propaganda lives

monday 19 december 2011


Just read a post by another blogspot writer. Very angry at The Amerikan Dream. I relate. I share this anger. I too have been left behind by that thing that so many attain, but not all. And those of us who don't get The Amerikan Dream are led to believe by those who do that it is somehow our own fault.

For too many years, I believed I would get some version of that Dream. I grew up with that damned dream. My own parents achieved a version of it: moved beyond the poverty in which they'd been raised; had a house and three children; had cars and television and a decent lifestyle. I was born in the fifties. I grew up with that dream made flesh in my parents and in most of the adults around me. I did not doubt that my idea of the Dream would be had.

Things happen in life. And other things don't happen. What many people call luck I choose to call the randomness. The randomness of living. If I cared to take the time, I could cite you many examples of people besides myself who took many steps and made many efforts to achieve their version of the The Amerikan Dream, and failed. Not for lack of effort, not for lack of desire. For lack of helpful randomness. If you are one of those who would blame us for our own dreamlessness, then I think that my immediate response to you would be: stuff a sock in it.

The Amerikan Dream is an effective propaganda with which many generations have been raised (brainwashed, duped), and presumably more generations will be raised with it as well. If you get the dream, you regard the prophecy as truth rather than propaganda. Those of us who don't get it are, I think, entitled to regard it as a lie, a con, a great slinging of societal bullshit.

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read... Streams four... Twenty-ninth december...

read... Sehnen... Poison and snowflake trees...

~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~


all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

oddballs

saturday 13 august 2011

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From 2002 until she died in 2008, this domestic grey goose in the photo lived wild in the Connecticut River here in turners trolls. She became a bit famous in these parts, but I never found that out until 2004, after having spent two years believing that the only human friends she had were me and a Russian man who used to visit her most days. But no, she had a good number of human fans, and I got to meet some of them. I heard stories about the various times her photo had been in the newspaper, which I don't read, so I never knew. I even heard a story in 2008 to the effect that she was across the water in the cove with her children -- she had had a family. The only geese available for her to mate with were the Canadian kind. Had this mating actually happened, or was it suburban myth. Don't know. In any case, I was very much in love with this goose, and very much in synch with her status as oddball: the only domestic animal among the wild ducks and geese and swans and cormorants. I'm an oddball myself, what with Asperger's and several other alienating issues. I know what it's like to be off-kilter in any group. And Goosie was always off-kilter there in the wild. Not exactly like the other geese, but enough like them that they in fact recognized her as goose-folk, but not really quite one of the clan.

One question that has never been answered: did she simply get tired of the life she had as a domestic animal on someone's farm, run away, and find herself a new life? Or did the humans who owned her get tired of her and dump her into the river? I suppose I'll never know that now.

Well, it's just about three years since Goosie's death, and here we go again. This year there are both a domestic white duck and a domestic white goose living here. I had my first sighting of the duck back in the spring; the goose I only discovered about a month ago. And yet again, my heart is deeply magnetized to these oddballs, these intrepid soldiers against conformity. I adore them, I envy them, I worry about them if I don't see them on any given wander-walk. They have achieved what I never could: they've found (or been forced into) a niche, and they're doing well there: making friends, eating well, flying free, retaining their essential selfhood. I root for them fanatically, their biggest cheerleader, their staunchest friend, and they know, of course, none of this.

If these birds decided to run away from home in search of greener pastures, then they have found them. They are adventurers, and rebels against the status quo. If they were forced into the river by human trolls who failed to keep their commitments to their animals, then they are victims of ugliness who have landed in a niche where they can turn their victimhood into freedom, happiness and family.

My envy smoulders inside me. They are odd and offbeat and happy. They landed in a place where they can make a good life out of their oddness. All this that I've never accomplished, and never will. No one holds them down or holds them back, now that they live wild. I will never, ever be able to live wild enough to prevent any human from ever holding me down or holding me back again. But in the case of two big geese and one big duck, I can fiercely envy and fiercely love at one and the same time. This is a feat I can't achieve with humans, because with humans, the moment the envy heats up, love becomes just about impossible.

I saw them only inches apart for the first time last night, this white duck and this white goose. They don't seem to be friends, since the duck swam off a few feet when the goose got so close. Maybe they're not friends, but they didn't fight. Just a yielding, a moving off to allow the goose passage. No war.

These oddies will go on living there among those who were born wild for a long time, it is my hope. And I will go on loving them, cheering them on, and envying them with a regret-fire that is as unquenchable as their delicious new freedom now is.
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read... Neverending solitaire... Cutting the pie...

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orange and raccoon

sunday 24 july 2011


Once again, I hauled myself to the river early this morning. Earlier than I usually make it out nowadays: five o'clock. For four and a half years it was routine for me to go out at five with my dogs, but that's all four years gone now, and five o'clock is often unappealing now that I have no dog to walk with. Mental hell.

Making it even less appealing today was the extreme humidity. In the last seventeen days, we have had only one day off from the monstrous wet air, and I simply can't take it. The longer such humidity lasts, the more irritable and physically sick I become. The less willing I become to move at all, because literally the instant I move, I'm covered in sweat.

It was only the memory of my dogs... my great, great dogs... that got me out the door at five a.m. in this vicious weather. Hating to face the stifling air and already exhausted from working on a song for three hours yesterday, and another two hours on a drawing. But because I happened to be awake, and because it was my old dog-walking time, and because I need to remember my dogs, I went.

I had no intention of staying out there very long. Just a quick tour along a part of my old dog route, then back inside this ponystall with a fan blowing on me. Those were my intentions. But you never know what nature's intentions are, and those can change from one moment to the next.

I was out there an hour, and it was all because of raccoons. I haven't seen a raccoon since 2002 (nine years!), and this is nearly shocking when you consider that between 1985 and 2002 I saw raccoons in this town all the time. In my yards, on porches, murdered in the streets by drivers. All the time. So to go nine years without seeing even one raccoon is maximally weird. And I didn't just see one raccoon on the riverbank at about 5:20 when this day began... I saw five. More raccoons than I've ever seen in my life all at once. The one and only time I've ever seen a mother with a litter. I spent about forty minutes watching those animals, talking to them, until they went back to their den to go to sleep. I saw them walk all in a line behind their mother, saw them all five up a tree while I stood there studying them and talking to them, saw the eastern sky behind them and their maple tree turn orange: five masked faces watching me from tree crotches against a background of unabashed orange.

