Damn Yankee

Damn Yankee, Part One
By
George S Geisinger

Chapter 1

The great Brighton Dam is nestled in a quiet country setting. The waters of an active river collect here. One approaches the dam coming down hill from either direction. It's beautiful here. The forest and hills surround the entire area, while the collective waters focus on a major city's water supply somewhere to the south of this lovely wooded area.
Then, there are the people here.
There are the three oxygen sisters, as I think of them. All of them wear cannula tubes to their eager noses, faithfully collecting extra oxygen, and catering to our senior statesman, the most honored King of the Queen's table. Two of the sisters kiss the King's bald head ceremoniously before each of our communal meals. The King tells tales of his combat tours with his machine gun in France during the great war. He says he had to get hurt more than once for the army to send him home. Now he finds himself confined to a wheelchair, but he says that when he stands up, he falls over backwards. “Can't do it,” he says with a chuckle. One of the oxygen sisters is the Queen, and particularly devoted to the King, defending his place of honor at her table against all and sundry who might sit there. The ceremony takes place regularly: two of the sisters kiss the heads of the King and Queen of the great Brighton Dam dining room, here at the senior apartments in the valley.
Then there's my neighbor, the writing professor. She always wants to talk about abstractions and depths of philosophies, or register effusive complaints about how the place is run. She doesn't like the way the water runs, either over, under, around or through the great Brighton Dam. She is the structure's greatest critic. She may forestall a flood one of these days.
Then there's usually quiet lady, who has plenty of insight to lend to almost any situation, in case it were needed at any moment. Even at that, one usually must ask her opinion; she seldom offers it without prompting.
There's the retired Gal Friday. She's been smoking some 50 years or better. Even so, she seems to suffer no ill effects from it, except that she has the most intense craving for cigarettes. She steals way during meals to go out and have a few hales on another, pleading that she has to go to the Lady's Room, but I know better. You can't fool an reformed smoker. Oh, and no one can pass any sort of untoward comprehension over on her either, anymore than one can pass one beyond the quiet one. Those two ladies are sharp as tacks. Every now and then, the one pats me on my forearm in a most maternal fashion at the Queen's table, in the dining room of the great Brighton Dam Senior Apartments, as if to reassure me somehow, in her most maternal fashion. I find her manner comforting.
An old salt here has been a near-silent, affable mystery until just recently. He's an old Navy man, no doubt, but I made a minor error in my estimation of how old he is. I'd assumed first off that he was a Baby Boomer, since he'd admitted to being stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War, and his face is nearly devoid of any tell-tale wrinkles that I ever see. But he tells me more recently he's 84 years old! Well, he's a nice, quiet guy. It seems impossible to not enjoy his company. His age simply underscores the reason why it is he speaks and moves as deliberately as he does. He's in ho hurry. He takes his time; a charming fellow.
Then there's the retired federal employee with a familiar Irish name and the most delightfully positive attitude. He's also confined to a wheelchair, like the King, but never complains of aches or pains, and never has enough time to do all the things he'd like to do. He and I have become famous friends here.
We cannot conclude this list of notable dinner companions here at the great Brighton Dam dining room, without gathering our attentions around one, central, most honored personage.
The young and beautiful Missie, is reputed to be the sole survivor of an horrendous auto accident some unknown amount of time back. As the prevailing story goes, she was out in a car on a date with her fiance, and somehow there was a dreadful, awful crash. How many people perished, I have no idea. She alone survives. Her body is broken and contorted, and her speech is significantly limited. The poor dear young lady is positively imprisoned in a wheelchair for life, and lives a fiercely independent, solitary life in our midst, isolated by her disabilities, coming and going among us like a specter. I search my heart to find some way to offer her some sort of kindness and affection, but I seem to fall short at every turn.
From whence cometh the courage to face such a life, my dear Missie?

Chapter 2

I've been doing some crocheting for some of the residents here, mostly hats and scarves. It ain't much of a living, but it keeps me busy and helps make people happy. It especially helps me relax, which is my major object. I'm in it for the pleasure.
Then there is an old school marm here, who marvels at the display of respect her students paid her by the time she approached retirement. They would rise to their feet at her entrance or departure, in her classroom, like the people did with Atticus, the attorney, in his courtroom, in the old movie, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” starring Gregory Peck.
The old gal crochets beautiful throws and afghans, but wants to learn my technique for crocheting hats seamlessly, in the round. I should be able to communicate my technique in a hands-on practicum class easily enough, though I'm not certain I want to betray my secrets. I figured it out for myself after I'd been crocheting for quite a few years, so I've got the background of my own trial and error to fall back on. My work has been popular from years of practice.
I have two different patterns for seamless hats, a stocking cap and a tam.
The retired school teacher has an elegant wardrobe, though not ostentatious. She dresses as though she has some taste, as well as some means. She's modest enough otherwise, in spite of the fact that she also claims her students responded to her simple act of merely putting her hands on her hips, on the playground, as an apparently effective disciplinary act. She also reports that her very presence could quiet the assembly at her school without further measures being taken. She says these things repeatedly. She seems lost beyond her classroom.
She must have become somewhat diminished by her years, by her own measure, honestly enough, because she is not so dynamic an individual at this late date in her life, but is a delightful person to know nonetheless, and very friendly. I find no fault with her.
I marvel at the idea that she cannot seem to maintain a balance in the temperature of her apartment here at the Brighton Dam Apartments. She keeps her door open to the public hallway most of the time, complaining of the heat in her apartment all summer long, though she's in as much possession of an air conditioner in her apartment as the rest of us, and has plenty of access to the maintenance man of the property, as we all do. But she seems to always have her life open to whomever passes by, craving companions. One of the gentlemen here is appearing to respond to her apparent loneliness, and she has at least the one friend, obviously enough. Never let it be said that my elders are without sympathy toward their peers. I'm one of the youngest residents in the place, myself.
The remote nature of the great Brighton Dam Apartments affords all of us here a security one might not expect in other places in this world. We never need to lock our doors, particularly, but I lock my own out of habit whenever I go out, more than out of necessity.

Chapter 3

There is a middle aged fellow here at the great Brighton Dam Apartments, who is first and foremost a friend to our community's pet dog, Bailey.
We have a wonderful, white Labrador to comfort all of us here, who is an absolutely harmless animal. Bailey will bark in full voice as he pleases, and charges and cavorts around the place whenever and wherever he likes, whether he knocks one of us rickety old geezers down or not, or wantonly making his harmless messes for people to clean up after he plays, being a dog, after all, but bites no one, and means no one any harm.
The man gives Bailey his treats daily, to the animal's great delight, and keeps a bed for the dog to sleep in at night, in his own apartment.
The man also administrates his own, community 'hard rock cafe,' so to speak, as a part of his belongings in his apartment. He has his own personal collection of hard rock recordings, and has opened his door to me in friendship, to come listen whenever I like.
He offers a sound I savor from such electric guitar greats as Jimi Hendrix, BB King, Alvin Lee, and Stevie Ray Vaughn, on DVD and CD. Similarly, he offers other hard rock I've barely begun to hear about, or know about, which is such delightfully good stuff, I need to take it bite-sized pieces, time-wise, in order to digest such heavy listening fare, fitful enough to keep it from overflowing in my very sensitive musical ear.
I might overwhelm myself listening to such serious music, and I do not reach for such a point facetiously. In fact, I'm as overwhelmed by such music as I am from almost any other masterful style, and I've heard almost every style of music on the market, with a schooled ear, I hasten to add.
My university major as a young man was music education; I studied to become a high school band director, and failed to finish the training for health reasons. I've heard everything from Medieval chamber music to the sounds I'm writing about here, at some great length over a lifetime of being fascinated with music.
From my point of view, the experience of listening to such a sound as hard rock, heavy metal, funk rock – call it what you will – is so delightful to my ear that I'm overwhelmed, in a relatively short period of time, and run away from it, fearing the return of the acid trips of scores of years past.
One would think I'm referring to classics, and indeed I am. I can't keep still and listen for a very long period of time, but I always want more later.
I'm never quite finished with it, as if I'm almost frightened by the power and authority of it while I'm listening. Being a composer of music for classic guitar, one might think I'd capture the funk rock sound in my own music, but apart of its allure to me is that I can never approach it myself. I can't hold a candle to it. My own playing is entirely different.
It's like listening to Arthur Rubinstein, the late, great piano virtuoso, playing Chopin and Beethoven, live in concert, which I did have the unique pleasure of doing when I was the young music student in university. The concert was at Duke University in the early 1970's. I kept my seat then, with a palpitating heart, not daring to leave for even a moment, on that historic occasion, for fear of distracting the master.
The Hendrix – Vaughn sound is as captivating and as inspiring as the other, to my personal ear, and since there is not a large, live audience listening with rapt attention, to distract the concentrating master performer in the event that I felt compelled to flee, I retreat to the hallway, halfway through the recording as it plays, in a self-consciousness that is as personal as to escape expression here. I think I'll have a flashback.
But I continue to plan excursions to my friend's apartment for more hard rock at the hard rock cafe. It's just too good to stay away from too long.

Chapter 4

We have a perfectly matched pair of turtledoves here at the great Brighton Dam; young lovers, who must both be mere octogenarians, by some sweet coincidence, who float down our hallways cooing in perfect harmony with each other, as their feet scarcely touch the floor, almost like a couple of teenagers, his hand lovingly holding the crook of her thin, white arm as they walk; they happen to be so much in love they remain contained between each other.
They walk our grounds without ever being apart from each other in spirit, sitting in perfect, mutually shared solitude at the only romantic, two-seated table in the dining room, the only one situated by the window, while the rest of us have our insignificant dinners as though none of us exists in their two-in-one life they share between them.
They are not unfriendly or less than cordial with any of us. We speak and are recognized, spoken to with every measure of kindness and solicitude. They are every bit as polite as anyone could hope for. But in the greater sense, we are all, simply irrelevant to them.
They are joined together more significantly than any preacher, priest or justice of the peace could ever join anyone. One can see the union between them from afar off, without hardly intending to notice; their union is so natural and complete. They are truly one flesh.
One cannot help noticing how cute they are together.
In a single, vain attempt to hold a conversation with the lovely lady myself, with peeked curiosity, I'm told at every turn of attempting to give any historical accounting of my own, selfish existence; I'm reminded of the total, nonexistence of her memory. She lives completely in the moment, and no one exists in that moment other than the each other of the two of them.
Trying to tell her something about myself was simply useless. I am just as irrelevant to her, to – them, as everyone else is.
They are both cordial and considerate, within the soul of propriety in everything. She has her apartment, he has his. The two apartments are completely in separate areas, and their comings and goings are habitually of the utmost propriety, in reference to time of day, associations in every way, etc.
They are simply consumed by their harmonious, mutual existence, in spite of themselves.
One afternoon, living as I do, next door to the beloved by simple coincidence, I was in the hallway with my physical therapist, practicing my balance, as a part of my physical therapy, by walking backwards holding the pretty, young therapist's hand. Our gentleman lover opens the door of his beloved's apartment, sees the two of us in the hallway, and calls back into the apartment that there are people dancing in the hallway at the moment, and that they should delay their departure for lunch.
They are that charming.
We simply finished the therapy session, and went our own way, and the turtledoves end up in the dining room for luncheon as one, as always, without further regard for us “dancers” in the slightest.
I have loved like that in my lifetime; and lost, as I hope they never do.

