MS. RICHFIELD'S HANDSA feeling for how I approach life,
is the quality for how I shall be born. --Helen Richfield When it comes to lovely hands, living hands, comprehensive old hands, there are no one like Ms. Richfield's hands: Large, bony, white, escaping once from a terrible disease when she was 2 years old; I acknowledge her hands as they are exceeding the talent of growing things. Things—such as bulbs, corns, tubers, strawberries, prunes, apples, raspberries, blackberries and grapes. In the early summer, her hands make them growing in a cool greenhouse, the frameworks of smell and the well-drained humus-rich soil, gives us the delicious welcome to eat all of them. The living pleasure, however, is the well-stocked quality her hands have that the treasure of glowing flowers. Few insight God's given to this unusual touch, leaving nothing but the pure magic popping bulbs in early or late summer or the herbs growing in moist and double sexy scent and the attractive festival feathery. "There is no magic," she says as she spots a hornworm climbing slowly up along a curled leaves of an apple tree. She takes the hornworm with a handy picker and drops it into a jar of oily water. "There is only one thing. Patience. And I've that for years." There is the hazard of highly bred cultivars that makes her hands to have such ability to form root initials and to bring the rhododendron leaves to its splendor or the sun-loving flowers or the super camellias along the fences. One can see her hands seem to test from the seeds, the roots, the bulbils, and the bulblets or feel the cormels and the tubers with extraordinary calm. All under her hands bring life—in which dangerous creatures keep out harm. Gradually her hands become two living organisms, challenging the propagation that somehow has witnessed it for so long. How long? She can't tell. Maybe it does not make any different. Very few old people want to say it happened long time ago. I must have forgotten, they would say and the mere fact that it had been so long, they must remember how they started. She takes a root of raspberry as she begins to plant it gently into a server. Ms. Richfield: "Where is the beginning? There is no such thing. The beginning has nothing to do what we are and what we do. It strikes easily from where it is. The most important is where we'll begin if that chance of getting there has been broken." However, like Ms. Richfield's hands. It was the beginning of an unsophisticated disease that has to do with the joins that in winter days squeezed her painfully and there was no joke or anything else to bring her deeply moment of life to a mold pleasure -- until this monstrous pain go away. I must say some arthritic nightmare, she says, shaking her head. In the summer of the Californian weather, on March 18, 1907, this old woman was born. She does not understand why people emphasis too much it as a ritual of the dates they were born, especially when each one of us still have a beginning until we die. Every day is a season, she told me. One that each minute it is growing into "something" more solid or it will be the end of this beginning. One day, this young woman was unable to help her mother in the field or the simple round-to-round house's duty or to plant potatoes into the ground and pick up the eggs from the chicken house. Barely perceptible, unknown what wrong with her hands, day after day, night after night, this aliveness pain with the fear that she had wasted all her prays before God, she set herself out an abyss of wondering. She also tried to look at any site that she could die beautifully, focus nothing else than what she tried so hard to act as a normal kid. That day was cool. The wind was moldering her body and mind; calm, the praised in every paradox was just a late conversation under the moonlight. Too sticky to God to perceive He was difficult to hear her; all of which end up in her soul that there was nothing wrong with her. She admitted it and the precious mixture of the camp, the pictures of sadness had housed themselves firmly within her, with her hatred or an aversion toward all the things, and she recognized once more that this was another beginning of life. "Faith created a path and this path creates this enormous expectation," she says, selecting a crown shoot. "In that expectation there was a grave of perception far better than the same attachment of death. I am on such friendly term, including this enfeebled path, and I think, the whole thing is more deep that the memory I have. I ought to say it is my beginning to see and to hold until it comes. This waiting is the most beautiful what we call 'life'". At first, as a girl, then as a grown woman, defined herself lonely after her mother died in 1944, and without gusto, she received the last destiny of summer spring. Loves came and love goes. There was no baby crying, but a notebook filled of poems from 1945 to 1946. It belongs to her sweetheart. He will tell her among “prune” and “thanks” what much the