Memoir: Medium

Medium.

How long has it been, since I was a Medium? I think it’s been at least twenty years. When I was three years old, my mother gave me a baked potato for dinner. I asked for butter. She told me we didn’t have any. I complained. I wanted butter! She explained to me that we were poor, we didn’t have money to buy butter. She said someday we would have more money and then I could have all the butter I wanted. She told me to use salt instead.

I have spent my life avoiding having that happen again. Piling on the butter. Eating like every meal is my last chance to have whatever it is we are having. Eating when I’m not hungry. Eating when I’m already full. Eating fast, and eating the last thing I do before going to sleep. Once I start eating, I keep eating. More than once, I have eaten myself sick.

At forty pounds overweight, my clothes don’t fit, my knees hurt, my self-esteem is shot. And all this to satisfy a three year old who didn’t get what she wanted. With all the formidable determination of a three year old, I have never let that happen again. It became a habit, a lifestyle, a compulsion.

What would it be like to be free of that? Maybe it’s time to find out.

Signed,

Extra Large

Memoir: Letter to a Nun

I never understood why your face was always bright red. Your cheeks were perennially flushed, as if you were really excited about something. But the rest of you was hidden in the black and white, starch and folds of your nun's habit. The beaded crucifix clinked and jangled against your chest as you moved about, always seeming to be in a hurry, always rushing to catch up. We never knew with what.

You were a small, round, swirling tornado that never touched ground, not quite connecting with us in the real world of the concrete and asphalt of our school yard, inside the six foot tall cyclone fence. When we were inside it, we minded you, because you were so quick to swing the yardstick. Or leave an impression of your fingers on our cheeks.

But all I ever learned from you was how to duck.

Journal: Troubled dreams

Today a bomb exploded in a crowded marketplace, a mudslide buried an entire village, a child died of hunger, someone fired a gun into a crowd of strangers, a teenager committed suicide, an old woman died alone, somebody beat a little boy to death, a ferry sank and somebody shot a polar bear for no reason. The paper says the oceans are going to rise. A whole lot of people told a whole lot of lies. Last night I had a terrifying dream. A great hairy beast took a swipe at me. I called out in my sleep. My heart beat wildly. A far off voice said, "It's alright you're dreaming."

Memoir: Boxes

I started keeping a journal during college. It seemed like everyone was doing it. Keeping a journal was one component of self-discovery, and self-discovery was an epidemic in New York City in the 1970’s. Coming off of the oppositional energy of the 60’s, we turned creative in the 70’s. We were inventing our world. I wrote and wrote, carrying my notebook everywhere I went and dedicating large blocks of time daily to contemplation and self-expression.

I valued my own views, and wrote them down. I trusted my instincts and insights. I respected my own mind and challenged myself to think deeply and clearly, and to come to defensible conclusions. It seemed there was an endless supply of issues to sort out, experiences to be weighed in on, positions to be taken, choices to be made. All this mental activity found its way to the juncture of pen and paper. Words filled the pages and the pages filled the books and binders and before long I’d filled many boxes with my journalings.

When I occasionally reviewed some of what I had written down, I was struck with the clarity of my own thinking, the uniqueness of my voice and the freshness of my descriptions and images. I discovered myself as a writer in those pages and they became precious to me.

So when I packed up to leave New York, I carefully boxed up my writings. I filled eight boxes and put them in storage, planning to send for them once I was settled on the west coast. I entrusted them into the safe keeping of a friend of a friend, who owned a moving company and promised me they would be safe and sound in his warehouse until I called for them.

The boxes were marked clearly, “Journals and Writing.” A year passed. I found a place to live in L.A., and flew back to New York to tie up my loose ends. When I got to the warehouse to gather my eight boxes of writing, I found the boxes were open. The contents were disheveled, and scattered on the floor. My papers were overflowing from every box. It was worse than disorderly. I stood there a moment in shock.

Then it hit me. My writings had been stored there so long that they were considered abandoned. The boxes had been raided, if only for some momentary entertainment. Or maybe the prospect of reading a single woman’s diaries was just too irresistible to pass up. I stood there staring at this personal violation and I remember the blood rushing hot to my cheeks and blazing up my neck. My ears were on fire, and I hesitated to turn around and make eye contact with the half dozen or so men who I knew were watching quietly from behind me.

I started picking up my papers and putting them back into the open boxes. My mind took inventory. How many intimate moments had I described in my writings? How much had I exposed myself to these strangers? And what was left now of my dignity? When I finally got up the courage to turn around and look at those men, the owner was watching me. “I don’t know who did it,” he said. And then, “I’m really sorry.” I nodded and asked for some packing tape. “No problem,” he said. I remember how it felt like bandaging a wound. But even after I had them all boxed up again, I still felt naked and exposed. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I carried the boxes out to the street and hailed a cab, and only as I drove away down that crowded side street in midtown, did my sense of integrity begin to return.