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Just my opinions and outlook on life |
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The end of 2020 The very first entry I made for The Writer’s Cramp was my best. It tied for the win and I was happy about that but it really made no difference to me. It was a poem written after Thanksgiving about my own recovery from addiction. That was 26 years ago and it totally changed my life. I checked myself into Drug Rehabilitation when I first realized that I might have a problem with substance abuse. I had no idea what changes that one incident would make in my life. When I was discharged, I had a lot of major decisions to make and the poem spoke to how conflicted I still was. The prompt was Closely Watched Trains. It was easy to take that one and run with it. After all, trains take you places and where you go can change your life forever. My journey had just begun. Closely Watched Trains I stand alone in blinding rain, waiting on an unknown train. My future life, a choice to make. Only one I can take. Two tickets lay in my hand, don’t know where to stand. One path leads to a familiar past. Comfort once lost; now peace might last. The other takes me far away. Unknown future, a bright new day? Strangers can become friends. A new life, old wounds can mend. Last time I waited on a train, a filthy walkway, urine stains. Crying frightened, shameful tears, burdened with pain, unknown fears. The smut on me wouldn’t wash away. In pores so deep, I had to stay. If I hung in, worked the steps. A cluttered mess might bring rest. Been running too long and fast, towards a certain fatal crash. Smoke the gin, drink the powder, Alice of Wonderland in troubled water. I did hard work, washed my stains. Princess in a castle, I glow, no shame. I found answers for all asked of me, climbed the Magic Beanstalk tree. Now, I wait on my wish filled train. I pray a light shines true in dark rain. God, I have come a long, long way. I need to love myself enough to stay. By Kathie Stehr 11/27/2020 Learning to love myself enough to make necessary decisions was the key to future happiness. If you don’t love yourself enough then you cannot love other important people in your life. I left a marriage that I knew was over after twenty years. We had two children together and were happy for many years so it was devastating to even think about starting over. Our lives had changed so much over those years. Now, instead of working together, we were destroying our lives and it was affecting the kids. I also ended up leaving my job as a registered nurse because the stress of all of it: the marriage, the job and no time for my children was taking a terrible toll. I had been diagnosed with a neurological disease that was painful and hard to deal with for me and my family. The final straw was taking medication for the symptoms and making the potentially harmful mistake of mixing it with alcohol. Thankfully I only did this when I wasn't working but if I had continued, I would have made mistakes at work and could have hurt or killed someone. Working with the hospital, I tried different areas to go back to work but could not physically do it. I applied for and got on the hospital's disability benefit. This step began a whole new way to live an even better life. I helped with the national organization for dystonia, became a support group leader, I also was a motivational speaker that traveled the country to talk at our national symposiums with physicians and scientists. It was a different way of being a nurse/caretaker by taking caring of me first then other people who needed information and guidance. I loved meeting the people and the symptoms, that I was trying to cover up at work, showed others I was just like them. I could give them hope. I remarried, in time, to a man who loves me and helped me with my volunteer work. He has been by my side for surgeries and many painful procedures. Of course, I have reciprocated for him but it is hard to deal with a partner with physical disabilities. We have been together for over twenty-five years and have a large combined family who love each other. I will be 68 in 2021 and we are enjoying a more laid back retired life. All of us should constantly take an inventory of our lives. How are we living them? Are we serving ourselves or others? I believe we are put on this Earth to help others and we must be willing and honest to do that. I follow the principles of AA and NA and it hasn't let me down. It is progress not perfection, like a marriage. If you make a mistake, you own it and begin again. I hope any future entries I make are as true to my convictions as this one was. Fiction is fine and I enjoy it. All writing comes from the inner well of wisdom that says so much about its’ author. I try to end all my writing on an optimistic note. I want to grow in my writing, sometimes I touch my inner feelings more than others and this was one that did. It was a great prompt. 2020 has been a very hard year for more people than I can ever remember. There are so many people out there that are ill, have lost someone they love, can't feed their families and are falling into the darkness of addiction. I pray for all of them and do what I can. I wish for the judges and all the people that belong to Writing.com that they are at peace within themselves and bring more joy to this planet than they take from it. I know I have to make that choice every day, to spread love and remain sober. I wish you all a happy new year, may it be a much better year for all. Thanks for letting me be a part of this family. Kathie Stehr December 31, 2020 ** Image ID #2267445 Unavailable ** |
