As always Thom thanks for the words. I truly love 3WW
My father would patiently teach me to cut paper dolls. I would be so excited until, of course, I cut the head off or part of the legs and arms.  The torso, forget, it would look dismembered.  I would have made a good serial killer and I was–of paper dolls or anything that required the least bit of coordination.
I still can’t open an envelope that has a perforated edge without screwing up whatever is in it, and as it’s usually a check, uh!!!!!!!!!!
“Try harder,” my father would eventually scream.  “Just try da da darn it.”

My father was a CPA.  Accountants by profession and nature are perfectionists.  He would lose his temper.  I would scream.  A good time was had by all.  The evening would end with me dissolving into tears, and my father hugging, kissing me and apologizing.  But still I knew if I only tried harder….My father knew everything.  He must have been right.
I was a bad girl intent on making my parents life miserable.  They never told me this but I knew.  If I hadn’t thought this myself the child psychologist my parents sent me to when I was nine, beginning to bud, and throw temper tantrums.  But only at home and only to my parents.  OK my little sister too.  Never in school.  Never in public.  I was considered a model child.
My father and I would drive to the psychologist.  The car radio would be on.  One week New York had a parade for Fidel Castro.  The next week, it seemed, he was the enemy.  I asked my father why.
He turned off the radio and looked at me sort of stunned.  “You know that’s a brilliant question.  I have no idea.”
it was the first and probably only time my father didn’t have an answer to a question.  He talked whether he knew anything about the subject or not.  He could have told me that Castro had been fighting Batista who was a dictator and America was glad.  But then the American government decided to fixate on Castro being a Communist.  Or he could have said that the American government just learned that Castro was a Communist, which I believe was the official story.
But he didn’t.  He gave me a great gift that night. I think my father, then a “progressive,” later a lover of all things Nixon and then Reagan wanted me to understand that we lived in a crazy world where things didn’t always make sense.  Or maybe he just didn’t know.
The child psychologist was an ugly short man with nose hairs and tobacco stained teeth.  He was the professional and I was just a child who never yelled at adults or kids or anybody not in my immediate family.  Like my father he didn’t believe in silence.
I loved doll houses, furniture and dolls but not in his office.  Dr. Wiener would make me play with the dolls–a mother, father, sister and of course me.  The dolls didn’t look like us.  They were objects not people, and I thought it was a stupid waste of time.  I was a girl who loved dolls almost too much.  But these dolls made me sick.
It’s OK,” he would say, “this is your safe area.  You can talk to the dolls and tell them how much you don’t like being adopted.”
“But I like being adopted.  I love my family very much.”
“Pia, you have big problems and they’re caused by being adopted.  In our sessions we’re going to make you see how much being adopted hurts you.”
Even when I was nine I didn’t understand how being clumsy, not being able to learn grammar, having temper tantrums and so much more was caused by being adopted. It didn’t make any sense to me.  I didn’t remember life in a foster home.  This was my family and I loved them very much.
My father would buy us O’Henry bars, and we would eat them on the drive home.  He would play rock & roll then because I liked it.
I began to buy into the things Dr. Wiener said.  I would tell my best friend, Ava, as we lay in the grass in back of the garden apartments we lived in that being adopted was very complicated and very difficult.  I was so glad that it was me who was adopted and not my little sister because I didn’t want her life to be hard.  Then we would lie in silence looking at the blue sky until one of us had something important to say. Usually about rock & roll stars or books we were reading together or separately.
•••••••••••••
Later I would understand that many therapists and others looked at being adopted as a disease.  They were convinced that many parents only adopted to have a “complete” family, and that ADHD and other problems were considered problems of the adoptee.  All that time, money, and effort wasted on trying to solve problems that didn’t exist and not trying to solve the problems that were real!!!!!
For the record I miss my parents everyday and can’t imagine life without my sister.

I’m trying to make this a coherent story.  It’s difficult putting in excerpts.  Bear with me! This is a continuation of last weeks–the post just above.  Thanks Thom for the words!

