Tag: Terry

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Brick(s), by Terry Dart

Bricks for sure make up some formidable walls. They are a well understood building material.

In metaphor a brick wall can be for protection from one bad event (say a house fire) spreading and multiplying problems.

Or a wall can keep out of sight unwanted entities. If I am depressed a metaphorical wall rises up within my consciousness. Of course that is not brick so I digress. I will leave.

“Like talking to a brick wall.” Well that has been tried many a time and always unsuccessfully as anyone who has tried will attest. But I have always thought it a terrific simile.

The most extreme use or misuse of brick is when it winds up being thrown through a window or at someone’s head.

Bricks can be broken with a hammer and often are broken in two by a bricklayer in the process of building. He may be building a house, of course. If you have ever watched a bricklayer at work, you can see the careful almost meditative work at this ancient craft.

So there: bricks. That about covers it.

Oh, there is a literary piece, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ by Edgar Allen Poe that makes great use of brick. But don’t read it. It’s Way too Scary!

© 12 October 2015

About the Author

I am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.

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Patriotism by Terry

America is a lot of country to love. Patriotism is love of one’s country. So here are a few things I love, or recall loving about America.

I love America The Beautiful as opposed to the America of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I love that first job I got at age thirteen in Minot North Dakota, coaching 4th and 5th grade girls in softball and volleyball. I loved the look on my players’ faces when they got their first hit.

I loved my job as usher at the DCPA where I got to listen to The Brahms Requiem, and to witness performance of The Buddy Holly Story.

I loved my job at Sylvan Lake in The Black Hills. I loved honeymooning at one of its cabins three years later, where my new husband and I shared the same dream. I loved our family reunion forty years later where I met the twins, my grand Nephew and Niece, who rode peeking out from their grandparents backpacks most of the way on our hike up Terry Peak, memorably curtailed by a sudden thunderstorm that we mostly outran.

I love the freedom to risk, to make honest mistakes. I am thinking of my marriage that also found its final chapter at that same little Eden in The Black Hills. Where the emperors clothes no longer covered a young couple that grew apart in what felt like tragedy.

I loved the fields of North Dakota where I chased many a Monarch butterfly, so long unaware that I could neither reach nor outrun them in their high reels across the plain.

I loved the psychodrama plays at The Moreno Institute, its the stage with its balcony and colored footlights. I loved my International friends there who taught me French tongue twisters and who acted out their life’s stories in role plays or dramas based in their real worlds.

A lot of people mistake patriotism for unquestioning nationalism, my country right or wrong. I do not have any idea how to love all of fifty states, most of which I have never seen. It is a strange feeling to realize what abstractions replace a sighting of The entire South, not to mention Indiana, Kansas, Maryland Washington DC West Virginia., Nevada Utah., Hawaii, and Alaska.

I loved joining the Great Peace March across America in what year I forget, though I was probably the only person there where someone actually tried to start a fight with me for some unknown affront. Happily I escaped unscathed in time to head on to The Women’s Music Festival in Michigan, which I definitely loved until I fell asleep in the middle of the outdoor premier of Desert Hearts. I do however, own my own copy of the video.

I love teachers, music teachers, art teachers, I love learning and still do love teaching, my way of working to enhance my pupils and clients ability to enjoy their lives in the face of childhood mental illness, drug addiction and Alzheimer and dementia. I love that I was able to pursue that calling.

I love doctors and nurses who keep trying to pull rabbits out of hats, like the sorcerer’s apprentice trying to mop up the continual distresses of humans, each one of whom is destined for a tragic end.

I love the builders who raise schools and airports and hospitals from flat earth, I love astronauts and actors, their sense of adventure.

I love painting for several hours per creation. I love when I hear people express their in-loveness with my paintings. I love to write exactly what I want to convey, a story or essay or poem and when someone connects.

I love Carmel Sutra Ice Cream (Ben and Jerry’s).

I love talking or chatting online into the wee hours of the night with long-time friends who live far away.

I love playing Scrabble with two friends, one of whom grew up loving to read the dictionary, I don’t think I have won against her yet.

I do love women who love women. I love their wittiness and laughter, their wondrous sexiness.

I love good men with their spirit, generosity and pride and such widespread handsomeness of soul.

Lastly but not least, I love my cats, Charley and Star for as long as they are with me and I with them.

I guess you could say I am in love with my own world, but then, who could possibly get their arms around a whole country? Well anyway I’m imagining a gigantic hug.

© November 2013

About the Author


I am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.

