CRAP!.......No Wonder..........

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I happened across this video posted on one of my favorite blog's - Finest Kind Clinic and Fish Blog and found myself both relieved and overwhelmed. The facts put my state of being into perspective. I'm EXHAUSTED.......ppppffffffffffttttt........ and I don't see any end in sight, and I know I'm not the only one.

If you've been following me and my rambling self for the past few years that this blog has been around then we probably last caught up in San Diego at Pacific Beach where I spent a few months last year dreaming of the sand and sun right out my front door and being tormented and assaulted by Surfer Dude's. Six months of my life I'll never get back - proof that sometimes paradise isn't what it's cracked up to be.

The weekend before Thanksgiving last year we packed up everything that would fit in my mom's little gray Saturn. My car wouldn't pass emissions in California and the three year old tags from Tennessee were becoming more and more conspicuous so I sold it to a man who took it across the border and sold it again in Mexico where emissions aren't considered a crippling ailment. All of the expensive kitchen equipment fit in the trunk. The lawn chairs in our living room had seen better days so we were happy to leave them behind. The new beds and mattresses we just would have to not let ourselves look back. There was no way to move them and no way to recover the expense. The big, flat screen tv tucked nicely in the back seat with two duffle bags full of whatever we could pack to wear, on top of floor to ceiling kitty condo that thankfully breaks down into little pieces that we carefully labeled and taped all the screws and bolts to for reassembly, blankets folded neatly on top of it all and a kitty litter box and two kitties that were has happy to leave San Diego as we were squeezed nearly to the roof of the car. I'm not sure what exactly was packed under my feet. Oh!? It may have been my printer and our two laptop computers. I think it was. My feet were on the dash, my knees against my boobs all the way to Albuquerque, NM (roughly 1,500 miles). We were each sitting on top of our coat. Albuquerque is in the mountains of New Mexico and that time of year we would expect cold weather and possibly snow. We weren't disappointed.

It was a three day trip - first day to Phoenix, Arizona; second to Gallup, New Mexico, and third into Albuquerque. We left with $800 and no place to land. As it happened, it all worked out. Go figure. After settling into a truly filthy but formerly (maybe 40 years prior) nice apartment we were penniless, gasless, and jobless, but we did have a roof plus a 20 pound bag of pinto beans and another 20 pound bag of jasmine rice, and cat food. I'm not certain now what we opted not to pack in lieu of the dry goods but experience has taught me some valuable lessons.

We moved into the apartment on a Friday night and by Tusday I had a job interview lined up for the next day. On Friday I had a bookkeeping job. Bonnie, my mom, had one just a few days later. No gas to get there though. hmmm...... Ironically, my horoscope had said that that month I would find myself pushing boundaries I had never pushed to accomplish things I needed to accomplish. That's always interesting! And so I did. We pawned our laptop computers for $100 each for gas and food. And yes, we got them out of hock two weeks later. Having never even entered a pawn shop before I had indeed crossed a boundary. I have always been raised in that Southern way of thinking that pawn shops are synonymous with bars - places ladies to don't enter at all, or at the very least not unescorted. It's funny now - the gentlemen that ran the place very nice and extremely professional.

We had gotten into the apartment by similar means. Bonnie gambled for a title loan on her car and then cleverly negotiated with the complex management for a cheaper deposit to let them out of doing a thorough clean. We rented it sight unseen so that was a somewhat regrettable choice when we saw it but I will say it beat any other alternatives that we clearly didn't have. We had gone to a Chinese food restaurant the night we signed the lease to celebrate. Bonnie pulled the car into a parking space and when she tried to shut off the ignition it was locked down. Nothing would remove the key or turn the ignition switch in any direction. After far too much fiddling and fumbling with it ourselves we caved and called a lock smith, and then another, and another, and another..... $600, $550, $450....it wasn't sounding any better. Our celebratory dinner quickly became a long night in a cold parking lot with a locksmith draining our every last dime. Which led us to pawning our computers a couple of days later to have enough gas to get to the interview for the job. Funny how life has a way of working itself out but never the way you want it to.

