HOLES
I have just spent the last while dredging up my history at the Yale. Its odd but I have gaps or holes in those memories. I spent most of the eighties in an alcoholic haze and have little or no coherent memories from 82 until 88 when the Yale period of my life began. I was severely depressed and suicidal but it was familiar to me having gone through it just after I left the service and my family in the early seventies.
I had put too much store in getting it right the second time around. I held to the picture of the good husband. I made sure, though, that Shelley and I never got churched and that there were no children the second time around. Early in the relationship Shelley was in agreement but then all her female friends started getting married and having kids and she changed her mind.
I was crushed when she decided to leave and we had this kind of hanging on relationship for a year until I finally stopped blaming myself for the breakup and got angry because I knew she was seeing other men. I haven't seen her since although I knew the guy she married and understand she has had two children. I have no idea when the kids came along but she would be fifty five years old at this point. She was twenty six when we broke up so if they waited a couple of years the kids would be in their late teens or early twenties.
I have never again pursued a long term relationship with the opposite sex. The ones I'm most attracted are too young and high maintenance. I get on well with women slightly younger or my own age but really have too much baggage for any kind of intimate relationships. I can be a good friend but the lover bit is a stretch.
These relationships, when they go sour, end up tearing the fabric of your life and leave a hole that can never really be filled. I have come to enjoy my own company a little too much and often when with other people yearn to get away and be alone.
My childhood from six years old to nine conditioned me to being alone. Those were hard years but I used to like to go to school because there were other children there. I hated the summers because on a working farm they have little time for kids. I did a little hunting and trapping and kite flying and read everything that was on the book shelves. Of course on a farm everyone has chores. Mine was looking after the large draught horses. I used to clean out their stalls and put down fresh straw. When they came back from the fields I would help unhitching them and then water them and check them for harness sores and put salve on them and then give them a good brushing up and put fresh hay in their feed boxes and some oats and chop in their chop box. The use of horses was to save gasoline because during the war it was rationed, even for farmers. I can honestly say that I loved those horses so the work really wasn't a chore.
The farm people were really good to me and I had my own pony, a little Arabian, named Princess that I rode to school. School was about five miles away and Princess got me to school and home blizzard or no. I can still picture her in my mind and still remember her smell and the smell of the saddle which I used to clean up once a week with saddle soap.
That was the hardest bit of having to go back to the town and help my Mom with my kid sister Charlotte after Dad was badly injured in a jeep accident. Suddenly I became a liability instead of an asset constantly being told by my Mom how expensive us three kids were. I began to long for the solitude of the farm and my chores and my horses.
La Dolce Vita!
Ciao, JWL
Standing on an orange crate curry combing burrs from Prince's mane I had
shovelled out the horseshit and washed down the drain - Three skidding
horses in winter I fed by hand after dad unhitched the double sleighs I
released each belly band - I removed the whippletrees and put them in the
stable removing collars and harnesses reaching the low pegs I was able -
the warm smell of the horses outside it was 45 below and the wind whipped
round the stable blowing drifts of winter snow - half arab and half
perchroan these were sleek and heavy horse and they pulled the logs between
the trees blazing each ski trail of course - canthooked logs upon the
double sleighs were pulled out onto the lake where in the spring the
dynamited beaver dams would down creek to river take- and that is how we
used the team to make our winter's take -hauling of our winter wood those
horses worked they way they should - I swatted horseflies in the summer and
I squeezed the warble flies I led the horse on the hayfork under the summer
skies - these are thoughts you brought to me when I read your blog
-thoughts of working horses and of a countrty boy and his dog - be well my
friend thanks for the memories -gee haw giddyup and back as the haim straps
lie loosely upon each back - whoa there - billy
My mom was just telling me how my dad used to tell us we were all
millstones around his neck dragging him down. I don't remember him saying
it but I do remember that he was not happy to be a father. It makes me
wonder if I was more like him than I like to admit.