Sudden Death

I keep thinking I'm going to write about this.  Then I put it off.  One excuse is I haven't yet figured out how to organize this blog---though i did figure out how to put labels in the head strip.  But it doesn't seem to be the same...I mean, I can figure out how to pick one and write and publish...seems they will all go under "home."  But that's an excuse really.  Besides, very little else in my life is organized.  Or conventionally organized.  Notice I'm not writing about what the topic even yet.

Thursday, Howard Martin-Vegue, 76 years old, lost his life on that stretch of southbound I-95 between High Meadows entrance and Kanner 76 exit.  Suddenly.  Without warning, and even if he had seen it coming, there was nothing, absolutely nothing he could have done to prevent it.

The TCPalm reports a 2006 Freighliner semitrailer plowed into the SUV which then plowed into other vehicles, all of which were traveling slower (obviously).  The driver of the semi was/is 26 years old.  Twenty-six.  I checked the hiring age.  Apparently the minimum age is 21, many long-haul companies hire no younger than 25.  I would give you the source but I can't find it again exactly, but a google will get you a general agreement among sites and blogs.  The kid driving this truck is from Oviedo near Orlando.  The freight was coming from L.A. to Delray Beach.  He had stopped at a rest stop, he said, and slept from 8:30 til 5:30.

The photograph looks like the truck was barely scratched, but the SUV is completely smashed and unrecognizable.  A friend who saw the accident said it looked like a bug on the grill of the truck.  Before I read the first article about the accident, I thought the vehicle was probably a small sports car, one that didn't have much protection.  An SUV?  Mr. Martin-Vegue was inside that vehicle.  Driving south from Port St. Lucie.  The semi crested the hill and couldn't stop in time.  Plys, the semi driver, is at fault.  He didn't have enough time to react, is how the TCPalm reports his comment through the FHP, Tim Frith.

Not enough time to react?  So many tormenting questions...how fast was the rest of the traffic going?  It's quite a distance between the Kanner exit and the next exit up (Bridge road?), was there another accident or fender bender that slowed traffic?  Slowed traffic?  I thought trucks generally maintained a speed under the maximum speed limit.  Plus he sits up higher than most vehicles, broader range of vision.  No time to react?  How fast was he going?  That is never mentioned.  He consented to drug/alcohol testing but what about other distractions--cell phone usage, texting???

Not enough answers.  Not enough time to react.

Those deadly black scars are still engraved on the bridge, several sets, nine or ten cars included in the pile-up.  Not enough time to react.  Five others were taken to hospital, but there has been no news, update, that I've heard of about their conditions.  Others at the scene refused hospital treatment.  Mr. Martin-Vegue was killed on impact, I should think and hope.

When I lived in Oklahoma, a good friend of mine was spiritual director for a woman who was among those responsible for cataloging body parts after the Murrah building bombing.  What a disturbing job.  Not for just anyone.  A great deal of emotional separation must be necessary to spend hours and hours over days and weeks identifying body parts and returning them for burial.  I cannot imagine the courage and love for humanity it would take to accept such a task.

How was Mr. Martin-Vegue's body extracted from that vehicle? Who had that job?  Was it even possible to  do?

Twenty-six years old.  Not enough time to react.  What are Mr. Plys' consequences?  Life-long nightmares?  Was he charged with anything?  Reckless driving?  Vehicular homicide?  The FHP said he was at fault.  What happens now?

I wish I had gone into journalism.  Tracking information is daunting.

Praying for those others who were severely injured.  Praying for Mr. Martin-Vegue's family.  Praying for Andrii V. Plys at 26 who didn't have enough time to react.

Every morning, every time I drive over that very short section of highway I hear echoes, wonder about Mr. Martin-Vegue.  About Andrii Plys. About how much time it takes to prepare for sudden death.

The Wife Who Saved England (flash nonfiction)

They hated her. She had flirted with him. She was married, after all. Wicked, exotic, American divorcee. She had no shame. She put her designs on him and trapped him. Everyone said it.  Even though they knew better. It was important to control public opinion.  To protect the royals.  Didn’t the pictures even reveal a great love between the two? For years they carried on.  Forbidden love seemed sweeter—how utterly romantic that he would give up the kingdom for the woman he loved. To be exiled from his homeland. It was better than anything Hollywood could have invented.

