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 young 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 the 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 classes - no orchestra - no band - no learning an instrument. 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 girl 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 mother's? 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 backward 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 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 about the popularity of the Beatles being bigger than that of Jesus Christ, 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 not just for me but for herself.

(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 Campbell's 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

I AM I AM I AM : SEVENTEEN BRUSHES WITH DEATH by MAGGIE O'FARRELL : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

 

  Saw that this book was on the London Times best seller list, found it as bought by the Friends of the Library, and sunk right into it.

The experiences author Maggie O'Farrell relates are all causes for alarm and some it it made me think that the author had an uncommon number of incidents of death threats in her life, from a run in with a killer to the fear of her own baby's death. That said, what makes this book a best seller is the creative writing, the distinct voice, the way with words.  There is an almost visceral quality to images and the chapters are the names of body parts, Lungs, Cranium...

The short Cranium chapter is a test.  Would you think that falling in love or lust with someone was a brush with death? But that's not it.  It's that spontaneity and a certain mindlessness puts her in harms way, an arm hair away from a fast moving truck because she's concerned for a dog.  The mood of this chapter is tantalizing and so I'm going to excerpt from it.  (Note the symbolism.)  It takes place in 1998

page 151

A man and a woman are walking beside a river. The water is so slow-moving as to be almost current-less, motionless. They pause on a bridge, looking down at their reflections in the mirror-flat leaf-dinted water: he looks at hers. she looks at his.  She has been collection acorns in her pockets, greenish-brown and set aside in their cups,  and as they have walked, she has sifted them with her fingertips and ascertained that, yes, each acorn will fit only inside its own cup. No other cup will do.

The woman is me.  The man is - well, never mind.

They are talking about their situation, their conundrum. They have fallen in love, instantly, surprisingly, dizzyingly, but there are problems. There are obstacle. Other people stand in their way - other hearts, other minds, other situations.

*****

 Simply loved this book, a unique idea, carried out with the moving pacing of a drum beat.

C 2024  Christine Trzyna

The pacing is also good and 

DEATH ON THE MIND - DEATH AS THE INFORMANT - DEATH AS A REALITY

Is it the effect of a modern plague called Covid-19, or perhaps the famous people who have died since the beginning of the year ---  broadcast journalist Barbara Walters,  musicians Jeff Beck, David Crosby, Lisa Marie Presley,  Burt Bacharach ....  ?   Death is a reality of Life.  However, I don't recall the public count being what it is now  -  starting at the beginning of the year instead of the end.  (I checked a list of famous people who had died so far and admit I had not heard of most of them.)

In recent days the Turkey-Syria Earthquake - their Big One - has taken thousands of lives.Thousands more are injured and in need of medical care.  Thousands more survived but lost everything and are homeless. The smell of death hangs over in the air, while others die beneath the rubble awaiting rescue that may never come. Teams from all over the world have sent help, including a group called Samaritan's Purse, a Protestant Christian group known more for sending shoe boxes with this and that and promoting Jesus - to poor children all over the world. They sent a plane containing all that it takes to set up a field hospital.  Teams from Russia as well as China are there.  Teams with sniffer dogs from Germany. Teams from our United States... With hundreds of buildings down, every rescue is greeted with joy and often thanks to Allah.  *But Allah or whatever It's Name Is, allows these things to happen, too busy to care.  I say that humans need to stop associating natural disasters as punishment from God. Who wants to worship or live their life around such a character?

It also seems the Idaho Four murders, with Bryan Kohberger the only suspect, has not been forgotten by the media.  Of 35,000 murders in the U.S. every year, you can delete all too common gang warfare and domestic violence as interesting unless it's truly bizarre or includes a famous person.  Only a few murders are taken up by the True Crime Internet community as worthy of their every suspicion. Finally a few posters are posting why they do not believe he did it or did it alone, or do not believe he will be Found Guilty are coming up.  (I hope the Gag Order remains. I really do not want to hear from Kaylee's family lawyer. I note that while other murder victim's familys public records of arrests and divorces have been publicized no one seems to know how her family has money. It's clear that of the Four, it is her parents who do have it.)

We are obsessed with Death.

My recall may be a little fuzzy regarding Carlos Castaneda's reveals in his books, likely read by me years ago, one here and one there, but was there not some wisdom relayed to him via Don Juan or some other shaman, about Death being an Informant?  Well, if one keeps in mind that time alive is limited, it might influence one to stay focused on what one wants to accomplish. But, likely like you, I too can be interrupted by hunger, and distracted by all the things one does to stay alive, and a certain poverty of advantage. For instance, I got up and made myself a peanut butter on whole wheat bread toast sandwich just now, but rushed to eat it so I wouldn't loose my focus for this article. 