My dad's job had moved us constantly when I was a kid but not the kind of moving my mom and I have done over the years since. In those days, a semi truck, usually a green and yellow Mayflower, would pull in front of the house and out would come a crew of men in coveralls loaded with stacks of cardboard that would become boxes, felted blankets and cottony, industrial quilts, clip boards, and stickers with numbers on them. Like a well choreographed ballet they would disperse into different areas of the house and start labeling each piece of furniture, wrapping dishes, magically turning cardboard sheets into neatly stacked boxes that were tiered onto wheeled trolley's and wheeled up the ramp and into the truck. Bonnie ran her own ballet in the midst of that of the moving men. She would cleverly orchestrate meals of sandwiches and sweet iced tea, handed to me on trays and delivered one by one through the house and eventually into the driveway where the men would take breaks timed to the flow from the kitchen.

The last of these many moves I was eleven, by the time I was twelve we had begun the new cycle of post divorce moves - just my Bonnie Mommie and me. The first one came with help from various family members. The kind of people that come out of the woodwork when they think a fat divorce settlement might be on the horizon. Funny how those people dry up and disappear when the dust that settles isn't the gold they were hoping for. Bonnie still thinks of that move as the worst mistake of her life. If I believed in mistakes I might agree with her. It was an emotional choice from an emotional woman who after 19 years of marriage didn't believe she would ever be divorced - running back to a familiar place. What no one tells you is that 19 years later, nothing is familiar anymore. People forget you. Even family. What people don't tell you about divorce is that it's like a death - not just for the couple but maybe even more so for the kids. It's the death of your entire family and it's a grief that never finds comfort. And maybe it is that loss of comfort that makes a restless spirit roam....

It would be seven years before we could leave that place that she had moved us - Nowhere, New Mexico. Clovis, New Mexico, actually. Five hours from the nearest airport. Not even a Wal-Mart in town until my senior year in high school. We would have both moved anywhere else once the divorce had settled but I had found myself unexpectedly in the 49th ranked school system in the US. To move anywhere else would mean repeating a grade and it wasn't a sacrifice I was prepared to make. In hindsight, that was a mistake but try telling a miserable, unhappy, twelve year old they need to spend yet another year in junior high. Seven years later and I had graduated high school with no financial prospects at all for getting through college, and suddenly aware that we were at least 20 years behind in technology, and working for waitress minimum wage plus tips. I think all of my closest friends going off to college and me being abruptly left in their dust hit me like a runaway train. Suddenly, everything I didn't have to offer towards my own life came crashing into perspective and bit by bit our lives would unravel over the course of the next year the bulk of which impacted in a single week - our house was burned, my mother lost a business, my grandfather died, and the day after our house burned I pulled out of the driveway in my mom's car with her in the passenger seat, just as a car came barreling down our residential street at 60 mph. She hit us with such an impact that our vehicle rolled from the street in front of our driveway, across our property, across the intersection, and was stopped by a huge, old oak tree in our neighbors yard on the next block. The girl that hit us was a teenager with a driving record miles long. I had known her by reputation and was aware that she had had so many accidents that her parents installed a roll bar bumper on her car because of it. The judge was aware of this too and promptly threw out any judgment toward me in the accident. Because however, New Mexico had a law on the books since 1921 that "anyone coming from the right in a traffic accident is innocent" - our insurance company would bear all financial responsibility. As it turned out, our insurance had expired the day prior. What resulted was a ridiculous financial liability suit against us that the judge vehemently denounced but was forced to uphold - we had to pay and we BOTH (because I was driving the car & my mom owned it) lost our driver's licenses for 14 years. Let me say emphatically - there was no alcohol or drugs involved by any party nor was it ever alleged. Nor was anyone injured other than me. And we both lost our driver's licenses for 14 years.

Funny, how when your life is in one of those stages that everything is completely unraveling beyond any control, pieces are also falling into place in ways you may have never imagined. This was happening that year too. Our sculpture had been picked up in galleries in Santa Fe, Taos, Albuquerque, Las Cruces. We had been featured in "The Collector's Art Guide" and I was the youngest artist to have ever been featured by them. We even had museums picking up our work both for exhibition and for retail sale. We had done all of this in our spare time, between waitressing and running the day care center my mom had bought just after my graduation with the expectation of earning enough income to send me to college.