You know the history. He was king fewer than 12 months in 1936. His brother reined successfully through the second world war. His niece became queen in 1953.

He died, still exiled, in 1972. By the time she died in 1986 she had stayed loyal to her third husband and had never spoken out about any strangeness, disease or malady that might have inflicted the abdicated king.  Conjectures looking far back into their past are the tools of the future to help defend or right the cruel luxury of harsh judgement.  He had anorexia nervosa, a disease that caused him to be trapped in a demanding juvenile obsession with the woman he loved; there are letters he’d written to other lovers before his marriage and escape from kingly responsibility where he referred to them as “mummie”; his threats of suicide; and her secret letters to the husband she had never fully intended to leave bore her loneliness and regret; he showed signs of having Asperger’s—even his own staff had claimed he was mad, as mad as king George the III.  But she had never said anything.  Never complained.  Never asked for help. For forty years. How much pain could she have endured in all the years that followed what she had thought was harmless flirtation?  What wondrous love is this?

While all around were accusations and bitterness between the men and women that made up the royal family and governing body of the land, a young lady growing up alongside all the politics must have felt mercy and love for her uncle.  Secure in her rein, she made a forgiving gesture by inviting the exiled prince to join the family in celebrating his mother’s 100th birthday.  He died not long after that.  When she died in 1986 the Queen granted her uncle’s wish that his wife be buried alongside him at Windsor.

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Losing things...

One minute I put both earrings down on the counter in the bathroom.  Next morning I chose a different pair.  Halfway through the morning had to change clothes and noticed...there was only one earring there of the pair I’d put there the day before.

I remember in the night I couldn’t sleep so through the darkness I walked from bed to sofa and reached in to the counter in the bathroom to get my glasses.  Couldn’t see them, but I always put them in the same place.  There are certain things I am pretty good at following a routine with so I don’t have to hunt them or lose them.  Keys go on the key nail just inside the back door.  Flashdrive of my whole life rests under its plastic cover on the corner of the chest of drawers with the tv, cable box, roku and dvd player.  Glasses get put on the counter by the sink last thing before bed.  Earrings, rings and necklace go on or near the miniature blue willow dish behind where I put the glasses.  All three remotes stay near the corner of the left side of the sofa along with the list of tv programs and days they come on.  Checkbook is either on the desk in the study or the elephant chair.  Stamps are on the shelf above the desk in the study. Clothes could be anywhere.  I mean anywhere.  On the floor in the bathroom, by the bed, in the closet, or hanging, or on the elephant chair or down here by the sofa and I think there’s a shirt in the kitchen.  But I don’t ever really lose my clothes.

But I’ve lost one of my favorite earrings.

They say the descent into madness is preceded by obsession.  I know I’ve heard that in the implication of many stories, probably read it in articles here and there...I read it again just the other day but don’t remember the context, just that it fit part of the exploration of the novel we’re studying in school so it stuck once again.

Lately I have felt a bit out of control in the stress of my work and concern for my mama’s surgery Monday.  There’s no such thing as minor surgery and I just want it to be over.  Even three hours away I think I’m absorbing her angst over it and the time it could take to recover, not to mention the pain she is living with daily until then.

Stress (get ready for a firm grasp of the obvious) exponentiates.  My shoulders are in knots, my breathing has become shallow to the point I have to mentally remind myself to inhale and exhale and relax my shoulders.  My stomach is churning.  I cannot get enough done in a day and I have too many students at school and when a handful at a time are involved in behavior issues, or are failing, or plagiarizing and I have to write reports and call parents (which is more often a kind of nervous phone tag stretching out the process for days). This is stressful.  Adding to the stress is having been moved from a portable surrounded by windows from which I would walk to the main building for the bathroom between classes putting me outside for five minutes every 85, to inside a building built like a bomb shelter or tomb where now the last two years have seen a classroom reduction to 25 students max but they shortened the classes so they could add two more, increasing the number of students and driving us all mad.  We have no windows.  We have no outside air.  And we have too many students which drives us inside the building for all the daylight hours and some of us can’t handle that.  At all.  And I am...losing my mind.

