Home repair and individual healing

Saturday morning. I should be headed to Home Depot instead I choose to sit here to write in this neglected blog. I would feel guilty if allowed myself to feel such things.

I am laying tile down-after replacing the water damaged floor in one of my bathrooms. Not a fun job!

Everyone is anxiously awaiting my progress so that this bathroom can be put back into use.

I wonder how people survived with only one bathroom in the home?

When I grew up I did not know how to properly use a hammer. I grew up without a dad to teach me to use tools. We always rented, so we never had home repairs to perform. I knew how to paint, but that was my extent of my knowledge of home improvement.

There is a great amount of pride that I feel by having taught myself how to repair things around the home. Little by little, tool by tool I learned. Now even big jobs do not intimidate me.

Home repair. It is part of owning a home. We are like homes in the sense that we need a repair every now and then. Like home repair, personal repair requires skilled guidance, knowledge, and the proper tools. It helps when one has no fear of the task at hand. Big jobs should not intimidate us. We must trust the process.

One should never stop growing. Life is about progress. One could always progress in life. No matter what damage one has suffered as a child, there comes a time in life when they cannot explain away the deficits of their life with the abuses of their childhood. There comes a time in life when we must become responsible for our actions and learn to accept the consequences for our actions.

This is not to say that the scars of the damage will not persist in one's life. There could always be evidence in one's behavior that is the result of traumatic experiences of one's childhood. One does not have to live life with old, open self-debilitating wounds. Life can be a healing process if we choose not to be intimidated by the process of healing and the paradoxical pain that comes with healing.

Back in the late 70s, I hit a man in the face with the side of a hammer because he refused to give me a dollar. I used to consider that person who used a hammer as a weapon as a completely different, separate person from who I presently am today. It is easy to remove our horrors from our reality. I am very different from that person.

Writing in this obscure blog has helped me open up and consolidate those realities with my present realities of today. Writing in this blog has helped me to absolve my guilt and assured me that I was not a monster but a badly damaged child reacting normally to a severely damaged existence.

I am the same person. I learned, little by little, tool by tool, how to repair myself.

I do need to go to Home Depot. It is good to repair things as they need repairing. It is a good rule to follow throughout life.

A poem for no one

I saw you sitting next to me
at my empty table
in the coffee house
the ghost of lovers' past

the sky
has lost your smile
and the sun
spins cold shadows
on my footsteps.

yet, I saw you
as I sat alone
in the coffee house.

I felt your fading warmth
or maybe I just thought I did
as I embraced
[only in my mind]
the fading traces
of the new colors
of your clothes
as they now dance
in newer circles
pouring different dreams.

Peter Coyotl

July 7, 2009

St. Vitus in the background. Early 70s.

1972 Peter Cooper UGC Yearbook

I graduated from Peter Cooper Upper Grade Center in 1970. My brother graduated in 1973. Yet, my mother had a yearbook for the graduating class of 1972. I recently found it in her belongings. It is decaying quickly, so I decided to scan it to save it for history's sake. Life being as surprising as it is; I intersected with a woman via the cyber world who graduated from this class. She asked if I could scan two pages for her.

Since I was planning on scanning it to save it, I decided to also post it in the hopes that others from this class who no longer have their 8th grade yearbook could look at it once again.Here is one page. I will have the rest up soon. Click on the photo and open it with your photo software.