Perhaps we would have pottered around doing chores until my physical therapy appointment. It should have been a day when both Casey and Mark got seen. Mark would have reported to TL’s study, or the house-room. Casey would have been summoned upstairs to RP’s crimson study—the one I keep thinking I ought to use more as a writing space, but can’t. I should have told him about the dream I had the other night, in which I was some rebellious prep-school boy cornered by an exacting master, my nemesis. He was going to give me six, and they were going to hurt, a lot. He told me to bend over, and he produced a fearsome (and improbable) cane, rigid and ridged, rather like Abel’s walking stick. I/my boy avatar was scared. The master held the cane against my bottom and waited. I mentally prepared, told myself to breathe, not to clench, to stay down, that I could take it. Still, he waited. I trembled. The door to the study was open, and passers-by peered inside. Yes, the master said to the peeping boys, this is what happens when you break the rules. He lifted the cane; I inhaled; the alarm rang.

Today was the kind of day that could remedy interrupted dreams, though I wouldn’t fancy a RL encounter with that sort of stick.

In the real day, I dragged myself from bed when the wolfhound insisted. After throwing the ball around the sub-zero park, I dragged the dogs home and embarked on morning chores. I organized the chaos of unrecorded to-dos. I tackled some email. I went to physical therapy. I walked around the city by myself imagining tweets I would write if I had a smart phone, and things I would do if it were the day it ought to be. I went to Muji and found a pair of pyjamas that fit perfectly. They are what M would call whack-me pyjamas. I thought about how much he would like seeing Casey in them, and how cute she would be in them.

And I thought about how he was the one who really got ripped off, not me. I have more life to live, I have great friends, I am healthy, the rest of my family are all alive, I can pay the bills, I have great dogs and a nice place to live, a garden in summer, neighbors who look after me, the best church in the world, and the love of God whether I deserve it or not. He didn’t get to live more than 45 years. He didn’t get to see his son grow taller than him. He didn’t get to have children with me. He didn’t get to read the things I’ve written these last three years. He didn’t get to read the things I’d written when he was alive but hadn’t shown him yet. He didn’t get to see me Sunday night, at the story slam competition where I read After the Party, a little fantasy featuring someone like him; he didn’t get to see me wearing the tartan skirt I’d just bought; he didn’t get to see me win the competition. He didn’t get to grow old. He didn’t get to see his projects blossom. He didn’t get to be with me when I really knew how to love him.

It feels perverted—and by this I mean fundamentally unsound—to put on outfits that look cute when there’s no one around to appreciate them. The Russian lady who inflicts bikini wax (plus) on me insists that you do things only for yourself, my dear, not for anyone else, only for yourself. While there’s something comfortingly self-sufficient and feminist and self-actualized about that, the sentiment rings hollow somehow. Connecting with others, depending on others is part of being human. I tend to agree with R.R. Reno that the opposite of piety isn’t unbelief but sovereign desire. So perhaps I can be forgiven feeling unsound wearing cute outfits that he can’t see anymore.

And of course beneath my noli me tangere exterior, I secretly long for attention. I’m not exactly the kind of girl to ask for it, but I get jealous of other girls who garner attention. Having been round the houses with this once before—coming out of my twenties—I’d say my reticence is not coyness, but a kind of armor. I know I can’t have the sort of attention I really want, so rather than seek out something I think will frustrate and hurt me, I work on ideas like humility, on not looking to other people for validation, on being grateful for what I have, on getting used to the idea that this will probably be it, and that it’s enough to get through the day, and I’m not in a war-torn nation, not oppressed, not cancer-ridden, not a million bad things, so I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and try to be of use to other people.

In the day that should have been RP would have had a chat with Casey about this attitude. He would have reminded her of her Four Things. He would have paid her several sorts of attention. In the evening M and I would’ve watched House on tv. Would he have liked Lie to Me, or would he have found Tim Ross a plonker? It would have been–should have been–the kind of day where you don’t mind that it’s winter, that the night comes soon and lasts long.

But here’s the thing: no matter how much you love them, at a certain point it’s healthy and right that you grow up and start your own life. You don’t leave them behind, but to some extent you escape that first family. I had done this. It took a long time for M to get me to see that we had a new family now. The parts of the old that weren’t so great—these we didn’t have to have. We could make our own traditions. Yes, we’d still put my childhood ornaments on the Christmas tree, but now on Christmas eve, he’d make mince pies and we’d listen to his Britpop Christmas CD. And yes, my parents will always be my parents and I love them, but in a way, I didn’t have to be that child anymore. RP was looking after Casey, so the old life was past, and the new, better, realer life was here. And I could love my sister and mother and all the rest, but with his help, I could take them with the right amount of salt, and when it was time to leave, we went home to our house that we had our way, to our dogs, to our bed, and to all the secret love we had together. At our wedding, we’d given ourselves to each other in Christ, and now this was my strongest bond. This was the new family, the new life. I wasn’t living in my childhood house any more.

