Kenneth Sewell - Creative Writing

On May 8 of 2008, I awoke with the memory of a vivid dream conversation with my late friend, Michael Mahoney. In my dream, everyone present was openly acknowledging something that is usually glossed over regarding Michael’s death: that it was apparently suicide. I asked him what has been on the lips of many of his friends since his passing: “Michael…Why?” His dreamt response was so striking that I wrote it down as soon as I awoke: “The me I always liked, I wasn't seeing him or hearing him speak anymore. I just wanted to make him make noise. I wanted to hear him scream one time.” Finally allowing voice to some of my guilty anger, I responded, “In so doing, you made sure the rest of us would never hear anything after that scream.”

Then the dream took an unexpected turn. Michael said he wanted to coauthor something with me. I immediately inflated with pride and satisfaction. You see, although Michael and I were, at times, very close friends, and we talked a lot about his writings and about mine, often sharing preliminary drafts of manuscripts, poems, and theoretical ideas, we never coauthored anything. So I was thrilled that he considered me a legitimate peer—enough to invite me to write something with him. I asked about the topic, anticipating that it would be about emotion in the therapy process, or therapist self-care, or the like. Instead, he responded with something so mundane and obscure that I could not even recall it when awake. Perhaps it was a chapter on the use of screwdrivers amongst electricians, or a treatise on why political parties lose favor in difficult economic times. It was likely neither of those topics, but no more relevant to us as psychologists, and not at all memorable.

Whether or not you have children, imagine that you have a 10 year-old son or daughter. Imagine that you are in a public place and visualize the following:

            Your child is crying.

With that image in mind:

            What parts of your body react?
            What do you feel?
            Where do you feel it?
            What parts of you are gearing up for action?
            What parts are inaccessible to you?

Now consider an alternative image:

            Your child has just won a trophy at a sports event.

Again, the questions:

            What parts of your body react?
            What do you feel?
            Where do you feel it?
            What parts of you are gearing up for action?
            What parts are inaccessible to you?

And finally, a third image:

            Your child is misbehaving in embarrassing and socially-problematic

ways.

And the questions:

            What parts of your body react?
            What do you feel?
            Where do you feel it?
            What parts of you are gearing up for action?
            What parts are inaccessible to you?

Think about the morning after a night with little sleep and the experience of the first desperately-desired cup of coffee. Allow yourself to experience your body with the imagination. Now say the word, coffee, aloud. Hear it fully. Feel it. If the way the word sounded did not match with your feeling, say it aloud again. Say just the word, but communicate as best you can, the context, implications, and bodily reality that the word-in-feeling-state carries.

Now change the scenario. Imagine the smell of coffee in your mother’s kitchen signifying the family gathered for a holiday. Again allow yourself to experience your body with the imagination, and then say the word, coffee, aloud. As before, align the sound of the word with the feeling.

One more scenario. You are a coffee plantation owner in South America. You stand on the hillside and overlook the vast fruits of your life’s work. Now utter the word, coffee.

You could repeat the above process with any number of mantra-words. For example, say the word fly with scenarios of (1) soaring above life’s problems; (2) rushing to get the children to school; and (3) going on yet another business trip away from the family. Or say the word God with scenarios of (1) transcendent connection with the ground of all being; (2) the self-appointed status of your ego-inflated boss; (3) a supernatural being that makes arbitrary decisions about the eternal status of individual human beings).

Having awoken today in a new existence...a different society, I find it amazing that my memories of yesterday are more visceral than visual—more pathetic than horrific. I spent all day yesterday NOT doing a variety of things. Most of all, I spent the day NOT crying. Somehow, the sense that my shock and grief—however profound it might have been—was too small...too removed...for me to be allowed the luxury of tears. Those tears waited patiently in line behind the half-paranoid glances around my own physical space, behind my look into the eyes of two teenage sons’ eyes as they struggled to understand their new existence, behind the stare onto my computer screen for work that would distract. The tears wait in line like passengers at terminals in airports waiting for planes that may never take off. They may curse their inconvenience, never knowing the blessing of their circumstance.

Others—my mother for example—allowed the tears to flow. Whether for better or for worse, those souls whose vessels of compassion have been emptied for their fellows must be awaking today with eyes that feel much different than mine...memories of yesterday that are less implosive, even if no less devastating.

