A couple posts ago, I mentioned how excited I was and how much anticipation I was feeling about a workshop I was to attend. Well the workshop has happened and I am still glowing from the energy and hope I drew from the experience beyond the sheer pleasure that being at the conference, in the moment, brought to me.
The workshop was entitled, “Our Lives as Sacred Stories.” And, “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, it was wonderful,” as my maternal ancestors used to say.
Carrie Newcomer is a dear friend I have known since before disco-died. In the very late 1970s or extremely early 80s, I heard Carrie perform as a solo act at the Pizza Keg in West Lafayette. I am not sure if she had written “Survivors” as yet, and she probably performed “Black-eyed Susan.” Within a short time she was dating a good friend of my boyfriend, and I was eating veggie dinners of delightful stuffed mushrooms, and wine, at her place, and was marvelling at this woman who soaked soybeans and made her own soy milk and tempeh, and made a run-down upstairs apartment in central Lafayette, Indiana into a beautiful, homey haven from impending Reaganism, and on top of it all she was a singer-songwriter. I was in awe of her. Still am.
I was right there through the entirety of the Stone Soup era. I lived with the sound man. I wrapped a lot of cords. I wrote a thesis about underground networks of midwives attending home-births as she had a home-birth. I marvelled at her strength, and her belief in the path she was making, taking, or following (depending on your own world view) as her solo career began again.
We were both there at the beginning of the ending of some quite significant relationships for both of us. One of images my memory conjures up whenever I hear the word “angels” is of Carrie and I as we sat on a low concrete step connected the sidewalk in front of my student ghetto home. There was a sense of turmoil and sadness around us as we talked. There were some pretty hard times ahead for both of us. I listened as she told me how she saw angels. I did not really understand this nor the verse that she had referenced until I heard the song of hers, Angels Unaware, decades later.
We have rarely seen each other in the intervening decades, but there is still a connection when we meet. Two midwestern girls all grown up, in fact grown to an age where some become wise women (but not us…, nah, we both see ourselves as doing foolish things with some regularity) as we live very different lives across the continent from each other. She is fiercely gentle as she shares her story of love and the connectedness of all things.
One thing I know: “Never get between a Quaker… and her mission.”
So what did we do at the workshop?
She showed us how to write about a kindness received or given. Then, she showed us how to take that glowing feeling we had after writing and take it out into community and grow it larger, this time, into a song. She showed us that when we share this kind of experience and really listen to someone, and connect, it is then good to stop, and say, “and it was holy.”
Carrie is so good at walking the walk. It is like the difference between being lectured at and having someone share a part of her heart with you.
Sacred Stories
This Friday I attend a workshop by Carrie Newcomer called, “Our Lives as Sacred Story + Community Songwriting.” I will report back, of course, as the course is very much in synch with what WLP is about. I’m writing now as there is some trepidation about attending. The person leading the workshop is someone I first met a lifetime ago when we were both young women with lives intertwined with men who we would be with for a while, but would both soon come to know we had to leave behind these men, through whose lives we met, if our lives were to grow toward the light.
I have seen her a few times since then for coffee, a quick meal, a walk in a park or along a stream, or a rare day long visit. She is a rather well know singer and song writer. Me, I am a women that few know who writes and tries to help other women write or capture their stories. For me it is always daunting to see someone who has made her dreams come true with incredibly hard work, tenacity, persistence, and a whole lot of days and nights on the road. It seems like a more difficult path than mine, but as we say these days, “she persisted.” It would be relatively easy to say she is successful and I am not, but inside I know we are all successful in our own way, just as we all have our stories, sacred and tender that we have lived as we walk our path in life.
It is still a bit daunting for me, here I am signed up for the workshop yet I do not write music, or lyrics or songs. Poems, yes. So while I am a bit nervous about tomorrow, I am also very excited. I want to see what women’s wisdom she has accumulated about the topic so I can share it with you.
The sacred, the place in our hearts where our precious aches and joys are felt and remembered, is not an place easily called upon for sharing, let alone easily evoked, yet Carrie writes words wrapped in music that open the hardest lithic hearts. Her music calls out and lifts our better, light-filled, selves.
