Abuse

I’ve been thinking about abuse lately. About what is abuse and what isn’t.

There’s a two-year-old who is being starved most mornings. She has adults forcing things down her throat, things that aren’t food. She’s being stabbed in the chest, regularly exposed to damaging levels of radiation, her lungs are intentionally flooded with fluid. She’s got a piece of plastic permanently embedded in her back. She’s so full of drugs and chemicals that she’s sick half the time.  She’s not allowed to play, not allowed to see anyone, not allowed to go to church.

And this is a cure!

She has leukemia, and has had bad reactions to a new kind of treatment, and all of this, and more, has been in the name of keeping her alive! It’s not abuse. It’s sanctioned! By doctors and nurses and teams of people, and heartbroken parents.

Then there are two other girls. One is twelve, the other one is fourteen. They’ve been psychologically abused for ten years by a woman that the courts still allow custody to. This woman has sexually abused the older girl, physically abused the younger. She’s kicked them in the head, convinced them that everything evil will get them when not by her side, done everything her power to get them to hate their birth father and his new wife, just so that she can have power over him. For TEN YEARS.

 She’s caused self-harm behaviors in the youngest, and self-destructive stupidity in the oldest.

Guess who these girls are accusing of abuse?

The step-mom. Because she won’t let them run roughshod over the rules when they’re in their father’s house.  Because she won’t replace IPads that the girls were too careless to keep in working condition. Because she wants perfectly healthy preteen girls to help with chores, spend some time playing outside, not act like brats and swear at the dinner table.  Because she’s preparing them for adulthood, they’ve decided she deserves the shaft. So they went along with their birth mom and accused the step-mom of trying to strangle them.

Never mind that there aren’t any bruises, marks or any indication at all of this abuse. And because social services always has to investigate every claim, the step-mom is being questioned after coming home from work, at a job where she is over worked, and overqualified with a master’s degree in psychology.

So I gotta wonder. How can a two-year-old, with leukemia, put up bravely, day in and day out with the torture of her treatment with more fortitude than an abused fourteen year old being asked to take out the trash?

And why are the teenagers putting up, day in and day out, with the woman whose only motivation is using her daughters to get at their father, but decide to attack the one woman who has their best interests in mind?

I’ve never been more ashamed of teenagers, and more proud of a toddler before in my life.

A Rant

I am regularly the recipient of comments like, "You should smile more.", "Smile, Dawn, come on smile?" and "Why you gotta be like that?"

I have people pay me compliments, and when I do not immediately perk up in response to them, they backtrack, back flip and go out of their way to try and rescue the comment and make it "work". 

I encounter people everyday who have nervous ticks like laughing at things that aren't even remotely funny, repeating the same pet name over and over again in a conversation (honey, dear, hon, love, etc.), or being excessively nice with the mantra of "kill them with kindness." 

For those of you whom I have upset, confused, insulted or ignored, here's why. 

1) Think about what you say before you say it. Get into the habit of counting to five or ten before making a knee jerk comment. Before you laugh at something anecdotal or mundane, think about it...is it actually funny? Is it even necessary to the conversation? Are you in fact redirecting attention to yourself that should remain on the person speaking? How about, has this person probably already heard this joke a bazillion times today and just doesn't have the wits to laugh at it one more time? Do you know how to make an awkward situation less awkward? Say nothing...

2) Any human being who has ever taken a selfie or looked in the mirror on a good day, or revisited an old photo of themselves is aware of how good they look when they are smiling. It isn't information that only you bear that God has ordained you to disperse about the land. Yes, you are right, I do look better when I'm smiling. Has it occurred to you that perhaps my looks are not my number one concern at all times? Just because you are attracted to my smile does not mean that it was my intention or purpose. I don't need to be reminded to smile as if it were something I forgot to put on this morning. If I'm not smiling, it's for a reason. So...instead of correcting the surface problem, how about showing some concern for the underlying problem. If you really want to know why I'm not smiling, you can ask, "Is everything okay with you?" I may answer with a straight forward honest response, or I may politely inform you that it is none of your business. But I will always thank you for taking the time to ask. I won't thank you for telling me to smile. No one will. No person lives in a bubble. All of our lives have depth. Stop treating me like a one dimensional mask that needs reshaping. Treat me like a person, or else leave me alone.

3) I had someone compliment my outfit today. I put no extra thought into it. Usually I plan my outfits in my head spending just enough time to reassure myself that I will be decently and not horribly dressed. Sometimes the plans flesh out great. Other times not so much, but the end purpose for me is: Am I decently dressed? Can I get to work without being ordered to change my clothing? I manage to achieve this, about 100% of the time. So at work this lady complimented my clothes. My response was a polite, "Thank you." I'm not sure what response she was hoping for, but clearly, that wasn't it. She proceeded to cajole, apologize, repeat and justify her statement until she had to move to the side so that another person could be served. If your compliment does not receive the aplomb that you were hoping for, especially if it was given to someone with which you have only a professional or casual relationship, just leave it be. Don't try to save it. Just let it go. It was a nice thought. Try another time. For all you know you've just complimented someone on the outfit they plan to wear to a funeral. Unless they are looking for a compliment, you probably aren't going to get the full satisfaction you are hoping for. That's ok. Just leave it be. All that trying to save it will do is expose your insecurities, and that doesn't need to happen at someone else's place of work. Unless you are visiting your psychoanalyst...

4) Not everybody is happy. I was never diagnosed but I dealt with severe mood swings, emotional upheavals, self-doubt, self-mutilation...essentially teen angst and depression times what felt like a-ja-zillion from middle school to my college years. There were triggers. There were bad solutions, and good ones. I have been dealing with it and growing stronger since. No medication involved A) because I am poor, B) I've never been diagnosed and C) if I can't learn to cope without meds, having meds won't fix me. Meds will become yet another crutch.

The roller coaster has begun to level off as I mature. I see more normal, strong, productive, victorious days than I used to. I have....VERY...FEW....ecstatically happy days. I'm talking, whole 24 hour days that happen without a major dive of some kind. Most of these dives are self-made or just life, but I don't have SUPER happy days. And frankly, I don't want them. I can't rely on super happy days. I can rely on the normal, flat, lil' bit bumpy days with tiny little peaks. 

When I know that I have a terrible day ahead of me, fraught with all the things that freak me out, or dump me at the bottom, I start out at a low frequency and I do everything in my power to stay there. I won't fake happy. I can't fake happy. It isn't worth it to fake happy. I don't need other people to bring me up. I don't ask for it. I don't expect it. Most of the time I just want to be left alone, so that I can keep on, keeping on, until the bad stuff is over. Because as soon as people get added into the mix, the roller coaster starts up again. And I peak and dive and people start making comments about the "crazy bitch". Actual quote. 

I don't need a sign warning the world about me. I don't expect the world to understand me at a glance. I'm like hundreds of thousands of other people also dealing with this stuff. What I do need is for the people living in their bubbles to venture out a little into reality. 

Let's recap. 

1) Think about what you say before you say it. Five to ten second count. For some of you, start with just listening to a conversation for ten minutes without adding your two cents. See what you learn.

2) DO NOT tell people to smile unless you are a professional photographer or a dentist. If they aren't smiling, there is a reason. If you really care, ask. If not, it's none of your business. LEAVE them alone. (For the truly adventurous, try asking, "What could I do right now that would bring a smile to your lips?")

3)Some people care about their appearance, some people don't. If your compliment fails, that's fine. Leave it where it is. Someone will pick it up. Compliments are never wasted, and never need to be saved.

4)Not everyone is "happy" and not everyone can be "happy". Concentrate instead on "joy". If you believe in prayer, pray for joy and satisfaction for those you love. Not happiness.

You can choose to ignore all this. You can choose to take it to heart. But keep in mind, whether you believe it or not. I do! This is how I live. Does that matter to you?

Librarian Thoughts...

I've been working here over two years, and I've learned about the quirks of humanity.  I have learned that my coworkers (like Miss Kate) can be highly unpredictable, supportive and jovial. I've learned that the public is a rioting, crazy, insane mess and we can't control it once it walks through the door. The public, as a communal beast, tends to be cranky, whiney, self-centered and a pathological liar, but there are some parts of it that are worthwhile. The rest of it is a disease magnet.

But most of all I've learned, when the public runs out of people to complain to, they assume that the people their taxes pay are the replacements.

Yay for being a public servant.

Differences

This morning broke bright and early and loud with birds. It is spring in my little town despite the thirty something degrees with spitting snow that hit us Saturday. And today it got up to sixty something with a cloudless sky and a strong willed breeze.

I spent the morning luxuriating my way through pork and cooked apples with brown sugar, played a few senseless games on the computer and rejoiced in the fact that after a rather lengthy period of being sick and weak, I was enjoying nourishing food made by my own hand, once again.

