The battle cry of most, if not all bloggers and developers is “content is king.” With that in mind I strive to meet that standard when writing Raw Candor. Technically I don’t have the capabilities to solve technical glitches as quickly as I would like. Currently there’s a problem with the header/slider loading. We’re working to resolve this and appreciate your patience.Please scroll down to read the most recent Raw post – Slow to Heal.

Thanks as always for reading Raw.

Before the World Trade Center was associated with a tragic event, it was best known for being the tallest building in the world. Friends of mine had gone home to England for the summer and asked me to stay in their loft just blocks away from the gleaming towers. This wasn’t a neighborhood yet. It hadn’t become Tribeca. The blocks surrounding the Twin Towers were a series of disparate shops and small restaurants. No coin operated laundries, no supermarkets, and no dry cleaners. Subways belched people from their stations Monday through Friday, but after five o’clock there were very few people on the streets, and even fewer on weekends.  Abandoned factories were just beginning to be rented and purchased as personal residences. I planned to spend the summer living in a former shoe factory.

Early on a Saturday morning I’d gone out to run. In the shadow of the World Trade Center I collapsed to my knees in agonizing pain, and have no memory of how I got back to the loft, or how I got to the emergency room of a hospital in Brooklyn where I grew up.The pain was caused by my fallopian tube wrapping around my uterus. Having never been given “the talk” by my mother, I had no idea where those two body parts were located, or how they functioned. Nowadays a five year old child could probably walk us through a detailed lecture on the reproductive system, but it was different then.

That first surgery strangled my daily life and brazenly interrupted what should have been a summer to remember. That summer was unforgettable, but not for the reasons I’d envisioned. Despite my strong and healthy outward appearance, ignorant that my anatomy is structurally weak, this would not be my last surgery. Over the ensuing decades different parts of my body would weaken, needing to repaired surgically. My anatomical flaw has caused me to abandon plans over and over again, pain immediately and unrepentantly demanding that I refocus my attention on recovery for months at a time.

This summer marks eighteen years since my divorce. Born a Jew, although not observant, I’m going to embrace the Jewish traditional belief which distinguishes the number eighteen as lucky. Through no fault of my own, my anatomy has always been fragile and delicate, appearances notwithstanding. But it was my heart really that has withstood breaking again and again. Finally my wounds from a long unhappy marriage and brutal custody battle, wherein my three daughters went to live with their father have scarred over, enabling me to move on. All three of my children and I have developed close and loving relationships.

My most recent surgery took me out of the game again for a few months. To regain strength and retrain muscles, my doctor prescribed physical therapy. It’s a challenge to learn new ways of doing things that have been repeated for years, but it’s doable with practice. Using that theory as my guide for more than just my physicality, I don’t put myself in the same positions I once did to have my heart broken.  I’ll probably never have any warning of what could physically need repair again, and while no one can ever predict the outcome of interactions between people, I look more carefully at what I’m really seeing now, as my heart will be forever fragile.

Raw Reflection: Are the best decisions made using love or logic?

Read more about losing custody of my girls: http://rawcandor.com/the-last-laugh/

I’m so happy to be writing Raw again after an unanticipated prolonged medical absence. A new Raw Candor page is up. “Likes” from the previous page couldn’t be transferred. Please take a moment to visit the new page.Raw Candor (Community).

And to my many friends, colleagues and fellow artists, the category d-RAW has been added to the re-designed Raw site. It gives storytellers the opportunity to share visual work to tell their story. Everybody has a one – I invite you to share yours. See submission guidelines.

The Raw re-design still needs to be tweaked. The PayPal button is missing from the SHOP page. The ring I designed and wear will be available for purchase soon. Thanks for your continued patience.

“His True Colors” by Judy Polstra. http://judypolstra.com/ 

Superimposed version of “His True Colors”  edited by me.

 

 

Kids from the New York tri-state area crammed into back seats of family cars for the annual summer pilgrimage to Catskill Mountain bungalow colonies. The mostly family owned “resorts” swelled with middle class Jewish families seeking relief from brutal summer city temperatures. Siblings interlocked like hand-crafted puzzle pieces to make room for supermarket cardboard boxes packed with sheets, and pots.  Dented cartons were the containers used to transport  household necessities  to recreate the comforts of home in tiny rented summer cottages.

