Spectacles and Retrospectives

• I am among the generation of kids that got the standardized talks in elementary school to educate us to ‘stranger danger’ in order to make us aware of the potential of kidnapping. I remember faces on milk cartons. • When I was in kindergarten, we became involved in the Gulf War. I was very young, but raised in a house where current events were openly discussed. I knew war was bad and that people violently died. And I knew that not all the people that died in war were the bad guys.   • When I was in the fourth grade (and living in Oklahoma) the Murrah Federal Building was bombed and 168 lives were taken. • When I was in the sixth grade, there was a bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. What should have been a celebration of national pride became fear-driven-chaos and embarrassment.  •  In the eighth grade, there was a premeditated mass shooting at Columbine High School. People my age were killing each other. • On picture day my junior year of high school, I stood in l...

My mom was our primary caretaker and lived (and continues to live) with severe gastrointestinal illness. The human experience centers around food. The focus on food becomes more intense during the winter holidays.  My experience with food has been different for as long as I can remember. My mother is forever on special diets that vary in substance, nutritional content, naturally ingested and/or artificially administered. In my world it it "normal". Even as a child, I was preceptive to the fact that this was not "normal" to others. Others (those who do not have experience with gastrointestinal  disease or illness) are uncomfortable with things out of their realm of experience. They often react by staring or doing a number of things that make the experience of food a strained emotional event, something that the breaking of bread (whatever that is to you) should never be. This is not to say that questions can not be asked. They can. And they should. As with all convers...

I have a change machine.  The 1960's pink change machine sat in my grandparents garage for as long as I can remember. It was placed there after my grandfather sold his string of locally own coin-operated laundromats. I've always had an attraction to the change machine. As a child, I would ask what it was and why it was in the garage. It is a piece of machinery from a different time and place than myself. In my collection of personal memories, it has always taken at least a dollar to run a coin operated washing machine (that is when there were still coin operated machines. Most of the machines in my memory operated off of a debit card type system). I don't remember half-dollars ever being a comfortable form of common currency. And pink was never a cool color for anything (other than a baby girl's bedroom).  The change machine came into my possession a little over a year and a half ago. My grandmother was moving out of her house (which she had lived in for near...

Illness is the other; The uninvited guest To welcome in this stranger, Radiates protest I remain the host, At a party I didn’t plan; I remain the host, Until the fatal end But at the party there is laughter Sweet love and precious life There is trueness There is wholeness And the uninvited guest