I Am Who I Am Now and Then

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance

Prompt by Harley Schreiber

Think about the type of person you’d NEVER want to be 5 years from now. Write out your own personal recipe to prevent this from happening and commit to following it. “Thought is the seed of action.”

After e.e. cummings *)

 

In some of my worst nightmares, I am Ms. Judy, a counter help at a fast food restaurant, who has an eight hour work day, wears a polyester uniform, dishes out colorless food to tasteless people, bikes home suffocating on the exhaust of rush hour coaches, watches the crafts programs on t.v. only, whose social life is like a Tupper ware party, and who retires in a U.V. park.

In some of my best dreams, I am the Dutchess abroad, a traveling artist and writer, who works twenty-four hours a day, wears whatever she pleases, sends meaningful visions into the expectant world, passes time pleasantly while waiting for a good time to travel, discriminately stays home alone or with her love, and never retires at all.

 

Judith van Praag

20 November 1994

 

My personal recipe works miracles: Thought IS the seed of action.

*) Norman Friedman insists on capitalization: E.E. Cummings

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

End Of The Rope Determination

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prompt Ashley Ambirge

Think of a time when you didn’t think you were capable of doing something, but then surprised yourself. How will you surprise yourself this week?

"If you don't want to move for yourself, do it for your daughter," my mother's physician pleaded, "She's concerned about your welfare, always writing letters and calling me." The doctor, her hands palm to palm in the fold of her skirt's fabric, seemed to pray.

"Is she really?" My mother appeared surprised, pleased even and indignant.

"Yes," the doctor looked at me, "It's difficult for her, living so far away."

"I understand, but I don't want to leave. I'm staying here. This is my home, this is where I wish to die."

The look on her face was triumphant. Earlier in the week she had fooled a geriatric psychiatrist and a psychologist who arrived by car at the crossroads between forest and fields to evaluate her capacity to live by herself in the old dilapidated farmhouse.

"As long as people do no harm to themselves or others we have to reason to deem them incapable, the psychiatrist told me. 

Same old, same old, I thought. My intelligent paranoid psychotic mother knew exactly how to play the others. The gentlemen belonged to the club of outsiders, not she.

"Go pack our suitcases," I said to my husband, trembling inside.

He got up, but hesitated, his hands on the back of his chair.

Remembering our arrival, seeing my mother's bent shape through the window, her spine broken by four spontaneous fractures, the protruding vertebrae ... I insisted, "Go pack. Please?"

"Why, where are you going?" my 79-year old mother glanced from my husband her "number one son" to me, her only child.

"We're leaving and we're not coming back, not ever. We can't stand seeing you live like this and you refuse to move. You say you want to die here, and you surely will. And we're not going to watch you do so under these circumstances. We're out of here." 

One moment of silence during which I tried not to blink. 

"All right then," she said, "I'll go."

End of my rope determination is what I need to challenge myself, to push over the hump before the finish line. I will surprise myself and receive the answer I've been waiting for, merely by continuing the way I am going, perseverance, fist on the table —with the knowledge that it's time to act.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Describe Another Person's Navel or Toenail

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance

Prompt by Lachlan Cotter

Is fear holding you back from living your fullest life and being truly self expressed? Put yourself in the shoes of the you who’s already lived your dream and write out the answers to the following:

Is the insecurity you’re defending worth the dream you’ll never realize? 

Can you be happy being anything less than who you really are?

Now Do. The Thing. You Fear.

Waldo did well considering the awful times he describes.

As long as writing is therapeutic there is no other need than to write down memories, thoughts and convictions. A wise man said: The woman who doesn't write and publish her books will die unhappy and frustrated.

Imagine that.

All the writing in the world not maketh a biography, a novel, a memoir, a work of fiction, a work of non-fiction. The art of writing lies in action, conflict, craft, building blocks, structure, flawed characters, and an author who has something to say that goes beyond a detailed description of her own navel.

There's light at the end of the tunnel, and one, two, three, or even more books.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Accept Godliness in Yourself | The Divine You

Imitation is Suicide. Insist on yourself; never imitate. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson | Self-Reliance

Prompt by Fabian Kruse

Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours?

Digital Writing Jolanda Nietveld

Printing a, b, c and each additional letter of the alphabet. Stay between the lines, let your pencil glide across the paper. First handwriting lessons, symbols painstakingly copied from the black board.

You and your parents visit another family. In the living room the man named Joop, uncle Sander and Papa bend over a book of artists' signatures. Used to the company of adults you feel insulted when sent outside to play with Joop's daughters. The mother hands you each a large carrot. The eldest girl insists you have to mash the carrot swallowing just the juice, and eventually you nearly choke on the pulp.

