In a few days I hope to receive the first of the journals that my son is writing while incarcerated. We have conceived of and taken on a project that we hope will reach and benefit a much larger audience than just the two of us as we each write candidly about our drug abuse and specifically about our addictive natures and how they have irreparably altered our respective sane destinies. This is my first public admission. It has perhaps been the most difficult step I have ever taken.
It wasn’t the first time I had tried it or the last time I would regret it. But early in the winter of 1969 it became clear that regret would be taking a backseat to risk if I were to ever make it out of my teens alive.
So when my boyfriend slipped that frail needle into the raised blue arc of my fourteen-year-old veins, I smiled with compliant trust and a virginal anticipation endemic only to children and the clinically lost.
At that fledgling age, redundancy is unknowable and ignorance unimaginable. That any of us survived the repeated missteps of our youth at all is ample evidence of divine intervention.
Continue Reading The Hard Truth »
For the past couple of weeks I have been quietly ingesting a nightmare. But because it is not one conjured from the depths of my own subconscious, it has taken me longer to reckon let alone attempt to reconcile. Because it will not go away, I continue to bend it into my every day in a way that might make its reality somewhat manageable.
I am not there yet.
Two weeks ago I received a phone call from my son in the state penitentiary where he has been an inmate for the past several weeks on prescription drug fraud charges. During that phone call I was relieved to hear a certain buoyancy had returned to his voice, replacing the earlier version of abject fear that was so evident when he had newly arrived at the prison. As he spoke, I felt my bones settle into a posture of calm to the point where they rallied almost on the cusp of normal.
It was an exhale moment.
I think I even had a smile on my face and laughed a time or two.
Continue Reading Dining With The Devil »
They came again this morning. It was early – just after eight a.m.
But I did not hear the metallic creak of the wrought iron gate that tops the steps outside our front door, that rusted yawn that signals to me the presence of friend or enemy, the sound I count on in the absence of a working doorbell.
The dogs, whose Bremen Town-substitution is unreliable, were scattered about the house and yard and failed to alert me. And so I continued to strip the sheets from our bed and to carry on my mundane ritual with the drowsy acceptance of early-morning normal.
It wasn’t until I reached for a dropped pillow slip and glanced out the window of our upstairs bedroom that I noticed them. There, lining the arc of our horseshoe driveway like a convoy of mutant, navy-blue beetles, were four police squad cars.
To someone else this sight might be alarming.
Continue Reading What Will the Neighbors Think? »
Yesterday I made the last of my long drives through the Kansas flatlands to a rural, Dairyqueen-town and to the dilapidated detention center where my son had been a resident for the past five months.
The sun was high and seemed to rally around my subdued consternation with an early-fall display of buttery light. Even the scattered bunches of Lazy Susan’s stacked in wiry clusters among the high and faded jade grass flagged my passage on either side of the highway with a cheery, yellow reception of solicitous regard.
Had my destination been of another sort, this would have been a splendid seasonal homage to perpetual optimism, which I would have wholly appreciated.
But yesterday I was neither going to visit my son nor to reclaim him. I was simply going to collect what personal possessions were mandatorily left behind when he was transferred to a maximum security prison last weekend.
The institution housing him presently is run by the State Department of Corrections.
Continue Reading Son Shine »
In a few hours my daughter and I will make the hour and a half drive to a small Kansas town and to a modest, slightly antiquated jail to visit my only son – her only brother.
He has been housed at this particular detention center for just under three months, although he has been a resident of two others previously since his arrest in early December. So far, this one has been the worst.
I’ve groomed my outer sensibility to adjust to our visits, such as they are, in these dim and claustrophobic places, and I’ve even acquired a sense of humor about the situation to help ameliorate the raw reality that begs my attention then mocks my attempts to sustain it.
As I sit in the waiting area beneath the high front window where the visitors of the inmates must sign in and relinquish their driver’s licenses or I.D.’s, I can look through the glass partition past the bored and mechanical movements of the officer on duty and scan the black and white security monitors that canvass the various sections of the facility.