Around one o'clock I decided that I was bored enough to make work sound like fun. I put on my cap and some good work clothes, grabbed a water bottle and headed out into the glare of sunlight. It was perfectly pleasant and I put my back into digging up, raking, molding and reshaping my small vegetable garden; tossing out the stones, collecting the clay, making it ready for the planting that should happen late April/early May.

When I stopped to grab a sip of water I would turn toward the house and see my three-year-old, black furred monster staring at me with vibrant yellow eyes, meowing through the glass. I worked until the main plot was done and my trenches dug.

 

 



It looks a little like badly dug grave. I was tempted to put up a grave stone. "Here lies the garden, which will rise from its rest sometime in August." Or maybe just a cross made of sticks, and let the obnoxious neighbor kids wonder.

But I had other fish to fry.

Last year I planted the beginnings of a flower garden behind our garage. Long, long ago that prime sunlit space was reserved for an herb garden and a stone path and several other niceties. We even had a pond. In point of fact this garden space above used to be part of a waterfall that started at the red pump and cascaded into a small pool of its own. But I like it better as a garden. Easier to take care of.

So, too, is my 'flower garden' in the back. It needed some weeding and sorting so I worked my way back there and first tackled the bent over, sagging, broken backed mess that used to be a lattice supporting morning glories.

They do well in the summer...

But by the time windy fall and snow heavy winter has passed, they are a dried crumpled heap leaning over and breaking apart the lattice.

This year they were heavy enough to topple the cinder block that I was using to support the post that was tied to the lattice.

All winter I have been pondering a better way of letting them climb, while not spending money and having it be..."me".

I'm so proud of this thing. I made it! I sunk the feet of it about three inches into the ground and I'm hoping that the tri-pod-esque base will distribute the weight of the plant and maybe make some interesting photos once the flowers bloom.

A good friend of mine, after seeing this photo, has determined that the 'evil' morning glories will take it down without a problem. I'd like to the think the amount of time I spent pounding crooked nails in with a hatchet will count for something.

I couldn't find a hammer.

So after my Morning Glory Oil Derek went up I tore the weeds out of a patch of nothing then played a game of find the lilies.

I planted these Asiatic lilies last year and they bloomed right about the start of July. A month later the blooms had fallen off and all I had was tall, beheaded stalks. But here they are, all five, growing away. I could swear that some of them have migrated since last year...

I had planted some other things back here the year before but I didn't see anything else that looked more like flower and less like weed. I was tired and about ready to call it a day anyway so I began to clean up the yard.

After a quick run to the store I was able to put spinach leaves, frozen berries and soy milk into the blender and I took my yummy smoothie (not a health freak, just happen to appreciate smoothies, as they save time) out into the yard.

I walked around a bit admiring the plants and trees, some of which have been in our yard since my mother and father planted them over thirty years ago. We have a patch of pine trees and a giant honeysuckle bush/tree. A few oaks and one maple tree. In the back I was pleased to find my rhubarb growing strong after the last few days of rain. A few more of those days and I'll have my first harvest.

I stood under the old white pine, enjoying its shade and the natural wind chimes of the breeze in the needles and the wind coming in off the farmer's field that backs up right against our property.

My next door neighbor had been out all day too, which is his routine on any day that ends in 'y'. My neighbor, Mr. Forester, is the Mr. Monk of lawn care. On hands and knees with scissors going after crab grass. Cuts the bushes with level in hand to get perfectly straight lines every time. He has two dogwood trees, precisely eight feet apart, with trunks centered in a perfect square of grassless dirt. His garden is a rectangle in which he plants the same crops, in perfect straight rows, every year.

He has bushes and some flowers around the front of his house, and one large shade tree, and grass. Thick, green, manicured, rolled, weed free grass.

There are none of these in his lawn...

I can remember Mom telling us expressly not to mow over these for fear that they wouldn't come back up. Not that I intentionally mowed over them, but on the rare occasions that I accidentally did, they clearly didn't seem bothered at all. And they only grow under the shade of the maple tree.

A little splash of beauty in our slightly rustic yard that simply doesn't exist next door.

I stood at the back of our property, peering around the end of our neighbor's wooden slat fence, staring at his squared, over treated, boring yard eternally grateful for the dappled, dirt worn, crooked, stick strewn, patchy glory of my back yard.

The more I stared at his geometrical landscaping the more I realized that, in total opposition to my own feelings, he probably LIKED his yard that way. After all he spent every waking hour out caring for it.

I would be perfectly unbothered by his peculiarities and be able, even, to enjoy them a little if it weren't for the fact that he had been forcing his yard care beliefs on my family for decades. But a small amount of the old bitterness was wiped away by two things. First...I don't care what he says, I like my home, outside and inside, and I will improve it as I see fit. And second...though I've never felt envy for his yard, ever, I did feel sorta sorry for its dullness today.

I think I should sneak in some night and plant something. Smack in the middle of the yard. Like a cactus. But a nice flowering cactus. See what he does.

As the beautiful day continued I took pity on the monster and allowed him a little time outside, keeping very close tabs on my otherwise 'inside' cat. He explored for a frolicking ten minutes before signalling he was ready to go back in. And of course five minutes of 'in' time and he was meowing to go back out again.

Didn't happen.

I was delighted though and I'm looking forward to more great planting days in the future. In the meantime I'm still thinking about my neighbor and his infatuation with his yard and wondering...is there some way to bond the rift that has existed between him and my family since before I can remember?

Maybe a friendship cactus isn't so far fetched an idea?

I may be grinning impishly now but, if they were a way to make peace between our two households, I hope it comes during the growing season.

Fire

I lit a fire today. It's been a rough, tough couple of months and someone that I am tertiarally familiar with passed away. Work has been less and less desirable and in the meantime I've basically been without energy and sick in some way or other since January.

Today was especially tiring and after taking a long nap or two I decided to enjoy our first spring storm with a cheery fire.

On the one hand, bad idea. Part of my on going health battle has been a week and a half old headache that makes my eyes especially sensitive to light. I couldn't do a disco, I barely managed the fire.

But while I was squinting painfully into its homey light it reminded me of a bunch of fires.

The Snowman Island Fire

My little sister and I, back around the time of middle school, would often end up at the college campus where my father taught, on dreary and boring summer afternoons. We played in the classrooms drawing on every black board, pretending that the room was a submarine, or the USS Enterprise. Or explore the campus and the woods surrounding it.

One particular afternoon we had a bag of apples, some matches, and a pocket knife. We headed out down the creek that runs through the campus, clomping over familiar rocks and deer trails and hopping across small runs of water that collected either side of sandbars. Each of those sandbars were islands, and of course we named them.  One of those sand bars was a large patch of stone and sand that looked suspiciously like a giant snowman.

We were hungry by the time we reached it. We hunted for sticks and pine needles and dry weeds and piled it all up on the sand bar and found sticks for the apples and lit the fire, then ate roasted apples all alone out in the wilderness.

A 12 year old and a 9 year old. I'd like to see a 9 year old do that these days!

The Mohican Trail Fire

Some time in the middle of college, after I had started to save the stipend I was receiving, and after the roommate that disgusted me and the old friend that delighted me became girlfriend and boyfriend, I suggested a hiking trip. We were meant to go about two hours south of campus but ended up two hours west. I was driving, the lovers were napping in the back.  I pulled the smoothest redirect that I could and went north and we ended up, four hours later, at a state park that should have only taken thirty minutes to reach.

But we made it.

Then I got us lost by leaving the trails. We walked briefly down some back country roads and trespassed in a couple of fields, headed down a steep and slippery valley full of giant granite boulders, then finally found our way back to the trails.

Then we built a fire! I had bought some food and we worked together to gather sticks. But we really didn't have a good starter. So I burned a shoe box that was in amongst the junk in my trunk.

Then soaked to the bone we all went back to my roommate's house and my old friend burned a sock on her wood burning stove.

The Underpass Fire

When things at school became too much to handle, I had many less-than-constructive bad habits to turn to. But, one of the good habits, involved walking off campus (at all hours...) and up to the overpass that spanned more of the same river.

Sometimes I brought food with me. One time when I went with a friend, we scarfed some of the corn that was lying in a plowed field just behind the college.

The rocky decline on one side was perfectly shielded. I don't know how many bikes, footballs, tennis balls, socks, hoodies and beer bottles I saw there. But the underpass also captured organic material and there was always an excellent collection of drift wood.

When my friend and I went down we roasted the field corn. On my own I might have a can of spaghettios or beans. I would sit and smoke a cigar, or write something, or just listen to music. I would listen to the cars whispering by underneath and just take a step back into time.

The Bad News Fire

I was sixteen, getting ready a week in advance for the trip I would be going on once school ended. I was headed for Cali to join up with a song and dance tour exploring the South Western United States. I was in the back yard, burning old paper trash from my room when I heard some cars pull up in the driveway.

I was mad, for some reason or another. Or maybe just melancholy from watching old reports and drawings and story starts burn up. But for whatever reason I had no interest whatsoever in going to see who had just arrived.

