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The Intercession of Saints

September 29, 2008 anxiety
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The Act of Contrition

O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,
and I detest all my sins,
because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell;
but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
Who are all good and deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve,with the help of Thy grace,
to confess my sins, to do penance,
and to amend my life.Amen.

My mother lacked authority of her own, but she had God. Her God was silent, delivering judgment as he willed; he could not be placated, only feared. The only device we had, so she taught, was supplication, but even our supplications were feeble and the chance of being rewarded slim. The only possibility of reaching such a God was in the multiplicity of voices, and so we must ask for intercessions, and we must constantly pray.

Pray without ceasing, and beg the saints to pray for us. If God deemed to hear and we were lucky, he might grant our prayers. If God turned his face away, then were fated to suffer, and there was nothing to be done; no act of ours could save us from our fate. God was merciless, or he was not; most of us were unlucky, but there was one other hope afforded us: heaven. We might work out way into heaven by avoiding sin, a perilous process which required constant vigilance, confession of lapses and penance for failings.

In truth, my mother believes that earth is hell, and that there is a worse place, for people who sin so much they are punished beyond simply having to serve time here. But hell was her favorite threat, and apparently still is today, as she threatened me with hell recently. She still thinks I might respond to the fear of damnation. I think this is because she has lied so long about the real hell I have been through, that she doesn’t know there is no greater threat for me anymore. My sister’s daughter is in danger, and I am going to have to engage my mother in battle now. I have to stop being silent and explain why I am fighting so hard, and so I do it here so all can see. My mother left me to fend for myself my whole life, and I won’t let her, nor God, abandon my niece now. I will intercede, and to hell with luck.

Tiles

September 28, 2008 anxiety
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Office Ceiling by Cathy Bel of Barcelona, Spain courtesy of stock.xchng

Office Ceiling by Cathy Bel of Barcelona, Spain courtesy of stock.xchng

I remember concrete, when I remember my early childhood in Staten Island, New York. It seemed that every building was tiled in the same cold, white polyurethane cross-hatched in black squares and splashed with painted black droplets. I remember waiting for my mother in countless halls lined with white polyurethane tiled with black paint, and counting its squares for company. My mother was at the Welfare Office. At the Post Office, where my father worked. At the Food Stamp Office. Housing. Hospital. Clinic. My early life seemed mired in public services. Free breakfast for us. Food stamps to buy formula for my baby sisters. Vouchers to get glasses and clothes. Free doctors at the clinic. Long ferry rides to Manhattan.

Between the trips to service offices, walks down grimy concrete streets with larger squares to count as I walked alongside the stroller, wind blowing up the skirt of my coat, chilling my knees through my stockings. Everything gray outside, my mother’s fingers occasionally slapping sharp against my ears or painfully pressing down on my arm to pull me closer to her, the walks so long that I timed everything by counting. I counted ceiling tiles too, for they were always the same as well, everywhere we went—white squares in silver cages with random streaks of black. I counted them down and across, and when I had counted them all, I counted them again.

I don’t remember trees, even though Staten Island was not a barren wasteland. When I went back there, what seemed like a million years later, there were trees and water and rocks and grass, but I only remember the concrete squares. Across from our project building was the park I played in, and it was made of concrete too; a long low concrete pool with a few inches of water in the summertime, and drained bare in the wintertime to provide for basketball and tennis and handball. My mother was always telling us not to run because we’d get hurt, and we never listened for long. In that park, I was pushed from a playhouse roof to break my right wrist, smash up my face and break out my two front teeth when I was four years old. I ended up in the hospital being carefully watched by nurses whose faces and voices I don’t remember at all; I remember their green scrubs and white shoes, and that they kept asking me if my mother broke my arm. I remember not being able to sleep in the room I was in, a private room only because no child was placed in it with me, and my mother promising to stay overnight with me, and waking up to find she wasn’t there. It was the middle of the night, although not quiet; my first encounter with the insomniac ward that is a city hospital, and I could not go back to sleep. I cried for my mother. A nurse came by in her green scrubs and said my mother wasn’t coming until the morning. I couldn’t sleep. So I counted the tiles in the ceiling. And then I counted the ones in the floor.