I saw the children climb all over the place, heard the mother make a noise like cat purring in her throat, watched her nurse a baby right there in the tree. Afer they'd come down from the tree and crossed the street (mental hell: will they get across safely?), I saw them sitting in a row on top of a sort of fence, just sitting there relaxing. And I, on the opposite side of the road, am anxious: No, no, I say. Don't sit there all in a row like that in full view of the humans. You don't know what they'll do to you. Go now, go back to your den. It's daylight. It's time for bed. Don't let the humans see you. As if she'd heard and understood my words, the mother climbed down with the kids following after, and they went back into their den. Now I know where it is. My lips are sealed.

Brief research I just did yields disparate results: some folks say baby raccoons are called kits (like foxes), others say cubs (like bears). Since pandas and raccoons and bears are all related, I make the unilateral decision to call their children cubs. The only foxy thing about them is the triangular, pointed face. When you watch them move, they move for all the world like little bears. Bears with tails; tails with black rings around them.

Whatever other things a walk at the river may be for me, it is always mental hell. Because I walk there alone now, without my dogs. Because my last two dogs were stolen, hidden, and killed by vicious, spiteful, ugly human beings. It is always, without exception, a walk in mental hell.

But my love for animals and my fascination with them is so great that even in my hell, my rage and grief, I am charmed, dazzled and transfixed by the creatures around me. Even as I rage at the theft of my two dogs with every step, I stand in front of the maple tree full of raccoons and study them, love them, talk soothingly to them. I'm dazzled and can't tear myself away, though breathing the noxious air is making me suffer. I hold my breath while they cross the road, fearing an ignorant and nasty human behind the wheel of a car. I thank them, repeatedly, for being there. Thank the mother for bearing the anxiety my presence is causing her, apologize to her that I can't yet bring myself to walk away.

They're safe in the den now, sleeping. I want them to be safe forever, to live to be very old raccoons and die peacefully in their sleep. I want them to have plenty to eat, and some fun, and good water, and any other blessings I could wish upon raccoons. All in vain. Because they live in the center of a town, not in some remote woods. Because humans in general hate raccoons and love to hurt them if they get the chance: I've seen it all my life. Because they drive their bleeding cars and don't care. So many of them barely give a dog or a cat a chance, let alone some wild animal.

I send my wishes for them into the new-morning air, into the orange, into the nearly colorless haze when the orange fades away. I try to fill every molecule of the air, plants and trees with my raccoon wishes, with my dog rage, with my love for all that's beautiful and my loathing for the vast seas of ugliness that gush from humankind.

In readers, my distaste for homo sapiens will be resented, is always resented. I tell the truth in my blogs, my books. And one of my truths is my dislike of the human race. If you can't read my writing and understand how I've come to this repugnance and bitterness, then I can't help you expand your capacity for understanding.

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read... Stolen stars... Spite and malice... Soulcast...

~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~

smoky

30 may 2011

The fourth guinea pig of my years. Half-way to Princess Shiloh-Chailin, the one I have now. Short-haired, all black, no rosettes (supposedly decorative cowlicks). Born late in 1984, and from January to June of 85, he belonged to my parents. They'd got a pair of pigs for themselves composed of male Smoky for Dad and an orange and white female called Peach Blossom for my mother. When my daughter was out for a summer visit with my parents, she returned with Smoky. Not having been present, I don't know whether Dad simply offered the pig (my father was never much into caged animals, though he was kind to them), or if the daughter wheedled to get Smoky. Whichever it was, he became ours. He was the beginning of the second continuous animal family of my life, the one in western Mass. The FIRST continuous animal family had extended from my birth until the age of 31, when the last cat of my eastern Mass life died. Then my daughter and I moved west when I was 32, and Smoky was the first member of the second continuous family that would go on until 12 March of 2008.

He was smart, he was good, and he was fun. And while he remained an only child, he was king of all he surveyed. In the spring of 1986 I got him a buddy, as I hate to see any animal living without another one of its own kind. And what did they have in the pet shop in Hadley but a nearly full-grown male, short-haired with no rosettes, and all WHITE. I loved the idea of the all black and the all white, so home the new guy came with us. I called him Snowball.

I repeat that male guinea pigs can't share a cage once they both reach sexual maturity. We had a few months when they could be snuggle-buddies, the all black and the all white, but when Snowball became a man, we had to separate them. I put their two cages side-by-side so they could still always see each other, lie down side-by-side with the glass between them. And there were supervised playtimes of freedom on the floors.

On 31 May 1988, Smoky died. It wasn't wet-tail, but I don't know what DID take him. He was three and a half years old, and at that point in time I had never had a guinea pig live longer than that. The three before Smoky had all died at almost exactly the same age.

He began a second animal family that I thought would persist for the rest of my days. On the day Smoky died in my hands, I couldn't foresee the mafia-chick or the psychotic landlady or the spiteful, lazy caseworkers of the Department of Mental hell who would one day demolish that family that Smoky had begun, and demolish me with them.


read... Spite and Malice... Stolen Stars
~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

julia

tuesday 10 may 2011


Julia, or Juliana, or Yuliana. Her name mutated throughout each day, depending on what I felt like calling her. She ended up being buried in my plot in the community garden. Not my usual practice, but since there were urgent bullyings going on from the landlord -- that was the alchoholic landlord that time -- I wanted Julia safely buried someplace nice before a disaster might occur. I dug up a young iris I had and buried Julia beneath it. That plot was taken away from me two years later by the wisdom of certain turners falls twitidiots who decided that since I'd been sick for three months and hadn't been able to garden, I didn't deserve to have the plot anymore, after six years. Anyway, since a zebra finch, as I've said before, only weighs about an ounce, I'm sure two years were enough time for her compounds to peacefully return to the soil and the air.