We all have these selves inside us. Sharing our selves, sharing our sacred stories is a beautiful frame for living our legacies now, telling our stories, giving those stories as beautiful gifts of self whether they are songs, poems, acts of kindness and helping, or times spent with grandchildren at our knees.
You can find her touring schedule and a few recordings and videos on her site at CarrieNewcomer.com.
Women Who Left Us in 2017
We lost so many strong, even iconic, women in 2017. And so many of them received little to no public media attention in this year of seemingly non-stop discussion about men.
Maggie Roche, of the Roche Sisters, left us at age 65 in January.
Here’s the NYT article briefly chronicling her music career.
Mary Tyler Moore
We heard about Mary Tyler Moore’s passing this year, but most coverage reminisced about her roles. What about the woman who brought those iconic roles to life? The best short summary I have found is under the subheading The True Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore in Forbes article about her passing.
Kate Millett
Radical feminism, anyone? Second wave? Kate Millet was at the front of the wave. She passed in September. Her last interview, only 6 days before her death, is in the New Yorker.
Edie Windsor
Edith Windsor, Edie, brought groundbreaking same-sex marriage case to the Supreme Court, and DOMA, left us in September. She was 88. I recommend her site for info about DOMA, Edie and Thea, and Their Long Engagement.
Other Inspiring Women Who Passed in 2017
Mary Anderson, Cofounder of REI, with her husband, not only started the business as a cooperative buying/import company when they could not find good mountaineering equipment to support their shared passion for climbing. The sport and business must have been good to her, she lived to be 107.
Harriette Thompson, two-time cancer survivor began running marathons at age 76.
She died at age 94 in October.
Nancy Zieman, of Sewing with Nancy also passed on this year. I am writing a special piece on all she gave to regular women. It will be published before year’s end.
Who passed on this year that you would like to honor?
When Christmas is Sad
My Take on Holiday Sadness
A huge hurt builds inside me. My father died on Christmas Day 1986. It is a familiar, old hurt. This past year freshly layered that hurt with new hurts and loss. All four of my brothers have passed on. One in 1998, another in 2005. Mom died in 2007. Then I quickly lost my last two brothers in the Autumn of 2014 and the Summer of 2015. My remaining sisters-in-law passed on in the past year. The last biological relative of the generation beyond me, my father’s youngest sister, died in March.
No one tells you that the odds of ending up alone, as the remaining person in your family of birth, are fairly high, if you were the youngest person in your family. It can really suck to be the youngest sibling in a family. It does suck to have your dad die on Christmas Day.
Death is playing on my mind differently this year. Someone I once loved died a year ago today. Just before Christmas. I did not know that the person I lived with for 13 years, spanning my 20s, my youth, died, apparently unexpectedly, last year just past mid December. Some of my friends knew and did not tell me Our ever-so-long-ago break-up did not go well, so to speak, and I was dead to him after 1988. I respected his wishes and never contacted him. The weird thing is that he stopped interacting with anyone who knew me too. That hurt a lot of people who had considered him a close friend.
Those same friends who he wrote off due to their connection to me, chose to keep me unaware of his passing until after my daughter’s wedding just the day after Christmas. That was quite considerate actually. Old friends who came to the wedding celebrated only the couple, and talk of mortality was to be found anywhere.
I have my dear Hubster, and a wonderful daughter and son-in-law. I have an amazing and talented step-daughter, her husband and their twin seven-year-old daughters. I am not alone. There is much sweetness surrounding my bittersweet memories of Christmases Past.
I am just 60. My mother lived to be 92. I could live for a long time as the only one who remembers my childhood family holidays. Childhood memories of fall and winter get-togethers become cloudy through time. There is no one left to shine sunlight through the clouds on old stories, desserts, family jokes, no one to laugh with about family eccentricities. I can tell the stories to my children and grandchildren, and I do.
But there is just no way around it. Losing a loved one is sad.
Actions That May Help Make Christmas – a Little – Better
Holidays can be very, very tough. I know I’m not the only one who feels this. But there are a host of other ways to redirect my attention, remember fondly, and create new memories.
