31 - 1979

1979

At the start of 1979, according to my diary that somehow managed to survive the past twenty- five years, and this of course is without the incessant self-reflective blogs and wikis and the many momentary sites such as Twitter giving each minute of our life in 144 characters or less; we are dutifully drowning daily in now that the Internet has swamped us, making our memories no longer special but something to be constantly commented on by some idiot we never met and never will who lives in some foreign hole-in-the wall with nothing in common with our sorry ass experiences. But my pencil and paper diary revealed that I was
“Living with Lynn and Tracy and working at Shepherd Pratt. Main relationships were with Beverly and Peggy. Involved with lots of astrology belonged to a group in Towson - picture-poems in DC and Harva DeGrace, Virginia, Atlantic City, New Jersey, etc. Stopping smoking off and on. Sick a lot. Smoked pot and drank a lot of alcohol – went to Atlanta, Georgia to astrological meeting – and to Detroit for a short vacation with the once-were-goddess Si Si” (a girl friend from the early 1970s New Orleans).

January 1st – overnight with Kathy Z 11th Beverly overnight
14th Beverly overnight 23rd Beverly overnight
24th had date with Lynn’s (black) friend 24th met a girl named Nancy at Hunt Valley 25th overnight with Nancy in Essex
March 11th Lois Rodden called about list of dates in astrology
14th thought about wanting to live alone 16th Beverly overnight
May 4th Beverly overnight
23rd to Atlanta, Georgia astrological meetings
25th overnight with a Janet met at a disco in
Atlanta house)

June 15th moved into Rosanne’s house (big 21st ended relationship with Peggy
end of June Randy visited
July 19th – went to Detroit and camping
with Si Si in Copper Harbor, Michigan
31st saw Shane in DC – stayed overnight at her house
August 26th moved out of Rosanne’s 30th – 31st Beverly overnight camping September 19th moved into house in
Towson on Milton Street
October 9th went with Beverly to Clifton Park – to Boston and NYC
November – printed Tree
December 25th spent Christmas with Beverly

In June, Lynn moved, and I would never see her again. I received an email from Tracy in 2002, she was living in Baltimore she still had a picture- poem I had made for her mother; she had kept it these past 45 years, always displayed.

Thu May 31 14:54:29 2001 … “I wasn't sure if this was you when I first looked at your website, but when I saw your picture I knew. It has been @ least 22 years. I've thought about you often, well practical. I have a framed picture of my mom, w/ a poem that you wrote sitting on my dresser. Has been there for @ least 14 years. No matter where I go (move) it is always there, along with pictures I have that you took of her in the woods out back from the house we lived in. I have been looking around your website for @ least 5 hours. Reading a lot of your poems. They are all wonderful, just like I remember you. Well, I just wanted to send you note to say hello and to let you know that I think of you. If you get a chance, I would love to hear from you. You can e-mail me @ the above address (home) or @ work. Tracy”

I moved out of the small house and into the large house on the property where we lived. The owner of the property, Rosanna, was in her forties and lived with her three children. Her husband had been a psychiatrist. He had fallen face down onto his desk of a heart attack in front of a patient. The patient was a teenager who said that when he grew up he wanted to be a psychiatrist just like the good doctor who gasped and died then and there. I wonder if in hindsight the teenager wished he had said something else or perhaps he has lived his life blaming himself for the doctor’s death. Life is weird. Nevertheless, Rosanna inherited the property with two houses and three kids. When Lynn moved I was planning to move back to downtown Baltimore but Rosanna invited me to live in her house. I would make breakfast and dinner for us all in place of
paying rent. The house was so large that I had my own section with a bedroom, bath and small lounge. The house had three large living rooms, lounges, or parlours; I was never quite sure what they were.
Rosanna would not allow Beverly to sleep overnight; something about morals and her children. I broke up with Peggy as she could not stay with me, I no longer had the time to go to Virginia, and we had already broken up months earlier because I would not move out of the house with Lynn. However, we had kissed and made up and broke up and made up again. Now that I had moved out I did not have an excuse not to live with her, except for my job, and I could have gotten a similar job in Virginia. Fairfax is where she lived. I could have gone to university near her house to continue my nursing so I could not use that for an excuse. I have always felt bad about making someone feel bad because

with Shane – Lutherville, Maryland I did not want to be with them, probably
from being adopted, so I could not tell her I had
another girl friend or two and that I may have been ‘more’ in love with one or two of them than I was with her. So, in my thinking the easiest thing to do was to tell her I no longer could be with her because of my living situation and the distance we lived apart. It was one of those classic, ‘it is not you it is me’ tales for breaking up forever and ever.
I never felt comfortable at Rosanna’s home. The kids did not mind me being there but I felt out of place. I did not like being placed in the servant class. A heavyset black woman did the house cleaning and washing and ironing. I was just another servant. Rosanna had a lovely bar, with dozens of bottles of liquor and I would take generous nips from time to time. She let me know a week after I was there that she measured her bottles to see if anything was missing and I almost got sent on my way for that. After a couple of months, I had enough of Rosanna’s moral crap and Beverly spent a night with me. The next day Rosanna told me to leave. I moved into a house with a female and a male I worked with. It would be the house that would change my life, again – or perhaps it was where I lived when events occurred that changed my life. I think we, as humans, try to transfer our living into inanimate objects. For example, Lynn had a name for her car, ‘Oscar’ and she would talk to her car as if it was a person. I have spoken with an inanimate object a few times in my life, from houses to cars to ‘you stupid fucking computer…’. Why do we do that?