Ten minutes passed before two of the ladies from my church ventured back to the burn barrel. They were acting like someone had died. They wanted me to come inside. They said, "Your father needs you."

I knew I didn't want to have anything to do with the hands on powwow they were preparing me for. It couldn't possibly be good news. And to this day it sorta irks me that Dad couldn't have just told me the news instead of 'inviting' someone I barely knew to do it.

But that afternoon I was told that my mother had left, she had disappeared over night leaving only a note on Dad's pillow. She wanted a divorce.

The minute I could get out of the house I ran up to my (then) best friend's house. We talked, I was upset but I didn't cry. And on the way home there was a thunder storm.

Other Fires

At camps, at reenactments, in other parks or on trails, at home, at my uncle's home, once using steel and flint, even fake fires!

It has always been a part of my life, a talent that worked hard to earn, and bright beacon leading to many, many memories. Shame I couldn't enjoy today's memory.

Water (Living Or Otherwise)

I passed by a church on my walk tonight. This church has been in my hometown for a while, and been in my life for all of it. My best friend's father became the pastor after a man that our family lovingly called "Grampa Straiter" stepped down. Since then the church building has housed several different faiths, including the Baptists it hosts now.

The building is simple, white, and small, and even though it has changed and expanded over the years, it is still nothing more than a couple of rooms. Next to it is a long brick building that hasn't changed at all.

I remember being little and getting delight out of being the one to suggest the next hymn. I remember I would always suggest "The Old Rugged Cross". Not necessarily because I liked it, but because my Grammy did, and even if she wasn't there, we might as well sing a song that somebody liked.

I remember standing in the bright sunlight of an Easter morning, on the black top in front of the red brick building, decked out in dresses that Mom made and eager to get to the sunrise breakfast that would precede the service.

Or being in the youth group and spending the better half of the evening getting rug burns in a hearty game of dodge ball.

Or attending summertime VBS and making crafts, some of which I still have.

Everyone in the church, but for my family, was elderly. That's part of why we left.

Eventually even so aged a crowd managed to out grow the building and our old church raised money and built a building outside of town where they still hold services.

Since then I've been to a million churches.

But my walk carried me past the church's doors and I noticed that the lights were on. It is, after all, the Friday before Easter.

I walked up to the doors and peered through them, listening to the wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth going on inside.

Then a little three year old child came running up to the veranda style doors that lead to the vestibule and pushed her way through them, making a beeline for the standing water cooler tucked into the corner.

No one came chasing after the child and she seemed perfectly contented as she moved the trash can away from where it stood, propping the doors open, dragged it to the cooler, and started fishing discarded water cups out of it.

Then, with no understanding of communicable diseases or the dangers there in, she proceeded to fill, and drink from, every single cup.

Following this fearless fete came the passing of water from one cup to another before it went into her mouth. And the occasional moment when she would either dump or spit water back into the trash can.

She finished her performance by meticulously seating one cup into another until she had a stack, then dumping them back into the trash can and returning to the sanctuary. No adult noticed. No adult went after her.

I didn't think of it then, but I hope now that God protected the poor girl from disease and sickness and that someone, somewhere down the line will teach her to do otherwise.

What I was thinking of at the time was very different however.

I was thinking about Easter.

About Jesus pouring water that turned to wine.

About Jesus pouring wine that turned into the mark of a traitor.

About that traitor leading Jesus to His arrest and capture and ultimately to His crucifixion.

About how we call Jesus the Living Water...and about a certain woman at a well.

And about how often water is used in the Bible, primarily because it is so absolutely necessary to life.

And how a room full of wailing, moaning, convulsing adults was nothing compared to the simplistic testimony of a little girl getting complete fulfillment from a cup (or more) of water.

Kinda like the adults wailing in D.C., making noise and calling it a fight for freedom. When the true freedom is as simple as taking a drink of water.

I dunno...

Happy Easter..

Broken Glass

I went to my old high school today. It ceased to be a working school building shortly after my youngest sibling graduated, I think.

I've been there plenty of times since it was remodeled, but never really down most of the halls.

A lot of it has changed.

The senior hallway was rebuilt so that the Board of Education could use it as office space. Most of the rest of the classrooms are being used by the Senior Activity Center and a couple other organizations, including a chapter of a tech school. But today the building was mostly shut down but for the old cafeteria, which hosted a hoard of students preparing to participate in a charity run.

I was there for moral support and to meet up with a good friend of mine who is, and was, a teacher at the old high school and, now, the new one.

I got there early. Not one to hang out in a flock of teenagers if I can possibly avoid it, I ventured down the halls that still existed, a little surprised that no one had seen fit to pull the lockers out yet. The first hall was the 'science' hall.

As I walked down it I remembered that the first door on the right was the classroom for one of my favorite teachers. He had a Mr. Roger's meets Bill Nye The Science Guy quality to him. And I did a lot of diary and note writing in that class...not necessarily because of the teacher. Mostly because there were days when I got done with my work quickly and decided to do other things instead. I also remembered that the only violent outburst I recall happening at my school happened right there, in the hall. And the science teacher had to step in and seperate the boys.

Another room to the left was the room where I took anatomy. It was one of the few classes I liked because it was hands on, and I could stay awake better, and the time didn't drag, if we did hands on things. I was always good with my hands. We got to dissect rats in that class as our final project, and since I had the only pregnant rat I got to 'give birth' to the babies with everyone watching. I learned two things that day. One of them was that I wasn't nearly as squeamish as most of the other people in the room, and that I was a kinetic learner. I learned more from dissecting that rat, than I did from a whole semester of lectures.

Up the hall on the left were more room doors. At least one of them I was sure didn't exist when I went to school. But on the left was a room that I knew very well.

The computer room.

I took computer class and journalism there. I remembered the typing tests we did at the start of every class, and that my best friend and I always sat beside each other, both because our last names were together on the class list, and because we wanted to be side by side when we took the test. Both of us had typing speeds upwards of 90 wpm, often breaking 100 wpm.

Journalism was different. I got into the occasional bit of trouble with it. Mostly I hated magazine layouts, loved typing out spoofs for the April issues, and for a brief time made a total mockery of the horoscope portion of the paper. I think I was my biggest fan then.

The hall ended there, becoming a new wall that someone had put up to finish the offices for the Board of Education. I doubled back and headed down towards the band hall.

The best place. Past the place where the stairs used to be that would let you go to the basement classrooms. Rooms that had been torn down when the high school moved, mostly because of the incipient mold that grew everywhere.

I turned down the hall and I walked very slowly down the first set of stairs, past the locker room entrances. I felt the pock marked, painted brick walls; leading to the double door entryway that I almost didn't want to see, for fear that the room was no longer there.

I stepped into the door well and jumped. Someone had set up a dummy right inside the door and it was dark enough to make the expressionless face lifelike.

Sixteen years ago, it had started. Even before I became a high schooler. I had been in love with the marching band the day my family attended the State OMEA competition. We sat in the stands eating peculiar sandwiches that my father had concocted and watched as the band thrilled us.

My brother, in the percussion section, was all snap and flare and military precision; and when they were done and the judges started handing out the prizes, our boy (and a hundred other teenagers) won, receiving the highest possible rating.

The next two years, while I labored away in junior high, I spent the weekends helping the marching band at competitions and games.

Thirteen years back I was a freshman. Finally allowed to be a part of the band. A part of the big kid club that I had been longing for so very long. And better still I was there with my big brother. The hero of my life. Every day of that year was fantastic. The band did great, and I, a clarinetist, was confident and excited and fully dedicated to the work.


Twelve years back and I was a sophomore. I hated school, hated life in general, saw my family going down the tubes, and had lost the small amount of guidance that my big brother had provided me. But when band was happening I was happy. Even if it was a little scary. I had only had the preparation of my freshman year of concert band on the trombone, and now I was the head of the section, along with another newbie, a former flautist.

Eleven years back I was a junior, not quite as sure about leading my section, but giving it my best shot. I had just had an argument with my divorced mother and was in a hurry, late getting to rehearsal. I rushed into the horn storage room, grabbed my trombone, then tripped over the slew of empty cases cluttered in the narrow room and went face first into the lip of a baritone case.

A moment later, on hands and knees, I found myself staring at a puddle of blood collecting on the tile beneath me. The assistant director came in, helped me stand up and mopped up the blood. But busted nose or not, the band was the only thing I wanted to do that night, and working around my swelling lip, I went out and marched into the dark, evening hours, with seventy other kids.

Back about ten years I was a senior clomping down those stairs at a few minutes before eighth period, grabbing my beat up tenor trombone from a case labeled "The Big Monty" then rushing my section back out the door to line up for pregame formation on the practice field. And keeping a watchful eye on the clarinet section, where my freshman sister was just beginning.

I had decided then that I wanted to be a music teacher. I got the chance to direct a few times and I was given the "Director's Award" at our banquet at the end of the year. Not quite the "Sousa Award" that my brother got but...

