he can tell me. Only he can tell me anything. Everyone else asks. Or doesn’t ask.

I have sent odd packages to my friends over the years. In twenty years there have been green apples wrapped with silver string, atomic fire balls, nine phone books and a compass, a rubber chicken, all manner of liquor & beer, various books – Jitterbug Perfume went out to few that I really cared about.

In return I received some strange things from my friends. I received the ugliest flower arrangement ever delivered, black & red flowers with rotten beets. I laughed and cried at the same time – the quarterdeck watchstander wanted to know if I wanted to call security. When I said no and kept the smelly thing it solidified my position as the craziest sailor on the base. I arrived at work one morning to find approximately five thousand atomic fire balls littering the parking lot entry door. I was both so touched with love and devastated with the prospect of loss of contact that I stumbled at the door and had to feign tripping as a coworker was coming out the door. I picked up one of the candies and rolled it as if it were a magic token to the quiet day I got to spend with litterer. He taught me patience and gave me another opportunity to demonstrate loyalty. You all get cards and flowers. I get secret messages from friends in secret languages. Isn’t the inside joke always the funniest?

So if I have made you, anything. If I have made you anything you didn’t want to be – I will not say I am sorry, I can only say I’d probably do it all over again. Knowing what I know now, coming upon my birthday in a few weeks I’d probably have done bigger, scarier, faster, louder, nicer, funnier, more outrageous stuff way earlier in my life. I would have stolen all the cool things I’ve heard from your lives and done them at fifteen. I love the idea of running onto a public transportation vehicle and discharging a fire extinguisher! I still might do that. Maybe for my birthday? That was just one of the cool things all of you have done. I would love to list my friends but they are too many, too far, and too wide. Some come and go. Some are gone forever. Salute. I have loved you all in our own way. You know. I know. Look out world I started telling my girls all your stories for bedtime stories. Training. Grooming for the ultimate as controlled as possible chaos filled existence, ready at a moment’s notice to stop what their doing and really live and to certainly shoot you or cut your throat if stepped within a frog’s hair of out-of-bounds. My twelve year old daughter can drive my six speed, shoot my nine millimeter, prepare napalm with orange juice, survey a target a close range, long range, knock on your door and ask you to buy cookies. She is anonymous. She is a child. She doesn’t mind pulling the trigger from behind the sites. She is not yet ready with a knife. We are working. Have you been rude to a stranger lately? Have you ever wondered how a person happened into the life of the mentally ill? Have you ever wondered how a person ended up on the news? Being rude usually has a good deal to do with it. Manners are the key to civilization. I know this to be true.