A TALE OF TWO LIVES

INSIDE THE TICKING MOMENTS OF A PANDEMIC– II –Linda Lee Greene, April 1, 2020, Columbus, Ohio, USA

A TALE OF TWO LIVES

Fifteen months ago, I was with my kid sister, Suzee, as she succumbed to a long illness. She was a radiant creature of 63 years of age. In her final weeks, family and friends gathered at her side and stayed with her, myself included. I came away from the experience saddened and distraught, but also enlightened in an utterly unexpected way.

                I was an adolescent when Suzee was born. The first time I held her in my arms, she was three days old. I was privy to the opening three decades of her life from an intimate standpoint that can only be provided in the fold of a birth-family. My concept of her was pretty much set in stone. I would describe Suzee as quiet; shy; private. She was a loner. She stood apart. The spotlight held little interest for her. She would prefer to steal away in a book. She loved animals more than people.

Thirty years before her death, Suzee relocated from Ohio to the Gulf Coast of Florida, and there she forged a new life for herself. Our sister, Sherri, and I had remained in Ohio. While visits, letters, and telephone calls were consistently passed among us, there is just so much people can know about the nitty gritty of one another’s life under such circumstances. The bottom line was that Suzee got away from us, to a large degree. Separated from the support of her early foundation, as well as out from under its scrutiny and stresses, she remade herself. While I was with her in her final three weeks, I was stunned to see that the Suzee I knew was only one, narrow dimension of her, and I saw it through the dynamic at work between her and the people she had attracted to herself in Florida.

The shy, quiet, private Suzee had grown into a deeply loved, very popular, and sought-after person. She had evolved into a witty chatterbox and a raconteur. She had become a talented artist. She was a property and a business owner. She was an advocate for animals and a minister of their care. She didn’t have children of her own, but in her role as a business person, she sheltered, guided, and mentored many young people. One after another, people told me that Suzee was the greatest woman they had ever known. What a revelation all this was to me!

Had I not been with her during her final weeks, I would have missed knowing the complete Suzee. And more importantly, Suzee would not have had the chance to reveal herself to me. She yearned to see the amazement in my eyes. She longed for my validation. She needed me to endorse her achievements. She wanted so much for me to open my mind about her. Otherwise, the whole of Suzee’s story would have gone undiscovered. She was desperate that I get her story right because she knew I would write it.  

My experience with Suzee circles back to our current situation with Coronavirus. I find myself lamenting the missed opportunities for people everywhere to examine and likely to edit the final chapter of the life of their dying loved-ones. Souls are passing away all alone. Confessions, apologies, secrets, successes, failures, ideas, histories, heroics, revelations, statements of love, and more, are going unsaid. So many vital stories are vanishing, are getting lost, are adrift in the ethers.

I hope that after Coronavirus, some sort of archive of the stories will emerge. Lacking that, I yearn for something akin to the Viet Nam wall scribed with the names of our precious brothers and sisters across the world who lost their lives to the virus.© #STAYHOME #SAVELIVES #INTHISTOGETHER

      

**A personal note to my readers: Muse kicked me out of my cave and told me to get back to my keyboard. It is a struggle, but I will take a stab at following her lead whenever she deigns to whisper in my mind’s ear.      

UNPACKING

UNPACKING©

By Linda Lee Greene, December 31, 2018

It is one of those days when a pale light in the distance informs that dawn has arrived, but the light doesn’t quite break through the cloud cover and icy rain well enough to properly proclaim itself as “dawn.”  I refuse to switch on lamps just yet because I want to experience the quality of this dark light—to feel its gauzy softness. I go so far as to turn the thermostat of my furnace to the OFF position and to open the sliding glass door to my patio to the sound of the rain dancing on its roof. A train clacks by on frigid tracks; an airplane soars in the frozen Ohio sky, and my defrosting heart rises to these spilling words that I hold in my mind until I am released from this nature’s magic to reach for my laptop. I tilt back in my recliner, wrap my legs and fuzzy-slippered feet in a warm afghan, and know that I am a woman content.

