Dr. Ni's Notes & Nibbles--4

Welcome to Dr. Ni's Notes & Nibbles--4, a gathering place of news, notes, words and wisdom bulldozing its way into your workday.

PERSPECTIVE RULES:  And the hits just keep on comin'--but as a devoted watcher of The Secret I know that it is all about your attitude.  Given notice that I am to be ejected from my third home in less than three months, I could choose depression, or despair, or rage, or anger, but no; I happen to love the people that I am staying with though I did not know they only intended for me to stay temporarily.

Because I understand, deeply, that it really is all about your perspective, when the rage and anger and tears hit, I did what I have learned since last Christmas to do:  turn within and talk to my Maker.  I went up to my room (because these lovely people have allowed me use of the entire third floor, rent free), looked out of the window on a cloudy, gray, about to rain day, and knew that my Lord was working.

I knew that He was using the husband of the family as a tool to force me into action.  There is a house waiting for me in Norristown, a house an amazingly powerful woman wants me to buy, she wants to sell it to no one else but me, and I am running scared--scared of the impossibility of it.  I have not worked for 15 months and my credit shows it; six books written, but TransUnion doesn't give one whit about that.

The Loving Force I believe in is simply pushing me to have faith, that hard as hell thing to do when your back is to the wall and the lions are nipping at your hoviaches, smelling, tasting and wanting blood.

I, however, as someone who grew up in Dr. Morgan's church; who watches The Secret when she can; who smiles intelligently and laughs a little when the guy in the beautiful blue shirts says, gently exasperated, "and then people wonder why things go awry.  The Universe always says only one thing:  'Your wish is my command .....'"

So I choose as I have always done: I choose faith, hope, possibility.  I choose to understand that God is pushing me, that there will "be no hiding place" until I buck up, do the research, and buy this house, impossible though it may seem.  It is my job to ask, to prepare to receive, and let the Universe worry about the How; the Hows are not my business.

I have lived through terror and constant fear; I choose that reality to be one of my past, not my present nor my future. 

Why so strong, so resilient?  Well, when you've lived through this (see below), not much can truly terrify you anymore ......

MARCUS WELBY, M.D.
2,008 words

 

Once upon a time an eleven-year-old girl spent her evenings watching
Marcus Welby.  It was her favorite show.  She saw too deeply into the
eyes of Dr. Welby, thrived on the kindness and gentility there.  Did
not know it was rescue she wanted.  Did not know it was rescue she
needed.
      

This evening it was ten more minutes and Dr. Welby was on the verge
of smiling that smile and saving another patient.  Dr. Welby saved
everybody with Dr. Kiley's help.  A dutiful eleven, the little girl
had a crush on Dr. Kiley, with his long black hair and motorcycle.
Handsome doctor white boys with motorcycles were rare in her
neighborhood.  She didn't care too much for the show after Dr. Kiley
got married.  Strange how all these years later she couldn't remember
the women on Marcus Welby, M.D.
      

That night she didn't hear her brother drag in from the kitchen.
      

"Go sweep the floor."
      

That reassuring smile.  One more minute; Dr. Kiley'd just rushed in.
      

"I washed the dishes, so go sweep the floor.  I'm too f*****g tired.
Pull your own weight, goddammit."  Her brother collapsed on the couch.
      

Since her brother was over 200 pounds and a high school football
player, she got up.  She was silent as she walked from the living room
to the kitchen.  She was silent as she went to the broom closet and
got the broom.  She could no longer hear the television, though it was
the only sound as her mother slept off the night shift way in the back
of the house in the master bedroom.  She didn't care; she'd been
robbed.  So close:  so close to satisfaction, happiness, joy,
resolution.
      

She was in the breakfast room now, the first of the three rooms that
opened into each other:  the breakfast room, kitchen, back porch.
Unspoken rule that "washing the dishes" meant sweeping these three
rooms as well.  But she was going to speak now, and loudly.  She flung
chairs in the breakfast room.  She paused every time she got to a
doorway and shook her fist in the direction of the living room.  She
swept and cussed and swung furniture.  Mama was asleep, but she didn't
care.
      

Her fury closed her ears to the gentle whoosh of air that swept from
the living room, through the dining room, and into the kitchen, ending
where she had her back turned, on the back porch.  She simply turned
around and there he was.  She could see what was coming as clearly as
she'd heard in her mother's voice that her father was leaving the
night her mother had called them all into the living room.  Only this
time there were no words.
      

He walked toward her and she backed up until she felt the door
against her butt.  She had nowhere to go.  The first punch shook the
door.  She didn't count them.  She didn't cry or scream because he
warned her that she'd better not wake up Mama.
      

The next morning she had a lump to the left of her forehead.  Her
mother asked about it just as her brother walked into the kitchen.
She said she fell down.  No women on Marcus Welby, M.D., not even now,
all these years later, as she excavated her memory.  She could think
of not one name of not one nurse; oddly, her mother's profession.
      