I wasn’t a neat person.  I couldn’t make my bed perfectly.  There was always a bulge somewhere.  My clothes weren’t arranged by color or in any order.  I had too many clothes, from Loehmann’s, from my parents stores, from Paraphernalia the coolest store in the world or New York, from my family visit to London the previous spring.  We had gone to Carnaby Street and I even had a brown velvet smoking jacket with a white lace collar and sleeves.
Most of my clothes ended on the floor of the closet.  My bureaus weren’t organized.  I didn’t have an underpants drawer for my too many pairs of underpants or a socks draw or anything resembling order.  I had no idea how to order anything.  My side of the room was a mess.
This is where you think that my parents failed at raising me.  No, they did everything possible to teach me organization.  My mother had begun working part time a few years earlier.  We had a cleaning woman, three days a week,  who wasn’t allowed in my room unless it was already clean and the bed was made.  No matter how much I tried I couldn’t order or clean things.
My Dad was a CPA.  He lived for precision.  But he loved me more than he loved order and that was almost smothering.  My Mom tried to balance him.  But you can’t stop a force of nature.
Our fights were fast, fierce and furious.  My sister and I had always related to Danny Williams (Danny Thomas) in Make Room for Daddy because he had dark hair, a big nose,a great sense of humor, and an obvious career that he went to at odd hours.  Mostly he yelled at his kids, Linda and Rusty.  It might have felt that he yelled more than he did because it was so good to see an imperfect father who would walk the plank if he had to for his kids.
My father had told me the summer before I began college that he was glad I was rebelling against him.  For if I didn’t I would rebel against the world.  Take the fun out of it, Max, why didn’t you?  But Freshman year was going to test our boundaries and relationship even more than Senior Year at High School had.
And my mother had found an ounce of pot in my room a week or so after I graduated high school.  I could have lied and said it was oregano but the thought never occurred to me.  She didn’t usually look in my closet but the night before my friend and I had gone in a “strange man’s” car and came home too soon.  This was very suspicious behavior.  Roofers were putting in a new roof.  My mother thought that if the roofers began a fire and the Jericho Volunteer Fire Department had to come, they would go into the house through my room and hammer my closet down–it being so neat and all.
My mother was a very intelligent, rational woman.  Even I knew this wasn’t intelligent rational thinking.  My high school boyfriend had been a 27 year old hippie East Village living, Mack truck driver.  They had let me date him so I wouldn’t sneak out or hate them when I was 30.
My mother uttered many words as she gave me bus fare to my aunt and uncle’s house in Connecticut.  My Aunt was a hippie artist who was to become a Buddhist. My Uncle was a former radio announcer now businessman.  In the 40′s, they had been friends with The Weavers and other folk singers.  My mother felt that I would be safe with them as she told my father what she had found.
After I arrived at my Aunt’s she asked if it was sex or drugs that had brought me to her house.  I looked at her.  “Honestly?”  I said as I played with my hair for a second or two too long.  “It could be either.  I had an older boyfriend I just broke up with.  His friend raped me.”
What can I say?  It was the summer of 1968.  I was a strange girl saved from total oddness by looks and something in my personality that attracted many people.  And repelled others.  By the time I got to college I was used to this weird dichotomy that was me.  I was fearful.  I only spoke to people who spoke to me first.  Fortunately many people spoke to me first.
I certainly repelled my college roommate Melanie and the Resident Assistant, Lois.  As I went about my life meeting more and more boys, they hatched a plan to bust me.
Now, I wasn’t a big drug user.  I dabbled.  But I had a spaced out look that made me seem as if I were a heavy user.
I wasn’t neat.  Melanie and Lois didn’t understand that this was a problem in me.  That inside me was a girl who wanted to be the neatest girl in the world but I couldn’t be.  I didn’t know how.  They couldn’t understand how a girl who had such nice and nice looking parents could be so sloppy.
My mother wore mini dresses.  She had great legs, and had always taught me to show off my assets so she showed off hers.  I made fun of her in that daughterly way, or maybe I was envious because in 1968, breasts and waists didn’t count.  It was legs, only legs that mattered.
I was too young, too self absorbed to understand that legs were what mattered to girls.  Boys they liked legs and other things.  I had the other things.
Every day boys would give me little presents like sparklers, incense, candles.  I thought many boys who all had long neat dark hair, large dark eyes, big nice noses, long tall bodies clad in cords and tees were giving me presents.
We never really talked.  I went around with JohnnyB who had come up to me and began talking the first day of college.  We made arrangements to go to the first dance of the year together.  It was called The End of the World Dance and the group that was playing was, I swear, called God.
One day a boy gave me a present and I realized that Noah was the only boy to have been giving me presents.  We began talking.  It turned out that he had been kicked out school the year before.  Supposedly for hanging out with drug users and I guess dealing.  Even his parents believed the school. In reality he had convinced many people to the 67 Moratorium.  I was impressed as he wasn’t the usual anti war nerd but a genuinely good looking funny boy who made me laugh.  But I wouldn’t date him because he wasn’t a college student.  Aside from that he was everything I had ever dreamed of in a boy.

(I have been doing a word exercise–750 words.  As always thanks Thom for the words.  All the 3WW’s below this are fragments or outline type chapters from Space Chick) This is my article on Non Verbal Learning Disorder (NLD) that sort of inspired my memoir.

¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶
It was summer orientation before my freshman year at that bucolic campus on the North Shore of Long Island.  Post wasn’t known for its academics.  if it had been I wouldn’t have gotten in.
Five curvy miles from my parents house, almost in the same public school district, they let me have a dorm room so I could have the “full college experience.”  My cousin had graduated the year before and he had talked my parents into letting me live in the dorms.
I had been corresponding with the girl who was to be my roommate.  She was a cheerleader.  I was a hippie freak.  She had long dark brown hair she ironed every night.  I had longish chestnut hair that frizzed everywhere it seemed.  Still people, to my constant amazement, loved my hair.
I knew because hordes of men in the city, construction workers and average guys would scream things out about my hair, face, clothes, body.  In 1968, you didn’t have to wonder if you were pretty or not.  Guys would just tell you.  I hated it yet couldn’t imagine being one of the girls nobody said anything to.
I’m sure Melanie was shouted out to.  If she ever went to the city without the protective arms of her quarterback boyfriend.
I’m sure I was the last person Melanie wanted for a roommate.  We had bought matching blue bedspreads, curtains and other things for the room.  The bathrooms were large and communal.
Freshman girls had a 10:30 curfew on weekdays and a 1:00AM curfew on weekends.  It was supposed to be for our safety.  At orientation they explained the rules.  There was a Resident Assistant (RA) on each floor.  She and she alone would determine if we were doing everything right.
There was a demerit system.  You could get demerits for not making your bed by 9AM, for not wearing shoes in your room, for not wearing a skirt to dinner, for being sloppy, and it would turn out just for being me.
She was judge, jury and it turned out, wannabe executioner.  Lois the RA was German.
She took an immediate like to Melanie.  Everything about Melanie screamed “affluent, good girl, fun, easy.”  Everything about me screamed “rule breaker, bad, maybe stupid, possibly poor but those clothes she wears….”  I wanted to be like Melanie, god did I want to be.
Orientation was more fun than I expected it to be.  When I was buying my books an older boy, much older stared then smiled at me.  I was scared to smile back but I did.
Melanie and I made some sort of truce during orientation.  I wanted her to like me and did everything in my power to make myself likable.
But the truth was most girls didn’t like me.  I had a few girlfriends but most people who talked to me were boys.
We went home for the rest of the summer.  It was the summer of the Chicago Convention.  Vile.  Horrible.  My parents had practically locked me in the house so I wouldn’t go with friends I had made earlier that summer.  It was for my own safety my parents assured me.  I was angry at them but secretly glad I wasn’t there.  Yet I should have been.  It was so conflicting.  For the rest of her life, my mother a non-crier, would cry whenever she saw anything about the Chicago Convention.  “You could have been killed.  Or worse.”  Worse meaning brain damage.  If they had only known how damaged my seemingly good brain really was.
I don’t know how to talk about non verbal learning disorder in this memoir. I can only show what I was like and maybe at the end of the book put in a chapter that explains how my behavior, in each chapter,  was infuenced by NLD.  I don’t know.
The rest of the summer was spent getting ready for school.  My mother and I went to Floyd’s a discount store near our house and spent $40 on health and beauty aids as they were just beginning to be called.  It seemed like a fortune to me then.  We filled up two giant shopping bags.
We went to Loehmanns and bought clothes my mother liked.  Fortunately my mother had good taste, and was proud of my figure.  I knew most girls I would like would basically wear bell bottoms with cotton peasant blouses.  I could get the bell bottoms from my parents store along with an endless variety of tee shirts.  But I was into dressing up.  I wasn’t the bell bottom kind of hippie but the Indian print dress type.  I managed to make all the clothes my mother bought at Loehmann’s into some sort of hippie atire by pairing dresses with pants and/or putting a Mexican rope belt on.
I managed to make myself stand out.
Finally school began.  My parents drove me and I couldn’t wait until they left. They stayed and stayed.  Finally just before nightfall they left.  I kissed them good bye.  Walked out of the room and began to make myself a life.

winter 1972

My father was waiting up for me.  I had moved home for a few months while I decided whether or not to get married.  Some people accuse me of making rash decisions but in reality I can take forever.  Or not.  It depends on my mood and the importance of the decision.  This was an important decision but I knew divorce was a viable option.  Hey I have always tried to be honest with myself.

My father looked uncomfortable as he stood next to what we have always called “the marble” in the entry way, as it’s made of Carrara marble.  “The marble” is a sort of catch all. I have known it most of my life and can visualize it perfectly but don’t know how to describe it as I have never seen a comparable piece of furniture anywhere.

“Dave Shapiro’s father died tonight, and so did JohnnyB.”  As nice as Dave, a member of my high school class, was, I really didn’t know his father.  JohnnyB on the other hand had been the first boy I sorta dated in college.  Johnny was tall, blond, sexually confused and had been a dancer on two TV shows Hullabaloo and an up with people type show.

When I had been living in Israel I had this horrible feeling that Johnny would die but had no idea either where the feeling came from or how to tell him.  I told my boyfriend who believed me and together we tried to think of a way to warn Johnny.  It was too late.  One day his girlfriend called me–I never did understand that relationship and told me that he had passed out the night before.  His revival was quick and gratifying but he was throwing up blood.  She took him to Roosevelt Hospital where they gave him medication despite her telling them that he had hepatitis.  JohnnyB lapsed into a coma.

The nurses told us that he got more phone calls and visitors than a Mafia member who had been shot in the head during a salute to Italy parade.  I loved JohnnyB and his demise hit me hard.  My father was droning on:

I don’t understand Pia.  I lived through the depression and World War Two and you have more dead friends than I do.

Is it a contest?

I knew what he was really saying.  I knew too many hardcore druggies, and people with problems.  Though JohnnyB had given drugs up years before.  My boyfriend didn’t do any.  Me I liked the passing of the pipe or a doobie only.  That night I appreciated the effort my father made not to say more.  But those two sentences stayed with me forever.

We both started laughing and went into the kitchen where my father sat while I made us tea and made phone calls.  I wanted to ask my father why just once he couldn’t make the frigging tea himself but he did buy all his employees coffee, treated women with respect, and he was not just my father but my boss that year.  He gave me the week off to go upstate to stay with JohnnyB’s family, before during and after the funeral.  It was my first Irish wake, and I couldn’t get myself to look at Johnny’s body.  After all it was just his body, not his spirit that had gone, I thought, two months earlier when he went into the coma.  But I couldn’t look at the body.

I had forced myself to go into his hospital room where he was hooked up to many machines. I was rather horrible around sick people, even ones in comas.  Especially ones in comas   That one day I would become a geriatric social worker was unthinkable.

Johnny’s father was an engineer for IBM.  He had always been ashamed of his bright handsome sexually ambivalent son.  Other fathers would cry to me, later, but he was the first.  It didn’t make me uncomfortable. I liked the role of comforter.  Johnny’s parents left New York for the mountains of North Carolina where Johnny’s father became a carpenter. I have always hoped he found peace.