Chapter 5

The great Brighton Dam is nestled in a quiet country setting. The waters of an active river collect here. One approaches the dam coming down hill from either direction. It's beautiful here. The forest and hills surround the entire area, while the collective waters focus on a major city's water supply somewhere to the south of this lovely wooded area.
Then, there are the people here.
There is the self-effacing Mouth of the South, who unfortunately enough for the rest of us, dwells in our midst.
“I'm leaving, and I'm taking my mouth with me,” he announces defiantly after every meal. He's doing us a favor by going back to his apartment. Don't hold your breath.
“Have a nicer day,” he says, looking for people's relief to register on their faces. Yet, he lingers, savoring the display of cringing faces still at the tables, as we anticipate more self-effacing humor that is not funny, as he stands over us, talking about leaving, while not leaving.
He's always referring to his mouth, as if it's a separate entity from himself.
“I can't help it. I've got diarrhea of the mouth,” he says, in the midst of the community dining room in a loud voice, while he's at table, as people try to eat their food.
He's doing us all a big favor by leaving, while he's not leaving but standing over us, as if he wishes he could leave his mouth behind when he exits, to continue the disdain he projects, after he's gone back to his vacuous life.
I can hardly believe he was a professional high school teacher.
The man publicly refuses to accept any responsibility for the things he says, as if he is not in control of his thoughts or words at all, but rather that he is under the control of someone or something other than himself, whenever he talks.
His voice carries throughout the hundred-seat dining room, as if he were using a microphone, and the Mouth of the South seems to delight himself in being a consternation to all those around him. He's leaving ever so slowly, standing first on one leg, then on the other, looking people in the eye, if they'll let him, one after the other, as he scans the room, enjoying every sign of discomfiture he can find, as he balks at his departure.
He'll leave his seat at his table before he eats, where there are a few sitting who have resigned themselves to putting up with him, and he'll go horn in on visitors' conversations, standing over their tables without segway into their conversations, delighting in being dubbed a “character,” by unsuspecting people who don't know him.
He's a self-appointed clown who simply does not get it that he's not funny.
It could be said of him that he's cruisin' for a bruisin', but this is a sheltered environment, expressly so for a refuge for seniors, and is generally devoid of violence. We are all screened for harmlessness in our backgrounds, chosen for our mutual safety and mutual comfort. It is unlikely that anyone here would take a poke at him, though he tempts everyone every time he takes a breath and opens his mouth.
He wants to be a nuisance.
One wonders how he passed the entrance requirements to be accepted here, and how he remains here with such impunity. How he ever gets away with his demeanor is beyond me.
Actually, his claim that he is not in control of what he says is probably not so far from the truth in some sense, except that he claims the ineptitude as he's practicing the behavior, acknowledging full awareness of it while propounding he's not in control of it. It seems like a double standard to me.
What goes around comes around. There remains the consequences for the actions of us all, in the final analysis of life.
The Mouth of the South is not misbehaving with as much impunity as he believes of himself, as he demands his two beers per meal. He'd like to have more beer. He'd like to have people call him a character more often.

Chapter 6

There is a gentleman farmer here, retired, who conspicuously keeps the company of two of our ladies. He associates with two of the ladies in the most wide open and frank manner, that one would wonder what goes on in the minds of either of the ladies involved.
There doesn't seem to be any of the adolescent notion of “going together,” among them, and there seems to be no contention among them otherwise, whatsoever.
***
Earlier, before the time this tripling took place, before these particular ladies arrived here at the great Brighton Dam Apartments, this gentleman, and I do not use the word lightly – I consider him absolutely a gentleman – was known to keep the company of another one of the ladies, sitting at their own table among others who would sit with them, myself included from time to time, in the great Brighton Dam dining room day after day, and spent time together otherwise as well, until this particular lady took her leave, went to the hospital, and quietly passed away.
The deceased was well advanced in years by the time I had the pleasure of making her acquaintance, and was indeed a delightful, charming individual in her own right. She was well up in her 90's, at the last there, and seemed perfectly content in every way by the time I met her, her junior by a full 30-odd years, and then some. She seemed perfectly content to spend her time with us here, in this calm waiting room for the end of one's lifetime. It was her one misfortune to suffer a bad fall toward the end of her life, which did not seem to bother her much, except that she had unsightly bruises on her face that were slow in healing. She did not complain about any discomfort, though.
One fact about my personal background is that I was surrounded by the elderly in my formative years. I lived with my grandmother, two of her elderly sisters, my aunt, and my mother, along with my three siblings, from the time I was entering adolescence. To be in the company of my elders seems only natural to me, and I enjoy it, by enlarge.
It is only when one of my elders insinuates an untoward relationship, that I find myself revolting against her. Girls talk about dirty old men...
We all have our fantasies, but there needs to be a limit. I'm talking about one of my elders hitting on me, here. I'm not preaching to anyone but myself. I suffer from the same malady with my juniors.
What goes around comes around.
Furthermore, I offer a heart-felt apology to any of my juniors around here who might feel unduly uncomfortable because of me. I don't wish to impose, anymore than I enjoy being imposed upon. I thought it was such a big thing to tell someone young and beautiful that's what they are, until some old lady said it to me.
***
Our gentleman farmer presents an appearance above reproach, of having friends and enjoying people's company. There is no suggestion of any untoward activity going on there that I can see. My hat is off to them.

Chapter 7

There is the woman here who's got her eye on one of the men, at least. He's a great old guy, easy to get along with, affable, and very mild mannered; a regular Clark Kent. She's always looking for him here and there, since he's as self-possessed as he is, napping regularly in various places around the great Brighton Dam Apartments. But the woman is always busy trying to interact with him.
She frankly says she'd “like to put him on a leash.”
I could scarcely believe my ears, at that statement, but a mutual, male friend of mine corroborates that she used that expression exactly. I know didn't imagine it.
It's sort of the same thing one sees with young women who want to “play house with their Barbie and Ken dolls,” in their novice times of young adulthood. The female wants to impersonate her Barbie doll, and wants to lasso the Ken doll of her dreams, and drag him home to play house with her, regardless of what he wants. His wishes have nothing to do with it. She's not focused on anyone's wishes but her own. I knew a girl like that at university at the age of 18 & 19.
Those kind are like the Canadian Mounted Police. They always get their man.
Forty years later, she's been married five times, and has buried three husbands. I asked her over email, since she wouldn't let me alone all these years later, if she's been investigated by the Police Dept.
I was under that sort of man hunt as a freshman in university, as a young man, with a war on, with a military draft in play. I think the girl would have been equally happy, if I'd have only given her a bun in the oven, waltzed down the isle, and proceeded to join the Marine Corps in wartime, and gotten blown to hell on the battlefield, leaving her survivor benefits as the honored widow and mother of the child of the fallen hero.
She was not in love with me.
She was in love with marriage.
The girl artfully played my libido against me, when I was in my prime, like a subtle weapon against me. After a time, I began to realize that I was on the verge of something I hadn't counted on.
So I made her cry, calling an end to her game, and went my own way, grateful that I was not about to become an unwed father or a military statistic.
In the entire theater of the game between the boys and the girls, I've taken a somewhat negative position. Personally, I've gotten a little set in my ways. I'm a bachelor for life. I'm on the look-out for the Canadian Mounted Police syndrome, and the girls who work a man's feelings against him, talking too much, giving unending, inappropriate attention, working at the game of “love,” opposed to working for a living and not minding their own business. I'm on guard. It happens to me all the time.
It's a dirty trick, if you ask me.
Oh sure, I would liked to have had a wife and family, for company's sake at the very least, now that I'm getting old and alone. But as a result of not tying the knot with any of my girlfriends over the years, I'm alone now, which is not so good. But I am a product of my environment, and I was greatly convicted by my parents' failed marriage from a very impressionable age.
By this time in life, marriage is a moot point. There's no one to be interested in.

Chapter 8

There is the person at the church program I attend once a week, close by the great Brighton Dam, who is so friendly with me, I wonder what she thinks she would get from me? What does she want? Then there are the people whom one cannot reciprocate attentions with, out of mere conscience, because of too many extenuating circumstances, and I'd rather not be romantically involve with anyone, anyway. That's being tested, by several people. I wonder whether I need to let go of some of my caution?
I told one person here at the Brighton Dam that I'd be more than honored to be more of a man to her, if things were not as they are, but I'm not citing her shortcomings or incapacity, I'm citing my own. I don't feel qualified to be in a close relationship.
I was so thoroughly, overwhelmingly abused as a child, and am such a severely traumatized person for most of my lifetime, I get upset at the idea of being physically touched by anyone. Not exactly a good place to be launching and constructing a relationship with a lover, or even being overly friendly with any sort of demonstrative person. It's not anyone's incapacity but my own.
I love to have a good, stimulating conversation with intelligent people, and talk about a lot of various things, but why can't some people keep their hands to themselves? I'm not talking about a hardy handclasp here. I'm talking about those people who just have to nudge my arm and my shoulder over and over to talk to me at all, and then have nothing on their minds to back it up with. It takes a third party to get the conversation going at all, beyond the most basic greetings, and even at that, The Hand does not seem to know what to say for itself. Besides which, it's various people touching a man repeatedly, in the course of conversation, for reasons I just cannot understand. That's not acceptable.
What's on your mind, buddy? Keep your hands to yourself.
Then there's the ladies who are just such sweet and lovable people, that all I want to do is melt into their arms, and be coddled like a child. They are long on hints of promises, and there is never any delivery of anything whatsoever. They are constantly apologizing for their omissions, and never really giving anything except their invitations, coupled by their omissions, and there is never anything else to our interactions. Push me, pull you, as they say.
What I can't understand is how to come ahead and back off, simultaneously. If they don't want any interactions with me, why do they make their overtures in the first place?
Life is so confusing.
Then there are the most beautiful people here and there in the world, and I crave to let them know how totally beautiful they really are in my eyes. I want them to know in their heart of hearts, how much I adore their images, whether I know anything else about them or not, but the one person who tells me that very same sentiment scares the Dickens out of me, and makes me want to run away from her completely, wanting to go to another city, or to another country, or to another part of the world altogether, just to get away from her, so I'll never have to hear her say that thing she said to me ever again.
She is not beautiful in my eyes, but she says I'm “a beautiful man,” and I Can't Take Hearing That From Her! It's not right somehow.
Why can't she understand that?
Then there's another person who has me babbling backhanded compliments at her, over and over, with all my complete and total self-consciousness in her glorious presence, and I think I make her feel just about the same way about me that I feel about the other person I've just mentioned.
Life is so confusing.
I don't understand what to do about any of these things.

Chapter 9

There is a certain person here who has the most glowing, sparkling, radiant smiles for me whenever she's on duty, whom I have shared my compliments with regularly enough that she knows full well I enjoy seeing her. She does not confuse me with complicated, jumbled feelings compounding in my heart in the slightest.
She's just a nice, sweet young lady, working her job with dignity and grace, who is pleasantly disposed enough to accept a compliment in a kindly spirit when one is given.
All the palpitating heart stuff does not apply to our interactions at all, unlike the other one, who has such an overwhelmingly glorious presence, not so much like anyone else anywhere, but absolutely unique to her own, undefinable way, which baffles me utterly. Why I can't stop babbling at her and about the other one, I can't understand. My friend just glows with warmth when I speak to her, and I bask in the sunshine of her grace, but I can't seem to get anywhere near the same rapport with the other one, though I try and try.
I think what I may do is stop trying. I'll let go. It's a great idea, but I'm so entranced by her presence, springing herself on me unawares the way she does, the few times I see her in her official comings and goings which have nothing to do with me. I really don't have any occasion to see her or speak to her, unlike my friend, who works with me regularly.
I seem to have a certain need of all this silly prattle, over the various people I notice in my comings and goings in life.
For instance, when The Hand comes again, reaching out to touch me the very next time, I'm going to tell him to stop touching me, in so many words. It almost seems like a rude thing to say, but it's only a direct statement of my wishes. I don't like to be touched. Call it odd if you like, but I don't want to be touched by these beautiful young ladies I'm going on and on about here, anymore than I want to be touched by anybody else. It's a level playing field that way. I enjoy seeing and being seen, complimenting and being complimented, but I am not prepared to touch or be touched.
It's where I happen to be in my life at the moment.
No thank you. Keep your hands to yourself, please.
***
Look at the clock and the late hour. Where does the time go? I'm writing a little bit. Crocheting some. Practicing guitar some. The clock indicates the end of my day so quickly and so definitely, I want to rebel and ignore the hour. Stay up and continue doing the things I love to do.
Furthermore, I want to be alone in my apartment here at the Brighton Dam Apartments, doing as I please, without ceasing. But convention overtakes me by a certain hour each night, probably because of my need for help sleeping with my medicines, and I'll have to surrender to the night soon, whether I want to or not.
The doctor has made certain chemically that I get groggy by bedtime, when for a long time I had no bedtime, and stayed up indefinitely night and day. I welcome the change for the better. My mind slows down so I can get my rest now, unlike a lot of my life before I arrived here.