I stood today, outside that room, sniffing at the dust that was choking the concrete hallway, wishing I could go in there, just one more time. I knew the trophies were gone, and that my old band teacher wasn't going to be in his office. That I wouldn't see the plunger that my brother's class got for the teacher, with "That Crap Don't Flush" burned into the handle. Nor the cymbal that the percussion ensemble signed or the myriad of other bits and pieces that had sparked so much into what was otherwise a lifeless high school career.

One of the students that was participating in the run started down the hallway and I decided salivating on the band room door was unseemly. I continued down the hallway, down past what used to be the shop class room and to the health room door. Down near the band entrance was the old wall mounted heater and I perched against it for a bit.

The old high school wasn't what it used to be. Not hardly. But those two hallways alone had brought back so many ghosts of memories, so sharp and strong. Memories that crowded out other ones.

My family is scattered now and relationships aren't what they used to be. I don't have the friends I had then.  But in that brief walk it felt like I was watching the shattering of glass reversing it self in slow motion. All the little scattered, microscopic pieces returned precisely to the position in which they belonged without a gap.

Some people say our memories are deceptive, but I disagree. I think our memories now are as wonderful or as awful, as our present was then.

Like watching a reverse of glass breaking. The glass is always perfect in the end.

Bookless Libraries

Some...okay well, part of one....of my works has been published recently on a website that, as I understand it, intends to become a magazine. I was the first person that the editor contacted which made me feel special up until I started reading all the other works that he was starting to compile and well...now I feel kinda sad and lonely and vastly under-talented in comparison with the others...

The site is called Site Unseen and it's unique, certainly. More than anything I've started looking into the blog that the editor has included and I'm learning things from it. But this morning my hackles rose just a little when I read yet another article about an encroaching storm known as paperless technology.

http://unseenfiction.com/2013/01/18/bookless-library-a-reality/#respond

The above link will take you to the specific article. I encourage you to read it first before getting to my commentary below. And from the above page you can of course explore the other authors that have been featured on the site and hey...! If it makes it to the stands, buy the magazine!

Here is the response that I started typing in the 'Leave A Comment' section, before I realized that my comment was more than three paragraphs.

First I am a librarian. We see a standard collection of people day in and day out.

When I look at that photo of the prospective lay out for a 'bookless library' I cringe. What I see, in between the pretty pixels of that image, is a collection of the worst of what we get in the library every day. And I do stress that this is the 'worst', and not necessarily, the 'only' patronage we get.

The first thing I see is a row of teenagers navigating around any excuse for security on the computers and finding illegal download sites for games, music and pornography, and anything else they can take advantage of thanks to the free Internet that most modern libraries now provide.

Off in another corner, where they are alone only by virtue of no one else daring to be near them is the massive swelling, seething beast known as the homeless and chronically unbathed.

Children, men, women, teenagers, older persons. All of them with their own weird, and sometimes lethal, quirks, all of them with their own foul and oft 'turpentine' strength stench, spending four to eight hours of their day watching YouTube videos, posting funny stories on Facebook and updating their blogs. And none of them, and I say this from experience, not one of them actually using the Internet to search for a job.

Yes there are those that come in and use the computers briefly to print, because they haven't got printing capability at home. There are some regulars that use the computers for writing projects, research, or some of the many historical or educational resources that they have free memberships to thanks to their library patronage.

But the the main, and ultimate, attraction of computers in a library today is free Internet.

We only have eight computers. We're a small town library. Imagine how much worse it gets in bigger towns, cities! Megacities!

I never do see the homeless people in the stacks. Rarely do they actually take a book off the shelf and open it up. The chairs we have stationed around are rarely ever used because there is nothing effortlessly entertaining sitting in front of them. If they are used it is by the homeless so that they can catch a quick nap.

The only person who does move from the computers to the stacks and back again is so blind that he has to hold the book less than a few inches away from his nose in order to read.

No human being could stand to be that close, and the computer screen is wiped down every day thanks to our certainty that he is the main source of colds and flues in our place.

Maybe I sound a little harsh but when your everyday health expectation lies in the hands of people who can't be bothered to bathe, blow their nose, or cover their mouth, and especially when you know that people who never set foot in the library when they are healthy, are guaranteed to come out to grab materials if they know they will be home sick for several days, you quickly lose appreciation for them.

So now they want to put these disease ridden, smelly, loud, rude, self-entitled and self-centered people into a tiny building with row after row of super close stools with nothing but germ-collecting surfaces between them!? And they say this is our bright and shiny future!?

We're not even touching on the population that is sixty and over. Many of whom don't have an e-mail address because they are so afraid that if they turn on their computer it will immediately be attacked by viruses and identity thieves and they won't be able to protect themselves from the big scary Internet!

Most of this age group will come in hoping to pay a bill online armed with nothing but their bank debit card and a stack of scrap paper, with wavering scribbles covering them. These 'notes' that they've taken are ultimately useless because the person who helped them the first time, usually a grand child, didn't bother to explain what they were doing, or teach their grand parent how to do it themselves. They just did it.

I have met fifty year olds that don't know what a mouse is for, forty year olds that don't know how to 'hunt and type'. Thirty year olds that can't spell 'Google'. Twenty-somethings that have to ask for my help because they can't find their e-mail. I.E. "I typed yahoo into the thing and I got here!"

Here turns out to be a Google search for the word 'yahooooo'.


And these are not people that I would have placed in the learning disabled category. These are people that work for a living in a small but real world where computers just don't exist beyond a cash register and a hand scanner.

Granted I live in farming country, but even I am shocked at how technology has disappeared for some Americans.

So, bookless libraries. Please...give me a break. Those aren't libraries, those are Internet cafes. Only the sign says 'no food and drink', instead of 'come in and have a coffee'.

By the way, whatever the sign says, they will still bring in picnic lunches.

Bad Ideas and NaNoWriMo

I think I've taken a full departure from the original purpose of this blog. In fact my reenacting career may be taking a semi-permanent back seat depending on what happens with my unit following Gettysburg next year.

In the meantime I've rediscovered a way to get back into the theatre world, which is something that I've missed since my former theatre group came to a close last May, after fourteen years of performances. I also just scored a singing gig with a Jazz/Swing/Funk band and while I was mind-blowingly nervous before I sang, I did enjoy every moment of it.

For the first time ever I had someone explain to me the meaning of NaNoWriMo and I kinda sorta took up the challenge, writing lots and lots of words. Unfortunately the words took the form of about three different stories, all of them fan fiction.

But I had fun, and I challenged myself to complete some things.

I have also received my Christmas gift early this year. I now have a lovely digital video camera to call my very own and have been making little, mildly comedic videos with it. I have in the past been able to create through the art of stories, songs, plays, paintings, crafts and now, HA HA, I have it all! Follow that with the maniacal laughter of the moderately insane and you have the perfect opener to one of the videos that I have been dying to shoot.

I went for a walk last night. It was dark and cold and as I started out I noticed all of the houses that already had lights up for Christmas. I came up with a great idea for a gift for a wonderful lady in my life. Later in the walk I was heading by the solitary laundromat in town. It, the town grocery and a pizza parlor were the only businesses still open at 8:30 pm. I watched clothes tumbling in the dryers as I approached and noticed a man and woman seated at a table inside the laundromat eating dinner.

Immediately I wished I had brought my camera with me, and wished I had a camera man. I could imagine myself dressing up a bit and barging into the laundromat.

"Hello, I'm Diane." I would introduce myself, shake hands then tell them. "Right now you're on camera. That fellow there is recording you. You have the right to decide whether or not this video is used in any formal capacity but before you do, what is your relationship?"

And just launch into this impromptu interview. Ask questions, get a tableau of exactly what was happening in the laundromat before I went in. Then, as an added twist, just to get a reaction say something like.

"Thank you very much for your time. I would like to tell you that as we speak there are men ransacking your home. They are a part of our crew and we were sent as a distraction to keep you all occupied while they did that. You can call 911 if you like, but of course you may regret it should this be a prank."

And leave...

And see what they do.

Breaking the fourth wall, breaking the barrier of believability. And starting with something good (fifteen minutes of fame?) and turning it into something very bad (btw, while you're gabbing excitedly with what may be your fifteen minutes of fame, your house had been broken into!)

This morning I went for breakfast, listened to a pair of elderly ladies tell a passing elderly gentleman all about a mutual friend. "Hey did you hear about, Shirley!? Oh yes, she broke her hip the poor thing. She fell off the treadmill and just broke it like that."

Then I went to Kroger's to waste time while my tires were rotated. Standing in line at the Starbucks, while a Kroger customer insisted on buying her milk and magazines at the Starbucks kiosk along with her Chai Latte, I heard a woman say, "I swear by my right hand to God, I will get those to you!"

I felt like turning towards her, with a camera planted somewhere back in the veggie department.

