nccotus

after 38 years I am finally ORIENTED.

I have returned to the city of Reading, PA since I was a young child. My family lived in NJ but my parents had friends with two young boys here and we visited throughout my youth.

it felt so odd to be at Wernersville State Hospital age 24 to age 26. My mother’s British friend Heather had been a psychiatrist there. I think that they always planned for me to wind up there. An answer to Uncle Graham’s incarceration at a mental institution in England.

I was a fish out of the water from the Boston area and did not want to be there and that has been the case ever since. I felt the pull. After 38 years, it is finally pulling off of me. I just connected the thread to where I have always returned here over the years, where my parents and there friend, after meeting in a small town where my brother and I were born, near Pittsburgh, reconnected when they moved here and my family had moved to a suburban town in New Jersey 2 hours away.

then, when I was 23, my family was transferred here through my father’s work and I had to relocate here because of my breakdown in Boston. Finally left for the West Coast then returned with the baby. Moved to Florida . Came back after the divorce.

I used to say that I have a “strange relationship with the State of Pennsylvania.”

I also always said to myself “You lay where you fell.” Which would be here. 38 years ago. Where I was down for the count in the ICU at the Reading Hospital and somehow lived but not really.

the pull from Boston remained and those two forces kept me in a sick thrall down all these years.

Now it’s coming undone like cats cradle.

I am ORIENTED. Now I know where I was 38 years ago.

Here to pick up the pieces and move on…

strange, how the city of “Reading” home of John Updike, should be the constant go to of a childhood reader, and fellow Harvard graduate of John Updike, and curiously met with Dr. Reading upon landing in the Tampa Bay Area in the late 90’s, my one anchor there. And how, at Wernersville State hospital here, I was led to my comeuppance through being ripped OUT of my reading through being ripped out of my reading the Tolkien Trilogy wherein I had thought myself safe. It was so strangely beautiful there the first time I went there, all but dead, a strange springtime in my soul, the most fascinating apparently imaginary beings. After I got over the first hard hit.

I all but stopped reading after that. It took a little while. It was my worst habit. I was not an educated reader. It is important to my orientation to realize this as I pick up and move on as a mother and friend to my son.