Chapter 10

The great Brighton Dam is nestled in a quiet country setting. The waters of an active river collect here. One approaches the dam coming down hill from either direction. It's beautiful here. The forest and hills surround the entire area, while the collective waters focus on a major city's water supply somewhere to the south of this lovely wooded area.
Then, there are the people here.
By enlarge, the people who work here are very nice. The ladies are all strong, the men are all good looking, to quote Garrison Kieler, and most are hard working.
There is one girl here who is a wife and mother at the tender age of 20, another who is a wife at the age of 18. There is a pair of twins, who are positively as cute as they can be in their perpetual togetherness, always interacting with each other in their own, mutually mystical fashion known and understood only by the two of them. They have an unspoken language all their own. I'm told that at least one of them is a mother already. They work together and live together. The greater part of their uniqueness is their unimpeachable togetherness.
There are others, with whom I'm not acquainted, but they all do about the same thing, and make the great Brighton Dam Apartments all that much more pleasant to live in for the residents.
The residents here are all basically senior citizens, with issues we all need help with, and we are all assisted in whatever ways we need to be, by a competent and dedicated staff. The staff are not pushed beyond their limits time-wise, normally working three different eight hour shifts. It was only during the time we were evacuated to avoid the recent hurricane that the staff were taxed so greatly by their continuous labor while we were at refuge.
***
The food here is basically delicious and nutritious. The selections offered are diverse enough that one can always find something to eat.
In fact, it seems as though we are always eating, and my appetite begins to flag.
There is an odd convention here among the residents. They gather in the dining room a half an hour before the staff begins serving, and it takes the staff a considerable amount of time to serve the better than a hundred residents. If one does as much as most other residents do, one spends an hour and a half, to two hours per meal sitting in the dining room, whether waiting, or finally eating.
The only rationale for spending so much time waiting in the dining room for each meal, that I know about, is that the seating is limited enough, that getting a place for one's self that one can enjoy their food, as well as arrange for pleasant company at table, is somewhat of a challenge, with such a diverse and quickly formulating crowd at every meal.
One distinct advantage to living here at the Brighton Dam Apartments, besides the very helpful staff, is that each resident has their own space, for the sake of privacy and comfort. One may retreat to their own apartment whenever they like, and do as they please there. You can even order room service, if you don't want to go to the dining room. In that sense, this is not communal living.
***
There is a person here who always walks the hallways with a sneer on their face, grumbling, as bitter people do. One evening in the dining room, I overheard them very distinctly articulate their sneer in words, talking to themselves about having to wait for a seat to get a meal, having missed the time seats had been available.
“I've had it up to here,” they said.
I tried the expression myself, in my apartment, and used the same facial muscles to achieve the same sneer. It's not worth it, to me. I prefer patience, if it takes all day to get what I want. I don't care.

Chapter 11

There is a person here who has a unique way of laughing, which is oddly familiar to me. I've been thinking and thinking about it, and now I've got who it is that they sound like when they laugh.
They laugh like Arnold Horshack, from “Welcome Back Cotter,” on the TV, in the 1980's.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh, Mr. Cotter, Mr. Cotter, Mr. Cotter,” says Arnold, waving his hand wildly, gesticulating in the air, anxious to get the teacher's attention for one of his pearls of wisdom he absolutely has to share with the class. Remember him?
That's who this person here at the Brighton Dam sounds like when they laugh.
Our own “Arnold” has a mind of demanding exactitude, knowing absolutely what they think about everything, about how things are around here. On some subjects, there's no point in even trying to have a discussion with them at all over certain issues. This person's mind is made up.
***
The one who wants to put a man on a leash pesters me endlessly at meal times, never giving me a moment's peace to think my own thoughts at meal times, like she does everyone else around her so constantly. I pity the old man she put in his grave. She must have slain him with torment.
I'm beginning to believe that the poor bastard she's got in her sites for that damned leash she talks about, is not only the old salt she chases around – but me, too! She's just trying to distract me, so she can more easily have her way. She can dream on. She's wasting her time with me. I'll tell her.
***
There's another person here who is truly a story teller by nature, like me. It's one of their major character traits. They'll be going along doing this and that, and get an idea. Then, everything else stops for this person till they tell their story. Each one of their stories is unique within itself, and they are all originals.
This doesn't just happen now and then, this person lives like this. It's a part of their being.
It's a shame they aren't a writer, if in fact they're not. They could make a decent living with all the stories they've got popping up in their head all the time. All they'd have to do is channel that energy to some sort of medium to write or take down the stories somehow, and learn how to market them, and their fortune would be made in no time.
That's what writers do.
A lot of people focus their lives that way. They force themselves to be writers, surrendering to the idea that they have ideas they want to share with others. It's a matter of being articulate with the written word.
The only thing I did to become a writer, besides being born, is that I've read a lot of books, and I went to school a little bit. A high school equivalency will do, but I graduated from high school on schedule, myself, and eventually graduated with a two year college degree. The degree took a while. It's not like I'm a scholastic wizard or anything, although I've had friends tell me I'm a genius.
I just took a creative writing when I was going to the community college, because I need to write like I need to breathe, and papered the professor's desk with stories everyday, until I got a good enough focus to write stories and poetry whenever my muse would come knocking.
Now, I'm writing books.
I serialize my ideas, so that I'm writing a new installment of my basic idea regularly, until I've got a story really, really, totally told.
My professor's burden was to get us to court the publishing markets with our work, to keep trying to publish until we succeed.
It's not so difficult to be a writer.
All you really need is a muse bugging your mind with ideas you're just dying to tell people, and a determination that you just won't quit.

Chapter 12

There's a guy who people call, “the gentle giant,” who doesn't drink alcohol anymore; because, it's not worth the trouble it gets him into. I can understand that. Anybody with enough sense to admit that sort of thing to themselves and to others is worth talking to, in my estimation.
We became friends at a church function a while back, and he has the most wonderful way with his backyard grill on his deck. I've never met his wife, though he speaks of her lovingly. I imagine she's beautiful. We used to get together now and then, when his wife was away, visiting her folks in the mid-west. I think they're both from Michigan, Wisconsin, or some place like that. He doesn't like to be alone, and he knows I'm a bachelor. It's nice to have a friend who volunteers to get together with me. It doesn't happen to me all that often.
He'd buy a couple of steaks, and I'd bring some fresh corn on the cob from the farmer's market by the roadside, and we'd talk about God for an afternoon. It's good eating and good conversation. God's a good, healthy subject for discussion, for a couple of guys with similar ideas, getting together on a deck, outside in warm weather. We're a couple of guys who don't want to talk about women or sports all the time.
He gets the thickest steaks cooking away on the grill, along with the corn, which he knows exactly how to time just right, and there's nothing else to do but spend some time together and chat. They call that good fellowship. We used to sit there and talk, while I smoked cigarettes outside, as is the way of things in the world anymore, smoking outside, and we were referring to a while back now, because I quit smoking sometime after that.
He enjoys Christian writers, and I usually enjoy discussing the Bible. It depends on the frame of mind of the person I'm talking to. I don't like arguments.
Recently, when there was all that hype about the Rapture of the Saints that was supposed to happen seven thousand years after the Flood and Noah's Ark, according to some theological scholar or somebody, and all that. Well, “the gentle giant” was into it whole-hardheartedly. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the Bible says, “no man knows the hour of His coming.” He wouldn't have listened to me anyway. A lot of people got all excited about that, but I'm old enough now, with enough experience with Bible fanaticism, to just kick back and be patient with such things. But we talked the whole thing over, and he was very excited that the End was, no doubt, at hand. So I sent him my book over his email right away, because we didn't have enough time left in life, according to the theory, to wait till the book gets published so he could spend his money on it. The world would be a different place by the time an editor ever saw my book, and we wouldn't be here, anyway. He must not be a writer, and I know he's not comfortable on the phone. I moved, and our friendship is over.
My book is a 17 chapter volume, and I lost count of how many words it has, at somewhere around 33k words. I never counted how many pages there are in the book, and I've lost track of how many more chapters I've added to the work since I did my last word count. It's a sizable treatise.
But I sent it to him anyway. I figured he could delete it if he didn't want it. Now, I don't hear from him at all.
The “gentle giant” is a big guy, nice and kind, with a heart of gold. He has a good, responsible job, and is all into the end of the world and the rapture, and all that, as I've said. He's steadily investing in precious metals and rare gems. He has no confidence in the world financial situation. He also has no confidence in the idea that the country, or the world, has any kind of stability left in it at all. Poor guy is all up in the air about how the world economy and the Federal Government are going to collapse any day now.
But he does grill one heck of a good steak and buttered corn on the cob, and it's good eating. Anyway, the Lord tarries in spite of him, but getting together with the guy again is probably not going to happen anytime soon, unless he'd like to take a really long drive to come see me sometime, since I've relocated pretty far away from his place and don't drive anymore, myself.
Nonetheless, he's a friend of mine, and I found talking with him a very nice way to spend some time. I hope he calls me back sometime, or sends me an email.

Chapter 13

There's a new girl living here who is obviously not very smart, who is generally sweet enough and innocent in her own way, about ten, going on fifty. I had breakfast with her once, and have talked with her a few times. She seems real nice, over all, she's just a little behind herself. Also, I was told that her twin sister brought in some yarn to be given to me, because I crochet, and talking to the girl. She explained she likes crafts. I couldn't quite follow the logic there, except that she's probably not too diligent with anything she does, the little bit of intelligence she might have, not that I'm putting her down or anything.
She is what she is.
But today at lunch, she got a sandwich with pickles, said she can't have pickles, because she's diabetic, and proceeded to take all the pickles off her plate, and put them, by hand, into someone else's soup that they were eating, right then and there, right in front of us!
I couldn't help the nervous laughter that overtook me, but once I settled down, I realized that sort of behavior in the dining room is just a little dangerous. What else will she do with other people's food, when we're watching or not? She did that right in front of us, without any apparent idea the she did something she shouldn't do, and the person she did it to is one of those easy-to-get-along-with people that we need to have more of around here. It's nice to have easy-going folks around. But what will she do when we're not looking, if she'll do a thing like that when we are? She couldn't seem to understand there was anything wrong with what she did, so I talked to her like a child about it. She simply clammed up, stopped making comments out loud, either to us or to herself, and clammed up altogether. She just sat there and ate.
That situation reminds me somewhat of the old guy from around here who used to always ask people if they were married. He seemed to have the irrational belief that everyone should be married, or something must certainly be more wrong with them than people who are. When it was my turn to be cross-examined and called names by the old fart myself, I got so hopping mad at him, I could have done more than raise my voice at him, if I were that sort of person, but I'm not. He can't help it. His mind is gone, like the girl.
***
Then there's all the folks here who are hearing impaired. God bless them. I'm just grateful that I can still hear well enough, myself. But that's right down my alley, the hearing impaired folks, like being around the elderly, because my grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt were all hard of hearing at the home, where I grew up. I was constantly struggling to be understood when I was young. I'm used to it. I just make my voice good and strong, watch my diction closely, and hope for the best. I'm always ready to repeat myself, if I have to.
People get all bent out of shape there in the dining room, and we all, pretty much, have to take our meals there, or pay extra for room service. It's our one common ground at the Brighton Dam Apartments. Everybody has their own private space to live in, and a wide variety of people to be friends with, if we like, but we all get together to eat. I just can't understand why so many people feel they're being imposed upon whenever they're getting a meal. There are better than a hundred of us to feed all at once, and when you think about it, the staff does a pretty good job of getting us our meals. It's not like a restaurant, which gets different people arriving at different times. We all show up at once, and it's a tall order to feed us, all one hundred-and-some at the same time, a few times per day. My hat's off to the dining room staff.