Left with a burned out shell of a house, no money, no way to work, and no way to drive we did the only thing we could do. We left. My uncle had parked an ugly old, 1965, red faded to orange, Chevy Bonanza pick up in our front yard because he didn't want to sell it and his wife thought their house was too hoity toity to have it parked in front of. It had been there for a couple of years and no one ever drove it except on occasional Saturday's to garage sales and to keep the engine running. We bought a camper for it, and had the biggest fight we'd ever had with each other loading it. We were going to sell arts and crafts to make some money but I was getting the hell out of that place. We were at our storage building in dresses and high heels - loading up merchandise to sell. I would pack the sewing machine and Bonnie would unpack it. I would pack supplies to re-group with and she would unpack them. I would put the sewing machine back in - she took it out. We had a screaming, cursing, Joan Collins vs. Linda Evans showdown that day. With time running out, I wore her down and she conceded that we could pack "whatever" but it was all coming back that night - and on a 1/16 of a tank of gas, 36-cents, and two donuts from the Motel 6 on the highway that we had been staying in since our house burned, we left. And we left for good! Armed with a graduation gift from my Senior High School British Literature teacher, a list of "the 100 books everyone should read before college or before they die" - bit by bit I would try to hold my educational ground by tearing away at that list book by book.

The likelihood that we would have made it back home from across the street was slim to none but we made it to a town 40 miles or so away and as luck would have it, the one woman, who owned the one gift shop in town, bought everything we had. We filled up our tank and kept trucking to Amarillo, Texas and rented a week in a fancy motel with an indoor pool, cable tv, and room service where we celebrated, swam, watched movies, and cut and sewed more crafts for a week and we just kept going and going and going for over a year.

By the time we landed in Stillwater, Oklahoma 14 months later we had 48 loads of laundry. We had sewn a new outfit almost every day of that trip. We had gone to Oklahoma because my cousin, my mom's niece, had told us that her husband was beating her black and blue and she needed us to come and help her take c.are of her three young children while she sorted through a divorce. Suckers for doing a good deed we drove there and rented an apartment at the swankiest place in town - it surrounded a small, private lake with exotic fish and pedal boats. We had developed a small mail order following by then and we knew that financially we could do nothing for 6 months or so while she sorted out things with her family. Turns out, the whole story was a rouse. She wasn't getting a divorce. She and her husband lived separately because they were cheating the system to qualify for a low income home loan. She did need a baby sitter pretty frequently but only because she was having an affair with someone 15 years younger who ironically, lived in the same apartment complex as us. When we confronted her about all of this, she turned us into the police for driving with suspended license and Bonnie was arrested. We were stuck fro 4-1/2 more years there. Our wholesale business shriveled up and died in months (there was no internet back then). Four miles from town and no public transportation, there were no options for work. Bit by bit we literlaly starved down to 82 pounds. We did what we could. We hung signs in the laundry and took in ironing for $1/piece and cleaned apartments when we could get the work. Bonnie had applied to work in the apartment office, she had been a realtor in two states and had 30 years bookkeeping experience, they offered her a job picking up trash. We took turns with that because we had one pair of tennis shoes between us. Finally the apartment manager noticed our weight loss and found out how to get food stmaps for us. Gradually we got more work with the complex cleaning apartments and hanging wallpaper. We had tried to pay off the judgment over the years but what started out $4,000 became $9,000, then $14,000, then $32,000. They would never accept any sort of payment arrangements and had no pity on the fact that we couldn't work if we couldn't drive. Years into this and we would find that the judgment itself had been sold to an individual who remained nameless. We were off of the food stamps in 3 months, and after 4-1/2 years of saving we had enough money to make a down payment on a car. We didn't get to pick it out. We called a dealer in Oklahoma City and told them how much moeny we had and that if they could bring whatever that would buy to us we would take it. We had a deal. The next morning a salesman showed up at our door with the ugliest green, Toyota Tercel ever made and a contract to sign. Still no license.