The rocket has landed on the moon and every one with access to a TV is glued to the set. Except for one other girl there's nobody on the playground, not even the guard. You and the girl leave the fenced area and scan sidewalks and stoops for coins. Money is lying in the gutter, the girl knows. Tired of looking you ask a woman for a dime.  

 "Do your mothers know you are begging for money? If you continue doing this you'll wind up in the gutter."

You have moved to the country, two hours north from the city. Whereas you were printing letters in italics before, the letters and numbers now have to stand upright. And whereas the upgrade from pencil in the city was to a ballpoint pen, the children in the village school are promoted to pen and ink, black for everyday use and colored when you make no mistakes. Your notebook is filled with green, purple and red that turns darker, nearly black as it dries.

Your mother sews your clothes from remnants a friend sends, after the latest fashion in Paris. The knee socks under your skirts are plaid, your long pants make schoolmates snicker, "That's boy's wear". Until the village catches up and everyone rolls up pant legs, showing the lighter side of denim.

Never advertise for free

Your mother turns name carrying shopping bags inside out. You learn to cut out labels, to not drop names, to know the difference between chic and ordinary.

Your father dresses you in Tartan, in tailored pants, a forest green bespoken suit in the latest Terlenka® and tries to find matching pumps and hand bag in the Godforsaken outpost. You're mother dresses in overalls, yet paints her toe nails and lips a startling fuchsia. She buys you candy striped and polka-dotted dresses in turquoise, pink and orange, but calls shocking pink vulgar, because it's favored by girls with the wrong hairdos and dialect.

You're an only child, who doesn't play much with other children until you go to Kindergarten at age five. "She loves to share," the grade-school teacher says when you move up north with your parents two years later. Girls at the village elementary school deny you a piece of candy. Your father gives you a guilder to buy all kinds of sweets and orders you —for once— not to share. A girl you don't play with, your best friend and her brother call you an i-di-Yid, the boy adds "voddejood". You're puzzled, the one thing your father doesn't deal in is rags, he buys textiles (your mother won't touch —that boring) from the Jewish pedlar who comes by on his bicycle loaded with merchandize. The men schmooze for hours, nurse their coffee, throw back a shot of jenever, and suck their cigars.Your father writes your friend's mother she should be ashamed of herself, to raise her children to call his child an idiot Jew. In her answer she says it's his fault entirely, in making his daughter stand out from the crowd, he singles her out himself. 

You are the one and only

And so it's up to you to take your unique singular self and deal with the pain of your elders; accept the godliness in every one, the divinity of life, and be, always be yourself.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Spread Love - Make Tea Not War.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prompt by Eric Handler

What is burning deep inside of you? If you could spread your personal message RIGHT NOW to 1 million people, what would you say?

Today blends with yesterday. Why dwell in the past? To tell the story of a man and a woman thrown together by fate, or of a family suffering shame over a favorite son's mistakes, one generation after the other. Are we talking history on a personal level? That can't be enough. What is it that needs to be shared? Zeitgeist? The post-war idealism that called for possibilities allowing artists to create without having to work an evil day job? How about the skeletons the couple thinks to leave behind in the city, when they move to the country? Face your demons, one way or another, sooner or later, here or there. Might as well sit down and sit back and let the good times roll.

What I really want you to know is that that telling a child stories only meant for grown-up ears ruins her childhood. That taking away everything she cares for, everything she loves, to save her the anguish of loss does not work. And isn't  all this about remembrance and forgiveness, and ultimately love? 

My message right now: 

Put the kettle on, spread love, make tea, not war —Memento Mori.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Fairytale

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance

Prompt by Mary Jaksch

Emerson says: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”

What is ‘too scary’ to write about? Try doing it now.

The tires of the moving truck get stuck in the mud in pretty much the same place where uncle Sander's wheels spun around without finding traction the day we came to look at the farm in the middle of the fields. Only this time throwing rags in front of the tires doesn't help. Papa and the driver light a cigarette. On the other side of the wide ditch that runs the length of the dirt path that leads toward our new home, a man in dark blue overalls, followed by a little girl, appears from the side door of a brick farmhouse that's attached to a large barn. The girl steps into her wooden clogs, the man slides his stockinged feet into dirt covered rubber boots.
"Pigs," Papa says, "You hear the oinkers Shudy?"
The man drops a plank from his side to ours across the ditch.
I wave at the little girl and she waves back.
The man is going to get his tractor and pull the van out of the mud, but he has to drive around and through the fields.
Mama and I walk all the way back to the main road and then the same way back only on the other side of the ditch to where the man and the little girl came out of the house. Mama knocks on the door of the farmhouse, she needs to go, I don't.
The little girl shows me a deep square hole in the ground, filled with water. "Our swimming pool," she says.
Mama returns and pulls me away from the hole. It's the cellar for the house the girl's parents are going to build. They will have a WC, hot and cold running water, and a shower too, the girl says.

