24 Day Street

I grew up on 24 Day Street in Clifton, New Jersey. A 2 bedroom apartment. With my parents, my older sister and me. Window air conditioners and radiators. Thin walls, smoke from my father's cigarettes and Mets baseball games on TV. My mother was an accountant for the state of New Jersey. Not sure what my father did or who he worked for.. No one ever said. And I never asked.
It was a big deal to pick out material to recover the living room couch. And wallpaper for the hallway near the kitchen. Speaking of the kichen...The table we sat at night after night till I was seventeen, was no ordinary kitchen table. It was a block of long rectangular shaped wood that sat up against the wall. If you could picture a family, night after night, facing a wall, not each other. Did I mention no-one was allowed to talk? The only audible sound was our forks picking up the next mouthful of food. No conversation. No voices. Nothing. Just the tines of the forks and an occasional knife to cut whatever my mother made that night for dinner. I still remember the hole my father made, slamming his fork into the table when my sister and I forgot the unspoken rule.
As I write this, I feel the same sick feeling in my stomach that I did back then. But playing the old tapes actually makes you relive the experience verbatim. All of it. Every thought. Every feeling.
Getting thru something doesn't mean reliving it. Just the opposite. You give yourself new experiences to replace the old ones. Self-Love. Self-Nurturing. And at some point, you realize you don't have to live there anymore. At 24 Day Street.

So, I live in this little quaint cottage. Near the water. A slice of quiet perfection. I feel safe here in this space. Free to write my blog and my stories. To create. There's a story I'm writing now. It's actually a children's story for adults. Because I think that's one thing that's missing. That as we get older and conform to rules, we lose our childhood when we were free to look foolish and not care what the world had to say. Excuses were built into the system. "Well, she's just a child, she'll learn". And learn we did... except it was at the expense of ourselves. And the unrefined, joyful expressions that seemed to just be there. Even on bad days.
I think it's time to strike a balance between expectations and dizzy drops, remember those? You'd spin around and around until you literally dropped. Of course today, I'd probably throw up from that.
Do you remember how heavenly a new box of Crayola's smelled? Or how cold Play-Do felt oozing through your fingers fresh out of the jar? Did you ever take a nibble? I did.

Some memories have to stay where they are. I can't bring my Nana back. I can't see her soft hands with painted fingers in hot pink anymore. I can't smell her chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven.
But I can open my heart to my inner child. To play. To paint. To dream. In my little quaint cottage. Near the water.

Living The Questions...

A famous poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem about living life's questions. Accepting that today you don't have the answers. And that if you're not willing to live the questions today, the day isn't yours. Because you've wasted it.. wondering.
As I pour my third cup of coffee, I think about this and I decide that I'm going to start living the questions. Because in a lot of ways, I feel like I've missed a lot of my life. Thinking, wishing and
wondering, not living.
And the answers never came until the moment they were ready to reveal themselves. Not once. Ever.
There's a rhythm to life. Like water finding its way home. Refusing to live the questions means that we want to change life's rhythm, that somehow we know better.
Because we don't like to wonder.
I'm thinking that I don't want to miss any more of my life sleepwalking through my days. I am living the questions, respecting life's rhythm, safe in the knowledge that the answers will come
in their time, not mine.

Welcome To My Life..

I'm 53 and never married. 3 proposals. The first one was at 27 when I had a perfect body; I don't anymore in case you're wondering. He used to leave, say he was going to the store for cigarettes and return 3 hours later. Hmm, that's odd. Turns out he was a crack addict trading sexual favors to get high. I know what you're thinking, quite a catch. The 2nd one had a real job. He was a film composer, uh, ghost writer in L.A. I moved there in 1989, lived with him for 3 years. He proposed but said I couldn't tell anyone. No, I didn't love him. Now the last one, that was different. Not because he was a great guy because as it turns out, he wasn't. The beginning was incredible, (the setup) then he became controlling to the point where I couldn't change the radio stations in the car. He would twist my words into something I couldn't even recognize and then ignore me for a week because I hurt him. When he proposed, things were still good. It's a shame he didn't tell me he was already married to someone else. He must've forgotten.

This last relationship is what brought me to blogging. I needed a place where I could speak freely, where I didn't have to watch every word I said, where I could just be me. Was hoping it would've been in a relationship, but it never was. My path was leading me somewhere else. (I hate when that happens.) Oh, before I forget, I said the last one was different; he was. Because this one I loved. I don't know what makes us love one person and not another. Do you? Anyway, since we've been apart, my life has been peaceful. I got a dog. And writing has always been my passion. So, here I am, sharing my life with the world. Scary? No. For the first time, I am saying what I really think. What I really feel. And for me, there's no greater freedom.