| “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”― Anais Nin Is there anything sweeter than to relive the high-points of your life in a poem or story? I know that I have used the births of my children, my experiences with love, fun and sexual healing in my writing. It is almost as delightful as the real moments. The wonderful truth about memory is that you tend to remake your story into something even better and that is okay. After all, it is your story so you are the narrator. A Sweet Symphony That song, do we dare take a dangerous chance slip our skins, roll back years hold each other so close again? No words needed our bodies speak. Heat beneath his hands we always fit together in sweet familiar lands. His scent for two decades sends chills up my spine, Chivas, Omegas , Calvin Klein. Nights born of passion his brown eyes seek mine. Twirling on the dance floor, possessive hands pull me close. Crazy work hours, ambitions, egos, excuses. No love notes, candy, or flowers. I melt like honey sliding down a jar. Lips whisper as before; "Do you remember, Punkin?" He reminds me of fire bursts as gentle hands stroke me first. I will always have memories: satin nights, secrets in sheets. Family times no one can replace. Over years, we both agreed we needed to break free. Looking back, it was meant to be. Not merely a three minute melody. A fully formed, carefully imagined exquisite symphony. By Kathie Stehr Dedicated to my first husband who died in 2001. |
| What would you say to your 80 year old self about all the things you've witnessed in life? Would you discuss what you've missed out and regretted or would you congratulate yourself on all the things you've accomplished? I will be 80 in just twelve years. Recently I have been going through photos and memorabilia from my life so this is something I have been reflecting on. I am fortunate to have lived during a time when incredible progress has been made in technology, medicine and acceptance of different cultures. Personally I have had a wonderful life with a happy childhood. You always hear there is a reason for everything that happens and that is very true. I married very young, too young at eighteen. I was in love and my husband was almost 10 years older. We had a son quickly and I have wonderful memories of being a young mother. I decided to go back to school while he was a toddler and completed college. Life was very busy for so many years with a second son, a full time job working as an RN in a large hospital, building a home we designed. After twenty years of marriage we sadly separated. That was the most difficult time for myself and my children , who were 14 and 19. I eventually remarried a man with 2 sons and we have been together for 30 years now. I love his family and all of our boys have happy successful lives. I am so proud of all of them. We have 6 lovely grandchildren. Retirement for me came early due to a neurological disorder I acquired at age 30. I stuck it out with my job for 12 more years but eventually left nursing. Working had become more stressful each year with a shortage of RNs and management changes. I became very involved in volunteer work for a non-profit organization for Dystonia. I have enjoyed that as much as my nursing career, being able to travel and speak all over the US to others suffering with this painful crippling disorder. It is fulfilling to help others and I believe that is what having a full life is all about. I have my regrets about some decisions I have made but if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change much. I feel very blessed and am thankful for all the opportunities I have had. I am grateful to have a loving family, a nice home and satisfying life.Life for me has truly been a circle of love. |
| Prompt: Let's talk about the psychology of fright. What do so many people enjoy about being terrified? Discuss the physical and emotional needs that are filled through this experience. I personally don’t care for fright movies because they are usually so fake. Being in the medical profession, I tend to prefer reality detective and true crime documentaries. I am, however, surrounded by family that loves “scary” movies. I understand the release of dopamine and adrenaline play into it. My grandkids love horror movies but they logically know it is a movie and not real life. A movie like “The Sixth Sense” is more intriguing and frightening than the “Halloween” movies. The kids love those and “Chucky” but they also laugh at them. I think they are a great tension reliever for my husband and older kids who just need to get out of the “real” world for a couple of hours. It is also a great way to spend time together as a family. One grandson loves nothing more than to come to our house and watch scary movies with my husband. I think they like that better than sports. There is nothing quite like taking a date to a horror movie and snuggling etc. together. Since I am from the drive-in generation, that was always a sure thing for getting closer to someone physically. As a teenager, they were great fun. I don’t think you can beat the nail biting, heart racing suspense of Alfred Hitchcock movies. He was a master of the slow build up of suspense and then a great fright climax. I found this in a magazine: Horror movies are meant to scare you. But for some people with anxiety, they may find horror movies comforting. According to Brownlowe, there's a good reason why. "The experience of your brain calming itself down after watching a scary movie is actually neuro-chemically very pleasurable," she says. "That’s because the dopamine release related to the 'rest-and-digest' brain response causes an increased sense of well-being." Happy Halloween! |
