A question for Dana

Dana, I'm hoping against hope that you will somehow look in, because I can't reach you any other way and I have to ask this.  And it's a...it's difficult to word and still be unclear to anyone else.

A month ago I sent you a private message on Facebook, and you responded by blocking me from PMing you again.  And I don't know what it was I said that made you do that.  I can only guess it was one of two things.  It might have been the song, that you were waiting for me to figure out you weren't going to speak with me again...and when I asked if that was what you had in mind you shut me down.  Or it was me saying that you had never asked what I thought of things as they were or what I could handle or understand, if you'd been able to have a bit of faith in me.  I understand that you couldn't back then but you've had thirty years to sort things out in you head and heart.  Putting it delicately.   I don't know why me saying either of those would have made you react by blocking me.   Please help me to understand you.

So, I'm taking a wild guess that maybe something about the second thing I said shook up your understanding of things both then and now.  Maybe because it's what you've based your response to me on for thirty years, I took that away from you because it was never true.  Maybe for just a moment Shiva looked in on your world.  I do sincerely hope I've shaken your view of me, because the old one hurt me to the core. 

So.  How do I ask this? 

If I was right back then, and if...things haven't changed that much?  Please have some faith in me this time.  I want your friendship back. Is that the real reason you still refuse to speak to me?   God, I hope you look in here at some point, it's the only way I can ask this. 

If I'm wrong, if I was always wrong... I don't care any more if you find that insulting, I've lost you anyway over something that should never have cost me your friendship.  That's unreasonable, and honestly...as a friend, it's unworthy of you.  If that's what happened, I'm ashamed of having thought you were worth the fight.  I don't think I was wrong.  I'm such an idiot, I should have asked you this while I could still message you privately on FB.  Fuck, how could I let that chance slip through my fingers?  I was so close to finally having peace in my heart again. 

I think maybe in some measure you were afraid of me before  because you thought I'd get hurt and you didn't want to be responsible for it?  And that happened anyway, but not the way you anticipated.  In other words, I think maybe it's yourself you've been afraid of.  I was never afraid of you that way.  What happened instead is so much worse.

If I'm way off base...well, whose fault is that?  I can only work with what I know and you won't tell me anything. Please let me have peace, if I must say goodbye after waiting so long for reconciliation, at least let me keep some piece of my heart and sanity.  Let some part of my soul remain intact.  Show me that compassion actually means something to you.  Please put this right.

Dana, I want to forgive you.   I don't think this is even going to reach you.  It's like throwing a bottle with a message in it into the sea.

Null Christmas

I used to love Christmas.  I have warm memories of going to Mall 205 with my parents and seeing the huge animatronic displays up and down the mall, the colored lights everywhere, the aromas of the foods, the flavors, the sounds of little bells, the Christmas albums from the Fifties my parents would play.  For many years it was an informal tradition for the kids of several families to gather and watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  For you Philistine's who re unsure, that's the Gene Wilder version.

Then for a while I hated Christmas for being a reminder of another year gone by that I knew Dana would spend with her family and no thought of reaching out to me. 

And I've hated it for losing the things that made it Christmas for me, hated it for becoming something you couldn't celebrate unless you went out and bought it prepackaged from a major retailer.  Christmas used to be richer, like Halloween.  If you're my age, you can recall the great variety if candies you brought home from trick-or-treating.  They included lollipops and suckers of all flavors and sizes.  Some of the were huge orange platters made to look like pumpkins, the details painted on in white.  Today kids get the same for to eight candy bars in worthless 'Fun Sized' miniature.  The same two or three companies own Halloween and they've reduced the product to the bare minimum.  Fun, right?  That's how I feel about Christmas.  It's...so much less than it was.

