Drama

Mar 26 2021

“They call me Mimi but my name is Lucia….”

I have been having a busy week. I had my six month checkup for my lung cancer surgery last September, with a CAT-Scan with contrast media, and follow up with the surgeon. I am very aware that breathing is a different experience for me, and not for the better, but I am adjusting. I even gained five pounds, which is a significant for me.

My chronic anorexia, and the experience of being inexplicably abandoned by someone who swore his love and commitment to me, only to be followed up by ghosting me, made the recovery almost impossible. Without love, it took away my strength to recover, and my will to live. But I am made of tougher stuff and survived in spite of it.

Today is very early spring, and I have reason for optimism and looking ahead. I am attaching a photo of my son and my grand-daughter, Piper Starling Connolly, who visited me a week ago, making me very happy. Kensie is standing by my side, where she can always be found.

I am reminded of Mimi’s aria in Act. 1 of the opera, La Boheme, set in Paris, my favorite city in the world. I would like to share it as an ode to spring for all of us, and to my own victory over death and despair. Mimi is forced to face her own mortality by the end of Act 3, as shall we all. But in Act I, there is flirting, laughter, and the hope that only comes in spring. Find it on YouTube to listen to the beautiful melody. The words follow:

“They call me Mimi, but my name is Lucy.

I embroider flowers, roses and lilies on silk.

I am peaceful and happy; it is my pass time.

I like these things. They have so sweet a smell,

They speak of love, of spring, of chimera, these things

That have poetic names….. do you understand me?

Yes, they call me Mimi, why, I do not know….

Alone, I make my lunch for myself,

I do not always go to mass.

But I pray a lot to the Lord.

I live alone and cook for myself. Alone….

But when the thaw comes, the first sun is mine!

The first kiss of April is mine!

Rose buds in a vase, leaf and buds

I watch them. The flowers I make,

They do not have an odor

Rose buds in a vase,

Leaf by leaf, I watch it

The gentle perfume of a flower!

But the flowers I make

Ah me, they do not have any odor!

About me, I would not know how to tell.

I am only your neighbor come to bother you!”

From Act I of the Italian opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini

Libretto: Giuseppe Giacosa

Mar 01 2021

Another Facebook Wisdom; Any and all wisdom is required.

I would like to share from “Notes from a crazy soul” on Facebook:

“There comes a time in life, when you walk away from it all, the drama and people who create it. Surround yourself with people who make you laugh, forget the bad, and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right. Pray for he one’s who don’t. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is part of life. Getting back up again is living.”

With that quote in mind, I realize how much I fail to succeed in living a life of wisdom. Instead, I am tested with tragedies that fly by with the speed of a tennis ball I cannot see, but only hear the Hisssssss of it speeding across my face, just missing me, barely. The impact would be damaging, somehow fortunately it misses me, but the effect is the same. This pattern has followed me throughout my life. It began with my parents who created their own domestic tragedy of a marriage and imposed it on their children. It left us, their children, stuck in the place where they failed, unable to go back or unable to move forward. The accuracy of this pattern in my life is stunning. In every relationship, all I have to do is sit back, smile, and wait for it to happen.

One day in 2002, I had the opportunity to buy a young male borzoi. He was very sweet and beautiful, and I embraced him to my heart. I felt a love I never thought I knew. He was followed by several others, including two bitches, and we bred a litter and kept a male. After a short while, I realize I had been changed by this experience and felt protected for the first time in my life. Love had found me at last and changed me forever. When one of those first borzoi died suddenly, in 2008, I became very ill. I had never grieved like that before. In 2019, my last borzoi passed away. I told myself I was fine and was doing well. A myth. A year later I was diagnosed with anorexia and bipolar depression and had to make serious choices regarding my treatment. In addition, between 2013 and 2020, I had cancer twice, each one requiring surgery. My parents’ legacy was still alive and well. They won after all.

