My Mother V
I don’t remember the ride to Josephine County Hospital with my mother. I do remember the emergency waiting room. Because I was fine, tripping, having a fun time before that, the emergency room was like a trip into Mordor. Suddenly there were, as there always is, grim realities. And I became, as one does, completely paranoid. I was sure that everyone who was talking in the emergency waiting room was talking about ME. Looking at ME. Whispering about ME. Eventually mom (at that point, I didn’t believe anything was what it seemed, including her) took me into the ER. I next remember lying flat on a gurney with one of those lights with the gigantic metallic domes around them staring down at me, like in old fashioned surgery rooms. Mom was on one side, some attending doc on the other. My mother asked him (hey, i’m here!) whether I would be normal again. The attending dude said (in what I now know was a very identifiable northeastern US accent) “Well, once they’v broken with reality, it’s hard to tell.” This, standing over a teenager whose brain is filled with LSD!
My Mother IV
In Rome, obviously
The problem with street LSD is that you really don’t know what the dosage is. My friends, including me, would buy a bunch, usually a hundred hits, and if they were, like in this case, microdots, after they were all gone there would be a bunch of powder left. So no one knew how much was in that powder, let alone the microdots. So when I ate it, out of sheer boredom, I did not expect what I got. Within the hour I was sitting on the concrete porch out back, watching ants. They seemed to be all moving synchronously. My mom noticed. Why are you staring at the ants? I don’t exactly remember how I got out of that, but I was back, sitting in my usual position with her, across a tiny table in an alcove in that house, where we usually talked about books. Then, she asked “Why are your pupils so big?”, or something to that effect. And, being completely stoned, I thought, unwisely perhaps, I’d just tell her the truth. “Oh, I took some LSD that friends sent me.” Actually, it probably wasn’t that seamless. I may have been acting anxiously, as I usually did while tripping in unusual circumstances. But her response was swift and unyielding: Get in the car, we’re going to the hospital.
My Mother III
I had friends, older, in Roseburg Highschool with whom I used to experiment with psychedelic drugs. My first whiff of weed was earlier, before the family had move from Grants Pass to Roseburg. It was at a heavy metal concert (Yes, even in 1972) that I went to with a friend and his older brother. But my love affair with psychedelics began when I was in Roseburg High School. I think my first LSD experience was transformative, although I had no one to guide me, and my friends were only really into the hysterical laughing first part of the trip. After that, well, it was “weird” and “wow”. For me, it was a religious experience. The first time I came home while tripping was in Roseburg and I dropped and destroyed an entire box of Noretaki china that my father had bought and brought back from Hong Kong when he was stationed there in the navy. To me now, it seems odd that she didn’t blow up. But we aren’t ‘Noretaki china people’ anyway. But my family moved back to Grants Pass from Roseburg and I stayed, without them, for my senior year in Highschool. Should be fine, right? Now, I can’t believe my mom would allow it, but she did. So my senior year was intensely drug fueled. There was a huge surge in LSD and peyote. So, even if I had zero money, I tried to get my hands on as much of it as I could. But the party ended, and before going to my first year of college at UO in Eugene, I went home at the end of the school year.
Unfortunately, with hepatitis. Still I’m not sure why. But I ended up in bed a lot, with my mother, at home. As I got more energy, we’d talk about books and stuff, but I was getting bored. In those days, however, people (shock!) wrote letters to each other. And my drug buddies from Highschool sent me a letter. “blah blah blah….and then a figure in the corner pointing to a stain at the bottom of the page “Eat me”. So those who know, know, that with pill versions of LSD, there’s always dust left over. So my friends had put the dust on the corner of the page and dissolved it with distilled water. So, being bored, seemingly trapped in my parent's house, I ate it.
My Mother, Part II
Yes, that is me, as a baby
My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a both a sharecropper while my mother was growing up, and a Missionary Baptist preacher, like his father, my great-grandfather. So it goes without saying that I was raised an evangelical christian. That meant I lived somewhat in terror. I responded to the ‘call to the alter’, was baptized at 12 years old, and spent time every Saturday and Sunday in church. My father was raised a (sort of) Presbyterian, which, according to my raising, was dubious, like every denomination other than baptists. But I also could see that my mother’s adherence to the strict, scary doctrine of the ‘lake of fire’ for unbelievers, did not match her life or behavior. Nor did it match the behavior of virtually everyone in the church. If you thought all of these people around you who aren’t in your church (or even are) were going to burn in a lake of fire forever if they didn’t believe, wouldn’t you be out of your mind? Think if you knew with absolute certainty that a complete stranger was going to die a fiery death in the next hour unless they did some simple thing. Wouldn’t you spend every last minute begging, pleading with them to do that simple thing? And if you didn’t, wouldn’t you be a really bad person? The cognitive dissonance was for me unbelievable. So I concluded that my mother, like every person in my church because they were all good decent people, didn’t really believe. Otherwise, why wasn’t their hair on fire about this? Only the corner preachers made any sense to me from then on. Except I wasn’t one of them. My grandpa did believe, ferociously, and he preached everywhere he went and all of the time I knew him. I get that. My mother, not so much. But that is yet another thing I admire about her. She made me go to Sunday school and church and I grew up in the church. But once I was 14 or 15, no more forcing. She almost never mentioned my loss of faith.
My Mother
Now that my mother has followed my father, and I now grieve for them both with my brother and sister and others of our family and friends, I reflect on what I remember of her. I was unusually lucky as a child because I had a lot of attention from both of my parents, not just my mother. But my first memory of my mother was of when I about 4 or 5 and brought a snake that I had found in the backyard and asked “What kind of red string is this?” or something like that. Alarm! That’s when she realized I was colorblind, and also guileless. The second memory is of having found the “chocolate” Ex-Lax in a cabinet and eaten it all. No need to go further there, except that she was alarmed again. The third is taco night, on Sundays. My earliest memory of taco night is my dad frying up the taco shells so that they were taco-shaped, and my mother frying up the hamburger, and then putting them together for me. After that, TV: F-Troop, Mutual of Omaha’s ‘Wild Kingdom’ and finally, Wonderful World of Disney. Fast forward, then the memory of me sitting next to my mother while we watched the funeral of JFK, my mother sobbing even if she and dad were pretty committed Goldwater Republicans. Memories are typically gilded, but in my mom’s case, the gilding reflects real gold.
Blog Post Title One
This is my mother receiving a flag from the US Navy during a memorial for my father’s funeral.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blog Post Title Two
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blog Post Title Three
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blog Post Title Four
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.