Chapter 14

There's a girl, and her parents, who have become conspicuous fixtures here at the great Brighton Dam. Actually, it's her father who has come to live here. She and her mother simply hang out here a lot. He seems to be significantly disabled, with multiple medical difficulties, and doesn't seem to be doing well. I think they must be awfully worried about him, or have boundaries problems or something.
They all seem to be a close-knit family unit, constantly raising their voices at each other, and can't seem to let go of the old man for even a moment, as though his mortality is imminently in question. It may well be, for all I know.
They are frequently in the dining room, as well as out and about among us, frequently leaving his apartment door wide open to the hallway, with the TV blaring, beckoning us all to come in. They spend a lot of time and energy talking fluently with everyone here who will listen, with plenty of thoughts to share with us. with an apparent burden to tell everyone in the great Brighton Dam Apartments, every thought they have about things, as though their lives depend upon getting their story out and told.
They all eat our food frequently, as if the girl and the mother cannot bear to have their old man left alone here for a moment, almost as if they feel they can't let go of the old man, without being a part of his every moment. One would think he's terminal. Maybe he is?
One might marvel about the fact that they're exhausting a fortune to keep the old man here, just like the rest of us are doing. But why they're spending their money on expensive family meals here daily is beyond my comprehension. And there's been no statement that I've heard, about the source of their expendable fortune. I have no idea what the old man did for a living. He's fiercely “American,” even to the extent of stuffing a small flag and pole down his shirt when he attends breakfast, but whatever their activities in the world at large have been, those things have not been a part of their continuous chatter at all, since they've been here.
Sometimes I think they're making an investment in the girl's future, keeping the old man here, because the girl's getting to be “a little long in the tooth” to be single and not have a beau. The idea is that they're all hanging out, hoping she'll land some rich guy, for the purpose of her future happiness, and solve her old maid problem. Not with me she won't.
For my dollar, I'd be going to school and working, to build a future for myself at the age of thirty-something, if the idea was at all feasible for the girl, instead of hanging out around here with all the disabled old folks, talking a mile a minute with the whole lot of us, wasting her time on her old man. At least at a school or a job, one could hope to find a future for one's self worth having. Here, pretty much all she can hope to find are people with a past, and a whole list of difficulties for a questionable future, at best.
But no, the old geezer is too sick to be playing games wasting his money trying to marry off his daughter at a senior living home like this place. He's here because he needs to be. His health is his problem. The girl is just a daddy's girl, investing her heart-felt devotion. She's probably worried sick about him.
Nonetheless, those two women need to go home and leave the old man to the pro's.

Chapter 15

The great Brighton Dam is nestled in a quiet country setting. The waters of an active river collect here. One approaches the dam coming down hill from either direction. It's beautiful here. The forest and hills surround the entire area, while the collective waters focus on a major city's water supply somewhere to the south of this lovely wooded area.
Then, there are the people here.
There's this woman here who wants to fight the Civil War all over again, summon her armies, and start pounding on people to get what she wants. She doesn't like some people, and she's very combative about it. She tried to get into it with me awhile back.
She's all into power and control.
There was the day my writing mentor here had just finished reading some of the chapters of my first book, and I saw her on the way into the dining room in the hallway one afternoon. I wanted to talk shop over lunch. So I edged my way through the crowd to her table, and sat down, as she maneuvered her electric wheelchair to the table.
The combative one came up to me menacingly, demanding her seat, and I didn't get up. I wanted to talk to my friend about my book over lunch. I've been told there's no such thing as a reserved seat here.
“That's my seat,” she said belligerently. “That's my seat, and if you don't get up and let me sit there, I'm going to have my son come in here and kick your ass,” she said.
I didn't say anything. I just refused to move. Then there came two Care Managers, out of nowhere, and backed her up, about how she'd been sitting there already, that afternoon, and had only been away from the table for a few minutes. You couldn't prove it by me. I'd just come down from upstairs. I'd been working.
I thought about it, and reluctantly conceded to authority, not to threats, and got up abruptly, swearing audibly, but briefly. If there were two people in authority saying it was her seat, then it was her seat. She can rot in that seat, for all I care. I know where my friend's apartment is.
And I don't like it worth a darn. I'd like to know where my seat is. I'd get up and go to the john anytime I liked, without fear of being deprived of my chair in the dining room. That's her game, and she'll play that game with multiple seats in the dining room, just to prove she's got the power and control to do it. Let's all fight in the Confederacy or something.
Ever since that day, I've watched that woman come and go from “her seat” so much at every meal, one would think she had proved something to herself about her power and control royally. One would think she owns the place.
Well, that's her point, isn't it?
The other thing about this is, that woman threaten another human being in another assisted living environment. She carries a walking cane, and invoked an image of a strong, brutal, bully of a son, who would attack me, or anyone – over a simple chair in the dining room.
If I said anything like that to anyone, anywhere in this place, and been overheard by any of the authorities around here, I'd be walking out of here in handcuffs, escorted by the Police, under arrest.
What's more is, this woman is reputed to have attacked someone in the other place we all had to go to for the evacuation for the hurricane, and gave that person a broken collarbone over power and control.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
What is that woman doing in assisted living?
This is supposed to be a place to be a safe haven for seniors, a harmless, safe place for everyone who comes here. If someone is known to be dangerous, they are not accepted as a resident, a visitor, or an employee, right? It is said that everyone who comes here is given a background check before they are accepted, to make certain of our safety.
What is that woman doing here?

Chapter 16

Then there's the Vietnam War hero here. He is a man of few words, though they are normally vulgar words if he says anything, and he mostly stays to himself, but I have a profound respect for the man. Some of the people here are afraid of him, and I would certainly never consciously provoke him, but he's accomplished something I could never do. He survived a war in a combat zone, like the King of the Queen's table.
***
I graduated from high school at the high point of the Vietnam War, and might have been drafted to go, but I got a student deferment from the draft, getting accepted to go to university full time, directly after graduation, planning to become a high school band director.
That war was given a lot of graphic press in those days. It was always on the news, and the news footage was gory. I've seen all the movies about Vietnam that came out over the years, read some of the books about it, went to gatherings about it in DC, smelled the tear gas in my sister's dorm at College Park, from the riots at University of Maryland. I've known some of the veterans of that fiasco over the years. One of my veteran friends was riding around with me getting drunk in my car one night, and went back to combat in his mind, in my car one night. I had to find the VA Hospital at Perry Point, drunk in the middle of the night. He was having a flashback and needed help. I'm glad I wasn't thought to be Charlie.
I used to play WWII when I was little, with a stick in my hands for a gun, and I was usually the victor in those battles in those days. There was little danger in the woods of Pennsylvania in the 1950's, but the danger that was there befell me one day in those woods, and that is an entirely other story. One that I won't get into here. Let's just say I learned that I was not going to win all my battles in life, and I learned it in Penn's Woods in the early 1960's.
But watching the news when I was in high school, and being exposed to so much of that war in those days, I sort of feel like Vietnam was my war. It was personal. I was frightened by that war in those days. I'm grateful that I didn't have to go.
The Vietnam Veteran walks around the great Brighton Dam slowly, noiselessly, as though he were patrolling the jungle, pushing his rollator like he's carrying his weapon, and witnesses the things around him here, aware of things here in the way he's been taught to be aware.
He was a Sargent, doing a Sargent's job in a war zone.
One day, he was in a battle, in that other country half way around the world. He was operating a machine gun on a tripod, firing at the enemy, when the machine gun suffered a direct hit of a mortar shell. The weapon exploded in his hands. The man caught fire. His hands, arms, face and torso were badly burned. It's become a part of him, so's you'd hardly notice.
Somehow, he wound up here, with us. He tells me he's looking for his car, which he doesn't have anymore. He doesn't like to be here. The Brighton Dam feels like a prison to him. He wants to leave. He's cussed me out over nothing, too, like he's done to others. I leave him alone, too.

Chapter 17

There's a guy here, one of the many old salts in the area, a retired sailor who looks the picture of health to most any eye. I noticed that whenever he sits down to a meal, he cleans his plate, every time. Sometimes, he orders quite a bit of food, for his healthy appetite, an apparently healthy gentleman, and he never leaves any of it for the dog, after he's done. He eats all that he's served.
He was brought up to the tune of “waste naught, want naught,” Upstate somewhere, as the saying goes, with his only sibling in a family of four, a brother, whose name is somewhat familiar to me, you might say.
The guy has an old fashioned, regular name, the kind that people like desk clerks think is a gag. It's a name that doesn't sound at all like the real article, like John Doe, or something. He and one of the other guys at the men's table were talking about the common nature of their names one day, and his buddy was heard to say, “The desk clerk says, 'If that's the way you want it, buddy,'” like it was that unbelievable. Knowing what his name is, it's not surprising he has that problem now and then. His name sounds like an alias, there's little argument in my mind about that, but I'm pretty sure it's not.
The old salt himself, is a quiet kind of guy, who pretty much keeps his own counsel, but finds some wit in his environment from time to time.
His wife and daughter saw to it that he came to our little home in the woods, though he can't imagine why. He has no clue.
“The Mouth of the South” is one of this gentleman's expressions, not my own, I'll admit, and when I made a comment about The Mouth having to have his “alcohol at supper,” when the sailor was at my table one time, the old guy defended the idea by arguing that he would not call beer, “alcohol,” he would only call it a beer. I used to talk like that to my mother, who looked askance at my own drinking, cigarette smoking, and the lot, while I still did that sort of thing.
Then, one night at supper the man orders a beer in the dining room for himself, which is not necessarily a false move around here, but “the truth will out,” as they say.
Never suspecting why his wife and daughter put him in senior living as good as he feels, the man was informed that he cannot be served alcohol here without a doctor's note, as arranged on authority of his family, to which he replied in a loud and vulgar fashion, and left the dining room without eating.
I wonder what his problem is?

