The Streets Sure Are Slick: Sunday Scribblings #163 Disconnect

Looking north down Kellogg's Main Street without snow and ice in the 1950's

(If you are new to my blog, my hometown is Kellogg, Idaho.)

About 4:00 this morning my Springer Spaniel, Snug, jumped off the bed, his nails whooshing across the hardwood floor, and began to head butt the bedroom door.

Sometimes he eats breakfast this early. I submitted, fed him, let him out, grabbed the morning paper, and came back to bed. Snug soon joined me and we both fell back asleep.

Within seconds, I dreamed.

I was uptown in Kellogg. It was Monday. The grounds at St. Rita's Roman Catholic church had been expanded, and I helped plant new trees in the winter ground, joking that it was a good thing Father King was on vacation or else the money to do this would never get spent.

Landscaping parishioners included my good friend Timothy Patrick O'Reilly and in my dream we hadn't seen each other since high school and we smiled broadly and couldn't figure out how to shake hands with each other: High five? Give each other skin? Traditional shake? Drug brotherhood peace shake? We mimed them all and laughed and laughed.

I had parked my little Jonathan apple colored 1993 Honda Civic on Main Street in front of the old Masonic Hall. I tried to get out, but I got stuck in a small berm by the sidewalk. I gunned the engine, extracted myself and started going backwards, downhill, down the slick ice of Main Street.

My car moved slowly, but out of control. I slid past the old Liberty Theater and Joe and Henry's and Ford Hoback's variety store and tried to steer out of my backward slide but I just kept sliding past Sass's Jewelery, Patano's Apparel, and then toward the intersection of McKinley and Main.

Just north of this intersection rests the Shoshone Funeral Home and giant broad shouldered pot-bellied mountain men with Z Z Top beards dressed in church clothes were making their way across Main Street, on their way to a funeral.

I couldn't stop the car. I hit one, two, several of them and could only see their purple and swollen and enraged faces, first through the driver's window, and then in my rear view mirror.

My Honda came to a stop near the Shoshone Funeral Home. I got out of my car and no one seemed the least concerned about what had happened. I wondered if anyone had called 911, but I was met with contented, indifferent faces, the faces of people about to attend a funeral.

Suddenly, a police officer appeared. It was Dana Bisaro. He was freaked out.

I asked, "Do I have anything to be worried about?"

"Worried about? Those guys up there have you scoped, man!"

I looked back toward the intersection of Main and McKinley.

At least three of the giant bearded mountain men in church clothes were armed with .338 Winchester Magnum rifles and had me in the cross hairs of their 2-8x Burris Signature scopes.

I shook myself awake.

I can't make sense of this dream.

It came from inside me.

I feel completely disconnected from it.

To read more Sunday Scribblings on the topic "disconnect", go here.

Sunday Scribblings #162: Healing: Not Sure I Buy It

Self-portrait, 2007

I'm not sure I buy the concept of healing. From my own experience and from my observations of and conversations with others, I don't see much healing happening. Rather, I am, and I see others, as damaged, unhealed, trying to navigate the choppy waters of insult, trauma, sudden change, and violation.

This isn't to say I don't make my way through the days. I do. I often do pretty well.

Always underlying my making through, though, is unhealed damage of one kind or another.

Before I write a word or two about this unhealed damage, let me admit that I might have the prompt wrong. Maybe the prompt, "healing", suggests that one is never healed, but always on the way of healing, that things get gradually healed, but never completely.

Nonetheless, here's some of my experience:

Back in October, 1981, my first wife, Eileen, suggested we go out for ice cream and about half way through a bittersweet nugget, told me she didn't think she wanted to be married to me any longer. At the time, I couldn't tell if she was talking hypothetically, but I soon learned she wasn't and in December we were separated and in August, divorced.

Understandably, I was devastated. But, I believed that over time, I would heal from the emotional and psychic trauma of this divorce. I took friends' advice as well as that from books and other sources. I tried not to stuff my feelings. I expressed my anger. I cried. I sought therapy. I believed that these actions, along with letting time heal this fracturing of my life, would eventually bring me to a point of peace.

It never has. I continue to feel the pain of the loss of my first marriage. I'm ashamed of myself. Everything in the church, the world of psychology, and in how people talk about these things says that after nearly twenty-eight years, the healing should be completed, I should have let this go, and I should not be feeling the pain of this separation and divorce.

It's not how it's worked for me. I won't do it here, but I can point to any number of other insults, disruptions, violations, and failures that are not healed, that happened as recently as two weeks ago and as long as forty years ago that are still pretty fresh, unhealed, and cause me suffering and regret.