When my mother came the next day she took me to a cafeteria and we ate green jello. And there was no mention of why she left me alone.

My sister died of sepsis in St. Joseph Hospital in Asheville, NC a year and a half ago. My mother had left her alone all night after she had suffered two cardiac arrests and the nurses had told my mother they were not sure if Dianna would make it through the night.

I wonder if she counted the tiles.

Atsür, Turks make Eurobasket 2009

September 18, 2008 basketball
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The Turkish National Basketball Team, of which our own Engin Atsür is a part, qualified for Eurobasket 2009-Poland by beating Belgium 80-64 yesterday, their fifth consecutive win in the qualifiers. Coach Bogdan Tanjevic has been crediting the “youngsters” like Engin, as they are known in Turkey, with bringing the competitive spark and athleticism Turkey needs to compete for the 2010 FIBA World Championship. 

“The young players in the roster are
going to constitute the main frame of the roster of the 2010 World
Basketball Championship,” Tanjevic was quoted as saying on FIBA’s web site today. 

The team arrived back in Turkey today. I hope they got a big welcome because I know to a lot of other “youngsters,” basketball in Turkey is becoming a pretty big deal. Go Engin, go!


And so we said goodbye

September 17, 2008 basketball
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Last night when my husband and I came home our cat Bishop was lying on the floor, his neck crooked, his legs akimbo. He could not stand on his own, he was confused, and he was crying. I picked him up and held him, and his head and limbs lolled around, especially on his left side. I immediately suspected a stroke, and we rushed him to the very kind vets at Quail Ridge Animal Hospital, where he eventually spent the night.

They performed neurological and pain tests, and told us they suspected something neurological because they could not get a response from his limbs—it was as if Bishop’s brain was not receiving information from his legs. They suggested trying steroids to control the inflammation to see if that corrected the problem, but there was no response, and later today they tried antibiotics, but there was no response at all. After review by a second vet, we determined that either Bishop had a tumor that had finally grown enouugh to seriously affect him this way, or he had suffered a stroke. Either way he was not the same cat and would not have any kind of life, and so we made the decision… and so we euthanized him… and so we said goodbye.

And while I know I made the right decision after a long night and day of reliving hundreds of memories of my beloved cat, who saw me through my suicide attempt, my move to North Carolina, my failed relationships and failed jobs until I finally found marketing, and Richard, and now a home; my heart is heavy and my tears keep coming. And so.

No crying in football?

September 12, 2008 basketball
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One of the sports topics in Wolfpack Nation this week was reaction to fans booing when Daniel Evans was attempting to quarterback the first half of our football game. Luke DeCock of the Raleigh News & Observer, apparently at a loss to talk about any other interesting thing that happened during that game—Nate Irving’s astounding ability to find the football, Owen Spencer’s graceful catches, TJ Graham’s balletic sliding, impossible Hail Mary catches, or the fact that we finally by-God scored after ten or so quarters of painfully slow, scoreless games—gave us the business for being hard on the kid. Although acknowledging that “the Pack probably deserved to get booed,” DeCock availed us of the story of Evans’ childhood growing up at Carter-Finley Stadium.


Thanks Luke. We didn’t know anything about that. I mean, why would any of us pay attention when his father Johnny Evans is on the radio calling the friggin’ game?


This non-event became a media happening after the article. Our own Joe Ovies at 850 described our fan base as boorish, a word I didn’t know he could spell—although as the creator of the Date Debate, he should be well-versed in that—and we were roundly criticized as being our usual low-class, redneck selves who can’t accept life at the bottom of the barrel where all Carolina and Duke fans believe we should be happy. Well, frankly I got a little rant coming on over that. Because the game is football, and Daniel Evans is a grown man we did not hog tie and throw on to the field for our cruel pleasure. He’s a graduate student who has watched countless quarterbacks and coaches get crucified by sports fans, and he put on the helmet and went out there.