Julia was the too-late wife I'd bought for finch Zachary in 2001. By rights she ought to have lived a lot longer than two years (most of my finches did), but birds are prone to various parasites and a host of viral and bacterial infections. Back in the early 90's I found in a used bookstore a copy of Robert Stroud's Diseases of Birds (at least I think that's the title). Stroud was the famous (to certain generations) Bird Man of Alcatraz. A murderer serving a life sentence in the prison at Alcatraz. I'd heard of this man since childhood, and had always been interested in the idea of someone like a murderer wanting to study bird biology while he was in the slammer. By the time I found his long out-of-print book, I was a birdkeeper myself, and decided to buy and read it.

So many possible diseases, and so little time. I'm sure that by the 90's many of the diseases pet birds can contract have been eradicated, and I felt I could dismiss as outdated certain ailments discussed in the book. But there are enough left to give me a fright, and it did.

So which of these ailments took Julia? I don't know. But I carry the remorse for a mistake I made in her treatment that may have precipitated her death, or halted a slow recovery, or both. One important task in treating sick birds is to keep them very warm, and I'd been doing that. Julia was in a little hospital cage with a heating pad under it and a light blanket covering it, vitamins and antibiotic in the water, etc. But on the day in May on which she died, the outdoor temperature had taken a spike upwards, the apartment had got uncomfortably warm, and I was afraid there would be TOO much heat for her, just when she seemed to be making steady, if slow, headway. So before bed I turned off the heating pad, fearing to give her heatstroke, and in the morning she was dead. I know from talking to other finchkeepers, and from some reading, that it's a real crap shoot with these little birds. Some of them live five or six or seven years with not much effort on the human's part, and others die suddenly and young. The hospital techniques save some, and don't save others.

Julia was my last finch. Haven't had another one since her death. If I ever get myself moved out of this ponystall the guinea pig and I now inhabit, I want to have a pair of finches again. I love the chattering they do, and their tiny but energetic bodies. Bodies may be small, but their spirits are large and sweet and fun.


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read... Lifelines... All my stars
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(photo: enhanced detail from greeting card)

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peter II

monday 9 may 2011


This particular Peter was one I got for my daughter when she was three. He came from a farm near a friend of ours, and there were lots of young bunnies, so we wandered among the cages until kid decided which one. The bunny was still pretty small, so child got to think of it as a baby, which, of course, children like. He was short-haired, colored in grey patches and white patches.

Myself was 29 at the time, and had previously had three different rabbits, but had had them when I was quite young. I didn't KNOW much about rabbits. We went to a farmy sort of store that my dad knew about to buy a cage for the rabbit, who was going to live in the screened-in patio attached to our breezeway. The man who owned the store told us we had to watch the teeth, that rabbits' teeth keep growing and if they get too long they need to be cut. I'd never heard of this looming menace before. My first two rabbits had been killed in their hutch by weasels, both at once. And my third rabbit had lived to be seven, in a hutch beside the garage. Now I had something new to get anxiety over.

Little Peter was often brought into my daughter's room to hop around and interact with us, and for a while things went fine. Even the farm store guy had thought there would be no real trouble, since Peter had a wooden cage that he could chew on any time his teeth needed it.

His appetite dropped, his spirit dropped, and then I remembered the tooth thing. Dad and I looked at the teeth, and they did seem long, so he cut them. But Peter died anyway, on mother's day 1983, when he was less than a year old. Daughter didn't seem much bothered by the death, but I, naturally, was brought very low. When we went back to the farm store, the man said the teeth were probably cut too late, and that in the meantime Peter, in his compromised state, had contracted some rabbit bacterium or something. Even then, in 1983, you did not take rabbits to the vet in the area where I lived. There were no vets who treated them. Vets who treated guinea pigs were still fairly new. When you had a bird or a rabbit who was ailing, the places you went to for advice were farmers and breeders. And considering the experience I've had with vets vis a vis rabbits SINCE then, the farmers and breeders didn't do badly at all.

Twenty-eight years it's been, and I can still see Peter lying on a red and pink towel at the base of the willow, just shortly before he died. I wanted him to die outside, breathing the outside air and hearing the breeze and the birds around him. I was there too, sitting on the ground beside him, petting him and talking to him until there was no more Peter. And I still, twenty-eight years later, get the lump in the throat and the little sting in the chest because I didn't remember the tooth thing sooner. That whip comes out, the whip of remorse that I blew it. I'm not complaining. I believe that people should feel remorse. This is, like many of my other convictions, absolutely passe and despised in the hollow human ambience we dwell in in 2011.


~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... All my stars
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antoinette

tuesday 12 april 2011


No, she wasn't named after the French queen who said "if the poor have no bread, let them eat cake," and was ultimately guillotined by the proletariat. Why would I name one of my animals after someone like that? No, her name came about as the result of a traumatic event in her life.

In September of 1992, when Antoinette was a little over a year old (and I'm ashamed to say I hadn't yet named her), I let her and all the other little zebra finches out of their cages for their play. The larger birds got their turns on different days. This was a long-established routine in our family, and had always gone reasonably well. Among the larger birds who watched while the little ones had their play were some lovebirds, who, as I've said elsewhere, are notorious biters of feet and legs. But there had never been any serious injuries, and I had come into a complacency that believed there never WOULD be.

I had checked on the finches a couple of times and found nothing amiss. But when I went in to round them up and get them back into their cages, I found blood. Blood on a windowill, on the window, and a number of other things. It was a LOT of blood, when you consider that a zebra finch only weighs about an ounce and can lose a life-threatening amount of blood very quickly. And birds can go into shock very easily as well.

Having found all the blood, I still had to find the bird that was producing it. Several finches were hunted, caught in my hand, and examined before I found the right one. A little off-white girl without a name. And there it was. A leg, I'm pretty sure it was the right, bitten very high up near the hip. Bitten NEARLY clean through, but not quite, and dangling by a very thin thread of what? Skin? Tendon? I wasn't sure. The thread was so infinitessimally thin that I hoped the thing would just break off on its own.

This was a Saturday afternoon. My mother was staying the weekend with my daughter and me, but it was no ordinary visit. We had big plans. Big for US, at least. On Sunday we were heading off very early in the morning for a bus trip to the Bronx Zoo. This trip had been planned for months, and my mother had paid for most of it because I was a poor single mom out of work, and we were all three looking forward to it. A big day out for mother, daughter and granddaughter.

