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March 8, 2010, 6:05 PM

Why So Many Superheroes Are Drawn to New York

By PETER GUTIERREZ

Courtesy of DC Comics

Cover of “New York World’s Fair Comics,” 1939-40. Slide Show

There’s a cool-sounding panel in Midtown Tuesday evening on New York City as character, inspiration and player in the universe of superhero comics. It’s called “New York, the Super-City.” We asked the moderator, Peter Gutiérrez, to pick a few images and say a few words.

Would there be superheroes without skyscrapers? For that matter, would superheroes as we know them even exist without New York?

The 20th-century big city, with its soaring spires, shadowy tunnels, huge crowds and towering suspension bridges, was a perfect incubator and backdrop for a new kind of archetypal adventurer who combined traits of the the warrior, demigod, frontiersman and rationalist crime fighter. What New Yorkers might take for granted, though, is the extent to which their particular hometown has been instrumental in creating the comic book superhero.

SUPERHEROES OF NEW YORK

A look back at the superheroes who have taken the city in a single bound.

• Slide Show

Even beyond its physical architecture, New York City provided a perfect setting for superheroic exploits. As a financial center, its concentration of wealth could act as a powerful magnet for bigger-than-life criminals. As a global city, it was ripe for international intrigue. And as a fashion mecca and a famously tolerant place, it established a social environment in which saviors of humankind dressed in flamboyant homemade costumes could go about their business.

Yet New York’s central role in the superhero universe owes at least as much to its concentration of major comic book publishers. DC Comics and its forerunners, the publishers of Superman, were based here, which may help explain how New York insinuated itself into comics that ostensibly had a more generic “American” feel.

Gotham City, of course, was always a thinly veiled version of New York. So was Central City, stomping grounds of The Spirit, a non-superpowered but influential character created by a native Brooklynite, Will Eisner. Indeed, in their earliest appearances, both Batman (1939) and The Spirit (1940) were set in New York. Later, the locations were fictionalized to court a wider audience, but when the Caped Crusader or Denny Colt scrambled over rooftops or stalked shadowy alleyways, it was with a decidedly New York flair, romantic and hard-boiled at the same time.

In the Marvel comics of the ’60s, the city (and its environs) became a kind of nonstop action fest, with the Fantastic Four headquartered in Midtown, Spider-Man hailing from Queens, and Tony Stark (of Iron Man fame) launching missiles from Long Island.

Really, though, it’s those downtown canyons and dizzying heights that are inseparable from the concept of a superhero. In fact, one might claim that the superhero has altered the relationship to urban space itself — at least among comic book fans. After all, don’t skyscrapers now reside differently in our imaginations thanks to all those the awe-inspiring human figures that swing and leap from them without fear?

“New York, the Super-City”: panel discussion with Danny Fingeroth, Gene Kanenberg Jr., Frank Tieri, Billy Tucci and Peter Gutiérrez. Tuesday, 6:30 p.m., New York Center for Independent Publishing, 20 West 44th Street. Sponsored by GraphicNovelReporter.Com, New York Comic Con, and Midtown Comics. Tickets $15, $10 for members, $5 for students. For more information: contact@nycip.org or (212) 764-7021.

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig Gotham City, New York, superheroes

Kurt Hahn High School, East Flatbush, Brooklyn

This morning about 24 students came, including a few dragooned up from the cafeteria by the Dean, Mr. Mendelson whose enthusiasm and love for the students is outstanding and inspirational. We began meditating at just after 8 am to allow the latercomers time to settle, and there were three new students today, including Angie, who’d just arrived in the USA from the Dominican Republic who barely speaks a word of English but who was welcomed by all and helped by three students who speak some Spanish.

We began by going around the circle and saying how long we’ve been practicing Sahaja Meditation, it varied from 20 years to 11 months, to 3 months, to a couple of weeks.  Joan Burress led the meditation and we meditated for about 10 minutes.

Afterwards, Mr Mendelson asked each of us how we felt. He said he had a million things on his mind right now, and after the meditation he felt completely focussed. People said things like relaxed, calm, focussed – and the three new people all experienced something calming and pleasant. Two people said it hadn’t worked for them.

Breakfast of oats, raisins, bananas, cinnamon and tea followed, provided as always by the inestimable Ms Fishstrom.