Arriving safely, without being  harnessed by seatbelts, the soundtrack for the hours long drive was “Are we there yet?” At least one of my three siblings always fell asleep, at least one of us got car sick, and all of us annoyed my parents with our incessant chatter. Notwithstanding, the journey, my family rejoiced in spending summers in the country.

“Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells was number one on the charts in the summer of 1967 when I learned to dance. I was eleven. My mother, two sisters, baby brother and I left for the months of July and August, leaving my dad home alone to fend for himself with two towels, a box of cereal, a container of milk, and all the quiet of an empty house. In our own way, each of us experienced an uncomplicated carefree vacation.

Our childhoods unfolded in the ten years my family spent summers upstate. My sisters and I learned to swim, shoot archery, and play volleyball there, things we would have never learned in Brooklyn. In between playing sports and roasting marshmallows at campfires, I came face to face with my newly developing feminine wiles.

   

I also learned to talk, or not talk to boys. Learning to flirt was a big part of my summertime experience.

The short window between day camp ending, and being called home for dinner found all the emotionally reluctant boys, and curious girls hanging out together in the enormous bungalow colony clubhouse. Late afternoon sunlight created the illusion of nighttime, and made us feel like grown-ups.

Girls sprawled across the jukebox listening to Mony Mony by Tommy James & The Shondells, and music by the Boxtops; sometimes we fed the machine a quarter to play a wistful Lovin’ Spoonful song. Girls encamped on one side of the room, boys staked out on the other, pretending not to notice each other.

Boys thrusted their hips against mighty pinball machines, fervently pressing flippers in hopes of influencing the balls trajectory, questing to win a free game, and earning bragging rights.  Day after day, week after week, pre-teen boys and girls fumbled through being together, desperate to conceal painfully obvious crushes.

Many evenings after all the kids had been fed, the wistful  husbandless moms met to play mah-jongg or Canasta. My sisters and I would promise our mom that we would watch our younger brother, but we esentially ignored him, and spent the evening listening to the playlist of a New York top 40 station with a barely audible signal. We swatted mosquitos, ate ice cream, and practiced dancing, thinking about  standing next to a cute boy at  flagpole assembly the next morning. My sisters and I fell asleep listening to the sound of chirping crickets, and left the door unlocked for my mom. Boys too young to shave, whose voices were just starting to sound more like their father’s than their mother’s awkwardly spent the  summer getting to know  girls who were just starting  to shave their legs. We weren’t really friends, and we didn’t know how to be anything else to each other. Just as a newborn foal is determined to stand up and walk on its own, it was inevitable that  our clumsy interaction would lead to learning something about the opposite sex. These summers were my primer for boy meets girl, and what to do, or not do. They were the summers of love…

 

Daycamp Crush

The date of my wedding was August 18th. I signed divorce papers twelve years later, almost to the day. Signing those documents during the summer annihilated the innocence I once associated with carefree warm weather months.

As a divorced mother of three I again faced figuring out how to navigate and integrate with the opposite sex. Faintly recalling memories of sweet summer love and innocent crushes, I struggled to recover from the loss and betrayal connected to my divorce, and wondered if adult intimate relationships would always and forever cause me pain.

With my innocence about love blown to smithereens, I was knee deep in confusion, remorse, dark humor, shame, and sometimes anger. My clumsy adult interactions with the opposite sex still sometimes leave me feeling as naive as when I was eleven. Damn It…

I’ve been on blind dates wishing at the start that I wouldn’t feel terrible about myself if I introduced myself as Jill’s twin, saying she had suddenly been called out of town. A stab at on-line dating found me reading emails from men (on two separate occasions) who felt compelled to let me know that they thought my face was “so skinny” they would never date me. One evening when leaving an event, I ran into a guy I casually knew and asked him if he would like to get a drink. I was sure I wasn’t inviting him on a date, but he interpreted that question differently. He ordered two drinks and something to eat. I sipped a single malt scotch and picked at the shared order of fries. When the check came I said I had no cash. Before I could finish the sentence he too said he had none. I let him know that I was sure the waiter could put half on each of our cards. “You don’t seem to understand, he said, I don’t have any money, and I don’t have a credit card. I don’t leave my house with money. You invited me out, so I assumed you’d pay.” Knowing in that instant that I would never intentionally see him again, I paid the check, and left.

