DROWNING

 

DROWNING

 

 

"They won't believe the world they haven't noticed is like that."

Graham Green, Ways of Escape

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These three pictures from dreams are in my book, and they all occurred before my memory returned. The man is pretending to drown me. I learned that if I quit fighting him he would stop. I don't know how long it took, but I learned if I complied without question he would leave me alone. However, that didn't stop him from surprising me with abuses if I hesitated.  

Once I realized what these dreams were about, I never had another one about drowning.

 

Dr. Spector

When I started writing my book, Abducted: A Memoir of Trauma, Nightmares, and the Struggle to Remember, in 2017, I began reading journals I had written over the years. I came across this memory I want to share with you. At the time I wrote it, June 19, 1991, one year and nine months after my memory returned, I was living with my mother in El Cajon, California. 

 Several weeks ago I called to make an appointment with my mother’s eye doctor, who I had seen for the first time a year earlier.  As I drove to the appointment I became unsure of the eye doctor’s name and the exact address of his office. After some thought I recalled the name Dr. Spector. However, when I stopped the car to look in my address book I discovered his name was not listed. Fortunately, I then remembered his office location and proceeded to the parking lot.

 

Inside the building I perused the directory. Dr. Spector’s third floor practice was listed. I proceeded to the third floor and attempted to check in, but was startled to learn that Dr. Spector was a gynecologist, not the eye doctor I was looking for. Puzzled, I returned to the lobby. I then realized that when I visited  Dr. Rhein,, the eye doctor, also located on the same floor, I must have noticed Dr. Spector’s name and for some reason stored his name in my memory.

I found this journal entry ten years after I had written it, and decided to do an internet search for Dr. Spector. To my surprise, I found there was a gynecologist with this name practicing in Denver in 1948. I must have had an appointment with that Dr. Spector after I was found in a police raid in 1948.    

It is amazing to think I would recall that name after sixty-two years, without knowing why. As Dr. Milton H. Erickson said “the unconscious knows what the conscious does not.”

 

 

I MISS

I miss the old days.

I miss living the bohemian life in Greenwich Village.

I miss riding my bike around Manhattan on a spring morning.

I miss hitting those high C's at singing lessons.

I miss vocal coaching and Italian and French lessons.

I miss the excitement of performing.

I miss being young.

I don't miss never having enough money. 

I don't miss auditioning.

I don't miss walking around Manhattan in two feet of snow.

I don't miss being sick when I must perform.

I don't miss late hours and no sleep.

I don't miss subways and buses.

AND

I don't miss having to move and start over again. 

 

 I'm sitting on a cliff overlooking an Oregon beach, eating an apple.

 Onward and Upward.