It's agonizing for me when I have to choose between an animal and the humans, and I almost always decide in favor of the animal, but this time was different. I was willing to ruin my OWN trip to the zoo (but not exactly happy about it) by calling the vet, having my mother take me and bird over there, and using my zoo spending money to pay the extra for an emergency vet appointment for this bird. But as I thought about these things all that afternoon and evening, I found I wasn't willing to risk ruining the trip for my mother and daughter. If the vet had said the bird needed to be watched very closely for a couple of days, and needed this or that medication every four hours, I would have stayed home from the zoo, and I doubt that the others would have gone without me. I was the mediator between them. And even if they had gone, they wouldn't have had a very good time without that mediation.

So I took care of my bird myself, keeping her very warm, putting antibiotic in her water and making her drink little bits of it through a dropper, until early on Sunday morning when we had to leave. I left her with huge reluctance, fearing to find a dead bird when I returned. I put on a good front for mother and daughter all day, and of course I did enjoy the zoo. But in my mind every few minutes all day long and into the night: is she all right? is she still alive?

Late Sunday night we got back. She was still alive. She was warm and eating and managing to move from perch to dishes with this dangling leg, but it wasn't easy. Next day she went to the vet, but there wasn't an opening until the afternoon, so every hour of waiting seemed like three.

That leg just has to come off. There's no fixing it. This from the vet. I start asking quetions. When can you do it, what do you use for anesthetic, bla bla. Vet says we'll just do it right now. It's just a snip and a stitch on the little stump. No anesthetic for a brid this small. We'll wrap her in a towel and that will keep her dark and calm until it's finshed. There are very few nerve endings in a bird's leg.

I paced the parking lot smoking cigarettes, certain that that tiny little bird had already had way too much stress, and that being held and wrapped and snipped by strangers would just finish her off. Heart attack of the massive type. This is a very easy thing to happen to a bird, death from stress.

She, my plucky little soldier, did not die. She seemed, in fact, extremely happy that that dangling thing had been taken away. There was no post-op infection or faiing, the stitch was removed when it was time (and I think I did it myself), and all ended happily. As I watched her through the remaining five and a half years of her life, I did so with enormous pride in her survival, her courage through massive blood loss and stress and strangers and snipping and stitiching. Not to mention the compensations a bird with one leg needs to make in order to balance and jump.

Overall I'm a depressive, cynical, serious individual. There is not a long list of things in this life that cause me to feel joyful, but seeing animals overcome obstacles is right at the top of that list. I feel that joy every single time I watch that animal overcoming that obstacle, and so it was with this little bird. The same is not true of humans. You don't like reading that, I'm sure, and think me an unappealing shit, I'm sure, but it's the way I was made. Animals have always been fascinating and loveable and desirable to me, whereas humans are difficult,nasty and unreliable.

The year before the biting of the little bird leg, this same vet had amputated the leg of a guinea pig I had who was called Tony. At the end of the bird amputation, we were setting up a file for the little finch, and the vet asked her name. She doesn't have one. Let's call her Antonia, after your other amputee. So the file was set up for Antonia the finch. Over the next week or so, I decided I liked Antoinette better, and that's what I always called her. Antoinetti, to be precise.

And that's how she got her name. Because a lovebird bit her leg nearly off, and this bite resulted in amputation, and a guinea pig who'd ALSO had an amputation was called Tony. A circuitous and odd route to something as routine as a name.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... Mugsy's book
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(fairy at www.toscano.com)

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coco

tuesday 12 april, 2011... turners fails


Coco was a little brown mouse that I bought in 1995 at the request of my daughter's boyfriend, who was staying with us at the time. While there were many pets in our home, he didn't have one of his own, and he asked for the mouse. So I bought the mouse and the wheel, etc, as a gift to him.

Eight or nine months after getting Coco, this seventeen-year-old boyfriend decided to return to his parents. Fine, don't have a big problem with that. What I have a problem with is that he left his mouse behind. Not because I didn't want her; on the contrary, I loved her and was happy to have her. But all this love and adoration that boyfriend spoke of over all those months seem to have been what? An act? A temporary infatuation? Or was he afraid his parents wouldn't ALLOW him the mouse, and he'd only have to bring it back to me? He never has explained to me why he walked out on this animal he played with nearly every day, and so I'm left to speculation. I'll say on his behalf that his parents were very twisted people who made him very unhappy, and I can certainly picture his mother screaming "You're not having a dirty mouse in MY home!"

So she was mine after his defection, until she died on 12 April 1996, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I can't speak for others, but for me, INSIDE me, all animals, people and objects take on the flavor of the circumstances that existed when they entered my life. And if those circumstances cease to exist, as they usually do, then the person or object or animal that remains still carries that flavor, that time and place. The parting between my daughter and the boyfriend was fraught with tension, and so he made no return visits to us or to Coco. Every day that I cared for her after he was gone, she was a little brown handful of life and beauty, but also of his going, and of his never coming again, and of his turning his back on her, whatever the reason. When SHE died, another piece of HIM, and of our time together, died along with her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(stars from a greeting card)

read... All my stars... Stolen stars
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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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ginger

sunday 20 february 2011

Yet another zebra finch, and yet again I don't have a photo currently to hand. Ginger was the light-grey variety of zebra, and she's the only one I ever had with a white dot on her forehead. She was also one of the zebras I actually purchased, as opposed to all of those that were produced for me by my two breeding pairs. I went out shopping for another female and came home with Ginger. Because of that little white dot.

Zebras tend to be jaunty little birds that chatter quickly and move the same way. Ginger was a little different. Not defective in any way, not TOO slow or TOO mellow, but there was a very slight slowness and mellowness to her that made her an individual.

And there was something else unique there too. For most of her life, Ginger always had in her eyes this little expression of amusement. As if she found everything that went on with her and her cagemates, and everything that went on in the rooms and the apartments around her, just slightly funny. And HER amusement always became mine too, because whenever I saw that expression in her eyes, it made me smile. Those of you who know I have Asperger's and have read elsewhere that I don't smile much might find this strange news. But all the laws of my internal physics are DIFFERENT with animals than they are with people. And while it's not terribly frequent that a human will elicit a spontaneous smile from me, animals can do it a hundred times a day.

I never got any chicks from Ginger. It's always puzzled me that from close to thirty finches that I had at the apex of my finch-keeping, only two breeding pairs established themselves, and both of them contained the same male.