In a half-hour or so, I will gather in the palm of my left hand a collection of pills that I will gulp down with my second cup of coffee, medications to aid and/or protect and/or replace my bodily functions. This is the morning routine of my 75 years old self, a woman enthralled with where I have been and where I am going despite the fact that I have begun to solicit recommendations from my girlfriends of my same age as to the best brand of hearing aids. 

All that aside, tugging at my consciousness is the fact that it is taking me days to unpack from my trip to Florida whereby key members of my family and I sat round-the-clock vigils for more than two weeks at the bedside of my dying youngest sibling. The unpacking is taking me so long to accomplish not because there is so much to put away, but because my rooms have been a milky haze that have sheltered but failed to console me since my return. One cannot go through such a thing and not emerge stunned, shocked, ones essence for a time blank with trauma as stark as erased pages in a book. The contours are reappearing now, though, even in this morning’s reluctant light, and their shapes are welcoming me and showing me how to continue to drop back into my everyday life.

Once my enchantment with this murky morning is satisfied, my morning maintenance completed, and my lamps finally ignited, I will finish my unpacking. This is a good day for me to begin to unpack 2018, as well, to go into those dark and musty drawers and closets, and into my heart and mind, and to clear them of outworn and unnecessary, and especially of harmful, things. I have learned well in my many years of life that the Universe adores empty spaces because they are canvasses on which It brings forth new life, new resources, new ideas, new events. I am hungry for such things.

My hope is that by way of this miraculous forum of social media, you, my cyber friends, and I will go on helping one another to grow and prosper and learn and feel through all the days of 2019. Your friendship helps me so much to get through some lonely days and nights, and contributes greatly to my contentment—and I thank you.

Happy New Year to you, one and all!

***

To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL©

By Linda Lee Greene

One of my sister Susan’s coffee cups warming my left palm, and the thumb and fingers of my right hand encircling its curved handle, I sat and watched the droplets of rain eddy across the surface of the pool in the lanai of her Florida home. Beginning as tiny rings of rain that rippled out in a series of concentric circles, I was reminded that birth and death and the life in between behave in the same manner. Like the lifespan of every human being, each concentric pattern on the water was a whole, a time-capsule of a tiny aspect of the energy of life.

 

                All through Florida’s December rains in this year of 2018 my darling sister Susan kept to her bed suffering the culmination of more than two years of life-robbing illness. Her earthly future was nearing its end, but like the cores of the eddies in her pool, she was still the nucleus of the enormous circle of life she had created in her sixty-three years. There was evidence of it everywhere—in the home, the garden, the artwork, the crafts, the pet grooming business, in every concerned human and animal voice, and in almost countless other illustrations of her heart and mind and spirit. Having scored so many achievements, one would think that there was no more for her to accomplish. A casual glance would suggest that her circle of life was complete—that a person in her weakened state couldn’t possibly do any more anyhow. But no—there was still one more contribution she had to give to life, and her debility was her instrument.

“To live is to suffer!” Nazi concentration camp survivor and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl examined this reality to great depth in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He advanced further the premise that if there is a purpose in living at all, there must also be a purpose in suffering and in dying. Woven among Susan’s several successes was an equal number of misses, and the hardships of existence she sometimes encountered manifested now and then in defensive behaviors that were unfortunate and/or unproductive. She was no different than most of humanity in that regard. But over the course of her illness, she did attain to an almost immaculate grandeur. As her body deteriorated, her soul grew sweeter, and her spirit blossomed. My sister showed us how a person can rise to the highest level of courage and strength and even of altruism in the acts of suffering and dying. In effect, she showed us how to die a good death.  

Dostoyevsky said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering.” My sister’s final deed, that last concentric ring that sealed the circle of her earthly life, was to prove herself worthy of her suffering, a feat that shaped a shining example for all to follow.