I feel and experience parallel doubt about my body. I suffered a serious industrial accident in 1973 that involved the inhalation of sulfur dioxide and heavy metal dust. I suffered toxic pneumonia. While I've been functional and even successful in the thirty-five or so years following this injury, as I lie here typing this post, I can hear my wheezing in my chest, whistles, squeaks, and rasping. I am recovering right now from a bout of pneumonia that started about six weeks ago. I think that because the toxic pneumonia never really healed, that I'm having problems with this pneumonia healing because the first pneumonia, in my opinion, compromised my respiratory system.

Maybe I've had my hopes up too high about healing. Maybe I see advertisements for the healing arts and I put too much hope in what they can do. Maybe I've put too much trust in the long- term healing impact of therapy. Maybe I have believed too strongly that time heals and that when I settled into middle age and as I moved toward old age, these old injuries and events would have dissolved into the past and I'd feel healed.

But I don't.

It leaves me wondering just how much healing really takes place in the aftermath of the events in our lives that cause us so much pain and suffering.

It leaves me wondering to what degree our trust in healers and healing is misplaced and if a major part of the human experience is not healing, but continuing to suffer.

If you'd like to read other contributors' pieces on healing, go here.

Sunday Scribblings: Do I Have To?

Do I have to write on this week's prompt?

NO!

I'm gonna watch a movie.



For other Sunday Scribblings on the topic "Do I have to?" go here.

Three Beautiful Things 07/26/08: Mutual Admiration, Back in the Groove, The Deke

1. I'm happy and proud to say that JBelle over at Notes from the 'Kan EWA praised my blog and its authenticity. JBelle's blog is fascinating: she writes everything from family stories, chronicles of her world travels, stories about her chows, recipes, comments on food and restaurants to comments on Gonzaga basketball, road trips in North Idaho, meditations on her gardens and gardening, and reflections on her devotion to Roman Catholicism. By keeping a blog, JBelle wants her children to have a lasting record of what's on her mind and in her heart whether she's laboring through another tax season or bicycling in Vietnam. I hope those of you who read my blog will go over and read hers, too. She's a terrific writer, full of intelligence, passion, and acute observations. She's a wonderful photographer, too.

2. It's been months since I contributed to Sunday Scribblings and Photo Hunt and I enjoyed getting back into that groove again and am going to try to get back to my weekly submissions.

3. The Deke will be teaching at Fox Hollow Elementary as a full time teacher. I've probably mentioned this before. It's a great accomplishment and today the Deke talked with me for a while about how that fact is just beginning to soak in and I think she is feeling proud of herself. She's stoked. She's eager for the school year to begin and meet the challenge of instructing children in math and science while speaking French to them. It's fun for me to see evidence of her different strategies starting to emerge as I see decks of playing cards and workbooks and other things around that she is going to play with with her students to help them learn.

Three Beautiful Things: 12/15/07: Hoffman, Scribblings, Catching Up

1. I saw the movie, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead". Could a family have more evil in it? Philip Seymour Hoffman builds on the role he played in "Owning Mahowny", a desperate, addicted corporate underling who tries to hide his panic underneath of a facade of competence. When the facade cracks, look out: violence is unleashed.

2. It felt good to post on "Sunday Scribblings" again after about a month's absence. I've enjoyed the comments different readers have made.

3. I'm trying to finish my sibling assignment from back on Thanksgiving week. I'm creating the assigned slide show of things I'm thankful for and it's been fun experimenting around with different effects and stuff. It should go up today.

Three Beautiful Things 05/19/07: Masks, Slob, Kurosawa

1. I'm appreciative and gratified that quite a few readers from Sunday Scribblings have responded to what I wrote about masks. (Sunday Scribblings is here. My piece is here.)

2. The Deke has told me repeatedly what we had for dinner tonight. It's French. It's from the south of France. It's a warmish salady dish: tuna, little tomatoes, green beans, baby red tomatoes, marinated in herbs and olive oil. Spectacular. If you want the name of it, ask me and I'll ask The Deke. She's the French speaker in our family. I'm the slob.

3. Have you seen Kurosawa's 1962 film noir movie "High and Low"? I watched it today. I'd seen it once before about twenty-two years ago and the memories of enjoyment flooded back. It's a fine study of moral conflict, class resentment, and the Americanization of Japan. It runs almost two and a half hours. If you've seen it, I'd love to know what you think.