Today I had Christmas brunch at my apartment for my mother, my sister, and my sister’s childhood friend. My mom had unexpectedly been staying with me since Thursday due to a minor medical emergency. Her difficult dogs had been in my way, frazzling my nerves, keeping me awake, and increasing my workload. I am coming down with a cold due to lack of sleep. We all had a fine time, I guess, but by evening, I really wanted everyone to go home. I had had visitors for 3 weeks and needed to spend some quality time with my dogs and do the zillion things I had to do to get ready for my UK trip tomorrow.

Except no one was going home. My sister and her friend were lying on my bed watching agitating videos on their phones. My mom was feeling weak and had gone upstairs to nap. It had become clear that she and her dogs were staying another night. I took my dogs around the block.

On a quiet, dark side-street, I leaned over someone’s wall, buried my head in my arms, and started to cry. I felt trapped by this family—a family I love but want to escape. I wanted my own family, with M, the one I thought I had, and I wanted the kids we were trying to have, the twins. I wanted it to be Christmas in the new life, with him and our children, and our dogs, and Casey and Mark and all the others. I wanted us to be able to come home from being with my mother and sister, but instead, my house was invaded by this old family. And no matter how much I love them, it just feels wrong in a way for them to be so much in my house and life—the house and life I should have with M.  My mom and sister think it would be fine, in the absence of a husband, to have a turkey-baster baby and bring it up all together in kibbutz. I feel physically nauseated by this idea. It is simply incestuous. But lacking a family of my own, now, I can’t seem to get them out of my hair.

It would be one thing to be a life-long single woman. But to have got used to the new family, and now be back with the old… I know it’s colossally ungrateful to say this, but it feels like getting rescued from the orphanage and then having to go back.  But I’m emotional, and I don’t really feel well.

There’s a blizzard headed into town when my flight to Englandland is due to leave tomorrow. My house sitting and dog sitting arrangements have grown inordinately complicated and unsatisfactory. My mom isn’t well and who knows when she’ll be better, or how much help she’ll need, especially with her horrible dogs. I am thinking this trip was a terrible idea. I should stay home, quit trying to make it happen, just take care of my mom and my dogs, and get some work done over the school break. It was selfish and stupid to try to make it happen. And kids in orphanages don’t get to go to parties.

I know I’m not being very rational. Things usually look better in the morning. I’m not a cynic about Christmas. I love Christ. And I’m so grateful for everything I have, and all the friends and family who love me. Still, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed today, except the part about turning out the light at the end.

Reality, I’ve never been caned anywhere except the bottom, and I consider this a hard limit. But Stalky was such a formative influence for me (detailed exegesis here); it obsessed me from the age of sixteen into my mid-twenties. It is responsible in large part for transporting my childhood tgi (orphanage & prairie focused) into my young adult tgi (English Public School focused). All the other English school literature that I read–and I have read pretty much all of it–I discovered after or through Stalky. For instance, when I was seventeen, I spent hours at the 42nd Street Library reading ancient copies of Dean Farrar (Eric, or Little by Little and St. Winifred’s, or the World of School) because the characters in Stalky mocked him so scathingly. Despite the eccentric (and to me entirely perplexing) fact that the Head in Stalky “licks across the shoulders,” I responded strongly to those scenes of punishment because of the relationship between the Head and the boys. The whackings, like all the stories, are under-written and vibrate with human tension and understanding. Because of Kipling’s obliqueness and the nearly incomprehensible world of the English Public School (to a teenage American girl pre Harry Potter), I found myself trapped in a kind of tractor beam with Stalky, utterly fascinated and attracted, yet grasping at meaning. I couldn’t, for example, understand how a person could be caned across the shoulders (or that this arose from the school’s military background) — wouldn’t you break a collarbone or something? I wondered. I had not yet encountered the species of light, whippy cane that could accomplish this task and yet leave Kipling’s heroes in once scene “within an inch of blubbing.” Generally, I pretended to myself that the Head was dispensing normal canings and left it at that. He wasn’t, though. And in my dream recently, I (my schoolboy avatar) was receiving just such a USC licking across the shoulders. It was all hot sting, no thud, rather like an intense and stripey sunburn. I’m sure that must be exactly what it feels like, lol.

And if this dream were not enough, last night I dreamed I was playing a school-like scene with John Cleese in academic gown. I was wearing blue-jean overalls, the kind I gave to Marky that first December we spent together fifteen years ago. (It was such a good December, and even though we had to spend Christmas apart, life carried so much goodness and hope then. Emotions ran high, low, and every complexity in between, but it was like eating and breathing for the first time, not having realized before that I was missing anything… turn back, o time…)

So there I was, and John Cleese was telling me to bend over. I gasped at the first stroke, more from surprise than pain. He carried on briskly, and while I felt them, they weren’t unbearable. I kept still and quiet, which I sensed was frustrating him. But seriously, I thought, does he expect me to howl the place down when he’s whacking at perhaps medium strength, over jeans and pants, and I’m not exactly a fainting beginner?

You can tell I was dreaming because in reality it’s been so many years since I’ve felt the cane that I might as well never have had it. Why caning dreams, though? I never dream of these things any more.

Yesterday while getting physical therapy on my elbow, I lay on a cot gazing out the darkened windows, thinking. Here I was in this dark, wintry, modern world, going about my affairs, while my characters waited for me in their English summer of 1926. My schoolboy protagonist, in particular, waited for me  to take him through whatever this fire was that he faced, to make him into the person he yearned to be. I thought of him in my dark, Gotham evening, but did he also sense me somehow from within that world where I long to be?

