I really should be trying to get some sleep because I’m very tired but the day doesn’t seem complete without a visit to the journal. The new yoga regime is waking me up in the mornings and I get so much done by the time the shop opens that the day seems bottom heavy with activity. When I finally I sat myself behind the counter today I had driven the g’son over to his pony and done an enormous amount of shopping, mostly in preparation for the week with the family in the time share lodge in Ballater. The mother in me cannot let this opportunity pass without lots of home cooking which will have to be done in this house, frozen and carted over there because I also want to be able to help with the babes. My programme of cooking for the next ten days is daunting. I wish I could rid myself of this subpersonality who has to cook for everyone, but she is very strong.
The way these subpersonalities haunt us - that’s turned into a theme for this week, beginning on Sunday when I watched John Cassavetes ‘Opening Night’ in which an ageing actress Myrtle, played by Gena Rowlands, is reacting badly to a new lead role as the older woman. She drinks heavily and generally messes up as she battles with this transition. She is literally knocked around by her younger self in the hallucinatory form of a young girl, a fan of the actress, who was killed in a car accident after one of the performances. It was all too easy to relate to that battle with the young self who is angry at having to die.
On Monday a young friend whose gender foxed me for two days when we first met at a workshop came into the shop. A puckish, funny, self-deprecating creature, she was meant for the theatre I think and hankers to be there, whilst trying to be ‘grown up’ and a massage therapist. She entertained me with a spontaneous performance, quite good enough for the Edinburgh fringe, of her battle with the seventeen year old boy who lives in her, sabotaging her professional mien and generally driving her nutty. Strangely and very sadly a young boy she shared a house with a year or two back was killed in a car crash. That affected her badly and took her a long time to get over.
People’s lives - I see a lot of them from my seat amongst the books. A lovely friendly kindly lady, who is literally a ‘Lady’ but would never ever make anyone aware of that, brought in some books to show me in the hope I could buy them because her children, she is sure, will not appreciate them, have only small houses and, what she doesn’t say but somehow says, have taken paths in life that are beyond her understanding. The son when I last heard of him was clowning (literally) in France. He used to run a restaurant in town rather well and maybe is back in that business, but anyway is an eccentric, very charming. One daughter has lead a colourful, rather frenetic life, often teetering on the edge of looking quite mad, living once for a while in a gypsy caravan; another married a very ordinary local lad and is leading a very normal ordinary life in a small house with several children. None of them however are doing what their mother and father, he the head of a house with a long and illustrious history, might have expected them to be doing. I don’t think she minds, she is just a little bemused.
I did once locate a subpersonality who is a nun but I’ve no martyrdom in my make-up whatsoever. I have so much admiration for Malalai Joya who is speaking out against the ‘war lords’ in her country Afghanistan in the face of death threats. It’s hard to imagine being so motivated to speak a truth that death seems a small price to pay. I don’t even like it much if speaking my truth makes me a bit unpopular. I just hope they listen - Obama et al - but hold little hope. There was so much mulch in the press about the ‘Last Tommy’ dying and the need to keep their memory alive but very little mention of his opinion of war and warmongering.
Enough already...
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