I’ve lost one of my favorite earrings.

The friend who gave them to me keeps saying it will show up.  Or it’s not something I should stress out over, she’ll get me another pair.

But that’s not the point.  I’ve lost one of my favorite earrings.  The other day I lost my flashdrive—the one that is “always” placed on the chest of drawers with the tv, the bottom drawer holds the batteries and the lightbulbs.  I finally, finally found it after much prayer and many tears because this is my life’s work since my computer has a “disintegrating hard drive” (according to my beloved computer guru).  It was in my little fannypack because, I remember now, I had taken it with me on my last visit to mamandad’s.

The point is I lost my ring a week before that.  Suddenly in the middle of yoga I realized it wasn’t on my finger.  I remember in school that very day, playing with it, twisting it.  Often in class while we’re discussing the depths of meaning found in the elements of fiction, the way in which a particular author might use the devices of literature to develop a particular element, and so forth, I play with my rings and move them from one finger to the next.  The danger is if I leave it on, say, my middle finger, it might slip off...it needs to be on my thumb or index finger and now I have two rings about the same size because of a Christmas present.  That ring I had on, but the ring that has the Hebrew lettering that promises, “God will call you back to God” was no longer on my finger and even though we were calmly stretching and posing in various warrior and balancing poses and breathing deeply and focusing on something through the window that wasn’t moving, I could feel the panic searing through my veins that I had no idea where my ring was.  And then I realized my necklace too was missing but I remembered before leaving the house that morning that I had changed shirts so I was fairly confident it slipped off my neck at that time, fairly confident.  But the ring.  I could not lose that ring.  The history of that ring on my finger traces back to a time it slipped off my finger when I stood outside the back door of the little house I lived in in Oklahoma and was throwing out some old potatoes and with one of the baseball-like pitches I felt the ring fly off my finger and thought I saw which direction it went to.  Somewhere I have that story.  Maybe, unless it is lost to one of the horrible times a computer has died and taken the story with it.  It took several days of obsessive looking, and borrowing, finally, a metal detector to find that ring.  But I knew where it had to be.  And I refused (obsessed) to leave until I found that ring.

I know that earring has to be in this house.  But the stress of it missing adds to the stress of school and being behind and having no daylight to speak of and all of it is like a mental, emotional, spiritual spiraling of toilet water as my mind is being flushed into oblivion.  I am descending into madness.

And I sleep well, I eat well, I’m even exercising, though it’s getting too cold to swim at 5 in the morning right now.  I have to manage the stress better.  The obsession with trying to get all these papers graded, the obsession with the backdrop of concern for my mom, the obsession with getting to the sunlight has paralyzed me to the point of insanely losing an earring.  How does it happen that ONE is missing when I distinctly remember pulling both off and putting them on the counter?  Then again I remember distinctly playing with my rings.  After yoga I drove back to school but the ring was not anywhere to be found.  I came home and there it was on the counter by the sink near the miniature blue willow dish where it belonged.  It had never reached my finger that day.  The necklace was there too.  So what in the name of all that is sane distracted me between rings?  I put one on, why not the other?  I had on earrings, why not the necklace?

So no, I can no longer with full confidence know that I took off both earrings and put them on the counter...but I would have noticed, wouldn’t I, that only one earring was in my ear?  And wouldn’t the other still be there?  Yes I searched the bed and the sheets and pillows and pillow cases and the floor under the bed and all the clothes on the floor and in the closet.

I have to find that earring.  Restore the balance to at least one small corner of my life.  How much of all this tells me that the source of the stress is some insane need to control things I cannot control?  There are things I can control and things I can’t and somewhere in the shattering recesses of my mind I recall the wisdom that we should focus only on what we can control and let go of the things we can’t...that obsessing on things we can’t control is really what drives us to madness.