Some of the things I do that seem to help when I’m feeling down:
- Be kind.
- Ask people how they are doing.
- Smile.
- Give hugs.
- Take it easy, don’t do more than you want to or can do.
- Allow yourself a good cry, don’t cut it short.
- Then dust yourself off and do something to make someone else happy.
- Find an activity that brings you cheer.
- Allow the cheer of others to creep into you.
We can learn to have a sadness and to be happy at the same time. Life is bittersweet for those blessed with long lives.
Merry Christmas, or happy whatever you may celebrate!
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An earlier version of this post was published Dec. 2015
Delivering Legacy
Prompts
Can you bring forth legacy? Can you deliver a lively legacy? Of course you can. You simply begin. One way to start is to use prompts to start regular writing as a legacy diary or blog. Any prompt will do. Well almost any. You can turn almost any thought or word toward legacy. For example, one of the good, do no evil, places at which you can find daily prompts is https://dailypost.wordpress.com.
Wordpress has both for-profit and non-profit branches within its organization. Stalwart participant in the open source movement, you can read more about the history of the company here where the freely distributed and free to use software platform is distributed and maintained, or here where you can get a free wesite or purchase wordpress hosted sites that are tailored to different personal and business types and needs. You have to love any company that considers its mission to be “the democratization of publishing.”
WordPress Prompts and Traffic Generation
The Daily Post sponsors WordPress University which exists to help those new to websites and WordPress create a successful blog.
I recommend using the prompts listed each day at the Daily Post as a start. All you need to do is:
- Go to the Daily Post’s prompts page and find the term that is the prompt of the day.
2. Write a post on your blog that thematically links to the prompt.
3. Go back to the prompts page and click on the word for today’s prompt.
4. You will be taken to a page for the word of the day. On that page, below the word of the day, you will see a phrase that says,
Want to participate? Publish a new post on your blog interpreting the theme. Create a pingback to this challenge and we’ll list your post below. Show instructions.
5. Click on the Show instructions link.
6. Below Show instructions, more complete text will toggle into view. It says,
“Pingbacks are easy! Just copy and paste the code below into the HTML tab of your post editor and you should be all set.
Please note that sometimes it takes a little while for your post to show up in our grid.
<a href="https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/delivery/">Delivery</a>
PLEASE NOTE: the last part of the link and the title of the link will change every day to reflect the inclusion of the word of the day. The above code shows …/delivery?” and >Delivery</a> This part of the code will change every day.
The code for that specific day needs to be somewhere in your post for the the post to ping back to the daily post to let it know it should list your blog post in on the wordpress posts page as the entry for the participating blog.
I simply link the word of the day, centered, at the top of the post as you can see at the very top of this post.
Do this for the days you participate.
Of course if you do not want the traffic to your site you may use the ideas for the prompts and not link or ping back.
Tying Prompts to Legacy
Almost any word can be tied to legacy. For example, today’s prompt is delivery. You could write a post about:
- Birth and delivering your child
- How was milk delivered to your grandmother’s house?
- How delivery and timing was the most difficult part of his stand up comedy routine for your Uncle Frank.
- How did lunch get delivered to your school as a kid, was that different from how your child had lunch at school? What about your grand
His Birthday and the Long Death of My Brother
An anniversary is nothing more than a ritualized memory. Dates are rather arbitrary. Moments are real. What happens in a moment changes every other moment that follows. Dates, and anniversaries, are unconcerned with change, they trap sentiment in an icy moment of time. This article is about one such icy moment.
I am writing this the evening of August 3rd, 2017. My brother Roger was born on August 4, 1948. He and I were supposedly of the same generation. We were both born during the post WWII baby boom. I was born in 1957. He died on November 9, 2014. He began his slow march to death in 1968 in Vietnam when he was hit by a mortar explosion that just happened to also be his birthday.
I have been searching records for evidence of his time in Vietnam. I want to write two fairly in-depth articles for the 50th anniversary of the TET offensive, in 2018, of major battles in which he fought, Hue, and Khe Sanh. It isn’t that easy to find him in web records. I have searched in associated data files through ancestry.com, nara.gov – the national archives, but I am now searching through Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and Archive. I need to get his service number so I can get files from the V.A.