Chapter 18

There's a very elderly woman here, who whimpers to the waitresses, whining like a child, “Can you get me a little glass of juice, honey?” about half a dozen times, while we're all waiting to be served our food and drinks in the dining room. You'd think she was dying of thirst, when in actuality, we're all well fed and watered, morning, noon and night, handsomely and right on schedule, everyday.
The girls have learned to keep score on her. She'll guzzle orange juice and coffee by the gallons, if they'll give it to her, and if they don't. She'll get up out of her seat, and go to where they keep the juices and the coffee, even though they're always asking her not to, encouraging her to go sit down. They'll bring it to her in a moment. It makes no difference.
Then, though taking food out of the dining room is frowned upon, the old gal is likely to stuff a piece of cake or pie into her purse, unwrapped, so that one can imagine how gross the inside of her purse gets. She's been known to consume the contraband, too.
Then, she'll get a cup of coffee, fill it the whole way up. She'll leave it by her usual chair in the lobby, on the table next to her chair, where she camps out all day. She'll leave the coffee there, go get a magazine and come back, sit down, and fall sound asleep, only drinking a quarter inch off the top of the coffee, and she won't have anymore than that little taste of it until the next meal. Then, she wants her food in the lobby. She doesn't want to go to the dining room. It's all a ritual she performs.
Now, since one of my crafts is crocheting, and I've got a couple of patterns I made up myself for making hats, I'm in the habit of wearing either a beret or a stocking cap when I go about the Brighton Dam Apartments, and particularly when I go to the dining room for a meal.
This same old lady is just as likely as not, to say, right out loud to me, when I walk past her chair, “Why don't you pull off that stupid hat?” But my hats aren't so stupid they don't make me any money. And there are people here with memory disorders, who don't remember their own children's names, who can remember who the guy is in the dining room, who makes his own hats, including the old lady under our current discussion.
One night, when I was wandering around late in the evening with my walker, downstairs, while I was still recovering from hip replacement, that old lady was in the lobby crying like a lost child. There wasn't anyone else in sight, and she was frightened.
She took hold of my walker as I walked into the lobby, and took off at a great rate, dragging me along, thinking apparently that I was her salvation, till I thought she'd cause me to fall. She was walking too fast for me. I wasn't too steady on my feet, yet, though it had been several months since surgery, but a supervisor came along in the nick of time. She rescued me from rescuing the old lady, and I got control of my walker returned to me safely.

Chapter 19

There are a few people here at the senior apartments that come from the place that I call home. I lived my entire adolescent, as well as adult life, in the Baltimore area, except for the times I was in university in North Carolina, and then near the District of Columbia in Maryland, either visiting or living in an apartment.
I was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area until I was 13, and my memories of that time are generally unpleasant, more or less. My dad was a Methodist minister, and a very troubled man. We moved to Maryland after he left us in the lurch and moved to Florida, leaving a family of five behind, with four teenagers in the house, and no visible means of support. That's how we got to Maryland. We went home to Grandma, where Mom could get a job at the army base. Dad couldn't help it; he was not well. I decided to stop hating him. He was my dad, after all.
I moved around in Maryland over the years, living in the city some, and in the surrounding counties quite a bit, but it was only a short period of time that I was in places around the District of Columbia and in Boone, North Carolina, in school. I've scarcely ever been anywhere else. I know enough about both places, that I can get around there without a map, more or less.
I'm fast getting to know the place around the dam here well enough that I'm getting an idea of how to get places here, too. I've only been here several months, and haven't driven here at all. I don't have a license anymore. It's the delivery driver in me that's keeping up with the roads, whenever I go places. It's part of the habit of my professional life, lingering like an old, familiar habit.
One Baltimore native who is here with us at the Brighton Dam, is the professional driver who drives the bus and car for residents. Another is the Mouth of the South. There's a third Baltimore area resident who lives here at the assisted living now, also, but she suffered a broken bone during the great evacuation during the hurricane, and she's still in rehab some place, absent from our presence at the moment. I think she'll be coming back later, though, once she recovers.
The driver here has a familiar style of driving, since no Marylander has any idea what driving a safe distance between them and the car in front of them really means. They have the notion that, if you tailgate someone, they'll go faster, and you'll get where you're going quicker. I finally rode with someone up home who verbalized it that way. It sounds like the Marylander way to drive, alright.
I hale from Pittsburgh, so I have a different take on what a safe distance between cars is. I've also been in enough rear-enders to know what a safe distance is. Pay enough deductible for tagging someone from behind, and you learn, alright. Tar-heels have a better idea about safe driving distance than Marylanders do, too. I've driven a car down there, as well, when I was young.
Another thing about Marylanders is they don't seem to have a very good sense about how to drive on snow and ice. I can do that pretty well, like being a skater behind the wheel.
I don't drive around here at the dam, as I've said. I allow the professional to do the driving. Her style is her call. It saves me money, and living in assisted living is costly enough, without trying to keep up a car going at the same time.
The other thing about living in assisted living is that I need the services of a med tech to keep me medicated properly. What brought me to this area in the first place was that I'd gotten confused about how to take my medicine when I was on my own. I accidentally overdosed myself, and I need to get my medicine safely. The overdose that I took in my confusion was just too close for comfort. I'm lucky to be alive at all. My brother and his wife have taken me under their wing, living close by now.

Chapter 20

One of my buddies I've known for several years. We have a really good time together, often enough. I know his wife, and have met his two adult kids. Now they're grandparents. They've had me over for supper parties and whatnot, from time to time, and the nice things they've done for me out of friendship are countless. Sometimes, I do things like give them hats and scarves when I get together with them.
We used to be hippies, way back before we met, and gave it all up, which is sort of how we met, but there are some stories to tell about all that. He used to hike, fish, and camp around the Brighton Dam. He didn't realize that I knew anything about the place. Now I live in the senior living apartments there.
He and his wife, (or is it just his wife?), are from someplace up North, up in New England or Upstate New York, or someplace like that, and he used to drive on up through New Jersey to see her, getting wasted in his Mustang on the way up and back, tripping his brains out on mescaline and whatnot, back in the day, and there was this one cop who would always haul him over on the interstate. The cop would bust him for weed, or whatever he was holding at the time. He'd spend a night in jail, now and then, over it, back when he was young.
But he couldn't stay away from that girl, so he married her. Makes sense to me. She's a real nice girl, too.
They'd known each other all their lives, anyway, and she has a whole gaggle of sisters, who are always teasing him, whenever they're around. They chime his name in flirtatious chorus. He just says, “Uh, Ohhhh,” and laughs quietly.
He was just like our entire generation. He partied and did his tripping and whatnot. He did Vietnam in the army, too. Not me, I stayed stateside, flipped out for your sins, and all that. He worked with addictions in Saigon, away from the worst of the trouble, talking to the GI's about drugs, made it home safe and sound. The irony of the situation is that he partied as much as any of the guys he counseled. But he was more concerned with heavy addictions than simple partying, on his job over there.
I realize there some question in uninitiated minds about what I mean, so I'll spell it out. There were a lot of heroin addicts in the service in Vietnam. My friend would smoke reefer, and trip on acid or mescaline, but he never got hooked on heroin. The way you keep from getting hooked on heroin is never use it in the first place. You use, you loose.
When he got home, he and his wife got loaded a while, like so many Baby Boomers, but when one of them decided to sober up, the other one made the same decision. They are that much of one flesh.
I've just known them in recent times, since we've all been sober, and he's done a lot of different stuff for me, like a little technical help with my computer, stuff to help me out here and there, getting together for fun. He's a regular, stand-up kind of guy, in my opinion.
He told me one time that he and one of his buddies were driving on the Capital Beltway at high speed, back in the day when the speed limit was 70mph. They were smoking a bowl and tripping. His buddy was driving his classic Mustang for him, the one that kept getting him pulled over by the cops up in Jersey, but this was down by DC.
They were just cruising along the Beltway, and the guy says, “Hey, man, I need a hit off that pipe.”
But my friend had been an addictions counselor, and he said, out of habit, “You don't need it,” and handed the driver the bowl.
He said it a second time, “You don't need it,” and the driver threw the guy's bowl out the window of the Mustang at 70mph in dense traffic.
It wasn't like he could say something like, “Hey, what do you think you're doing, pal?” or anything like that, at that moment. They were both tripping on mescaline at the time, and one could never tell what that driver might do. He didn't want to cause an accident.
Another one of the nice things he did for me was help me move once. We talk on the phone, and exchange email. It's a heck of a nice friendship for a guy like me, who can relate to his stories and visa-verse. We can all use a friend, somehow or another.

Chapter 21

I go to the public areas of the senior living environment here at the Brighton Dam Apartments where I live, to any activity in the place, which I really don't like to do in the first place, only to be treated like the newest Ken doll in the biggest real-time, live Barbies Playhouse game you've ever seen since junior high school. We have it going on around here, by so many of the endless number of geriatric women in the place, so constantly. I feel like I'm back in junior high, up the creek without a paddle and sinking fast. There's nowhere to hide. Occasionally, they even come to my apartment.
I'm having to play hard to get in so many ways, just to keep from blowing my stack, or being bowled over by some dried up old lady, or getting kicked out of the place for some kind of inappropriate behavior, like screaming obscenities in the public of the place, I'm so overwhelmed at the moment. I'm trying to avoid saying obvious things like, “Don't you realize you're way too old for me, lady?” to an interminably long list of daydreaming old ladies, who never gave up trying to achieve male favor, like little girls at a school dance; each of them easily old enough to be my mother, and maybe even my grandmother. I'm young enough to be at least one earlier generation around here.
I put them off gently as possible, one after the other, daily, as if I'm the new boy in town, attending the first, early fall, junior high dance everyday, since the rumors of my arrival here have just now reached every last one of the little girls (old ladies) in this small town south of nowhere, wherever this place is that I have to be now. My dance card, so to speak, is filled until this time the next decade, and I'm considering starting a rumor that I'm a homosexual, in self-defense against this endless, life size Barbies Playhouse game, in this overly-expensive, totally over-rated crazy-house of a place where I have to live now, so I can get my medicine from a professional medical person, and not OD out of my terminable confusion again, and die before my time.
People, keep your hands off me, please.
There are all these old ladies who found out that I'm a younger man who knows how to crochet, since I'm always wearing my hats and scarves around, publicly, telling everybody my grandmother taught me to crochet when I was little, trying to attract customers with a lot of face-to-face advertising.
They insist that I teach them how to crochet, as if I'm the teacher type, which I'm not. And I can't get rid of them. They seek me out every time I go out my door, with no apparent aptitude for the work at all, as students, anymore than I have any aptitude for teaching to bring to the table, myself.
They would hardly let me out of their sight after a full hour of perpetual, catty torment, scarcely letting me get a word in edge-wise the entire hour, not listening to word one of my demanded, detailed, ignored instructions, getting everything backwards, trying the final, miniscule amount of patience I'd brought with me in the first place, stretching me to my limit, as if I were not human and had no limit, and I'm expected to do this every week, until they can make their own hats and scarves? There goes my paycheck, if they figure that out. They're demanding that I show them how to crochet, when the two attempts I've made to hold the class so far have been disasters. Anything at all that anyone else doesn't know how to do, I cannot help them understand it.
I'm not in my element in that environment. I ain't no teacher.
I even get emails from my lady friend, the activities director at the other place like this, where I used to be, wishing I could be there to teach a class for her, too, even though it's hours away by car, and I don't have a driver's license or car anymore. I like the woman, but I think she was only trying to say something nice in a quick email. She wasn't seriously asking me to take on a class there. What I can't figure is how to stop the class here without a big row. Well, maybe it won't be so hard.
I'm not a teacher, I'm a craftsman, people. Buy my wares from me, don't make me explain how I do it. Pay me a little money to do it for you. I'm good at it. The money is what I'm after.
Please don't eat me alive with your sandcastles in the sky, ladies, please?