Here’s what one of the students said during breakfast.

http://is.gd/9KYz8

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig focus, higher grades, Sahaja Meditation

In the late 1980’s, I was living in London, stressed, depressed and in need of a break. I had always wanted to visit Iona, the island off the coast of Scotland where Irish Christian monks lived in the 6^th Century, notably St. Columbus, one of those who first brought Christianity to Britain.

When I arrived at Heathrow airport, on a whim, instead of taking the shuttle to Glasgow, and on from there to Iona, without any solid reason for doing so, I decided to fly to Belfast instead and to make my way up the Antrim Coast and to take a boat over to Rathlin Island. Rathlin is where Robert the Bruce allegedly hid after his army was defeated by the English and a story is told of how he took refuge in a cave and watched a spider try many times build a web. It kept failing but in the end it was successful. Inspired by this, he again raised an army and this time was victorious over the English. The story apparently has no foundation in truth but that of course takes nothing from its power.

Back then, because of the Troubles, there was a security zone around Belfast airport and I had to take a taxi from the airport to near the town of Larne and from there I hitchhiked and walked my way up the beautiful Antrim Coast road. Msy is a special time of year and new life, vitality and resurgence were in the air. One night I stopped at the town of Cushendun and checked into the local Youth Hostel. The place was empty apart from an Englishman and his wife who ran the place, and a lone German postman who was cycling up the coast. That night, in a pub in the town, a chance conversation with a local man resulted in him telling me that there was ‘a holy mountain’ nearby. He explained that it was holy in pre-Christian Ireland and went on to say that it was called Tievebulliagh. On it there was a ‘Neolithic axe factory’, an outcrop of blue granite and if one looked in the scree, (the countless small stones that littered the mountain face), one can find broken shards of axeheads discarded back in the Stone Age

He told me too that there was a grave nearby that of Oisin, a 6^th Century warrior/poet/king who famously, by the way the Christians subsequently told it, refused before St. Patrick, to convert to Christianity, because he said he had been to the land of Tir na Nog, the land of the ever young. The land of the ever young is the present, the here and now, and only already evolved souls can be there for long. Hence Christianity would have had little appeal or attraction for him.

I found the grave the next morning, some way out of the town and in farmland, and there was a heavy sea mist, with visibility down to about 40 meters. However, beside the grave was a plaque that said that whereas local legend said it was the grave of Oisin, carbon dating proved that the grave was  some 4500 years old so whoever was buried there was definitely not him.

I walked past the grave through heavy mire and mud and began my ascent of the mountain. The atmosphere was eerie with the watery mist hanging suspended in the air. I passed cattle on the lower slopes and as I commenced the climb, it was relatively easy going but I wasn’t very fit and was soon out of breath. I found the scree and much as I searched, I picked up no stone that looked like it had been fashioned by human hand.

At this point the going became difficult for as I climbed up the scree, I would slide back to almost where I’d started from. This problem was solved by walking up at an angle, criss-crossing my way up in the manner I’d seen skiers move up a slope.

As I reached the summit, something strange and wonderful happened. I was quite out of breath, bent double with the effort and as I lifted my head, in that instant, the mist evaporated (which I’d read that sea mists do). The fact that I knew it could and did happen did nothing to take away the magic of what ensued. Suddenly the sky was clear, cloudless and filled with sunshine. Looking across the sea I could see the low gray hills of south-west Scotland in the far distance and up the coast, headlands receding, one after another, progressively turning from purple to gray.

I was immediately transported to the present and was in a state of pure bliss where I was totally at one with all around, earth, sea and sky. I’d read of this state, but never before remotely experienced it and here it was, joyful and uplifting, life changing even. A big black bird kept swooping in low over my head which I thought meant that most likely it had a nest with some young nearby and it was trying to scare me off.

I had no sense of time and had no desire to leave the mountaintop.

Eventually, as I started my descent, I came down another way following a small stream passing trees bursting in newly emerging leaves, and hedgerows full of wild flowers of great profusion and vigor. It occurred to me that since those Neolithic times, not too many humans had gone where I had, maybe a few thousand at most. This was never a populated area and even for those who were here, unless they knew of the special nature of Tievebulliagh there was no great reason for climbing it. That night I wrote an account of what had happened to me on my return to the Youth Hostel.

