purplerabbit

Doors open at 6 PM. Concert should be 7-10 PM. Location, the Rabbit Warren in Hayward, CA. (Email for address and/or directions.) Attendance is limited, so RSVPs are suggested. (Send RSVPs or questions to: purplerabbit13 at gmail dot com.)

Suggested donation $20 per person. Proceeds to benefit the Rabbit Warren (Lon, Dany & Rowan).

Some refreshments will be provided. Particularly cake and ice cream in honor of Lon's birthday. Guests are encouraged to bring other snacks and drinks to share.

About the performers:

Shay Black is a singer and instrumentalist based in Berkeley, California. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he sings with his brothers Michael and Martin, as part of the Black Brothers Band, and also occasionally with sisters, Frances and Mary Black. He is a frequent performer at The Freight and Salvage Coffee House and his most regular gig is running the Irish music session at The Starry Plough on Sunday evenings in Berkeley. As a song teacher, he has a weekly class at The Freight and Salvage with his hugely popular series “Expand Your Repertoire”. Shay was a featured singer at Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance Samhain Ritual in 2003, has been a long-term supporter of Pagan Alliance and has been MC at the Annual Pagan Parade events for the past seven years. He has a background in public health, works on the management team of a family support agency in Oakland and supports social justice causes both locally and internationally. As a musician and performer Shay has continued to establish a close rapport with his audiences at many events and he constantly manages to import that unique Irish humor and craic into his performances. For more info see: http://www.black-brothers.com/library/shay.htm

Amelia Hogan, singer of Irish and American music. Hobbit, bard, mischief-maker of the highest order, and lover of bread, cheese, and wine. For more information see: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ameliaisaverb/184029821614381

Sharon Knight is a nationally touring musician in the Mythic-Celtic vein. She calls her quirky style "Neofolk Romantic" - Celtic-inspired songs for poets, adventurers, and lovers of mystery. She dedicates her music to hopeless romantics everywhere - bellydancers with daggers, pirates in eyeliner, eccentric old ladies, brave explorers, epic love, Fairy tales and fetish boots, circus acts and re-imagined history. Through song, she aspires to kindle your poetic soul! For more information see: http://www.sharonknight.net/

I have been reading a box of letters I've carried around, unread, for 35 years.

It's a love story and it's beautiful and makes me cry. All of them are from my mom (Mary) to my dad (John) who was in Viet Nam that year (1968). Mom had left her abusive husband (with Johnny's help) and was waiting for him to return so they could marry and start their life together.

I wish I had Johnny's side of the letters, but I only have mom's. She was 28, had three little girls and no money. The letters detail her struggle to survive, her battle for a divorce from her ex and her longing for Johnny. She wrote nearly every day for nine months. They also sent tapes, though those have not survived.

She tells her daily life with three small children. She sent children's drawings and a list of the first words I learned to read. She tells him how important it is that he survive. Always, how much she needs him and the life they will create together.

I was there. I was 6 and I remember this. I remember mom crying all the time, not having enough food, bill collectors pounding on the door and her hiding from them, the red white and blue letters from John... soo much coming back to me.

It's an amazing story. It does remind me that romance novels drive me crazy because "happy endings" depend on where you end. If you stop when he comes back, marries "us" (he said that), carries us off to our new home in Oklahoma, and they have another baby, then it's a happy ending.

Problem is that the happy ended 6 years later when a hit and run driver killed him.

Mom went through a grief purge and tried to throw away all of his stuff. I managed to save a lot. I remember finding the letters and deciding not to read them but to save them for the future. I carried that box of letters around for the next 35 years, knowing that when mom died, I would read them.

These letters are such an amazing window into the past. I've always planned to write a book about mom's life.

After he died, mom became an activist. She changed the world in so many ways, saved so many women's lives, both individually and through the changes she helped bring about. She never remarried. On her deathbed she was talking about how now she would "go dancing with Johnny" again.

It makes me cry for her again.

My husbands say it's why I have a thing for tragic angsty romances. And why I still like to give them a happy ending no matter how much bad happens. Someday though, I will write the story where one dies and write about grief.

It's so important but most love stories don't write about surviving that kind of loss. Even most tragic love stories have both of them die, like Romeo & Juliet. The really hard thing is honoring the person by going on.  Mom did it for us - four children.

When dad died, my aunt sent my mom a bouquet of six roses - one for each precious year they had together.

Remember that makes my tear up every time. Those six years though - they were worth it. They saved us. They taught me it could happen, that love like that was real.

Mama said it would get better.

I nearly killed myself a month before my fifteenth birthday. It seemed to me at the time, that the pain was beyond my ability to cope. Sixteen months before, my dad had been the victim of a hit and run accident, left half dead and brain damaged. He was institutionalized in a semi-vegetative state. He didn't know my name.

Dad's loss had plunged my mother and I both into depression, forced Mom back into the job market and left me in charge of the household and my three younger sisters. I'd had a secret first love, a girlfriend, who dropped me during this awful time. Then I got Hepatitis A, nearly died and spent months sick and lonely. I had to do double time to catch up on school work from missing nine weeks. All this while, I was enduring the constant torture of bullying as a geek in junior high school. It was unending taunting and even violence.

Is it any wonder I cracked. I remember it so clearly that my skin can still feel it. I was taking a bath, during one of those rare times when I was home alone. I sat in the bath, thinking about the horror that my life had become and unable to imagine how to get through it, to imagine anything other than things getting worse and worse. I remember still the feel of the blade I took out of my mother's shaving razor. I remember sitting in the water growing cold and staring at it. I know I didn't really want to die. I didn't think I had a real option. I couldn't take any more.