Ginger died in January of 1998 when she was close to seven. Another star in this Aspergian sky, with a little white "star" on her forehead.

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read... All my stars... Braonwandering...

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

(russian penguins at www.signals.com)

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

bandit

Page

sunday 20 february 2011

Not a name I would have chosen for any animal, but I say again that I had a small child, and children like to name animals. I got to choose his MIDDLE names, which were Blandiens Bendybones Bum. Yeah, yeah. You like the KID'S choice better.

We got this little bandit out of the laundromat in the first week of September 1986, a basically white cat with large patches of dark-brown tiger. Child and I were there doing our usual Saturday stint with laundry, and there were these two rather infamous townies in there with a kitten sleeping in the woman's lap. The kitten was wearing a flea collar, and I naturally assumed that that kitten belonged to that woman. But when she left, she and her companion got up and left the kitten in the chair. He didn't stay asleep long once he'd lost that warm body.

So, of course, the next humans he came to flatter were my kid and me. Blandiens, that name you don't like, is the Latin for "flattering." Bandit was an inveterate flatterer. When he wanted something, he would rub up against you oh-so-adoringly, and make these sweet little high-pitched sounds in his throat. As far as I ever saw, it worked every time. The woman who owned the laundry said she was sure the kitten belonged to no one because he'd been hanging around for several days. I argued that he was wearing a flea collar, a sure sign that he did, in fact, belong to someone. But she defeated my reasoning by saying that whoever it was obviously didn't want the kitten anymore, and that people in downtown Turners were forever getting cats and then tossing them out forever when they were tired of them. Really? say I. I'd only been in Turners a year, and spent little time there, as my weekdays were spent 9-5 on the campus of UMass. There was a lot I didn't yet know about the town. A year or two after this day, I had learned to advertise on radio and in the paper before I kept any lost animal I found. I didn't want to take an animal someone loved and missed. But on this particular laundry Saturday, I took this woman's word that someone had rejected this kitten, and we took him home. He was smuggled up the back stairs in a brown paper grocery bag so no fellow-tenants would see him. I hadn't yet asked the landlord if I could have a cat, and I didn't want some asinine butt-brain getting to the landlord before I did.

When I reached him a few days later, he said the cat was okay. So began Bandit's time with us.

I don't know how many weeks went by before I was standing on my back porch and saw at the edge of the woods a cat who was the spitting image of our little Bandit, except that he was full-grown and dirty. I called my daughter and pointed out the cat. She makes a blase face. Ya ma, I know. That's Brandon's cat Bandit. That's why I named the kitten Bandit, because he looks just like that one. There had been a method to her madness, after all.
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read... Sehnen... Neverending solitaire...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

the fishes

tuesday 8 february 2011.... turners turds

Yes, you can use the plural fishes when you're talking about more than one SPECIES of fish, and that's what I'm going to do.

I was a fishkeeper from 1987-1998. Freshwater, not salt. Five gallon tanks, ten, twenty, and for a while a thirty-eight gallon gem. The beginning of this era was thrust on me by someone else, who gave my daughter a five-gallon tank and heater and filter and pump, plus a couple of fish, for her birthday. It all started so simply. And escalated. And kept going.

Prior to this fish-birthday, I'd only ever had goldfish in bowls. Had never had tanks and all their equipment and all their headaches. I still maintain, however, that the headaches are worth it, because the fish are both beautiful and fascinating. And like potted plants, the waterworld of an aquarium provides a miniature OUTDOORS indoors.

There are certain horrors, too, to fishkeeping. At least to someone as sensitive and invested in animals as I am, they were horrors. Really I don't even feel like going there now -- maybe another time. Today I just want to stay with the pleasures of fish. This quote from the naturalist Konrad Lorenz (from his book King Solomon's Ring) will give you a hint of what you must face when you keep aquariums: "...there is no other group of animals that, even in nature, is so plagued with infectious diseases as the fish." Now back to the pleasures.


How many kinds did I have over the years? Reticulated catfish, angelicus catfish, albino catfish, algae eaters, guppies guppies guppies, swordtails, mollies, many varieties of tetras, including the lovely little neons; gouramis, bettas, angel fish, and more. Interesting, graceful, different demeanors in different species, and so on. An underwater adventure.

I salute every single one of the hundreds of fish who lived in my tanks, from the tiniest baby guppies to the largest angel fish and gouramis. I'm glad to have known each one of them.
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read... Mugsy's book... Mishibone...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

on poems

friday 4 february 2011
turners tricksters

Anyone who's done any wandering around on my website knows already that poetry has become very tough for me, both reading it and writing it. In the summer of 2008, when the stealing of my animals was very recent, I was still able to deal with poetry for a number of months. But since the end of that year it has become a progressively more difficult thing to do.

I continue to cite other people's poems on my blogs, but I can't tell you how hard it is. To read poems is nearly as rough as writing them. Expression in a poem is very different from expression in prose, and that is poetry's chief value, its mode of expression. I still turn to that value, but it has become an effort and an ordeal that it never was in the 46 years before the theft of my animals, when I read and wrote poetry nearly every day. When poetry was as regular a part of my life as eating meals.

I wrote one poem over this past November and December. Not because I forced myself to the job, but simply because the first few lines came to me, and I didn't want to just let them go. Over a month or so, more lines came, two or three at a time. Slowly, reluctantly.

