May 14, 2025

The third adult in my childhood was Lena Bristow.  She is 106 today or would be if her physical body was still with us.   I think we had a lot of interesting adults in our home, but Lena was the most consistent and had the biggest influence over my development, hands down.  She was a guardian angel placed in my life, and she claimed the same for me.

Loudest bird at the Rookery today 

We were a teenage love built from the war torn environment of our lives.  My home was filled with beauty and delight and explosions and traps.  You were lost in a life of very high expectations and unspoken shame and unreal demands. You were brought into our front door just as the building was about to blow up and we would seem to protect each other from the warring factions of both our lives.  

My mother was willing to let you in and by the time you were gone she felt you not only betrayed me but you betrayed her, too.  She was willing to treat you as a part of her litter, but she demanded honesty in return, which you didn't always give her.  But, the one thing you did do was come to me whenever I asked you to, from where ever you were,  if I could find you.  That was before cell phones.  So whenever I got that feeling of vulnerability, as though I was surrounded by quick sand, I could call you and you would come and hold me in the wreckage.  You could protect me from my own sinking feeling.  

I still get that sinking feeling, so many years since I stopped asking you to come.  All through the past 50 years I've looked for someone who would just come because I asked them too, who would remove that sinking feeling.  But there was no one.  And there was only annoyance at the idea that I thought someone should just stop whatever they were doing and come put out my internal fire. 

Today I lay down for my nap and I wondered if you would come if I asked you to.  I haven't seen you since 1979, I haven't asked for you since 1972, I rarely even think of you anymore.  But like an old addiction when that ache appears these many years later I wonder if you would come and if you would smolder the hurt.   

I now know that feeling is fight or flight, a response triggered by a trauma impulse.  I still think if I eat chocolate it will make it go away even though I never had chocolate fix it.  I now know to breathe into it, to go swim, to write a poem, but that doesn't mean I don't wonder if someone else's arms would do after all these so many years.