"Pardon me, Ma'am. I couldn't help but overhear what you said. I was wondering are you swearing by your right hand, or by God? Which is of more value to you? Where did you first hear that phrase and did you really mean it? If you had to lose one or the other which would you rather have, seperation from your right hand or from God?"  Maybe part of the point is that I have problems with people who blurt the first quaint phrase they think of whenever they're surprised, and I certainly take umbrage at people swearing to God about trivial things.

But more than anything else, the woman was speaking loudly and I'm sure, was very aware that what she was saying was being broadcasted to all the other people in line. If she's intentionally putting it out there for us to hear, why not draw more attention to it.

After I get her to answer I'll point out that there's a camera back there, just to the right of the tomatoes, and was there anything else she'd like to say to her audience, or swear to...or by.

I got my Mocha and traveled the store, observing people and pondering my idea.

Since I didn't have my camera with me I can blame the missed opportunity on lack of equipment instead of lack of guts. But I can't help but wonder. How many more people are going to start thinking about what they say, or about how visible they are when they think they are alone, if I were to start doing that?

Or would it just amount to me being precocious and annoying.

Dunno.

Due to the ease of access I've decided to start some fiction stories on blogs. That means I can work on them during my down times at the library and while I'm at home.

I've never really gotten the hang of novel writing. If I have any talent at all I think it lies in relating my own life experiences, but...fiction is fun from time to time. And who knows, maybe I can fake it well enough to fool someone into publishing me.

So I have postapocthesaga.blogspot.com started up. I'm fairly certain that the title is mispelled on the blog. But if you have time to waste feel free to check it out.

Cheers
Wyatt

Another Snippet - Never Forgotten

(I've decided I'll try it again. Another snippet.)

Leaves crunched under my feet, along with the occasional snapping twig. The swish, swish of cloth against twigs and branches and dead briers easily announced my course of travel. Filtered by towering trunks of trees I could see the sunset coloring the sky before me. Light purple, lilac, a tiny hint of blue then fuchsia and pink closer to the horizon.

I stepped over a fallen log carefully. The thick skirts I wore, even without the hoop, proved challenging when trying to evade some obstacles and I was keeping my eye on the sloshing liquid in the tin cup I carried. It was hot and I had already burned myself once that day. Beyond the log I stepped around the remainder of a stump and looked up to the only other figure standing in the wood with me. My older brother was stone still, his dark hair slicked back under the stained, gray forage cap. His butternut colored jean wool frock coat and trousers turned a muddy brown by the red of the sun. He was looking at something, his own cup of coffee almost forgotten in his hand.

I stepped up quietly beside him, pulled my tin cup to my lips and let the steaming vapors wash over my frozen cheeks. It was only September but it was already cold, and the night promised to be colder. I didn't mind. I loved this time of year. When the heat of the summer began to shift, a bite visited the wind like a long unseen cousin.

I watched the sun for a moment then shifted my gaze to my brother's whiskered, but no longer whimsical face. Beneath his gaze lay the remainder of an artillery piece. It was small, the sort that could be used by men only, moved and aimed by muscle alone. There were no horse bones nearby, nor any hasty graves indicating that they had been buried. Only the piece remained.

What had once been gleaming black was now starting to fade and green with time. One wheel was flush against the ground and nearly grown over by vines and wild strawberries. It was fall but I could still see the drying tendrils. The rocky ground tilted the barrel so that it leaned heavily and I could see that it teetered dangerously, held in place only by the joists still connecting it to the other wheel that had been wedged between a rock and a hard place, forced at a slant, frozen in time, attentive but wounded.

In a way my brother was precisely that as well. He had been wounded in the war of course, many times. And each wound brought him more sorrows, more pains, and strangely, in the way of all wars, more responsibility.

When the war ended he had returned to our home. Mother had expected that he would marry, perhaps the red headed girl that he had been writing to when he first left for the fighting, but he had refused to see anyone. He worked in the wood shop or in the fields, he built himself a small shack on a parcel of land that he bought from father.

I visited him there often, whether or not I was invited, so close in age were he and I. When a year had passed and he received a letter from some of his fellow soldiers describing what remained of the old battlefields he determined that he had to return. It took some convincing to assure him that I was going as well.

There was concern for his safety and for mine. A soldier of the former confederacy might not be welcome near the place where Union died, even if as many or more Rebels died in precisely the same spot.

In this moment however our concern seemed fruitless. My brother remembered the hillside for its strategic value. He remembered fighting desperately to gain and then hold the position near where this dilapidated gun had fallen. He remembered hundreds of thousands of men crossing this ground over and over from both sides. And yet a year later it was deserted. Silent.

"Out there..." He said quietly, then lifted his arm to point beyond where the thick tree line ended. There was a small cabin nestled against large boulders, a wisp of smoke rising from it's mud and wood chimney. "That cabin wasn't here then. It was a pasture for sheep there. But the rancher must have moved them long before we arrived."

A vague look that might have been amusement crossed his features, ending with a barely perceptible wince. "The men kept slipping on the dung."

I smiled slightly, knowing a blush had colored my cheeks, sipping cautiously from my cup to cover my reaction.

My brother took a deep breath and swallowed...and the dampness about his eyes could have only been the cold, or something else. He finally seemed to notice the brew in his hand and he sipped from his cup before he pointed to his left. What I had taken for logs or stones suddenly sprang into being as other dead carcasses of weapons. Only bits and pieces but enough for me to envision what might have once been a battery, lined up, defending its fellow troops.

"All along that line," He said. "Shelling one right after the other...keeping the field clear for the boys.  It was bad enough getting the guns to this spot...we knew the enemy couldn't get them up there."

Far off, near where the sun was sliding out of sight were the beginnings of foothills. I could not imagine the distance, nor that the gun before me could possibly reach it. Or that there were enough men in the world to fill that field. The noise, the crush of so many boys...men desperately fighting for their lives...or their country...to defend themselves or their families.

Tears sprang to my own eyes as I stared at this empty place, hating it now. It seemed to have forgotten. The rocks and the dirt and the sun seemed not to care at all about the sacrifices made under their vigil.

I knew the questions that so many had asked as the war continued on. Was it worth it? Was it all just a waste? Could we truly win our independence? Was it about the slaves the way the northerners said? Would they be free when the Confederacy became a nation? Where the fighting men, black and white, throwing their lives away for nothing?

And when the papers came and we saw the pictures of all the generals in their shiny uniforms, and saw that the war we had waged had been lost...how many more of those questions came? We saw the pictures of cities burning, left wasted in the path of Sherman and his armies. Heard the rumors of other atrocities acted on civilians, or on our men in prison camps.

But nothing in a paper or in the quivering voice of a mother or wife affected me as much as this vast, empty, cold place.

"I'm glad it's here." I said, my voice shaking with anger, sadness and something else. Something determined. "It should always be here. Protected. So that no one will forget. So that no one sees this place as just another...parcel of land to be bought or sold with money."

Tears ran down my cheeks, burning hot channels through the cold numbness.

"Because it was once purchased with blood and it belongs to those men that paid for it with their lives. That should never be forgotten."

A Snippet - The Boat

(The walls of my room are covered with stuff. Most of it is fairly stationary but over my bed I have tacked, taped and stapled pictures from magazines, my own works of art and a handful of important photos. When I'm having a rough day I go to my room, stretch out on my bed and stare at these photos, most of which involve some form of water.

Tonight I felt the need to write something and noticed a painting right above my head. I decided to write based on what I saw, felt and heard, when looking at that painting. Below is the snippet that resulted.)

The sounds of the waves were gentle, hesitant as they brushed occasionally against the rocky shore. The sky was gray and overcast and there was the slightest of breezes. There was tension in the air but it was subdued. As if something terrible had happened and the world needed to be still, needed to wait for a bit before it was sure it could recover. The thick nylon line leading from the small boat wasn’t really necessary to keep the craft at the shore. The flat, smooth stones didn’t shift the way sand would. Without a hearty push the wooden row boat wasn’t going to go anywhere. The surface of the water was still enough to offer an almost perfect reflection of the boat. It barely rocked or moved. It was still, as if the panorama was only a painting. Beside the larger row boat, there was a smaller boat. A toy, tied to the brackets that should have been holding oars, floating peacefully beside it’s much larger brother, gamely lifting it’s little white sail toward the sky.

A child had tied it there. A small boy with golden yellow hair, bare footed in his overalls and warm flannel shirt. When he had come out to the water’s edge to play it had probably been sunny, warm enough for him not to notice the chill of the stones against his bare skin. Warm enough that he could ignore the small bit of water collecting in the bottom of the boat, that had quickly soaked the bottom part of his pants. It was too much fun to watch his little skow cut through the water, to crash it into the side of the bigger craft and imagine an entirely different world from the one he was forced to live in.

Maybe if Mom and Dad hadn’t been in the middle of another fight they would have noticed that their son had not only gone out to play as he had been told, but he had escaped the sand box he usually occupied and made a dash for the lake. Perhaps if Dad hadn’t lost control of his temper, yet again, and thrown the vase at Mom, she might have noticed how long her boy had been gone and run from the house to find him.