It had been a truly remarkable experience, a connection beyond my wildest dreams and the first time I had ever experienced anything that could be even vaguely regarded as spiritual.

Some eight years later, I took my new wife and son to the place. To my astonishment, what I had written down that very same day and experienced could not possibly have happened as I described it. In the pleasant spring sunshine, there was no mountain remotely near the grave and a map hastily consulted, revealed that Tievebulliagh was some 8 kms away, a distance I certainly never walked.

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig magic mountain, out of world experiences, Tievebulliagh

When I was a young guy, in Ireland and growing up in London, I always like Malcolm X. He was bright, he was feisty, he stood up to whitey and the nonsense that racism foisted on him. I liked that he understood that the secret of living a balanced life is inside us, and that, in the end, he realized that he’d taken the wrong path in signing up with the Nation of Islam and it’s false guru, the now shamed and discredited Elija Muhammed. It takes a really brave man to say publicly “I was wrong” and Malcolm was certainly that.

How many of us have taken the wrong path in our lives? And how many of us have recovered from it?

“There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain—and we will smile. Many will say turn away—away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man—and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist—who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.”

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, God, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Understanding, human brain Malcolm X

By Dan Agin, Huffington Post

Once upon a time, the only books that existed were books copied by hand by monks and scribes and sold to the very rich for the equivalent of $5000 or $6000 a book. Then along came the printing press, and all the monks and scribes had to find another way to earn their bread.

Once upon a time the only books that existed were books on paper made by printing presses and sold to the rich and not so rich and not rich at all for enough money to make publishing houses worth hundreds of millions of dollars, enough money to pay high salaries to publishing executives. Then along came the digital book, and many thousands of people in and around publishing had to find another way to earn their bread.

The subtext of the story is the impact of technology on culture and commerce, and the unfailing collapse of any industry that allows itself to be blinded by sloth, short term greed, and general mediocrity of attitudes.

Anyone with an imagination about the future of technology and commerce knows that the printed book on paper is already on its way to obsolescence. The wrangling and beefing and whining about prices and protecting demand for printed books by publishing executives is both amusing and tragic.

It’s tragic because when an industry dies because of corporate blindness, people do get hurt. When the automobile put the horse and carriage trade out of business, blacksmiths and carriage makers became irrelevant overnight. But before that happened people were up to their eyeballs in media baloney that the automobile was only a fad.

Some fad.

The same will happen to the entire printed-book industry, editors, publishers, printers, salesmen, publicists, marketeers, whatever. They will be gone or transformed — to be remembered in anecdotes about the old days.

Which brings us to the Amazon Kindle. Although most people don’t know it, you don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books. The current high price of the Kindle device is irrelevant. Amazon is now offering free software for download to any PC, the software allowing Kindle books to be downloaded in seconds to be read at once. Anyone with a laptop that runs Windows can read Kindle books. There are now 400,000 Kindle titles available, everything from high and low class lesbian erotica (Spectrum Diva Books) and erotic romances (Harlequin Blaze) to high and low class Supreme Court decisions and books about string theory in cosmology. In short, nearly everything is now available — and soon it will ALL be available in digital format.

My personal view is that apart from the ease of access to books, the most important feature of Kindle books is that the type size can be adjusted to anything you like at the click of a button. No more eye strain. No more visits to a bookstore that may be miles from your house. No more waiting for printed books in the mail. No more crowding your living space with thousands of books that you can’t throw out because they are part of your life and represent what you once were and what you are now. The Kindle (or your computer hosting Kindle books) can hold thousands of books in no more space than that occupied by a single school notebook.

Anyone who believes this new technology is going away is dreaming. Anyone who believes the print publishing industry has a chance to survive in its present form is dreaming. It’s now possible for any small publisher to have free and almost immediate access to the largest bookstore in the world — Amazon. In a few days, a small publisher can have its entire backlist in Kindle format available at Amazon to readers. Salesmen are bypassed, distributors are bypassed, bookstore buyers are bypassed. What will not change much is marketing and promotion — new books will still need to be brought to the attention of the public. But the new books will be Kindle or Kindle-like digital books.

