WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 3 : Buttercup)

 WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 3 : Buttercup)

Petunia is dead. Daffodil is dead. 

Thinking about Daffy and her 'sex positive' feminism, I thought about one other friend of sorts from those days when it didn't take a whole lot to think someone was a friend, a victim : Buttercup.

She sat near me in biology II class. She was a sweet little butterball  - yes, sorry, it's true - with sparkly blue eyes and a simple goodness to her. While, perhaps oddly, I don't recall being in any academic high school class with Petunia or Daffodil (other than the previously mentioned wood shop), which makes me wonder if they were perhaps not in College Prep like me, but in secretarial, or general studies or, well, some form of tech school instead of high school***, Buttercup was for sure as least as smart as me or she would not have been in that class sitting next to me.  

I got a B without studying because I never studied. I remember only one incident in that class, a lecture about protein. I pulled my hairbrush from my purse, harvested some of my hair out of it, and threw the hair into some solution that the teacher had. The solution and the hair all turned bright yellow. ... Wow! *****

Buttercup and me weren't especially chatty in class. Rather, we had empathy. We were bored and sulked together.

But whatever empathy there was as we got through biology class together wasn't enough. Because of what happened sometime that spring as the earth warmed after the thaw and we finished tests that proved that we listened to the lectures and planned to get the hell out of there for the summer. Buttercup came back for junior year quietly pregnant.

Actually, there were pregnant girls everywhere. It seemed there was a pregnant girl on every street. Girls that were careless students were pregnant. Girls that were good students were pregnant. Usually they dropped out of school, or were sent away, or sometimes parents would arrange abortions. If you were as observant and listened well like me you would know:

There was the poor stuttering girl who took six months to afford a trip out of state on a Greyhound bus, a girl who had probably been raped by an old man, to have an abortion all alone. There were rumors that she was into witchcraft.

There was the clever girl who managed to fool her mother long enough that her mother could not insist she have an abortion. She told me what she'd done, her mother suspecting and demanding proof she was not, what proof she had given, and how angry her mother was with her and how the baby had been taken away from her, how much she wanted to keep it, how depressed she felt. She kept her head down on the desktop and failed to do her homework.

My mother must have gotten wind of the way things were though she was not part of the gossip network. (The Avon Lady, the biggest gossip there was, my mother would not even buy from.) One day I came home from school and as I passed her on my way to my room she said, "Don't be bringing any babies home for me to raise. You get pregnant, you'll pack your bags and move out." 

She had not spent five minutes talking to me about the so called facts of life.

Buttercup, like many of us, had nothing to do and nowhere to go when we were not in school. For boys who were interested, talented - skilled, and had a modicum of financial sponsorship, there were sports. Other than volleyball, which was certainly not for everyone, there were no sports for girls who had not made it onto Drill Team or Cheerleading, neither of which were actually considered sports.  

So, like anyone bored and broke might, Buttercup had made the most of her surroundings. Buttercup had taken a walk in the woods with a boy. It might have been into a hollow. It might have been near the dump. It might have been in a colonial era ruin or one of the old Underground Railroad houses, or near the closed mines. And the boy was black and Buttercup was white.

Her parents had not sent her away. She still took the orange school bus to school. She had special permission to use the girls bathroom whenever she wanted or needed to and to skip out of any classes if she felt sick. Her natural plumpness hid her pregnancy for some time, and then, I'd find her posing, looking out over the football field, into the yonder, watching for hawks that might circle, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the day that she would split in two.

The sparkle in her blue eyes was out. She had taken up smoking and no one told her not to. She lingered in the girls bathroom, smoking. She would smile my way and I'd say hello. But I knew and she knew I knew. Without ever saying a word.

Christmas came. School Break. Back to school in January, sitting in study hall, some snotty girls came over to my table just to tell me that they had heard that Buttercup, hollowed out, had an abortion. An abortion was barely legal and was considered horrible sin. This was a condemnation. Especially for a Roman Catholic.

She was sitting by herself across the room.

I found myself hurling words back at them, "You had better not let Buttercup hear you say that. It would really hurt her!"

They scurried away.

All was not well. Buttercup's parents had conspired with a doctor to have her induced early and she gave birth to a premie before the New Year. She came back to school in a state of shock, new to every form of pain and without any sense of a future. They had the newborn taken away before she could hold it. She wasn't speaking to me or not speaking to me. Was it a girl or boy? She was less likely to talk than ever.  And it seemed as if from then on, absolutely no one was supposed to talk about it.

In recent years, with an emphasis on adopted children and birth parents finding each other, I've thought of Buttercup, wondering if her child survived into adulthood and had ever tried to find her, and what that could've meant to her.