| “Law enforcement exists to ensure the safety of the public, but if the public are primitive enough to think that all they need to ensure their safety is a personal firearm, then we better destroy all things civilized and head back to the jungle, because a society where anybody can own a gun is not a society, but a jungle anyways.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Your thoughts? Agree or Disagree Law enforcement should be much more about community involvement and less about the guns. Cops need to be a part of the community outreach to teach citizens better ways to handle situations before kids get into trouble. They need help, more money and other personnel. 911 operators get calls about all kinds of situations. I don’t know how much training they have but it can’t possibly be enough for what they have to handle. Why can’t drug addiction specialists, mental health specialists do ride alongs and see how they can assist police? What happened to tranquilizer guns instead of bullets that tear a body apart inside? Can’t you shoot someone in the leg, arm, etc instead of deadly force? Many cops come from the military. That is great but they have been taught to shoot to kill so is it a reflex that kicks in or is that taught in police academy? I just saw this morning that the program “Cops” is being brought back to TV on Fox News nation. I know most of the TV programs (Law and Order, Blue Bloods)about police make it look like they can take each case personally and make it a crusade. That was never possible because most departments are too busy but at least it was something to shoot for. “Cops” made mostly minority kids look like a bunch of wild criminals that the police had to shoot down. Right now in the US we have more firearms than people. If a person is going to open carry a firearm and they get into a domestic argument, isn’t it easier to reach for that gun then use your words, get help or walk out the door and calm down? Most homicide victims are known to their killers. We are asking for violence when people think firearms can solve our problems. How about taking a course in martial arts? Then you actually learn techniques to discipline yourself but also to harm an enemy without deadly force if you have to. I am not saying gun owners that have valid licenses and have learned gun safety can’t get a personal gun but it needs to be in a safe place in your home with a safety lock. If you are a hunter, fine, but you don’t need an assault weapon to go after Bambi. We need community police departments that are trained very well for all situations or yes, it could easily become a jungle. Seems like it already is. |
| I belong to a Facebook club that addresses reading for women in their sixties. I was surprised that "Gone with the Wind" is still one of the most popular books and movies, ranked in the top ten and many times number one. I loved the book and movie when I was a teenage girl, wanting to be strong like Scarlett and was crazy for Rhett Butler. I haven't read it since I was in my forties (in the 1990's) when I saw the movie on TV and it occurred to me how racist it really was. Where was Mammy's family? Why was she so loyal to these people and waited on them hand and foot? Why are families that owned slaves the heroes of this story? This kind of thing was spoon fed to me in elementary schools in the state of GA. Black slaves were owned, that was the system of things and most were treated well. The Civil War happened and Lincoln freed the slaves. Then all was well. This was in the 1960's when we went from school to home TV sets where we saw firehoses turned on black children and cops beating people who just wanted to vote. I hear people now speaking about Critical Race Theory being taught in schools and how they are against it. Our grandchildren need the facts of history-we were wrong and we are trying to make it right. The following was written in 2014: Gone with the Wind turns 75 this year, a long enough period to establish it as an artifact, a museum piece. We like to think 1939 was a different world, a world divided from our own by a supposedly vast span of progressive enlightenment. Unfortunately, while 75 years in American life is enough to constitute several distinct epochs, it's not long enough to kill off the country's enduring prejudices. What is astonishing about Gone with the Wind on its anniversary is how relevant it seems, not necessarily in its story or in its frame, but in its working stereotypes. The movie is, in many ways, a repository of the originals that have shaped American culture's tortured descriptions of race since. Broadly speaking, the movie falls into the category of racist American classic, a rich and cherished filmography. The movie that invented narrative film as we know it was The Birth of a Nation, an epic about the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, and it remains, beyond any doubt, the single most influential film ever made. The technique and the vocabulary of film shots were defined by it. The way that emotions are captured by the use of the camera in relation to the actors was invented by its director, D.W. Griffith. If he hadn't created such a horrifically racist film, Griffith would be up there with the Wright brothers as one of America's foundational innovators. Gone with the Wind was the next leap forward, the Technicolor, talkie equivalent of The Birth of a Nation. It cannot be denied its profound beauty, the relentless drive of its story and the fascination of its characters. Gone with the Wind is a deeply lush film, filled with a subterranean eroticism as well as a brilliant historical sweep. The grand epic film has fallen out of favor recently — although Boyhood is a brilliant reimagining of its possibilities — but attempts to imitate Gone with the Wind resulted in such classics as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and even the Godfather movies. The character of Scarlett O'Hara, and her love affair with Rhett Butler, is a study in what time does to people. We see her first as a coquettish girl and in the end as a ravaged woman. The sprawl is wonderful. If the classic movie structure is three acts, Gone with the Wind has thirty. Watching it today is closer to binge-watching a Netflix hit. With its classic antihero at the center, its conjuration of a lost world that is also a morally dubious world, it is easy to see the influence of Gone with the Wind on Breaking Bad, or even more Mad Men. Mad Men is basically Gone with the Wind meets the sixties. Romance for the world of slavery is the book's setting as well as its philosophy: "There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South... Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind..." This is only the worst of the film's politically incorrect sins. Gone with the Wind contains the single most romantic vision of marital rape ever put onscreen: The film more or less invented the concept of the sassy black friend, in Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, who was the first African-American to win an Oscar. The film explicitly talks about reparations, the famous 40 acres and a mule, as a vote-buying scam put about by Yankee carpetbaggers. There are good blacks and insolent blacks. There are house blacks and there are field blacks. Whenever African-American characters are articulate, it is always meant as a comic surprise. These are still the prejudices that bedevil representations of African-Americans onscreen. But what is most fascinating about Gone with the Wind is the capacity for the story not to be about race. One would think that a story about the Civil War, about the liberation of the slaves, would naturally involve the discussion of the nature of enslavement, the nature of rebellion. But there is really almost none of it. Even after the war is lost, Mammy remains Mammy. The good blacks remain the good blacks. The carpetbaggers only appear in a tiny fragment of a scene, and they are not really given enough personhood to count as villains. That honor goes to white trash and the Yankees. The details of the material life of the Southerners is the key, and in that drama the black people amount to furniture. During a nap before the war, white girls sleep while black girls fan them with peacock feather fans. Whether those black girls have any feelings whatsoever is a matter of the strictest irrelevance to this movie. That fundamental indifference is the key to Scarlett O'Hara's character, a heroine who is also a monster, a nearly pure materialist. She is a daring bit of writing — in a film about the sweep of history, the protagonist is remarkable for how little she cares about the workings of history. For her, history is what interrupts the business of life, which is dressing nicely and having sex with hot guys. She stands in for the whole of the South. The white people in Gone with the Wind aren't necessarily good people, but their badness as it is understood in the film has nothing to do with the lives of black people. Their dramas float over the suffering of the slaves and then over the suffering of the free black people indifferently. This is the underlying reality of the racism in Gone with the Wind: its abstractness. The War is an external force outside of the personal dramas of the players. Slavery, hatred, prejudice — all may well exist but not in any personal way. The crimes of Gone with the Wind all spring from that original sin: the failure to recognize that there's a problem at all. That willful blindness remains the primary source of the stereotypes that still afflict the representation of race on American screens. Unfortunately, Gone with the Wind isn't gone at all. It's still very much with us. |
| Prompt: "Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found." Ann Morrow Lindbergh What do you think? I am watching an active shooter situation at a high school in Arlington, Texas. The question of security is certainly one to be asked. I thought all high schools had metal detectors to detect weapons. This is a sad reoccurring situation in the United States that no one seems to know how to stop. These kids have enough to worry about with Covid plus they still go through active shooter drills. I look back at when my children went to school in the 1980’s and 1990’s and they didn’t have anything like this happening. Their children are having to face these tragedies. My kids knew of kids that overdosed on drugs, which was the problem then and still is. The quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh is certainly the truth and she would know since her own baby was kidnapped , there was a ransom note but the child was found murdered. Security would have to be a number one concern for her always since she and her husband made aviation history, risking their lives at a time when aviation wasn’t as safe. They also became very political, joining an Isolationist group that spoke highly of Adolph Hitler so they were controversial. I think that growth, reform and change is always needed for a feeling of security. Diplomacy is a key to that though because you can isolate yourself behind walls, have lots of money and armed guards and true security can’t be always be found. What kind of life is that? True security is found in the people around you that you can trust, the place you call home and your own emotional well being. I feel like I have had that most of my life and I have been fortunate. As far as how I began this, there were children shot and a teacher. An 18 year old is on the loose that caused this shooting. Change and reform are badly needed as far as guns go and treatment for mental health. |
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