I remember much from when he was in Vietnam. I was a little kid, but an adult processing switch flipped on in my brain when I realized he was going to Vietnam.
I remember answering the phone when he called Mom before shipping out (flying out actually) for Vietnam. He left from Camp Pendleton, CA.
He send me a doll while on R & R in Saigon that was supposed to look Vietnamese. It creeped me out.
I remember being summoned down to the principal’s office with no reason given when I was in fifth grade in 1967/68 when I was 10 years old. I was never taken out of school without knowing about it first. The administrative secretary told my parents they were on their way to pick me up. I could only think of one reason they would do this. They had gotten bad news about Roger from the Marine Corps. Turns out I was wrong. They had retrieved the wrong girl from class. Whoever issued the summons had thought the principal said, “Get the Hill girl.” Turns out it was another girl in my class with a very similar last name. They had said, “Get the Hile girl.”
For 10 minutes I thought my brother was dead. I knew that my parents would tell me at night and not pull me out of school if he was just wounded because we had already been there. We’ had been through that before when he was shot in the leg in the Battle of Hue. In the book I am currently reading by Rick Eilert he describes his mother receiving notification. “The Marine Corps sent someone out right after you were wounded. I opened the door and saw a man in dress blues. I thought you were dead. I know now that a chaplain would have been with him had you been killed, but the shock nearly gave me a stroke. He showed me a casualty work sheet. It contained all the basic information we got in those telegrams. By the time he left I felt sorry for him. What a terrible job, telling families their sons are dead or seriously wounded. – For Self and Country: For the Wounded in Vietnam the Journey Home Took More Courage Than Going into Battle by Rick Eilert.
Hue was the battle when we saw him in a clip on the 6 o’clock evening news. Dad spotted him. It wasn’t easy as he had grown a moustache and did not look like the just out of High School kid we had last seen. Dad turned to Mom and said, “Tell him to keep his helmet on.” Mom went white when the letter from him came that said, “Don’t be surprised if you see me on the news. There are news crews and cameras everywhere. You might not recognize me though as I have a moustache.” Eventually he also confirmed that he did not like wearing his helmet. He never liked seat belts either. He had been corrupted by constant danger.
When Roger was shot in Hue, in February I think, he was basically sewn up, given a couple of days to heal, and sent back in to combat.
Just before I entered 6th grade, in August, we received notice that Roger had been seriously wounded in Khe Sahn and was in Japan for surgery. He had had some surgery in Vietnam then evac-ed to Japan for further surgery. After a couple more surgeries and a few days in intensive care he was transferred back stateside to Great Lakes Naval Hospital. He was there for many months. Eventually he was stationed at Quantico, Virginia where he received an early discharge. There are not many things for a Zombie Unit survivor to do in the Marines.
I was told that we could not go see him at Great Lakes. I now question whether this was because visitors were not allowed, my brother asked us not to come, or my parents did not want to drive in Chicago. I was lead to believe he was not allowed to have visitors.
It was about several months later, in early 1969, that he was finally allowed a visit home. I can still see him standing in the kitchen of the farmhouse in which we grew up. He was skeletal and fragile-looking. It frightened me. I remember going to him and hugging him. This was not something we ever did in my family. It almost felt like I was hugging a ghost. This was not the brother who tormented me and tried to get me to stop pestering him and his friends.
He had caught part of a near-by explosion, probably mortar fire, up and under his flak jacket as he lifted a buddy into a Med-evac Chopper. His entire mid-section was cut to shreds piercing his gut, organs, muscles, and connective tissue. No one lived from this type of wound in the Vietnam War, not unless you were hit when you were halfway inside a Med-evac Chopper already. Without the immediate attention that chopper crew was able to give him, he would not have lived.
I have never been able to reconcile some facts. I started to try to piece together the events my brother experienced in the Summer of ’68 after my mother’s passing in 2007, but my relationship with my brother was confusing and more distant than I would have liked. It turns out that his paranoia about my Mom’s estate, and its gross mishandling, was due to illness and dementia that would kill him within a few short years. Roger was injured in Khe Sanh in August yet the Battle of Khe Sanh ended at the end of June, a month before he was blown up. He told me he was involved in retrieving bodies at that time because “Someone had to do it.”
