My Alix Dobkin Personal Anecdote

Famous lesbian activist musician, Alix Dobkin, passed away today at 80.  Alix was famous for the song “Amazon ABC” and others to all lesbians coming out in the 1980’s and later. During my illustrious but short lived standup comedy career 35 years ago, I had the honor of opening for Alix Dobkin in a Halloween concert in Olympia with the Righteous Mothers, a beloved northwest group.

I didn’t have show biz chops.  I trembled mightily before each show.  When I got to the theatre, I was told I would be introducing Alix after my first bit on stage.  In my naivety, I went up to Alix to ask her how she would like to be introduced.  I knew of her, of course, but that was the extent of it.  Alix’s response was, “I prefer personal anecdotes.”

In my nervousness, I clarified, “So, you’re referring to a story I have about hearing your music?”

She said, “Yes,” in a way that implied I was dumb as a post.

I said bluntly, “I’m sorry. I don’t have one.” I thought she had gall. She looked at me coldly. I went off to talk to the stage manager.  Alix did the same.  Shortly after, the stage manager informed me she would do the introduction.  Naturally, the stage manager did a marvelous job because she did have an Alix Dobkin personal anecdote.  Alix no longer made eye contact with me.

It was my first brush with a famous person.  I missed the mark.  When I put on my mustache for my second act, Alix did deign to tell me I looked “svelte.”  I repeated svelte stupidly, thanked her, and thought about what svelte might mean.

When I told this story to Ronnie this morning, she said, “I imagine Alix has forgotten.”  

“Undoubtedly,” I said. “Death will do that.” The good news is, “Hey, Alix.  I do have a personal anecdote.”  She probably wouldn’t want me to tell it at her memorial.

Here is the link to “Amazon ABC.”  (This was prior to the Amazon we all know so well.)

https://youtu.be/lmr3ZYa0Aaw

Rest In Peace, Alix.

Joceile

5.19.21

[Picture of a younger Alix Dobkin in jeans and a t-shirt.]

The Day I Went to Western State Hospital

What can I say?  It was transformative. It will always be transformative. This is why I pay homage every year. A fourteen year old girl was plucked from terror and confusion and placed in a time out. Not as punishment or penalty but as an opportunity to mentally breathe. 

Generally, we don’t think of mental hospitals or psych wards this way. Used well, they can be a place where we take stock, adjust our thinking, and make a better plan. I was one such lucky person, able to reorient the trajectory of my life. 

So, I say thank you to that fourteen year old, the mental health staff, and my grandparents. We don’t need to abolish the things that scare us. We need support to find a way through them. 

May 19, 1972, will always be as important to me as my birthday, though obviously, not as highly regarded. I was lucky to be born and then given an opportunity to improve my lot. I know many don’t get such opportunities and when given are unable to embrace them. There are two parts: luck and fortitude. I am grateful I had both.

To Life. 

Joceile 

5/17/21

[Picture of my counselor, Jerry, and I. 1972]

May 7th Again

It’s my mother’s birthday.  She’s 86.  I wish I could call her.  Call her up and say, “Hi, mom.  It’s been a long time,” and listen to a voice I haven’t heard for 27 years.  It’s not that I’ve forgotten it.  It’s just that it’s not safe for me to call her, even though, she’s alive; even though, she’s near.

Twenty-seven years ago, she was 59—four years younger than I am now.  She was angry then.  I understand she’s angrier now.  My mom is consumed by the world in her head, victimized by so many people who didn’t do right by her.  Any list I make would never cover them all.

Her mother couldn’t take care of her.  Multiple foster parents were abusive.  Relatives who molested her.  Her father had a second wife.  I haven’t even gotten out of her childhood.  Husbands that didn’t understand her or take care of her.  Money that didn’t come her way.  Denial of either of her uncles’ estates she believed she was entitled to.  My grandparents left her nothing in their wills.  Employers who didn’t treat her fairly.  My father who had more children with his second wife instead of her and married a third.  Men who took advantage of her and tossed her away in a world that didn’t teach her self-sufficiency.