Review of a Trouble in Tampa by Louise Titchener, a Book to Add to Your To Be Read List

Author Louise Titchener has a new fan in this avid reader and writer. This novel of historical fiction held my interest from the first word to the last. It is meticulously researched and masterfully written, highly entertaining and informative. The characters are believable and engaging. The plot is clever and satisfyingly complex. It is one of the best books I have read this year.  I read it in eBook format for this review, but when finished, I ordered a paperback of it. This is one I will add to my library. Review by Linda Lee Greene, author of Cradle of the Serpent.

Currently a semifinalist for the Florida Writers Association Royal Palm Award for Best Historical Mystery of 2018, Trouble in Tampa is a thrilling look at the Wild South of Florida in 1885. An easy assignment for sharpshooter and ex-Pinkerton investigator, Oliver Redcastle, turns deadly. A wealthy Baltimore art collector sends an employee to Florida. When that man goes missing, the rich man hires Oliver to find him. Reluctantly, Oliver boards Henry Plant's newly constructed train to Florida. At the end of the line he gets off in Tampa to find a swamp load of trouble. He's betrayed by an old acquaintance, and by not one, but two passionate women. Oliver is railroaded into one of old Florida's infamous turpentine camps. There he must use his sharpshooting skill to escape certain death. But that means a harrowing trek through miles of dangerous animals, dangerous people, and shocking intrigues. In Key West he meets female Pinkerton operative, Hannah Kinchman. She got him into trouble in Tampa. But Oliver has a soft spot for Hannah. Together they fight their way through kidnapping, treasure hunts, intrigue, and the beautiful but treacherous Florida Everglades. Will Oliver overcome the many hurdles blocking his way home? It won't be easy!

My Talking Heart - Chapter Seven: THE FACES IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Marlin Landon "Bob" Gaffin circa 1941

When I think back on the houses that have contained my life, including farmhouses, a log cabin, single-family homes, duplexes, condos, and apartments, located in diverse areas across Southern Ohio, Central Ohio, Queens and Long Island, New York, and the Atlantic Coast of Florida, one of the things all of them had in common was framed photographs of family members hanging on walls and ranging the tops of furniture—copious photographs that were, and are, storyboards of the lives of my ancestors and of me.

                My attachment to family photographs began when I was a toddler. The Second World War was raging, and Bob, my mother’s oldest brother, was in the very throat of it, serving as a half-track driver and sharpshooter in Patton’s Army in Europe. Bussy, my mother’s seventeen-year-old brother, had died seven months before I was born. My grandmother’s worries about Bob, and her grief over the loss of Bussy and of her own mother just weeks after Bussy’s passing were a serious threat to her emotional well-being. On the advice of our old country doctor, my parents agreed to let me stay with my grandparents, in the hope that my presence would be the balm my grandmother needed to regain her health.

The following is a scene evocative of the root of my love of family photographs. It is a dialogue between my grandmother and me when I was about two years of age. It is a fictionalized account of much less structured discussions we often shared about the family photographs that are the subject of the piece. I wrote it for GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS (http://goo.gl/imUwKO), my novel that is a blend of fact and fiction, a book populated primarily by my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents and the people of their circles, as well as one main fictional character. Mommaw and Poppaw in the passage are my maternal grandparents; Uncle Dickie is their teenage son.

Excerpt of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS

“…As, like Mommaw and Poppaw, the sun gave up working for the day in our corner of the world, and retired behind the lazy hills reclining all across the broad horizon, it was then that the gloom of death-revisited settled in upon the household once more. Our nightly ritual never varied. Riding Mommaw’s hip, she carried me to the room where I slept. While the bedtime stories of other children were of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” mine were of Uncle Bussy and Uncle Bob. 

