Friday, January 03, 2014
A summer story
One July long ago my girlfriend's large family (7 kids, she was the teenage oldest) went in with some other relatives (more kids) on a week rental around Lavalette. I wrangled a few days off from work later in the week & told Karen I'd be down late the night before. When I arrived, nearly all the kids were tucked away all over the house, grownups sitting outside in beach chairs, drinking beer & munching pretzels, quietly chatting. Karen & I went over to the Seaside boardwalk for awhile, then took a walk on the beach. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the vacant porch & went to sleep.
I was awakened at dawn by whispering, a little kid asking, "Who is he?" Another answering, "He's Karen's boyfriend, ssshhh." I opened up my eyes, five children standing around me in a circle staring down at me. I muttered, "Beat it," they went away & I went back to sleep.
I was awakened at dawn by whispering, a little kid asking, "Who is he?" Another answering, "He's Karen's boyfriend, ssshhh." I opened up my eyes, five children standing around me in a circle staring down at me. I muttered, "Beat it," they went away & I went back to sleep.
Labels: boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Karen Battell
Monday, February 04, 2013
The rest is a pop song
. It was obvious to others back then that I found her beautiful, smart & talented & loved her.
The rest is a pop song & I play with the lyrics., my right as a poet.
We were small town ambitious. We believed one or the other of us, or both, might become famous. Although neither of us was a great social butterfly, we were sociable & enjoyed being seen together.
I've always been grateful for her family, her mom especially, how I was taken into that crowded, chaotic house on Hemlock Street during a turbulent period in my own family. I was "Karen's boyfriend," & with that came meal privileges & use of the old upright piano.
Karen, of course, always wanted to get out of the house if it wasn't a school night, or if it was, at least go sit on the front porch or on the back seat of an old but functioning 1948 Desoto, a Battell heirloom called "The Turtle" kept in the garage. She would be annoyed with me If I settled on the couch, watching TV with three or four kids crawling over me. But I felt love in the chaos, & I sensed the love was emanating from the frazzled woman in the kitchen who welcomed me if I went in there, sat down & chatted with her. As long as mom liked me, I'd be o.k. with her dad & we'd get a longer leash. I liked talking with her mom. I suspected her dad secretly hoped we'd elope the day after Karen graduated high school just to get her out of a crowded house lacking in space & privacy.
It was my job as a writer to fit Karen into my narrative. Where I fit into her's was of small concern to me. I hoped only that she carried no hurtful memories, & in our few conversations later she never gave the impression she had.. You won't find her in my poems, except invisibly in a group I wrote in 1990 which drew from every romance & break up I'd gone through up to that point.
Karen passed at age 62, a tragic fact. I have only two early years of those 62 & I wish she had lived until my small percentage was much smaller. But they were two adolescent years filled with the kinds of days & nights everyone remembers as the rest of our days & nights & years speed by faster & faster. My poetry mentor, Joel Oppenheimer, taught by example that there are memories a poet holds in trust. He was passing down an old tradition. One might never bring those memories to a poem or story, but they are held & treasured all the same. It is a privilege.
Remembering how Karen, the most beautiful teenage girl I every knew, entered a party, a dance, a brightly lit diner, a wedding reception (we went to at least two), my dad's living room, whatever occasion called for it. She always did this if she was wearing something new from Daffy Dan's. She would walk through the entry, quickly survey the occupants, tilt her regal nose up & slightly to one side just so, & pose for a moment. Yes, people looked. Always. I'd be standing behind her or off to one side, thinking, "Wow! I'm sure she rehearses that." To me she was dancing.
In Memory of Karen Battell Silva, 1950-2012
The rest is a pop song & I play with the lyrics., my right as a poet.
We were small town ambitious. We believed one or the other of us, or both, might become famous. Although neither of us was a great social butterfly, we were sociable & enjoyed being seen together.
I've always been grateful for her family, her mom especially, how I was taken into that crowded, chaotic house on Hemlock Street during a turbulent period in my own family. I was "Karen's boyfriend," & with that came meal privileges & use of the old upright piano.