Okay fine whatever.  But my shoulders are killing me, my stomach is in knots and I can’t breathe.  I have lost one of my favorite earrings and I can’t seem to calm down with no sunlight trapped in that tomb all day and the rage and tears hover very close to the surface and if I could just find that earring I believe it would put back a piece of my peace that I have lost and am losing and I’m not too sure what exactly is under my control and what isn’t because the lines are unclear and most things in my life overlap.

Normally when I write something like this there is an epiphany that comes in time to wrap up a profound and memorable conclusion, satisfying with a kind of comforting closure.  I’m pretty sure that’s what drove me to write this this morning because I have been a little jittery now for a couple of weeks and that earring has been lost now for two whole days and even the day I took off, day before yesterday, was marred fairly early in the morning by a frantic drive to school where my large cup of scalding tea fell into my lap and the telling of all that would be another story but the loss of things includes the loss of my sense of having that cup of tea on my dashboard like I have every morning and yet the insane traffic I am not used to so late in the morning distracted me to sudden fits and starts, throwing the cup into my lap.  So that day I lost a couple of hours of grading to the pain and drain of dealing with all that.

And it was during that madness that I think something happened to the earrings that I had taken off the night before and noticed halfway through that morning, Tuesday morning, that one was missing and it was in the bathroom that I had taken off so carefully the clothing that had received the scalding water and I put on dry clothes to go on to school to pick up the papers from first block and return and when I returned with packets of mustard from the school cafeteria and put on a second lathering to prevent blistering and relieve the pain, that’s when I noticed that one of the earrings was missing and I truly believed that it must have been swiped off the counter in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep and had gotten my glasses so I could watch a little tv to relax but I have looked everywhere through every stitch of clothing and pocket, taken the sofa apart, every drawer and cabinet in the bathroom, behind or underneath everything five times and no earring.  But initially at that late morning hour, I distinctly remember earlier in the morning before the frantic late trip in, that I started to wear those earrings (note the plural) and chose instead to wear the old standby ones.  Wouldn’t I have noticed THEN that there was only one?  Seriously I think they were both there that first time about 7 in the morning and it was about 9:30 when I noticed one was missing.

My friend says it will turn up.  But in the meantime I am losing my mind and the missing earring seems to be ... a kind of metaphor.  Definitely a sign that I am distracted to the point of doing stupid and dangerous things in the mindlessness of overwhelming stress.  And I know I’m not the only one who is overwhelmed and stressed out.  So that means there are a great number of us out there losing things and becoming dangerous.

Christmas Letter and other terrors of the night

Good morning.  Thought it would be a good time to write the year-end or Christmas letter.  My sister's birthday is Oct. 24 and so after school the other day (and in the pouring rain) I went to Hallmark to find a hoops and yoyo crazy card for her.  Love those cards.  Turns out Hallmark was having a "buy one get one free" on Christmas stuff.  YES it's way way way too early for anybody to have Christmas stuff out!  TICKS ME OFF, yes it does.  I don't even have my wig for Halloween yet, which is on my list of things to do today actually.  Anyway, I bought gorgeous Christmas wrapping paper and two boxes of fabulous cards and that has now put me in the mood to write the letter that needs to go in the cards to people I haven't talked to in years and ... I don't even remember the last time I sent cards or a year end letter.  So here I sit in the dark stillness and I'm sneezing because the season is changing and the air is just a degree cooler and it's dark and I love being on my patio in the early early morning but I'm finding this time of year it isn't silent on Saturday or Sunday early predawn mornings---the traffic on the turnpike wooshes like some giant clothes dryer and it is persistent so where are all those people going on October the twentieth?