It had been rough for all of them.  Her father pretty much
disappeared--building a new life takes all your strength--and being
the oldest, Wilfred felt he had to be the man, keep them all in line.
He was angry and hurt, with nowhere to put it.  That is why they found
him that night, after the living room news, sitting in the closet,
arms folded, wearing his football helmet.  Football, like my father,
was one of the great loves of his life.
      

Most of the time now I am not afraid of him.  The memories are
receding, and maybe he learned from his long-term relationship that
you're not supposed to hit women.  I don't think it would occur to him
today to hit me.  But somewhere deep, in a hidden, dark corner of
myself, the fear of him lives because very early I learned that to
survive I had to say yes when I was expected to say yes, and no when I
was expected to say no, and to shut up most of the time.  For other
people it doesn't hurt to say no.  It might be scary; people might not
like you anymore; there might be violence.  But yes can be just as
dangerous, can cover ground just as fault-plagued.
      

I was in my room playing dolls.  For once they weren't fighting, the
two brothers who inspired fear; Wilfred, the two hundred pounder, nine
years older than me, and Everett, the sensitive one, seven years
older.  The divorce had propelled them into knock down, drag out,
rolling on the floor, who was going to be the punching bag fights.
      

This afternoon it was quiet.  Mama not home yet from UCLA nursing
classes.  An R.N., she sought her bachelor's degree.
      

I was very small:  six? seven? eight?  My ballerina doll twirled in
her rhinestoned green dress.  Everett called me.  I knew that
particular call, felt the cold, sorry hand of dread on my shoulder.
Something to get through, merely something to get through.  I went
into the living room.  I remember Wilfred standing at the top of the
steps, watching.  Only two steps separated the living room from the
entry hall.  I still see the glare from his glasses as the sunlight
reflected off them.  Only two steps down and he did nothing.  How on
earth could he fear Everett, who was taller by almost a foot, but who
did not lift weights, was not on varsity?
      

I was the only one who had the right to be scared.  I can still see
myself, from a distance, lying under him.  My typical vantage point
the ceiling, there among the beams painted a lustrous gold and
highlighted red.  Everett is on top of me, but I don't let myself feel
him--I am only six, seven, eight.  Then I hear a car--a familiar
car--and he's getting up and there it is long and curled and horrible,
but he's zipping it up and telling me to pull up my pants, hurry,
she's coming, "don't tell" the command and we all look normal as she
walks in the door.
      

Years later he tells her about it during a manic high.  We'd been
sitting around the breakfast room table, my mother, Everett, and I,
waiting for him to explode.  The hospital stay was coming soon, his
drug abuse and mental illness having yielded years of a bad
combination.
      

"Have you seen The Color Purple?" he challenges me.
      

"No," I reply.
      

"You know why?"
      

"No, why?"  The trap is closing.  I at once sense the troubling of
floodwaters long ago hemmed in, dammed up, shut off.  Something
unusual is rearing its head, something out of the norm of his baiting
of Mama when he's crazed, and I am unprepared, unaware that my pants
are about to be ripped from my hips all over again.
      

"Because of what happened between me and you."  He points from
himself, to me, and back again.  "Us," he says.
      

"What do you mean Everett."  My mother's voice is steel.  He has
accomplished his task; Mama is mad.  I am adrift, naked, exposed.  Dr.
Welby?
      

"I slept with her.  Used her.  My toy.  Like Vance did with me."
Proud!  And angry.
      

"I thought something like that had happened between you two."
      

No one seems to notice me.  I look to my mother, frantically try to
remember Dr. Welby's nurse, he had one, I know he had one, I can
almost see her face, but her name, what on God's green earth was her
name; my mother is a nurse, maybe there is salvation, justice,
resolution, happiness for me.  The possibility of joy, of sanctuary,
of justice.
      

There is gasoline in the air and I am wondering who will light the
match.  He wants her to react, to fly at him; she is determined not to
give him that satisfaction, for this is an old game he always plays
when he is manic.  No one seems to see me, or my past, scattered on
the table like someone's penny ante in a high stakes poker game.  I
have always been peripheral, a tool, a pawn.
      

He gets up and goes into the living room.  My mother follows, to
watch him.  He sees pictures of his ex-wife, their daughter, and his
ex-wife's son and daughter on the piano once played by my father.  He
pounces.
      

"The perfect little family.  Bullshit!"
      

My mother is still calm; I see that he is going to lose the battle.
      

"I keep pictures of whoever I want; this is my house."
      

