A New Era Begins in Dayton, Ohio

After leaving the convent on Saturday, December 24, 1966, at age 30, I collapsed in my parents’ living room in front of the television. There I sat—all day and through the night, unmoving, my mouth gaping. Staring. I later learned that my mother considered having me admitted to the mental ward at the Sanitarium Hospital in Independence because she was so concerned about my inability to communicate.

         On Tuesday, December 27, I got a call from Washington, D.C. Sister Mary Dennis, a convent friend teaching at Catholic University, had recently met the owner of Pflaum Publishing. He’d asked if she knew anyone with a background in teaching and theology who could also write and edit.

         She asked if I’d be interested. I had no idea what editing was. The term was new to me. But I was so lost in a sea of malaise that I mumbled, in a voice that hadn’t been used for three days, “I guess.” She then called Bill Pflaum and set up an interview for the following day in Dayton, Ohio.

         For the trip, my pregnant sister-in-law loaned me three winter skirts and sweaters. Mom and I visited Jones Store to purchase underwear and a coat, shoes, purse, and hat. Mom bought the last item because at that time all well-dressed women wore hats when they traveled. So, wearing my black, brimmed, felt hat, my green, nubby winter coat, and my high-heeled leather pumps, I flew on a TWA jet to Dayton on Wednesday, December 28.

         In 1966, passengers alighted the plane out on the tarmac and then walked across it to the terminal. On that day, the wind gusted so insistently across the barren airfield that the lower half of my coat and my skirt flapped up against my thighs. For eight years, my lower legs had been covered by a black serge habit and simply showing them made me self-conscious.

         Now, to have my thighs revealed almost shamed me and so I stumbled across the tarmac trying to hold onto a bulky purse while pressing one hand across my thighs to hold down the coat and skirt and the other hand on my head to keep the wayward hat on. I was bent over like a doddering, arthritic alien. And everything did seem foreign to me—the clothes, the makeup, the plane, the legs that looked liked debarked sticks below my knobby knees.

         Joe Kneeland, managing editor at Pflaum Publishing, met me in the terminal. As he approached, I let go of despair, lassitude, passivity and turned on the spotlight within so that I began to act. I knew what normal was. I also knew that I was nowhere near normal at that time. But I could act, and so for the next two days I did.

         I acted all through the interviews. I acted as I wrote the children’s stories they wanted. I acted as I met each new editor at the publishing house. I laughed at the appropriate times. The truth was I charmed them—or so they told me later.

The University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, USA.

         But then Joe drove me out to the University of Dayton to take the MMPI—the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. According to Wikipedia it is “the most widely used and researched standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to develop treatment plans [and] assist with differential diagnosis . . . .”

         I couldn’t “charm” this inventory or “ace” it. I’m quite sure that the reason Pflaum took three weeks to decide to hire me is because I came across as mentally unhealthy—imbalanced—on the MMPI. And so I sat for over twenty days, gaping at the television. Then, in late January the publisher called and offered me a job as an editor on My Little Messenger for grades one and two. I would earn $6,500 a year.

         And so a new era in my life began. Peace.

Photographs from Wikipedia.

Making Heaven Interesting

For me, fear and desperate planning filled the first three months of Grade 5. I had to somehow avoid Mr. Jackson’s groping hand when he drove me and his sons and daughter and my little brother to and from school. Grade 6, however, went well. No trauma that I can remember except for Dad’s drinking and the loud arguments between him and Mom. I kept hiding the hammer, axe, and knives for fear that during one of those drunken arguments he’d try to kill her again.

         In fact, I remember the fall months of 1947 with enjoyment for it was then that I first studied ancient history. One November day, while reading about the Grecian city-state of Thebes, I had a déjà vu moment and roamed the streets leading up to its ancient citadel. The present merged with the past and I became Theban. That experience led me to visit Greece in 1993 and work on a Bronze-Age-Greece novel.  

  

    Remains of Cadmea, the central fortress of ancient Thebes.

         The other vivid memory I have of Grade 6 concerns heaven. Over and over in religion class Sister Mary McCauley talked about the afterlife.    

      Dante and Beatrice gaze at the highest heavens.

         “What will we do in heaven,” I asked one day.