war had rotten him away and what much he had been in his thoughts away from her. The sentiments, mixing by a healthy eroticism and convertible touch made her to live through these periods of war: Here, naked, laying on this rocky bed, Watching the moon, drinking my Martini. How I wish to have you, my love! Without altering anything else than our bodies, Our lips, our way of touching repeatedly! Ah, where are you, Richfield? Summertime is here! Then all silenced. Robert Jones Simon's voice had gone. The last news was in the following spring of 1946, when a tall-red-white-uniformed man brought her all his belongs. He, too, was a lonely soul. If at all uncertain and digging up into her heart to what she could discard, that was it because she loved him. She was ready for him. She was ready to learn how to make a dinner, clear the dishes, inquires where she could find more happiness to give it to Robert Jones Simon. Most importantly, how to be a mother. What a drastic disappointment! What a waste of that reality! If that could be the suitable of a hybrid end, it was then the beginning a stake, the beginning of a "start" over again. She remembered she wrote this to her dead lover: The old & new love is gone! And like the wind along with the waves of the Ocean, As they are licking from your feet & drinking The wet of your petals, beyond all Change & Mortal, I am here to love you! Open along the blue cascades, your mind to me, Your cherry-soul, your body marked by the comforting Feeling of cupping your dream! Open the season with the night my tears! Later, like an impetuous, virgin, enthusiastic, belligerent, but a lonely woman, she took refuge in this place around the San Fernando Valley’s landscapes, where she would begin to take slowly her life back. Just as she takes, also one minute or two to see what she has done none. There is no excitement, while the ground begins to open underneath her feet. Now it is the moment to write a memoir or wait quietly the color-blindness of Death. As she is listening, in 1990 at the height of changing began to take form, seeing these moments unfold apart, rather thing trying to recreate them, a tinny bird fallen from the near tree in front of her. What a straight out of line! What is the message? Where is the apparently barrier between death and life she would face it? Carefully, however, she took the bird and cared for him. Hope, love, patience, this tinny bird overcome all of that -- a change! While her, Ms. Richfield, who has suddenly taken up this for something more hieroglyphics, it illuminates her with such intensity. Ms. Richfield: "I considered it as an unusual given. Just imagine the patients who want to die, who has this deep depression or they may find a way to denial all this as a pleasure. When your mind is wandering filled of choices, who give too much hope an unrealistic assessment of what they went through. Now here is an old woman who has 86 years old, who does not know anything but this isolated ground with the most toxic remembrance of denial, still believing that love will come one day. Not this kind of propagation. A love of belief, a love that I never give to my poor Simon or to any man because of this halfway to see myself part of this big picture." Now in her later 90s, while she is maintaining her focus as a mountebank of easy challenge, Ms. Helen Richfield does not think it a turbulent past or a supply line for a novel. She thinks it as a train of living, and what happened to her hands, and that count, for her present attitude, would never have the notion to understand it fully. It likes every day being carefully to step out of the cottage she does it just like that. She does not think what it is; she thinks in terms that her hands have given her a memory to be special. Like this letter from July 1946: Dear Simon: I read your poems and they are, well, exotic! Nevertheless, there is no necessity of giving it a reply, you say. Silly! I think about it. Life is tough, even if the suckers are apparently healthy. How much I wish to go there and show you I have more guts than you? "This letter never goes through," she says, fully intended to given this petiole a tinny cut. "The letter was returned back when he died near the capital of Italy." Suddenly there is a sensation of worry through her slow moment or acting out to win the last lap of a speed platform. An action that are sitting movements, gestures, goodwill, you must say, along with all of these fact of that in which she knows she could not move fast enough to be there. She becomes unless a symbol of time and space, where her hands refused to go ahead. If that happen, she would break a smile across her face, she would take her time over the plants as a taster, using her eyes only; but if it does not happen, her hands then become a body language in a unique absorber of accountability to select the best approach -- or simply to touch it for a good effect. Author's Notes Helen Rogers Richfield died on September 21, 2008. Age 99.