I froze, in a sort of fugue state, blade held between my fingers trying to will myself to either use it or put it down. My mother found me like this. She asked what I was doing. I remember answering in that distant, flat voice that I thought it would be better if I was dead.

I remember her gently taking that blade from between my finger tips, opening the drain and reaching for a towel. "No," she said. "Do you know how much I need you? How much I love you?"

She wrapped me in the towel and urged me out of the tub, leading me down the short hall to her bedroom, where she bundled me up, holding me and she kept talking. "I can't lose you. I know it's been hard, so very hard. It won't always be this way. Someday you will find people who are like you and can appreciate you. In the mean time, we have each other. I love you." Over and over she rocked me and told me how much I meant to her. Promised me we would find a way to get through it. Promised me I wasn't alone. Promised me it would get better.

And it did. She worked hard to make sure it did. We both did.

***

Right now, I wake up each day with such a heavy weight in my chest that breathing hurts. I feel that same sense of disconnect, like the world is spinning around me and I just can't follow it. I remember after dad's accident, watching children playing outside and unable to understand how the world could just keep going on when my life had turned upside down.

Dad's body finally died only weeks before my twenty-fourth birthday. I had been in an awful place that winter, living alone in a basement studio apartment and working temp jobs to keep myself fed. The death of Dad's body so long after the death of his mind, had been like a freeing of the grief that had held us in such pain for eleven years. Yes, we had learned to go on without him, to live with the ache and unresolved loss. That final release though, it was like a miracle. Things raced forward and miracles happened. I went back to college, met Troy and Mom moved to Santa Cruz. We found a place for ourselves.

One night there, I woke up from a horrible dream. It shook me so badly that I went next door to my mother's place and got into bed with her. She held me while I told her that I'd dreamed she died. It had become my greatest fear and it haunted me, knowing that someday it would happen. She rocked me and told me I would have to face it, she couldn't help that because she did not want me to die before her. It was the way of things, she said. It's a great wrong when the child dies before the parent. She said that she had once heard that you were never completely grown up until both your parents had died. Hers were still alive then, so she smiled and told me that made me more grown up than her.

My mom's life was never easy. There was at least one real scare per decade of her life where she was hospitalized and I had to face the possibility of losing her. She fought hard to live, to see her children grown and even to be there for her grandchildren. In the last nine years, she was in and out of hospitals and complained about seeing more doctors than friends. Last year, she was diagnosed with COPD – her heart was failing. She'd already had one heart surgery and would not survive another. Even then, I begged for more time. I couldn't let her go yet.

Last month, when the call came that she was in the hospital and this time there was nothing they could do, I knew it was time. She wanted to invoke her right to die, but she wanted me there with her. It had always promised that when there was nothing that could be done, no quality of life, I would be there to let her go. Now was time to honor the promise. She saw me and smiled. She said, "Please let me go." All four of her daughters told her, in tears as they said it, that they understood and that she could go now.

I sat beside her for the next thirty hours, helping her through the process of dying – singing songs of spirit and comfort to help her let go. In the night, while she lay there laboring to breath and struggling to find release, I talked. I told her how much I loved her, recounted what an amazing person she had been and encouraged her to find that next adventure. I asked her forgiveness for the times I let her down and thanked her for all that she had done for me. In the still dark night, she breathed her final breath and stopped. I felt the warmth of her again as she passed.

***

Mom's love for me, and for my sisters, was unconditional. It didn't mean she always approved of what we did. It meant she loved us even when we messed up. And when we did well, she was always there to cheer us on, to tell us how much our success meant to her. And when were down, she was always there to tell us it will get better.

So every morning I wake and remember that she is dead, the weight of it so much I have to remember to breathe, to find a way to get up and face the day – I remind myself it will get better. It won't go away. Even my grief for Dad's loss has never gone away, surging up with Mom even now. I just know that there will be good times again. I have husbands who love and care for me. I have a son, who is for me, like her daughters were for her, like sunlight that warms my heart.

It only gets better if we let it. If we work through the dark painful times to get to the other side. The only way out is through.

"Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out..." (From Sleepless in Seattle.)

My mother, Mary E. Atkins, an amazing feminist and social justice activist for nearly half a century, died Saturday. There are no words to describe the void left.

I sat beside her bed, holding her hand and singing to her for the last two days of her life. To say that my mother and I were close would be an extreme understatement. My dad died when I was 13. That left mom with four children to raise and I am the eldest. Mom and I took care of each other and my sisters. Mom was my friend, my ally, my teacher, my mentor and so much more.

One of my mother's favorite songs about our relationship was, "You and Me Agaisnt the World" by Helen Reddy:

You and me against the world
Sometimes it seems like you and me against the world
When all the others turn their backs and walk away
You can count on my to stay

And when one of us is gone
And one of us is left to carry on
Then remembering will have to do
Our memories alone will get us through
Think about the days of me and you
You and me against the world

I designed these shirts for my son and his friends, who are all proud childen of geek parents. I thought I would share in case folks here wanted one:

I am working on development for a new original erotic fiction site: Forbbiden Fiction

It will feature the work of a variety of authors, myself included. We are looking for erotic photography and art for the site. If you know of any photographers and/or artists who would like to see their work promoted and are willing to contribute their work to the site in exchange for that, please send them our way.

Have them send samples of their work and/or links to their webpages to: forbiddenfictionpub@gmail.com

Somedays I am very proud to be a geek! I love my fen!