Then, there’s me.  From what I could tell, I’ve been a grave disappointment.  I left her house at 14.  I sought help from counselors when my mother could have provided everything I needed.  I manipulated mental health professionals into believing I was abused.  My grandparents wanted to steal me from her.  I went to live with my grandparents instead of her or my dad.   I became a lesbian.  My partner is Jewish.  I withdrew from her to protect my daughter from her.  

On and on it goes.  My mother can recite line after line of the ways she was mistreated.  In fact, she’s essentially unable to converse about anything else.  It is heartbreaking and abusive.  She’s ten digits away on my phone.  I could hear her voice speak to me just before the cascade of wrongs becomes her sole focus.

My brother still tends to my mom’s needs.  He drives her to her doctor’s appointments.  I don’t think she sees his children much anymore.  She’s unable to respect verbal and physical boundaries.  My brother told me she ranted so much on the way to the doctor he had to tell her to stop talking or he would never take her again.  Is this anyway to live?

To enter into a relationship with her is to engage in a war of grievances.  There is no resolution.  No peace treaties.  No reconciliation.  No end to the recitation of harm.  It is an endless stream of bile.  Apparently, she had an exciting ride as a Trump supporter.  One lifelong friend I knew as a child reported her mother was exhausted from my mother’s constant political ranting.  Finally, she pissed my mother off in some imagined way.  My mother stopped talking to her.  My friend’s mom said to her daughter, “Well, at least I have two hours of my life back every day.”

My mom has had an endless stream of recycled friends.  A few years ago, she came to the end of the line.  Everyone is dead or too tired to go anymore rounds with her.  According to my brother, even Trump was a terrible disappointment.  She believed he would not leave the presidency.  The voting results not withstanding.

Regularly, I have to re-adjudicate my decision to continue our separation.  I made a file years ago of my mother’s crazy letters so I can remember why I’m not in touch.  Her birthdays are the worst because I know one day she won’t be on the other end of that phone number.  The fantasy will cease to have any possibility of reality.  I’ve done all I can do with her in this lifetime.  I’m sorry, mom.  Happy birthday.

Joceile

5.7.21

[Portrait of my mother.  Circa 1980]

My Bionic Ears

They say hearing is a precious commodity.  I’m sure this is true.  There is also research indicating that unaddressed hearing loss can contribute to dementia.  The good news is that we have options.  The bad news is that hearing aids are expensive and health care doesn’t pay for them.

Initially, my hearing loss was only in my left ear.  It was difficult to identify what I was missing with a loss in one ear.  I had to work at daily wearing my left hearing aid until it landed in my shirt pocket (where it is never supposed to be) and went through the wash.  It couldn’t go the distance.  Getting it fixed, resulted in an updated hearing test. I now also had a hearing loss in my right ear.  How helpful.  Rather than spend money to fix the one, I purchased two brand new hearing aids.  Yes, I get a $700 contribution from my healthcare insurer which doesn’t go far for $4000 hearing aids.

When I sported my new hearing aids at work, I wasn’t shy in talking about getting them.  People were surprised.  I assist employees with accommodations at work for medical conditions.  It is incumbent upon me to be a leader in normalizing accommodations, demonstrating there is no shame.  My openness about my hearing aids caused people to ask me questions allowing me to spread the gospel of addressing hearing loss to improve mental health, social engagement, and as a bonus, act against dementia.

I remember working with a man named Greg who was reticent about wearing his hearing aids even when his wife complained he couldn’t hear her higher voice.  When I asked Greg why he didn’t want to wear his hearing aids, thinking it was because they were uncomfortable or some such, he told me it was vanity, pure and simple.  Wow, I thought.  I’m vain but not wearing my hearing aids is just stupid.  With two, I can very clearly hear the difference when I am wearing them.  It’s worth it.  And, not just because I can listen to the ball game on my iPhone and no one knows it.  It gives me a break from asking people to repeat things three times.  Three is my absolute limit. If I don’t get it after three, I just give up.  This way lies loss of engagement with people.  Not a good look for someone working in Human Resources.