The one thing I've always enjoyed every year was setting up the tree.   Until this year I'd managed to build a stockpile of ornaments and lights for many combinations of colors.  Karla has those (I'm glad they won't be thrown out), and while I have a  smaller tree and set from Jesseca those were among the first things I packed to make sure I could keep them.  My best tree might have been the year I decked it our in purple and gold.  That was gorgeous.  And  every year I'd set out the Department 51 Dickens Village houses.  Nobody bought them, they should have sold for Christmas.  My brother took them.  I couldn't have kept them anyway, I'm trying to keep too much as it is.

New Year's Eve became painful emotionally too, for the same reasons...bad memories (see the post about overcoming two blocks)...but I'd always make a cashew butter pie and have Bailey's Irish Cream with a piece.   Got a birthday coming up in January, what I want mos s a bottle of Bailey's. 

This year I can't get a handle on Christmas at all.  I'm in the house alone, and the house is a mess of boxes to sort and pack. There won't be any decorations.  My parents are gone.  Dinner will be whatever the hell I feel up to cooking, some random thing or a frozen dinner if I don't have the spirit for it.  I have a few Christmas movies to watch, some Christmas music to listen to - Oh, damn, I won't even have this posted until after Christmas most likely, just realized.   No TV anymore, so no commercialization.  No contact with friends except Scott, and we just go see movies.  I'm sure we won't be seeing the lights at the Grotto this year or attending the singers.  I feel neither happy nor sad for the holiday...I feel nothing at all.   Christmas doesn't exist this year.  I don't know if that's a loss or a blessing.  I think maybe it's a loss, but if it passes without leaving a mark maybe that's for the best.

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A year ago I bought a pack of frankincense made at one of Scott's favorite monasteries, and I've been burning a stick every few days.  It's an aroma traditional to the faith, right?  And it's Christmas. This stuff is pungent!   Getting used to it a little but not a favorite scent.   No, I've not converted, I've been doing this as a...I dunno, can't think of a good word for it but I burn them with Dana in mind.  Dana believes.  I guess in a sense I burn them for Dana like a prayer.  Don't know if it helps soothe my heart or not. 

YUH AHH TEAHH-ING ME APAAHT, DAY-NA!!
(ahem.  If you go see The Disaster Artist, stay for the post-credits scene.)

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What do I want for Christmas?  They've finally stopped putting kettle corn in those tins, it's back to buttered, cheese, and caramel.  So that's what I want.  Popcorn and a drink.  Kahlua would be great, maybe with soda and creamer.  I'll watch Rifftrax' Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, and Star Trek the Motion Picture.  I could try to describe how it felt getting the Jerry Goldsmith score from Eastport Plaza at Christmastime, all the evening snow and lights, the colorful Bob Peake artwork...but words can't sum up the quality of the moment.  ST:TMP came out Christmas of '79...it's about a family reunion of sorts, it's rated G, and the larger V'ger interior looks like a Christmas tree.  You can't get much more Christmassy than that.
Maybe I'll dig out my VHS of Willy Wonka and watch that on Christmas.  I still haven't gotten rid of that stash yet.

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I'm looking for my next image and want to do something in paint again.  I very much want to do something more loose like my last, I ended up feeling like that could be a huge step forward for me if I pursue it.  It has a little of my touch in that I focused on getting the feel of the textures, and I want to continue with that.  The colors are vibrant (go back and see the pic I added, colors much closer to true), and I ended up even really liking the final texture once the satin sealer was applied.  I still have some stuff to work with or that I could add to the paint for effect.  What I don't have yet is the masonite or the time.  Not sure if the enamels from my modeling days are any good still, either.  I really want to do a portrait of Dana with her copper hair.  That I could do on paper in crayon, blending it with rubbing alcohol.  It would be easier, though, if I had her FB page open but (a) I absolutely do not want to look at her page when I feel this shitty, it just makes me feel worse, and  (b) net access is restricted to library visits anyway. 

I have a bunch of fabric softener sheets I saved, as I've a couple ideas how to use them in a painting.  What I've never had was an image in mind.  That's still a creative hangup Dana could teach me about.  I wonder if they still make those sheets?  I could use more.  I'm supposed to be throwing things out and here I am still wanting to use them.