Karen, of course, always wanted to get out of the house if it wasn't a school night, or if it was, at least go sit on the front porch or on the back seat of an old but functioning 1948 Desoto, a Battell heirloom called "The Turtle" kept in the garage. She would be annoyed with me If I settled on the couch, watching TV with three or four kids crawling over me. But I felt love in the chaos, & I sensed the love was emanating from the frazzled woman in the kitchen who welcomed me if I went in there, sat down & chatted with her. As long as mom liked me, I'd be o.k. with her dad & we'd get a longer leash. I liked talking with her mom. I suspected her dad secretly hoped we'd elope the day after Karen graduated high school just to get her out of a crowded house lacking in space & privacy.
It was my job as a writer to fit Karen into my narrative. Where I fit into her's was of small concern to me. I hoped only that she carried no hurtful memories, & in our few conversations later she never gave the impression she had.. You won't find her in my poems, except invisibly in a group I wrote in 1990 which drew from every romance & break up I'd gone through up to that point.
Karen passed at age 62, a tragic fact. I have only two early years of those 62 & I wish she had lived until my small percentage was much smaller. But they were two adolescent years filled with the kinds of days & nights everyone remembers as the rest of our days & nights & years speed by faster & faster. My poetry mentor, Joel Oppenheimer, taught by example that there are memories a poet holds in trust. He was passing down an old tradition. One might never bring those memories to a poem or story, but they are held & treasured all the same. It is a privilege.
Remembering how Karen, the most beautiful teenage girl I every knew, entered a party, a dance, a brightly lit diner, a wedding reception (we went to at least two), my dad's living room, whatever occasion called for it. She always did this if she was wearing something new from Daffy Dan's. She would walk through the entry, quickly survey the occupants, tilt her regal nose up & slightly to one side just so, & pose for a moment. Yes, people looked. Always. I'd be standing behind her or off to one side, thinking, "Wow! I'm sure she rehearses that." To me she was dancing.
In Memory of Karen Battell Silva, 1950-2012
Labels: growing up, Karen Battell, love, Mahalo, obituary, Roselle Park
Monday, March 26, 2012
Do You Wanna Dance?
The Beach Boys, Today! (1965) It's difficult to imagine oneself as a teenager in a small town when this special album was new & yet had the power to grab attention away from the hipper Beatles, Stones, Animals, etc. We didn't hear it in terms of the tremendous influence of Phil Spector on Boss Beach Boy Brian Wilson, as it is always discussed now. It was years later that I realized my love for this LP wasn't just about the incomparable music, but also that the record was so completely (& honestly) framed within a world of teen relationships not yet afflicted by cynicism. The album has joy, anticipation, insight, & beautiful ballads of love & insecurity. Who except poets believe any of this anymore? & we know we're fools. Last month I went back to The Beach Boys, Today! for solace & to get some sense of the sentiment & ideals we felt & the self-contained world my girlfriend & I created for ourselves where adults hardly mattered at all if we could help it.
The opening cut of "Do You Wanna Dance" is brilliant. The Bobby Freeman original was one of the few Fifties songs you'd hear at parties in the mid-Sixties, & this over-the-top version supplanted it (Plus Dance, Dance, Dance, the side one closer & also a hit single). Dancing at private parties among friends, especially in backyards dimly lit by strings of Christmas lights, was far more uninhibited & ecstatic than at public dances & record "hops." Brian captures it. I have non-specific memories of arriving at a house at twilight, hearing music blaring from the back yard (some improvised loudspeaker system), smelling the hot dogs & hamburgers, walking up the driveway. Usually some big guy or two hanging around there who'd nod you past. Crashers were always a concern, their bad vibes could kill a party in ten minutes. You couldn't make a grand entry into these parties, they were bathed in perpetual dusk, crowded & noisy, mysterious at first; you slid into them.
The opening cut of "Do You Wanna Dance" is brilliant. The Bobby Freeman original was one of the few Fifties songs you'd hear at parties in the mid-Sixties, & this over-the-top version supplanted it (Plus Dance, Dance, Dance, the side one closer & also a hit single). Dancing at private parties among friends, especially in backyards dimly lit by strings of Christmas lights, was far more uninhibited & ecstatic than at public dances & record "hops." Brian captures it. I have non-specific memories of arriving at a house at twilight, hearing music blaring from the back yard (some improvised loudspeaker system), smelling the hot dogs & hamburgers, walking up the driveway. Usually some big guy or two hanging around there who'd nod you past. Crashers were always a concern, their bad vibes could kill a party in ten minutes. You couldn't make a grand entry into these parties, they were bathed in perpetual dusk, crowded & noisy, mysterious at first; you slid into them.