And then today, something a bit bigger than a few lines appeared in the brain. Appeared when I was out walking at 6 a.m. in the two-degree air, walking the steps I used to walk in the early mornings with my dogs when we lived beside the river. I have no idea how many people reading blogs are fond of poetry, but today's lines that showed up in my cold-walking brain are part of my blog-life now, and have no title beyond today's date: fourth february.
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read poems... Scealta liatha... shadowpoems...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

matthew's apotheosis

friday 21 january 2011
turners trogs

~~~ Has he reached it yet, I wonder? That glorious day when he can finally see himself as, if not an actual god, at the very least some dazzling sort of macho hero-saint. Because that, according to my senses of him, is what he's after. It's what his ego needs, and needs frantically: to elevate himself above the rest of us, above his undercover colleagues; far, far above the norm. He can't, without this transforming elevation, see himself as valuable and meaningful. ~~~

You don't know how difficult it is to write about him. I have to. There's no way out. I'm working on a book that includes him, and words he said to me, and things he did. This underworld that Matthew pulled me into on the heals of my illegal eviction is part of the human behavior, directed precisely at ME, that I address in the book I'm slowly working on. I must write about him. Spite and Malice, composed of blog posts, and because of that book, I have to write about him. The book is one part of the history, the truth that I want to leave behind me when I die. But you honestly don't know how hugely difficult it is to write about people whom I consider to be evil. No, I don't believe in god or the devil, heaven or hell, but I do believe in human evil. I believe that most of us have this evil in us, including myself. It's what you do or don't do with it that is the telling thing, the defining thing.

Matthew's quest for transcendence to a level far above the rest of us; his ego's insatiable need for gratification. For the first time ever, Matthew stayed out of my face for four whole months. From 2 September to 31 December. When he did this, of course I was very grateful, and I also thought it was just another of his steps on the way to glory. I thought he had finally, after two years, decided to honor my request that he stay away from me, believing that if he honored this request to stay completely away from a woman he loves, it would add to his superiority and his hero-hood.

Well, whether it was another of his steps to glory or not, it seems to be over. The last three times I'v gone to Greenfield (Dec 31, Jan 4, and yesterday), he's put his carcass in front of my face again, knowing full well that just seeing him, even if he doesn't speak, causes me an anxiety attack. What a feeling of personal and male-ego power that must give him, that knowledge that just the sight of him will ruin my entire day.

He calls what he feels for me love. But what Matthew Lacoy feels bears no resemblance whatsoever to any definition of love that resides in MY heart. What Matthew feels for me is born of his ego, and born of pheromones, which we cannot control. His pheromones and my pheromones seem to hit it off real well. But love is made of more than reactions of invisible chemicals collected in the skin. At least for me it is. For me love is also made of kindness, and tenderness, and loyalty, and a certain amount of self-sacrifice. He has almost NEVER displayed any of those qualities in his treatment of me. Truth is another creature that belongs in love, and Matthew has only ever given me truth in very tiny and very infrequent doses.

I both love him and despise him. Bifurcation is all that's possible for me with people I love who consistently treat me badly. I hope one day to be cured of the love, but have no desire at all to be cured of the loathing.

Once he attains his apotheosis, if he hasn't already, he must strive and struggle daily to keep it. What a way to exist. What a waste. What a lot of ego-driven crap.
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(clip art photo)

read... Spite and Malice... Sehnen...
~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2010 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.


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how old are you now

tuesday 18 january 2011
turners troglodytes

How old? As old as glacial ice. As old as nightmares. As old as ignorance, and a teaching of Socrates: always quesion.

It's 6:35 in the morning, and we are having a weather. I've already spent seventy minutes in the dark morning at the river, trudging through the snow, looking at swans, listening to ice-sounds, being snowed upon, wiping tears. Trying to look at snow crystals with my new magnifying glass, which is apparently not a strong enough model, though it was the strongest our drugstore had. Didn't take my glasses. Thought I wouldn't need them with the magnifier, but guess I do.

And I was there last night as well. Before the snow began, while the one-hair-off-full moon was staring down, while the swans were closer to the shore, and therefore larger in my eyes. Whistling my long-established song for water birds, wiping the same tears. They are always the same tears.

Since my way of life and everyone I love was taken from me in March of 2008, I have had three ugly, alien, burning birthdays. I say sardonically that they have been adventures in barrenness, adventures in abandonment, adventures in emptiness. Let me say yet again that my eviction was illegal, and again that I always paid my rent, and again that I had a huge social service dinosaur that was supposed to prevent the homelessness, and say that they sat on their brains and their hearts, and did nothing.

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On the first, turning 56 in 2009, I was living in a hell-hole of a shelter in Norhampton Mass. Run by ServiceNet. I've stayed in two different ServiceNet shelters, and they were both hell-holes. This would lead me to conclude that ALL homeless shelters are hell-holes, if it weren't for the fact that I stayed in one in New Hampshire that was a lot better.

It started snowing the night before my birthday, and was still snowing vigorously in the morning. It was a Sunday, and on Sundays we had an overnight worker at the shelter who tried to be a kinder, gentler shelter worker. Normal kick-out time in the mornings was seven, but Riley would let us stay in as late as ten, if she had no pressing things to do in her personal life. Especially if there was weather. She let us stay in on my birthday. But I didn't take much advantage of that grace. Horrible, ugly as the birthday was, I figured I at least deserved a nice breakfast after everything I'd been going through for ten homeless, loveless months; and I had no intention of eating my birthday breakfast at a freaking shelter.

I ate it at Kathy's diner. Eggs and pancakes and bacon, if memory serves. I hung there as long as I dared for the money I'd spent, though Kathy never said anything. Maybe till 9:00 or so. This is your lifestyle when you board at a shelter that does not stay open all day. You are kicked out in the morning and let back in at suppertime. In between you hang. And this costs money, because you just can't hang in an eatery for hours without buying something. I would generally hang at one place for up to three hours, then I'd move on to another and spend more money eating things I didn't want. All the eatery people know who the shelter ones are: they're the ones who hang and hang and spend as little as possible. There is endless, meaningless hanging. And for me there was in this hanging, as in so much else about homelessness, endless shame.

There's no clear memory of where I hung until lunch time, after I left Kathy's. Bruegger's Bagels is the most likely place, so that must be where I went. I wanted to buy myself a set of art pencils in the art store, but I had to wait for them to open at 11 or 12. I also wanted a carnation, but the florist wasn't opening till late either. Carnation is the flower for January birthdays, but I wasn't buying it for my own sake. I wanted it for a birthday that had been the day before mine, the birthday of three loved friends. I remember sitting on a bench on the sidewalk outside the art store, burning a stick of Nag Champa and smelling the carnation, wiping those famous tears. The snow had slowed a great deal by late morning, but I sat there with incense and flower and cigarette and snow, simmering shame and loneliness, grief and rage, while I painted on myself a phony placid face.