...aaaaaaaaaaaaaand probably delusional too.

The initial post of this blog gives you the essential reason I believe in ESP, and why for me it is wrapped up in dreams.  What I haven't explained is the problem it created.

Back in...'81?  I was briefly infatuated with a girl named Mara.  Lasted maybe a week.  I had been on the verge of approaching her when one night I had a dream.  I won't detail that dream, but it was the first that had a peculiar intensity that I later would come to think of as "that kind" of dream.  As Jesseca would say, "Usual Caveats Apply".   UCA.  It was vivid, tactile, and very immediate, and I awoke with a mad conviction - an utter certainty - that it had been a vision and not a dream.  Mind you, because it was delivered as a dream it was staged with a number of symbols.  It was set in an unspecified future year,  after 2010, and in it there was a woman...and I knew that I knew her, I knew she looked like someone I knew, but I couldn't place her.  She looked like Dana, I'd later realize.  That's hindsight, which is highly suspect and given to misreading after-the-fact...just sayin', I'm aware. But that was hardly the only dream.  Most aspects of it are coming true currently, read a certain way (if you spin things just so)...but not that one vital moment: the recognition of compassion, the opening of the heart, the embrace.

If I believed in God, I'd have believed that dream was a message.  "Mara's not the one.  There's someone else.  This WILL happen."

It was a startling dream.  I awoke immediately from it, believing with all my heart that I had glimpsed something vitally important about my future.  I knew this woman would be the love of my life someday.  I also was suddenly aware that Mara was a complete cypher to me, and was over her instantly.  I had fallen for her to help recover from Diane Schwartz. 

I had a number of other dreams, and in these I was fully aware at the time that it was Dana in them.  At least one was while I was in high school, a few more when Dana first arrived in California, and a few when we first started writing to each other in '88.  In these I saw the future again, some unknown date after 2010.  Each dream showed me the same thing in a different way - a long separation, a rift, pain, depression, heartache, ended by a heartfelt reconciliation.

At the time I had those dreams, no such rift had yet occurred.  Nor was it a self-fulfilling prophecy.  When it happened in real life, it took us both by surprise.  It was unavoidable.

If I believed in God, I'd have believed these visions of reunion were a solemn promise.  Especially after in real life the rift came true.  But I cannot hold Dana responsible for a promise that wasn't made by her but by some God I don't even believe in.

Could only the worst aspect of those dreams - the separation - have been prophecy?  Why did every dream show us re-uniting when we had never even been apart? They all felt like "that kind".
Over the last thirty years I have had more dreams of Dana, some of which were definitely psychic: they contained specific details I couldn't have known yet later were corroborated as having been true.

Over the last few years dreams of her have become exceedingly rare, now I almost never have any...usually if I do it's no more than a hypnagogic or hypnopompic flash (those brief dreamlet moments you have while either falling asleep or waking up).  That infrequency is part of the reason I think she has put me out of her thoughts entirely.  There was a link between us that I think Dana has finally managed to kill off completely in her heart.  That, and her insistent silence despite knowing she has hurt me deeply.

But maybe you see the problem regarding the dreams?  Every time I dream of her, I have to wonder...was this only a figment of my psyche (I'm telling myself a pleasing romantic lie), or was some aspect of this dream really her?  Because, see,  some of these dreams prolong my hope.  If they really are just dreams and nothing more, then my own heart has been as cruel to me as she has been.

If I did believe in God...at this point, and after what my family has been put through over the past few years, the unnatural, unrelenting way it has been piled up on us...I would have to believe that God is an evil fucking bastard who delights in hurting good people for no reason.  I don't want to insult anyone of faith, and that includes Dana...but God is smiling right now.