Second Part
Chapter 1

There's an old codger here who always rides his wheelchair, here at the Brighton Dam Apartments, who has a familiar name, and never speaks above a whisper. One has to read his lips to understand what he has to say at all, even if the room is quiet at the time. I'd rather not bother, so I don't pay him any attention. His reason for whispering is beyond me. He has the most lovely, middle-age daughter, who is not married, who attends him at meals now and then. I know very little about her, except for her looks, her first name, and to consider the issue of how she ever managed to remain a spinster with the looks she's got, has got to be a story worth telling.
There's something else about that. I can do without knowing.
But now I've talked to her. She was married, and has three daughters. The old man is a grandfather, and the beauty queen is a mother and glamorous divorce. What's her X's problem?
Then, there are the women who work here at the Brighton Dam Apartments.
I'm alluding to the story of how I've remained a bachelor, writing the story down as it occurs to me, for the purpose of solidifying my own sanity. I choose to be alone. I don't consider myself qualified to be a husband or father, for various reasons. But the lovely woman I was just referring to, of course, is different than me.
I've found out that, even when there's a perfectly nice, single woman, who happens to regard me pleasantly, with nothing to stand in our way, no artificial boundary or taboo between us, like some conflict of interest, or whatnot, I'd still rather remain a bachelor, myself, thank you very much, ma'am. I'm really quite too bruised and scarred from my monumentally traumatized life, to think I could ever have a close relationship with a lady again. I've been hurt too much.
There's a couple of the female employees here, who are very nice, flesh-and-blood women, and plenty attractive; I mean not the least bit “plastic” in their character or disposition; and I do have a wonderful time talking to them during the few minutes they have for me at any given moment on their jobs, but I stand by my own incapacity, with damaged instincts and damaged emotions, as if my entire future is weighing in the balances. There are no imperatives here.
It's a self-perpetuating concept, guaranteed to keep me alone.
Even if the woman are is as free as a breeze, as some of the women I'm thinking of in writing this are, and there's nothing impeding a relationship between myself and them, whatsoever, I'm still held back by the idea that I cannot deal with a relationship or commitment with anybody. I've been hurt that badly in life, and I surrender to the idea that is a part of who I am, whether I'm lonely or not.
I'm not that lonely.
If I ever did marry anyone, for whatever reason, I sorely anticipate coming down with one of the worst psychotic breakdowns of my lifetime, comparing since way back to my first one, when I was a young adult and didn't even recognize my own mother and sister when they came to visit me.
If there's a woman who thinks this is unfair of me, or unreasonable somehow, they are being too focused on themselves to understand who I really am as an individual. Besides, I really don't want to let them get to know me well enough to understand, though I talk and write about this overall issue endlessly. It's one of my main topics of discussion with people.
I've always had thoughts of how it might be, being married, with children of my own, in every fantasy of adulthood I can remember since early childhood, with so many visions of various ladies in the parade of my memory, until each of the few times the grasping of a relationship looked imminent. At all those times, reality set in, and I was never able to solidify the relationship and go on with anyone indefinitely. I undermine the whole relationship before I know I'm doing it.
I can break a heart, but I can't join forces with one.
How I'll ever be anything different than alone in a group home with friends around me, I cannot imagine. How I'll ever manage to change that position in my thinking and belief system can only happen as a growth process, and here I am, talking down the idea of having any other person who might like to get to know me and get close to me in the future.
I can flirt, I can visit, I can enjoy the view, as well as the company.
But, “I'd rather look at the menu, but never order,” as one of my buddies once put it.
I'd rather not publish all my reasons for this. I consider the issue to be significantly personal.

Chapter 2

I was a child prodigy. It was the one thing that helped me survive high school. Without the music programs, I would never have made it through high school. We had a dynamic director of the choral music program at my school, and he became intrinsically involved in helping me become the musician I was born to be, if only briefly. I thought of the man as a father figure, long before I ever graduated. He was the sort of man who was born to be a teacher, the kind of person who could bring out the best of what all of his students had to offer.
Being hesitant to do anything with music on arrival from my traumatic childhood in Pennsylvania, I had gotten Mister in a general music class that I could hardly avoid enrolling in, when I'd reluctantly signed up for classes in the fall, though I'd had it in mind to forget all about music altogether, before I'd enrolled that year. I was very self-conscious at that age, and was not interested in becoming a noticeable individual at a new school in a new town and a new State of the Union. This was Maryland, and I was new there. I wanted to blend in. He simply had had the general music class sing a few songs out of a book, and my bell-tone, boy soprano voice betrayed me to the very talent-conscious Mister. I was the sore thumb in the group. I could not fool ole Mister. He heard me loud and clear, even though I was trying my best to blend in with the music flunkies, but there was no getting around him.
Before I could take a breath, the man had me enrolled in every chorus and band the school had to offer, that I was eligible to join, that is, at the time. Then, the high school teacher called the 13 year old student on the telephone at home, to offer to pick me up on his way to school in the morning, so I could be in the men's chorus as well, which met before classes began every morning, well before my bus would arrive, in all kinds of cold, blustery weather.
I was terrified, but my mother decided that I should do it.
He would come driving past my aunt's house in his Volkswagen, and I'd get in the warm car, shivering from the cold.
By the time the man was done bringing my talent to a pinnacle, I just really took the opportunity to enjoy those days, I earned an appointment to the Maryland All-State High School Chorus, I was the drum major and student conductor of the high school band, and the Outstanding Senior in Choral Music.
He offered to not only write a letter of recommendation to go to the university where he'd gotten his Master's in music, he tutored me as well, free of charge, in music theory at his home, all the way through the spring and summer months of my senior year, before and after graduation, preparing me for the university.
I went to university to become a band director, a music education major, right in the middle of the Vietnam War Era. My instrument was trumpet, and I was also a tenor of some significance, not to mention being self-taught on guitar since I was 14. I had started two different folk groups in high school, and fumbled around with an old guitar until I had a few songs that I'd made up myself, by the time I went to North Carolina to begin my studies at the university.
I worked at a live musical theater in the summers for several years throughout high school, as a volunteer. I did everything from bit-parts in the musicals to accounting in the business office, when I was a clear-headed, intelligent teenager. Also, I played in a semi-professional dance band, playing trumpet and guitar in night clubs throughout high school. At those gigs, the alcohol flowed and flowed.
So, I finished high school with honors, and was packed off to university five hundred miles away from home.
But I was not the success everyone expected I would be. There was no one at the school to offer any kind of structure, limitation, or moral support of any kind, least of all to help keep me on an even keel to deal with my studies. The alcohol habit was complicated by a drug habit by the time of my sophomore year. It was the early 70's, and it seemed everyone was partying.
I began to come unglued as a person, by the time I was expected to get down to some serious rehearsal time and some serious studying. I spent a lot more time partying and chasing the girls around than I ever spent on my school work.
I had no idea how to handle university.
I was eventually told by a therapist that I'd been self-medicating with the drugs and alcohol. There were things that were very wrong inside of me, and I had been trying to get some relief from all my turmoil.
Failing utterly to get accepted into the degree granting college, stoned to the gills at the jury exam I had no clue how to handle, after two full years of neglecting my studies and partying myself into a nervous breakdown at the university, I decided to become a music theorist, a composer of music, and dropped out of university for the second and final time. The first time I dropped out, I was taken to the state hospital, with a diagnosis of an Acute Toxic Psychosis. Even after I was released from the hospital and had conned my mother into letting me go back to school in the fall, my health was not good, I had developed a lot of bad habits on campus, and had run out of money. I was starving.
I launched head-long into trying to compose music, since it was my best subject at the university I was about to drop out of, again. I didn't want to waste my education completely. It was the last bastion of hope for my dysfunctional thinking, complicated by a significant musical talent from behind the eight ball.
But I was a very creative young man, and began writing music, to help me half-way believe in the idea that I had any redeeming qualities at all. Why I had developed a problem with my self esteem is a mystery to me, but my entire twenties was a time of believing I was some sort of hideous monster that the world would be better without.
But I was writing music. That had to count for something.
First, there was Prophecy, a piece for solo trumpet with organ, that I performed for the music department in the performance seminar that I'd been cutting regularly for the entire time I'd been enrolled. I had a faculty member accompany my trumpet on the pipe organ. The performance went well enough, but I remember standing in front of the other music students I'd known for the past few, disastrous years, and looking into their eyes, trying to say goodbye to each of them by making eye contact with them. I'm told I took an eternity to begin playing the piece.
Next, there was Weeping Color, for four part mixed chorus. I'd rehearsed it with the university singers in my last weeks on campus, when I was starving. We'd rehearsed it just a few times before I bailed out, dropping out of school in mid-semester, and I came back to campus for the contemporary music festival, where the University Singers, of a full 70 voices, sang my song in the same concert with the music of the great Randal Thompson, who was conducting his own music, live, for my fraternity's Contemporary Music Festival.
I'd heard of the great Randal Thompson when I was in high school, when I had been so immersed in choral music with the great Mister, that the memory of his work had followed my talent to my mentor's Alma Mater, with my high school teacher's personal endorsement to underscore the idea that I was a musician. I did not believe I was anybody worth having a life, for some reason. I believed I was worthless.
The whole bit was kind of a blur in my adolescent mind the whole way through to an oblivion the reader would probably not understand, even if I could describe it in a fully orchestrated and fully organized motion picture portraying the story.
By the time of the Contemporary Music Festival, I was already dropped out of school and working, driving a delivery truck back home, living with my folks. I was delivering flowers, writing love songs behind the wheel of the flower truck in full voice, singing while I delivered flowers. Flowers by Dale; love songs by George. It was a marketing arrangement that was working wonders for my boss's business. He never did forget me, either. Mother was always telling me Dale was asking for me, whenever she'd see him here or there, after I'd quit the job.
I'd taken some time off to drive the five hundred miles south to the campus, to be there when the chorus did my song at the concert.
Anyway, there was this evening concert with Randal Thompson, on campus in the Contemporary Music Festival, and I attended it with Holly, Bill's old girlfriend he wasn't interested in anymore, and Caron, who was just about as big a knockout as any girl on campus. Bill was a pianist and a good friend, at a time when I needed a friend. The girls were both about as pretty as any college coed could hope to be, and they were friends of mine, too.
When the song was finished, the director of the chorus, knowing I was in the audience, called, “Composer!” and motioned out into the crowd, and I stood up and took a bow in the thunderous applause. But the bow was not half accomplished when Holly and Caron both stood up on either side of me and planted kisses on both of my cheeks at once. “Glory days in a young girl's eye,” as the popular songwriter once wrote, like a person is likely to hear on the radio.

The years went by, and I spent a dozen of them in state hospitals, plunking out extremely dark piano music on the crazy house piano, scribbling on folded sheets of staff paper, in varying stages of being a vegetable, depending on what kind of chemical had gotten me incarcerated for the particular hospitalization of the moment. As I've said, I developed a kick-dog attitude about myself, and believed the worst things about myself. I cannot account for the fact that I had a negative self-concept throughout my twenties. I even made an attempt against my own life one year, but promised myself I'd never do it again, fairly quickly after cutting my wrist with a razor blade.
The only thing I did in the state hospitals, besides practice my drug habit, was to write music. I was very ill, and had a very difficult time concentrating on the songs I was trying to create, but I developed a few keyboard works, and a few guitar pieces, over the time I was getting locked up so frequently, before Ronald Reagan changed the rules about state hospitals.
By the end of the 70's, I had a new guitar I'd bought at a music store, waiting for me at my mother's house, and was a ward of the State of Maryland, with two doctor's certificates against me, locked away in a hospital with an ancient baby grand piano. I was not at liberty to leave the building for better than a year. I wrote the Songs from Secluded Grove, because I'd been in Spring Grove State Hospital in those days, and somehow, those works were a lot less dark in quality than their predecessors from my drugging days.
I'd ended up getting sober at Spring Grove, and began a new life, by the time I was in my thirties, and wrote about 15 original songs for keyboard, and about 45 original songs for solo classic guitar, by the time I was in my fifties in the early 21st Century.
Poor Mister, having allowed me to drink his beer now and then, when my drinking buddy and I used to go over to his home while we were in high school, blamed himself for destroying me by giving me alcohol under age, and drank himself to death.

