TheCapeBlog

This is inspired by some really nice things that Ron wrote about me and because I want my friends and family to get to know the terrific guy I was lucky enough to marry.

First of all, no one is more surprised than I am not only to be a married woman but to be married to the one man to whom I feel a profound psychic and somatic attachment, attraction and almost eerie compatibility.

We met when we were 23 years old. In fact, Ron’s the only other adult I’ve ever lived with.

I wish I could say that he’d been my first love because there’s no doubt he would have been romantic and considerate.  He wasn’t the first, but he was the best.

We have a number of common interests and find it easy to talk with one another about a variety of things, from the mundane to the philosophical.

My big regret is that we missed out on sharing so much between late 1969 and 2010.

The biggest of course was seeing Peter grow up and the grandchildren when they were very little.

Ron had a number of great experiences, too, and I would have liked to have been a part. These would have included being his helpmate during his active working years, his participation in bands as a guitarist and washtub bass player, and his immersion in hippie culture, especially the Rainbow Gatherings.

It’s a strange feeling to know that he lived with several other women, including a wife and a common-law significant other, during those years.

It’s disturbing to know that except for a couple of “ships passing in the night” scenarios, he got very little from these couplings aside from a pocketful of woe – no kids, no property, no assets other than a few pieces of jewelry and maybe a shirt or two.

I think I would have been better for him and he for me. I think we would have been a better couple than some gave us credit for.

There are a lot of things I like, respect and admire about Ron.

For one thing, we are not in a celibate “friends with benefits” relationship: I think he’s hot.  He has a tempered, subtle machismo, and I’m not sure he’s even aware of it.  He’s competent in areas that I am not although I’d like to be, traditional guy things like firearms, carpentry, camping.

He’s bright and self-disciplined, having overcome alcoholism and addiction to cigarettes.

He knows how to live very abstemiously, but still shares generously with others, including me and the grands.

He has a strong sense of family and is intensely loyal to friends.  His friends love and respect him and are protective of him, which says a great deal for the man.

He’s funny.  He can make me laugh.  He’s a good sport.

He has a strong social consciousness and a solid historical perspective on the labor union movement, Civil Rights and feminism.

He’s musically talented and his musical tastes and knowledge are both deep and wide-ranging.

He’s humble and non-chauvinistic, giving credit to me when it’s due but having enough of a spine to not cave when he disagrees.

He’s patient.  With my defenses down, I had nightmares for days, reliving many, many years of horrible abuse from old boyfriends, old coworkers and old bosses.  Ron saw me through that black period of tears and rage, providing reassurance and stability.

Ron is physically as well as psychically tough, enduring pain and discomfort stoically.  He takes on tasks that other people would whine and complain about – like driving us from Berkeley to Reno and back in the same afternoon/evening.

He’s a solid guy.  To be honest, when we started on our trip to Reno, I didn’t think he’d go through with the ceremony.  I wore jeans and a decent but old sweater and sneakers.  I hadn’t been feeling well for days (turns out, I had a UTI) and when we got to the chapel, just wanted to park myself in the restroom.

The same couple that had registered at the Washoe County clerk’s office ahead of us pulled in to the Chapel of the Bells parking lot as we were walking up to the door.  So, instead of skipping to the loo and possibly causing us to lose our place in queue, I decided to tough it out and wait for the minister to start the civil ceremony we’d requested – again, figuring Ron would call it all off anyway.

At times, I am a spectacular jerk.

Ron said his vows with tears streaming down his face.  Moved to the core, I unconsciously davened through my part.  Seeing Ron’s loving face, it was easy for me to repeat the vows to him, and I meant them with my whole heart.

Afterwards, I asked the minister for a copy of the ceremony, but he said he couldn’t provide one because he never says the same words twice.

We left Reno immediately after the ceremony and stopped for a light supper.  It was cold and the deicing tubes attached to the wipers had frozen.  Fortunately, the roads were dry, so after cleaning off the windshield, Ron was able to drive us safely back to Berkeley and our “honeymoon cottage” in Elmwood.

So, that’s a bit about the man I married.  I feel more than lucky and more than singularly blessed.  He’s the father of my son and the love of my life.  It’s enough to make me believe in miracles.

I finished fall cleanup at Edgewater today. Just in time, too: rain and snow are headed our way starting tomorrow.

It was much more work than at Dixon: more trees, more “fussy” areas like the big patches of pachysandra that don’t lend themselves to easy raking or mowing.

I yanked out lots of nasty thorned stuff in the back and weeds in the front. Much better to get that out now rather than the spring.

Peter is very pleased, which makes the effort worthwhile.

Ron and I got married in Reno on Friday, November 26, and maybe more about that later. In the meantime, here are a few pix.

Started work today at Pondscapes in Cataumet.  Brought home 3 bags of Coast of Maine compost with seaweed and spread it on the roses.

Finished cleanup at 20 Dixon.  Yesterday I raked and pruned the front and the rose beds.  This morning before work, I got the back and side yards done.  It’s been bitter, bitter cold and windy.

Went to a lecture at WBNERR last night on locavoring.  Very good, picked up some nice recipes and ideas for entertaining.

And I mean brand new Greg Bennett (Samick) acoustic/electric OM 8CE. Solid cedar top, rosewood back and sides, rosewood fingerboard and bridge, Grover gold tuners, Abalone rosette and purfling, Fishman onboard preamp.

Photos here and specs here. I did not pay anywhere near this much.