I'd seen her once since high school. I'd gone to a flea market at an old drive-in theater and had seen her with her parents, trailing after them like a duckling. She walked by me, smoking. We made eye contact and smiled mutually, but she we didn't find each other after that to ask how's life?

And so, yes I did, I looked up Buttercup on the Internet, just as I had Petunia, and Daffodil.

Buttercup had also died. Cancer.

She had died a few years ago and if you read that obituary, you would know she was a maiden. Her obituary mentioned no husband, no children, only that she was a sports fan and that she had worked the same job - a little job - her entire adult life. I couldn't imagine how it had been for all those years, getting up Monday through Friday and going to the very same company and the very same job, in the very same town, until you died. I also knew that kind of loyalty to a company or a company to an employee was not something most people experienced - not anymore! What was it like to actually live close to where you went to high school for the rest of your life? Because when I was in high school I was raring to get out of there and once I graduated I never looked back. School was just something I had to do. I'd never ever even, though all those forced pep rallies, learned the school song. What was it like to continue to live with one's parents as an adult in the same house one had always lived in? Had she ever moved out? And then maybe moved back in?

I wondered if Buttercup had ever had a real love affair, if her family had ever forgiven her, if she was burdened by what had happened when she was sixteen for the rest of her life. Had I secretly had greater expectations of her?

Buttercup, and all those pregnant girls, had effected me profoundly. Without saying a word they had spoken to me far more than my mother ever had. I knew I could not become one of them, not only because of the threat my mother had made that one day when I came home from school, but because I myself could not cope with anything to do with unplanned pregnancy. I would never have wanted to have to choose nor would I have wanted to have no choice in the matter.

And when I think back to those days, when a girl had to sneak for contraception, when a teacher could loose her job for telling girls about using condoms to avoid unwanted pregnancy, when abortion cost way more than most girls earned as minimum wage workers - a time I'd hoped was left in the ignorant past - that girls and women in some states have had the choice taken from them, angers and upsets me.

But as the new year began, as I learned that I'd outlived three women who had been my life young, who had influenced my way of thinking, my way of being, for better or worse, I also thought about how one never knows what challenges one will experience alive. 

Oh Petunia, Daffodil, and Buttercup!

Damn it!

C 2026 Christine Trzyna

***Or many accelerated program, but then almost all the students who were in that program were going to college on scholarships.

Just a note. Based on some research into Petunia's four marriages and divorces before she died at 40, it would seem she got over her racism.

***** I also learned that the biology teacher had also recently died. He'd had a teaching career of about three decades and then had a second career. I didn't recognize him in the photo that had been posted.

WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 2 : Daffodil)

 WHY CAN'T I CRY?  (Part 2: Daffodil)

I tell my best friend about Petunia and her blue Cleopatra eye shadow, all the way up to her plucked eyebrows. He comments that I'm wearing nail polish.

The scene where we girls walked to the movie theater for old Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin movie matinees, for which I can't remember a single title or plot, makes him smile. He too recalls going to the matinees with a few quarters in hand.

I tell him the theater was in the crook of a two lane road not far from the mines, which were long ago closed up, but it must have been opened there for the miner's entertainment back in the 1920's.  And maybe there had once been a stage.  I heard that years later it had been converted into a dancing school where local girls who aspired to be on drill team started early to learn to twirl batons. I describe the territory; the mission churches, the creek, a graveyard with colonial burials in the woods, overgrown. There's flooding in the spring.  A railroad trestle high above.  All of these childhood-quaint experiences, these people - their attitudes, all of them would soon enough become worthy of escape.  

I'm not especially sentimental. 

I tell him that I don't know what compelled me, but that after discovering that Pauly and Petunia were dead, that they had died years ago and I sensed tragedy, I decided to look on the Internet to see how Daffodil was doing; Daffy who had elected to go to electronics tech school right out of high school and was one of the few other girls who identified as a feminist or had feminist leanings. Daffy, who I'd defended when Petunia talked against her that last phone call.

Daffy had said, when we were teens, that she was just being practical. She had already told her boyfriend-fiancée that after she finished tech school they'd see who was making more money. Who was making the least was going to have to stay home to raise the children. Word was that some big companies, sans a single woman employee, were making women who graduated from electronics school higher starter-job offers than the men.

 An obituary for Daffy that included her married and maiden name came up quickly on the internet. She had died early December! Recently! Whomever wrote that obituary had no sense of artistry. It said simply Daffy died. I got the impression she had just one day dropped.

She had married - young - and stuck with it - no divorce! She'd had children. She'd become a grandmother! There was no mention of her having worked at any particular job, company, or a career. Nor was she called a 'home-maker.' Apparently she had taken up golfing. Golfing?! Suddenly I imagined her as a corporate wife, the member of a country club, having concluded her job of raising her children. She'd moved further into the country. She'd left a husband behind. 