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LET'S TALKAn Article about Men & Women
"We carry the message in many small, subtle, but powerful ways. We do our own recovery work and become a living demonstration of hope, self-love, comfort, and heath. These quiet behaviors can be a powerful message"[1] What a fool I was to take you, Pretty Love, into my household, Shape my days and nights to charm you, Center all my hopes about you, Knowing well I must outlive you, If no trap or shotgun gets me. [2] Most days, women feel like a density cloud away from man, and there is no recycle to fill it with cute words or a 1-800-Flower buds to get it even. How did happen to the pretty details between woman and man? Unlike Machismo [3], which did not seem to know what was the problem or what was the reason we the man and we the woman little by little have begun to split each other. For the last five years, I found this split weird. It took me a week and three days to see that in the clubs, in the gyms, in the theaters, in the streets, in the freeways, as if the women were moving away from men's shadows, and nowhere did I find a drawn as curious as compelling with the couples, but I find women more attached to their girlfriends than men. It did not take me a minute to find out some reason why women have begun to be a solo minder in their daily routine. As a former student of California State University and a junkie-mushier in Hollywood and Santa Monica nightclubs I have known many women. And there I found this Costa Mesa resident worker and student, an aspirant soap opera, told me thing that pushed me back to the classics. Frustrated and humiliated, Beatriz Tocqueville retreated momentary from her own right. "Are men in general beasts?" she asked herself. "Yes, they are. It has not used to be when they're more sensitive and where the physical aspects never have been a problem. Now they seem too cute and too self-image." On that first moment in May as a curious bastard I was, I went to my way to get more about Woman's talk. Without leaving from 24 Fitness Foothill Ram I took more than 100 answers for this simply question: What happen between Woman & Man? A 25-year-old Californian girl Patricia H. Lewis felt that split is part of 'social tension' among man and woman competition in front of sexual independence, but the typical it is too much that the proclamation of survival where weakened mind have made it so complicate. It created, she added, an explicit adjustment in both sexes. This is obvious enough in the argumentation of Lewis, according to her it is not there anymore. "It's nothing personal really," she said with a mysterious smile across her sweating face as she was kicking the pedal of the 'climber' bicycle in front of me. "I've nothing what I have dream that I can get it. Have you read a book called, 'Polite Lie'? [4]'"No, I did not, I replied. She looked at me and shook her head. "That is the paradox about men!" It was nevertheless the risk of alienation that could incorporate in this new approach that Akira Longbirg did not want to take. A Project Specialist in a Research Firm in downtown, Los Angeles, she believed it has to do more about the choice of acting in some manner that is an indirect conflict with the personality of men and women’s discovery that could be said is the possibility that man has begun to act more selfish and he has withdrawn himself altogether from the classical relationship [5]. "Man thinks that we are a sex machine," Akira said. Her head high as she hurled with defiant look toward me sitting in a Melrose leveled-street sidewalk café, Los Angeles, California, after I took my liberty to sit at her table as I began to ask her some questions: What happen between woman & Man? "They've us as an open-legged animal for that purpose." "I am not a 'sex-seeker'[6], but the woman who isn't breeding ground because of man and man has become an “asshole”. I am a freer woman. And you must believe it I can do whatever I please." By the similar impact of the relationship, she was unable to define her points of view as a challenger toward the distance between men and women. "Don't take me wrong, George," a 31-year-old Margarita López from North Hollywood said as she begged me not to print her full name; but in the last minutes, she changed her mind. "I love men. Rather than allow them to pull me into an underground or in a full release of passion, I always let him know what the options are. With no desire to give it back, I often inhibit it as a vulnerable bird. They do not deserve us to be dynamic as before, and that is 1960 storm. There are the beginning steps to eliminating any confusion. The reason is that men have changed a bit. They have become cocky, internet seekers." What is the reason of such changing? Could