         “Why, Dolores, you’ll praise God for all His glory and beauty and goodness. You’ll sing, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and Earth are filled with your glory!”

         “That’s it?”

         “Yes. Isn’t it glorious?”

         Clearly, she thought so.

         I didn’t.

         The truth was that hell, despite its flames, sounded much more interesting. No mealy-mouthed humans there.

Medieval illustration of Hell 

in the Hortus deliciarum manuscript

of Herrad of Landsberg—about 1180.

         So I thought. And thought. And thought some more about how to make heaven appealing. After alighting from the school bus one afternoon, I ran up the rutted driveway, into the unpainted house, and called out, “Mom!”

         “I’m here. In the kitchen.”

         Dumping my books on the divan, I hurried to the kitchen where Mom stood at the range, stirring a steaming pot of macaroni. 

         “Mom!” I shouted. “You know how heaven being boring bothers me?”

         “Yes.”

         “God seems so conceited. All He wants is to be praised all the time. And it just goes on and on and on with no ending. It scares me. Everything ends. What’s the end of heaven?”

         “It’s the end of life I know about, Dolores. We die and we’re with God.”

         “But just saying, ‘Holy, Holy,’ all the time gets monotonous. I’d like talking with people.” I paused and then confided that God simply wasn’t enough for all eternity.

         “He’s pretty wonderful,” she said.

         “Well, if dead people have been telling Him that since the Neanderthals”—we’d started our study of ancient history with them that year—“then He must be sort of tired of it all by now. Wouldn’t you think so?”

         “Possibly.”

         “So here’s my idea! When I get to heaven I’m going to ask God—as a favor—if He’d show me a movie of every person who’s ever lived—even those babies in Limbo. Going all the way back to the Neanderthals.”

         “Sounds interesting.”

         “Yes," I agreed enthusiastically. "And that’s not all. I’ll ask to see not only the people but also what they thought and what they said and what they dreamed about! And I’ll see and hear their conversations when they were alive. I’ll watch their whole lives! The life of every person!”

         As Mom drained the macaroni, she summed it up. “So you’re going to see a long movie?”

         “The longest ever, Mom. It’ll go on and on because people keep dying and I’d keep seeing movies of their lives. Maybe God will even give me popcorn! Buttered!”

         I went to bed content that night. An eternity of stories . . . and buttered popcorn.        

All photographs are from Wikipedia.

         

We Journey with Shepherds, Magi, Animals, and One Another

The Magi Journeying by James Tissot

No story today about growing up in the forties with the rationing of the war and the shortages on the home front. Instead, as we begin to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas, I cherish three of life’s gifts: the warmth of friendship and family, the miracle of renewed spirit, and the wonder of love shared in Oneness.

         I hope that as the new year dawns, I will grow in compassion, charity, open-mindedness, and the willingness to listen to views that differ from my own.

         It is in the listening that all of us discover that we are truly One and that our differences need not divide us into warring camps but can help us appreciate the multi-faceted complexity of the human spirit.

         As Gertrud von Le Fort wrote in her poem “Corpus Christi Mysticum” in Hymns to the Church, “Everywhere there is one and never two.” My life has been given over to discovering what that line of poetry truly means.

         Always and ever, especially when I find myself at odds with others, I learn that in truth we are One, not two, no matter what seems to divide us. As the new year dawns, let us all reach out and embrace what seems to be Other, but at the deepest level is One.  

         Why today especially? Because this is the first of the twelve days of Christmas. Our celebration of Light within our lives culminates in the Epiphany on January 6 when the three kings discover, as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Journey of the Magi,” that the stable of our own spirit and the child within each of us offer us not answers but questions about how we will live our lives.

         “The Friendly Beasts” is a carol that speaks to the Oneness of all creation. The music originated in twelfth-century France and the words we sing today are from the 1920s.

         I chose this rendition by Tennessee Ernie Ford because it features the artwork of the famous children’s illustrator and writer Tomie dePaola as well as the words of the song.

         If you enjoyed that traditional carol, you may also enjoy two others that have been favorites of mine since 1986, when a friend gave me the audiocassette “Christmas Carol,” featuring the flute of James Galway.

         One, “Shepherd’s Pipe Carol,” speaks of the loneliness we might feel on the way to Bethlehem, destiny’s end, where family, Magi, shepherds, and animals gathered as One.