Happy Channakuah!!!!!

✡

I’m getting into this.  It’s becoming fun.

3WW–Three words on a Wednesday

There are times in life we know something important is happening or about to happen in our immediate life: high school graduation; the first day of college; meeting the person we will love; etc.  But there are times that the unexpected happens and something, maybe small maybe large, happens we will treasure forever.

October 17, 1977 could have been just another day in my life.  I was taking grad classes at The New School in poli sci and wondering what I was going to do with a fairly useless Masters when a friend, David, asked me if I wanted to apply for a job in the company he was temping at.  He was convinced that the supervisors and co-workers were anti-Semitic and wanted my input.  I just wanted a job.  There was a recession that had begun in 73 and wasn’t going to end until 82.  For the first time we had stagflation and there were more college grads than there were “suitable” jobs for especially in New York and Boston, the only two cities I truly knew.

The interview was short and sweet as the job was supposed to last six weeks.  I would be coding documents on anyone or all of 40+ suits against AT&T, then the only real phone company.  The largest case was The Department of Justice who was suing AT&T for being a monopoly.  AT&T and its subsidiaries, especially Western Electric had factored out the coding to the company I would work for Aspen Systems.  If a Western Electric employee coded documents they were paid at least $25,000 a year plus benefits.  We were paid $5.00 an hour, no benefits.  But $5.00 an hour was enough to pay my rent with money left over.

And together David and I were going to uncover anti-Semitism.   The Viet Nam war was over; I needed a cause.  My college friends in Boston had scattered all over the globe.  It wasn’t that I was sick of my New York college friends, but I wanted more friends.  My best girl friend Shelby had gotten every girl she knew but me a job at her publishing  company.  It was a gesture that spoke volumes.  Our friendship had always been tempestuous.   Years before, for a brief moment during the Watergate hearings we had been roommates in Sea Cliff, LI.  She threw a crystal ashtray at me; I threw it back.

The ashtray had been a gift to me but she ended up with it.  Like Shelby it was very beautiful.  She probably thought she deserved it.  I didn’t speak to her for almost two years.  But like the cliff swallows of Capistrano, I seemed to unwittingly find my way back to Shelby.  I was sick of it.

At 27 I was already divorced.  The summer of 77 had been one of the craziest ever in New York and I was glad to be alive to talk about it.

My new temp job was downtown; across the street from Saint Paul’s.  Much later it would become famous for being a refuge for 9/11 workers.  Then it was the adjunct church to Trinity and a beautiful building to look at during work.

I loved training.  AT&T had a well deserved rep for being one of the best corporate trainers.  I was in a group of twelve; the next week we would join 228 other coders plus supervisors and managers in a large room on the fourth floor.  To get into the fourth floor we needed a card key, the second I had ever seen.  Our card keys had our picture on them along with identifying information.  I so wish I hadn’t lost as it was the one picture ID I truly loved.  I could and did look at that picture for hours.

Who was that girl?  I wish I known to treasure her; to respect both her body and her mind for it was a sharp one.  As usual I downplayed my accomplishments.  Excelling at training?  It was easy.  Too easy.  A trained parrot could read the documents and put the required info onto the document control sheets.

The Yankees won the 77 World Series that Wednesday.  They hadn’t won a world series since the early 60′s and had been given one ticker tape parade for a series they had lost.  This ticker tape parade would be the first one for a series they actually won.

I joined some coworkers and watched it from the main floor’s windows.  People kept smiling at me and saying hello.  This is a horrible admission but I expected people to be friendly, to want to know me.  I wouldn’t have known how to start a conversation if somebody didn’t begin one with me.  I wouldn’t have known that a guy wanted to date me if he didn’t blurt it out.

David was one of the few single straight men I didn’t date at Aspen. Six weeks turned into three years and then I worked for a spin off, with promotion after promotion.  I forgot to look for anti-Semites as I made friend after friend, and slowly extracted myself from Shelby and her world.

This sounded so good when I wrote it in my head yesterday.  The words were perfect for it so I can’t blame them.  This memoir is driving me bonkers.  I know so much is in my blog–needs much editing but first the HTML in the older posts needs cleaning and I’m going to have bite the bullet and pay way too much money.  I really love writing fiction but won’t let myself until this is finished.  I’m going to have my own NaMem__month!  I’m sorry that this doesn’t flow the way I would like it to.  Any suggestions are more than valued.

My book’s about an imperfect girl who lived in New York in the 70′s and 80′s and often felt that her life was one huge fairy tale.  She didn’t take the roads more traveled or the straight roads with the great pavements and wonderful lighting (interstates, I guess) but the windy curvy side roads that often lead you to someplace new and not necessarily great, or even more magnificent than you could imagine.  It’s also about a girl, the same one, who has an invisible disability but she didn’t know she was “disabled” until her late 30′s and didn’t know the name until three years ago.  By necessity it goes into childhood to show how the problems first manifested.

I don’t want to make this a “disability” memoir as while my life was affected by the disability I lived, worked and played in an “able” society, with the “able” society’s rules.  Perhaps this was unfair but I like to think it made me more interesting.  Hence the problems will usually be on the side, unstated and occasionally take center stage

Think outside the Fox

Not all South Carolinians are DeMinted

Best signs I saw at the rally.  The rally will hold me together for awhile.  I’m not going to discuss how I feel about the results now.  It’s obvious.  On the good side my city will be getting public buses.  I read that only people on welfare who are parasites need public transportation.  Love being categorized so wrongly!!!