We made crafts. We made TONS of inexpensive, affordable crafts. The kind of thing that was a sure thing to sell in any tourist trap in Anywhere but there USA. Then, in the middle of the night one night, we loaded a sewing machine behind my seat, and two changes of clothes each, and packed our bounty and in every nook and cranny that tiny car would spare - and then we drove he hell out of there leaving everything else behind. A house fully furnished with all of the stuff that remained of our life when the Mayflower Truck magically appeared to ferry us from place to place with it's band of well orchestrates elves.

We went back to Texas to continue our former route of sewing and selling prior to our derailment in Oklahoma. We went there because it was familiar and because it had been successful for us. We went there because we reasoned that in Texas the police would be too polite to arrest a lady for driving without a license. And when we wore Texas out, we kept going ......nearly 200,000 miles and 38 states to the East coast and all the way back west as far as Wyoming and Colorado, before I got homesick for my Omaha childhood once again. we were in Colorado anyway so why not pop over for my 25th birthday. I cried for days when we entered the city. Sobbed inconsolably. I think that's the first moment of consciousness I had about divorce being akin to death. We stayed there for another 4-1/2 years before heading west in that same Toyota Tercel, Los Angeles boundand if you've read any of this blog the past few years, you know much of the rest of this story from here.

While in Omaha, we did scrape together a little bit of money that we took to a lawyer and told him the story of our driver's license. We had stumbled unwittingly into the new attorney's office of a former NYC police officer. He listened to our story, looked over the legal documents we had brought with us from the District Attorney in New Mexico that had spearheaded this rouse against us. He didn't utter a sound. We had come to ask if the money we had would be enough to pay his fees to try once again to make payment arrangements with them. I was 27 then so we had been 7 years without a license and 7 years yet to go. Still not a sound from his mouth when he picked up the telephone and began dialing. He got the man on the phone, gave him our names and our case number, introduced himself, and said, "I have one word for you Mr. _______, EXTORTION!" Within minutes a fax came through stating that the judgment was released effective immediately. The attorney that did all of this didn't charge us a dime. I quite literally, and I mean literally, knelt to the floor and kissed his feet. Sometimes you find goodness in the least likely of places. "Free at last! Free at last! Lawz has Mercy, we'z free at last!" we shouted and sang all the way home!

We had a moment there to make a choice. We could afford a new sewing machine or a new computer. Sewing had been our way out. Without a sewing machine we would have never made it out of Clovis in that old, red pick-up truck. And the sewing machine we had at that moment was 25 years old. My dad had fixed the motor on it before the divorce by replacing it with the motor from a saw. Bonnie had been sewing with it for a few years now with the tension attached with a piece of chewing gum. We needed a sewing machine. We needed a computer too. We had never owned one and work opportunities were fewer and fewer without the advantage of knowing how to use one. We were already on the cusp of Y2K and Al Gore was all over the news talking about "the internet super highway". Ultimately though, the sewing machine seemed the more practical investment and the computer would have to wait until long we arrived in California.

We left for California in March of 2000 with the Bernina packed in the back seat. In typical fashion, we were 25-bucking our way across the USA. It took us nearly four months to get from Omaha, Nebraska to Azusa, California - just outside of Los Angeles. We left in March and arrived on July 4. It was December 23, 2001 before we could afford our first apartment. It was 2004 when we finally were able to invest in computers. I feverishly scoured the Dell catalogues that came in the mail every month and read everything I could to explain gigabytes and RAM, Memory and modems, drives, etc.... and finally we bought two of the very best we could afford plus all of the online training I could find to buy with them. Luckily, life in California was peppered with frequent bits of paid unemployment that we used to plow into all of the online classes we had arranged.

We had known for years that we had a gap to jump. It had often felt like we were together on one of two, towering cliffs that were separated by a vast canyon. We were conscious of needing technology, education, employment, knowledge and more knowledge, to jump that divide - just to survive and keep a roof over our heads and our heads above water. And finally, when we got all that we were after, all that seemed it might give us a fighting chance, it's not enough. I don't mean I want more. I don't have a damn thing and that's not really a problem with me. But it's not enough, in that it's not enough to survive............and that video at the beginning of all of this, "Did You Know?". It completely validates everything I feel about my life and I can't seem to fix.

Is it possible that there is a point that, the fight is no longer worth all the fight?

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