         The other, “Pat-a-Pan,” speaks to the divinity within us. I believe that when we embrace our sparks of divine Oneness we make the earth whole.

         If you’d like to listen to both carols, please clink here and go to my second blog where I featured them this past Sunday.

          Next Wednesday I’ll return to my on-line memoir stories on this blog. I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you for the visits you make here each week, the comments many of you choose to leave, and the good will you extend toward my words and toward my journey of accepting the whole of my long life.

         It is peace I wish each and every one of you. Peace pressed down and overflowing. Peace that flows like a river within your heart and mind and spirit. Peace ever and always. In the new year of 2013, let us share that peace with each person whom we encounter as we go about our days.

         Peace.

A "Broken Hallelujah"

Ten words on the election:

It’s time to pull together for the good of all.

Prologue to Today’s Posting

This past Monday I read a posting that ended with “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. I first heard that song when k.d. lang sang it at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010. It led to my writing an introduction for a memoir that I hoped would be published the traditional way.        

    

            After reading that intro, a friend suggested I write differently. “You’re a  storyteller,” she said. “Tell stories in your memoir.” Then another friend suggested a blog and the two ideas coalesced: an on-line memoir.

            Thus, this blog, begun in May 2011, has featured stories rather than musings. So many blogs I read are replete with wisdom. I’m still looking for wisdom to tap me on the shoulder and announce its presence. In the meantime, I tell stories.

            Yesterday I found that 2010 introduction. I want to share it with you today as proof that I need to stick with stories!

That Old Introduction

I am a “broken Hallelujah.” Within the deep center of myself memory and Presence meet and merge. They proclaim, “I am broken, but I have survived.” What I have survived is my own desperate need to be enough for someone. To be enough that someone would love me despite my brokenness. Only in the last few years have I recognized that what I really want is to be enough for myself.

            The first five years of my life were idyllic. My parents loved me—dearly and deeply. Yet in 1941, when I was five, they left me with friends and took my baby brother with them to Parsons, Kansas. This seeming desertion left me fearful. That fear tripled when my dad began to drink heavily and a neighbor molested me for three months.

            Then came the loss of identity in a Benedictine convent in Kansas followed by twelve years of depression and the hallucination of three different aspects of myself. I kept these hallucinations hidden for twelve years during which I became both actively and passively suicidal.

            I have known my own failure of integrity, fallen into the frigid pit of despair, lost faith, endured Meniere’s.  

            We all have a long litany of the days of our life. This was mine.

            Through it all, I, like you, survived.

            In later years, Dr. Nimlos, an astute psychiatrist in St. Paul, Minnesota, told me that I had the most highly developed sense of survival she’d ever met. It’s like the word survival is branded on my soul. It’s the incised touchstone for each experience.

            I’m only guessing that, however, because in truth much of my life still eludes me. Who is that giggly child called “Dodo”?

            Who is that shy and subdued grade-schooler known as “Dolores?

            Who is that bemused college student hailed as “Dee Ready”?

            Who is that confused nun named “Sister Innocence”?

          Who are they?

            Who is she? 

            I’m hoping that writing this memoir will help me understand her.

            Depression, despair, apathy, deep-down-bone weariness are puzzle pieces. I’ve spent my life sorting them. Looking for like colors. Shapes. Images. This memoir, I hope, will finally reveal to me the picture that is my life. The pieces will sort themselves into the who of Dee Ready. I tell you now that she has come to believe in her own resilience. That was a gift of Meniere’s.

            Had I known before my seventieth year that Meniere's awaited me in its acute, progressive, intractable form, I do not know that I would have chosen to remain alive. Yet because of Meniere’s I now know that what I have searched for all my life is my authentic and true self. This broken Hallelujah seeks wholeness. As I begin this memoir, I wonder if the hardest, the deepest, the dearest wholeness is that which bears the jagged scars of struggle.

            All my life I’ve longed to be loved. To be enough for others. I now recognize, with gratitude, that the friends who have stood by me throughout these many years have loved me in my brokenness, almost despite myself. Now I begin to love Dee. Now I am enough for myself. Or perhaps I am just closer to being that enough. For does the journey of a broken Hallelujah ever end?