If Dad hadn’t stormed out of the house. If Mom hadn’t bent to pick up the shards of glass, her makeup running with her tears, and sliced her hand badly. If she hadn’t called Grandmother on the phone. If Grandmother hadn’t already been on her way.

When the coroner arrived on the scene he couldn’t immediately tell whether it was the cold that caused the boy to drown, or if he’d hit his head on the rocky bottom when he tumbled out of the beached rowboat. There was no blood to speak of but little boy’s heads are made of far softer things than adult's. Even the slightest bump could cause problems with a child. And Mom had been screaming that the boy couldn’t swim from the moment she found the still toddler.

There were words flying around. Neglect, murder, tragedy, fault, blame. Words that meant nothing whatsoever to the little boy. The crime scene people quickly determined that the toy boat wasn’t paramount to the investigation and Mom was clutching it as she knelt before the blanket wrapped figure on the gurney. There was a helicopter overhead that she ignored. The backyard of the country cottage ended at the lake, preventing most of the press from finding a way past the police line, but it wouldn’t take long before they rented or stole boats to get close enough for a photograph.

Grandmother stood away from it all cold and immovable. She did not comfort her daughter, nor did she kneel to mourn the loss of her grandchild. She’d seen it all coming. She’d known that one day or other this would be the result. She had no reason to regret, or to blame, only to agree with the still silent natural world around her that the world needed to take a breath. To pull back and examine with unnatural stillness, what had occurred. And perhaps…maybe…it would never happen again.

(Apologies to the artist. The magazine was old and I never thought to keep the blurb that explained who painted what.)

A Librarian Moment

I had intended that this blog be reserved for pure CW reenacting tales but at the moment I haven't really got any. In the mean time I've run into an surprisingly potent irritation at work. You see...some of the ladies that work in the processing/finance/inner bowels part of the library decided to have a few impromptu words with me the other morning and I've been put off by it since. Here's what my imaginary therapeutic session has done for me.

Bear in mind that I work at the main branch of a small county library.

The stage is set. I'm head librarian for a day and my crew is most of the girls that work in the basement.  Most of the time they can be found sitting at their fun little desks, taking one or two ice cream breaks, five or ten smoke breaks, one or three lunch breaks. But...these beeches is mine today.



I walk into the arena and inform them that at least one of them is page for the day so she should immediately go out and start properly shelving and organizing four to five carts of books. At first she looks smug thinking, 'Alphabetizing...ha! I can do this in my sleep. And I know the Dewey decimal system better than my husband’s backside!’



I grin ever so slightly then flatly continue. “And after you finish those five carts you have all those to do…” I point back behind the circulation desk to the shelves that are loaded with books. Not only is every shelf filled end to end, but in some places the books have been shoved to the back of the shelf and a second row has been added. “…tonight.” I finish.



The poor dear has more than enough to do but I tell her she has other duties. Like giving children’s floor a break at seven, locking up the basement at eight and being ready to clean up the various areas on the main floor at eight thirty.



She marches off sullen and resigned to a lonely, mind numbing task and I point to the others around me. “As soon as she brings back a cart someone should be back there checking in and loading up another cart. In the interim there needs to be at least two people behind the circulation desk at all times. You need to put away the Audio/Visual items whenever you can and you will all be asked to put away at least one cart tonight because slave-ah…I mean Librarian…T-trainee #1 will need all the help she can get.”



Never mind that you may or may not be familiar with the computer system, or the main floor itself.

Just wait for the first homeless person to come in. And you must respond to their needs. If they decide to lean over the counter and breathe into your face while they tell you interesting facts about the new wonder-nut they just heard about on their portable radio, you are not allowed to make faces, or comments.



When the woman with three screaming children insists on keeping her kids on the main floor while she uses a library laptop to check her Facebook status, you are not allowed to shout at her that she should take her kids up stairs, or corral the little brats into the bathroom and lock them there. You must treat her like the freedom loving American that she is and do your best to placate the other annoyed patrons.



Suppose someone comes in, having had the world’s worst day and they ask for an item that they claim is being reserved for them and it’s not there. And they throw a fit. Then you have to inform them that not only is their item not their but they are not there. As in…in the system.



“Well I have things I’m going to be checking out. And I’ve been waiting for the 54th season of Snoggles United for fifteen  !@#$% weeks!”



You try to say, “Sir, I’m fairly certain that Snoggles United  doesn’t actually exist and that’s why your Inter-Library Loan request was not only ignored but I also see someone wrote ‘LoL – You’ve got to be fu-‘”



But Mr. I’ve-Had-A-Bad-Day-and-Can’t-Think-Past-It isn’t going to stand by. Not only has the library failed him in his time of dire need, but now they are mocking his intelligence. So he fumes and snarls and says horrible things then stomps out leaving you bewildered and on the point of tears. But right behind him are fifteen other patrons, twelve of whom insist on conversing at the top of their lungs and standing in the way of the people that are clearly in a major hurry.



And you have to be polite, patient and calm….with all of them…right now.



Then there’s a lull. And in that lull you have to hurriedly check, scan in and lock, organize and put away every item that has collected in the drops or on the counter top before the next rush comes through. If you miss an item, or don’t scan it in, or don’t lock it, or put it on the wrong shelf in the back it will come back to haunt you.



The lull ends…far too soon. Another group comes in, you’re shaking because you haven’t eaten anything since you left home and it’s been three hours of flow and ebb and no time for food. You’re still emotionally spent from the reaming you didn’t deserve by Mr. Nasty-pants and just as you go to help the first in a line of aged patrons you can barely hear, the computer terminal freezes. And it’s the kind of freeze that can only be fixed by shutting the whole thing down and turning the whole thing back on.



And since these computers were brand new about when mobile phones started to become popular it’s going to take a few minutes. Now there’s only one computer at the front of the desk, one in the middle at a separate kiosk with no locking magnet and OH BY THE WAY…the computer in the back is on the fritz…again…so now everyone back there making carts, sorting stuff, etc. has to use the computers at the front to do it.



Another lull. Then she comes in. Tall, gangly, walking with a rolling limp, her hair in tufts sticking out every side and she’s never known a quiet day in her life. It’s not her fault really, she’s probably autistic. She always wants to get on a ‘compooter’. She always wants help. Your skin crawls and you try to look busy every time you hear her shout, “Scuuuse me…Kin you haalp me.”

She always comes in to search the net for a stay at home job that doesn’t require her to send in money first. You don’t know how many times you’ve told this woman that it’s not going to happen but she doesn’t care. It’s what she wants, and she comes to the library because she doesn’t have a car and can’t walk all the way across town to get to the business set up precisely for the sake of helping people like her.


So she sits down, finds some websites, starts loud conversations on her phone flourishing with profanity.

And of course, ten to one, you'll be the librarian that has to go over and help because every other co-worker has had the same exact reaction as you.

But the patron saint of librarians will bless you ten fold if can help her with loving kindness in your heart.

Meanwhile you’ve got another impatient customer who doesn’t appreciate the joke you tried to tell because you’re losing your sanity and right now a slightly bent sense of humor is the only thing keeping you together, but she’s in a dang hurry so she can get home and enjoy the final season of Dexter that she tried to borrow from the library but couldn’t watch because it’s scratched.



“And why is it you can’t just clean it now. The machine is right there. What’s the reason? Oh…no poli-cool? Really…why don’t you order some?”



“Not my department,” say you. And it’s not, but that doesn’t make sense to Mrs. Everyone-around-me-is-inept-just-like-my-husband-says.



Then….then!!!! Someone comes in and says, “I need a library card.”



What you would love to be allowed to say is, “I need to see a background check, credit check and if you wouldn’t mind stepping through this metal detector here….Or would you rather submit to a pat down?”



But what you actually say, with some manner of hopeful trust in mankind, is, “Sure thing, I’ll need to see a driver’s license with current address please.”



“Oh well I don’t have it with me, but, can I show you my Kroger card instead?” She asks.



“No, Miss. I really need to see a state ID.”



“Well..it’s out in my car and I just wanted to get a library card…” She says, showing you with her soulful eyes just how painful it will be to trot out to her car.



How many ways can person politely say the same thing before it becomes rude?

So instead, you cleverly lean in and wince right along with her. Feeling her pain. “I know it’s a little inconvenient but it really is necessary for us to have your information on file.”



She sees the wince, gets the idea that your conspiratorial inward cant means that you’re letting her get away with something and happily trots out to get her ID.



When she comes back she mentions that it’s not her current address on the ID, and no she doesn’t have any mail on her. No bills indicating her current address.



“You can check out today but we’ll mail you your card, and you will have to bring it in next time.”



For all she cares you could be telling her you need to hold her first born as collateral…so long as she can check out that movie she’s hoping you have. Or those shiny new video games there on the wall kiosk.