be an interpretation that opposes his existence but in recognition of woman’s new role and certainly that women have for the past fifteen years broken that invisible chain that attached to them as a false commitment by men. "I don't know what it is," Nicole P. Lingerie of South Gate with such experience of twenty-tree boyfriends and an-almost proposal marriage, said with such calm. "I've tried to find a modern love of what Ma and Pa felt from the first time when they met back in 1936. But I failed, and the chief of this is that man is filled with pig's waste!" Could be then a competing plot-plus confrontation in which there was a manipulated challenge in the rearing make-up women today. In full force, Noemi Maggar, who was proud to say she had a man with whom she loved and she had planned to marry him, she recognized often that harness. "Luckily for them!" she exclaimed as she was sitting around a table at Beverly Hills Mall, waiting for one of her girlfriends to arrive. "It will be nice to have two minds. It is because man’s minds create a powerful correction to any further mistakes. Equally, I accept, however, that man cannot handle it as before and we are losing patience in front of them. They are afraid in front of us who become stronger and smarter." However, Mary Knowless, Social Workers in the City of El Segundo, disagreed. "I haven’t tasted a man for five years now. I'm become aware of man's image problem. Maybe it was back to 1950s when men started calling us 'sweetheart', dearie', and so on, and it was reference to the truly attitude what they felt. In the 1970s, everything had a drastic fall. From now on it is a track when I cannot see anyone with a good feeling what it must be. Better is to do it or not do it at all. Either way I am not into do it. Except for occasional TV Date Dying filled with foolishness. Believe me, I love cock, so what is the point?" That self-disclosure, that was how and to whom one lets himself or herself to have sex wishes, Kimberly Gayden did not see it as a sexual relationship or the real goal to let a man to take her to the bed and had sex with her. She either disagreed about Date Show. "I am a woman if I say otherwise," she said. "Not precisely the point to be dated and have a personal orgasm instead of submit myself into that thing", she said with a self-control mischief, sitting in Cal State University Library. "Well, it is. The way men have begun to behave toward us is awful. There is no escape. This play-fouled thinker believed he is a believer. However, I think he is just a dig-headed soulless, and they manage themselves under that pressure the so-called 'man' before us. Nevertheless, women are a creature of union now. Since the history has begun to call history and women, I can tell you woman has begun to see herself more that a woman than a toy, thank a lot for the women's movement and the transformation of ourselves. The sensibility, this classical alternative happens where the self-worth of being what we are, they recognize now, I hope, not all is playing by the foolish being a man." What about respect? Who would make more roles among them? That is more freedom from the traditional supermodel that the man has created. Having gained the initiative, Carolyn Artuyunyan and Antoinette Melvin-Encino looked at me with uneasy gestures. "Wait-a-minute! We got all that and more," Carolyn said finally, sitting comfortably on a chair in Venice Beach front ashore. "We got that, sugar. I got a job and I got my own place and I got my own car and I can be a self-stimulation bitch (explicit) so do not pitch me, sugar pie. They are scared to us and we do not want to mess it with that big ego. The tell-it-like-it-or-not is man generation has gone. The transformation or the guilt is a reflection that men kept with themselves." "There is not going-on fire," Antoinette said. "Even though I do not sense myself as a romantic person, and this does not mean I am feeling so faithful supporting to have a man to bring this radiated past into my soul! The value is there, but men are loaded with bird’s seed and they are beginning to lose grounds." All attention went to Akiko Kuratoma. "Man is missing the point and I must say, for the first time from those past troubles to the present era of social media." There was more, and Jean R. Guon was hoping that discord of jealousy was just a detached point of view. "There are too many books of superhero," she said as she looked at me very seriously in the level-street coffee shop in Santa Monica City across Ocean Avenue. "However, there is none about female heroine who man has required to be called unique. Only men, and those who are mourning them, they still believe the happiness will not come with physical contact but with wordiness and incomprehension." To