There was one sentence that gave a clue to her personality. It said she always told funny stories.  She had! I was so glad to know that was a lifelong characteristic. There was a photo of her with her same wolfie smile I remembered, her hair a little spiked and her eyes full of life.  

Bit by bit my memories of Daffy bubbled up. I wonder if she ever told her daughters what it was to live when we were young.

She'd been one of the very few girl-teens to actually buy one when a Hope Chest manufacturer came around to sell big wooden chests with lids. If you're too modern to know, a Hope Chest was supposed to be filled with the things a young bride would need in her marriage, like bath towels and bedsheets, pots and utensils, things you might be gifted at a bridal shower instead. I'd never heard of one before that or contemplated using my teen years, or minimal baby-sitting money or minimum-wage cashiering income, to fill one with things I might need if I ever married, so I thought a Hope Chest as antiquated and seriously not feminist. 

Daffy had showed me the Hope Chest catalogue in wood shop. We'd bonded a bit while we crafted wooden jewelry boxes. Hers came out beautifully and made with pride. I could actually imagine her using it. Mine, I sanded into oblivion but I got an A for effort and took it home where it soon disappeared into the basement. Our youngish teacher acted as if he were both blessed to have a couple girls in his class as well as a bit miffed about how to deal with us.

While we figured out how to use grids to copy or enlarge comics from magazines and avoided buzz-sawing our fingers off, Daffy was open about her relationship with her boyfriend. Where they were meeting to have sex, she never said, but she had already bought faux leopard skin lingerie and that had to be difficult to get in and out of in a parked car.  And she once brought a sexy magazine to show me full of naked men with erections. What the hell!

But there we were, interpreting our reality as well as our idealism; feminism was also about being able to have sex as freely without guilt as boys did. If one wanted to.

Daffy, unlike other girls in high school who hadn't opted out, took charge of her sexuality. She determined that she needed to get on the contraceptive pill. To do this she had to get her teachers to agree that they would not report her as missing from school.

Here is a scene from my health class in high school: Our teacher takes roll. She says she has a film to show us. She has already taped over the window in the classroom door with cardboard.  She locks the door. Somberly she tells us girls, "If any one of you tell on me that I showed you this film, I could loose my job." She proceeds to show us a short black and white film that reveals the existence and use of condoms.

Meanwhile, a good number of boys, especially the school athletes, had been told by their fathers to always carry one of these. I heard they did, in tight jeans pockets and hot and messy glove-compartments in used cars.  Always ready these boys were supposed to be. But girls? Girls could still get called whores if they had sex. Who did or did not have sex was always speculation - gossip. Even some girls called other girls whores. Only the cheerleaders could have sex and not get called names, because if they were "going' with someone, they already wore a promise ring; the heck with class rings. Star sapphires were popular.

No one told on the health class teacher for showing us the film.

Every teacher Daffy asked cooperated to hide her absence from school. Everyone knew the only place to go was Planned Parenthood and to get to the closest clinic was going to be a long journey. In fact, it was going to be a whole long day to get there and back.

Daffy and her boyfriend, her fiancée, the man she did marry and stick with till death parted them, were each others very first, only, and forever lovers. Remarkable!

Her boyfriend was a volunteer fireman back in the day. 

We had a friend who lived in a hollow with her grandmother, a girl of Native American heritage. Their old house burned down. I never asked where the girl and her grandmother were going to go to live, what they would do, but I turned up when Daffy's boyfriend and the other volunteer fireman brought one of the red firetrucks, filled up with water, and parked it visibly from a two lane. We held up car wash signs on the main road. We girls washed cars all day in exchange for donations to give the homeless girl so she could buy some clothes and personal items.

We were all wearing short-shorts, which we called hot pants. We had no idea how hot we were.

While Daffodil went to electronics school, using public transportation, I once in a while saw her and sat with her.  I was dating one of her classmates.  She was getting a lot of attention being one of the very few girls who actually went to the school. She was gently and jokingly being sexually harassed, but she seemed to be enjoying it. One day, she said, my boyfriend had followed her down the school hallway with his face very close to her rear end. I was appalled. She thought it was funny. The way she told that story!

He wouldn't have told me he did such things to be funny and popular with the other guys. He wouldn't have pulled such a thing around me. As she laughed aloud and told it, I said, "Really?" 

But then there was the time she accused me of flirting with her boyfriend. She was red faced mad and I was shocked that she would think so. To this day I can't remember what might have been said or where because I spent no time with them as a couple at all. More likely it was he who said something complimentary about me to her, to make her jealous. And oh, I hate the type that say or do things just to make you jealous. I thought for a moment and said, "Maybe he just likes girls with ski-noses?!"