Postscript

·      If you’d like to see the first story I related on this on-line memoir, click here.

·      If you’d like to know how I go about writing the on-line memoir stories, please look at the most recent posting on my second blog—the one about writing.

Buddhism and Ménière’s Disease

(Continued from Wednesday, August 22 . . . )

Two weeks ago, I posted the story of how Blue came into my life during an asthma attack when I was eight. Today I’d like to share a happening sixty-two years later.

            In May 2006, Ménière’s Disease imprisoned me for eighteen months. At any moment, I could pitch forward onto the floor, tumble down the steps, bang my head on a rock in the perennial garden, fall against a window pane. The house became both refuge and mine field. Terror camped around me, and I often spent the day crawling from room to room, unable to stand balanced.

            Vomiting, dehydration, and a loss of mental capacity accompanied these acute rotational vertigo episodes, which occurred almost daily. I couldn’t drive or walk outside. I couldn’t watch television or scroll a computer screen. Parallel lines brought on episodes, so I could not read. My life narrowed to my thoughts, books on tape, and the walls of the two-story house.

            One day in late summer, I sat in a chair listening to a tape. Abruptly, an attack thrust me to the floor. It rotated. The walls rotated counter-clockwise. Moving. Moving. Moving. I vomited. My head fell into the mess.

            I didn’t know how long this episode would last—one had gone on for twenty-four hours—so I wanted to be in bed. I slowly turned over. My brain had become tangled yarn. The walls rotated. The ceiling—the  floor—moved inexorably.

            I crawled down the hall, into my bedroom, to the four-poster, mahogany bed that had belonged to my grandparents. With great effort, I pulled myself upward onto its high mattress. Everything rotated. I lay on my back, the room rotating. I fixed my blurred gaze on the far right-hand corner of the ceiling. Fixing one point could keep me from continuing to vomit.

The cats and I and my 1904 bed on a “normal” day.

            Panic deluged me. What to do? What to do? What to do? The walls rotated. My stomach churned. My head felt heavy.

            Then thought came: “It’s not my fault this is happening. I can’t do anything to make it go away. I have no control over it.”

            Another thought passed like ticker tape through my muddled brain. The year before, I’d read a book on Buddhism. In it, the author suggested that when we feel deep, sometimes frightening, emotion, we let ourselves “sink” into the feeling. We let ourselves breathe within it.

            So that’s what I did. I simply sank into vertigo. I stretched out my arms on the bed and opened my palms so that they could accept whatever happened. I let myself become the episode and in doing do I experienced a cessation of panic.

            Ultimately, the episode released me. Exhausted, I slept for long hours. But I learned, as I had so many years before with asthma, how to let go and sink into a frightening experience to enter calm waters.

            Why hadn’t I entered Blue when these acute rotational vertigo episodes occurred? A good question and the only answer I have shows how narrow, perhaps rigid, my mind truly can be. It just never occurred to me. This wasn’t asthma and somehow I never thought that Blue, which was my nirvana for that disease, could be used for Ménière’s. Ah, how frail we humans are.

                                                            (Continued next Wednesday . . . )

PS: Some of you may want to know more about Ménière’s Disease. Last year I posted a series of seven stories about it. You will find these under the label “Ménière’s Disease” on the right-hand side of this blog.

PPS: “Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats & Their Humans” was downloaded 741 times during the three days it was offered free during the recent blog fest of which I was a part. “A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story,” which was offered free for only one day, was downloaded 1,384 times.

             As many of you know, I’m a rank novice with regard to social media, so I find all this amazing. It happened only because of the generosity and expertise of Elisa Hirsch who sponsored the gala affair. I want to thank both you and Elisa for its success. I feel I’ve hitched my wagon to a rising star.

Photo of stairs from Wikipedia.

Meeting Blue

Yesterday, I provided a link to a posting from last year on asthma and how I learned to “tough it out” and “distract myself.” Some of you may have had the time and/or the inclination to read that posting. If so, thank you.

             Perhaps, however, your blogging schedule makes following links impossible, even though you might want to. So for you, here’s a brief synopsis: I was born with asthma. During my first five years, mom and dad rushed me to the hospital six times. I almost died four times. From kindergarten through third grade, I missed three months out of each school year because of asthma attacks. All that changed in the fourth grade.             