Labels: growing up, Karen Battell, love, music, video
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Dancer
In the summer of 1966, when I was 17 & a recent high school graduate, I met Karen Battell, 16, entering her junior year, & a devoted dance student. For about two years from that time well into 1968 we were a couple. Her family witnessed it, my family witnessed it, our friends witnessed it, probably most teenagers in Roselle Park knew it. We reached the point when adolescent lovers break up or grow up, & we broke up. The circumstances of the split haven't mattered for a long time. Those are, I believe, the bare, indisputable facts. & that I was in love with her.
Everything else about her is a song. Every meaningful memory of her from that time is a song. I'm a child of doo wop; literally a child when it was in the air, mesmerized by its etherealness & absurd boppity bop ding a ding dong language of everlasting love. The idea that you could treat an adolescent romance with anger, sarcasm, mockery, as the Rolling Stones sometimes did, was new to rock when Karen I got together (we both liked Mick Jagger & The Stones). I knew it would never be my way.
Karen Silva died at age 62. She left a husband, a son, six younger siblings, at least one dozen nieces & nephews & hundreds of former dance students. With so many knowing & mourning her, Karen's life story is secure. All those too-few years were more important years than the two with me. But those two years so long ago are mine to tell, what I remember of them, & in my own way. Karen knew I was a writer, a poet. Let her other years be whatever they are, whatever anyone else makes of them.
In that summer of 1966 Karen began appearing at the periphery of my social crowd, a loose, coed, fairly diverse group that had been hanging together a couple of years. Some of us skateboarded. Mostly we talked about records, which bands were cool, which were not. We were starting to feel the Vietnam War & nascent counterculture pressing at the borders of our small town universe. I was nearing draft age & my brother was in the Army. I had hardly noticed Karen around town, for reasons that soon became clear. My previous girlfriend & senior prom date had been a vacuous, whiny, faithless blond cheerleader. It taught me a lesson & I had closed up. I had to be informed by friends Karen was trying to get to know me. Ever cautious, I made a few inquiries about her, some background information but mainly to find if she'd recently broken anyone's heart. What quickly came back was this: Nobody seemed to know much about her except she had grown up in town, was the oldest daughter in a very large Catholic family on Hemlock Street, & that she was really, really into ballet dancing. Take a good look at her.
Karen Battell was the most beautiful teenage girl I had ever seen. She has remained so to this day & will always be the most beautiful teenage girl I have ever known. Not an indisputable fact. Don't underestimate my ability to make a convincing case for it. Accept it as the eye of the beholder.
She had a regal nose & dark hair sometimes brushed out, sometimes pinned up in a dancer's bun. She was also smart, quick-witted, sarcastic, sweet, knew how to dress herself, & had poise & presence - words that wouldn't have occurred to me then - meaning a way of looking good just standing in one place. & she was really into ballet.
We lived 1,500 feet from each other. Half block, long block, short block, right turn, first house on the right. I can still walk it in my mind. So close. I know a family across the street. Where has this beautiful girl been hiding? It would have been like to me to look at her house, at night, before I picked up the phone. "Here's her number," someone handed me. It was in the phone book. I'd looked. Thanks, I'll take it from here.
I understood really being into something. I was really into writing & getting into music. I had friends really into playing guitar. My dad was really into American history. I didn't question their devotion or the time they gave to it or the dreams they had. Karen, just by observing me at a distance, had perhaps intuited I was something of a kindred spirit. It was good to be a teenage couple in that town. She wanted a boyfriend who wouldn't compete with her dancing, wouldn't question her dedication. That would be me. I wasn't handsome, I stuttered, I had anxiety attacks, I was an insomniac, I was shy. But I had a variety of friends, most of them a little nutty, I knew how to have fun. I had interests I didn't much share with my friends. I had the capacity - familiar to other poets - of seemingly doing nothing for hours on end.