She broke out in a wild laugh and that was the end of that. A relief!

There was also time that she explained about getting credit and buying a house. This had never been explained to me. I took mental notes but years later when I first applied for MasterCard or Visa I was turned down.

I can't remember if I was invited to Daffy's wedding or not. Maybe I was invited to a shower? I might not have been. I'm sure I did not attend. But I do remember that I bought a set of six antique hand painted drinking glasses at an antiques show and got them to her somehow. I don't recall a thank you note but maybe she already had a set in her Hope Chest.

Daffodil was just one of my friends who disappeared into marriage.

Disappeared...

C 2026 Christine Trzyna

WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 1 : Petunia)

WHY CAN'T I CRY?  (Part 1: Petunia)

A sense of doom to start the new year overcomes me, not helped by a hellish cold - a face of pain - that has had me laying around for a couple days, creaking, and a partial loss of my voice.

I'm in this sad state because I revisited the past.

It began without intent. I was sitting with my best friend talking about this and that. This was between Christmas and the New Year. We had done a few interesting things to celebrate Christmas but it's not religious for us - a neighborhood Christmas light show - a choir performance at a liberal church - a tour of a historical Victorian house, every room dressed in holiday glitz. New Years, and future-thought, was replaced by one-day-at-a-time. 

For some reason I thought of someone I had not in years, a memory that came to the surface like a bubble making it to the surface in the La Brea Tar Pit. Someone from my early teens. Let's call him Pauly. He was a neighbor kid who liked our yard because he was looking for slimy snails - interesting insects - and salamanders. I saw him in my minds eye in our yard searching around the slab wall and heard him shout salamanders ! I expected that this neighbor kid must have gone on to study these creatures. Maybe he was a famous scientist or taught at a college.

I went on the Internet to look him up. This looking for people from my past is something I almost never do. But I did.

Years ago he had died at the age of twenty! Of what? Who knew? Of course I imagined a car crash first, a drug overdose second, but who knows. His father had died more recently of very old age. Pauly was named in the obituary. There was his father's tombstone and on it were affixed two other plaques: his and - his sisters. Petunia had also died!

This - the death of his sister years ago - was also a surprise. As a child, as a pubescent girl, I had once considered her a best friend. She had died at 40.

I thought of us as girls, how in the short story I once wrote about her I described her spending hours picking at her zits, applying Ponds skin creme from the drug store, and powdering over her overworked skin. I saw Petunia once again in my mind, plucking at her eyebrows, fashioning her dark hair into a greasy mop. Very early on she had a strong sense of being feminine and was determined to be a diva. She had a bedroom that was stereotypically pink, with a canopy bed, and a dresser - and a mirror - all ruffly - which I could not relate to or desire. 

I can't recall how it was that we two girls had started a friendship, other than that she was kid in my grade school and they went to our church. I don't recall ever seeing her or her family in church but maybe I wasn't that observant. Had she invited me over first? Was it our mothers that thought playing together might be good?

Besides Pauly, there was a third, younger brother, who was probably an 'idiot savant', but who knew such diagnosis or labels back then? He spent hours every day listening to rock and roll records and playing the drum parts. His siblings were in awe of him because they said he only had to listen to a 45 rpm once and he had it down. He'd been sent to a special school and her mother seemed to have a great sense of shame about this. There were rumors that she would not leave the house. 

Now, if you're stuck in a tiny apartment and won't leave, that can be bad, unless you're intentionally sequestering yourself to get into flow and stay there for days on end, which I've done. This was a house with a good yard, and she went out in it, so perhaps it was that she would not leave the property. There were stories that this mother had to see a psychiatrist, and that Petunia's father would drive her there, and that this mother would wear a trench coat and big dark Jackie Kennedy type sunglasses, and kept her head down. Within the household, however, this woman was in charge.

She was not one of my favorite mothers, though I willed to like her. 

One day when I was over there playing, Petunia's mother asked me if I liked the Monkees or the Beatles. Naturally I said the Beatles. Petunia's mother screamed at me. She told me off and she was not my mother! Something to do with that John Lennon had said the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ. I was unaware that he had ever said such a thing. I could not defend him. What did a grade-schooler know about such things - or care? It may be my imagination, but if I recall Petunia's mother broke a vinyl record or two in half in front of us. She threatened to tell my mother! She scared me.

I didn't tell on Petunia's mother when I got home. What would my mother, who didn't like rock and roll at all, say, if Petunia's mother called mine? Luckily, from that time on, when I was over there, it seemed her mother was busy - setting up records for the younger son to drum to, making dinner, and watching the clock to tell me it was time to go because they were going to have their dinner. 