settle the matter and to find the reason for this statement, I went myself to Santa Barbara when my last teacher of Psychology lived. I spoke with Lorraine Peoples-Miller. The 79-year-old woman, who for the safety and prosperity had received me with a smile, "It has been a long time," she said as I crossed the narrow hall and sat around at a table where she had already some Kroger crackers and milk. After an hour, the question surprised her again. "You've never given it up, haven't you, huh, George?" "No, Mrs. Peoples-Miller," I said. "And?" "Very well," she said after a long silence. "I don't have the answer as you should know... in my mind that's for the better. Yet women certainly have now a wide enough range of alternative roles to select from. No matter whether it can be accordingly or not, but she can demand for herself a 'cultured' amount freedom of mutual force." After a five-hour talking I was still not satisfied; but it was time to say goodbye. That is when I stood up, kissed her at both cheeks as I dared to take a last shot: "Who will be the winner in this battle?" "Us!" she said quickly, and smiling she added, "Whether that's the way I feel or not, you'll change or you will lose yourself under us!" Author's note The individuals who have appeared in this article are real people. Once again it is time to say how can I thank you all of you and be grateful and unique whatever you do. Blessing to my lovely Canadian French girl Abrielle, who always has encouraged me to write this with open heart, and here is what I came with. My sisters Isabel, Thaili, and my friends Frank, Carlos, Walter, etc. I am forever grateful to Scarlet Leaf Publication, the Internet magazine its staffs to have their time and their patience to read this and to publish this one and give me once again a piece of heaven for a near future. Thank you all of you! Thanks to my writer friends Gil, Hermann, Hana, Katherine Roteriosare, John Smittson, who argued with me that with the best questions I should be asking. Throwers politicized minds, indeed! Many thanks to my teachers Dr. Robert Haban and his wife Nancy during those wonderful moments of bla! Bla! bla! Many thanks to my professor Lorraine Peoples-Miller using always expression like "free man, free woman” that made me to do it right. Once again, I joyfully quote them and if there are some mistakes in their conversation, I will take all the responsibility as a bad listener as that damned recorder was always broken at right moment when I tried to copy from her. Well, let just say it is my fault. References Notes & Books [1]Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London, 1997, pp. 258-281; p338-378. [2]Millay, Edna St. Vincent, Collected Poems, edited by Norma Millay, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1949. [3]This term is most suitable to Latino men rather than American males. The archetypal of super-hombre Latino; it is the traditional Hispanic male image. The notion could be sexuality in this rush society and also this is the notion that man is unable to be emotional expressive or involve in conation of weakness [4]Mori, Kyoko, Polite Lies: On Being A Woman Caught Between Cultures, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1997. The Greatest is Love, Published by The World Home Bible League, 1967. Borysenko, Joan, A Woman's Book of Life: The Biology, Psychology, and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle, Riverhead Books. New York, 1996. Beattie, Melody, The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations for Codependents, A Hazelden Book, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1990, p.343 [5] In our interview, she told me that she believed in Betty Friedan, the American writer who wrote the book named Feminine Mystique. Also she stated from a book called "The Greatest is Love" published by The World Home Bible League, the followed lines, Act 15:24 p188: 'We understand that some believers from here have upset you and questioned your salvation, but they had no such instruction from us.' In the way she said it I recognized she was upset against men in general. However, I have never a woman with such control and power in her voice that I did not notice it. [6] This is term that Betty Friedan (1997) uses in her book, "The Feminine Mystique" that Akira has repeated it throughout our interview with a different meaning. "I did not do a Kinsey study," Friedan starts in Chapter 11 (The Sex-Seekers). But when I was on the trail of the problem that has no name, the suburban housewives I interviewed would often give me an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all." Friedan, Betty, "The Feminine Mystique", W.W.Norton & Company, Mew York/London, 1997, p258. |
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