That's all there it is to it, for a start. There is not much chronology or narrative. I didn't keep a journal. I went away from writing for awhile, to make music. It's possible I wrote a few poems for Karen, perhaps some letters. It's mostly anecdotal now. Some are anecdotes I've been telling for decades, on the radio, to friends, in my blog - impressions of her, her family. The way she looked in different surroundings, how she moved. How I felt being with her. Never saying her name. She was The Dancer. There are things about her I have never shared with others & never will. We were both private people who held back large parts of ourselves, a Scorpio & Capricorn. My nickname, Rix, was itself a kind of public mask. Privacy was a premium in both our homes. we valued it, & quiet moments. We were open with each other in ways we weren't with family & friends. But even then we had our closed places. She became a rudder & keel to my sail.
I don't look back at it as a failed relationship. I've long thought of it as a successful relationship, a remarkable adolescent pairing for its time & place, hardly connected to what came before or afterward. In a larger town we would have been invisible. Being a couple in our one square mile town was a public thing. In real life, people have love relationships that go on two or three or more years after they should end. Some of them turn into doomed marriages because it's the direction the current flows in many small towns & families. You get engaged halfway through college & from then on ride toward the wedding on the commitment itself & on expectations of others, blinding yourself to changes making the thing an increasingly poor gamble. Take away the natural adolescent disappointment that Karen & I weren't soulmates & the relationship provided me with just about everything I could have wanted from it.
Everything else about her is a song. Every meaningful memory of her from that time is a song. I'm a child of doo wop; literally a child when it was in the air, mesmerized by its etherealness & absurd boppity bop ding a ding dong language of everlasting love. The idea that you could treat an adolescent romance with anger, sarcasm, mockery, as the Rolling Stones sometimes did, was new to rock when Karen I got together (we both liked Mick Jagger & The Stones). I knew it would never be my way.
Karen Silva died at age 62. She left a husband, a son, six younger siblings, at least one dozen nieces & nephews & hundreds of former dance students. With so many knowing & mourning her, Karen's life story is secure. All those too-few years were more important years than the two with me. But those two years so long ago are mine to tell, what I remember of them, & in my own way. Karen knew I was a writer, a poet. Let her other years be whatever they are, whatever anyone else makes of them.
In that summer of 1966 Karen began appearing at the periphery of my social crowd, a loose, coed, fairly diverse group that had been hanging together a couple of years. Some of us skateboarded. Mostly we talked about records, which bands were cool, which were not. We were starting to feel the Vietnam War & nascent counterculture pressing at the borders of our small town universe. I was nearing draft age & my brother was in the Army. I had hardly noticed Karen around town, for reasons that soon became clear. My previous girlfriend & senior prom date had been a vacuous, whiny, faithless blond cheerleader. It taught me a lesson & I had closed up. I had to be informed by friends Karen was trying to get to know me. Ever cautious, I made a few inquiries about her, some background information but mainly to find if she'd recently broken anyone's heart. What quickly came back was this: Nobody seemed to know much about her except she had grown up in town, was the oldest daughter in a very large Catholic family on Hemlock Street, & that she was really, really into ballet dancing. Take a good look at her.
Karen Battell was the most beautiful teenage girl I had ever seen. She has remained so to this day & will always be the most beautiful teenage girl I have ever known. Not an indisputable fact. Don't underestimate my ability to make a convincing case for it. Accept it as the eye of the beholder.
She had a regal nose & dark hair sometimes brushed out, sometimes pinned up in a dancer's bun. She was also smart, quick-witted, sarcastic, sweet, knew how to dress herself, & had poise & presence - words that wouldn't have occurred to me then - meaning a way of looking good just standing in one place. & she was really into ballet.
We lived 1,500 feet from each other. Half block, long block, short block, right turn, first house on the right. I can still walk it in my mind. So close. I know a family across the street. Where has this beautiful girl been hiding? It would have been like to me to look at her house, at night, before I picked up the phone. "Here's her number," someone handed me. It was in the phone book. I'd looked. Thanks, I'll take it from here.
I understood really being into something. I was really into writing & getting into music. I had friends really into playing guitar. My dad was really into American history. I didn't question their devotion or the time they gave to it or the dreams they had. Karen, just by observing me at a distance, had perhaps intuited I was something of a kindred spirit. It was good to be a teenage couple in that town. She wanted a boyfriend who wouldn't compete with her dancing, wouldn't question her dedication. That would be me. I wasn't handsome, I stuttered, I had anxiety attacks, I was an insomniac, I was shy. But I had a variety of friends, most of them a little nutty, I knew how to have fun. I had interests I didn't much share with my friends. I had the capacity - familiar to other poets - of seemingly doing nothing for hours on end.