For lunch I further treated myself to sweet and sour chicken at the Teapot. I sat alone at a table in front of the window, staring out at Main Street as if there were anything of interest or meaning to see out there, when I already knew full well that there wasn't.

The shelter wouldn't open again until 6:OO, and it was probably only 1:30 when I finished lunch. I felt I'd already spent enough money that day. Where was I going to hang that was free. No library on Sundays. Only the laundromat.

And so I hung in a drab, messy laundromat on the day I turned 56, staring out the large windows, thinking about my REAL birthdays, the ones in the life that had been stolen from me, wiping more tears. Eventually I needed a bathroom, went off in search of such, bought yet another cup of tea, and back to the laundromat for the duration. The sun had come out weakly after the storm, and I watched it go down on the birthday, watched the dusk and the beginning of the blue point. Tried several times to reach an acquaintance in Greenfield on the phone, but she never answered. The darkest shade of blue comes, the day is on the brink of night, and it's back to the hell-hole I go.

Later I lay me down to sleep in the bottom of a bunk bed; lunatics, alcoholics, addicts, criminal recitivists all wheezing to their creepy beds around me. Not one human being -- no relative, no so-called friend, -- had called me on my birthday. As on many, many nights, I made a birthday wish to die quickly, quietly in my sleep.

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In 2010 I became 57. Living in a rented bedroom in Greenfield. Infinitely better than any shelter, but not without its hardships, and not without its shames. One hardhsip was that I wasn't allowed any space in the kitchen to store food, or any use of the stove and microwave. All my meals had to be composed of things I could keep unrefrigerated in my room, or gotten out. This birthday was supposed to be less bleak than the one before. My friend was going to bring me to Turners to visit some places my animals and I had loved, and then we were going to her place for supper and movies. And I had my new guinea pig, so I was not completely without animal life or completely without companionship in my rented room. Did that lessen the grief and rage for the fourteen animals who were stolen and killed? Not one iota. But it did make a very small dent in the loneliness.

The morning was my own -- my friend never got up and running until early afternoon. It didn't snow, but was instead a bright, fresh January day with former snow already on the ground. I had planned on that morning to walk to the hotel in Greenfield where I had walked and medicated my dogs for the last time. That walk took me forty minutes each way, made a good exercise binge. But when the day came, I woke with an attack of palindromic rheumatism in my legs. Walking was a study in stiffness and pain and joints swelled with fluid.

It wasn't going to steal my memory walks from me. Not the walk to the hotel, and not the shorter walks I would take in Turners. I took prednisone. I took what felt like pounds of aspirin. About 11:15 I set off. When I reached the hotel parking lot, I did my ritual. Found the parking space where the van had been; the van with all my animals inside. Found the spots where I let the dogs do their potty. Found the place where we stood when I gave them their pills and some canned food dished out on the pavement. After forty minutes of walking, the attack was much worse. I was breathing hard from the pain.

I dragged myself into Dunkin Donuts for a late breakfast and some sitting down. I was having trouble getting my voice up because of the pain, but on the second try, my order was heard. After the food I needed to pee, and in my efforts to raise myself from the chair and start walking to the ladies, my body started heading for the floor. I caught myself before the fall was complete, but not before a man came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I lied and said I was just a little stiff. Stiff drunk, they all thought. I could see it in their faces.

On the trek back, I found Matthew Lacoy squatting in front of the health food store. Not unusual. We saw each other from a great distance, as we most often do, and he watched my every tread, as he most often does. When I passed him -- hauling my almost non-functional legs and huffing with the pain -- I glanced at him only briefly. This Matthew, who, according to his own mouth, is an undercover agent who loves me, had not one word to say to me on my birthday, not one word to say to my obvious physical pain, though he watched every step I took for blocks. I glanced at him only briefly. If looks could kill, I would have killed him then and there.

Just minutes after I passed by this agent in love, my friend called me. It's party time, says she. Was I ready to come over. I wanted to know if we could have going to Turners as the first activity so that I could then sit down for the rest of the day. I've looked at my finances, says she, and I'll take you to Turners if you want to give me some gas money. I fumed into the winter air. She had already told me two days before that she would take me to Turners and that it would be a birthday present. The distance between the center of Turners and the center of Greenfield is something like five miles. How many drops of gasoline are we talking about in a four-cylinder Subaru? This friend had already ruined both Christmas and New Year's by acting like a bitch constipated full of sulphuric stinking crap, and now it looked as though she'd got the same plug in her anus for my birthday. Just as on Christmas and New Year's, I refused to play the passive-aggressive game, the meanness game. If she couldn't be kind on my birthday, be an actual friend, keep her word, then I wasn't going to play. I'd damned well stay in my room with my crippling pain and swelling, and my guinea pig who loved me. I don't see why I have to pay for something you said was a birthday present, I say. But I hadn't checked my finances when I said that. She says the word finances as if we're talking stocks and bonds here. She lives on the exact same monthly disability pittance that I do. I tell her to forget it, and to forget the birthday. I hang up on her and go back to my room.

Mostly I am conked out until supper time. Between the pain and the new dose of pills, I finally thud-bump into some sleep. After sleeping and sweating, the attack is less severe, and I'm able at 5:00 to walk to the free poor people's meal at one of the churches. Eating my birthday supper with loons, alkies and addicts, yet again. More humiliation. I could have eaten at a restaurant, but I didn't want to spend anymore money that day. Walking back after the meal, I call my daughter. She doesn't answer. She won't return my call. She just about never does.

But I get to my room and she does call back. I think we talk about an hour. For most of it she's rather bitchy and snipey, but while it hurts, it's no great surprise. Even in the years when we lived together, she would always sabotage my birthday in any way she could.

I go to sleep with those other birthdays, the ones in my own stolen life. Seeing the same stolen faces and saying the same stolen names; wiping away the same grieving, raging tears.

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And now I've gone 58. Living in Turners again, the town where the memories of me and my animals are. The town that contributed to our demolition. Living in, not an apartment, not even an efficiency, but a space, as I've said before, the size of a ponystall. A space, as I've said before, that I wouldn't give a good-sized dog to live in. Claustrophobia niggles at my nerves and cells and emotions constantly. I made few plans for this year's birthday, and that was deliberate. I planned several of my memory walks, but due to another birthday storm, only two were possible. I had lunch at a bakery nearby. At four my one friend called, and later my daughter. No nasty stuff; she was pleasant the whole time.