The bluetooth feature with iPhones and iPads is really cool but only if one has a high tolerance for technical nonsense.  I’ve learned to switch between my iPhone and iPad and most recently my work iPhone.  It took me a long time to learn to switch devices effectively and turn off bluetooth on the device I’m not using.  I hate having one ear in my iPhone and one in my iPad.  While watching Saturday Night Live clips, my right hearing aid keeps sounding like a slow alien.  If I toss my head around or move my iPad, it clears up.  I’m not sure what part of the system gets screwed up—my hearing aids, my iPad, or my head.  At times walking by a fluorescent lightbulb, my left hearing aid hums like it’s in touch with the heartbeat of the fluorescent.  I don’t like to think about what’s really going on there.

Other than listening to baseball during work meetings—I have to remember to not shout out, “Yes!” in the middle of the meeting when my team scores—I’ve learned other dynamic uses.  I love to hear birds singing.  The more, the merrier.  My hearing aid has 12 settings from -8 to +4 with 0 being normal.  To hear birds beyond my normal range, I turn my hearing above normal.  So, sweet.  When voices or media outside of my control are too loud, I turn them down to the minus range.  Recently while hanging out in a public park people watching and eavesdropping, I discovered I can eavesdrop better when I raise them above normal hearing level.  “Those two look intense.  I wonder what they’re talking about?”  I boost my hearing.  I might learn an important stock tip or a plot to take over the government or just two moony eyed idiots talking about their dating lives.  If it’s good, I listen.  Otherwise, it easily goes back down.

The bottom line is these things are pretty damn fun.  I’m not advocating hearing loss.  But if I’m gonna have it, I sure like to adjust my experience a bit.  Why the hell not?  There’s so much in the world I have absolutely no control over.  And by the way, technology companies maybe bringing the cost down.  Already there is a setting paired with bluetooth headphones that enable iPhones and iPads to act like remote microphones when placed on a table.  I mean the table in front of you not for spying in the other room.  I’m positive they weren’t intended for that!

To life and tech.  Gawd help us.

Joceile

5.7.21

[Picture of me laying on a couch adjusting my iPhone.]

The Flower I Grieve

I’ve spent most of my life focused on a certain flower that passed long ago. I believed it was the only one, never to be replaced.  I’ve grieved.  I’ve lamented over losing that beautiful flower.  Each year, I’ve gone to the place where the flower bloomed in its glory and cried.  I’ve memorialized its passing in writing and photographs.  At times, I didn’t notice all that was around me, catching only a glimpse of the wider world in my grief. 

In my pain, I’ve gone to mental health therapy week after week, year after year, determined to get to the bottom of the flower’s loss.  I worked with therapists for decades.  A few were special guides on this long journey.

The lost flower is a metaphor for my grief over sexual assault by adults starting as a very young child.  A child only knows what was done to them.  A child doesn’t know what they’ve lost.  “It was me.  It was my fault.  If I’d been different, it wouldn’t have happened.”  Each of these statements were worked through in an effort to get resolution of what happened and how it impacted me.  Each little strand was pursued in the search for my truth, my childlike understanding, and my adult understanding.  It is an epic journey comparable to climbing the highest mountain or circumnavigating the largest sea.  When I climb my high mountains, there’s no fanfare or public recognition.  It’s all personal.  Those closest to me who have touched my life know of the journey.

I learned this week via a chain of obscure facts that other children in my extended family, my cousins, were also sexually abused by evil men. Boys and girls were hurt this way. Not just girls but boys too. It wasn’t just being female that makes children vulnerable. It wasn’t because I wouldn’t give in, refused to cry, or had a vagina. It was because these men were sick criminals. Why they were this way is not my problem.

For nearly 60 years, I’ve hated my woman-ness thinking it was the reason for my being targeted. Now I realize I was assaulted because I was there, vulnerable to men willing to harm merely to assert their power over someone unable to fight back. Perhaps I don’t need to hate my femaleness quite so much anymore. It’s a long process. The grief can morph into anger, resolve, and finally, confidence. 