In September, I had one of those dreamlets, a hypnopompic flash, an unidentified voice speaking.  The voice said "It's coming true."  There was no explanation as to just what might be coming true.  Probably just a dream.  UCA.  Two days later mom went into the hospital.  She never came home.  And Dana responded to me on Facebook.  She did.  She was speaking to me.  She was finally able to speak to me.  The block was gone.  The wall was down.  Dana felt free to speak to me.

Except she won't.  Still.  By choice, by design.  I can no longer console myself with the hope that it's just a block for her to overcome, she really means to do that to me regardless of the damage she knows she's doing  to someone she knows loves her and is a loyal friend

Would someone please tell me how the FUCK I am supposed to feel about this?  I've TRIED 'just getting over it'.

What it Takes to Heal/Unashamed

"You don't want to hurt me but see how deep the bullet lies.
Unaware, I'm tearing you asunder. There is thunder in our hearts.
Is there so much hate for the ones we love?  Tell me we both matter, don't we?"
-Kate Bush, 'Running up That Hill'

*************
Yes, I keep Wiseau-ing on about her.   I know.  Everyone's annoyed.  I'm usually not this much fun. (insert facepalm emoji)  Sorry, I'm doing my best staying a step ahead of a slo-mo breakdown.

Dana apparently needs me to move on without my ever hearing from her.  I need her to talk with me so that I can move on and heal.  We are at an impasse and we continue to hurt each other when we should be trying to help each other heal.

My friends on Facebook think my pain is just unrequited love.  Fair enough, they know what they see.  As far as it goes, it's true.  There's so much more to it than that, though...Ive been through unrequited love and lost love before and gotten through.  I fell out of love again, my heart mended.  There's more to this one, this isn't the same thing at all.  There's a backstory I cannot tell anyone. 

I have not been reaching out to Dana as anything more than just a friend.  Dana understands that if no one else does.  I don't expect her to harbor feelings of love for me, we were never that to begin with.  And I'm sure she's already with someone, though I don't wish to know about it.  At least, not from anyone but her.  Point is, her being with someone else is not an excuse for her treating me so badly as a friend.  She knows that too.  She knows she's been hurtful.  The question is whether she'll do anything about it.  Whether she will put this right.

 The way we parted was abrupt.  It was tragic.  Putting it mildly, it was without resolution for either of us.  It left questions, it left misunderstandings, and it left deep wounds that for me have never healed.  And if Dana absolutely cannot bring herself to speak with me, if her conscience cannot move her to act with any compassion...then I think she never healed either.  She might need this as much as I do.  Ironically, she runs from it at any cost.  The cage isn't me, it is her fear of facing me.  The bird within refuses to set itself free, thinking that removing me from her awareness will do the same thing.  I could move to the Moon and she wouldn't be free: If I died she would be in that cage for the rest of her life because she never faced her fear of speaking to me.

If I could get over this unaided, I would have a long time ago.  Her freezing me out without even telling me why will never make that happen (she seems to be betting that it will), it only makes things worse.  I love her and usually admire her, but the wounded part of me thinks she's a cold, selfish, cowardly, uncaring person unworthy of the hope I hold. She's used up the faith I used to have in her.
I've needed this every single day for thirty years: answers, resolution, closure (though her letting me back into her life would be preferable to closure and a decent, honest goodbye).  Dana finally offered closure to me this past October.  I was so close.  Then she pulled it away - and at the lowest, most terrified, most vulnerable point of my life.  Why would she do that??  How could she do it?  Why make the offer if she didn't mean it?  I've known people who didn't like me, and a few who hated me.  None of them ever did anything so heartless. 

I am certain that I have finally gotten a few things across to her, after having tried and failed for so long...that I am a fiercely loyal and dedicated friend, that I have always - always - been on her side and would have stood by her anywhere or backed her on anything.  And that I'm in love with her.  And that her absence and her silence have been damaging.  And two or three other things best kept private. 