            So much for the synopsis. Now I’d like to share with you one of my most cherished childhood memories.

            Toward the end of second grade, Grandpa Ready died, I learned to tell time, my mother shared her philosophy with me at a funeral parlor, and my father tried to murder my mother in the kitchen. All of this I’ve chronicled in the past few weeks.

            The upshot was that my spirits sagged. I was afraid to whine because my parents might leave me again. Asthma always lurked, ready to keep me in bed for as long as a week. I’d miss school and struggle to breathe with my chest feeling as if a sitting giraffe weighed it down. And sure enough, I had an asthma attack in mid-May.            

            During one of those May days, I was lying in my parent’s double bed. I’d made a tent of my knees and pulled the blanket over the tent, my chest, and my head. Beneath the blanket, I gazed at my tented legs and saw them as a futuristic city with spaceships flying under my knees and over my thighs. I imagined Flash Gordon navigating with me. We swooped the city’s towering buildings. Like them, we scraped the sky.

A Flash Gordon comic strip.

            All this imagining helped me distract myself from the coughing. The breathing. The wheezing. But then suddenly all the symptoms grabbed hold of me. I panicked, unable to distract myself or even to tough it out. I felt as if I were drowning in the sea of my own lungs.

            It was then that I experienced mystery.

            Blue engulfed me. Enfolded me. I breathed in Blue. I became Blue.

            “What does that mean?” you might be asking. I don’t know. I know only that I breathed the essence of Blue. It surrounded me. Like a river of peace it flowed through my pores.

            I began to breathe easily. The wheezing ceased. My chest unburdened itself. The height and depth and breadth of Blue seeped into me. I knew Blue. I was known by Blue.

            And ever after, even unto this day, whenever I have difficulty breathing I let myself sink into Blue. I rest there and my breathing finds its natural rhythm again. And I know that I’m not going to drown because I can’t draw or expel air. I’m going to live.

            That mysterious gift didn’t change the frequency of the asthma attacks. For the rest of 1943 and the first seven months of 1944, I experienced them again and again. The difference was that I could enter Blue and rest there.

            And so it was that when fourth grade began, I could set myself the goal of being at school each day. Blue was with me. It reminds me now of that line from one of the Starwars movies: “The force is with you.”

            For me, Blue was the force that enabled me to breathe.

Comics and blue gradations from Wikipedia.

Time Passes

(Continued from last Tuesday . . . )

Grandpa Ready was a Kansas City fireman, nearing retirement, when he died from smoke inhalation in March 1943. My brother was nearly four and I would soon be seven.

            My aunt Dorothy, Dad’s older sister, called to tell Mom what had happened. She told us the sad news only when Dad arrived home from work and had settled in the easy chair. He rose, opened the front door and went out onto the porch. The door slammed behind him as he stepped into the front yard and began to pace.

            Mom picked up my little brother and sat down in the vacated easy chair. “What does it mean, Mommy?” he asked. “Death? What does it mean?”

            “It means that Grandpa’s gone away. We’ll never see him again.”

            “Where’s he going, Momma?” he sobbed. “Can’t I go with him? Won’t he take me with him?”

            “No. He has to go alone.”

            “But I could help him hammer. I could hold the nails.”

            Mom began to explain why my brother couldn’t follow Grandpa on the trip he was now taking. She spoke softly to him as I got up on the straight back chair that stood wedged between the buffet and the corner of the living room.

            Earlier on that rainy day, Mom had done the laundry and a clothesline now stretched across the length of that narrow room. She and my little brother sat on one side of the dangling white panties, towels and washcloths, Dad’s brown work pants, my white anklets, Mom’s cotton blouse, and my pale blue school dress with the appliquéd white doves, wings spread in flight, on the bodice.

            On the other side of this wall of clothes, I sat huddled on the corner chair, hidden from sight.  I’d pulled up my feet and sat on my folded legs. I could hear Mom singing to my brother. She’d sing, he’d ask questions, she’d answer, and then she’d sing some more. Their voices lulled me into reverie. I knew that Mom was comforting my brother; I understood that she’d forgotten me.

            After all, I hadn’t gone each day with Grandpa to his farm just down the road apiece to work on the one-story house he was building for himself and Grandma Ready. He wasn’t my best buddy. I hadn’t handed him tools and ate bologna sandwiches with him and drank sweet lemonade while sitting under the pear tree. My brother had.