I'm writing this on Sunday morning - that is to say yesterday morning - because I'm truly beginning to think I'm starting to be aware on some level when people have passed.  I'll clarify in a moment.

I mentioned my friend who has been in stage four lung cancer for about five years, defying all predictions.  I mentioned he does not want me to be involved.  I should have clarified that he does not want me to be involved in his care not that he doesn't want me to care about him.  What happens is that most of the time when I catch up with him or see him, such as at the Christmas potluck we both attended, he says he does not want to talk and I respect that. Yet once in a while he will blurt the latest such as that his doctors said he had a month to six months, which was actually about nine months ago. I feel he does not want to feel himself to be a burden but needs to vent. When he told me that I said, "You have outlived the predictions again and again."  Based on his symptoms I did some research about lung cancer and what happens to the body in the last days.  He has those symptoms and has had them, a lack of oxygen giving his skin a mottled appearance. So what is keeping him going?  Is it Fate? Stubborness?  That he has had very strong heart ?  Fear of Death?  Something more that he was meant to do when he took on the Assignment?  Well, something is going on that is not explainable.

This is an example of my trying to use science to predict and prediction as a way of being prepared.   

On perhaps the best of the true crime podcasts, Surviving the Survivor, the host, whose mother is a Holocaust survivor, mentions this Jewish saying.  MAY THEIR MEMORY BE A BLESSING.  Just the other day I was thinking that the memories of my dog, who passed in July, are all a blessing.  She was a blessing to me from the day I got her to that last day and so often some memory of something that happened or something that she did, showing how perceptive she was, comes to me and puts a smile on my face. I can rarely say that about others I've encountered in this life who have passed or even many of those who have left my life who are still alive.

What happens is that I start thinking about someone or something that happened in my life years ago, someone who was once important in some way but who I moved on from or who moved on from me, someone I have not thought about in years, and then I find out they recently died. Could it be that as a person approaches their death they are reviewing their life and thinking of me (as well as others) and that's what I (they) pick up on?  I have to emphasize these are not people like my friend with the stage four lung cancer, but people who I would consider to have been forgotten.

A couple months ago I started thinking about a friend I had whose mom was friends with my mom. Our episode of friendship ended because of her drinking, or to be more specific, I barely ever drink and after one of her cocktails I was drunk and did not want more. She openly ridiculed me for not being willing or able to keep up with her.  (This happened on a few Friday nights in her mom's kitchen. I suppose her mom felt that at least we were not in a bar or on the road.) I had figured her parents had probably long ago passed but I found out that both of them had just recently died. My mom's friend died a few days after her husband! 

And then, about a week or so ago I started thinking about an employer I had, a husband and wife who owned a business back in the day, and what it was to work for them. They were greedy people, cooking the books while underpaying and working their employees hard. We didn't get breaks or lunch which was not legal, so we could not leave the place to even go out and make a phone call. He had been a lawyer.  If they had no spiritually driven morals, one would think at least they could obey the law. Their children were spoiled brats. Their son at 12 years old started screaming at me one day, telling me how I worked for HIM. I finally quit without another job lined up, unable to find another job while so entrapped. They acted as if we owed them and were owned by them. Though paid an unlivable wage, they resented that I quit. 

I'd started writing about that experience, not for publication, and then what the hell, I put his name in the internet, as in my mind the man still looked as he had the day I quit, and it turned out he had been buried the day before. (The obituary mentioned his law school, the firm he had worked for, the business they owned. The rotten brat son went into public heath and might have been working selflessly while independently wealthy, to provide for the poor. Requests were made for donations to a food bank!) This means that he was dying while I was writing about what it was to work for people like that.  (Obits rarely have anything bad to say about a person.)

Geeze, I said to myself, I really need to talk to someone like James Van Praagh about this! In a video this psychic medium says that when a person has their life review after death they get to feel the happiness and pleasure they gave others as well as the sadness and pain they gave others. Better or Worse,  if someone has wronged you in a way where it effects the rest of your life, they get to feel that too. Every damn thing they set in motion.

At least Van Praagh is not in the "It's All Good" mentality.

 C 2023  Christine Trzyna

Note  Feb 13th.  I have no idea why the font on this blogger is not holding firm.  The problem seems to be when I use the medium font. I just went through this post and fixed the crazy font changes.

RECONSTRUCTING THE WORLD'S OLDEST POEM: GILGAMESH - AN EPIC ABOUT THE GREAT FLOOD and THE NATURE OF HUMANITY

Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East presents - the Babylonians - the Assyrians - THE GREAT FLOOD. This poem is about 4000 years old.  Reconstruction through many long ago sun baked clay tablets, this is the story of Gods and of humanity.  The original pre-Jewish/Christian Bible, the flood was already an ancient story.

