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!

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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.

Thanks Thom for the 3WW words!

Summer seemed both too long and too short.  It was suddenly over with a drop or many drops of rain.  Four and a half inches so far.

She couldn’t focus.  Though her house had no mold–she had it checked constantly, and her eagle nose didn’t detect that horrid distinctive smell, her brain felt moldy.

She couldn’t focus so she attacked the kitchen.  She should have been happy when she looked at the almost bare counters, sink and scrubbed almost to perfection appliances.  But as she was finishing she could hear her father: “you missed a spot.  Do it over.”

Not fair she thought, not fair at all though she knew that if she had been young when diagnosed her father would have searched the world for answers.  He would have engulfed her in love; not pointed out all her weaknesses.  “So close to perfect. Try a bit more.”

I tried, I tried, she thought.

It was so much easier in her late teens, 20′s and 30′s.  First she drowned his words out. She claimed to have the longest adolescence in America. Though she worked and had an apartment somehow she managed to drag it out into sometime in her 40′s.

Somewhere in those years, she made herself indispensable to his life. Or she always had been and hadn’t noticed.  Members of her family were constantly in imminent danger.  It was her job to sort out the messes; to comfort them; to let them know that they saw too many mountains.  Her mother comforted her.  But then she became old, blind and frail.  It wasn’t fair.  No it wasn’t fair, but nobody says life’s supposed to be fair or easy.

She wondered what life would be like if she tampered with her memories?  Edited them just a bit so only the good ones stood out.  Or day dreamed a more perfect life?  That should be a book.  But she’s actually making progress on the one she began so long ago.  First she needed sun.  Copious amounts of sun.

My wisdom has grown damp like the rivers.

Incredible line by Doug Pascover I wish i wrote!  His poem was inspired by one by Langston Hughes

As always thanks Thom for the 3WW words

These words awaken something in me I would rather keep asleep right now.  I don’t usually read entries in 3WW before writing my own but I’ve always liked Linda Jacob’s poems and her submission this week brought back the sad season.  It’s OK; I can’t expect people to not talk about aging because it drives me crazy until 10/14 when magically it goes away.

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The old man walks out of his house and screams at me.  “You’re walking in my grass.  I keep telling you to stop.  I’m trying to grow grass and you’re ruining everything.  You, you walk too much.  Everyday I come out and tell you to leave.”

I would laugh as I walk this route once a week at the most. I’m walking in the middle of the gutter, and three cars are parked in his so called grass but my gait is off.  I’m almost limping and very self-conscious.

My gait is usually good but I’m tired and no shoes seem to fit properly. I was going to nudge them into a cute pair that seems to be a size too small–funny they fit yesterday.  Oh how my body ripens over night.

This town is all about appearances. Somehow I have passed the appearance test.  Probably because I have the most expensive teeth in America and smile at every opportunity. (Not the best teeth but the priciest.)

Sometimes when I pass people I know I nudge my mouth into the largest and most stupid of smiles, stand there with one hand up, and feel like a traffic monitor or live billboard.  In New York I can get away with a half smile, but not here.  The smile must ripen to take over my face.

I try the smile at the old man and he stops yelling but stands there with a bewildered look on his face.  I look at him more closely.

Then I think the old man might in actuality be younger than me and once again everything’s right with the world.

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Take back America.  Go to DC on 10/30 for Jon Stewart’s rally for sanity!!!!!  Just remember that Christine O’Donnell is a serious candidate, and that could get you there!!!!!

I tripped over a rock most people would have noticed. He first saw me then. Later he said that was the moment he fell in love.

My features were unformed; most people confused them with perfect. At eighteen I knew they were childlike. Most girls longed for beauty; I longed for character.

I did and didn’t want to blend into the curtains; to be camouflaged until I understood what I was doing.

That year, 1968-69. I felt as if I were a girl in a candy store. My candy store gave out real life boys. I was in hippie princess heaven, complete with sound track by Janis, The Airplane, Moody Blues, Donavon and Melanie among others.

For the first time since early elementary school it was better than OK to be me. I could dance to my own rhythm; sing out of key, be sloppy, do whatever people with the unnamed disorder did or didn’t do. It didn’t matter what I did. People either hated me or were entranced.

Life would have been perfect had I any idea about what I was doing. I accepted my life as a gift from the gods but was never actually sure why.

That year, and the one after that, and the decade that was to come gave me much warped confidence.

I knew I was desirable but wasn’t sure why. I thought I was smart but was convinced most people thought otherwise. Even when all the evidence pointed to the contrary.

I love writing in fiction. It’s something I discovered I was good in after I began my blog. But I feel pulled toward writing a memoir about living with non verbal learning disorder. People either feel pity or don’t believe it’s a real disorder.

I’m not a person to be pitied though I often hurt from what I can’t learn. That I can’t learn too many things no matter how much I try doesn’t point to stupidity but a bona fide disorder

Crossposted at Red Room Please comment there. I realize this is territory charted too many times. It’s language I’m playing with
I just realize you have to give your life story practically to comment at Red Room–which includes such authors as Maya Angelou. It’s a very interesting site. So comment if you want

I don’t usually wish I were in my 20′s or 30′s now but I do today. So that I could fill these pages with pictures of moi and write pithy sentences mistaken for oh so clever because back then I could recite the phone book and six out of ten people would be enthralled.

In October of my freshman year in college I forgot I had to give a speech the next day for speech class. It could be on anything I wanted. Fortunately I didn’t have to take the remedial speech class “losing your LonguyIsland accent.” I so wish I had a copy of the catalogue to show that I’m not making this up.

I was helping my boyfriend and his friends roommates guys he sort of knew and I was to know much better then he did* clean their new house on the Long Island Sound. House sounds grand. It was a basement apartment. Over them lived the biggest dealers on the Island but we didn’t know that yet. Or maybe the guys did but I sure was clueless.

My mother only used cleaning products like Ajax. I found myself enthralled by the Pine Sol bottle. It smelt so good. It was a liquid. It wasn’t on the Savage family approved list. As much as I lusted after my boyfriend I think I lusted after this bottle more. It was in the province of “I don’t have to be like my mother, and when I have my own apartment I’m going to use all the fancy cleaning products I can find.” I know–pine sol? I’m just telling this story not editorializing.

I read the back of the bottle to my boyfriend and his roommates. They loved it so I read it the next day. We had many friends in that class and they all reported back to my boyfriend. I was a complete success and got an “A.”

Unfortunately I never went back to class again and failed it. I, Miss Priss & Proper, do everything as soon as you get it, never let a bill sit, treat life as if it’s one big test, was a total screw up then.

But I can’t remember ever having so much pure fun. Well yes I can but that was the first time since grade school life was uncomplicated yet complicated.

*It was complicated.
I’m having the 9/11/dead mother thing again. After I got over thinking she was my father’s appendage but loved her much anyway, she became my go to person for just about everything. And in the revised family history I was always perfect.

I’m really looking forward to the illumination of the Shagger’s water tower. Sheet, I’m turning into the Sylivia Miles of North Myrtle Beach. Look her up. Oh she was a kinda actress turned older who would go to the opening of an envelope I can’t believe who came up with that line. Wiki has been wrong before…..