Continue Reading Sentenced, But Not Shamed »
On Sunday, Michael Vick led the 7-3 Philadelphia Eagles into Soldier Field to battle a Chicago Bears team, also 7-3 and tied for the NFC North division lead in spite of a porous offensive line and a much maligned quarterback in Jay Cutler. Vick is another story though, having an MVP caliber season and completing a career high 62.8% of his passes and throwing for 1,608 yards and 11 touchdowns with a remarkable 0 interceptions coming into the game. Renowned for his prowess as a runner, Vick also had 375 yards rushing and 5 touchdowns on the ground. The Eagles’ quarterback finished Sunday’s game on Lake Michigan 29 of 44, passing for 333 yards, 2 touchdowns, and his first interception since Christmas Eve 2006 (he went on an 18-month hiatus shortly after that game) in the 31-26 Bears victory. Despite the Eagles loss, Vick displayed the patience and level-headed decision making in the pocket that he was completely devoid of during his tenure in Atlanta, coupled with the freakish athleticism that once made the all-pro quarterback a household name. It is still early but if Vick can continue his renaissance season, sports writers will be hard pressed to deny the 1st overall pick in the 2001 NFL Draft his first league MVP award.
Continue Reading Redemption in a Time of Vick »
Until this moment I have skillfully (subjective opinion) danced around an area of my life that in many ways is my life but for reasons that will become obvious to any reader shortly, has remained deep in a soft, holding cell at the frayed and care-worn center of my heart.
If you go there, you will find every filament, fiber and microcosmic tissue throbbing harmoniously in the unifying thrust of unconditional love protecting the essence, image of and ultimate hope for, my son – Griffin.
My firstborn child and only son is a drug addict and has been so in one degree or form since he was about eighteen years old. In late August he celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday under the same conditions in which he has celebrated all but one of his birthdays since 2005: as an inmate in a state correctional facility.
Given that he is a young man of extremely high intelligence, he managed to fund his addiction by the cleverly-executed scheme of prescription fraud, which is what he was sentenced for. Again.
Continue Reading The Crucible of Truth »
There was a time, back in the day, when abortion was illegal in the United States of America. I vaguely remember the first time I learned about abortion. I was a young girl and I was horrified. I was raised to be a good Catholic girl and quite frankly, I can’t remember if my being appalled by this procedure was because of the way it was explained to me or if it was because it was the feeling that came from the core of a pure heart who couldn’t fathom the idea of someone deliberately ending what I considered to be a life.
I was unmovable in my beliefs. The year was 1969 and the legalization of abortion was a hot issue…an issue that was tearing apart families and friends. I went to a Catholic all girl’s high school and to my dismay, most of my girlfriends were pro-choice. How could this be?
I would passionately and vigorously debate the issue of abortion, despite the unchanged minds of my classmates. I was sure that our government would never let a law pass that would kill innocent human beings. In 1973, it did.
I became a born again Christian at the age of 19.
Continue Reading Confessions of a Former Pro-Lifer »
Edward Smith* is one of those men whose smile makes the corners of his brown eyes crinkle in such a mischievous, elfin way that no matter how old he gets (currently, thirty-five) he will always invoke the specter of his boyhood. He is smiling at me because I am going to give him five dollars to take my picture in a free-standing jail cell while I model a dusty replica of an old prisoner’s uniform, complete with the black-and-white stripes that used to mark convicts at Louisiana State Prison back in the days of Jim Crow. Edward is serving natural life for second degree murder. I am his guest in a faux prison cell at the 46th Annual Angola Prison Rodeo.
*************
Louisiana State Penitentiary is more commonly known as Angola, which was the property’s official name in its former life as a plantation, likely as a nod to the African birthplace of many of its slaves. The prison’s grounds span 18,000 acres in rural West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. In a state that incarcerates the largest percentage of its population of any state in the country, in a country that incarcerates the largest percentage of its population of any country in the world, it houses more than 5,000 inmates
Continue Reading The Angola Prison Rodeo »
Vanity Fair essays of Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens’ essays on his sure-to-be-fatal cancer in the August and September issues of Vanity Fair magazine should probably be regarded as the start of one of the most significant pieces of 21st Century literature. I’ve scratched my head to find any comparisons. Marcel Proust lying on his deathbed contemplating madelines just doesn’t cut the mustard, and I had to reach all the way back to Socrates’ dialogues on taking hemlock to find an adequate comparison. Hitchens expounds on his hemlock too, only it’s called chemotherapy. To my knowledge, there’s never been a literary figure who’s set out to chronicle his own demise this way, and that’s what we can expect in monthly installments until Hitchens, as Roger Ebert says gets, “ closer than most to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”
The coincidence of his cancer is even more poignant given that he only discovered it after he started his book tour for his memoirs entitled Hitch-22. The knowledge that you’re dying a slow death changes everything, even though you’re the same person.
Continue Reading Dying by the Month »