The big print publishers need to understand the reality of the 21st century: either you roll with new technology or you get rolled over by it. That’s the lesson of the history of technology in commerce.

Requiescant in pace, big print publishing. The run is finished.

admin Awareness, Knowledge, Truth, Understanding, human brain death of the book, Kindle

J.D. Salinger said in 1974, “I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

When I first came to the USA having been marketing director of a successful publishing house in the UK, I attended a conference with the sales people at St. Martin’s Press and presented my first list of books to them. Their sales director seized on one of the novels I’d presented and told me that in order to sell it to Barnes and Noble, Borders and the like, the 20% of the American book trade that account of 80% of the business, given that there are so many books to present and each title gets only 30 seconds of the attention of these important buyers, it was necessary to say something along the lines of “This novel is a cross between The Great Gatsby and Breakfast at Tiffanys”.

Such stupidity, of course, I’d come across before. I’d been asked by similarly small-brained people in the UK questions like this before, e.g. “Which market is this book aimed at?”

I’d always been most uncomfortable with questions like that, and indeed, always shied away from them. As a marketing director, I’d always tried to think of myself as a reader and that basic discipline, which never left me, over the years has served me in good stead. If I look at the books on my own bookshelf, by this kind of thinking, which market, or markets am I in? And in the sense that it’s any help to someone trying to make books appeal to the likes of me, is it of any relevance?

One of the unexpected, unanticipated joys of fatherhood was in re-discovering the pleasure of reading children’s books. For example, on my shelf, one might find a book aimed at 7th graders, one for pre-nursery kids (I like the artwork and the innocence of the story), an early Spenser novel by Robert B Parker, some P.G. Wodehouse and the complete works of William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Carl Gustav Jung and James Joyce. How would one market to someone like that, someone who would read whatever takes his fancy, someone who is willing to buy a book on spec, and either be delighted and surprised that he liked it, or, that he didn’t, and that not liking it was OK too?

Clearly, there are areas in which writing for a market might make sense. For example, if one looks at Cookery, as a generic area of publishing, or book selling, a good bookstore would have a range of titles. There will be books which are introductory books on the subject, books to get a reader started on cooking and food, for obviously, in a subject like this, if the ingredients are substandard, the end result will be too. Then there will be books within sub-categories, such as generic cookery, Chinese, Indian, American, Italian etc etc, cooking for special diets, books about food and eating some of which were nicknames ‘scholars cookbooks’ in the trade. The best-selling books in this category are probably the introductory books to cooking, and this will be reinforced by going into somewhere like Costco and noting that they’ll have a couple of basic, all-color-all you need to know about cooking books. So if your desire is to make a lot of money and you want to write a cookery book, this is probably the best place to start for it will have more appeal than Cooking for Serbo-Croats.

Books are different to other products in certain key ways. If you are in the business of producing beer, for example, and you produce the worst beer in the history of beer making, it may not sell at the $4 price you first envisioned. But if you keep on reducing the price, at a certain point, you’ll be able to sell it, for notwithstanding such matters as flavor and how quickly you’ll get a massive headache from drinking it, there will be a price at which you can sell all you have. Books aren’t like that and if you come across Build Your Own Nuclear Reactor At Home, unless you are one of a very few, even if it’s on sale at 5 cents a copy, most people won’t buy it.

Some time ago, the venerable publishing company of Faber and Faber hired an idiot for a marketing director and among the gimmicks he thought up to sell books was a helicopter tour of the UK with their best poets on board. Seamus Heaney, later a Nobel Laureate and in this writer’s view, the greatest living poet in the English language, wouldn’t go. He said something along the lines of “I’d be in danger of gaining a market and losing my readers”.

Seamus speaks of his approach to creativity as trying to come at the truth from traces of it that are inside rather than from evidence gained methodically from outside, following a sixth sense, proceeding on the off chance, testing the ground by throwing a shape…. He talks of impulse discovering direction, potential discovering structure and chance becoming design - a movement I depend on, the only process I trust.

A publishing cliché says there are three types of writers, typists, who put words on a page, storytellers and real writers.

So write for markets if you must, but as Salinger said, the only question worth asking of a writer is, “Were most of your stars out?”