I am SO happy!

Thanks to Peter for inspiring my nostalgia trip and reminding me how much I missed owning a guitar.

From the brilliant Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of Women Who Run with the Wolves:
“There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness- although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as “nothing but shyness”- more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dialogue in the woman’s mind.

“If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or compliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the complimentor, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged.”

I’m a software developer.

I’ve made it in this profession in spite of the worst, most vicious male chauvinism, almost as bad as my fellow pioneers have encountered in fire and police departments.

I’m not rich, photogenic or tiny, but my profession puts me somewhere near the top of the social order, at least among educated people.

When I think about a certain gentleman and his old love affairs, it hurts my heart. Reminding myself that I’m a software developer lets me breathe again.

Today, at the gas station, I encountered a Suzanne – tiny and dark, with delicate hands. She was driving a better vehicle than mine, some kind of nondescript SUV, and I allowed her to cut me off at the pump. Of course, she didn’t acknowledge me, much less thank me.

Miraculously, when the Suzanne was done, a tall, blonde, blue-eyed woman pulled up and gave me a big smile.

She was driving a Hummer.

Bless you, bless you, Viking sister! May your tribe increase.

From Salon’s Cary Tennis:
“The way I see this is that the hard damage done by parental abuse is that the person, the soul, the “I” in the child experiences a threat to its survival by its creator, the one to whom it looks for life. Experiencing such a contradiction is a kind of soul death. The child has no recourse to logic or knowledge that might counteract its experience. What the child experiences is that he or she ought not exist. Then, in later life, as we do with what we learn from our parents, the child gives expression to this message that she ought not exist. Thus we see such children grow up to be suicidal and self-destructive, cutting themselves and cutting off their feelings through numbing addictions and consciousness-altering distractions.
This is the message I think a child gets when abused by a parent: You don’t deserve to be alive.”
From Joe Soll:
“Our society doesn’t want to acknowledge what has happened to all of us, to give us respect. And truth be told, I lost more than a leg, I lost my mother. But wait, I got a prosthesis, a new mother, a substitute. Why doesn’t it work just as well?. Why does it still hurt? Of course our mothers lost a baby… but they got no replacement, no substitute. Respect is truth, no secrets, absolute honesty. We can all deal with the truth. Have we in adoption had our eyes wide shut? Isn’t it time they were wide open?
“Well, how can we give ourselves the respect we never got? By learning to experience our feelings. By learning to make I statements about our experience. By learning to say I feel sad because, I feel angry because, I hurt because. And when we say these things out loud for the first time and get validated for the first time, the feelings become real in a way they can never be if un expressed. And once the feelings become real, we can start to understand why we feel what we feel and once we understand why we feel what we feel, we can start to change the way our experience affects us today.
“We can respect ourselves by expressing our anger at what happened to us.
“Having anger about something that happened to us and expressing it does not make us angry people. We need to express it. If we don’t talk our anger out, we will surely act it out or act it in, in either case, it is destructive. It is poison and will poison our lives and relationships unless we release it.
“We can respect ourselves by expressing our sadness. Feeling sad about something sad that happened does not make us crybabies or wimps. We need to express it. Keeping our pain in is destructive. It is poison and it will poison our lives and our relationships unless we release it.
“The only way that I know of to be truly happy is to give ourselves the respect of feeling all of our feelings. If we don’t feel the bad ones, we cannot feel the good ones. Those around us often try to minimize our losses, our experience. We must not buy into that. We can respect ourselves by acknowledging the true extent of the effects on us of the events at the beginning. If we don’t acknowledge the full extent of our wounds, we cannot heal. Only by acknowledging the truth can we begin to heal from our wounds.
“If I am in an accident and go to the ER and they don’t examine my wounds, don’t clean the depths of my wounds and get the dirt or poison out, I will get an infection, the wound may heal superficially, but the infection is there never the less and I will pay a price. Only when I respect myself and take the risk of opening that wound again and clean it out will I be able to truly heal.
“Healing involves a lot of pain, but the alternative.. I guess we (adoptees) have all lived it. We need to give ourselves the respect to climb the mountain of pain that leads to healing. The mountain is steep, but climbable. There are many crevices on the way up, but each crevice still puts you closer to the top. And we are all here in this adoptive family to help each other, nurture each other, support each other, share with each other and learn from each other on this road to respect and healing.
“Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves, has said that those who have been abandoned and face it and work it through can become the strongest people on the face of the earth. Don’t doubt it for a second, Only the Brave do this work.”

“This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements.”

Readers’ comments on this article are almost as interesting and heartening as the article itself. There are the usual corporate apologists, but the great majority of recommendations – outnumbering the apologists in some cases by as much as 10:1 – are in support of comments favorable to employees.

The erosion of workers’ rights should be much more of a concern in public discourse. The NLRB’s stand is a welcome and long-overdue break from the usual. I am so grateful that this group of tough, smart attorneys and advocates are on our side.

We had snow night before last, and sleet for most of yesterday.

Finished the mow at Edgewater. Never could get the big lawnmower started, which is annoying, but I got the leaves off the grass, front and back, before the rain started this afternoon. Right now, it is pouring.
Brought Emme, James and Ethan to Sea Mist. James said it was a lot more fun than sitting around playing with the computer all afternoon – yes!!
Sandwich Agway posted an advisory that it is not to late to plant bulbs, so long as you do it within the next two weeks. Guess I wasn’t too late after all.