It isn’t just my characters that I carry around inside myself this way. There is M, and Marky, RP and all the others. I can feel them, too. Where are they? Where are they all?

Casey said she should do the reading because she’d been promised a Lessons & Carols reading since that time before. She was referring to the time fifteen Decembers ago when we went with M, Marky, & RP to visit M’s Public School. The students were on vacation, so we got to tour all his old haunts,  including the chapel. RP said Casey was doing one of the readings for College’s ¹ Lessons & Carols, and he made her practice it right there in the chapel. Ever since then, she’s been expecting to go.

When we left the house, Casey’s smile seized my face, the shy but irrepressible little smile she has, because she had dug out her clothes and was taking over my reading. We rode to church and changed into this hybrid outfit, Casey from the waist up, TL waist down. Then the parish-house whirlwind took over, and I forgot about Casey. At least, I didn’t feel her anymore; I was too focused on where I had to go and what I had to do.

As I went about my preparations, I started getting compliments on my outfit. The Rector said good morning and then stopped as if something about me had distracted him. He said he liked my tie, and then he paused, searching for words. “You look like… a young Etonian,” he finally said. Her school tie, shirt, and jumper look nothing like an Eton uniform of any era, so why did he say that? It felt at that moment as if he had glimpsed something unexpected, yet entirely familiar, but couldn’t find a way to describe it adequately.

An unprecedented number of people commented on our wardrobe. They liked the tie. They liked the look. My mother’s friend said I looked “like a little schoolboy.” I looked “about twelve.”

I am over 40. My hair is shoulder-length and not at all boyish. I was wearing a 3/4 length black skirt and TL’s dress shoes. But these were the kinds of comments I got all morning.

My only conclusion—Casey is visible, and she’s recognized, if not by name. Apparently, it’s obvious.

In this dream, I was visiting some friends, Mr & Mrs Lovely, before a party they were to give. Mr. and Mrs. Lovely were sitting on chairs, but another American visitor and I were lounging around on the floor. We were all joking and bantering. Mr. Lovely, American-friend, and I were sort of wrestling. Cheeky remarks and gibes were coming out of my mouth. He wrestled with us playfully, but he didn’t push it when he felt my uncertainty. American-friend wrestled differently, like she meant it, like she wanted to lose to him, like she intended to get herself smacked.

Soon the hangout dissolved, American-friend went upstairs, and it was time to get ready for the big party. But Mrs. Lovley was berating Mr. Lovely, telling him to figure out a way to get me to play. She felt it was his duty as a man to get creative and help me out, “so that she can get past this one place and start to live the rest of her life.” Mrs. Lovely had the idea that I was frozen about crossing this threshold, and that simply being able to play around at a party would draw me firmly into real living. She felt somehow that if I remained an observer at this party, I’d be missing a chance to stop being an observer of my own life. He, paterfamilias, needed to take initiative.

I’d earwigged their conversation and was burning with embarrassment. The thing was, I explained, I was deeply ambivalent about playing. Mr. Lovely was paying attention to me now, and the vague quietness I’d observed when visiting in the summer was now a kind of pregnant sensitivity. We faffed around in this uncertain tension until I asked if I shouldn’t simply list all my fears. Mr. Lovely said, “I think I’d concentrate on the possibilities.” So I picked the thing top-of-mind: Just who would be seeing little Casey?

To ask this question was already to have come a long way off the sidelines. To voice this question revealed that I was capable of imagining Casey being present. I was in fact already imagining falling into her, and into her clothes, and secretly inside I already was starting to feel like Casey. The question revealed, also, everything about how I play: in role. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: wearing a costume so that other people can see what this inner me is all about.

I couldn’t endure the idea of playing as X (my real name) because X is a grown-up, pulled-together, balanced person. She isn’t especially fragile (though she isn’t the iron clad maiden she was in my 20s), and even though she manages a certain amount of frank vulnerability, it’s all on the verbal/literary level; it isn’t immediate or physical. There’s an adult distance about it all. To play, though, means to allow forward a part of myself that is not very X. This part I call Casey, and over the years with M, Casey developed beyond a label and into a full-blown person. ¹ To play as Casey, who is an extraordinarily vulnerable little girl, more so than when M was alive, is to make visible the psychological reality of playing itself.

So Mr. Lovely and I were pondering this question: who would be seeing little Casey, and why? I explained again, as if it needed explaining, that she was scared, bereaved, lonely; she would not be very robust. Yet, someone dealing with her couldn’t allow her fear and bereavement to dominate. The point, as Mrs. Lovely had put it, was to nudge her over a frontier. I don’t think she   would cross it willingly, but if she turned up to a scene, that would be consent enough. At the same time, if someone steamrollered her, or gave the impression that he didn’t understand her, or didn’t base his command on that understanding, then she would merely comply in a mechanistic way. It would be robotic, and not only fail to accomplish any threshold crossing, but it would scare her away worse than now.

