Heaven

The solution to my remaining digestive woes? A little ginger ale. And a prayer to St. Erasmus.

So now it is 11:30 p.m. and there are four MAJOR, active situations. At least, and none of them can I talk about directly. The Asian Holocaust sensitivity problem is pushed into the background by my own intensely personal issues with my ex-husband and my brother.

My mother is in Heaven. I think that I have worked it out that my belief that she was living was actually coming from her being in purgatory. I think people reach us from there. I don’t know a whole lot about it. My son rejoiced with me at the thought of her laughing and smiling and floating way high above us.

That’s not one of the situations it is a resolution of a misperception that is welcome.

Being back on the Clozaril just for an hour is already fantastically improving my mood. Once again, not a situation, just a resolution of one.

As for my brother and my ex-husband, I am praying for them.

As for Hiroshima and Nagasaki I am sickened by what I begin to understand about what the brass tacks of the atom bombings in World War II must have been and must still be. When I think of my mother and father and their experience of wartime England in their youths, I now instantly understand the remark that my father made at dinner one night and my reaction and what that was about. I was in second grade so I was 7 years old. My father said something to me and I said, “I know.” My father lectured a lot and it was boring as heck. He said “No you don’t,” and looked at me fiercely. In other words, “shut up”–words sort of like “cunt” to an Englishwoman. I thought he was an idiot. For real! At age 7. I had just won at multiplication tables and I was thrilled. I’m pretty sure it was that night. It was all about WWII in different countries and that we were in America where there was next to no fighting on our own soil. My father had gone through bombings and evacuations and a decimated empire of which he became a scholarship kid and therefore a representative (I never thought of that before!) I never saw his war and his talks of it were dull to a little girl in a fascinating New World. My mother hated America but she also loved it at the end when she learned to see the beauty of it.

The point is, it was true that I had no understanding of my father’s War and never could in a lovely North Jersey town and there was no way for him to teach me. (But teach me he did. Honor your Mother and Father.) Similarly, he had no idea of what my brother and I were going through in American public grade school. It was the teachers who were doing it to these arrogant little snots (us).

So, I finally met my comeuppance at the Horsham Clinic an hour south of here starting 3 years ago (I went twice). There was a woman who was up all night screaming in the hall every night and it brought to my mind images of bomber planes going by overhead and shelters made of any available metal by dockworkers who had life itself and that was all and they were protecting it because Life is good.

So, my father brought his bride here to America, because someone told him it was the only civilized place left on Earth–or similar words. And here we have been ever since.

Our America was so safe and bright and funny compared to bombers flying over head at night and rationing, and fathers standing guard on the rooftops and bomb shelters in the back yard–in England, throughout WWII.

And in America we had snow!

It was like a fairy tale.

And as I grew I tried to picture the American-English mother and how beautiful that would be, oh, well, so… oh, oh, so, so beautiful…