One time Petunia and me and her salamander-loving brother walked all the way to the matinee at an movie theater that ran old Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin romps on Saturdays. This was quite an adventurous walk for us although it was probably no more than a mile. How we knew what was too risqué or not, I have no idea, but at one of these movies there was a scene that was too sexy. What if our mothers found out? Petunia raced to cover Pauly's eyes.

I think she went to another school by the fifth grade. This was because she wanted to learn to play the clarinet and our school had no music - no instrument instructions - no band. It seems to me that ours became a friendship that picked up over the summers, since we were no longer in the same school. 

They got a blue aluminum and turquoise plastic-lined, above ground pool, at the time when an above ground pool was key to having a social life and kids could compete about how deep; another of our friends had one that had five foot walls but had been dug down into the earth to be six feet deep. (There as also a handsome older brother over there that could dunk you, if you weren't careful about getting out of his way as he showed off and dove in.) Those were the days. No one was worried about skin cancer. The deeper the tan the better. Coppertone. Baby Oil. Bare skin and the sun. 

We had such vigor.

I was invited to spend afternoons in Petunia's family above-ground pool maybe once a week one summer. Other kids came too, sometimes. When we tired of other games, we'd go walking round and round in the water in a group, clockwise or counterclockwise, to make the water whirlpool until it started splashing out over the sides and then refill it with the hose. We did not have a pool so I could not invite Petunia to mine, but I did invite her to run through our lawn sprinkler. I know how pathetic that must sound, but Petunia actually did show up! Pauly would show up too and continue his never-ending search for slimy snails, interesting insects, or salamanders! This was good healthy fun, no doubt about it. And when we took a break to lay out and tan, sometimes we still played with Barbie dolls.

I had a Barbie. Petunia had Barbie, Midge, and Skipper. And it was clear that she could and would dominate any play-action we had with these dolls. After all, it was her house, she had three dolls, and she had lots of clothes for her dolls. (Where was Ken? The convertible car?  The house?) I didn't mind really. I'd never been all that into dolls but to not have a Barbie at all was to be totally socially outcast. Then one day, while my borrowed Midge gave in to Petunia's Barbie, Petunia asked me if my mother had told me yet that pretty soon we were going to bleed. She said it was how women had babies. My mother hadn't said a word. I didn't believe Petunia though I also didn't suspect her of lying or having any motivation. When I admitted I had not been told, she made me promise not to tell, that every girl's mother had to tell her about it. I walked home feeling sober, feeling the implication that my mother had decided I just wasn't mature enough yet to know such dark secrets. Then, quickly, I forgot about it. 

Petunia continued her domination of me in other ways. I didn't quite understand it that way at the time but that's what it was. One day, instead of going to the matinee at the old theater, which was probably closed by then, she asked me to walk to the store with her. When we got there she picked up a box of sanitary napkins from the shelf, handed me the money, and expected me to be the one to actually buy these, saving her some, shall we say? embarrassment. I understood that she, unlike me, had started to bleed.

For some reason, my mother took to Petunia in a way that her mother had not taken to me. Maybe Petunia was playing up to her. It seemed to me Petunia was being treated and talked to my my mother as if she were more mature than me! Was she my friend or my mothers? Everything about Petunia was more mature than me.

She was in her high school marching band with her clarinet. She was proud of her white boots with the pom poms. She was often at band practice - busy. She said that band taught people how to get along with each other; she made other friends. The division between the two of us was widening. While I might not have been as mature as Petunia, who was doing blue eye-shadow like Liz Taylor as Cleopatra, I was becoming more sophisticated.

I realized that she, and Pauly, were racist. I might not have said so, when they called other people "niggers," but I inwardly cringed. I never did understand how racism could be acceptable within Christianity.

More important to me than racism was feminism. I was becoming aware at a time when to be so was to be openly mocked by my classmates - both male and female - and by some relatives. Their understanding of feminism was so banal. It was in their heads that to be a feminist was to hate men, to be quite possibly 'lesbian' and also the height of stupidity. I would grow up and out of it, that's what they thought.  All it would take, it was implied, was meeting 'someone' (i.e. the man I wanted to marry) and I would give it all up and return to the way things in the world really were. What did I know? I hadn't fallen in love yet. I was too young. 

Petunia made it clear she was no "woman's libber."  Just as she ridiculed 'niggers' she sneered at women who wanted equality with men. 

Even then, as limited as my experience and understanding was, having not lived as a full adult yet, I knew that it was all more complicated than that.

In my high school, there was one other female teen in my class besides me who took wood shop and graphic arts which had for years only been allowed to be taken by male students; let's call her Daffodil, Daffy for short, because she had such a good, fun, sense of humor, and she will soon become part of the story. Daffy had a mother who had to raise her and her sisters alone because her father was a merchant marine and only came home when the lakes froze over. Clearly Daffy had given some thought about going into so called "men's work."