Thanks Thom for the words

Memory is funny.  It’s highly selective.  90% perception; 90% pictures and films; 90% discussion with relatives and friends you have always known; 90% discussion with friends and family you make once away from the nuclear family–and these memories get thrown into the shuffle; five percent absolute truth; five percent absolute falsehoods; five percent kernel of truth. Yes I know this is way over 100% but what in life is a 100%?

I was born in the middle of the 20th century and live in 2010.  It feels absolutely incredible to be part of the biggest revolution in telecommunications since?  I’m not really sure.

You in your 20′s now, maybe 30′s and definitely younger will always know where your former classmates and friends are.  You might not speak to somebody who used to be very important to you for years, but one day you’ll IM or Skype or whatever.Then again you might know exactly who you want to keep in your life from the time you graduate college.  I hope you leave room for the unexpected and the wondrous.

I don’t know if this change in communications and the youtubing of everything will allow you to remember with more clarity and precision or your memories will be selective also.  Only time, a zillion studies, and you yourself will be able to answer those questions.

I became an Internet junkie far earlier than most members of my generation.  But I quickly established contact with some people who had been important to my life since my late teens and we had just fallen out of contact for a few years.  Yet this new way of communicating–email, allowed us to be more honest than we had been previously.  Or maybe it was being on the cusp of middle age and being a bit sentimental.  We wanted people to know how much they had meant to us.

Through the years I reestablished contact with many people.  No matter how slow the contact came it always felt a bit abrupt.  By establishing this contact we wield our story to another person.  I learned what people really thought of me at various times and each time was blown away.

Last week something amazing happened.

When I was four I made my first best friend. I don’t remember meeting her. We must have picked each other as there were many girls around our age in the garden apartment we lived in.

We were friends who could spend hours just lying on the grass staring at the sky and telling each other stories.  We made up games.  We read books.  Did she come to the court barbecues where kernels of corn would fall all around me as I was messy?  I think her family was away all summer; not just six weeks for camp as my sister and I were.

She set the bar high for all future friendships.

And I realize that many of my memories aren’t false but aren’t exactly the way things happened.  So much bad happened in my own head, for I was struggling from the time we were nine or so with NLD, that I didn’t see the good around me.

I’m not changing my memoir for it is my perception but I’m adding chapters.  I have been toying for some time with having somebody who knew me during a specific period write an intro or a bit more to a chapter.  Yes I would wield space to them.

It is abrupt; this feeling that I wasn’t as strange as I believed I was.  But I can get used to it.  Lord can I get used to it!

Thanks Thom for the words. Difficult as they are!

The tremor in my voice is palpable as I try explaining how fearful I am.  My fear isn’t minute but rampant, stretching across my world  like a Christo presentation.

Oh you believe in the law of attraction, thinking positive thoughts, banishing negativity and everything toxic?  So did I my friend, so did I. Read more…

Thanks Thom for the words

“Mr Linky” is linking to this rather than this post

The Bronx, winter 1969

I don’t know where we are exactly. Some community with hills and old uncared for wood frame houses. Literally that’s what much of the Bronx looks like; the parts that aren’t all old apartment buildings in horrible condition, Riverdale, Country Club (the two very good areas) or Coop City the newish giant complex of buildings that all look exactly alike and unfortunately were built over Freedom Land–an amusement park on a map of the USA that I loved.

I’m not sure why I’m here either.  I convinced some friends to spend the night at Tricia Levy’s. She’s older than us.  Tough.   Shoots dope and hoops with equal vigor. She dropped out before I began the previous September.  Many of my school friends are drop outs.    Segal, student body president,  is in love with her.  He hates me for reasons I don’t understand.  He’s not with us.

Really I’m pissed at my off and on boyfriend, Noah, who set out to visit Tricia with some other friends that didn’t include me. I don’t understand why we break up every three weeks.  I found the secret to getting him back but I don’t share this info with anybody including myself.  It’s sort of subliminal.

We spend hours smoking dope.  Noah leaves with a few friends.  I stay with Jacy and Jake, her boyfriend, who I had convinced to come with me.  They go to sleep in a closet.  Jacy’s one of my crew of gorgeous girlfriends.  We all hang out with boys and happen to get along.  People type us girls as tight and I guess we’re as tight as any girls who only care about boys can be.

Noah’s best friend Henry who never smokes dope or does anything that wouldn’t be parent approved stays with me. I adore Henry who later I will hurt as I never hurt anybody before or since.  The guilt remains to this day.

The apartment has very little furniture but too much pop art consisting of straight lines, squiggly lines and neon for my taste.  I find a sleeping bag and get ready to go to sleep.  Henry takes a sleeping bag next to me.  Somebody hands me a glass of Kool Aid.  Too damn sweet but I’m thirsty so I drink the whole thing.

I wake up in the early morning.  The sun shimmers into the apartment.  The posters look immense.  Something’s wrong.  The lines are moving.  The colors are too bright. Everything’s moving. I feel as if I can’t stand or walk yet I do as well as I do normally.

I try telling Henry that something’s very wrong but I can barely talk.  Henry hates eating out, hates food really,  but for once in his life he wants to go to a restaurant.  I just want to go home and somehow convey that.