That's all there it is to it, for a start. There is not much chronology or narrative. I didn't keep a journal. I went away from writing for awhile, to make music. It's possible I wrote a few poems for Karen, perhaps some letters. It's mostly anecdotal now. Some are anecdotes I've been telling for decades, on the radio, to friends, in my blog - impressions of her, her family. The way she looked in different surroundings, how she moved. How I felt being with her. Never saying her name. She was The Dancer. There are things about her I have never shared with others & never will. We were both private people who held back large parts of ourselves, a Scorpio & Capricorn. My nickname, Rix, was itself a kind of public mask. Privacy was a premium in both our homes. we valued it, & quiet moments. We were open with each other in ways we weren't with family & friends. But even then we had our closed places. She became a rudder & keel to my sail.
I don't look back at it as a failed relationship. I've long thought of it as a successful relationship, a remarkable adolescent pairing for its time & place, hardly connected to what came before or afterward. In a larger town we would have been invisible. Being a couple in our one square mile town was a public thing. In real life, people have love relationships that go on two or three or more years after they should end. Some of them turn into doomed marriages because it's the direction the current flows in many small towns & families. You get engaged halfway through college & from then on ride toward the wedding on the commitment itself & on expectations of others, blinding yourself to changes making the thing an increasingly poor gamble. Take away the natural adolescent disappointment that Karen & I weren't soulmates & the relationship provided me with just about everything I could have wanted from it.
Labels: growing up, Karen Battell, love
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Asbury Park NJ
In Memory of Karen [ Battell ] Silva
The Doors at Asbury Park Convention Hall.
Postcard is from 1968. But I saw them here in summer of 1967.
The Doors had been hastily booked in place of a Lou Rawls show, on the strength of the monster hit "Light My Fire." Tickets were cheap, the Hall maybe 2/3rds filled. I brought my beautiful girlfriend, Karen, always up for a night on a boardwalk anyway. We'd been together about a year. She enjoyed the concert. Members of Rawls' ace group, who'd had their second show canceled so The Doors could perform, stood at the rear of Convention Hall looking utterly baffled as Jim Morrison - still a gift from the rock gods & not yet a penis-waving drool drunk - squirmed around the stage. Magical. The experience totally changed my idea of what a rock band could be, & the role of a cheesy portable organ in a band. I immediately coerced my garage band into adding almost the entire first Doors LP to our repertoire (not "The End"). The band had no leader, so I must have made a good case for it. A high point "date" with Karen. No doubt, Karen forgot a whole lot about our time together when we were teenagers, but I'm confident she remembered this. I hope she found occasions to brag about it.
***
In the short version of this anecdote, I'm "with my girlfriend." The longer versions include a fond description of what a knockout of a girl I'm with & how great she looked on the boardwalk; the way Karen would want it told.
Labels: Asbury Park, boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Karen Battell, love, music, obituary, postcard
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Karen Battell; narrative not myth
Jotting down various memories of Karen Battell Silva, who passed away far too young this week. As they accumulated they began taking on a "what a fool believes" quality. Which is all wrong. I don't overestimate my impact on a teenage girl in the 1960's who lived an entire life since then, or her influence on me. She leaves a husband, a son, her mom, six siblings at least a dozen nieces & nephews. My condolences to them. But as a writer I'm always trying to draw a narrative out of the episodic, was already doing that when I was 18 years-old. I'm the son of a fine "amateur" historian & storyteller. There are a number of anecdotes about Karen & her family I've told all along. I repeated one to my stepbrother earlier this week, before I heard about Karen - he knew her as my girlfriend & met his future wife shortly after I met Karen - about a particular summer night on the crowded Seaside Heights boardwalk. Karen & I were strolling the Seaside Boardwalk on a balmy summer evening just digging the scene. Karen probably wearing some light summery dress - she was very much a dress kind of girl in those days. Over leaning against the boardwalk railing were my stepbrother & his girlfriend, a tall attractive blonde, both in leather jackets. At the timehe had a beard & a bike & looked a bit like an outlaw Abe Lincoln. We sropped & chatted for a few minutes, the most natural thing in the world to meet in that place at that time.