I'm not ashamed of showing my pain.  I'm fighting for my soul with the only thing I have, words.  And I'm not going to hide my love for Dana Marie Cooper. Not from anyone, least of all Dana herself.  That's a lesson I learned long ago from another love I missed out on, someone I lost the chance to tell.  Diane Schwartz and I clicked (at YMA, Willamette  University campus, 1980).  Diane disappeared without ever knowing that she meant something to me.  I'll never let that happen again.

If I still mean anything to Dana at all, even just as a friend, she hides it magnificently.

Resurrection?

In some ways I will be glad to be gone from this life - I wish I could say that literally because I'm more than ready for that peace - from life here in Portland, from a good half of my family...from one insane, hostile, hate-filled sister and one sociopathic brother in particular.  I'll be glad to never see them again.  This could be a rebirth.  Jesseca cares about me, more than Dana ever has.  But Jesseca has her husband, I will only be a friend. 

I had wanted to marry Dana someday, and barring that at least be in her life.  The only ambition I've ever had in life had been to spend it with Dana, to mean something positive to her.  I've meant something to her alright, something she feels she has to be  rid of at all costs even to the point of treating me with contempt as she has for three decades.  Even reconciliation, even closure, is more than she can do as it means having to speak to me - a thing she cannot tolerate.  Even explaining it to me means breaking that imperative, so not only can I not have her friendship, I can't know why.  She has no idea how badly my heart is broken and doesn't want to know.  The promise of hope she offered in early October, she rescinded.  I don't know why she made it if she didn't mean it.  She got me through my mother's death with that false promise, anyway.  Now I have literally nothing left I desire to live for.  I sure don't want to stick around for more of the same shit, things just keep getting worse in ways large and small.  It's a promise of a future spent empty and hurt.  Why the fuck would I want it?? Dana is counting on me to accept that I will never hear from her again: her peace depends on my continued suffering. 

I want fucking out.  And that's a peace no one will let me have.  I've got strangers online sending police to my door to make sure I'm not committing suicide (which I wasn't)...that was the right thing for him to do, no question, but fucking hell let this pain end one way or another.

It isn't just that I'm in love with Dana, it never was that by itself.  There's a backstory about the rift that developed between us.  I can't discuss it because I'm still very protective of her despite the ice-cold way she's treated me all these years, her uncanny way of making me feel worthless.  She knows she's been cruel, but she continues to be so.  No pang of conscience stirs her to put this right.  So I continue to be heartbroken, not only for the abiding love I hold for her but also very much for our lost friendship.  My arms have always been open to her.  She never steps into them. 

It's like she resents actually meaning anything to anyone, I knew someone else like that.  Maybe if I didn't give a shit about her I'd still be welcome in her life.  I have to become someone I never wanted to be, someone I don't even like - indifferent, uncaring, cold to life and feeling.  Maybe that's the kind of person she wants anyway.  But those aren't her values.  Her values seem to be mine.  More's the loss.

My only hope is that I will have a rebirth in New York.  Maybe I can be someone different.  Maybe it will be a different life.  If only I could forget Dana Marie Cooper ever existed.  If only I could forget I ever existed.  There are people who have accidents that erase their memories and identities.  Some  even awaken with radically different personalities.  How I envy them.

Pardon the Hamster

Being forced to move and with no money, I have now sold all my Aurora model kits and all but two of my Polar Lights repops and originals.  I'm keeping the cold-cast porcelain Wolfman that Lisa Greco sent me, and the numbered Guillotine signed by the company owner Thomas Lowe.  All the rest...all my hard work, my award winners, my best paint jobs, all the evidence of my growth as a model builder...all gone.  My original Superboy and Captain America, gone.  My black-and-white Universal Monsters, gone.

Got a great price for them, anyway, and they went to a fellow modeler and an appreciative home.  Still, it was painful to see them go. 