Understandably, Mr. Lovely found this all a bit overwhelming. Mrs. Lovely and I went shopping for the party, and on the way back she almost ran over a bunch of schoolkids. I yelled and grabbed her arm; she swerved to avoid them, just. She was angry at me. I apologized for yelling and for touching her. She said that she was never going to hit them. I very much doubted it.

Back at the house, I hoped to find Mr. Lovely to talk. I was beginning to imagine a scenario—the very fact that I could imagine something seemed to be a hopeful sign. What if, I wondered, Casey had brought home a bad school report? It would be terrifically shaming for her, since she’s such a good student. She would have bollixed up the first term at her new school out of an inability to join in. The same reticence that kept me on the sidelines at parties would have caused every kind of problem at this school she was attending. She’d avoided homework and then avoided the consequences, she’d offended teachers with her silence, which seemed to them churlish and sullen. They certainly didn’t understand her, and this had made her worse. It was a train wreck.

A discerning interlocutor would be able to see what her teachers couldn’t see. He would realize that she didn’t need yelling at, that she was already ashamed beyond endurance, and that it was her sadness and this boil of emotions that needed addressing, not her homework per se. At the same time, she had not behaved as she ought. She had declined genuine offers of help. She had indulged in procrastination and avoidance. Most importantly, she had allowed herself to carry on until she reached the state which now tormented her. How could she treat herself like that?

It couldn’t be a guardian with a real relationship, because that would be fake. Casey has no relationships with anyone but TL. But what if it were the man of the house where she was staying over the holidays? He, perhaps, knew some of the staff at her school, perhaps her form teacher. In any case, he had her report in hand whether or not he’d any right to it, and as a grown up, as the best available representative of loco parentis she had just then—in that fleeting, un-ideal moment—he intended to have a word with her, even though he had no previous relationship with her, even though he would have no serious relationship with her beyond that holiday. He didn’t appear bothered by the unofficial, presumptuous character of the interview. He was paterfamilias, she was a child under his roof in need of guidance, he intended to provide it. End of story.

The dream ended before anything could happen, before I could even speak to Mr. Lovely again. We were in a building high up in the Gotham skyline, almost as high as the Empire State Building (where M and I met). A storm came upon our skylighted room, blowing rain in the cracks. I woke up.

I overthink. I overimagine. I rehearse excessively in my mind. But it was always this way. M and I wrote over three hundred long emails each before meeting. We, especially I, explored tgi and ourselves from every possible theoretical angle. I can’t endure reading the correspondence, in part because it’s too grievous, but also because it’s so very tedious with all of its intellectualizing. I hope I’m not intellectualizing that much now. But, as I live alone with my dogs and my computer, words, dreams, and thoughts remain my chief vein of experience. And I suppose this kind of rehearsal is preferable to an impetuous, confused, disaster of a real-life play encounter.

Of course, party play isn’t the same as deep play, and role play as other people know it is, I suspect, a distinctly different activity to playing Casey. I don’t know, yet, if there is anyone amongst my acquaintances capable of playing with Casey. Besides, being on the sidelines of parties isn’t a bad thing. At least it’s being at the parties.

And—just as I was bringing this to a close—let’s not leave before putting under the microscope the glories of my reserve. If I stepped off the sidelines, it would mean sacrificing this quality of mine—that I don’t play, that I am charming and nice and only a visitor from afar, that I am not a pawn in gossip, not an adherent to one side or another in whatever drama is unfolding, that I possess a lofty wisdom born of distance and of not having a horse in the race. Why should I want to give any of that up? Then I would be just like everyone else. I would be part of everyone else. Feuds and tensions would involve me. What I did and said would start mattering to people personally; I would start offending people on more than an intellectual level.

And—this is the heart of it, isn’t it?—I would grow attached. My massive, neglected needs would come out of the deep freeze, and then where would we be? I will tell you: in torment. I would have allowed myself to need these people to the core (with Casey even!), and then I would be all alone again at home in Gotham.

Also, I know my heart. It is essentially monogamous. Certainly it has room for friends, deep true friends, but that is distinct from its central longing. Which is a way of saying that even if I did live in the land of parties and could join in on equal status as everyone else, I would still be…well, wounded after an honest encounter via Casey. Wounded in the sense of having undergone a surgical procedure.

People talk of sub-drop, but this is more serious. Sub-drop as a term implies a neuro-chemical depression after extreme stimulation. Like a hangover or a post-cocaine crash. You did something very intense on a physical and emotional level, so you felt “high”, you “flew” as some people like to phrase it, and now, as a prelude to normality, you have come down from that high, a disagreeable descent.

I’m not looking for a high. I’m looking for a Real. I’m looking for a breath of real, intense air on this planet where I have not been able to respire. You flew, you dropped—a normal course of things. You finally breathed, now you must again hold your breath—not.