I 've told a few stories on the radio. None of them are negative. I began writing some of them down only after I started this blog, I allude to Karen in a very general way in just one of my poems I can think of. Most of my poems are located in their moment of creation, recent past, or mythic time. She was long gone when I began writing publishable poems. She has her place back there, mainly in mythic time, but she is so distinctive a personality, attractive, sensual, intelligent, even as a high school student, so memorable - & I've been with several remarkable women since then in longer, more serious relationships. I imagine Karen would appreciate being so memorable. She wanted her presence & personality felt. She was very good at letting me have the spotlight, but when it was her turn, I got out of the way. Maybe I learned that from her, when to get out of the way. She also had small tolerance for crass or vulgar people, & that taught me something important, too.
Karen was not only the first woman (at 16), but the first person to give an unqualified "yes" to my creative aspirations, which at that time were vague & largely undefined & searching for outlets, but very strong. For Karen it was part of who I was, just as dancing was who she was, & something she liked in me, & no further discussion was necessary.
I 've told a few stories on the radio. None of them are negative. I began writing some of them down only after I started this blog, I allude to Karen in a very general way in just one of my poems I can think of. Most of my poems are located in their moment of creation, recent past, or mythic time. She was long gone when I began writing publishable poems. She has her place back there, mainly in mythic time, but she is so distinctive a personality, attractive, sensual, intelligent, even as a high school student, so memorable - & I've been with several remarkable women since then in longer, more serious relationships. I imagine Karen would appreciate being so memorable. She wanted her presence & personality felt. She was very good at letting me have the spotlight, but when it was her turn, I got out of the way. Maybe I learned that from her, when to get out of the way. She also had small tolerance for crass or vulgar people, & that taught me something important, too.
Karen was not only the first woman (at 16), but the first person to give an unqualified "yes" to my creative aspirations, which at that time were vague & largely undefined & searching for outlets, but very strong. For Karen it was part of who I was, just as dancing was who she was, & something she liked in me, & no further discussion was necessary.
Labels: boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Karen Battell, love, Mahalo, Roselle Park, Seaside Heights
Friday, February 03, 2012
Sad news today
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat
May the ranks of angels receive you
Sad news today. My brother Joe reads the obits, remembered she was my first great love, & broke the news. It was a long time ago. She is so special in my heart & memories.
May the ranks of angels receive you
Sad news today. My brother Joe reads the obits, remembered she was my first great love, & broke the news. It was a long time ago. She is so special in my heart & memories.
Labels: Karen Battell, obituary
Monday, January 30, 2012
Pointless trip to Kansas
The problem is when I'm having a lucid dream & sort of know it but I'm not yet fully aware it's a dream. Unless you know it's a dream, it's even more difficult to manipulate it. It's hard to get dream beings to pay attention to you,.You know they know you're there, but they ignore you. If you can get them to talk to you, they speak perfectly fine English but what they say often makes little sense. They don't like to give you straight answers & explanations; or more likely, they enjoy giving confusing & evasive ones.
Someone was arrested in Kansas using my identity. I'm curious. So I go to Kansas, some small ugly city. I ask where the county jail is. Outside of town. I see a rental car agency across the street. Next thing I'm pulling into the jail parking lot in a rented pickup.
Some jive ass punks get out of a car next to me, joking around. Maybe this a juvie jail.
I go inside. A large echoey room, two rows of wooden benches down one side, people sitting in them, fidgeting, some children. At the far end is a reception counter of some kind. I walk over. I can't seem to get anyone's attention. Finally, a guy walks over, looking through some papers, looks up at me, "Yeah?"
"You have someone here named Robert Rixon. I want to see him."
"Why do you want to see him? Are you a relative?"
I answer, evasively, "The Elizabeth NJ police Dept called & said he was here."
That seemed reasonable, so the guy said, "Then give your name." & he walked away, Give my name to whom? Someone in a uniform was sitting down tapping away at computer. Two other staffers were behind the counter doing some other work. Clearly, the prisoners were beyond a door on the left. People walking in & out of there. Around this point I'm beginning to understand the game, why I'm there. I want to find out if this person using my name name is me, or not me. If me, at what age. If not me, what my impostor looks like & why this faker wants to see me, enticing me all the way to dream Kansas, I've been to real Kansas twice & disliked it both times.The first time I got caught in massive swarm of locusts & stayed in a hotel downwind from stockyards. The second time I rode a bus west to east across the entire damned state.