At some point, when we were about fifteen, I visited Petunia in her fluffy pink bedroom. For Christmas yet, she had gotten a Ouiji board, a board with letters, numbers, and symbols and a movable planchette that was supposed to move with mysterious means across the board, to give answers to serious questions, about love, for instance. I'd never heard of or seen such a board, but when she asked me to join her, placing our hands together on the planchette and asked to summon a spirit, I tried it. Of the occult, I must say, it was popular, and Petunia was not the only teen into some aspect of it at the time, but when the planchette spelled out "Jesus Christ," I felt scared. 

At sixteen, my first job as a minimum wage worker- cashier, a seasonal job, and other activities and school took up almost all my time. There were a couple teen boys from other schools who worked at the same store. I dated one of them, not seriously, in the end briefly, but enough to think that meant that a girlfriend (a good one, the only kind) would respect that. And one day as I cashiered, here came Petunia, and her latest side-kick girlfriend, targeting this kid for flirtation, astutely sneaking around me. I saw them. I got it, Petunia was after a prom date and she had somehow also met him - or he her - and she was targeting him. The diva in her was going to get what she wanted. This might have been enough for me to be, sadly, wearily, wary of her, but it was made worse when she showed up to gift me, something she had never done.

She gave me a black candle. It smelled of liquorish. I put the unexpected gift in my bedroom. Bad things started to happen. I thought she had put a curse on me  - that candle, and after lighting it a few times, I got rid of it. Was that just my imagination, running away with me?   

Why waste herself on hating me for no good reason, when she could bless herself with a love spell?

Senior year, other people told me that Petunia had run away from home. There was a conflict, especially with her mother. Petunia had lost respect for her mother or her mother had lost respect for her and was abusive to her. Years after the incident when her mother had told me off over John Lennon's statement, I believed it and pitied her. Petunia had said she was going to have children because if someone as ridiculous as her mother could give birth, she could. I also thought she was lucky to have her side-kick' and the side-kick's family who said she could live with them and finish high school.

And suddenly, soon after, Petunia and her family, her mother, her father, her and her brothers, united, had moved to another state. Up and went.

But some time before they left, there was a phone call. I probably didn't realize it would be the last time we spoke. She went on with me about the stupidity of feminists and mentioned Daffy, who I had taken to, and who was going to tech school for electronics after graduation. I heard myself say something I meant but I regret. I told Petunia that she could lay off Daffy who as least respected herself! I could tell I upset her.

I had finally said something to her that also defined where I stood. Besides her lack of respect for our friendship that had gone as far back as Barbie dolls and swimming pool summers, I also thought sneaking around me to get herself a prom date as she had was a lack of self-respect.

(Her target did go to the prom - three different schools - three different girls. Not her. Not me. And I didn't care.)

About a year after high school graduation, I heard that upon arrival in the other, southern, state, the eighteen year old Petunia had been a big hit with the men, that she'd been sought after. She had met and married a horse jockey so she must have been going to the races!  But then I heard he had beaten her and so she had divorced. Of course, she didn't deserve that. She would not, in time, be the only friend of mine who experienced domestic violence in marriage.

But now, circa January 2026, on the Internet, knowing that there are errors on the Internet, I learned that Petunia had died at 40, that she'd died divorced because her body was in with her father and her brother, and worse, that Petunia had been married four times and had not one child before whatever happened happened. In my gut I thought, perhaps unfairly, she had taken her own life.

From this distance I still think of her as trapped in pre-feminist thinking. Her mother's advice that she'd relayed to me, such as "When you go on a date to play miniature golf, always let the boy win" was about manipulation, about taking on a persona instead of being real. But was it her mother's advice? Because the truth is her mother was no diva herself. She was like any other housewife/ stay-at-home mom you could meet. Wearing slacks and a tennis shoes and a casual top, worried that her thighs were too big, thinking about if dinner should be home-made spaghetti with meat sauce or opening a couple cans of Campbells soup. 

Petunia once told me that when I went on a date, I should not get in or out of a car by myself. I was to stand there or sit there and wait for a man to open doors for me. Such gentlemanly behavior was supposed to show respect for me as a woman, to acknowledge the differences biologically between genders. 

If I'd listened to her, I'd probably still be waiting.

C 2026 Christine Trzyna

 

ALL THE OTHER REINDEER USED TO LAUGH

 

I don't know where this one came from.... but it appeals to my dark sense of humor....