Chapter 3

Have you ever heard of the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, the ole funk/blues guitarist, who dared perform ole Jimi Hendrix' songs in the 1980's in his own concerts, and did them well? He could easily be called Hendrix' successor on electric guitar. He carried on a hard rock tradition and legacy. He used to play with Eric Clapton, but lost his life in a helicopter crash after a concert in 1989. One of my buddy's here at the Brighton Dam has some recordings of ole Stevie Ray, and he's so totally heavy, he reminds me that I'm still tripping, after 28 yrs of total sobriety.
I don't have to take any elicit substances at all to get back to that place in my head again, but I listen to that late guitarists' music, and it's just like old times, when music was more sacred to me than any other thing, even more sacred than all those things that are Holy, like the word of God and other such things. It was a large part of the beating of my heart, right around the time of all my schizoid stuff. All my bad habits had me feeling almost totally defeated, back when I was keeping myself unglued all the time. It makes me feel like I always used to feel when I heard that kind of guitar, not the bad stuff of what I went thru in my youth, just the good old pride and joy of understanding the language of the man's music, like I could always do in my youth. It's an instinctual thing with me, a part of my blood.
And that's not the only sound that spoke to me in those days. Chopin's piano, especially as interpreted by the late, great Arthur Rubinstein, who were clearly both geniuses, and Beethoven was another absolute master to behold. His symphonies where some of the greatest musicianship I've ever witnessed, along with some of his piano work. Not to mention J S Bach and the young Mozart.
There were times when I was partying, back when I was young and stupid, that I'd hear a certain, disciplined sound, and at those times I knew I had a gift that I was squandering. I felt so guilty about letting my music slide the way I did for so long. I dove head-long into all kinds of substances, trying to bury my musicianship and my ailing memory in drugs, but I'd listen to other guys' music at parties, and couldn't escape understanding the language. I'd end up playing guitar in the middle of the night in the basement, keeping my aunt awake when she had to go to work the next day, when I felt compelled to labor at my own sound, and nothing else mattered, not even the hour of night.
I've been over at my buddy's apt here at the Brighton Dam Apartments a couple of times now, and we listen to his DVD of Stevie Ray's concerts, and the experience is just so awesome it demands expression here. I never could play that way, like Heart or Lover-boy or Joan Jet, all those guys. I could never make that sound, although it speaks to me so directly, so acutely. I hardly ever had the discipline to rehearse frequently enough to do that kind of accuracy on my own instrument with what I'm doing, musically, with a guitar in my hands, but that ole Stevie Ray Vaughn spoke the language fluently with his electric guitar. I do understand what he was saying.
He was a spokesman, a messenger. He understood what to say and how to say it to the world.
My sister was never into Hendrix, Alvin Lee, Dwayne Almond, guys who played the funk/blues guitar and mouth harp, but she never tripped, either. I did. I'm still tripping. I'm still into acid rock. Are you into that old sound? I don't even know if we ever even talked about all this, my friend? Do you understand what I'm saying? It's something of a mastery of an instrument and a style, of a conquering of a voice all it's own, that a mastery speaks to my in-bred, trained musicianship, in the flickering flame within the winds of time, inside of me, that was almost extinguished in my heart, after all the troubles I've been thru in my traumatic life, until I got my new Ibanez a little while ago, and have been trying to play again, sometimes.
I don't just take to a guitar like a duck to water anymore. It's something I have to struggle with, something I'm using all of my efforts to get myself to want to play it again, to want to work at my own sound again. It's all still there, and surfaces in my memory now and then, but most of it is still asleep my memory. My scores are not completely gathered together again, which means I have the responsibility to do some more creativity in the future, along with playing more regularly, whenever I can grow into doing it. It's not happening easily.
Some old guitarist I showed my scores to a while back kind of put down my style, and it kind of clipped my wings there for quite a while. He didn't like my parallelism. In fact, a lot o people have put down what I do and who I am, but that's them, and I'm writing like this here, to do some of the healing my heart needs to go thru, before I can fully feel the spirit of my own sound again, and naturally gravitate to my new instrument, regardless of the discomfort of my hip when I play. I'm trying to redevelop my ailing instinct.
It's a whole new awareness of the responsibility I've been entrusted with, to make my own sound, like so many other musicians have done. I'm talking about the art that was entrusted to my soul by my Maker, that almost got destroyed in all the things I went thru over my so unfortunately overwhelming lifetime. I'm trying very hard to resurrect that personal sound, that personal language that all responsible musicians speak with their instruments. I have a sound all my own, and it is coming back to me, slowly, but oh, so slowly. I'm struggling to overcome my underlying disenchantment.
I've tried a thousand times to have another love affair with guitar, like I had earlier in life, and I'm having a lot of trouble tearing down all the elaborate the walls that keep me away from playing on a daily basis. My sprained hand has almost fully recovered after these four years since I fell that time, and I'm all but a stone's throw away from playing as well as ever, but I'm having difficulty being comfortable when I sit and play. My hip replacement bothers me, before I've been playing very long, and my memory of my songs lets me down a lot of times, too. I just get so deflated, when I can't remember the way something goes.
I'll be playing, and the bubble gets popped, and all I can do is put the instrument down and limp away from the rehearsal session, to take refuge in a more comfortable seat, and do something else entirely. I doubt I'll ever get the funding to record, but maybe I'll end up with a recording contract with a producer again, some day, like the funk/rock folks have done. I almost had a recording contract once. Maybe it'll happen again.
Those guys've got their sound, and I've got mine, and I ain't dead yet. I owe it to God to make my own sound come alive again, to flesh it out some more, so it doesn't just flicker and go out, like it nearly did after I sprained my hand, when I nearly gave up on my talent.
I haven't sung a note in 30 yrs.
When I lost my instrument and my will to play, it was a very low time in my life. I was extremely depressed and troubled, because I wasn't being true to my gift. All this writing is just another attempt at healing my broken heart. I can't tell you how broken my heart has become through the years.
I'm working at my perspectives and my attitudes, and fitting in a few jam sessions now and then, and there is always the Brighton Dam lobby beckoning to have me sit and offer my sound to the other residents' here, whenever I get the amp. I have my own ready-made audience.
My quest for inspiration has a lot of pit-falls and troubles to work thru, and I'm awake late at night, wanting to write about playing, instead of wanting to do the playing itself. Ah's me... I'll find a way to get around all these walls I've but up between myself and my playing. Somehow, I'm certain I'm going to be able to pull this whole thing together, if my Maker will just help me with it. It's not easy, but what is there in life that's worth doing that really is all that easy?
I was supposed to be the next teacher of music, the successor of the old man, when I went away to his Alma Mater, but the more I got into it, the more I did not want to pursue it. It went against my grain. I was an active alcoholic, and became an active drug addict, telling on myself to department heads, and the like, undermining my success every which way I turned. A lot of it was done without intent, too. I was subconsciously undermining my success, because I was headed in the wrong direction. I had no business trying to become a teacher. I was an abused child. Those things don't mix.
Then there came the acute toxic psychosis and the schizophrenia, with obsessive delusions that almost lasted forever, and there went my musicianship for a lot of years, and my relationship with my music mentor went right down the tubes. I still had the talent, but I didn't have the healthier thoughts I'd had when I was younger, to go along with it.
I boxed myself in with thoughts that are too vulgar to write down, too repulsive to claim as my own, though thousands of people have listen to me talk about all that, over the phone of all things, as well as face to face, and my mentor was affronted every which way I turned on him. I lost my comfort with the idea of sharing anything with the man, musical or otherwise.
It wasn't rational, but it was real.
I ended up rejecting him altogether.
I was trying to live his dream when I went to his school, and I couldn't do it. He was a nice guy and excellent musician, he taught me a lot about music, but I could not fill his shoes, because that's not who I am. I think it was presumptuous of him to expect me to follow in his footsteps in the first place.
I ended up being creative, developing my own voice, writing my own guitar music, and some piano music, too. It was my own sound and my own language, and that man never did understand half of what I tried to do. He said so in so many words.
He started blaming himself for my alcoholism, at the onset of my lifetime of disaster, and ended up drinking himself to death, destroying himself, believing he'd destroyed me, while I went on with developing a sober, creative life. I couldn't save him. It was hard enough to get help from God to save myself, with all the company of Heaven behind me.