Unexpectedly, I met a magical and new man in 2020 who swore his undying love for me after finding me and my dog pictures on Facebook. He told me I could trust him. I was his everything, especially, his future. One evening, a simple conversation turned suddenly aggressive and he left me. It took about one minute and he was gone. Although I begged him to return, and he did, he created another dramatic scene few months later, leaving me alone again. I felt like a fool for trusting him, but he put on a great show of a man in love and I believed it, even in the face of many contradictions.

It is experiences like this that I must be wary of, and not just me, but everyone. I don’t care if you are a man, since I am sure there are insincere, manipulative, ingenuine women in the world, as well. But I have accrued such a long list of men covering the last ten years of my life that I have been a widow trying to exploit me, men who had no love in their hearts for me whatsoever, that I wonder if I should end this quest once and for all. They all had nothing to offer beyond smoke and mirrors, and when they grow tired of their game, they create a scene and leave. I know I have many true friend and it is to them that I must turn. I have Kensie, my new Silken Windhound, by my side, to replace my former borzoi, and she makes me smile. Life is hard but there are little things that make it sweet, and downy pillows on which to rest my head and dream.

Feb 11 2021

Finding wisdom on Facebook for Blyss

I am frequently amazed by the truly great pieces of writing that end up in my Facebook feed. It is as if the writer were sitting there in the room with me and looking deep into my very heart and knows exactly how I feel and expresses it with perfect clarity. So it is with the writing of Stephanie Bennett-Henry, especially one particular post, that I will share on my own blog, here that she posted on August 2,2015:

“I want the weirdos, the clumsy, fumbling, awkward ones who call themselves a big mess. That’s where it’s at. Give me the one whose eyes are colored with shades of madness. Throw me in a room with the loners, the ones who never found their place. Sit me down at the table with the dreamers, the ones who feel with their eyes and see with their hearts. Surround me with the extraordinary souls who inhale passion through their fingertips and exhale creativity from masterpieces in their bones. I want to dance with the ones who will break their own hearts because they only know how to love too hard or not at all. Build a path with the pieces of the broken ones. I will follow the trail and carry each piece back to its owner, showing them the stained glass pieces of their beautiful, broken magnificence.”

Stephanie Bennett-Henry. Copyrighted.

So yes, there is dignity and loss in defeat. There must be, be some positive dimension for humans since it is so ubiquitous and it does not kill us, it just keeps coming. Is this a realistic interpretation of the human condition, flailing around, coming up short, losing everything, “dying” even, when you are still very much alive? I am a master at surviving deaths. I have had several reincarnations: surviving my childhood, surviving my first and second marriages, and coping with the tragedies that befell my kennel. First, a puppy died unexpectedly. I had forgotten puppies died, as I was so focused on breeding them and on their subsequent arrivals! After, the puppies from my only litter were sent far away by my co-breeder, the one I got to keep was very sickly his first two years of life and was not emotionally sound. This was challenging and I was focused on these events more than it was warranted until the punishing hand of God delivered its final blow: taking my darling husband, prematurely young, from cancer. The only mercy to the story was it was swift.

My dreams of an adult life, happily married with a child and a houseful of dogs, Llewellyn English Setters come to mind since I did not know what borzoi were then, a show kennel and horses in a pasture, and never at a loss for love, was a bitter delusion that I never stopped pursuing long after it was feasible. I pursue it still, and I am a very old woman.

And there lays my psychosis. It is what places me in the room with the eyes colored with shades of madness, thrown in a room with loners who never found their place, who feel with their eyes see with their hearts. And yes, I have wanted to “dance” with the ones I knew would break my heart because they, too were flawed and could not love, so like my parents before them. My life is lived on a path of broken stones and every step is painful. But I see no magnificent stained glass portrait of myself to hang in the window to catch the sun and celebrate my life. I am in a very dark place. The pieces of my life lie on the ground like broken stones, and an urn will hold my ashes in a mausoleum when I die.