Because I still cannot cry today, I write. Perhaps tomorrow, I will have something more useful to share.

The Day We Cried in Our Cereal

Scooby was a beautiful dog. But his appearance was certainly not typical. His father was a German police dog and his mother was a collie. Although the siblings in his litter had the hair pattern and coloration of their German police dog patronage, Scooby stood out as amusingly different. He had strawberry blonde hair, which seemed oddly out of place on a body type that otherwise resembled his father’s strong shepherd form. As he grew out of the puppy stage, the strawberry blonde hair grew long and became curly. In addition to being utterly unusual, this curly blonde hair gave Scooby a distinctly girlish look—even as his body type continued to mature toward the large guard-dog musculature. Somehow, the dichotomies in his physical characteristics were matched in his personality. Although capable of fierce aggression toward other dogs, Scooby was always gentle with people—especially children—and had a playful spirit that defied all correction and attempts at training.

Scooby had two great passions in his life: chasing the school bus; and lounging in my mother’s juniper bush on the east side of our house. There was just something about a large canister of screaming children that Scooby couldn’t resist. Scooby would come to the bus to greet my sister and me, then we would have to hold onto him tightly as the driver pulled away. In the mornings, my mother would lock him in the garage so we could board the bus without him following us around the rural section-line dirt-road square that we called “around the block”. Finally, Mom began locking Scooby in the garage even in the afternoons, to preempt the daily wrestling match. Regarding the juniper bush, it was a decadent pleasure for Scooby to lie on the puffy, round shrub, which must have seemed like a cool feather-bed after being shaded from the afternoon sun by the eave of the house. Mom had other plans for her bush than for it to be flattened like an old pillow on a daily basis, so she would shoo Scooby off each time she caught him there. She even resorted to the rolled-up newspaper now and again.

I suppose that every boy has a special connection to his dog. But I always felt as though Scooby and I were alike in some important ways that I didn’t understand. Looking back on it now, I see some of the same tense opposites in my boyhood existence that I recall in Scooby. I was a large and muscular boy, largely owing to my own German heritage. And I could be “all-boy”, as the older folks would say, just as much as my male relatives and playmates. My attraction to sports and physical work with my father seemed to attest to my male identity. But somehow my size and shape stood at odds with my red hair (not inherited from my mother or from my father)...and with my emotional sensitivities that could have me writing a poem, reading the Bible, or playing house with the girls just as easily as organizing a tackle football game. People often seemed not to know what to make of this overgrown man-boy who might be emotionally hurt by an off-handed remark. I now think that my awareness of these competing extremes in my own identity gave me a special empathy for Scooby, and a certain kind of envy for how he enacted his personality with great gusto...certainly giving no thought to the expectations of others. They say that dogs mature seven times faster than humans...

One day Mom picked up my sister and me from school, and we ran some errands before returning home. When we opened the garage to let Scooby out, he did not emerge. It didn’t take long for Mom to regretfully realize that she must have forgotten to lock him away that afternoon. The school bus had long come and gone, and Scooby was nowhere in sight. We drove “around the block” to scan for Scooby in all directions, hoping to find him chasing a rabbit in some nearby field. No Scooby. Although our negative imaginations were well-founded and thoroughly feared, we also knew how common it was in 1970s rural Oklahoma for an unleashed pet to wander off for unwitnessed adventures, only to return home either unscathed or with only a few battle-scars to show for the trip. So we hoped for a safe return for Scooby.

At breakfast the next morning, I had already asked Mom if Scooby had come home. She said he had not. While my sister and I ate cereal and milk, Mom followed Dad out to his truck as he was leaving for work. I knew that something was wrong when they both returned. Mom was crying. They took my sister and me outside to see our beloved pet. Scooby had indeed returned. He had made it back home, apparently after an unsuccessful encounter with the school bus, and had laid himself to rest in my mother’s juniper bush.

My sister and I came back to the kitchen; on a school day, we still had to finish breakfast and get ready for the day. My sister cried in full, free sobs...the tears mixing with the milk of her tasteless cereal. I struggled with my tears. They wanted to come out. But I was supposed to be the man, right? So, I strained and I mourned on the inside...and then eventually cried anyway, but not without a healthy dose of embarrassment.
It took me many more years to mature as much as Scooby...to learn to express all of my personality without doubting my legitimacy. I only wish Scooby could see me now (or rather, I wish I could see him).