Bramblings

 While the Slice of Life Challenge for the month of March is over, I intend to continue to write in this blog.  I've started exploring other venues: Such as taking a creative writing course online, coupled with meditation and a compassion cultivation training workshop, I will continue with memoir and biographical writing. If there is one thing that I am getting from this experience it is that writing MUST be a daily practice. As part of the creative writing workshop I'm enrolled in, we were told to obtain a journal that we actually write in each day, yes, as in with a pen on paper! Here was the first assignment, the assignment for today: Write a one-page autobiography of your life. Why only one page? Because setting a page limit will help you stay focused and encourage you to be clear and concise. And if you're thinking you can't possibly fill a whole page? Try it--I bet you can! I found this assignment to be fascinating. Writing about my life on one page was challengin

It was the Fall of 1994. I'd been renting a room from Cindy for more than a year. We got to know each other pretty well in that time. She told me a lot about her family, where she was from, what she aspired to do with her life.  At this moment in time, she says she is content with her night shift job.  There is so much about Cindy that eludes me.  For example:  While she would talk about her family, she only spoke about them in vague terms.  I'd come to understand where they lived, but she wouldn't tell me anything about their character other than that they were either nice or not nice.   I, on the other hand, spoke at great length about my own family, my background, what it was like to grow up in Northern California. Halloween had come and gone, and the nip of winter was in the air around Lacey, Washington.  There were days that seemed cold, while other days seemed spring-like, almost summery.  It was that time of the year when warmth gave in to the cold of winter's sl

 Perhaps the most influential person of my life was my paternal grandmother, Hortense Weston Lucas.  Everything about her channeled goodness, fairness, and a conservative morality that was very much a reflection of her generation. She was born in Salinas, California, to a father who worked the railroad that wound it's way through the northern California green.  Her father met her mother, Ruth, who was a student at Mills College, at a dance. Hortense was born in 1909. I am grateful for the years that I had to know her.  I am picturing her now, in my mind.  She always wore her hair in a Gibson bun.  I didn't even know what that meant until I looked it up one day.  The Gibson Girl look was very much a thing to fashionable ladies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the early mornings, I would watch my grandmother brush her hair, it went all the way down to her hips.  After brushing her hair, she would carefully mold it into the Gibson bun, pinning it into place with real

I'm exhausted. There are a couple of people in my life who are constantly seeking-out my advice. With the first, I'm simply faced with the realization that the person is an ask-hole. Friendships never start out this way with me.  I usually get to know someone as a result of some shared interest.  Perhaps we met each other at a volunteer event, or at a fundraiser, or a marathon.  I bump into them in a few places where it is clear that we have similar interests.  It's the way friendships normally unfold, with similar interests, similar paths in life. I deliberately start out with healthy boundaries, explaining that while I am a licensed therapist, I really don't allow for that talk in my personal life. Things progress nicely.  We're having fun.  Days, weeks, perhaps even months pass by while we're having friendly fun, and then there's a frantic call in the middle of the night.  The person is in crisis because of a (fill in the blank) problem and I'm the on

It started out like almost any other evening in late August of 1984. The sun had just set. This was usually the time when our mother would go out to water her vegetable garden, shrubs, and flowers. The summer months in Alderpoint, California, tend to be very hot and dry.  Today, like most summer days it is incredibly hot, even at sunset.  This is no different from the previous day or the previous weeks for that matter, going all the way back to the end of  May.  This day, this week, the past three months, are typical to the Southern Humboldt County area. Mom is outside, and we can see her watering the fox glove, hollyhocks, snowball bushes, and roses she's beautifully cultivated at the front of the house.  We can see her through the front door of the house, the living room door.  In the summer months it is always open in the late afternoon and early evening hours. In the small quiet of our house, we can even hear the water running through the pipes as mom does her plant watering. 

"Orval, you don't understand how she abuses me." This was my re-introduction to my Aunt Terry when I came home to visit my mother in the summer of 2005. "Auntie Terry, what do you mean?  My mother has provided you with a home.  She helps you out, financially.  How is she abusing you?" "You don't understand," she continued, "your mother emotionally abuses me.  She tells me I'm no good and she takes advantage of me.  She is very cruel, Orval." Aunt Terry began to cry. The first time I remember her tears, I was an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College when I was called upon to rescue her from her employers.  At the time, she explained to me that they were her captors, but, I remember the people I rescued her from.  They were two people of advanced age who were using wheelchairs to get themselves outside and around their house.  This is the same house that Auntie Terry had, over the years since her liberation from them, come to ref