Diary: Photo Journal Completing a Nine Year Cycle

I think I'm doing this photo scrapbook as therapy. Summing up the last nine years and letting it go.
The date on this photo is 9-9-09. I'm at my son's and my granddaughter took this. It's maybe one of three photos of me. I had just heard that my ex husband was coming for a visit. I hadn't seen him in probably 15 years. I left after 10 years of marriage because he beat me. If I'd stayed my life would have been out of "Hoosiers". Bruce Wayne, named after Batman, was the county wide basketball star in 1966. His ego never recovered.

This was my granddaughter when she was 6. She was posing for me. She's 16 now.
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When that photo was taken I was holding in all sorts of craziness that I was thrown into. I understand now that Spirit was sending me on a "Walk About" but I didn't know that then.

A good metaphor for the Level of Crazy: My mother was watching "Runaway Doctor" on America's Most Wanted...a reality show that featured criminals. She remembers reaching for her coffee when a photo of her daughter-in-law who was a victim pops up on TV.

Vanity Fair did a story on it...Click Here

That was the level of crazy I was dealing with on many levels as I tried to smile in that photo.

Things were THIS crazy. This is the reflection off this globe.

This Globe was in my dream that started this Walk About at least 10 years before the park put this one in. There is also one in the Hospital lobby that hadn't been built yet.
This Globe spinning in a cup of water is connected to Skellig Michael somehow. That view of the ocean seems oddly familiar.

At this point I wasn't prepared for Crazy. I finally got things settled and found a cute little apartment owned by art dealers. The community pool was a block away and summer concerts were a block the other direction. I had wisteria growing over my patio. I was prepared to stay. And then things flipped.

6 Months earlier.........
I was staying with my son in the photo because I had just returned from visiting my brother for the summer. He was the Secret my mother had been hiding having given him up for adoption when she was a teenager.
Only a couple of people knew of my brother Stan and the secret didn't come out till I was 30. Ten years later we met. Turned out he had been going through town on his way back and forth from his house in Mexico for years. Now he was stopping by and over a few years the family got to know him. Then his wife died and he needed help moving. My mother shoved me forward and said "Beth would love to help you!" Which was true. My life was pretty simple and I could move easily and the idea of having a Big Brother was a dream come true.
I was next in line coming when my mother was 17 so you can imagine the emotional climate I was born into. Being extremely empathic I was affected but just assumed that was how life was and I would have fantasies of a Big Brother rescuing me. So even though I loved my life and my sweet little apartment I gave everything away and moved to Vancouver, Washington to help him.

Stan had been adopted by the Barrows Family.
Click Here
He went to prep school with Scooter Libby and the Pillsbury heir and would see Caroline Kennedy at dances. The grandfather was president of Sears and his grandmother coined "Craftmen" for their line of tools. Stan's father ran all the Sears stores in Chicago.
Stan grew up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and would work at the Playboy Club during the summer. He was delivering room service to George Carlin right after he was booed off stage for his raw comedy. Carlin was an early critic of the Vietnam war and that was just not acceptable. Stan stayed with him for awhile encouraging him not to quit.

Before Stan's wife died they lived near Aspen.

Her best friend was the sister of Steve, one of the guys from Lynyrd Skynyrd.

My younger brother Dan had died right before the family met Stan. Oddly they lived parallel lives. Both flipped houses, were hobby artists, had the same wife and dog, same eclectic books in their library, had the same politics and used the same cliches. Both wore the same uniform....baggy cargo shorts, Hawaiian shirt, flip flops and a fedora. And while Dan was sweet and naive, Stan was cold and calculating. I cut short my visit and never talked to Stan again.

I did meet his neighbor, JimmyBeFree. My girlfriend's daughter,Arianne had moved to the same city and invited me to a pot luck at JBF's house....a block over from Stan. I had known Ari since she was 5 and she called me her Fairy Godmother. JBF webpage Click Here

JBF had been a chubby, crew cut nurse for the jail....until he went to South America and did

ayahuasca. More info on that stuff... Click Here

2 Months later...
I decided that since I was still living out of a suitcase that I would go visit my son Justin in
Las Cruces, New Mexico where he eventually taught animation in college.
He had quit school in 8th grade. We were moving back and forth from Valparaiso, Indiana to
New Mexico a lot and he never went back. Justin eventually enrolled in college after getting a GED and was so talented that he ended up teaching before graduation. He also does tattooing.