A FRIEND DIES DURING A ROUTINE MEDICAL PROCEDURE

A woman I knew who did extensive volunteer work serving hot meals to anyone who showed up, including homeless people, at her church every Sunday, has died.

On Sunday mutual friends and her minister had been trying to reach her hoping to visit her in the hospital. They weren't sure of which hospital as she had sent a message that she was going in but made light of the whole thing and said she'd talk to them in a few days. They felt concerned not hearing back from her. Certainly she didn't expect to die. This morning we are dealing with the notion that it must have been her time. But here's the situation: She didn't die of Covid but certainly Covid deaths will effect her due to the back log of funerals, burials, and cremations. So there's a feeling of irony as well as confusion about a memorial service. Her boyfriend is in shock.

I had been thinking of her so strongly on Sunday. 

She was no nonsense and known for keeping order. She was respected by those she worked with and those she served. She was known for looking in on her neighbors. She took food to them when they were unable to leave the house.

This woman took blankets around to people who needed them. She cared about the man who had taken up residence on the bus bench in view of her building.

After a while people took to knocking on her door when they needed something. Now all those people are on their own.

And so the word is out that she's not coming back to her earth home.

But I don't want to say Rest In Peace because I can't imagine someone so active taking an eternal snooze in the After Life. I can imagine her being a leader and ordering some snoozers to get off their heavenly sofas and move their butts!

I imagine she is blessed.

Goodbye!

HE DIED BUT VISITED ME LAST NIGHT - A MEMBER OF MY OLD WRITING GROUP

The strange dreams continue.  Is it the season?  Or the ongoing threat of Covid-19?

I woke up around 4 am.  My dog had walked through my sewing kit and I could hear buttons and spools - but I woke thinking "needles." She needed to go out.  So did I.

But I managed to fall back asleep.  I remembered three strange dreams. This one was a visit with a member of my short fiction writing group.

This man was a bit of a mystery.  I first met him at a writing class focused on short fiction at a community college night class. He wrote the shortest of short stories.  One pagers.  If you're wondering how a one pager can qualify as a short story, well, if there is the slightest change in a character's viewpoint, that would qualify.

If I knew him today, I would suggest that each short was actually a chapter.  He wrote scenarios that seemed to focus on people with mental illness.

He never stayed to chat or get personal after we had critiqued each other's stories.

He would stand up, bid us a hearty fare-well, and walk out in an almost military fashion, with his notebooks in one hand. 

Then one day I was telling a friend about this man and his work when he said, "Wait a minute.  I think my dad knows this man!"  And not only did his dad know the man, but they had worked together, and his dad had introduced him to his wife.  Who, it turned out, became seriously mentally ill.

I felt that this man did not want our group to know this.

So one day I encountered him and I spit it out. "I know so and so.  I'm friends with his son.  I know."

To which he said nothing in response.

But I felt maybe I had relieved him some.

In my dream I was wearing my reading glasses.  My reading glasses are really ugly.  I made a mistake choosing them. The first thing I saw was that he came up to me wearing the same reading glasses.  He was smiling.  I said "I thought you were dead!"

In waking life I have been thinking this for some time - years.  One day I happened upon a newspaper I don't normally read and there was a one liner.  It said So and So was dead, as if it was the least someone could do.  There was absolutely no mention of a wife, family, friend, or children. Somehow I assumed it was him.

In the dream he was sitting with a woman I didn't recognize at all but knew to be his wife.  They were together, well, and happy.  They had two young people with them - perhaps grandchildren?  What was most important to me was that they were happy.  I looked over this woman, who I had never seen in waking life, thoroughly.  Now if I ever see a photo of her and I learn it is her, I'll probably get one of those shocks up my spine.

C 2020 Christine Trzyna

All Rights Reseved

HE DIED SEVEN YEARS AGO and WAS IN MY DREAM YESTERDAY MORNING

Yesterday morning I woke from a dream.

Someone I knew years ago was in that dream. So unexpectedly.

I knew he had died about seven years ago. I hadn't been thinking of him. I hadn't been thinking of him when I'd learned he died years ago either. I hadn't had any contact or knowledge of him in years before that. 

We had not been speaking for some time. It wasn't that we were angry. We just had lost words. He was a man of few words. Uncomplicated and simple you thought, until you heard his lyrics.

I'm not claiming to be a psychic. I think everyone is a bit psychic. For many years now it's happened that I've learned that someone who was once in my life and who I haven't thought about in years, has died. Usually something odd happens. Like I read a newspaper I don't usually and see an obit. Or I have a thought about them. So I check the Internet.  

A little more than seven years ago, one afternoon, I suddenly thought "I wonder if he ever put out a CD?" So I went on the Internet and instead found out he had died, about three months earlier. In his case there was no obit. But there were memorials. There were postings in on-line newsletters. There was a YouTube video of an event where he was given an award that made me tear up. Once athletic and strong, he was weak in a wheel chair, only able to stand for a moment to say "Thank You." Once a man who slept around and had too many women, he had found the one for him. He had married and had children since I knew him.