SINGING: EXPERIENCE FIFTY : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

I'm not into karaoke but friends are.  When they ask me to join in I say, "I only sing in the shower when no one is home and somebody is always home."  What about you?  Are you a natural singer? A trained voice? Can you stay on key when you sing Happy Birthday? Tell us about you singing.

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

DAVID BYRNE : TINY DESK CONCERT

 

YOUTUBE HAS NO SHAME (WHEN YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC IS BEING USED FOR COMMERCIALS FOR PHARMACEUTICALS IT'S ALL BAD) DON'T READ THIS IF YOU 'RE SQUEAMISH!

YOUTUBE HAS NO SHAME  

(WHEN YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC IS BEING USED FOR COMMERCIALS FOR  PHARMACEUTICALS IT'S ALL BAD)

 DON'T READ THIS IF YOU 'RE SQUEAMISH!

Have YOU noticed that the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles (these two the early music which I believe is still owned by Allen Klein's company), and hell, not just music from the 1960's but even some music from the 1980's (which I suppose does qualify as Oldies) is being used to advertise products such as whisky and pharmaceuticals? 

Sometimes I think an AI spy is looking to see who is watching what in a room. I especially hate the soothing voice overs that suggest the side effects that might be worth it to solve the maladies of aging, such as the appliance that stops the ruination of your (rear-end) skin from leaky bladder and runs off urine into a receptacle.

I think, OK, the guitar heroes and the owners of the musical intellectual properties are selling their catalogs (or at least a song or two) and are out of the control and so the music is being sold and used for these purposes. The guitar gods, the singers and songwriters, are facing their own mortality and want things to be more simple for their heirs, I get it, but it wouldn't just be Jim Morrison rolling in his grave over in Paris over the use of Light My Fire, because the energy of rock and roll is being used to suggest we medicate the aged with prescription substances. Would someone who liked whisky too much (or make it through a serious drug addiction) really want their music behind an ad for liquor?

It's assumed that if you love this music you must be old, old enough to be on at least one, maybe a dozen prescription medications... But if you like to be more natural in your approach to health there are advertisers waiting for you too.

Worse are the ads that come up on YouTube, which assume that if you love old Soul music, which I do, then you need pills for erectile dysfunction, and even worse than that, worse that some modern "snake oil" remedies that suggest that you will loose weight drinking some sort of pink salt mixture or simply warm water...  (If drinking warm water was the cure, surely this would have been discovered eons ago.)  ...  Let's just say that almost every food that exists is bad for you and go from there. And that it's assumed by what I listen to that I have a penis that isn't working and obese.

Even worse than that are ads coming up on videos, including podcasts, telling you how to conquer not just DIABETES but also STUCK POOP!  (One states no, it's not about SUGAR, another that it's not about  FIBER. These "experts" who are selling products are in conflict with each other by the way.)

It happened slowly that such ads showed up on GOOD SONGS WITH LOVING and ROMANTIC LYRICS. (Not, as my buddy says, more appropriately on "Rap Crap.") But now, it seems I'm getting one ad after another and some of them are gross and graphic. I swear to you that one of these commercials actually suggests how many times one would normally wipe, and another showed what looked like poop streaks on someone's underwear. Like I really want to have to experience such a commercial simply because I was thinking of The Temptations or - more locally - Pepe Marquez!

What can a YOUTUBE VIDEO POSTER DO?

First of all, I resent the way that these commercials ruin my experience, take the pleasure out of listening by inducing anxiety and worry. I resent being pushed to pay for a listen by accepting interruption. I have never bought a single product thrust upon me and have bookmarked very few for future consideration.

Who does profit from these ads?

I suggest that if you post on YouTube, that you say NO to having ads on your video... If you have enough hits, you should still be PAID BY YOUTUBE as promised. The videos I post here are acceptable to me because I did not encounter a commercial. I hope when a reader listens to them here they contribute to the hits.

I will continue my policy of not posting videos that have commercials on this blog. YouTube would not exist if it were not for the way people early-on decided to CONTRIBUTE TO IT. People spent many hours creating content as volunteers. I seek out those contributors who believe in this COLLABORATIVE EFFORT. Some of us did that at no charge to Google or the Universe in the spirit of NON PROFIT SHARING for years, but YOUTUBE is worth millions... And, sadly, you may here there is no such thing as a free lunch, but there is because you served it!

C 2025 Christine Trzyna  All Rights Reserved Including Internet and International Rights.

HALAH : MAZZY STAR

GOODNESS OF HEART : EXPERIENCE FORTY-NINE: CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

In my series of snack endorsements, I write that I was not PAID to say it. Well, being paid, rather than volunteering or doing something that one could be paid for but one does for experience or as an internship, or out of the goodness of their heart is ... different. 

What have you done out of the goodness of your heart, without expectation of pay, reward, or credit ?