We are going back to nature and have none of those luxuries. 

This is not picture of ours!

We have a fairytale well with a bucket on a rope and two wrought iron pumps. One is on the terrace outside the small brick house where people used to cook and do the laundry, and one inside the barn, near the door to the hallway.
(to be continued)

So what is scary about this you may wonder. Well, let's say the scary stuff is yet to come, got to start somewhere, with spinning wheels, and getting stuck in the mud, a foreshadowing of never getting out of the drowning hole...

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Learn to Let Go to Deliver

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prompt by Corbett Barr

What would you say to the person you were five years ago? 

What will you say to the person you’ll be in five years?

Prague 2006.

Inside the ancient shul, I go back in time 26 years to 1980.
In my search for roots and ancestors I find not Golem but an apparition of my own father at my side. The smell of his tobacco juice impregnated red farmer's handkerchief tickles my nostrils. My fingers remember circling small balls of tread in the fabric of his shirt cut from 1950s plaid. A smoker's hack brought me back.
"Excuse me," the dolled up octogenarian beside me grunted, her lips a scream of red.

Remembrance —a reminder I owe my father his story, history, my story, our mystery.   

Back in the hotel I find an email message from two gents in the the Netherlands. They've bought a portfolio of my father's work, a good 200 painted sketches, at a swap meet. They want to honor him with a book. "I can write," the typist says.
"Good for him," my husband quipped. "He won't have to, how do you say that in Dutch?"
"Get back the money he paid for school?"

I laugh with Gary, but a claw of fear grips my stomach. I've spent three years organizing data, writing my father's biography, simultaneously, side-by side on my monitor in both English and Dutch. And these dudes want me to hand over all that so they can put the information in a catalog that will raise the value of material that should have been mine in the first place?

The email says the man who demolished my parental house after I sold it, found the port-folio hidden underneath the bed box in my mother's room. I break out in sweat, I stopped my search for valuables when I reached the bottom of that bed box and noticed pink pallets of rodent poison dispersed across the boards. Did I ever know about the hiding place underneath? An ever so faint recollection of a dark hole, a scary place for a child, surfaces, nausea adds to the tightness in my chest. I know crying is the best way to release the fear, to soften the blow and the rock on my stomach. I cry in the shower, where my tears mix with the water running down the drain,

Back in Seattle I start the negotiation, and write the couple that I'm delighted they've recovered my father's art, that I'm saddened that the demolisher didn't contact me when he found the hidden treasures, and that I'll be happy to reimburse them for their expenses plus for postage and handling when (not if) they send me the goods.

"I remember the sketches my father made with colored ballpoint pens during meals at the dining room table in Amsterdam. it'll be great to see them back."

"That's not possible," the typist replies, "You cannot have seen your father create this work since you weren't even born in '35."

The nerve! And yet, it's true, I was born ten years after, not before WWII. Looking at the paintings on my wall, I can see how someone would mistake my father's painted '53 for '35. I know for sure his career as an artist did not start until the early 1950s. I ask them to send me JPGs to proof their point and to see if the work they talk about really is my father's. The couple feels insulted by what they see as my insinuation that they would not have obtained the artwork in a legal manner. However, they understand the work belongs with me, but not in exchange for reimbursed expenses! The work will need to be appraised, they state.
Before our trip to Prague and Amsterdam, I was almost ready to post my father's bio on Wikipedia, but after the correspondence I keep my writing to myself, until I know what to do about the portfolio, I tell myself.

Going back in time to 2006 I tell my younger self: 

Don't lose your momentum, you've worked so hard on your father's biography, it's time to share. Five years from now, you won't even care that you can't afford to buy back his art from these men. And you'll consider their browsing the swap meets similar to your parents bidding at auctions. 

Let them enjoy their find. You know they love his work! Don't worry about them using your father's biography for the content of their catalog. You've got something bigger in the making, not only a biography in Dutch and English, but memoirs, not one but several novels and a screenplay.
Learn from your mother's departure. Let go. Let go of your need to hold on, let go of your need to hide what you have discovered.

In 2016 I'll tell myself: BRAVA! You've delivered!

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.