            I knew, too, that Mom loved my brother best. After all she’d taken him with her to Parsons when she didn’t take me. They’d come back, but if she saw me crying, maybe they’d walk out of the house, leave me again, and this time not come back.

            So I didn’t cry that night and I didn’t say anything. I simply hid behind the clothesline and its load of wash. I tried to make myself very small in that cramped space, intent on becoming invisible. The loud ticking of the clock that hung above me on the corner wall entered my still point. I craned my neck back and looked up. The movement of its longer hand transfixed me.

            I did not know how to tell time. I knew about springtime and wintertime. About school time and vacation time. About bedtime and getting-up time. But I couldn’t tell time. I knew about something called hours and minutes. Each weekday, I’d heard Mom say, “Dad will be home in about fifteen minutes.”

            Each Sunday morning, I’d heard Dad say, “What’s the rush? Mass doesn’t start for half an hour.”

            I knew about waiting for something to happen and time having to pass before it did. But that night—the night after the day that Grandpa died—I learned to tell time. I can’t explain the phenomenon. I only know that I stared and stared at that ticking clock and suddenly I knew that its long hand was ticking away minutes. It moved regularly. Tick. Tick. Tick. After sixty ticks, it moved to another little line on the circle of the clock.

            And I suddenly realized—truly I do not know how—that the long hand moved five times to get to the number 1. Then it moved five times again to get to the number 2. And I knew, surely and with great certainty, that five minutes had passed and then ten.

            With growing awe I watched the hand move around one side of the circle. I knew that I’d discovered time at 6:05 and that it was 6:25 when Dad reentered the house.

            “Shh,” Mom said. “He’s asleep. He’s cried his heart out.” I could hear her get up out of the chair and carry my little brother into the bedroom.

            Then through the barrier of the drying laundry, I heard Dad pass me and go into the kitchen. Next, I saw one of Mom’s hands gently move aside a dishtowel. “Dodo,” she said, “it’s time to come out from there and have some supper.”

            “Mommy, I know what time is!”

            “What is it?”

            “What the clock tells. It’s 6:30 now.”

            Then I explained to her what had happened. She helped me down from the chair and hugged me against her so that my face pressed into her stomach. And she patted my back and said, “Oh, Dodo, you never cease to amaze me.”

            I looked up and saw tears in her eyes. “Mommy, don’t cry,” I said. Then I told her that my brother was okay. That she didn’t need to cry for him.

            “But are you okay?” she asked. “Do you understand?”

            “I do.”

                                                      (Continued next Tuesday . . . )

Clock photograph from Wikipedia.

Clothespin photograph by Carlos Porto from freephotos.com.

                                                                        

Commonalities

(Continued from Tuesday . . . )

First, let me say that today’s posting is long. I hope you have your cup of tea or coffee or can of soda pop handy!

            Now to begin.

            In Tuesday’s posting, I confided that in 1988 one word sent me to Ramsey County Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, to volunteer in its AIDS clinic. By that time, 107,000 cases of AIDS had been diagnosed in the United States and 62,000 individuals had died of it.

            That one word was outcasts.

            I encountered it in a cover story published by Newsweek magazine. The article detailed the known history of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. At the time, many believed that HIV originated in the gay community. That has since been refuted.

            Another theory then was that it originated in African monkeys. That, too, was later refuted, but now, if I’m understanding the latest on AIDS, some scientists do believe that primates carried the virus for thousands of years and that it may have infected humans when chimpanzees were hunted and eaten.

            We may never know where and how AIDS originated, but in 1988 most people in the United States blamed the promiscuity of the gay community for this modern “plague.” The truth is that some sexual practices among gays spread the virus more rapidly among homosexuals than in the larger heterosexual population.

            Being born homosexual is as natural to gay men and women as my being born heterosexual. And both homosexuals and heterosexuals are social creatures.

            Because of this, a gay culture developed in the midst of the larger heterosexual culture. For gay men in San Francisco—and elsewhere—part of that culture was visiting bathhouses. There gay men met other gay men and often engaged in sexual activity.