When and why? (Be honest!) 

(Remember that you never have to show anyone what you wrote about this or any other subject in this writing workshop!)

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

GRAHAM WALLAS on CREATIVITY : WORTH REPEATING

GRAHAM WALLAS on CREATIVITY

"According to Graham Wallas, a sort of re-ordering process takes place in the brain during creativity, which he calls incubation. A creative person develops interest in a particular subject, gathers supporting material, and studies everything possibly related to it. He calls this first stage preparation. After some time, the accumulated material reaches a boiling point and something incomprehensible goes on during the period of incubation that forms a prelude to the next stage, illumination. In three stages - preparation, incubation, and illumination - the creative person receives a new insight and finds a solution to the problem, or can rearrange the accumulated material to put it under an all embracing principle."

As mentioned in THE KUNDALINI BOOK OF LIVING AND DYINIG
Gateway to Higher Consciousness
Ravindra Kumar and Jytte Kumar Larsen

Worth Repeating:  First posted September 25, 2010

THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS TIED INTO THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

This post was triggered because someone clicked on and read my 2014 post about JULIAN ASSANGE.

***

NOTE  September 23, 2025  I followed the Julian Assange saga for YEARS and well, it seems he was allowed to go free - in his home country of Australia.  Like the Edward Snowden saga, which I also followed for years - Snowden has married and has a child but looks to be permanently in Russia - it seems these men's stories have fallen out of media interest.  

As of today, the Freedom of Speech is being challenged in the United States.  Of course it's not like the Freedom of Speech isn't tied into Freedom of Thought or overall Expression through Art, Ideas, Interpretations, and so on.

The other day I spoke with a "conservative" friend of mine about POLITICAL CARTOONING and showed him some cartoons printed in publications - even before he was President - of Thomas Jefferson. Every President is controversial to someone, some more than others.

My favorite President is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Controversial. He stepped up into the chaos of the Great Depression and found ways to put people to work and have money circulate again. 

Yes, we should be worried.

Get out there and vote. Vote those who oppose your IDEAS ABOUT HOW LIFE IS BEST LIVED - which includes, not just us as individuals with our "own" concerns but others - OUT OF OFFICE.

I know how frustrating it can be to even research who is running and what they stand for. I do it every election, especially looking into what various newspapers and organizations such as the Teachers and Women say.

***

I loath the idea of persons being assassinated for their  opinions or ideas...

AND

I do not hold the values of a Charlie Kirk...  

Never heard of the man actually, until he was assassinated. So, I find it almost unbelievable that he is being held up as a Hero of the Crazy Right Wing Conservatives.***

C 2025 Christine Trzyna

***My conservative friend seems to think there are only Crazy Left Wing Liberals, no middle of the roaders.

THE BEATLES : LIVE AT WASHINGTON D.C. 1964 THIS IS WHY THEY WERE GREAT!

The Beatles were my first "favs" and, though I rarely post videos of them and their music on this blog, I do return to them time and time again. Sometimes one of their songs comes to me. When first did I hear a Beatle's record? I think some of my older relatives had their 45s and played them... or maybe it was the hip mom of a childhood friend who lived on the same street... or my best friend in high school who used a lot of her babysitting money to buy the albums... that contributed to my fandom.

Recently a friend invited me to hear a Beatles music concert in Long Beach California at an event called First Friday. The band that played (which included one woman singer) was very good and 'a good time was had by all.'

Looking at the comments that were posted under this video... I excerpt from this one:  

@Myguitar-y2e1

No drum mics, no vocal stage monitors, no ear monitors, no guitar pedals, no backup row of instruments, ready to play in case of a broken string, only two roadies, no banks of backing vocalists, No fireworks, no smoke, no string section, no huge video screens, no spotlights or stage lighting,, No electronic guitar tuners, no synthesizers, no digital mixing board, no Guitar techs, no amp techs, no personal assistants, no make up and hair, no costumes, bodyguards, masseuses, lawyers, drivers, personal chefs…. ….. am I leaving anything out?

*****

THEY WERE TIGHT AND THEY WERE HOT...

*****

Excerpting again:

@cmwfeb65

Being able to play anywhere near in time AND in harmony, in the middle of a screaming arena, without stage monitors is miraculous. These guys were road-worn pros after a solid year of European Beatlemania, as well as a thousand gigs in noisy, crappy clubs in the previous 5 years.

*****

I note that they had to clumsily turn Ringo's drum platform, which was wobbly, but that meant they could face the audience in each direction over the time of the concert, that three of the songs they did were cover tunes, and - have we forgotten? - harmonies! And George's musicianship, especially! 

C 2025 Christine Trzyna  BlogSpot

slight edit October 9 2025