The walks I couldn't do on the day itself got done the next day. The walks in the places that have a meaning and a presence and a history particular to me and mine. Those walks where I feel less distant, less dismally far removed from the life and the loves that were mine. If I had died in my sleep on birthday night, so be it. If I die that way tonight, I die with my hatred and my rage intact. My loathing for every single individual who had a hand in stealing and hiding my animals, who had a hand in killing them, who had a hand in making me and leaving me homeless, who has knowledge at this very moment of where and when those animals died, and will not tell me. If looks could kill, I'd waste you here and now. Many happy returns of the day.
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read... Braonwandering... Stolen stars...

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2010 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

christmas day heart attack, 1986

monday 17 january 2011
turners stale

My daughter and I came to live in Western Mass in April of 1985, though not to the psychological cesspool that is Turners Falls until August of that year. Homesick as we were, we made the 240-mile roundtrip back to our hometown fairly often until the fall of 1986. That's when I came down with palindromic rheumatism and chronic fatigue syndrome, both at the same time, and the number of trips home dwindled with my unreliable energy.

At Christmastime that year, though, I was able to make the trip, helped by lots of caffeine. We left on the 24th, early in the day, since both of us were on school vacation. Pictures in the memory tell me that that year was one of our snowless Christmases, but I'm not absolutely certain on that.

Evening came on. We usually opened one or two gifts on Christmas Eve, and that year was no exception. My mother and daughter and I were all in the livingroom, deciding which packages we wanted to attack, when my father came into the room with both a gift and a state of low-level agitation. Not anger, but a kind of nervous urgency.
He badly wanted Mum to open HIS present first. This was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it had been years, I believe, since he had chosen a gift for her. She usually told him what she wanted, and he bought it. The first ten or so years of my life, money was on the tight side for my parents, and in those years my father made Christmas for the kids his priority. This left my mother with either only one rather inexpensive gift, or no gift at all from him. She did not take this with equanimity, and when finances improved, she assured herself a suitable gift by telling him what she wanted. And the second strange bit was that if he did in fact ever choose her gift himself, he would give it to her as soon as he bought it, rather than saving it for the day itself.

So here he was on Christmas Eve with a gift he had chosen himself and had actually saved for the right time, urgently telling her to open his gift first. There was a little whiff of pride, too, mixing with his nervousness. I was sitting beside her when she opened it, and he was standing on her other side. When I saw that the box said Towle Silversmiths (a very old and prestigious Newburyport firm), I knew he had spent some money. But the shocking part was that he had acutally gone to Towle's and picked out something.

Inside the upscale box were two silver bells, about six inches tall. One was an actual bell that could be rung (with a lovely sound), and the other had a music box in it that played a song. What other song would it be but Silver Bells. My father's cheeks were pink with excitement. He was waiting for her to gush, to be delighted. She said Oh thank you, dear in a high-pitched pleased voice that I myself knew to be phony, and he probably did too. He said a few more things, pretended he believed she liked it, and went off to his bedroom.

When he was gone, she turned to me. Why did he think she would want these bells? Because you love silver and gold, I told her, and because you've always loved the song Silver Bells. She would not relent. I wanted to brain her. The gift was unsatisfactory to her, and furthermore, he'd been acting strangely for a couple of months. Strangely how? She couldn't describe it, but he wasn't himself.

Later we all went to bed, colored lights burning inside and out. It was about 1:00, I think, only an hour into Christmas day, when I heard my mother at their bedroom's private exit saying What are you doing out there? What's the matter? My father had got up out of bed and rushed outside in his underwear. I got up. What's wrong? He's outside in his underwear. He says he can't breathe.

She called an ambulance. I can't remember now whether or not he had fallen to the ground. It was decided that she would go with him and I'd stay with my sleeping child. She would call me when she knew anything.

I don't recall how long I waited for the phone to ring. When it did, I was told it was a heart attack; what the doctor called a SILENT heart attack, without any left arm pain or chest pain or other common symptoms. It was caused by congestive heart failure, but that wouldn't be known for another day or two. And congestive heart failure was, the doctor said, what had caused my father not to be himself for a couple of months.

Relatives needed to be called when the morning was at a decent hour, and I believe I had to do that. Most of the calls were long distance, and I don't think Mum could do that from the hospital. Whenever that was finished; whenever I had my kid breakfasted and dressed; whenever I had let her open at least a couple gifts and told her that Grampa was in the hospital and we were going to see him, we loaded his gifts and her gifts into the car and went along.

Naturally he was in ICU. They would let two of us in at a time, once an hour for fifteen minutes. My daughter opened and played with her Christmas presents in the ICU waiting room. We ate our lunch and supper there. Throughout the day and early evening, relatives arrived, stayed a while, then left. On our first trip in to see him, daughter and I took in some of his presents. He was so weak he could not unpeel tape and untie ribbons. He tried, but his hands were too weak. I did it for him. He didn't even give a crap about the gifts, I could tell, but he was trying to act Christmasy for my daughter's sake, who was seven years old at the time. He also put on an ultra-cheerful if wan performance every time she showed him one of her own gifts. I'm pretty sure he even apologized to her for getting sick and screwing up Christmas.

My father had a very sheepish air about him most of the time that day and evening, and I, if no one else, knew why. My father felt loved that day. That all these people would come on Christmas day to a depressing ICU and visit him made him feel loved. This was a thing that didn't happen terribly often for him. He was a difficult person in some ways: fussy, nervous, and quick-tempered. It was often hard to feel relaxed enough to behave in a loving way with him. But there were times when it could happen, as on this day, and he would almost always go sheepish. As if it overwhelmed him to see that he might just be loved.

We are not the only family ever to have had a Christmas medical emergency, and we were not the last. But any of you who HAVE had such an emergency know how much weight is added by the fact that it is Christmas day. The one day of the year when you most hope things will go well. They did go well. He didn't die. And the fact that we spent most of Christmas day and night in ICU and didn't cook our Christmas dinner and didn't have a normal Christmas in any way is, and was, irrelevant to me. What mattered to me above all things was that he must not die. That was my most important, most lasting Christmas gift on 25 December 1986.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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read... Lucked out... Lifelines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(stained glass at www.signals.com)
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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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