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig process, writing

I rang the bell at 2.40 pm Sunday. No reply. I waited a couple of minutes and rang again. Still no reply. I phoned Joseph’s cell phone and a sleepy voice said he’d had a late night. We’d agreed I’d show at 2.30 pm. “So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Can you wait ten minutes?”

“Sure.”

The late November New York sun warmed me as I stood outside the apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue. A young Afro American woman approached the door laden down with clean laundry, pushed her apartment buzzer and was admitted. The buzzer rang again and I went in. I made my way to 3E and Joseph was standing outside the door in welcome.

The acrid, stench of urea, of cat urine greeted me as I stepped over the threshold into the overheated apartment. There was a long corridor, with papers on the floor, leading to Joseph’s black walled bedroom.  Half a dozen guitars and a few pentangles adorned the walls and on the floor, a couple of Marshall practice amps and a Peavey were stacked  beside a large Emerson monitor. There were several cheap bases, including a Fender Squier P bass and a large makeshift drum kit.

I walked in, put my coat and sweater on the bed and unzipped my guitar.

Joseph had said he had two Les Paul Specials, they turned out to be Epiphones, but hey, I’m no guitar snob which was just as well for when he started playing, it was immediately clear he was miles better than me. He played through a special metal pedal and had a fast technique even though he’s self taught, learned most of what he knows through youtube and has only been playing 18 months.

He was soon joined by two other guys, a bass player and a drummer. What amazes me is that in Europe many young white guys like black american music. Here, young Hispanic or Afro American guys like heavy metal! The other week I was in a school in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and a young woman said, when I told her I was Irish, “How exotic”. She looked dumbfounded when I told her that living in Ireland, Brooklyn sounded exotic to me. Black American music these days is, I suppose, gangsta rap. Perhaps some young American black people prefer heavy metal to that? These young guys neither smoke nor drink, they are upstanding and kind, so it’s understandable that the ethics of the prevalent music here wouldn’t appeal to them.

Anyway, we jammed for a couple of hours. The bass player was really good, and he drummed a little and played some mean lead guitar, but his bass riffs and technique were excellent. The drummer was more enthusiastic than good, and Joseph, after 18 months playing could hold his own. The weak link was me, and they didn’t ask me back. I could just about play pentatonic riffs, didn’t know any of their numbers, which hardly mattered because I could pick up the chords quite easily, it was all in Am or Dm. But I couldn’t really add to anything they were doing, except playing a few rhythmic riffs.

However, I really enjoyed it and I take my hat off to them for being so friendly and for being not remotely unkind.

I even learned something too, and this morning, as I practiced, I was noticeably more adventurous in what I was attempting and actually brought it off too.

ydigydig Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Understanding, human brain, ydig

Dr. Vinay Goyal is an MBBS,DRM,DNB (Intensivist and Thyroid specialist) having clinical experience of over 20 years. He has worked in institutions like Hinduja Hospital , Bombay Hospital , Saifee Hospital , Tata Memorial etc. Presently, he is heading our Nuclear Medicine Department and Thyroid clinic at Riddhivinayak Cardiac and Critical Centre, Malad (W).

The following message given by him, I feel makes a lot of sense and is important for all to know

The only portals of entry are the nostrils and mouth/throat. In a global epidemic of this nature, it’s almost impossible to avoid coming into contact with H1N1 in spite of all precautions. Contact with H1N1 is not so much of a problem as proliferation is.

While you are still healthy and not showing any symptoms of H1N1 infection, in order to prevent proliferation, aggravation of symptoms and development of secondary infections, some very simple steps, not fully highlighted in most official communications, can be practiced (instead of focusing on how to stock N95 or Tamiflu):

1. Frequent hand-washing (well highlighted in all official communications).

2. “Hands-off-the-face” approach. Resist all temptations to touch any part of face (unless you want to eat, bathe or slap).

3. Gargle twice a day with warm salt water (use Listerine if you don’t trust salt)… H1N1 takes 2-3 days after initial infection in the throat/nasal cavity to proliferate and show characteristic symptoms. Simple gargling prevents proliferation. In a way, gargling with salt water has the same effect on a healthy individual that Tamiflu has on an infected one. Don’t underestimate this simple, inexpensive and powerful preventative method.