Like others during this dark year of the pandemic, I’ve been introspective, pondering the ever present questions of “What is my life?  Who I am?  Where am I going?”  There’s been an increase in richness that isn’t pandemic related.  I’m getting older and am in my last third of life.  Many I’ve known have not been so lucky.  I mourn them.  I celebrate that I am here and carry on the love they’ve shown me.

I know now the flower was never lost as I stand here remembering its fine color and beauty.  As I look up and around me, I see I am in a garden of flowers with a riotous display of colors, shapes, and fragrances.  It’s true that an individual flower was lost.  While I was looking down, I didn’t see that the rest of the garden was robust.  I’m able to see it now.

The garden that is my life is temporary.  The impermanent beauty is its essence.  I look at the splendor of nature and those I love.  No flower lasts forever.  The magic is in knowing that it’s here now, celebrating it, and knowing there will be others.  I will end.  Those I know and love will end.  But something will continue to grow strong, facing the sun, and listening to the night.  I’m honored I was ever here at all.

As for my younger self grieving for that lost flower all these years, thank you for your focus, determination, and for carrying on even when it appeared all was lost.  It was only through your diligence that I get to look up and see the whole picture.  Even a glimpse was worth the ride.  May we all be blessed to see the garden as we mourn the loss of a flower.  It isn’t perfect but it’s rich.

Joceile 

4.16.21

[Picture of a magenta peony.]

Resurge of the Recumbent

I’ve always preferred to walk at night. The dampening of the sights and sounds of daytime is comforting to me.  I’ve generally walked with my dog.  My dog buddies have been good companions.  

During the last ten years, the act of walking in and of itself was limited regardless of the time of day.  Four years ago due to an intermittent medical issue, my walking sputtered to a slow shuffle until walking at night could no longer happen.  I had to be content with night standing or mobility scootering.

Recently, my fortunes improved.  With an intermittent medical condition, I never know.  I’ve been walking better and able to walk the dog again.  My legs have been feeling stronger and more reliable.  At last, I thought I might try my three wheel recumbent bike.  

I love my bike.  I haven’t been able to ride it for nearly ten years but I didn’t get rid of it just in case I could ride again.  A few weeks ago, I uncovered it in the garage.  The tires were profoundly flat.  I was concerned they might not hold air.  I pumped them.  The pressure held.  My dog, Sheba, was waiting tethered to my waist as I pushed the bike out of the garage.  I straddled the bike and sat thinking, “Wow, this bike is comfortable.”  Sheba had never seen this strange bike before but she loves to run so she was game.  I started slowly peddling and we were off!  Sheba can run 15 miles per hour without much effort.  I could keep up especially going down hill.  The bike felt great.  The tires held.  The gears still worked effortlessly.  The breaks were spot on.  What a great bike!

After several day time runs, I was once again ready to bike at night.  The front and back lights still worked.  Their batteries hadn’t run down in intervening years.  Sheba’s pushing ten now and actually gets tired.  One night for my second ride of the day, I went alone in an effort to help me sleep.  After getting off our dead end road, there are two neighborhoods to choose from.  The older neighborhood has lots of trees and few streetlights.  Riding there, I feel I’m actually in the dark.  It’s my preference.

The other newer neighborhood has great blacktop for a smooth ride but way too many high street lights causing a hideous half light at night.  Still, there’s multiple ponds with thousands of glorious treefrogs singing.  It’s beautiful and clear tonight. The stars are clear but the light pollution blocked my view of most of them.

It’s a cool 37 degrees.  If I forget to exhale down, fog hits my glasses temporarily blinding me.  I love the night sky when it’s clear and cold.  The stars are pin pricks of light.  Because I can’t see all the stars, it’s obvious to me I’ve chosen the wrong path tonight.  I stop and listen to the frogs.  After restarting the ride, my legs signal they are getting tired.  This is much sooner than I would like.

It’s late.  I’ve run into two cars.  A pizza delivery person with the lighted magnetic sign on the roof and another car going a bit too fast through an intersection.  Though they have the right of way, they slow down when they see me as if to say, “Crap, too fast if pedestrians are around.” I pray cars don’t do anything stupid.  It’s not like I could avoid them by somehow jumping from the bike out of the way at the last minute like some agile A-Team member.  I’d be flattened like the squirrel I sadly passed on my way into this neighborhood.