When I get back to school Segal finds me. He wants a full report on the night and morning.  I’m not sure how he knew I went to Tricia’s.   I’m better and beyond angry:

You want to know?  You really want to know?  I’m feeling the effect of Acid right now.  Acid that I didn’t f–king want.  Your f–king girlfriend. She gave me the Kool Aid.  I’m going to kill her.  Kill her if it’s the last thing I do.

Segal immediately becomes madder than hell at Tricia. He says he no longer loves her.  He falls in love or lust or something with me.  I let him take me out, take me to demonstrations in DC in his Jag, but I won’t sleep with him.  Never.

This is an excerpt that will expanded upon.

Thanks Thom for the words

The following isn’t my book but the side affects of it.  Or how my hair is turning gray at record rates because this book and life leaves me emotionally drained.  And when I try to get in touch with NLD groups and/or coaches nobody gets back to me or tells me I’m too old.  Funny but I thought this was supposed to be the prime of life. I didn’t mean for this post to be so all around the world with Pia.  I’m not a bad person or a bad writer and yet I’m back to feeling everybody else deserves more than I do–no matter what I say later in this post. it’s the outcome of years of trying too much yet being told I wasn’t trying at all and if I just did….I tried making this private as I didn’t want to trash it but don’t want to subject people to feeling they have to comment

I’m so tired.  Lord am I tired of trying.  I fear that my old age is going to come earlier than it should so I do everything I can to stave it off.  However how do I know that dementia or Parkinson’s or something akin to either one won’t happen?  I could appear demented at eighteen–hence the title Space Chick with the Electric Hair.

You make a mistake.  You get angry sometimes for a second then shrug it off.  I make a mistake.  I get angry then angrier.  How do I know it won’t happen again?  Sometimes it happens for the 20th million time or so it feels.  I can’t absolve myself of guilt, of fear, of so many ordinary things.  I can’t let go of stupid mistakes that anybody can and does make.

“Relax,” you say: “picture yourself relaxing on a beach…..”  Idiot!  I live at the beach and my problems aren’t in my head–they’re neurological.* Thanks Lillian, Bill for that sorta analogy.  Two more adults with non verbal learning disorder (NLD). *Actual brain malfunctions rather than emotional I should clarify.

No matter how much I relax I have to live in the real world and the real world isn’t relaxing.  I have to be on constant guard that my gait is good.  That I don’t look spacey.  That I do everything correctly.  That I don’t take too much time counting change or scanning in items in the store.  Little everyday things aren’t little to me.

Anxiety is a killer and I have high blood pressure to prove that.  Perfect blood tests.  No physical reason the doctors say.  But blood pressure that was off the roof because I wanted to go off Klonopin and no doctor would help me–I no longer have great health insurance.  Pre-existing conditions. ANXIETY.  The insurance company claimed I was lying about never being hospitalized.  But I haven’t been.  Yet I can’t prove a negative.  ANXIETY  can cover so much–high blood pressure, then anything to do with the heart or a stroke or I can go on and on.

I’m under insured (but pay double in premiums each month just to help me lose money, and because I’m too scared not to be insured ) doctors no longer find me “remarkable,” “hilarious in a good way,” or “wonderful.”  But a frigging charity case they probably hiss at when I leave.

Me, a charity case!  I can’t be.  I’m not the one that should be ridiculed.  We should ridicule a system that won’t stop pre-existing conditions for adults until 2014.  Of course health care might be overturned and then my premiums that cover so little could go up to the sky and I will be totally uninsured.  And it’s not fair for anybody including me who has paid into the system forever.

I never thought about these things when I was young.  Youth seemed endless.  True I could never absolve myself of the guilt I constantly felt.  Mea culpa, mea culpa!!!!!  I delighted it seemed in taking blame.  Used to make “funny” remarks about it.  “I would apologize to a street lamp.” OK I have!  I used to tell people I began World War Two. It seemed funny at the time considering I wasn’t born then.

I used humor, some sort of ability to make people like me and my personality as a cover.  I came of age in the late 60′s–70′s.  It was OK to be different.  It was more than OK; it was great.  I look back at the life I led in disbelief.  I can’t believe I was not only comfortable working in a huge room with 240 people but one of the stars.  I can’t believe I not only went to huge parties but had them twice a year.

I watch Hoarders and think “this could be me.”  For I don’t have an organizational bone in my body.  And I was messy.  Very messy.  I went through an entire relationship without once letting him into my apartment.  True he was my boss and I didn’t really like him.  True we went out to dinner one night and I got trashed.  Didn’t mean to but….Ended up in his bed and woke up from my black out screaming at him.  I ran from his apartment scared that I would run into somebody I knew for it felt like half my world lived in that building in the late 70′s–early 80′s.  People who played important parts in my life lived in The Atrium–which I later called the Melrose Place of the Village because it felt so interconnected and scandalous .  Though I have to say I was the scandal a third of the time.

Most of the time my apartment was half-decent. I love having company, and don’t buy because it fulfill needs.  I bought because I had no place to do laundry.  I bought because I loved the way I looked in clothes and lived near many interesting stores.