If I was still 26, if I had never lived a real life, this would not be so difficult.  But I have. I know what I’m toying with. I know what kind of heart I have. I know how it feels to live, how it feels to be a phantom, and how it feels to long for a life I can’t have. Of these three, it’s the last I dread most.

casey in her boater hat this summer

As this blog has ground nearly to a halt, it probably has no lurkers left. But in case you are new or not-new and still lurking–a warm hello. Maybe today will be the day you leave a comment and delurk? While you’re thinking about that, here are some pictures of casey in some of her hats for you:

When I started this blog, in a half-blind urge to speak of the part of my lost marriage I couldn’t speak about with everyday people, I thought no one would want to read a blog with a subtitle like “whacking, bereavement, God.” Who besides me would want to read about all of those things, what’s more at the same time? Apparently, there are people who do, and many of those people have become real friends. Without those friends and this blog, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of this shrouded part of my character and my experience. To those friends–giant hugs.

If you’re a return or regular reader, you will no doubt be thinking: why doesn’t Casey blog more?! I’m not entirely sure, beyond the normal excuses of life getting in the way. But if I were to be really honest–and what are blogs for if not that kind of risk?–I suppose I could guess a couple of other reasons:

1. Bereavement. It continues. How many times can I write the same thing? I am wary of losing friends by turning into Casey-one-note. So increasingly I keep it to myself.
2. 

   winter uniform hat

   Ambivalence about The Scene. As you might have gathered, I’ve gone to a few parties in the last two years. I haven’t yet played with anyone else. I haven’t had a romantic date. I haven’t kissed anyone. As time goes by I wonder, increasingly, whether I ever will do any of those things. Many of my friends write about their play dates or parties, but I don’t want to write about these things. First, I think it would be churlish to write posts about liking but not liking a certain party. Ditto with writing about being depressed by prospects. If the Scene depresses me, it isn’t because there’s anything wrong with the parties or people at them, it’s because of a mismatch between what I need and what’s on offer. So, I don’t see how it’s productive to complain.

3. Anxiety about outing. Because I work in a sensitive sector, and because of the integral role church plays in my life, the prospect of being outed scares me. I’m quite cautious in my face-to-face encounters, and I try to be careful about what I write, but sometimes fear grips me, especially when I read about other people being outed by vindictive former friends/partners. This has made me self-conscious about some of the fiction I write because it strikes me as the most vulnerable part of this blog. I have no inherent qualms about the stories I write or the kinds of experiences that attract me, and I find them all fully compatible with professional integrity and with my fairly orthodox religious beliefs. My worry is that my interests are so open to misunderstanding. I mean, I live in a cosmopolitan city. If my employers or fellow parishioners were to read that I got up to a bit of kinky adult sex in my marriage, so what? But there is a lot in my writing that could be misinterpreted. So I worry.


casey's peruvian hat

4. Real world writing. I do write fiction in my regular life, and that has been waking up from bereaved coma and taking more of my time and attention over the last year. When I started this blog, I thought of it as a kind of CPR. The CPR has more or less worked, and while I do not feel like a whole or healthy person, I can’t say I have not been resuscitated.

In other news, I fell off my bike and broke my elbow last month. I’ve acquired a roommate/free lodger in my sister’s boyfriend, who fell victim to some shady real-estate maneuvers and found himself evicted with 4 hours’ notice last week. Before he moved in, I had visitors staying for six of the last ten weeks. Besides that, my garden has been very busy and demanding (until elbow broke), the various channels of work are very busy, and the current novel is moving itself to the front burner. So there you have it. Nothing too thrilling.

I think, on this day of appreciating friends known and unknown, I’ll leave you with a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. It’s from the end of “Friendship”. I do like what he is saying about Christian friendship, but I also think it applies to all true friendship.

Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “you have not chose one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

As a child, and still now, I found anger difficult. Lots of people are like this. Anger is Bad. Good people do not get angry. Anger is a destructive force–axioms of my personality. M and Mr. Prior did a lot of work over the years trying to rewrite some of the axioms, for instance trying to redefine Good as meaning honest & true, rather than Polite & Well-behaved. This is probably a long, boring topic for you, but the point is that my musculature is overdeveloped from holding in anger and other unpleasant emotions for most of my life. M did a lot to release this. The release normally took the form of tears.

This weekend I am in the industrial midwest, having travelled here with my brother and sister for my father’s 70th birthday. I’m the eldest and closest to my father, in contrast to my sister, who seems to have almost an allergic reaction to him. He’s a nice guy, a decent guy, an honest, hardworking guy. He’s also a workaholic, hard to connect deeply with, and prone to emotional tonedeafness. As a teenager and young adult, I felt a lot of anger towards him for having left my mom and thus destroyed our family. I’ve since forgiven him, and I feel a lot of compassion for him. Nevertheless, his behavior is sometimes very tiresome, and I have had a lot of it over the last two days, combined with trying to take care of his vulnerabilities while also taking care of my sister so she doesn’t go into emotional anaphylactic shock. Such is the way with family.

Last night I dreamed we were all together (my dad, stepmother, bro & sis) and my dad was talking. All of a sudden I said: “Fuck you, Dad. Just fuck you.” I continued with a string of angry f-expletives. He snapped and ordered me to go to the other room, just like I was little and he was ordering me to my room. I stomped off, part angry, part nervous of suddenly being in trouble. In the other room, I realized Casey was “in”. I think her shoes were even on my feet, and I was kicking stuff like she does, or wants to do, when she’s angry. I’m a little vague on what happened next in the dream when my dad came in to talk to us / tell us off. I think it was a combination of adult-me apologizing and explaining my frustrations, and Casey-me kicking in anger and shouting more provocative things.