One night out with a group of friends, I was seated next to an attractive guy.  Shortly after the meal began I got a text saying “Will you go to dinner with me sometime?” It was sent by the same man sitting right next to me. I turned to him letting him know I would prefer if he actually asked me personally. More than a decade my junior I knew from this interaction that we did things differently. He never asked me again.

And when another man I briefly went out with, more than ten years my junior asked if we shouldn’t consider seeing each other until someone better or more appropriate came along, I  again knew that I would prefer to date someone closer to my own age. After an absence of many months I recently ran into him at an event, where he made sure to tell me he was seeing someone. Hmmm. I’m sure my mother would have an expression for him in Yiddish. And although lost in translation, the guttural sound of the idiom would suggest that he should grow like an onion with his head in the ground.

And then there are the married men who think no one will find out. The ones who casually suggest some kind of interlude, tryst, affair… I’m not sure why they ask me, maybe it’s my “bedroom eyes”, or my just got out of bed hairstyle, but I’m not interested in salacious, can’t be seen together in public sorts of clandestine relationships,and I never say yes.

Recently one of the most handsome men I’ve ever met, also many years my junior handed me his card and TOLD me to text him. I was flattered, but speechless.  He didn’t ask me, it was a command. Presumably innocent on his part, my past experience with demanding men immediately triggered fear and foretold of what an interaction with him might be like.  His cavalier swagger was a harbinger of what was to come.

He told me not to tell anyone about us. There was no us, but that didn’t stop me from wondering if he was married, or was there some other reason why he wanted to keep this encounter a secret?  He was very tall, with a beautiful mixed race complexion, and was so incredibly handsome, but what did I already know about him? I knew that he was commanding, which in my mind translates immediately into adamant, forceful and demanding. Given his insistent and secretive nature, I knew that despite any desire I might have felt, it wouldn’t be in my best interest to contact him.

It doesn’t end there… I could retell other encounters of the ill-fated attention I have received from the opposite sex, but I think my entanglements of boy meets girl are amply clear. But there’s always next summer.

“Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter.” – Eckhart Tolle

…Hey, I just met you,

And this is crazy,

But here’s my number,

So call me, maybe?

And all the other boys,

Try to chase me,

But here’s my number,

So call me, maybe?

Before you came into my life

I missed you so bad

I missed you so bad

I missed you so, so bad

Before you came into my life

I missed you so bad

And you should know that

I missed you so, so bad…

Carly Rae Jepson – CALL ME MAYBE

RAW REFLECTION: I chose not to contact the man that commanded me to text him. As I drove through afternoon traffic that day I wondered what it might have been like if I had. What would you have done?

To read about my past relationship with a very controlling man please see – http://rawcandor.com/ive-heard-that-before/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nobody knows why a relationship works, but everyone knows when it doesn’t. Much like Tolstoy
said “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So many
relationships begin based on attraction, but ultimately a person’s physical appearance loses its
appeal. Sometimes they’re a match, often not.

The couple in Yesterday didn’t end their relationship overnight; they slowly, almost imperceptibly
became distant from one another. The delicate flower behind the Humpty Dumpty couldn’t
withstand the climate it lived in and subsequently dissolved, much like the imaginary couple in
the painting.

Regardless of perfect image I found myself perpetuating in my day to day life, I painted the
anguished couple in Yesterday as a reflection of the life I actually lived. It wasn’t intentional, but
when so many people asked me if the blond woman was me, I knew I had painted what I felt.

d-Raw what you live, even if you’re not an artist. We’ll know what you’re trying to say.

[Me, second row from the right, 2nd seat]
Growing up I lived in a neighborhood where people didn’t knock on doors. Either the doors were left open, or we just walked in. Read more »