 (Oh yes. The video games...that do next to nothing when it comes to educating the populace, but some brainiac figured they would be uber popular and are definitely reason enough to spend several thousand dollars purchasing...not to mention the time it takes to enter them into the system, and the money you spent on the special carousels that hold the discs. Carousels that are placed at the very back of the room adding another fifteen-to-twenty seconds to the amount of time it takes to check a single patron out. )

She fills out the paper work and you get into the computer system and look her up and you are, gosh….not at all shocked to see her name there in the system.



Brightly you say, “Well looks like you used to have a card with us.” And you know full well there is likely to be a massive fine attached with it. But boy doesn’t she look hopeful, and completely innocent. And you can see the ‘liar liar’ gears starting to churn in her brain, prepared to deny deny deny.



You open up her status and lo and behold there’s several dozen books missing, and all the replacement fees have been sitting on her dormant account since she moved away. She’s got several hundred dollars that she’s got to pay.



First she’s shocked, then she’s outraged, and even after you print off a copy of her account (which costs money, which she isn’t going to pay for) she can’t believe that she is still expected to pay those fees. And surely that book can’t possibly cost fifty bucks.  And I never checked these items out.



And her grandmother died, her dog was accidently burned at the puppy sa-lon, and she lost three nails just the other day and can’t you just cut her some god-forsaken slack!?



Bravely, firmly, you say, “No.” Because you are aware, if no one else in the town is, that the library does not in fact have its own money tree growing out back.



She pulls out her credit card and hands it to you while looking away…hardly believing that she must stoop so low as to be charged for using the FREE public library.



“We don’t accept credit cards, I’m sorry, Miss.”



More shock, more indignation.



So you do the lean again…and you tell her the deal. “If you just bring those items back, or replace them (which you can do pretty cheap on Amazon), we’ll let the fines slide.”



Because really once the item is replaced, what does $1.90 in fines per book do for the library? Especially when it no longer needs to shell out several hundred to have the things replaced. (Which in this case they probably weren't going to replace anyway..)



Well she thinks you’ve just saved her life, or at least saved her dog’s life, and maybe she can replace a few nails with the money she’s saving.



Out she trots, happy as a pearly clam.



She’s happy, you’re happy, the library hasn’t fallen down, and one less person has yelled at you today for things that were out of your hands from the beginning.



Now is when I pull my librarian intern to the side with a friendly hand on her shoulder. And I say to her,

“Imagine you get to have lunch now…and you go down into the lunch room hoping that it’s empty so you can have a small part of your day be void of human noise. But…no no. All the people that work downstairs are there, leisurely reclined about the table enjoying lunch…hot lunches. That they’ve obviously had time to warm. So you sit, with your cold PB and J and glass of ice water, and you listen to the chatter and are fairly ignored up until one of them notices you…and starts talking about how you all keep waiving fines. And the more they talk the more they indicate that everything you do up stairs is in-ept and is essentially the reason the library is bleeding money.”



Then I pat her on the back as I pull away and head for the counter, back into the fray. Let her sort it all out on her own the way I did.


I would LOVE to hand a copy of this out to all the ladies I shared lunch with. Not looking for a win here...just a little understanding.

Sincerely,

The Librarian

Gettysburg

Gettysburg was the beginning and the end of a number of things. For example, I was looking forward to beginning school again in February, and ending my job at Wal Mart. I was also looking forward to beginning my life as an official adult, with my 21st birthday coming in January.

Our unit had been given a unique honor of being invited to spend a weekend camping near the Pennsylvania Monument in Gettysburg National Park. While there we would offer a living history camp site for the public to tour, photo opportunities and would practice marching and firing drills in the field on the other side of the road.

I believe we were one of four different groups there that weekend, scattered around the park.

Now this would be the first time that I had ever been to Gettysburg. I had watched the movie once, maybe, but I'd never been there. (I had also never actually seen a reenactment, outside of the movie Gettysburg.)

In fact the movie had been my only real exposure to the civil war while I was in grade school. In high school I had done an advanced history project on female soldiers in the civil war, but the education I gained in my first year of reenacting trumped all that. The war between the states is a topic too vast to learn in a single lesson, or a single chapter. All wars are that way. It's foolish for a grade school teacher to stand before a classroom of students, present a well worn chapter on the Civil War or the Vietnam conflict or what have you and then call it done. It isn't over...not for the men that fought, nor for their descendants, because it happened...it is still alive because there are memories of these men (and women) still alive in their descendants. If that idea could be infused into the history teachers of today there would be far less burn out I suspect.

Either way, through the eyes and stories of the reenactors around me, I was starting to grasp just what it meant to be a living historian and have a better understanding of the war I presumed to represent. On our way to Gettysburg, crammed into a five person vehicle and traveling most of the night and well into the wee hours of the morning, instead of watching the movie itself we watched Scooby Doo and other children's videos. Primarily because our driver had chosen to take his young son along with him to enjoy the experience of his first reenactment.

We headed down Cashtown Road, which wound sharply through the mountains and it seemed that every ten minutes we would pass a sign that promised, Gettysburg 15 miles. Yet we never drew any closer to Gettysburg. We passed various signs for small businesses, including some establishments that promised naked women from the waist up. We were giddy, and tired, yes, and determined which dead Generals and Colonels were the reason for the erection of the various signs. Colonel McDonald, General King, Etc.

"This sign has been erected to mark the spot where General King was shat and killed on Jew-lie the third, 1863."

It took a few minutes to realize that the past tense of 'shoot' was not 'shat'.

We pulled into the inn where several of the other boys in the unit had already secured a room and piled out of the truck. There were two beds, but plenty of floor space, and I chose to bunk down on the latter. And of course my relationship joined me. It had become common place then for us to sleep in proximity of one another. I thought I was in love and I enjoyed the feeling of a man near me, the fluttering in my stomach knowing someone thought I was a step above repulsive.

The next morning we piled into our cars and headed out to the battlefield. We toured a little first, and at my behest we went to the top of Little Round Top and found the spot where the 20th Maine stood. We crawled around Devil's Den and went a few other places that I knew nothing about because I hadn't seen them in the movie and hadn't learned much beyond it about the battle of Gettysburg. Towards late afternoon we parked near the Pennsylvania monument; a four square pillar of a building with a rotunda at the top; and started to unload. We set up our tents in a sort of Chevron pattern opening toward the tree line and pointing toward the road.

There was a brick and stone out house near the road that was to be our toilette and we had water from various sources. Inside the tent we would share a few blankets, straw and the company of at least one other soldier. Despite the chill of September it was bound to be a warm night.

Some would swear I got drunk that night. Some would swear that I was a lush and was begging to have my cup filled, and filled again. Others would swear that I wouldn't have made it to my blankets if it hadn't been for a helpful soldier guiding me to the restroom and back. Some even swore that I danced about the flag poles.

None of that was true. But it didn't stop the men from gleefully spinning stories. I had some to drink, yes, and I swear that someone continued to fill my glass every time I looked away such that I couldn't empty it and call it a night. At the time I had blue tinware, provided by my father. Neither of us knew any better and I was working very hard to black it up. At Jackson it had been squished, inadvertently, by the wheels of a truck driven by a member of our unit; and since then chips of enamel had been coming off and floating into anything I drank. From coffee to beverage.

By the time I did get up I didn't realize how much I had had, nor how much it affected me. There were some blank moments between rising, getting to the toilet and getting into bed but...I was very warm that night. The next morning I was feeling a little sick. A little sorry. I rose and stepped out of the tent and headed for the little stone building and saw the loveliest rainbow. Arching up over the stone building and into the russet and gray sky.

We marched all over creation at that event. We marched across the road three or four times a day to show off for the tour buses full of spectators. We marched down to Armistead's marker and the wall to take pictures, including a very good unit picture. We marched at night out to Devil's Den to climb around the boulders and enjoy the silence of the park. Some of my fellow soldiers felt the need to bring cameras with them and spent hours snapping pictures of 'orbs'. Some claimed that they had started down the road near camp and had seen a soldier walking towards them and swore that it was a confederate picket. One photo was taken at Devil's Den, and shows just in the corner what might be the silhouette of a man in uniform. What I've never said to the photo taker or the others present when the photo was taken is that I'm fairly certain that the 'ghost' is actually me. It's far more fun to let them think they've a real spook on film.

We even speculated that the trenches buried under ground cover and dead fall in the woods behind our camp were once dug by soldiers, preparing for the battle to reach them if the lines broke.

This past fall I went on an early morning walk through the battle field and ended up at the Pennsylvania monument just as morning broke. I climbed to the top, exited the rotunda and while I was enjoying the breeze I tried to find the spot that I had taken a photo from five years prior. I circled the rotunda twice before I realized that I wasn't going to find it because all of the trees had been cut down by the park service in the interest of returning the park to the way it appeared in 1863. The green yard where we had camped was now indistinguishable from the rest of the area.