Anyway, I'm sitting here with a denim shirt on over the tank top but the sleeves are now pushed to the elbows, of course i have on my writing gloves with the little bean palms that keep the laptop from searing my flesh and yes I have on my wool socks for the first time this "winter."  The official weather on the net?  Seventy-one degrees which "feels like" 75.  I know, but I get chilly easily.  But I also digress.  It's 6:41 and I've been sitting out here since 6:00.  I've looked at Christmas present possibilities on amazon which I can't order because I just got the new card and still need to call it in and it's on the other side of the house and I should be working on the novel.  I've looked for the location and times of the new bank that swallowed my bank officially and I have no cash and need to go to the grocery store today.  I've checked another blog which reminded me of this blog and I also looked at the authorbytes web stuff but don't yet have the guts to contact them because I just know it's going to be so expensive my eye teeth will fall out and I just paid off the websitepalace which isn't a good fit for me because I don't know what I'm doing and I really need to talk to them and get an education.  And all this because I decided this would be a good day to write the Christmas letter and I ended up with a lame beginning that stalled several times because I think I'm just too frightfully wordy at the moment (as you can see) and I don't know what to say really and I'm talking to people that are far away geographically and some who are far away chronologically meaning I haven't spoken with them in a year or more but I still have heartstrings attached and don't want to lose them and wonder if I shouldn't write an individual letter to each one...or ... maybe that's the key...write to one of them and then shape it into the universal...that might work...

I usually have trouble blogging but I am convinced no one is reading and so while there is still the terror (overly stated) of being read by enemies everywhere who could use my words as weapons against me, I am trying to write anyway.  And I am writing on a blog that is off the hook actually because I don't know how to plug it into the universe and so that gives me the false confidence to write and write quite blitheringly and aimlessly and yet I do have this sense that it might be read by the wrong people.  Weird, I know, but fear and terror are never ... or rarely rational.

Wow the first shade of night just peeled out behind the trees and I can barely make out the contrast.  It's a sad thing because soon this will give way to glorious sunrise and the day will sweep me off this gloriously intimate nocturnal womb of me, the laptop and lamp, and my savory tea and the far distant sounds of people in transit...

All this to say I have no idea what to write in a Christmas letter as I sit in 75 degrees in south Florida way before Halloween but it would be such a good thing to get a jump on it and get it all ready and actually connect with my friends again this year!  I am in my 50th year which sounds old and yet I feel timeless.  except for the weight of my butt in this chair and the face that levitates me when i glance at a wall mirror.  Speaking of terror.

So I guess I will set out to write the longest "lost" friend and shape a letter.  After breakfast.

Message in a Bottle

Blogging.  The problem isn't so much writing...but in the conviction that all this is swirling in some tiny bottle in the middle of the vast ocean.  No one is there.  

Somewhere there must be a place (so to speak) to activate even notifying friends at least that I'm rambling online.  Especially after so many friends comment that I should write a blog.  But what I write in a personal email may seem universal and insightful...but I also have a specific audience at that point.  This...this is madness.  

I'll write to no one and everyone...if only I knew where the button is that opens the portal to at least the choice for everybody to read or reject.  What is that "+ share" button in the upper right hand corner?  What is a permalink.  etc etc.

Hell, it takes me half an hour just to get to THIS page after all the hoo ha with Jim's old "automatic" blogger link popping up...oy.

I want to post my flash fiction at least---with the fear and trepidation of having it stolen...which sounds awfully fully of hubris, doesn't it?  Especially since the original problem is NOBODY IS READING...because I don't know how to connect with the outside world!

wanted: WATER! --signed, fish

okay so i am in touch with feeling foolish and a failure and...i'm rather shooting arrows in the dark with this blogging thing...i respect your privacy and all that and so here's what i want to do.  i want to write reflectively...and i want to practice writing the flash fiction.  my style will undoubtedly be a tad different than what's touted out there but...isn't that part of the pursuit?  the unique writing voice?  so i will practice---and i am up for input and criticism and other opinions...

somehow this is ending up being the "other" blog...so i don't know what that means and i think i can "add" readers...so i'm adding just a few just to see what happens.  so bear with me, will ya?  and if you want to stay on for the new blogs, great---i am trying hard to be more ... public with the writing...so...this is really intimidating.  i mean, i teach high school for crying out loud but i'm intimidated by blogging?  i know--weird.  but ... i want to write 1000 words a day...either on the novel or independently reflective or practicing the short fiction stuff...

let me know what you think.  and you can privately email me on my private email.  if you want.  or reply  here...