Chapter 4

There were all kinds of things I wanted to leave behind in Pennsylvania, when we left the North behind, but some things, like my musical talent, could not be escaped from, as I've already recounted.
I eventually learned that I could not escape the abuses of my youth by simply blocking them out of my memory with substances. That tactic got me addicted to drugs and alcohol, considering the effects those things always had on my memory. Even so, I could not escape the truth of what had happened to me in PA, and eventually got to the point where I had to face my own memories, or die altogether. But I was well into adulthood before I had to face all that.
When we first arrived in Maryland, there was a family decision to be made about where we'd go to church, and I set my mind on staying away from my aunt's church, because her singing voice drove me nuts. She was a terrible warbler, and thought so much of her singing herself, she used to sing solos in that church of hers all the time, sing in the choral society, and all that, and I didn't want to hear it. She was Presbyterian, and we'd been raised Methodist, so I camouflaged the issue by just insisting that I was a Methodist and wanted to go to the Methodist Church, and that was that.
I achieved a majority vote in the family on the issue with that statement, and my aunt continued to go alone to her church, while my siblings, my mom and I all went to the Methodist church in town.
We had arrived in Maryland in August, and I began assessing my new environment right away. I had a bicycle, which was indispensable for a kid in that semi-rural environment. The distances between places, starting at my aunt's house, were miles and miles apart. It was not practical to walk much of any place from my new home.
I found a girl who was hanging out in the above ground swimming pool of the local apartment complex, just by looking around the new town out my way. We were the same age, and I gravitated in her direction regularly on my bike, until she told me her father had gotten another job someplace else, and they moved away abruptly before school got started.
So much for her.
There was also a bunch of girls who lived close by, but riding my bike right up to the back porch where one of them lived, when they were all hanging out, and talking trash to all five of them at once, did not do any good for my popularity with any of them, whatsoever. They scarcely spoke to me again the whole time I lived there.
Then, there was a house just up the street from them that had four brothers of various ages living there with their parents. I developed all sorts of problems with them eventually, but since they lived so close by, it was difficult to avoid going over there. That house was the only place within easy walking distance, besides all those girls who didn't want to have anything to do with me, and I had associations with the Disgusting-son's brothers, as I've grown to remember them, which is a bastardization of their last name, and associated with them to varying degrees for many years.
The oldest one was several years older than me, and I found him to be greatly intimidating, but he was not much of an issue for very long. I think he got married and moved out of state when he was still a young man. I was still a kid when he left, as I recall.
His next oldest brother was just a year behind me in age, and went to the Boy Scout Troop mother got me into at our church.
I got so hopping mad at him one evening, I could have beaten him within an inch of his life, if I was like that, but I'm just not interested in hurting people. There was an announcement at Scouts one evening was that there was going to be a father's day at the meeting soon, and we should all tell our dads when it was going to be, so our dads could come to the meeting, and he turned around and said to me that I didn't have a father. I wasn't going to let him talk that way about my mother, so I started yelling and cussing him out, right in front of everybody at the Boy Scouts, and only got in a little bit of trouble for my language, and the yelling, instead of sending the guy to the hospital from beating the crap out of him, like I wanted to do. I always wished I'd whooped him good and proper, though. I wasn't any bastard, and he had no right to say that I didn't have a father. My father was just not available, having deserted us and gone to Florida.
I've never quite gotten over thinking about that. It still sticks to my craw sometimes, fifty years later.
His little brothers eventually made certain I was continually addicted to drugs, like he did by the time high school was over, and they eventually provided such important introductions in the community for me, like giving my acquaintance to the guys who robbed my folks' house while I was tricked into getting out of the away. I narc'ed on the whole bunch of them to the state police after they did it, too. But that was a long time later, after I'd lived there well into adulthood. Those youngest two brothers were quite a bit younger than me. It was the second brother that was closest to my age, but I could never quite seem to keep myself away from that house, even after the two oldest brothers moved to the southwest.
Then, at the church there were a couple of guys who hung out with me quite a bit when we first arrived in town. One of them was the preacher's kid, like I'd been when I was little.
That's right, my dad was a preacher, and deserted his family after a fit of angry violence, leaving us with no visible means of support.
The other PK at that church and school kept up with me over the years, calling, coming over, getting together, mostly for one sort of mischief or another. He as the one who was so fond of alcohol in high school, and particularly beer, that it was his idea to have the chorus director give us beer over at his place, when we were still too young to drink. It was his idea to go over to the teacher's house all the time in the first place, and he was always spoiling for the old guy's booze.
He was Joe Sports, which I could definitely not relate to, being a creative type. He'd do all the write-ups of the high school sports for the newspaper in those days. He definitely had a way with words, so he was packed off to college to major in journalism right out of high school, but dropped out after only one semester. He wanted quick money, a car and a girlfriend more than he wanted a career. He wouldn't even try to get a degree.
He ended up with a wife and two kids, (one of each), and a house in the suburbs, with a car, a van, and a motorcycle, which he and his wife paid for by their constant participation in the work-a-day world, doing whatever they could to get paid.
He loved to get drunk and yell at the TV when a game was on, as if ruining his voice and my ears was going to effect the outcome of a game through the TV set.
I was in very poor health throughout my youth, and spent a lot of time in the state hospital. The problem eventually turned out to be my drinking, as much as anything else, but my dear ole buddy was always coming to see me at the hospital, bringing me a couple of beers every time. He was doing me a favor, you see. And he was always putting me up in his house in the suburbs, when the hospital wanted to discharge me.
But I got so I couldn't handle a job.
After a while, with all that going on, he got sick and tired of my version of crazy. He didn't stop hanging out with me. He just stopped being kind to me. I didn't have too many choices of people to hang out with, except for the drinkers and the smokers. I was just about the most clueless person in the world about how to clean up my life, for the longest time. What I needed to do was quit getting drunk, and quit smoking.
Eventually, the guy who was my inseparable associate, got cancer, and mother said it was because he drank so much beer all his life. He died before he was fifty.

Chapter 5

One of my buddies I've known for several years. We have a really good time together, often enough. I know his wife, and have met his two adult kids. Now they're grandparents. They've had me over for supper parties and whatnot, from time to time, and the nice things they've done for me out of friendship are countless. I do things like give them hats and scarves when I get together with them.
We used to be hippies, way back before we met, and gave it all up a while back, which is sort of how we met, but there are some stories to tell about all that. He used to hike, fish, and camp around the great Brighton Dam. He didn't realize that I knew anything about the place. Now I live in the senior living apartments there.
He and his wife, (or is it just his wife?), are from someplace up North, up in New England or Upstate New York, or maybe she went to school someplace like that, I forget exactly, and he used to drive on up through New Jersey to see her, getting wasted in his Mustang on the way up to see her and back, tripping his brains out on mescaline and whatnot, back in the day, and there was this one Jersey cop who would always haul him over on the interstate, and bust him for the little bid of weed, or whatever he was holding at the time. He wasn't speeding or anything. That cop just like to haul him over for the heck of it. He'd spend a night in jail, now and then, over it, back when he was a young man in love. I think it was just because the cop liked his Mustang.
But he couldn't stay away from that girl, so he married her. Sounds like good reasoning to me. She's a real nice girl, too. I gave her one of the hats I made, through him one day while he was over at my place, and then forgot I'd done it. When I said something about the hat, when she was wearing it, she had to remind me it was one of mine. Talk about a senior moment...
They've known each other all their lives, anyway, and she has a whole gaggle of sisters, who are always teasing him, whenever they're around. “Tommy!” they say, in the most flirtatious voices they can muster, as if they've been practicing all their lives. He just says, “Uh, Ohhhh,” and quietly laughs, smiling, all good-naturally.
He was just like the majority of our entire generation. He partied and did his tripping and whatnot. He did Vietnam in the army, too. Not me, I stayed stateside, flipped out for your sins, and all that. He worked with addictions in Saigon, away from the worst of the trouble, talking to the GI's about heroine and other hard drugs, and made it home safe and sound. The irony of the situation is that he partied as much as any of the guys he counseled. But he was more concerned with heavy addictions on the job, than all the simple partying that was going on, where his job over there was concerned.
When he got home, he and his wife got loaded for a while, like so many Baby Boomers, but when one of them decided to sober up, the other one made the same decision. They are that much of a couple, thinking as one flesh together, as the preachers have it.
I've just known them in recent times, since we've all been sober, and he's done a lot of different stuff for me, like a little technical help with my computer, stuff to help me out here and there, getting together for fun. He's a regular, stand-up kind of guy, in my opinion. They own a house and cars, and work jobs in the work-a-day world, like any normal people.
He told me one time that he and one of his buddies were driving the Capital Beltway at high speed, back in the day when the speed limit was 70mph. They were smoking a bowl and tripping. His buddy was driving his classic Mustang, the one that kept getting him pulled over by the cops up in Jersey, but this was down by DC.
They were just cruising along on the Beltway, and the guy says, “Hey, man, I need a hit off that pipe.”
But my friend had been an addictions counselor, and he said, out of habit, “You don't need it,” a couple of times, to make his usual, professional point, out of habit, and handed the driver the bowl.
He said it another time, “You don't need it,” and the driver threw the guy's bowl out the window of the Mustang at 70mph in dense traffic on the beltway.
It wasn't like he could say something like, “Hey, what do you think you're doing?” or anything like that, at that particular moment. They were both tripping on mescaline at the time, and one could never tell what that driver might do next.
Another one of the nice things he did for me was help me move one time. We talk on the phone, and exchange email, keep in touch. It's a heck of a nice friendship for a guy like me, who can relate to his stories and visa-verse. We can all use a friend, somehow or another.

Chapter 6

I used to have a lot of anger about God, and people who talked about Him. Sometimes I still do. Turns out that my anger was mostly about my father, his violence, and his paranoia, not to mention my other abuses and other abusers. My father was a minister when I was a kid, and an irresponsible man. He talked about God a lot, being a minister, but was some sort of hypocrite, the way he was always beating on all of us at home, to get what he demanded, and just acted like a little Hitler around the house all the time.
I believed he'd kill us, sooner or later.
He left us all high and dry when he felt like it, too. He finally decided he wanted to leave his family behind, with no visible means of support, whether we survived or not. He went to Florida to sun himself, because he “needed to get some rest” after getting his big PhD. He didn't finish school and get a good job so he could support his family better than he ever had when he was a preacher, before he got fired by the church. He finished school and bailed out of our lives.
I was a kid, and was terribly offended by all that.
That wasn't God's fault, although it connects with my emotions that way sometimes.
Now, I did spend a lot of time in churches over the years, and much of it was because I just wanted to. There were always things I enjoyed about church, from time to time, when I was temporarily on an even keel. There have been things I've resented about churches over the years, too.
I even took a college-level Bible study course in my late 20's. I was also a church musician, singing in choirs and playing the trumpet and the guitar for various congregations on Sunday mornings as a youth, and as an adult.
I've had a considerable background in the Faith.
When I finally figured out that I needed to get sober, I figured out Who to pray to, and how to pray to Him. Somehow, I just knew. Then, I did the most natural thing for a drunk to do: I went out and got drunk again.
Well, God came to me while I was drunk that last time, and He ministered to me in every way I needed Him to. There had been times I'd had a relationship with God when I was younger, so it wasn't completely unlike me to open myself up to God's help.
I never gave up completely on my faith.
I had prayed for help when I had my breakdown in university, and got the help. The same with my relationship with my girl, whom I wanted to marry, when I was in university. I didn't know what to do with her, after I knew I was going to be a liability to her like Dad had been to Mom, so I asked God what to do. He told me that I could not take her with me, so I broke up with her.
There were many things, over the years, that God has helped me with, and getting sober was one of them. My aunt always told me to pray about my smoking, and I finally did it. I got honest with God, and admitted I smoked because I couldn't stop without His help. Then, I was set free from my nicotine addiction, just as I'd been set free from my drug addiction and alcoholism.
I've always had a lot of problems with my thoughts, feelings and beliefs, and still do see a Christian Psychotherapist, take medications, the whole nine yards, but the thing the Lord has done, is consistently facilitate my circumstances, and help me with things that no human being, therapist or otherwise, could ever have known how to help me with.
What it's taken on my part, is a commitment to openness and honesty. It's taken willingness to be cooperative and faithfulness to avoid the things that I'm trying to avoid. I learned to stay away from bars, parties, and smokers, and to keep myself from romancing the idea of drinking or smoking, whenever I've had to be around such things.
I don't wish I could smoke or drink.
I don't miss it.
I'm grateful I don't have to do it.
The thing about being actively addicted to something is a matter of feeling a sense of urgency about continually doing the substances. God has taken all that urgency away from me.
I'm free of it.
Avoiding substances is being faithful to what God has asked me to do with the rest of my life. It doesn't bother me that I'm avoiding substances everyday, because I've been taught, by experience, and by the Lords direct guidance, that the only way I can continue to live at all, is to avoid the substances that gave me so much trouble for so long. It's not a burden to do this, it's an honor and a pleasure.
I enjoy this life.
There's nothing in it like paying obeisance to a violent, belligerent man who has a lot of demands, like my dad was doing when I was little. It's a matter of having a lot of nice things in a nice life, like a clear head, a healthy self-esteem, and the ability to utilize my talents, instead of being ashamed and disgraced on a daily basis.
It's as if I'm almost earning a decent life, by not doing things that make me sick. There was a long time I thought differently, but God helped me see that I was destroying myself, and that He needed my help to give me a good life. He'd already carried me through a million catastrophes, seemed like. He finally showed me that I could choose to live sober, or die on the spot.
He was that direct about it, just as I needed Him to be at the time.
The benefits of staying sober are mind boggling. There are just so many things I have as advantages in life now, that I'd be an addict to want to trade them in for more substance abuse. What I mean is that I have the natural propensity to do addictive thoughts and behaviors, but I realize it would only precipitate disaster.
I've written all these things about my life, not to gloat on the idea that I did so many wrong things and got away with them, which is not so, but to work some of my ideas out, and find a way to give myself some serenity about the life that I've found beyond being a Damn Yankee, flower child, hippie.
Where my life was a nightmare in so many ways while I was younger, sobriety has given me the gift of deliverance. I have plenty of every good thing now. I feel very well most of the time, and am enjoying so much more of my life than I ever thought possible, with a conscious, voluntary contact with my Maker.
I just want to speak and write His praises, and if you're this far in this book, I think you'd want to hear me say so.

Cover graphics by Fiona Johnson and http://www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Impressum

Texte: George S Geisinger
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 22.04.2012

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