I now realize he had been dying ever since he was in Vietnam. His body and mind had been poisoned. It was a slow-acting poison. It was a long death.
- Agent Orange killed him.
- Metallosis killed him.
- PTSD killed him.
- Diabetes killed him.
- Steven Johnson’s Syndrome killed him.
- Lack of a loving support system killed him.
So, the U.S. government that sprayed Agent Orange killed him, the suppliers and fabricators (Soviets) of the pot metal in the inoperable bullet and shrapnel he carried for decades killed him. The VA killed him by not treating him until disease from his injuries set in later in life presented in such a way that they could not be ignored. Our family killed him by not giving him the kind of support he needed. His ex-wives killed him by putting themselves and their needs and addictions before his needs. The local commuity killed him by decades of legal harassment for his use of cannabis to treat his PTSD. And a fortunate son from the upper caste killed him.
I began writing this article when the current talk of Russia reached fever pitch. I have never forgiven the Soviet Union for Vietnam. I cannot tolerate those who would support the corrupt remnants of the vile U.S.S.R. I suspect most people do not even know that by the late 1960s more than three-quarters of the military and technical equipment received by North Vietnam was coming from Moscow. Nor do most people remember the insanity of mid-century America conservative hawkishness that killed so many young men in Vietnam. I know about conservative propaganda and manipulation; my mother-in-law, Wilda Polt, ghost wrote Mama Went to War a piece of pro-war propaganda for Gina Manion, one of the Manion Family that brought neo-conservatism to America. I learned about hawkish privilege in Democratic families as well when I listened to stories Roger told about being under Robb’s command. Chuck Robb married LBJ’s daughter. Those who escape service, accountability, and familiarity with a day’s work at a low wage disgust me.
Captain Charles Robb saw four months of action in Vietnam in 1968. My brother served under him during that time. Even 45 years after his Vietnam service, my brother’s eyes would flame with hatred whenever he said or heard Robb’s name. There is no telling what really happened there, but my brother’s hatred was real. This is all I can find for the description of Robb’s time in Vietnam; it is from a Washington Post article by Carol Morello from October 10, 2000. [Bold emphasis mine.]
Robb was assigned to India Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. Its base in Quang Nam province teemed with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army regulars who fired rockets into DaNang 20 miles to the northeast.
The unwanted attention he attracted, plus a routine change in battle tactics, led some of his fellow Marines to believe that Robb was being protected. Before and during Tet, the company had participated in some grueling operations. When Robb arrived, the company was assigned to ambushes, road sweeps for land mines, and “search and clear” operations looking for Viet Cong sympathizers.
“The unit was a lot more active before Capt. Robb got there,” says Don Gilette of Roanoke, Robb’s radioman. “While he was there, they put us out of harm’s way.”
But Robb was seeking approval for more combat assignments.
He asked 1st Lt. Larry Wilson, who drafted the battalion’s battle plans, for permission to go into an area with so many snipers and booby traps that the GIs called it Dodge City. Wilson wanted to keep the company in reserve. But Robb appealed through the chain of command until approval was granted.
Wilson, now a retired FBI agent, says he had placed India in reserve not to make it easier on Robb, but to give his men a break.
“His company had been up front before,” he says. “It was someone else’s turn. It had absolutely nothing to do with him being the president’s son-in-law. In fact, I think he was prone to be more aggressive because he was trying to prove himself.”
But his days in the field were numbered. Two erroneous reports reached headquarters that Robb had been wounded or captured. After four months in combat, he was ordered to a supply logistics post at division headquarters.
So, Roger, Happy Birthday Dear Brother. You would be turning 69 today. I just turned 60. I am sad that I cannot make a chocolate upside down birthday cake for you. I am happy you are no longer in pain. I am still angry that I am alone and that you and my other brothers all abandoned me in this life. I am telling your story as best I can. It has been 49 years since you were blown up on your damn birthday. I am trying to emphasize what most impacted me and what you allowed me to see that tormented you. I miss you.