I woke up from this dream and thought: I must be angry with him, who knew? But I kept thinking about the dream—you know how sometimes dreams keep drawing you back to think about them, as if they contain some kind of addictive substance? And what drew me back to the dream was the experience of Casey. I longed, and still long to be able to be back in her. Casey was frequently angry. Casey was allowed to be angry. Casey was allowed to scowl, to stomp around, to shout grouchy things, to make outrageous claims, to hyperbolize without rational tempering. M had a portmanteau for Casey’s go-to mood, which was glumpy (glum + grumpy). And Mr. Prior, the only person I have ever encountered in my life like this, he could deal with Casey’s feelings. He could take her anger. He knew when her misbehavior was anger, when her glumpiness was anger, when her sadness was anger, and when her anger was sadness. He allowed all of it, and he loved her so intensely when she was Bad, when she was out-of-control, when she was angry. He wasn’t afraid of it or her.

I think most tops, when faced with a scowling, sad-angry-provocative Casey Morgan, would conclude that she needing whacking and that I was indeed asking for whacking via “playing” her. It wasn’t like that. And he understood that. All those years of playing—if it can even be called playing—opened up huge wings inside the mansion of my personality, until they were more or less integrated, at least around him. But when he died, there was no longer anyone who could see Casey—See (deal with) her or see (perceive) her. I have to be a grown up all the time now, except when I am by myself. When M was alive, I sometimes found it a trial to have to be a grownup all day long at work. Now I’ve been grownup for 26 months straight. Now she mostly comes out in dreams.

I cannot tell you how much I want M right now, how much I want him every second, but especially right now. The last time I was here at my dad’s with him, we were looking through the famous & voluminous family photo albums. My father loved taking pictures when we were little, and you were often having to put on nice clothes and smile during photo shoots. I’d always loved these photo albums, but M saw them with different eyes. I remember him poring over some pages of me when I was two or three. I thought I looked happy (I was smiling), but he drew my attention to the eyes. Look how sad they are, he said. He pointed out  a lot of things in these pictures. I don’t enjoy looking at them anymore. The myth of the happy pictures was shattered for me. Don’t get the idea that there was Abuse in my childhood. There wasn’t. We’re talking ordinary life unhappiness that just didn’t have a legitimate channel for expression before I met him. Or so it seems.

If he was here right now, he’d hold Casey tight and call her by the pet names he had for her that said she was special and his and entirely safe and loved in his arms, no matter how she behaved. Once he called his real kid by one of those names and she got so jealous it wasn’t even true.

I’m sorry for complaining so much. I have an unbelievable amount to be grateful for. But Casey says being alive is unbearable. She’s a kid, so everything is exaggerated. Still…

by Michael Appleton

It is a beautiful photograph so redolent with masculinity that I feel I could resurrect an old-fashioned activity and swoon. You can smell the room, right? That gentlemen’s store smell.

When I was little, my father would take me with him on his Saturday morning errands: the dry cleaners, the tailor, the market, etc. We’d always stop at a certain men’s clothing store. It didn’t make bespoke suits, like the shop pictured above, but it did smell of men’s clothing. There was a long shoehorn I used to play with, a contraption that produced a flame for your cigarette or cigar, and some butterscotch hard candies. I don’t know what my father did at this shop every week; I think he just went to check stuff out and to talk to the men who ran it.

But the store in the picture: you wouldn’t go there merely to browse. In fact, the picture looks less like a store than like the corner of a man’s dressing room. I look at the dressing gown, the shirt, the jacket, and I think of the man who would wear them, how he would look in them, and how his body would look underneath them, when he took them off, or when I took them off him. I can smell his shaving foam: Taylor’s of Old Bond Street. I can see the jacket on him, or being taken off and hung over a study chair. I imagine his cuff links, being threaded through the cuffs, or unfastened to roll sleeves up to the elbow. I can feel the heat of his body through the dressing gown, his hardness when engaged in a kiss. The man who wears these clothes is a man who understands something essential about what it means to be masculine, and that something does not involve track suits or tattoos or vegetarianism or a lack of grooming, any more than it involves emotional illiteracy, sports obsession, extreme skepticism, or compulsive topping. I can’t find the words to describe the potent masculinity in this picture, but I am drawn to it inexorably, as the feminine has always been drawn to the masculine ever since opposites began to attract.

Yet, my kind of feminine does not possess a waspish waist, stiletto heels, makeup, or a flirty little personality. Mine rides a bike to church and there changes into stockings and a skirt knee-length or lower. Mine wears tomboy shorts in the garden, or gray flannel when summoned to a certain type of study. Mine can surrender to love while seeking surrender in return. It can work a Melita drill, cook pizza from scratch, scuba dive to 170 feet, make algebra lucid, or deal with children who suddenly start to cry. It isn’t a Victoria’s Secret catalog, but it craves this.

by Michael Appleton

English flannel with Twist? Yes. Please.

