Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

Oh my goodness….I just want to say thank you sooo much for making the opening of Go Figure such a success!!! Thank you for attending and participating in the voting!
Here are the results;
Best in Show
First Place-”This Little Light of Mine” by Kristen Cumings
Second Place-”Coquette” by Vanessa Barrett
Most Creative
First Place-”Icarus Lamp” by Brian Giambastiani
Second Place-”Dress of Many Women” by Lorri-Marie Jenkins
Most Humorous
First Place-”Hot and Cold” by Nicolas Caesar
Second Place-”Scarlet Tittimama” by Brian Giambastiani
Most Thought Provoking
First Place-”Mystic” by Bruce Temuchin Brown
Second Place-”Obsessive/Compulsive” by Kristen Cumings
Most Disturbing
First Place-”Mystic” by Bruce Temuchin Brown
Second Place “Lawrence” by Duncan House

We had a great time…thanks again for supporting the ARTS!
Lorri-Marie and Rob Jenkins

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Scar Tissue

I remember how the scar tissue twisted around the whiskers of his neck, where the surgeons pulled his flesh and stitched him back together. Where the shrapnel took out pieces of his jaw, teeth, his right optic nerve, right wrist and right and left hands, leaving him a left wrist only. He would later relearn to write and draw primarily with his left prosthetic hook, the one he could rotate best because he still had a wrist on that arm.

He taught me how to use my first hand tools, how to make simple home repairs, my small hands at 5 and 6 and 8 being more articulate than his aluminum hooks. He would place X’s on a line on the upstairs plywood flooring for my new bedroom, my small hands easily taking the nails out of the nail can, starting the nails on the X’s and then he would follow behind me, power hammering the nails to completion. What a team of determination, insight, resources, and a will to live and get back to normal, if normal could ever be redefined.

I can still recall the smells of trains and the crunch of snow in Utah when Mom and I traveled there to visit him during his earliest reconstructive surgery, shortly after the close of WWII. And then later at Palo Alto Veterans Hospital. How he told me to say, “Hubba-Hubba at your legs, Mommy,” me becoming a messenger for a wounded vet, still alive, being reconstructed, and eager to become whole again.

He went on to become Prosthetic Chief of the VA Regional Office at 49 Fourth Street in San Francisco, serving the prosthetic needs of US veterans throughout Northern California. His friends were all vets too, leg and arm amputees, paraplegics, quadriplegics, Col. Frank H. with his shattered WWII elbow, Bill E. with his mortar wound at the base of his neck, now a quadriplegic from the Korean War. Bill M., a leg amputee from WWII, who caught it in a bomber over Germany.

Towards the end of his career, before he retired in 1975, Dad told me that he had served vets from the Spanish American War at the Veterans Home in Yountville, California, as well as WWI and II vets, Korean War vets, and was having his share of Viet Nam vets as well.

And now we’re engaged in another f’ing bloody war, this one preemptively created because a moron in office wanted to be a war president, because war presidents were popular presidents. What an idiot! Add to it a collective band of further idiots whose global quest for oil domination of world reserves led to a preemptive attack on Iraq, a country with oil that might satisfy the glutinous petroleum needs of our own leaderless country. Our country so frozen in its own vested corporate interests so as not to begin effective research on our own alternative fuel possibilities. Add corporate war profiteers in need of a country to annihilate so as to immerse themselves with rebuilding in the corporate troughs of greed. No thank you. No thank you. No thank you.

I’ve lived with the war disabled and have seen the downside of war. It ain’t pretty, it’s heartbreaking though it’s inspiring, and sometimes it’s not even survivable, not even for the greedy and/or the stupid, of which we have many in positions of dysfunctional leadership in the US government. God help us all. When do we begin to get smart in the United States of America? I doubt that it will happen with this current administration in Washington, DC. Where else do we turn?

©Peter Bray, 3/5/07