4. Similar to 3 above, clean your nostrils at least once every day with warm salt water.. Not everybody may be good at Jala Neti or Sutra Neti (very good Yoga asanas to clean nasal cavities), but blowing the nose hard once a day and swabbing both nostrils with cotton buds dipped in warm salt water is very effective in bringing down viral population. Neti pots and sinus rinse kits are available at the drug store and relatively inexpensive….under $15.

5. *Boost your natural immunity with foods that are rich in Vitamin C (Amla and other citrus fruits). If you have to supplement with Vitamin C tablets, make sure that it also has Zinc to boost absorption.

6. Drink as much of warm liquids (tea, coffee, etc) as you can. Drinking warm liquids has the same effect as gargling, but in the reverse direction. They wash off proliferating viruses from the throat into the stomach where they cannot survive, proliferate or do any harm.

admin Awareness, Knowledge, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig avoid Flu, Swine flu

Enjoy this beautiful work of art by Slava Reibin, a master from the Samara region of Russia. He digs the clay from three Ganesha swaymbhus in the Zhuiguli mountains and the semi precious stones at the base of the statue are from the same area.

The artist gave the statue gratis to the Australian yuva skaktis and it was presented as a gift to Shri Mataji on the occasion of the Shri Ganesha puja held at Palyanna in late 2009.

For those readers who can feel the divine cool breeze, the statue emanates that energy aplenty.

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig Russian artist, Sahaja Yoga Festival, Shri Ganesha

They were four or five inches wide, over a foot long and made of a reddish brown leather. One of the tawse was serrated, the slits in the leather forming strands about nine inches long. Tawse, according to my Oxford American dictionary, were formerly used for punishing children in schools, except in my case. I never saw them in any school I attended, my father had them made in the shipyard where he worked and he brought them home to use on me, or maybe to scare me when I was about four of five.

I never saw him much for the first years of my life. As he put it himself, he worked all the hours God sent for the only time there is full employment under the capitalist system is when there’s a war on. Submarines would come into Belfast from the Atlantic fleet having been pounded and depth-charged by German warships and with men working night and day, they’d be refitted and back at sea within forty eight hours.

In my early years I was so unused to seeing my father that when I did see him, I cried. I was terrified of him. Later, when the tawse appeared, the terror reached new levels. He hung them on a nail he’d knocked into the wall beside the fireplace, so, as he said, they’d be in easy reach for him and my mother. The coal fire in our living room fire was the only source of heat and even the hot water for the house was heated by a boiler at the back of the fire. The fireplace in houses like ours was the focal point of the house, and my attention was never far from the tawse.

I couldn’t articulate much of what I felt at the time but there was an acute sense of betrayal, of injustice, and deep inside me I  knew something was very wrong – how could my father love me, his only child, if he needed to present me with the terror of this instrument in full view of everyone who came into the house? I can’t remember getting hit my them, but that seemed neither here nor there, and their presence slowly turned my fear to aversion, then to hate. My father was popular and well-respected, outside in the street people called him Mr. Wherry, whereas they mostly called each other by their first names. He was always joking with the young guys, a marked contrast to how he treated me.

One day the tawse disappeared. My father searched the house, looked in every cranny and cupboard, he raked through the ashes in the grate to see if I’d thrown them in the fire. There was no trace of them in the grate or anywhere else in the house. The disappearance of the tawse was a subject of conversation and speculation for years afterwards and the mystery of what I’d done with them was never solved. Indeed, It’s only now in writing of this that the truth of what happened to them is plain. If it wasn’t me who took them, it can only have been my mother. She must have gotten rid of them and too subtle to admit it to my father.

Many years later and long after I’d left home at 17 for good, I learned that my aunts and uncles used to tell my father that he was far too hard on me and furthermore, I wasn’t the sort of kid who was going to take it for any longer than I had to. I never realized at the time what a terrible blow it was to my mother when I went to live in England just weeks before my 18th birthday, but when she was dying and I told her I loved her, she said through her pain, “You couldn’t wait to leave me.” There was no denying the truth of this, and I wanted to ask her whose fault she thought that was, but for once in my life I kept my mouth shut and said nothing.

admin Awareness, Knowledge, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig Beating children, Domestic violence