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Moving into the more ‘recent history’ of my childhood as I search through my mother’s accumulation of papers begins to make my stomach queasy and gives me a feeling that something icy is crawling around on the inside ‘surface’ of my skin.  I feel very small, nearly caught by the cast of a massive creeping shadow.

The following link is to a letter I wrote to my grandmother while we were living in the Eagle River log house the winter of my 6th grade of school.  I enjoyed very much reading about the ‘clappers’ because I have never forgotten that experience — though now I know that at the time I was (just to make you a little curious) sick to death of ‘clapping’!  I have always remembered being a part of the group with all of my classmates, on equal ground and on equal footing with them as we practiced our unique musical skills.  I have always thought what joy it would give me to be able to repeat the experience with a group of adults!

I can sense the same lack of emotion in this letter that I sense in the ones I wrote to my own mother well into my adulthood — before I disowned her.  I hear the cold distant ring of the left-brained intellect, devoid of any in-formation from passion, from body memory or emotion from the beating heart of the right brain.

It’s like I hear myself speaking in a vast, empty hollow chamber so big that all sound dissipates into nothingness before it can actually reach anyone — and I am absolutely alone.  More accurately, it feels to me today like I opened my mouth, pantomiming communication but not a single word or sound came out.   I see the image of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.  How does a child create a self in a world of violence, where the inner and the outer world feels exactly like a vacuum?

Perhaps it’s the contrast and contradiction between supposedly attempting to communicate in my letter, while at the same time knowing that ‘Linda wasn’t at home’ when she wrote it that bothers me most.  She/I was not connected to any feeling center that was informed with the warmth of being alive in a body in her/my world.

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*Age 11 – My May 30, 1963 Letter to Grandma

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