Bussy Gaffin 11 years old circa 1936

On the wall, within eyeshot of my bed, was a photograph of Uncle Bussy, a grainy black and white enlargement of his face and upper torso picked out of a family photograph taken when he was about eleven. Riding my grandmother’s hip, always she carried me to the photograph where it hung on the wall. He had been a good-looking, fair-haired, pale-skinned boy, and like my mother, his nose and cheeks were dusted with freckles, his station in life clearly evident in his bib overalls. It was like one of those portraits where the eyes follow you all around the room, and although some children might have been frightened by it, it called to me, instead. 

“Mommy says dat Uncle Bussy called me ‘Tadpole’ ‘cause I was in Mommy’s tummy when he knew me,” I reminded my grandmother, my pudgy index finger tracing the cheek of the young boy in the photograph. The man he would never become was unmistakable in the outline of the jaw, although not quite angular, was on the verge of being, like a flower halfway between budding and full bloom.

“My land, yes, Honey. He tried so hard ta hold on so he could see you. Poor Little Bussy,” my grandmother replied, her voice breaking, her great intake of breath tamping down the nagging voice of her great loss. 

“I wish Uncle Bussy could know me, Mommaw. He wooks so sad in da pichure. I could pway wiff him and make him feel bettuh.”

“He was just so sick, Honey.”

“Is Uncle Bussy in Heaven, Mommaw, wike Mommy says?”

“He surely is, Honey.”

“Can people come back home fwom Heaven, evew, Mommaw?”

“He surely would want to, if he could, ‘specially ta see you.”

“And, dis is Uncle Bobby,” I pointed to a photograph on another wall in my bedroom, a photograph of a young man in a military uniform, sporting a handsomeness so blond and well put together as to be the envy of any movie idol. Mommaw carried me over to the photograph, my brow wrinkling seriously. “Uncle Bobby is fighting dat bad man in…I can’t ‘member dat pwace, Mommaw.”

“Uncle Bobby is fightin’ a bad man named Hitler in a place called Germany. Hitler is the leader o’ them German people, an’ we ‘er fightin’ them ‘cause they do bad things,” Mommaw explained patiently, speaking to me as if I were an adult, as she always did.

“Uncle Dickie spanked Wex dis morning. Wex got in da henhouse. He ate some eggs after dat fox weave.”

“I know, Honey. Uncle Dickie had ta learn the dog that it’s bad ta eat them eggs. That’s kind o’ like what Uncle Bobby is doin’ over there in Germany, but not exactly.”

“Is Gewmany weawy, weawy fawr away, Mommaw, wike Heaven?”

“Germany is away over on the other side of the world, but not as far as Heaven.”

“Why did Uncle Bussy go to Heaven, Mommaw?”

“Because he sneaked out ta play when he was down with the measles.”

“You wet me go out to pway, and I don’t go to Heaven.”

“Uncle Bussy got real sick outside. When people git real sick sometimes they go ta Heaven.”

“You made bad wike Wex, Mommaw. You forgot to tell Uncle Bussy no when he went outside, wight?”

“No, not exactly, but I shoulda stayed right there in the room with him.”

“Did Uncle Dickie spank you for being bad wike he did Wex?”

“God spanked me, Honey.”

“Did it weawy weawy hurt when God spanked you, Mommaw?”

“Yes, Honey.  It really really hurt, an’ it still hurts mighty powerful.”

“But when I go out to pway, I won’t get sick ‘cause Uncle Dickie says I’m weawy weawy stwong. Uncle Dickie says dat Uncle Bobby is vewy big and stwong. And he wuns weal fast wike Old Smoky.”

“He runs pert near as fast as that old horse.”

“He can wun home to us, den, if dat bad man twies to hurt him.”

“The Good Lord awillin’, he will, Honey.”

 The nightly “visit” to the photographs of Uncle Bussy and Uncle Bob completed, Mommaw carried me to the living room, where the old rocking chair sat in wait. And Mommaw’s rocking and crying commenced anew. After I had fallen to sleep, she carried me to my bed in the downstairs room nearest to the bedroom she shared with Poppaw….”

