I trip over my own threshold

I’m late arriving to the Blogosphere, though I have since 1995 sent out email journal entries of a sort each time I’ve left one part of the country for another, in an effort to keep track of the friends I’ve left behind. This is new behavior for a military brat; we usually just press on and don’t look back, and that’s a damned shame. Only the most tenacious of my friends (like Susan née Coop, the best leg-clinger since Howie Morris on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”) have managed to track me as I wander around the globe. The big loser in my old pattern was of course, I: trying to avoid the pain of separation, I just denied it all, looked forward to the next adventure and if people missed me, then that was their problem. Lonely out there, though, in Adventureland; it only took me 50 years to feel it, and it hurt! Hurt enough to drive me to extraordinary measures, i.e., to Writing.

I have had the mother of all writing blocks all of my life; writing (albeit infrequent) personal letters wasn’t as difficult for me as Writing Lit/Crit/Poetry/Essays, etc., since in correspondence there’s a connection to be made and maintained, so this bold step into actually keeping in touch with some detail was not as brave, nor as doomed, as would be a decision to Write (L/C/P/E). So, in my two major cross-country moves since 1995 (I didn’t count the 4 house-to-house moves in Atlanta), I wrote letters to my friends, and it was okay, on the whole. They seemed to enjoy them, and I felt I had found a place to put all my conflicting and burdensome feelings, a place other than in my digestive tract. I eventually put the Georgia-New Mexico letters up on our website -- http://www.villawisteria.org/JulsJournal/JJIndex.htm -- and got some surprising responses from all over the place. This was getting perilously close to Writing L/C/P/E, though, and it scared me, so I quit. I’ve still sent individual emails out to friends and family, but they’re usually short and mostly have to do with logistics or research into what TV to buy, etc. -- they’re not very newsy nor admittedly very self-revealing either.

There is one correspondent of mine who encourages me to pursue Writing L/C/P/E, and who is thoughtful and gentle enough not to pressure me in any way. Martina is a good friend, and was once a client of mine (I had a small but thriving Reiki practice in Atlanta); we know each other really very well, and she is a scholar, with a lively and curious mind. She wants to know the stuff I know (that’s the scholar part), and she wants to help me get it all out (that’s the friend part -- Martina knows that if I don’t dump some of this data in my head, I’ll blow up, fry my disk, pick your favorite metaphor for intellectual overload). Periodically, she’ll pose a puzzling question, asking my opinion about the nature of consciousness, or about relationships, or about nature vs. nurture, or something she has just mused about. I am enough of a yammerer to take great delight in opinionating; while I’m caught up in the sound of my own voice, asitwere, I quite forget that I’m WRITING, and really do enjoy it. After the fact, when I get wobbly and self-conscious and self-deprecating, I’ll ask her where the hell this is all going, what’s the hook, what’s the point, and she says, “Nevermind, just keep responding.” So I have, and here I am, and I’ll keep pounding away and be as brave as I can in the process.

Thank you, Martina. And thank you to all of my friends and family who have waited so patiently for me to set some of this stuff down; I am grateful to you all, more than I can say.

It is my intent not only to answer Martina’s questions (each and all of you can pick through those answers for what you find true for yourself, and blithely and confidently ignore the rest), but also to set down stories and events of my life as they come to me. My children have asked this of me, but I haven’t until now been able to contemplate actually doing a memoir, telling them smugly that I have been too busy LIVING my life to take the time to write it all down. They have also been patient, and I thank you, my dears. I hope not to disappoint.