]]> http://www.caseymorgan.org/2010/06/masculinity/feed/ 4 http://www.caseymorgan.org/2010/02/the-schoolhouse/ http://www.caseymorgan.org/2010/02/the-schoolhouse/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:43:23 +0000 cdm http://www.caseymorgan.org/?p=1624 The American Schoolhouse—ah, where to start? Luckily, Graham already has started us off along these delectable lines, noting, among other things, that the one-room schoolhouse of American lore was in some respects gender-neutral. Men and women whacked boys and girls, usually in full view of all (due to constraints of the one room).

Graham mentioned two key examples: Tom Sawyer (in its several forms and adaptations) and Little House on the Prairie (books, but especially the TV series). Little House fashioned the imagination of many, including yours truly, and continues to fashion young minds today if reports out of the Kinky House are to be believed.

illustration by Mercer Mayer

I’d offer a couple more: The Great Brain, in which the title character gets paddled for something he didn’t do, memorably drawn by Mercer Mayer and less memorably portrayed by Jimmy Osmond in the 1978 tv movie (if anyone has a link to this video, please speak up, as I can’t find the scene in the parts of the film uploaded to u-tubby). This paddling is a great scene, even though I personally dislike the paddle as an implement (I find it rather brutish and blunt; unsubtle). It’s enjoyable because a) the victim, Tom, is such an insufferable manipulator most of the time, I don’t mind seeing him whacked unfairly; b) Tom is brave, refusing to give his tormentor, Mr. Standish, the satisfaction of seeing him cry. As narrated by Tom’s brother:

I felt tears come into my eyes as I watched Mr. Standish give Tom ten hard whacks with the paddle. The tears weren’t for the pain I knew Tom was suffering. I knew my brother could stand pain like an Indian without crying. The tears were for the humiliation I knew Tom was enduring (The Great Brain, 121).

c) Tom gets revenge on Mr. Standish, which appealed to me as a young reader, the rebel against unjust authority. But, d) ultimately Tom’s revenge is revealed as cruel and callous, earning a terrific rebuke from Tom’s father:

“I have never laid a hand on you,” Papa said, breathing heavily, “but right at this moment if I had that paddle, I’m afraid I would give you a paddling that would make the one you got from Mr. Standish seem like patty-cakes” (136-7).

I was absorbed for some time in imagining that if-statement.

From the children’s book shelves we find If You Lived in Colonial Times ¹ by Ann McGovern. I would direct the reader to page 24 “What happened if you didn’t behave in school.”

I was lucky enough once to get a first-hand encounter with the one-room schoolhouse. I grew up within field-trip distance of the Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village, which is a gigantic outdoor museum of bygone American life. People are dressed in 19th century garb, and you can make butter like they did back in the day, see men forge horse shoes, etc. There is also a one-room schoolhouse, the Scotch Settlement School. When I was in fourth grade (age 9) my class got to spend a day in it.

At that age I was in a mixed 4th and 5th grade class of about 30 kids taught by a husband/wife team. I’ll call them Mr. & Mrs. Sweet because we all adored them. They were perfectly firm and took no nonsense, but they valued fun and unconventional methods. We got to go on more field trips than any of the other classes; they’d give us long recesses when we got cagey in the winter; they kept all sorts of live animals in the room; they’d tear up your math book and skip you ahead if they thought you could handle it; they read aloud to us regularly; and they had a carpeted claw-foot bathtub, shaded by a rainbow umbrella, where you could go and read books when you’d finished your assignments.

Mr. and Mrs. Sweet also had a paddle on the wall of their classroom. This disconcerted me. As previously discussed, corporal punishment was not used at my school (although it was legal in the state), but most of us got it at home. I just didn’t know how to feel about the fact that my favorite teachers kept a paddle on the wall, and, worse, would jocularly (?) threaten kids with it from time to time. (e.g. kid getting wild would be asked sternly: Do you want a spankin’? To which the only answer was a fervent shaking of the head no.) What’s more, this paddle was covered in signatures, supposedly the signatures of those who’d been whacked with it.  The subject was far too serious for me, at age 9, to have any perspective on the Sweets’ possible tongue-in-cheek threats.

Scotch Settlement School Greenfield Village

Still with me? Right, the schoolhouse: it is winter of fourth grade and we are going to spend a day having school at Greenfield Village. We will have free dress (no uniforms), and period costumes are encouraged. Costumes!?! I wore one of my Little House on the Prairie outfits, and even better, all the other kids made an effort, and Mr. & Mrs. Sweet were wearing costumes, too! OMG!!!!!!

All morning we sat at double desks, wrote on slates, did lessons out the McGuffey Reader, and got to sample the full range of old-fashioned responses to incorrect answers and misbehavior: writing lines on the blackboard, the dunce cap, holding books out in front of you, and—yes—whipping! This is where I got a little confused about how real it all was. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, with the deep thespian instinct of all good teachers, introduced the punishments one by one, beginning with the mildest, and working up to the whipping. They looked for victims, choosing the typically naughty kids in the class, robust kids, kids who would play along. When it came time for the first whipping, Mr. Sweet put on his gravest scowl, selected a long switch from the supply, and wordlessly beckoned the naughty boy to follow him. They exited behind the blackboard wall.

The Scotch Settlement School at Greenfield Village

[When you entered the schoolhouse, there was a row of pegs for hanging your cloaks, and on each side a doorway leading to the schoolroom itself. It was to this "cloakroom" that Mr. Sweet & boy repaired.]