I was a  kid in the Seventies when I found Aurora kits of the classic monsters at K-Mart.  These were the square-boxed glow kits, with the James Bama artwork vandalized to express that some of the parts were now being molded in glow-in-the-dark plastic.  There had been thirteen in the original line-up, with only The Bride of Frankenstein dropped for the glow series.  I built as many as I could before the line was discontinued.  I didn't know about painting them, and when I saw someone else had done so I went home and attempted it myself - using watercolors!

My Aurora collection grew when my mom signed me up for a "model of the month club", a way to get rid of overstock presumably.  They had models from any number of companies, and each month would surprise me with something random. 

As an adult I saw a picture in a magazine of the old Aurora Frankenstein.  Nostalgia, you see, eveything old was hot again.  Anyway, it was a fantastic paint job and I wanted to to do that too.  After a few months I brought all my old kits (in such poor condition) down from the attic, stripped them, took them apart, and did them all over again...starting with Frankenstein.  I did my best to recreate that wonderful paint job, and got nowhere near the mark.  What surprised me, though, was that I gave it my own touch...and was pretty damn good.  I'd never been that good, and had not been in practice for decades.  How did that happen?

About that time I discovered that a new company was cashing in on the nostalgia market and had bought the rights to a great many Aurora models (and the name Johnny Lightning, rival to Hot Wheels).  Playing Mantis began putting out the old kits under the new name Polar Lights.  They'd been at it for maybe a year when I stumbled across them.  They were using a daring new business model utlizing not just a web site but a message board for their customers to interact with each other and with the company itself.  The Polar Lights Bulletin Board would soon be featured in Inc. Magazine for its success and innovation.  I can proudly say that I spent some time as a volunteer moderator on that site under the screen name 'dreamer'.  The site was run by the company's public relations manager, the beloved Lisa Greco.

Doing those old kits allowed me to play around with color quite a bit.  I'd had some interesting ideas to experiment with, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.  For the Mummy I consulted the best color photos of Egypt and its ruins that the local library offered.  For Dracula, I painted the diorama of natural surroundings in dusty, dull earth tones to suggest death and decay, while the figure himself looked feverish in stark reds, whites, and blacks - the ideas to suggest he was a thing apart and thus not natural.  That idea didn't come communicate well.  PL's original Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera, OTOH, was a big success as I painted him and his organ (PLBB running joke) to suggest an old sepiatone photograph.  That one garnered me a Best in Class at Sci-Fan near Seattle.  For the matching King Kong and Godzilla builds, I did the Tokyo Terror in drab pastels to siulate the unrestored, faded look of the '60s movies, and did his Skull Island counterpart in rich earth tones highlighted by flecks of bright tropical colors.  Paired, but opposites.  It was the first time as an artist that I delved into color.  Now I'm beginning to experiment with it in two-dimensional painting.

There's a story about the demise of Playing Mantis under the new owners who bought it out, and how they treated their loyal community with disregard, the PLBB (and sister board for Johnny Lightning, the JLBB) with disdain, and the eventual dismantling of the company.   Inc. Magazine's praise had been lost on them.  They were bottom-liners.  There was also a lamentable disturbance in the force on the BB, which was not owned by PL but leased from a webmaster.  I ended up resigning as moderator to protest the treatment of the BB family, no longer allowed the freedom to do my job anyway.  People were looking to me to help them, protect them, and I couldn't having been essentially locked out by the guy with the keys.   I won't bother with all that, but I can say that Mr. Lowe eventually began again with a new company named Round Two.  He eventually won back the Polar Lights title and trademark and is now once again going strong.  I haven't checked to see if there's a new BB or online community.  Sadly, model kits had already become too expensive and I was priced out of the market.

They were good great times.  One of our running jokes was a phrase that one of our members coined, from a childhood memory involving his brother, the Aurora Guillotine, and a pet hamster that had been "condemned" by the French Revolution.   Thus is named this blog.

Someday I hope to do the complete line of those thirteen monsters again, in black and white.  And maybe this time I can keep them.  I had a grand scheme for the Salem Witch.