I loved the use of candles instead of lights so people couldn’t see too closely.  My apartment was built in the 20′s and hadn’t been renovated since then.  When I moved in the fridge was one step up from an ice box.  I bought a new one.  But the apartment had no amenities, was hard to clean for anybody, and not walking distance from a Laundromat. What it had was pre-war charm (without light), 12 and a half foot ceilings, a huge archway, and a renter who would get everybody drunk or stoned when they walked in–lighten up it was the 70′s and uh 80′s.  I also cooked in those days and nobody turned down my food.  Most of the time I went out.  Most of all it had location–just off Fifth Avenue in the East 60′s.   I loved that apartment and would probably have waited to be bought out if there hadn’t been five floods in three weeks that destroyed it–and building management wouldn’t do a thing.  I of course thought the aftermath of the floods somehow my fault and didn’t press too hard for them to fix everything.  Idiot!!!!!

I taught myself organizational skills.  It didn’t come easy and I let a dresser draw and part of a closet be disorganized.  Places where I can just throw things to later put them in order.  But my kitchen, bathrooms, living room, and guest room are all immaculate.  Even my study is always “company ready.”  Honestly I have myself convinced that the Horry County police are going to come in at any moment.  I know how irrational that is.  But here people just stop over and almost demand entree.

I bought my apartment on Riverside Drive because I could see its potential for organization.  It was the first time in my life I organized an apartment or anything rather than have it control me.  I do consider an every two week cleaning woman one of life’s necessities for me.  In the city Zobedia understood me and was incredible.  Here my cleaning woman does the minimum but I pay her much less and love her politics and wit–not too many white women voted for Obama in my small beach city.

*******

A friend asked in a post “who reads blogs anymore?”  It feels, to me, that there are hundreds of blogging associations most of which think you should put your personal blog to bed and blog solely for them. Never!

At the same time I like facebook for socializing and yes linking my posts. Twitter scares me as it entails looking for subjects and more.  Honestly I just want to write.  I don’t want to do all the periphery stuff but I will if it means an old fashioned book contract.  I know I’m not organized enough to self-publish.  So why do I think I’m organized enough to be published?  I waver on that one but believe that not enough is known about a disability that has affected every aspect of my life.  As I said I don’t know if it will affect my mind–in different and worse ways than it has already.  Though it can be argued that people with NLD have poor judgment, I have always been known for basically having excellent judgment and I’m not going to argue with a lifetime of assessments. More than anything I fear my judgment going.

I read yesterday that people with NLD can’t focus on books and get fidgety when read to.  They were talking about kids.  Knock me over with a spoon and some codeine.  I loved being read to and taught myself to read before entering Kindergarten.  My older by a year boy cousin couldn’t believe I could read so fast so he  tested me with a boy book he knew I had never read.  Yes I really could read both fast and with perfect comprehension.  I’m sorry if this doesn’t jive with some for profit learning center for kids and people with dementia but uh….

I’m not being vain when I say there are few adults who admit to having NLD and fewer that can write like I can.  I really want to write edgy fiction.  But I feel compelled to get my story out there.  And honestly when people without NLD write about it they generalize or get subtle things wrong.  When parents write they write from their perspective.  Which is OK.  But I am a writer.  I have a compelling story.  I hate pitching it.  I hate having to sell myself on FB, Twitter etc.  It feels like much clutter being added to my day.

I realize we live in the era of shameless self-promotion.  I’m good at having a bold facade–something I always was in real life too.  Distracts from the mess inside and I was vain.  It ends there.  I stopped reading blogs looking for “followers” on networked blogs–and if you said you were a follower of mine rather than a reader I would hand you the Kool Aide. Anyway, people promote blogs–that they sound proud of and have nothing to be proud of, IMHO.

I do yet I have so much trouble being a part of this whole new world—and I was here long before many or most bloggers.  Not just in the regular world but in the blogging world.  I feel as if I missed my chance.  I missed it because I was too overwhelmed.  Now I’m ready yet is the world still ready for me?  I feel weird posting this.  It’s as if I can’t absolve myself of sins real and imagined.  I hiss at myself and both ridicule me and hold myself up to ridicule.  But I’m as worthy as any mother of any child with Asperger’s (the disorder de jour) or person with bipolar disorder–another disorder that gets much play in the blogosphere probably because it’s easy to understand!  I want to make NLD easy to understand and I almost promise to keep the posts shorter as I was until last week.  I’m tired of having to explain NLD.  I’m tired of writing about it but being obsessive….

I’m sorry well maybe a little for the length of this. I’m going away tomorrow for a long weekend and have much to do so if you comment on this I won’t be around until Tuesday at the earliest

Tomorrow is the ninth anniversary of my Mom’s death.  Sunday would have been her birthday.  It would have been nice to celebrate on 10/10/10.  This is my Mom in her later years.

Thanks Thom for the 3 Word Wednesday words!  And hope your year move to the East Harlem/Harlem border is everything you dreamed and more.  Me a bit jealous.  I will return part time within the next five years!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I was twelve that Halloween in 1962 when our family left the garden apartments in Beech Hills, Douglaston to live fifteen minutes northeast in East Birchwood, Jericho LI.  Fifteen minutes on the Long Island Expressway (LIE) or Grand Central/Northern State Parkway, but a world apart.  Exits 41N & S had just opened on the LIE, and East Birchwood was almost directly off it.