"Oh, no sympathy for me.  You my mama and you keep pictures of that
b***h on your mantle.  I don't want no pictures of that wench--"
      

"This is my house Everett, and I will keep pictures of whoever and whatever--"
      

"She's got my kid livin' with her and some Jamaican and you keepin'
pictures of them like some goddamn shrine--" I wonder where I went,
the incest, the revelation, my dangling underwear; it is old news that
my brother hates his now ex-wife.  I am in some netherworld, somehow
removed from the scene as I stand in the dining room and listen to my
mother lose control.
      

"That's it--that's it!  Get out!  I don't have to take that from
nobody in my own house!  Get out!"
      

She opens the door, but you can barely hear it over the screaming.
He lets loose now, raising his voice, shouting and leaning into her.
      

"You gone throw me out?  You got that b***h's picture up, but you
gonna throw me out?"
      

"Out of my house, Everett.  Out, now."
      

She speaks with that deadly kind of calm, so he pauses a moment, then
leaves.  He knows what her deadly calms can mean.  He goes, blustering
and bitching under his breath.  After he's gone and we are settling
back down in the kitchen she turns to me, the afterthought.  He is
gone, and I am slowly re-entering my body, my spirit too worn and
weary from the aftereffects of shock to take much more.  It is
unnaturally quiet in this house of silences.
      

"You know none of that was your fault."  Matter of factly.
      

"What?"  A murmur is all that I can manage.
      

"What he said; he was just trying to get me riled."  She sighs.  "And
he did.  But I want to make sure you know nothing he did was your
fault.  Nothing."  Then she goes into the kitchen to wash the dishes.
Picks up a plate, searches for the dishrag.
      

And where is Marcus Welby?  Where are the heroes who came to my
rescue?  I am as I have always been, an escapist, searching for hidden
solace, succor, in the eyes of imagined strangers.
      

In the interim I have grown up.  I understand the technical now.  I
know that life is not fair; that doctors and nurses are achingly
human, ignore their own children as they save lives, nurse others back
to health.  I remember that I do not remember Dr. Welby's family.  And
Robert Young is dead.
      

Nowadays it is ER.  Complexity.  I have become comfortable with the
fast pace of shouted medical terms, the manufactured urgency,
something Dr. Welby would never have dreamed of, as I live and work in
the world of literature.  We all find our recreation somewhere.  Mine
exists in teaching the nuts and bolts of metaphor as spun by the very
best, in watching each week the fault lines and gaping holes left by
lack of sight, those entangled in what becomes when the responsible do
not see.
      

I watch, and often I wish for simpler times; for kind, caring, gentle eyes.

###
 
Trust me:  I am surrounded by gentle eyes these days.  Present and at great distances, ethereal and close as my eardrum.

But enough heavyweight stuff!  On to the funnies!!!!!  Remember what that great cancer-facing physician said about laughter?

Let's see what my good friend Sandy L. has seen fit to send across the internet wires from California ......

A Mafia Godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has cheated him out of ten million bucks. His bookkeeper is deaf. That was the reason he got the job in the first place. It was assumed that a deaf bookkeeper would not hear anything that he might have to testify about in court. When the Godfather goes to confront the bookkeeper about his missing $10 million, he brings along his attorney, who knows sign language.

The Godfather tells the lawyer, "Ask him where the 10 million bucks he embezzled from me is." The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper where the money is.

The bookkeeper signs back: "I don't know what you are talking about."

The attorney tells the Godfather: "He says he doesn't know what you're talking about."

The Godfather pulls out a pistol, puts it to the bookkeeper's temple and says, "Ask him again!"

The attorney signs to the bookkeeper: "He'll kill you if you don't tell him!"

The bookkeeper signs back: "OK! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo's backyard in Queens!"

The Godfather asks the attorney: "Well, what'd he say?"

The attorney replies: "He says you don't have the balls to pull the trigger."

Don't you just love lawyers?

----------------------------------------

A very successful lawyer parked his brand new Porsche Carrera GT in
front of the office, ready to show it off to his colleagues. As he got
out, a truck came along too close to the curb and completely tore
off the driver's door.

Fortunately, a cop in a police car was close enough to see the
accident and pulled up behind the Porsche, his lights flashing. But,
before the cop had a chance to ask any questions, the lawyer started
screaming hysterically about how his Porsche, which he had just picked
up the day before, was now completely ruined and would never be the
same, no matter how hard the body shop tries to make it new again.

After the lawyer finally wound down from his rant, the cop shook his
head in disgust and disbelief. "I can't believe how materialistic you
lawyers are," he said. "You are so focused on your possessions that you
neglect the most important things in life ."

"How can you say such a thing?" asked the lawyer.

The cop replied, "Don't you even realize that your left arm is missing?
It got ripped off when the truck hit you!!!"
 

"OH, MY GOD!" screamed the lawyer.

"MY ROLEX!"

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--
Dr. Niama L. Williams
Norristown, PA
http://www.blowingupbarriers.com