            Back in 1988, my conclusion from reading about AIDS was that gays and I shared something important. Not our sexual orientation, but our need for approval.

            What do I mean by that?

            I spent many years of my life seeking approval. When I was five, my parents left me with friends when they moved to a city where a munitions factory had opened. My grandmother told me they’d deserted me because I was naughty. She said they’d never come back for me. No one wanted me.

            A year later they returned, but through all my years of growing up, I felt that at any time they could leave me without my knowing why they’d gone or what I’d done.

Me at ten in the fifth grade at St. Mary’s Catholic School

            For decades questions hounded me: Why wasn’t I lovable? What had I done that made my parents leave me? What did I need to do so that they—or the friends I’d made—wouldn’t desert me again? Why was I a throwaway?

            I grew up feeling unlovable and unlovely and so came to hate myself. I felt myself to be despicable. I could put on a good front for friends, but my home was within my own despised self. Only there could I be the unhappy, discontented, flawed human being I really was. Only there did I not have to try so hard to imitate what being mature meant.

            The reading I did made me wonder if homosexuals—not all, but some—also felt they weren’t lovable. When they let themselves be who they naturally were—gay men and women—society, and often even their own family members, turned away in disgust and disapproval.

            Back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties that’s what most gays encountered in their lives when they “came out of the closet.” They were shunned. Considered dispensable. Cast out.

            My reading led me to wonder if being ostracized might have left many gays hungering for approval. Finding no approval among the general population, they may—I say “may” because this is all supposition on my part—have sought it from one another and from their brief encounters in bathhouses.

            To whom else could they go for approval except to one another?

            So some of them—at least in San Francisco—met in bathhouses. If I read correctly back in 1988, those bathhouses helped spread the disease in the late seventies and early eighties before a California judge “issued a court order [in 1984] that limited sexual practices and disallowed renting of private rooms in bathhouses, so that sexual activity could be monitored, as a public health measure.”

            Why didn’t gay men stop going to those bathhouses before 1984? A year or two before then, doctors had come to believe that AIDS came from the exchange of bodily fluids like blood.

            The question could just have well have been why did I keep going to my own bathhouse of self-hatred even after three psychiatrists had helped me understand why I sought approval? Why did I not let go of what was killing my spirit, my very self? For the bathhouse of my own self-hate was doing that as surely as the San Francisco bathhouses were taking away the lives of many gay men.

            They had their bathhouse; I had mine. Up until 1984, they didn’t give up bathhouses. Up until 1976, I didn’t give up despising myself.

            Why?

            Because I didn’t think that friends would love me if they saw who I really was. I’d found a home in denigrating myself. I felt safe there. I knew who I was: a poor excuse for a human being. My home was the misery of myself.

            And perhaps—I say “perhaps” because I don’t really know—but perhaps those men in San Francisco feared finding out that the bathhouse culture they’d developed was devastating them. AIDS was destroying the only place where they’d found outright approval. Who wants to let go of home?

            The upshot of this was that I felt an affinity for these men. I wanted to stand with them in solidarity. I wanted—through the simple action of listening to their stories—to witness their being gifts to and from the Universe. I wanted to honor those whose only desire had been to be themselves in a world that wouldn’t accept them.

            They had marched to the tune of their own drummer. I wanted to march with them. I had begun to march to my own drummer in 1976. Now, in 1988, I wanted to march with those whom Newsweek called the modern-day outcasts. The lepers of our time.          

                                                                        (Continued on Tuesday . . . )                                                                                       

Postscript: Perhaps today’s posting makes little sense to you. It may be an example of specious reasoning or convoluted thinking or claptrap. All I can say to this is “So be it.” I’ve never been either an intellectual or a logical thinker. What I have struggled to be is someone who follows the thirstings of her heart for fairness and egalitarianism.

            What this posting tries to do is to share with you the 1988 thinking of my labyrinth mind. I’ve tried always to find what connects me to others. So of course, the first question I asked of my reading back then was “What do these gay men and I have in common?”

            To find Oneness, we must find commonalities. And that’s what my life has been about. Finding Oneness with all of creation.

PS: Please note that in my Tuesday posting I said the article was in Time magazine. On reflection, I realized that it was Newsweek that came weekly into my home.

Quote about bathhouses and two photographs of San Francisco from Wikipedia.