After our demonstration days were over our unit packed up, headed for the hotels for a final night in town before we would start the pilgrimage back. Most had come out in a large van and already there were grumblings about who would be driving. Some of the older members were fast losing their welcome, and more than a few fits had been thrown in camp. I was glad to be traveling back with a smaller group.

My relationship and I, and the others that we had joined our first night in Gettysburg, were planning to group together and spend the night in the General Lee suite in the Cashtown Inn. Above the museum is a series of rooms connected together, with (I believe) only one bath. Each room is well decorated and there is a common room with couches and fire place and a large TV. I made use of the bath first thing, enjoying the Jacuzzi and pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweat shirt. When I exited most of the rest of the group were gone somewhere and it was just my relationship and I.

I sat down and he started to massage my feet which was strange, and yet I thought...it was a good sign right? He wants to touch me...I can't be as repulsive as I've always believed myself to be.

Then we were sitting together and I was leaning against him and he turned to me. And I could feel him watching me so I turned to him. And then he kissed me. And I felt my heart leap into my head, clang around my skull and then try to go back down my throat, and get stuck. I told him it wasn't right. And he said he was sorry. But he had to do that. He had to see what it was like. And I thought, how could it be any different than the most frightening thing I'd ever done?

That evening we were once more on the floor together and I was cold because we only had the one comforter and I wanted my blanket. But my blanket was in the car. And I also wanted out. I wanted away from what was fast becoming something very very wrong. For an hour, in the darkness, I thought about how wrong it was. And felt sick to my stomach, and wanted to rave and rant and hate. And I really wanted my blanket, the vestige of the innocence that had been torn from me with just a kiss.

Finally I snuck out, got the keys to the truck and grabbed my blanket, taking my time getting back into the hotel room. I lay curled in my blankets, not sleeping until morning. As soon as the sun was up I left and sat outside on the steps thinking and crying. Feeling like I'd spent the night with a hundred different men, but knowing it'd only been with one. And nothing had happened between us yet I still felt spoiled and dirty.

I sat and I recited a hateful, hurting speech over and over in my head so that by the time he finally came out to see where I was, my speech was so refined and rehearsed it barely made sense. I told him I didn't want to be his girlfriend on the side. That I wouldn't be the reason for breaking up a family and what was he thinking acting that way toward me? Where did he think it was going to go? I told him that he should think of me as his daughter, and what would it be like if his daughter were faced with the decision he was putting on me? I told him that he had made a decision before God to be faithful to his wife and he wasn't doing that whenever we went to reenactments. I told him that it was my fault. For not putting a stop to it before then. For not telling him that I wasn't going to be his 'special friend' any time his wife wasn't around.

When I had talked myself out he said some things to me that I didn't want to hear. Already I had heard rumors floating around the unit about what was going on between us and I had gotten the idea finally that some of the arguments in camp had to do with my relationship and I. He promised me that it wasn't the way I thought it was. That I wasn't the girlfriend on the sly. After so much listening I decided I had enough and I told him I was going for a walk.

More than once, in the past, I got into heap loads of trouble for taking off on walks without telling someone. Going deep into the woods where I knew I could get back if I had to, but nobody else did and they thought for sure I'd be lost for all time. This time I didn't care. I was nearly 21, and obviously capable of making already gargantuan adult mistakes.

I kept my blanket around my shoulders and stomped down the stairs and across the parking lot, down a slight decline across the railroad tracks then up into the woods. I followed deer trail after deer trail praying and crying and begging for forgiveness and trying to figure out how deeply I'd dug the hole I was in.

I wouldn't say that I found peace. I still liked him. For all the hatred I had for the situation I still liked...loved the man. And that in itself was wrong. And I knew until that love was gone, I would be in the wrong.

I did cry all the tears I had left and at just the right moment I saw someone coming across the parking lot and onto the tracks with two cups of coffee in his hands.

He told me that he wasn't going to treat me like his daughter. I wasn't a daughter to him. He said, he felt more like a brother. He said that I was right. That what he had done the night before was wrong. He said he would tell his wife about what we had done that past year; which wasn't more than courting really; but it was bad enough. He told me he wasn't worried about what the rumor mill had to say about us, and that I shouldn't care a lick either. He told me that he cared for me, a lot.

The drive home was strange, and good, and I felt so unstable and awkward. I was glad when I was home. Glad to get on to simply working, and not thinking, and knowing that I wouldn't have to communicate with him again until the company meeting in the spring.

I hoped I wouldn't miss him but I did.

I hoped he wouldn't call, but he did.

I hoped I wouldn't feel the need to tell anyone about him, lying left and right, but I did.

Most of the rest of those first years is a blur of events. Meetings with my relationship that had nothing to do with reenactments and everything to do with my loneliness. Phone calls while he was on business trips with semi-serious offers to have me fly to where he was and spend the weekends with him.

At first I said no kissing. Then I told him more about why I was so afraid. Then he said that he was meant to be the interim. That he would be there to help me not be afraid of intimacy until my future someone came along. Then I made him promise to let the next step be my decision.

And it made me sick, and I hated missing him. But I still loved him. And I waited and waited to not love him anymore. And I lied to my family and friends and total strangers until I had created several different lives, separate from my own that would allow for my memories of him. Some of those memories weren't memories at all but more lies.

I left my first unit after about four years. After I saw that it was starting to fall apart, and after a brief weekend as acting First Sergeant ended badly. The younger men in the unit supported the man, my age, that had been elected second Sergeant. I never asked to be promoted. I had been in anticipation of future command changes, and I wanted nothing of it. Another unit was waiting to welcome me. They were based out of a city hours closer to my own, their events were closer and there were no relationships built on rickety scaffolding of falsehoods waiting for me either.

I left my first unit, feeling guilty; watching from a far as more than just the unit started to fall apart. But my relationship continued to cling to me. I would see him at some of our joint events and I would be repulsed at first at his behavior. And realize how much I had put up with to be with him. Then he would start to sink into me and I would be back to my old ways. And hating myself for it.

When I made my pilgrimage this past fall I lit a small votive candle at the Pennsylvania monument and watched it burn for a moment or so.

I thought to myself, "This is the end of that old relationship, the one that began here. The one that has been wiped from the field by the park service, and been wiped from my life by my own choices."

I lit another candle at The Angle. The beginning, I thought. I hoped.

Recently I met my relationship unexpectedly. I had come to this very large event with my current unit and he had fallen in with the Yankees. I was leaving for camp and he recognized me and shouted my name.

When I first recognized who he was I was surprised, and pleased, then immediately filled with dread. Because I knew he didn't get it yet. He didn't yet understand that I needed him to leave me be. Up to that point I had been too much of a coward to tell him that outright. To tell him that even friendship wouldn't work between us because he was still in love with me. Because he still thought we were soul mates.  Because any laugh or smile or tiny fraction of approval from me was an encouragement to him. I couldn't be merely friends with him because he wanted more.

We talked and I stalled, wanting to return to camp, wanting to be done with the day. I was tired and just recovering from moderate dehydration. There were a myriad of discomforts at camp as well but I'd rather have them than my old relationship. He decided he wanted to visit old friends in Confederate camp and we managed to hitch a ride together. And I felt myself slipping into being nice because I was in the presence of others that didn't know any better.

We got back to camp and while he made nice with mutual friends I slipped to my tent, grabbed my spare shirt and prepared to duck under the canvas to change. He wouldn't let me go. I said I had to check for ticks and such and finally managed to evade him and do just that; with out his help. When I got back he had caught on to my sour mood and...I'm not quite sure what he thought he had in mind.

He tried to sandwich me with his arms, then tried to convince another of my comrades to join him. That fellow wisely stayed away. I was telling my relationship to stop. No, I said. Stop it, I said. Leave me alone, I said. And finally, when he just wouldn't catch on I punched him.

I was close to him, and I thought, this is the only way to get the idea across. So I punched him. And he looked at me shocked. And I walked away.

He followed me and tried to ask why I had done it.

"You wouldn't stop. I asked you stop," I said.

He dogged my steps and said, "You didn't have to punch me."

"Yes, I did." I said. "You deserved it."

He tried to pout. He tried to get me to tell him it was all a joke. To laugh and shrug it off and make nice. But I didn't. I wouldn't. And I left him standing there pouting.

I felt guilty about it. I felt remorse at losing what might have been a friendship after all. I felt that I made him lose face before his former friends, and felt that I had lost face too perhaps...but I had finally drawn a line. I had protected myself in a way that I hadn't been able to in the past and for once it felt good.

And I kept thinking back to Gettysburg, and lighting that candle, and about how it was finally over. I had finally killed off whatever kept me in chains...chains disguised as love. I had decided what was best for me and acted on it, and done so with a pure, and hopefully chaste heart.

Perhaps, to you reader, it sounds like a lot of sappy, holistic, self-righteous nonsense. You may think so if you choose. But as I sit and write I have no regrets.