At this point the dream ended. I somehow became aware I was napping, & my interior mental alarm clock had gone off at anout the 30 minute mark, which is the max length I want for naps.
Futile anyway. I wasn't going to see this person using my name. I know these dream characters. Maybe I invent them, maybe they are, as poet Jim Cohn suggested, Bodhisattvas. He said I should try to talk with them. But either way I give them form, & personality, & they behave with the same, succinctly cryptic talk that I use when I'm avoiding expressing a direct opinion or emotion. They toy with me & mock me, partly, I think, because I act in the dream world as if it were the waking world. Oh, these people are in charge here & I need their permission to go in the back room & find person using my name. Once, I ought to try saying, "Look, this is my dream. I came here for a reason, get out my way."
***
4/12
This dream was, I believe, an unclear premonition of the the news I received on Feb. 3. I went away to a college in Kansas in Sept. '66. I hated the college, the town, & my roommate. I was homesick & I missed my new girlfriend back home. Without the girlfriend - I was still falling in love, & I'd never felt anything like it before, I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to bail on the college after two weeks, knowing how pissed off my dad would be, but chosen to stick it out through one semester. Trying to make sense of my strong reaction to Karen's death, I had to go back & find the young man from this dream, because now I know he was me at age 17, not an impostor. Where did the dream come from? I don't know. But the characters in the dream couldn't tell me why I was really there. Maybe they didn't know.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Someone was arrested in Kansas using my identity. I'm curious. So I go to Kansas, some small ugly city. I ask where the county jail is. Outside of town. I see a rental car agency across the street. Next thing I'm pulling into the jail parking lot in a rented pickup.
Some jive ass punks get out of a car next to me, joking around. Maybe this a juvie jail.
I go inside. A large echoey room, two rows of wooden benches down one side, people sitting in them, fidgeting, some children. At the far end is a reception counter of some kind. I walk over. I can't seem to get anyone's attention. Finally, a guy walks over, looking through some papers, looks up at me, "Yeah?"
"You have someone here named Robert Rixon. I want to see him."
"Why do you want to see him? Are you a relative?"
I answer, evasively, "The Elizabeth NJ police Dept called & said he was here."
That seemed reasonable, so the guy said, "Then give your name." & he walked away, Give my name to whom? Someone in a uniform was sitting down tapping away at computer. Two other staffers were behind the counter doing some other work. Clearly, the prisoners were beyond a door on the left. People walking in & out of there. Around this point I'm beginning to understand the game, why I'm there. I want to find out if this person using my name name is me, or not me. If me, at what age. If not me, what my impostor looks like & why this faker wants to see me, enticing me all the way to dream Kansas, I've been to real Kansas twice & disliked it both times.The first time I got caught in massive swarm of locusts & stayed in a hotel downwind from stockyards. The second time I rode a bus west to east across the entire damned state.
At this point the dream ended. I somehow became aware I was napping, & my interior mental alarm clock had gone off at anout the 30 minute mark, which is the max length I want for naps.
Futile anyway. I wasn't going to see this person using my name. I know these dream characters. Maybe I invent them, maybe they are, as poet Jim Cohn suggested, Bodhisattvas. He said I should try to talk with them. But either way I give them form, & personality, & they behave with the same, succinctly cryptic talk that I use when I'm avoiding expressing a direct opinion or emotion. They toy with me & mock me, partly, I think, because I act in the dream world as if it were the waking world. Oh, these people are in charge here & I need their permission to go in the back room & find person using my name. Once, I ought to try saying, "Look, this is my dream. I came here for a reason, get out my way."
***
4/12
This dream was, I believe, an unclear premonition of the the news I received on Feb. 3. I went away to a college in Kansas in Sept. '66. I hated the college, the town, & my roommate. I was homesick & I missed my new girlfriend back home. Without the girlfriend - I was still falling in love, & I'd never felt anything like it before, I probably wouldn't have had the nerve to bail on the college after two weeks, knowing how pissed off my dad would be, but chosen to stick it out through one semester. Trying to make sense of my strong reaction to Karen's death, I had to go back & find the young man from this dream, because now I know he was me at age 17, not an impostor. Where did the dream come from? I don't know. But the characters in the dream couldn't tell me why I was really there. Maybe they didn't know.
Labels: dreams, Karen Battell