This is my third current blog.  The first is for reviews of movie and TV.  The second began as a chronicle of efforts to jumpstart my artistic endeavors, but as those efforts were undercut by a life slowly disintegrating the blog became something else: an art block blog with no art and a great many posts sounding off for the sake of my sanity.  Posts much like the ones I'm writing now, here.  So I've broken those off into their own blog.

Comforter

*********

I took mom's bedclothes out to the garage tonight, ready to donate to a place that helps women trying to escape abuse. Seeing them in a heap like that being discarded hurt more than most of what I've been having to lose. I held the blankets and cried some. I keep feeling as if mom is just gone out of town. It isn't sinking in because when it threatens to it overwhelms. I made a peanut butter pie a week ago and realized it's the last one I'll ever make in this house. I tried it with brown sugar this time. Wasn't strong enough to make a difference but either way mom wasn't here to try it.

I held mom's hand for a long time in the hospital. She was under sedation.  I told her when she sees a light, go to it.  . She had wanted me home, not there, so I left the hospital. I was told later what time she passed. It was during the ride home. During that ride, at the hour I was later told of, I'd had a sudden and vivid sense memory for a moment of holding her hand.

'Comforter' 18"x24", enamel and crayon on Masonite

Updated, color is more accurate in this shot, some details sharper except that the  whites are a bit snowed out.

Mom's hospice workers were named Claire and Tim.  Tim was Claire's assistant, being a teenager.  He spent a very long, careful time giving mom morphine.  When he finished, I thanked him for the care he'd given, and he looked surprised and embarrassed.  Claire was particularly kind.  They both were.

The one sister that lives here moved in about two years ago to help take care of my parents. She's not openly hostile to me most of the time but doesn't mind making things as difficult as possible, throwing up new roadblocks to me sorting my stuff while pushing me to get it done and passive-aggressively cutting me down...insisting we sell the house before I can ready a place to go is the worst part of it, scares the shit out of me and she knows it (doesn't care). The tension is there and some days worsens. The night after one of those damned 'family meetings' I dreamt that we had caused mom to retreat to her bed crying. We did that, we caused that.

Mom had had two children by her second husband before me. I was the one that lived. I had never heard of them from her and never knew until many years later. One, a girl, was told me by one of my sisters. The loss had put mom in a clinic. The other I learned of by accident when I was looking through some magazines being thrown out. Hidden among them had been a birth certificate for a brother born not much more than a year before I was. I never wanted to hurt mom by asking so I put the certificate back in hiding and soon it was gone. To my lasting shame I can't remember the name on the paper, what my brother's name was. I've never asked anyone else in the family and never will.

I remember my first Christmas - it had to be, because I remember not being able to walk, just crawl. I recall the living room in Vallejo, the tree towering in the corner with the blown-glass onion-shaped ornaments in all colors. I have an impression (but is it mis-shapen by what I have learned since?) of the many smiling adults who kept urging me to play with an arrangement of toys on the floor, and being reluctant to do so because I knew they weren't mine but belonged to another child. I was the only child there.

I had a nephew Tony, who was a year older than me. he died a few years ago after a troubled life of drug abuse and homelessness. I used to believe that he had visited us down there, but everyone swore up and down that he never left Portland. See, I thought Tony had been with us on this one occasion I remember of my father taking me to play at a park in Vallejo. I remember a structure with holes and tubes to climb through, which I and the other boy with me really enjoyed. He was only a little older than I was, about a year. I felt he was family somehow - why not, as he rode in the car home with us? But everyone swears that I was the only child on that trip.

*********

The above is the bulk of a slightly longer bit that I posted elsewhere a month ago.  It was in hopes of convincing a particular someone that deeply personal, even painful matters can be talked about - not necessarily openly like this, but even privately with, say, someone who cares.

Pretty sure she's put me completely out of her head at this point...  : (