I contained sadness.

This man was in my dream yesterday morning.

We were in a restaurant. Maybe a salad bar. Not fast food. It was bright and airy. I looked at him and the sun seemed to be shining on spots of his pale skin. We were both standing there, looking into each other's eyes. He was youngish and healthy. His sleeveless tank showed off natural muscle. He was silent.  So was I. That continued. In my mind I was thinking I had recently met up with him in another dream but I couldn't remember it. I wanted to talk to him. Arrange a time. He knew that. I felt he could read my mind. I felt there was something I didn't know.

Then I saw a cameo of a woman. I think I know who this woman was, though I can't remember her name. She and I were friendly. I don't know if she's still alive.  In the dream, she spoke. She told me that he was going to a certain city in Texas and to a certain type of medical facility. She was very exact.

I woke up.

I immediately put in the name of this city and the words she had spoken in my search engine.  I was astounded by what I read about this place.

I realized I had been meaning to send his best friend a letter for the last seven years. I hand wrote it. Then I searched for an address one can send an old fashioned hand-written snail mail letter to.

And no, the man who was in my dream does not have a CD out. Not one.  No YouTube videos of him singing. No web site. Nothing. His wife and children also seem to have disappeared. 

I fear his music is lost. That he let it go to have a life different from the one he was living when I knew him.

I can hear some of his songs in my head.  Hear him singing like a choir boy.

C 2020 Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved

HE DIED and I IMAGINED HIM ALIVE FOR YEARS NOT KNOWING

As a teenager, I attended art classes on Saturdays at a famous museum and then a famous university. At the museum each week an honor roll was called. I was on it frequently. I also remember many of the names called as if it were yesterday. I think they called them alphabetically.  Hypnotize me and take me back to that time and I could announce the whole list.

Some of these people were my friends or friends of friends. We all had a small sense that we were special because we had been invited selectively from all around the county.

In the end almost all the people who got full scholarships to the famous university classes were male. I sometimes wonder about that. Was it sexism? Was it sexuality? Was it that the people who were behind these classes just thought that men artists had more potential and would be more serious about pursuing art? There were many women on those honor roll lists. 

So one afternoon back in the day, when I was visiting my friend Sandy, my favorite classmate, who lived near her friend Robert, a name called, a person who got the full scholarship, she introduced me to Robert. He was a very tall teen from a German background in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. 

We went over to his house.  We sat in his living room. He and Sandy were chatty.

I remember that day because of the finery about the way he spoke. The thinness of his fingers. A seriousness about him. And also because he had a slobbering Saint Bernard with a small barrel under his chin.  (Why do people make Saint Bernard's carry barrels?  Maybe this dog carried Robert's cash or stash?) The dog got on my lap and slobbered. They all told me this was because he "liked" me. I hated his slobber. I wanted him off my lap. You would never guess at that point in my life how much I would come to love dogs. They all thought it was sort of funny that the more I resisted the Saint Bernard, the more he "liked" me.

Every once in a while I would think of Robert, such a promising artist. Had he gone on to afford the extreme tuition of the university? Did he still paint? Was his work represented in galleries?  Maybe a museum?

So, one day I had the urge to check. I put his name into the Internet and up came an obituary.  He had been dead for years. He had died young in another city and state. The obit suggested that he had long had family in this other state. I wondered when he moved. What he did for a living when he was alive.  And what killed him.  Was it a car accident? A strange disease? Cancer of some sort? AIDS?

Then it bothered me, the way I had carried him around as a live person when he had been dead most of my life.

Even as I write this I see his face.

C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved

AM I BACK?

I've made myself no promises.  So I can't say that I'M BACK. 
I don't want to put any pressure on myself to produce content for this blog.
I'm back to being blasé about watching films.
I started reading e-books.  I like the time I save by finding out that I really don't want to read a particular book after all.  Notes and Reviews became a habit.


I know that I waste time by reading headlines, especially repetitive headlines. 
Especially headlines and stories that have no impact on my life at all.
So any headline and story I link to, must be part of a scrapbook.


I need to not scatter my time.


Lately my interests have turned back to music.
My personal music inventory is immense.
I've been ordering in and listening to jazz and singer-songwriter albums that I haven't ever heard by my favorite artists or that I haven't heard in a while.


I don't feel sentimental, at least not enough to only remember good things.
Is all history revisionist?
There's a good argument in favor of that idea.
But I think we owe it to ourselves, if no one else, to tell ourselves the truth about ourselves and the person we were in our past.
Can you conjure the person you were at 16?  21?  Last year?