September 2021. Currently, our truck here in Adelaide is ‘Billy’ our caravan is ‘Holiday’, our new MG yellow car is ‘Jellybean’, our bikes are ‘Jack’ and ‘Jill’ because they are e-bikes which get us up the hills here. We always talk to them. For example, ‘Billy’ is happy today because she is not dragging ‘Holiday’ around. Holiday has been overweight since our last three-month trip up to Queensland.
Sometime toward the end of 1979, another life change was about to take place for me that became in certain terms permanent. What is the defining moment that will govern the next large segment of one’s life? I take it for granted that we cannot foresee what each activity we do will result in
as I have been saying throughout this story. Anything can happen at any time that will change the course of our history. Then there are the thoughts that pass through our mind that will change everything for us. Why will passing thoughts suddenly so seemingly out of the blue change everything?

I am sure there was the first moment when I questioned my parent’s belief structure and that life ended in either spending eternity in heaven or hell.
There are also the moments when suddenly we feel the urge to do something and nothing can stop us.
I had been attending astrological meetings in Towson for a couple of years. We would meet once a week and discuss some aspect of astrology. I think there were less than a dozen of us in the group.
When we received information about an international astrological convention in New Zealand, followed by a weeklong conference in Australia, I felt an overwhelming urge to go. There were several people going from Baltimore, which made the trip affordable because of a group discount fare, at least for those who could afford it to begin with.

I was still playing the role of live-in house care person and working nights at Shepherd Pratt. This was before moving out of Rosanne’s house. I said no at first even though I was experiencing just another life altering tug deep within me. I just did not have any desire to go. I was working fulltime and knew I could not get the time off and furthermore I had less than one hundred dollars in the bank.

However, there was a moment during the following week that suddenly I wanted to go. The desire to go welled up within me to the point that I could think of nothing else but going to this astrological conference. The downside was that I did not have the money to go and no matter how much I did a reality check that there was no way I could find the money to go I still had this knowing that I had to go to this astrological conference.

Beverly, suggested that I apply for a credit card. I had credit cards before but I do not recall when or why I did not have any at the time.

Nevertheless, I put in applications for two hoping one of them would come through. How I would pay off the trip even if I got one bothered me for a couple of moments but I philosophized that if I were to go then somehow I would receive the money.
‘Faith’, ‘and if’’, are strange ways to act-out a life but we do it all so often we forget that we make deals with whomever or whatever gives us what we have. Some people pray and if they get what they ask for they say it was God’s will. I usually do what most people do and say if something is supposed to happen then it will – but not always. I have a lifelong history of disagreeing with what I am given or the direction I seem to be hurling in that I have come to lose all faith in the notion that anything happens for a reason but then something happens and the reason seems apparent.

What I suspect is happening however is that we make up the reason after the fact. Perhaps there is no prior reason for anything and we are just making it up as we go – there is no script or master plan. If I had not received two credit cards, each with a three-thousand-dollar credit limit and the trip cost close to all of that then I would not have gone and the rest of my life would have turned out incredibly different. For example, I would not be writing this little story, ‘Leaving Australia’. I assumed that the fact that I was able to get myself $6000 in debt with one trip was a sign from the cosmos that I was to go fly away83F. Logic is a faulty thing for sure. A logical person would not say because they had been given a line of credit that they were supposed to go out and spend it on something like an astrological trip overseas.

I have made this trip from the States to Australia fifteen times now since this first trip; New York to Adelaide. It has become such a causal trip that my wife is going there for a week to visit her family in a few weeks. And because we have done this trip so often she is able to fly on ‘flyby points’. Only 45,000 United Airlines Points – and we have enough points remaining to do it a couple of more times.
I received my two weeks off from my job and told the person I was living with that I was going to Australia. I am not sure what happened with her but before the year was over, I had moved out and moved in with two people I worked with. I remember having Christmas in my new home, sharing it with Beverly and the two others, a female and a male that I lived with. For whatever reason I had the largest bedroom and my own bathroom. The other two had smaller rooms and shared a bath. I think it was a good living arrangement but I do not remember too much about the home in Towson except for the ‘big event’ yet to happen. I spent Christmas 1979 with Beverly.

Christmas 1979 Towson, Maryland with

33. Beverly
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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.