The good news is that Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) Maine is going to begin providing weekend workshops again at Maine State Prison. This next weekend I and good pal and co-facilitator Joanne will go in Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, and most of Sunday. Hopefully we’ll have at least a dozen incarcerated men to work with. If you get a chance look up the AVP website at http://www.avpusa.org. The project was begun in 1975 by incarcerated men at Greenhaven Prison in upstate New York as a result of the fear generated by the Attica Prison riot. That ugly and violent incident left many people stunned and reeling from what they experienced. AVP is the result. Take a look at the website and see the good works being performed on a regular basis. The workshops are now held in over thirty states and over fifty countries.
I’ve been trying to fit into my jeans for about thirty years. The normal progression for people in the U.S. is to gain weight as middle age gains on us. Metabolism slows and waists speed up it seems. My pants size is now where the waist band is longer than the in-seam. Jeezum! What the heck happened? I know what happened. Bagels. Not only bagels but good bread and good food but, … I hesitate to let it end there. I have not been eating well for ages. That is not until the past three years and a half. I’ve been frigging around with all those minimal efforts to clean up my act in the dining area of life. You know what I mean; cutting back on this and that, not eating that and this, reading about these and those, all the while doubling down on those and that.
Without getting too detailed I can tell you that I stopped eating red meat, then chicken, then fish, then ate vegetarian, then snuck in a steak or whole roasted chicken and half a turkey just before swallowing a striper whole. (A stiper is a striped bass.) A few years ago I was enticed to become vegan. The details of the story are X rated so I shall just keep it to myself. Suffice it to say that my eating habits now include being aware of sentient beings from all points. Vegan eating can include politics as well. I began eating for myself but quickly began caring for all other living creatures.
But…just like the author of Forks Over Knives I gained weight eating vegan. The problem is the pastries, bread, dinner rolls that get consumed. I know those beautiful salt bagels with toffuti cream cheese (fake cheese – non-dairy) with a lovely cup of dark, Italian roast coffee in the morning were tripping me up. Last fall and winter I went from 210 pounds down to 184 pounds while I was in New Mexico for seven months. After April of this year I left Santa Fe and drove through to Florida and then north to Maine. Along the way I re-discovered the great Northeastern Bagel. Sometime in June/July I made it back to 200 pounds. Aarrgghh! So, I am correctly dropping bread out of my diet and adding more fruit.
While in Florida visiting Tom and Olga Robertson I began eating fruit in the morning. a few pieces of fruit and a few cups of coffee. I was eating bread but I was getting the hang of eating the fruit. Our mouths need to adjust to new textures in order to accept the change. I’m good at eating pieces of fruit now. So I have just this past week dropped the bread from my personal menu. I’m getting used to it. Things take time. Time is mostly all I have so I can do this.
When we do prison AVP workshops we eat with the men/women. It’s a strategy to build community quickly. I don’t eat the food on the trays that come into the group room for us at lunch time. I might eat a piece of fruit if we are lucky to have that on the menu. I always take a supplement of hummus or some other vegan fare for myself. I remember once Joanne looked at her tray and was totally confused by what she saw. She had to ask one of the men what the thing on her tray was. He told her it was pizza. She took a bite and discovered the phenomenon of disguise and how it relates to food. She discovered that pizza can taste like pizza but look like anything but. She ate the whole thing and was satisfied, mostly.
I was reading the Sun magazine yesterday and was pleased to see that the next October deadline for entries for “Readers Write” is a subject that I happen to have a short story/essay already written. The prompt for October entry is “stairs”. I’m going to enter a revised version of this piece below. I hope your day is going well and I hope we get to meet some day. Tell me a little about yourself if you like. Peace out. G. M. Goodwin
BROODING
Mackenzie climbed the stairs to his old bedroom. He was between the second and third floors and moving slowly up the staircase, deep in thought. He had arrived at his parents’ house a few hours earlier. The train ride from Chicago to Boston took nearly a full day and he’d been unable to relax on the trip. Mack, what his siblings called him, was exhausted and he needed to get some rest; get off his feet and get some shuteye. Mack’s father had died a few days earlier. He and his siblings had all traveled various distances to gather at this place they’d lived; this place from where all had flown the coop, either eagerly or reluctantly. Well, actually Mack was the only one who had been reluctant to leave this house and to leave his father. He was his father’s son. He was the only sibling to have spent so much time with the old man alone in this house. Mack had left a few months earlier to join the Navy, October to be exact, and now it was the middle of February.
February in the Northeast is a tough time of year regardless the circumstance. In the present situation February and this big old house was heavy with cold and melancholy and grief. A sadness permeated the three story structure from the basement to attic. The winter day was overcast just enough to mask the sun. The low clouds were thin enough to allow the milky sun to penetrate and cast dim shadows. Mack’s feelings were like the light coming from above this February. He felt the brooding of the house and the brooding of the day outside. The mood all round suited the circumstance of the moment. Mack continued slowly step by step toward his room on the third floor of the old house in which he’d been a child and a young man. This old house was a protection from the weather, the emotion, and as he climbed the stairs he felt the comfort he’d always felt here.
Mack’s contemplative mood was interrupted by his brother’s voice above him. William had heard Mack’s footfalls and had come to the railing above the stairs. William spoke softly to Mack. Softly and secretively.
“Hey. You know how Daddy died, right?”
The question was loaded with something that Mack couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“No. What do you mean?”
“He shot himself”, said William. “He committed suicide.” Williams’s eyes were searching Mack’s face for the reaction. Mack sensed a cruelty in the look and the situation.
“I didn’t know”, Mack responded. His face clouded over and he turned away from William as he took a few more steps upward toward the landing outside his room. He reached the third floor and without any more words he entered his room and closed the door. He wanted to cry. He didn’t want William or anyone to see him grieve. This new information was more than he wanted to hear. It was like a stabbing in his heart and he wanted to be alone with the pain. Goddammit, he thought. He crossed the small room to the bed and sat down softly. He reached for the pillow and covered his face and his sobs and he shook with the grief of abandonment and loneliness. Mack was filled with feeling he could not identify and he was afraid to take the pillow from his face. He held it with both hands tight against his skin and held it so his ears were covered as well. He was sobbing and choking and mad at everything except his father. He was feeling the ties of family loosening and dropping away setting him adrift into the ether of whatever was left of his world. His father had left him too soon; too soon. Mack felt abandoned and isolated and his body instinctively curled inward as he sat on the edge of the bed in his room.
Mack stayed in his room with the door shut for nearly an hour. When he had cried enough to ease the grief he stood and opened the door to his room. He could sense William was still in his room. Mack turned and went to the windows looking out on the gray day and sat in the old armchair so he could observe and reflect. He sat on the edge of the seat with his elbow on the window sill and stared out the window at the gray light casting ghostly shadows into the room. He sat that way thinking about his childhood in this room and his father who was always semi-invalid and unable to work full time, or often, anytime due to his disabilities.
Mack was looking out the windows of his room reflecting and brooding and he was thinking of his brooding father who no longer was alive and he was sitting in mixed reaction to the noises of the family in the house moving around busily, cautiously helping his mother and his grandmother with the business of getting used to no more husband and no more son to walk carefully around. Mack sat and felt the day inside of the house pass through him to the outside of the house. The brooding of his father was still present and passing up the stairs into his room. He could feel the comforting love of his father pass through him and out through the window pane to the outside February cold and melancholy day. Mack felt the comforting brooding and melancholy carry him out of this house filled with the damn people who would never be able to comprehend the connection of a brooding father with his son.
G. M. Goodwin
16 October 2015
Playing Fair and Being Kind 