Award-winning author and artist, blogger, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor

Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor

Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+

My Talking Heart: Chapter One - MY MOTHER'S MILK by Linda Lee Greene

I came out of my mother’s womb kicking and screaming, and I didn’t stop carrying on until after I was weaned from my mother’s breast. The opinion of our country doctor, and of my grandmother, was that I had colic, which is defined as “a severe, often fluctuating pain in the abdomen caused by intestinal gas or obstruction in the intestines and suffered especially by babies.” I think I was merely hungry. I think my mother’s milk was insufficient to nourish me, because as soon as I was weaned from her milk and put on solid food, I settled down. Another possibility is that my mother’s diet tainted her breast milk. A modern-day treatment of colic includes eliminating caffeine, cow’s milk, and gas-producing vegetables from a breastfeeding mother’s diet. From the time of her teen years, my mother was a caffeine-fiend, and a main staple of her diet was vegetables grown in my grandmother’s enormous farm-garden. One of my indelible memories of my mother is watching her at mealtimes, her fork in her right hand and a freshly-pulled, cleaned, and trimmed scallion in her left hand, a bite from the fork followed by a bite of a scallion. I wasn’t yet a year old when my mother weaned me, and I was by then a precocious, curious, fidgety child, talking like a magpie, and wound up like the Eveready Bunny.

Another widely-held belief is that a colicky baby’s nervous system is immature at the time of birth, a phenomenon that renders the infant unable to handle stimuli outside the womb: sights and sounds, for instance.  At the time of my birth, my Dad was away at Navy Boot Camp. Mom had moved back to her parent’s farm for the duration, and it was there, in a bedroom of the farmhouse, that I was born. The household was a raucous one, as six of the eight young offspring of Mom’s birth family was still under roof, plus my grandmother and grandfather, and then me. Mom’s youngest sibling Dean was only eight days shy of seven when I was born. Other than during my young girlhood when I was still a chatterbox and a jumping bean, throughout the rest of my history, I have tended toward widely-spaced bursts of energetic chatter and activity, for during my adolescence, I discovered quiet, my quiet bedroom, and quiet people to whom I was drawn. I fell in love with quiet. And I just wonder if at the moment I first emerged into the world, if my soul was jarred by all the activity, as it still is. I can handle noise only for short spans of time. Recently my son Frank drove me from my home in Columbus, Ohio to Palm Harbor, Florida, and back, for a short visit with my sister Susan. Throughout the entire 36 or more hours of the roundtrip, my son entertained himself with blasting music on the car’s radio. This is his habit. It energizes him. It depletes me. And by the time the trip was done, the inside of my head was ringing, painfully, and my soul just wanted to hunker down in the luxurious, the deliberate serenity, the utter freedom of my home.

While I was my mother’s first child, she was not a novice in the care of infants, for she was the eldest female among her parent’s eight children. As such, Mom acted as backup mother to her younger siblings for most of her girlhood. In the attached photograph of Mom and her seven siblings, she is the teenager in the back row, the one holding her youngest sibling, the infant Dean.

As you might have guessed by now, the title of this chapter “MY MOTHER’S MILK,” is a metaphor for my relationship with my mother. That I am introspective is a given, as most highly creative types are. My reflections often center on my bond with my mother. Mom and I were devoted to each other, without question, and while outwardly it was unhampered by dysfunction and inadequacy, a Sherlock Holmes-type of investigation of it unearths a mother/daughter connection not quite so blemish-free. Strangely, the glitch in our relationship can be boiled down to one factor, one giveaway clue: my colicky infancy. The unfortunate truth is that like my mother’s milk that left me under- and ill-nourished, she was not enough for me in other ways, as well. This was the case during my formative years, at least.