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Filing through the Files by Terry

In
the effort to avoid a depressing subject, I am sharing my little adventure in
going through my files to find the title of my car. It took me twice through to
locate the title. I traveled a territory spanning at least three decades. I
searched through three different files.
The
largest, looming at a full page, officially stamped, was my marriage
certificate. Could not for the life of me remember what I’d needed that for.
Ahh
the receipts.  For someone who doesn’t
itemize, I have a lot of receipts!  Everything from ice cream shops to body shops,
not to mention movie tickets (remember Back to the Future?)
For
some reason, I had tucked a bunch of poetry and letters written many years ago,
under, for some reason, letter H.  I read
through several letters written to someone named Nancy. Unmailed, Passionate,
that professed undying love, please don’t leave me, that kind of thing, for
pages and pages!
I
was stunned. I had no idea who this Nancy was.  Had I been in an imaginary relationship?  Or, had I actually been writing letters, at
age thirty or so, to an imaginary lover?  Was this a half-finished narrative from a
short story that I forgot I wrote?  Who
in the Hell was Nancy?  I don’t know any Nancy,
or any Nancys.  The handwriting looked
like mine.  It took a good twenty minutes
of staring into space before it dawned on me; the woman I thought I would
never get over, over whom I had been devastated and bereft; I must have been
chuckling to myself the rest of the day and into sleep over that one.
The
other find was the roster for The Denver Golden Girls, my wonderful Lesbian
rugby team.  I had started out just to
take part in practices to get into shape. But that game just sucked me right in.
 I remembered practice, breaking through
tackles, when Harpo (her real name) tied to catch me by the waist band of my
shorts which were of a stretchy material, and more than my athletic talent was
revealed, however briefly.  Though we
beat the women of The Air Force Academy I remembered only Harpo from that
roster.
Ultimately,
of course, there were receipts from doctor bills and shrinks and surgeons, but
I said I wasn’t going to get into that.  Suffice
it to say that some things just are bound to be forgotten.  After all, isn’t that why we have files?
  
© 23 June 2013 

About the Author 
I
am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career
serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental
health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for
elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have
returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.
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My Bi-Sexual Soul by Terry

My friend Ann, my college buddy, bridesmaid, and now Facebook Friend and I were just yesterday in the midst of a Facebook debate when she reminded me how we used to have “knock down drag out” arguments, forty odd years ago, the favorite topic having been religion. Still a loaded subject.

Atheists don’t believe religion is reality based, some adamant having suffered at the hands of hurtful and or bigoted leaders and their followers. Some denominations or nondenominational churches point fingers at each other, claiming to be the only ones who will avoid hell and other forms of outer darkness because of their particular beliefs and practices. My church welcomes LGBT people, where we are respected as equals and there is no problem with marriage or who uses what bathroom.

My soul, I believe, is probably an average soul. I find painting and writing and helping others to be its best nutrients. Of course, a community of kind people falls in that category.

In the early seventies I remember that gay and lesbian people were walking out of churches in the middle of sermons in protest of their being set up as sinful horrible and lesser than.” The churches took longer to realize that there were bi-sexuals in their world, so it seemed to me that the others wound up paving the way, or at least beating down some of the resistance to gay ways.

There are still many hostile and bigoted churches, though educating individuals seems to have helped in some quarters.

I get annoyed when I hear about pools of burning phosphorus, as though God didn’t have better things to do than to barbeque unruly, misbehaving, or simply “bad” individuals.

There are the metaphysicals and the mystics. I suppose I fall somewhere in that category, god being more of a mysterious metaphor.

There is obvious corruption and downright evil in some religious groups and factions. Some are distressingly ambitious to take over the American Government so as to enforce their beliefs and way of life on everyone else.

I find what is nourishing to my soul (which is another kind of metaphor to me) among friends and kind strangers. As far as coming out spiritually I am just not into a lot of openness. For me it would be just wrongheaded to inform people who I do not know or have reason to trust. Coming Out is unquestioningly spoken of as the only way of life that is valid, healthy and wholesome in the LGBT Community. As a pure benefit. For me, some know and some I don’t bother to inform.

I wish there was some way out for the LGBT young people abandoned by their parents to try to survive on the streets. It is shocking how many there are, who came out or were outed to awful parents.

When the minister of my hometown church found out I was not heterosexual, he did not have any problem with that. In that church we had talk back sessions where anything could and was intelligently and respectfully discussed after the sermon and main service. Free thinkers were not chastised or excluded.

I wish we didn’t have all this bad blood between some atheists and some religious people. Religion, is one of the ways ordinary people can be divided against each other, especially when manipulated by those powerful officials who have a vested interest in keeping civilians weak and easy to control for their own aims, enrichment and ambitions. In fact, as is described in “Genocide, A Problem From Hell,” the root cause of genocide is the purposeful manipulation to drive people against each other. Using religion as well as race, and class. Hitler was especially adept at creating this type of divide between Germans, within their citizenship and between the Germans and those from countries that he wished to attack and conquer, kill, and enslave.

I haven’t really told a story. Maybe there is too much patchwork to my spiritual development.

At twelve I decided that I did not believe in talking snakes and naked people in a garden, much less naked people getting kicked out of a garden for eating an apple. Thus, I declared that I was not going to church any more, and was given the ultimatum that I would have to spend the day in my room, which I did. Nothing could shake my resolve and eventually my parents gave up and just let it go.

I eventually came to a more sophisticated interpretation.

© 2 July 2013 




About the Author  

I am an artist and writer after having spent the greater part of my career serving variously as a child care counselor, a special needs teacher, a mental health worker with teens and young adults, and a home health care giver for elderly and Alzheimer patients. Now that I am in my senior years I have returned to writing and art, which I have enjoyed throughout my life.