A hush fell over the class and then we heard it: the unmistakable sounds of a switch being applied. Thwick… thwick… “Ow!” the boy cried out plaintively. Thwick-ow! Thwick-ow!! Thwick-thwick-thwick! Sobs.

Can you imagine my uncertainty and fear?

great pic of the hooks by Devonhaupt

Soon Mr. Sweet emerged, conducting the boy by the collar. The class found this risible, but Mr. Sweet merely glared at us and deposited the boy into the corner, where he continued wiping his eyes. The twitters in the class probably communicated to Mr. and Mrs. Sweet that we were with them, but also possibly that not all of us were sure how real the performance was. I, for one, was starting to feel sick to my stomach. My seatmate, Frances (the best friend of my friend) assured me it was just pretend. But wasn’t the boy crying? I asked. His face was red. Frances wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t long before Mrs. Sweet had to whip someone. They, too, were taken off to the cloakroom and subjected to the same painful treatment. They, too, emerged rubbing their eyes. This was quickly becoming a very anxious field trip for me. I wondered when we’d get to go visit the crafts people, or have recess. As the morning wore on and more punishments were meted out, kids started to vie with one another to get punished, eager for the excitement and attention. Everyone was getting it, bad kids, good kids. You didn’t even have to misbehave for the Sweets to find a reason to include you in the drama. Frances told me not to worry; it wouldn’t be bad if I got in trouble. But I was worrying, and worrying all the more because the Sweets were running out of victims. The majority of the class had got in some kind of trouble or another. I sat very quietly at my desk and worked very hard on my slate.

The whipping reached a climax with the execution of a girl called Beth, who was generally well-behaved and a great favorite of Mr. Sweet. He summoned her to the cloakroom with thespian gravitas, we heard the requisite sounds, but when they emerged, she had her hands over her face—to conceal her passionate tears? or… was it to conceal her laughter? For Mr. Sweet was holding a broken switch aloft for the whole class to see. He wore an expression of disgust and shock, that this girl had been so very bad that she had actually broken the switch! The schoolroom exploded in laughter. If there had been a curtain, it would have fallen.

It was probably then that I began to cotton on, but unfortunately, it was time for recess, lunch, and touring the rest of Greenfield Village. Beth, who was a trustworthy friend, later revealed the stagecraft (whacking the coats, with the kids crying out).

I can’t tell you how much I would like to have a second chance at that day. Or how much I’d like to take some of my former students on such a field trip. Or even, how much I’d like to try it on with various friends who could be relied upon to rustle up authentic costumes, and swot up authentic practices. Wonder what it would take to book a field trip there today…

Norman Rockwell's classic illustration for Tom Sawyer

¹ This book is the antecedent for an in-joke M and I had. Once when we were staying at an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica, I accidentally got smashed before lunchtime on Brandy Alexanders. We retired to our room where I (uncharacteristically) took off all my clothes, sprawled across the bed, and (reportedly) said: Tell me about the colonial days! before passing out. M teased me with this thereafter whenever a drink started to go to my head. Other people took it as an amusing, drunken remark, but he and I knew I had been asking him to tell me about birching of school children in the American colonies. lol.

As previously discussed, I’ve never really played with safewords. This isn’t out of any philosophical stance, but simply because they proved extraneous in my play relationship and in the few scenes I did outside that relationship. Another common practice that has never quite entered my play is the warm-up. This probably has to do with the fact that when I play, it is always–through role–real, in which case a warm-up would seem at cross-purposes, and thus on some level probably pervy. I think, perhaps, I have been missing something.

I’ve no idea why, but this morning popped into my head a memory of a trip to the doctor for planters warts. This would have been just after I met M, probably just after my first trip to Englandland to visit him (three weeks of a dark December in Surrey). Planters warts are a painful and difficult-to-eradicate infection usually in the sole of your foot, in my case in the flesh of my heel. You have to soak your foot twice a day, scrape with a razor blade down to the roots of the thing, and then staunch the blood with a salicylic acid preparation. (Sorry, graphic part over.) Let us simply say that in addition to the expected kinds of pain, I was experiencing considerable discomfort during that trip.

Eventually I broke down and visited the doctor. Doc confirmed that it had gone beyond the soak&scrape stage and that the only solution now would be to freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. He warned me: this could get quite painful, and I should let him know if I needed him to stop. I, overflowing with confidence borne of newly discovered tgi play, told him it was fine. I gave him my stoic face. He put my bare foot up on the table and took out something that looked like a blowtorch. I blanched.

Ok, he said, I’m just going to keep on with this until you tell me to stop. It’s not going to hurt at first, but then it’s going to start hurting and keep getting worse.

Me: Sure.

Doc: Oh, and you should know that the pain is going to keep increasing for a while even after I stop, so you should tell me to stop before it’s at the absolute limit. K?

Me: (gulp, nod)

This was an interesting exercise: to safeword, but to have to safeword before you’d reached your limit. You didn’t want to do it too soon, because then the treatment wouldn’t be as effective, but if you left it too late, you might find yourself in an agony you didn’t want at all. It was, intellectually, quite hot.