I suspect that by the time I came into being, my mother was burned out on babies, on the work tied to babies and young children. She’d had years of it by then with her younger brothers and sisters. Then I came along, and rather than being the designer baby she had dreamed of, I bawled night and day, I bit her nipples with my sharp baby teeth in utter frustration toward those only instruments available to feed me, and getting little of what I needed from them. I’ve concluded that the breastfeeding interaction between us set up a psychological pattern that dogged us forevermore, one in which my natural need to be nourished by my mother was thwarted at so many turns, the consequences of which played havoc with her confidence that she was equipped to respond to my needs, sufficiently. I think she gave away her power to me out of guilt. Throughout the years Mom and I had together, her reliable response to me when I solicited her guidance on almost any situation was, “Why are you asking me? You’re smarter than I am.”

An adjunct to this whole thing is that I think the basic need of my mother’s soul was quiet. I think she craved serenity and freedom, and other than for a little while in the last years of her life, she was allowed very little of it. I inherited my need of those things from her. She has been gone now for 25 years, and still my need to feed off her is as strong as the day I was born. My only comfort is my belief that our story isn’t finished—and someday, somewhere we will be together again, and then we will get it right in every possible way.

***

“Guardians and Other Angels,” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO) is my novel of historical fiction blended with the true story of my maternal ancestors, including my mother’s girlhood, a story that takes place during the early to middle Twentieth Century. It has been compared to Pulitzer Prize winners, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “Angela’s Ashes,” as well as to Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke Horses.” 

Glory by Diana Hannon Forrester

Lucy and Ethel would have had a ball (pun intended) adapting this story to an episode of I Love Lucy.  And like the famed twosome in the beloved television series, the wacky team of females in Glory, by Ohio author, Dianna Hannon Forrester makes a case that good girlfriends, like good husbands, are hard to come by.  I’m talking about the kind of girlfriend who will go through anything for, and with, you, even if it puts her in the line of fire of a demented killer.  Kate Marcum, best friend of Glory Pruitt, passes every test, and more, of such a girlfriend in this entertaining book.  While a mystery novel, it is at the same time a lighthearted and fun romp with a beautifully crafted setting and a cast of captivating characters, especially Glory and Kate, the pair of them prattling in snappy dialogue and conjuring harebrained schemes while all around them people are dropping like flies by baffling means in the small, Central Ohio town of Camden.

                Just to give you a sneak peak at the canny writing of Mrs. Forrester, this is the opening paragraph of the book: 

My name is Glory Pruitt.  The Glory came from my father who was a Methodist minister.  He was one of the Central Conference’s worst ministers of all time, but God’s glory was his bread and butter.  He’s retired now and living homeless on a beach in Florida.  The Pruitt came from Charlie whom I met at the Ohio State University in 1976.  I was eighteen at the time and Charlie was a senior in agriculture, which I think they still teach at Ohio State, even today.  Charlie was recently buried in the Greenlawn Cemetery south of town.  I’m not convinced of natural causes.

                Day after day, a shame-faced and bewildered Glory hides away in her house and drains Charlie’s wine cellar of his stash of vintage reds and whites and tries to wrap her head around the fact of Charlie’s having dropped dead of a presumed heart attack while in the bed of one of her girlfriends.  Despite Kate’s daily drop-ins, her mind fruitful with ideas for outings, nothing pries Glory out of the house, nothing but the news one day of the suspicious death of the friend in whose bed Charlie had taken his final tumble.  But was it his first two-timing tumble? Glory and Kate begin to wonder, as clues, like the bodies, begin to pile up, hints that Charlie was up to much more no good than being a no good husband.

                As Lucy and Ethel would have done in their high-jinx ways, Glory and Kate uncover the villain in this one, and it proves that one way or another, it never pays to be undercover under the wrong covers.  My prediction is that you will lose yourself between the covers of this delightful book.  Therefore, unlike Charlie’s inconvenient pastime, this is a diversion I highly recommend.    

Glory in paperback is available at www.McDiggsPublishing.com

The direct link to the paperback or eBook of Linda Lee Greene's latest novel, Guardians and Other Angels is at http://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Other-Angels-Linda-Greene/dp/1897512562/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338336762&sr=8-1

To view an online exhibition of Linda Lee Greene's artwork, please log onto www.gallery-llgreene.com