When the low chorus of boos started—which were hardly the boos the stadium could have unleashed on his poor head—I felt a twinge for Danny. But what mostly happened during that first half was a lot of stunned silence, and more than a few “Oh my God’s.” Because we could not believe that the coaching staff could not put Danny in a position to succeed, that the offensive line could not seem to learn a single play, and that we were sitting through seven…seven… painful three and outs. The only thing that was keeping us in the game at all was the fact that William & Mary was sucking just as hard as we were. And maybe boos are not the nicest thing in the world. But it’s not t-ball we are talking about here. 50,000 people don’t stack that place shoulder to shoulder six to seven times a year so that every kid gets a chance to hold the ball and go over the goal line before we go home. It’s just a game—that somebody has to lose. It’s just a game—that some people play better than others. It might not be pretty. But it hardly warrants a censure of the entire fan base, especially when every single one of them will stand up and cheer for that kid like he was their own on senior night this year—win or lose. Go Pack!


For more on what kind of fans we are, visit State Fans Nation.

Waiting for

September 5, 2008 basketball
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We’re all waiting for Hanna here, that bitch. Waiting for hurricanes is something we do ever few years here, and the last one, for me anyway, didn’t end badly. For the duration of an entire evening the world shook from winds and I was terrified that the tree outside my apartment was going to fall into my bedroom, and then my power and phone were out for about a day and a half, but I got off lucky. Folks in northeast Raleigh were under water for half a week. 

Yesterday we were starting to breathe easier because it looked like Hanna was drifting east, but she decided she liked vinegar-based barbecue, apparently, so here she comes, probably ruining our football game (which we were ready to screw up all by ourselves! darn). I’ve moved my bike indoors, checked the batteries and gotten extra water set up. Looks like it’s going to be really, really wet. Waiting like this is dangerous time. Yesterday, when I was sitting dressed in a lovely papery cotton dress waiting for the nursing staff to come in and set me up for my colonoscopy, feeling shaky, thinking about the last few tests I’ve had that have landed me in surgical units, scared out of my mind that this was going to end up the same, I realized I could either let myself become completely panicked, or I could just let myself be and get the hell out of my own way.

You know how, when you get utterly prepared for a disaster, the disaster doesn’t seem so bad? Like Y2K? Okay, I kid there, but … maybe Hanna (and my colonoscopy) will end up the same. It’s going to take some time, and it’s going to get a bit messy, but in the end, we’ll all still be here.

Except, I can’t eat barbecue anymore. But y’all save me some nanner puddin, you hear?

Moon in Capricorn

September 2, 2008 PTSD
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Full Moon by Anselmo Garrido of Salvador, Brasil courtesy stockXchng

Full Moon by Anselmo Garrido of Salvador, Brasil courtesy stockXchng

At the bottom of my astrological chart lies the core of all my suffering, the waxing and waning moon where pain seeps and tumors grow: my mother. The silent killer of my personality, the one who damped me down, her hands tight around the sides of my head at mass, her mouth pressed tightly to my ear while she spoke in urgent whispers to me in church, like we were confidantes. Like I was the one who held all her secrets. With my mother, even the secrets were built on lies and the tremor-filled landscape of my childhood was a mindfield where there was no safe passage. Not at mass, where Jesus bled and bled and bled and Mary wept. They stood and suffered, and how could they offer help when they were so wounded? How could I ask for help from a God who murdered his own son and threw out the bearer of his child like a rag when she had served her purpose?

My mother was a liar, her life built on the lies she told me about my self, who continues to lie to me to this day. My mother is possessed of the cold heart of a liar, one who can use people and walk through them like a river, walk over them like the stones in that river, pay them no mind as if they were ghosts, and she has blessed me with this same cold gift. She can gather Mary’s tears into her own eyes, and claim that her agony is all that there is to know about the world. And she pulls me in, even now, to help her stand up because she can’t do it. She can’t stand up. She could never stand up. My mother the liar. And I have just written her an e-mail that cuts to the cold like a razor.

No, I haven’t sent it. I have to hold off. But I’m so tired. I’m so tired of keeping all this in. I want it over. I want her to confess, and she never will. She never will. Until the day she dies, if I brought her all of my sorrow, and laid it at her feet, she would say she didn’t know it was happening. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, and all the steps she took to keep me safe. I don’t have love and hate for her in equal measure anymore. I only have anger that threatens to consume me if I think on this too long, and so I push it away. Because I don’t know what to do with her. And so she sits, my Moon, waxing and waning; always we orbit around each other, and never shall we rest.

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