I thought I might have blown my opportunity to drink in the night on my way back home until I started back down my road.  At the bend in the road across the lake, the view was breath taking.  A no longer quite full burnt orange moon hung in the sky just above the horizon.  Though it has nothing remotely to do with me, I feel amply rewarded for simply getting out in the night with all my senses alert for magic.

As I peddle home, I think, “Good night, Moon,” from a children’s classic.  I know there’s a song there somewhere.  The frogs know it even if I don’t.  I am lucky and I know it.  Yet, another children’s song.  No, that’s “happy and you know it.”  That works.  My inner child is delighted to ride at night.  My job is to keep her safe and enchanted with all the natural world has to offer.

To Life.

Joceile

4.5.21

[Picture of Sheba and I on the recumbent bike.]                         

Have You Done Your Paperwork?

I'm finding myself compelled to warn people to make sure they have really talked with their significant other or person who will be making health care decisions for them if they are incapacitated. My husband had a series of heart attacks and stents which lead us to have a lot of conversations about end of life and how much he was willing to go through. I thought I had a good idea of what quality of life he was willing to accept and what procedures were acceptable to him. For example, I knew he did not want to be on permanent life support or kept comatose in a nursing home and he didn’t want open heart surgery. However, when he did have a major incapacitating heart attack, I found myself faced with many smaller decisions on how much intervention we wanted them to take. The heart attack (widow-maker) essentially destroyed the function of the left side of his heart. He came out of the first life-saving surgery at our regional hospital with a 'balloon pump' already in his heart without either of us having any input. He went into A-fib in the ICU and I was asked if he could be sedated, intubated, and put on a ventilator (not permanently, just to stabilize him). Those steps required my permission. He was then transferred to a specialized heart hospital where I was told they had 'more options.' 

I never really heard the words ‘life support.’ The questions were an incremental slippery slope of decisions putting him more and more on life support. As I said, they had first asked if they could intubate him and put him on a ventilator (not permanently). My husband’s wish was no permanent life support so that was my guideline. Once he got to the Heart Hospital I was asked if they could put him on dialysis (again not permanently). Next, they told me he would die if he didn't have a heart transplant and they could keep him alive long enough for that if they put a Left Ventricle Assist Device (LVAD) in him which would be permanent unless he could receive a heart transplant. They showed me the pump that would do the work of the left side of his heart and said he would have a cord coming out of his abdomen to a battery pack and the computer/controller that ran it. He would run on batteries or be plugged into the wall or the car. This is where I drew the line and said no. There was no way I was going to wake my husband up and inform him he now had to be plugged in to live. If you knew him, you would realize how hilarious that prospect would be. I told them that if they could get him conscious and he wanted to do it that was fine but that I wasn't signing him up for that life. I heard later this was kind of shocking to them that someone had refused.

The medical team was able to get him through this stage and awaken him. He woke up furious, restrained, intubated, with 18 IVs in him, and me telling him not to move because there was a pump is his heart and if he moved his leg it would kill him. His first question was whether I had allowed them to do this to him. His perception was that he had been put on life support when he told me he didn’t want that. I tried to explain that it wasn’t permanent, and it was the result of many steps and not just one. We hadn’t understood the level of interventions now available and the choices we would be faced with. My husband did eventually agree to the LVAD as a 'bridge' to transplant, but there have been many times he questioned his decision, and he would have been very unhappy if it had been 'done' to him without his knowledge. By the way, if you aren’t eligible for a heart transplant due to age or other reasons, they call the LVAD a ‘destination’ device.  Time for a new marketing team.

At any rate, the point I'm trying to make is to make sure you have your living will in order and talk to whoever will be making the decisions because the health care machine takes over and you find yourself on what many would consider life support through a million little decisions. I was clear, at least, on what decisions I knew my husband would want to make for himself and maybe that is the key thing. If you have a particular health condition, make sure you understand what interventions they might offer you as your health worsens so you can consider them while you can still communicate your wishes and put it in writing.

By Anonymous

2021