I called us “Expressway followers” as we had moved to the garden apartments when the exit to it was built eight years earlier.  My father needed quick easy access to the city. He played poker one night a week in a game I imagined to be like Felix and Oscar’s but with the players were mostly in the arts, and took endless classes at The New School another night.  We were going to live in the suburbs but not shaped by them if we lived the life of my father’s almost dream.  He really wanted to live on Fifth or Park but didn’t believe in private school and most city schools weren’t what they are now.  I had passed almost every test to get into Hunter, (Hunter’s ed department’s school–the only “gifted” coed school then but bombed at the finish line.

The house was unlike any we had been looking at in Great Neck or Lake Success.  Later my father would take me to the see the house we almost bought in Lake Success.  It had its own pond.  But there was a recession in 62 and we were a stock market family.  Almost everything about our lives was shaped by the market but my sister and I didn’t really realize that then.  Our father loved to tease us with hints of what could have been.  But my sister and I spent our childhoods and most of our teens thinking we were middle class then just slightly more.  Our parents didn’t want to take the sheen off our lives by bothering us with money problems or explaining how sometime we had more money than most people in Jericho.

Our house was an eight room four level split.  I loved it.  I loved how modern it was, and not really lived in.  The family that had lived in it before us kept it in pristine condition.  Their only concession to bad taste was a caricature of their family with their name on the mirror in the bar in the rec room.  We kept it for the tackiness factor in the house that was to become, in my opinion, overly decorated.  But we were the first people I knew not to have a couch in the living room but five chairs and a love seat.

I loved the house for all the reasons I was to hate it  as I grew into my teens.

There were four or five developments in the Jericho school system, parts of Brookville, Old Westbury, Muttontown, and South Jericho which was near Hicksville, now regular then lower middle class I think,  and thus never talked about.  I didn’t know until years later that South Jericho was famous for houses built from Sears catalogues but I could tell you all about the Quaker cemetery, meeting house, The Milleridge Inn which is the oldest continuously operated restaurant in America as is the old portion of the Jericho Middle/Senior High School.

I always tell people I grew up in  a school district not a town because everything revolved around school.  Even then Jericho was considered one of the best schools in the country.  I had been in the Special Progress (SP) classes in the city; I could have done Seventh and Eighth Grades in one year or taken enriched classes because I passed a years worth of tests.  My parents felt they had to give me the choice so over the summer when my sister and I were at camp they did serious house hunting.  It was the first time we weren’t actively involved in the process. My parents were moving for other reasons one being all my friends had stopped talking to me the year before.  I had gone from being everybody’s friend to an outcast.  But in my new Junior High I had been making friends, rich girls who lived on the right side of the Expressway and were in the SP.  My parents assumed I had been going through a stage and would continue making many new friends.  So did I.

I had my first boyfriend and my first kisses.  Well a bit more than that.  They didn’t call him Hot Fingers in the final skit because he was good on the guitar.  David went to Bronx Science and I was in love with everything Bronx.  I wanted to be a cool girl and cool girls didn’t come from Queens.  Having a boyfriend, coincidentally also from a garden apartment area of Queens seemed to be as close to the Bronx as I could get.  I didn’t lust for him; I’m not sure I even liked him but he was there.

My first day of school was November 1st.  Somehow my records hadn’t arrived, and I was put in a regular class.  Not just regular but the “A”s to “F”s when I’m an “S.”  That bothered me more than it should have.  I thought I looked cute.  My dress was a red and white checked shirtwaist with a large red patent leather belt.  My brunette flecked with red and blond hair was brushed to a sheen, tied in a pony tail and my mother had let me wear a hint of red lipstick.  I wanted to die when I walked into my first class, English, and saw all the girls dressed in Villager Oxford shirts and ugly A lined wool skirts.  Almost no girl had make up on.  The ones who did had eyeliner!  They weren’t cool but bad.  I knew the difference from my intimate study of older girls in the garden apartments, books, magazines, movies and TV.

I sat next to Anne Feigenbaum, an obvious bad girl.  She began talking to me and I perked up for a second.

“See that boy who is staring at you?”

Actually I hadn’t noticed Steve Miller but he was about the cutest boy I had ever seen.  My heart flip flopped.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you ever talk to him.  That girl sitting next to him?  That’s Bev Cantor, his girlfriend and my best friend.  Get it?  She’s my best friend, and I swear I will punch you out if you so much as look at him.

Anne was big.  She looked like she could knock me off the ground.  I believed everything that she said.  Somehow I lost the voice that had been so vocal my first six weeks of Junior High.  I gained 35 pounds in the next six weeks.  When my parents would ask about my day I would mumble something.  I wanted to cry but couldn’t.  The only people I could talk to and wouldn’t really talk but yell when I wasn’t mumbling were my parents and my sister.

I did horribly in school.  The subjects that had seemed so easy in the advanced classes in Queens seemed like Greek in Jericho.  When my records arrived the guidance counselor asked me not my parents if I wanted to be in the Honors Class.  I said no because I thought that’s what he wanted me to say.  It didn’t occur to me to tell my parents.

I was officially weird again.  Every morning I would tremble as I went to the bus stop because, several times a month–I never knew when,  Joan Hoffman would tell Gary Stein to throw me into the bushes, and he would. They found it funny.  It went on for about two years.

I did nothing to stop them.  I did nothing to make myself likable.  I couldn’t even say hello to people. My gait was off.  To this day I couldn’t tell you how to play field hockey. Not that I have ever needed to know that.  I couldn’t learn Spanish.  The rules of grammar eluded me.  I knew I wasn’t stupid but I felt it.  I hated who I was.   But inside me I knew there was a popular funny smart girl waiting to come out.