Shards of memory - an aging experience

Monday - January 18, 2025 9:30 a.m. Frozen snow on the ground, four paintings waiting to be framed.

One of the odd little phenomena of my current aging process is the flash up of fragrments of memory, unbidden and seemingly out of nowhere. This one came to me this morning.

A psot divorce anecdote

About 45 years ago when I was married, my ex-husband Mike and I would visit his parents in New Port Richie, Florida. There was a beach (Dunedin?) that was littered with an astonishing array of different kinds of seashells. Having only ever experiened the seashell varieties of Ocean City, New Jersey, clam shells, this was a revelation to me. I collected those shells like a gold miner collecting nuggest from a river. At my favorite antique store on Haddon Avenue in Collingswood, I bought an antique wooden type case (very popular in the 1970s craft movement) and cut little squares of green felt to line the small square compartments. I identified each of the shells I had collected, plus some that I bought, and put them in the compartments then I bought a sheet of plenxiglass at the hardware store for a cover, and put eye hooks and wire in the back for hanging.

I have always had an interest in certain aspects of science, archaeology, evolution (I read Darwin's Voyage on the Beagle), animal life and the history of classification, genetics, all sorts of things. I had a great full year science course at Trenton State extension college in the 1970's "History and Foundations in Science." >p/> When I left my marriage, I left a lot of my things behind. I took nothing from the walls, only my art supplies and my clothes and a few necessary furnishings. I left the seashell collectin on the wall. I never thought about any of it.

About 15 years later, late 1990's, my former mother-in-law phoned me and said she and her husband were moving from my old marriage house which they had moved into when my ex moved to Colorado and they came home from Florida. They were going into assisted living. She asked if I wanted my seashell collection.

My daughter (not from my marriage, but from a relationship after my divorce) was about 10 and just an age to appreciate something like that so I said that I would like to have it.

I want to interject here that while married, I had paid half of our bills and mortgage, at a struggle since I didn't make much money in my library job, my biggest expwnse was my college tuition $700 per semester at Glassboro State College, which I paid. When I left Mike, he emptied the bank accounts and kept everything. I didn't fight him because he was clearly metnally unbalanced and psychotic. It was, after all, only stuff. I wanted freedom from fear and intimidation, safety, peace and my life back. He could keep the house. And he did. I signed no fault divorce papers that he sent from Colorado though he was clearly at fault in many proveable ways I will not discuss here.

To get the seashell collection, I drove to Collingswood and the mother met me outside the assisted living building and handed in the seashell collection. We spoke only briefly and I left. A few days later, I had a phone call from her, very distraught, crying, and hoping I would be kind enought to bring back the seashell collection because she had told Mike she had given it to me and he had pitched a full on rage display and she was crushed and intimidated.

I understood. I had taken Mike's most prized psosession, myself. And he had at first done what he could to prevent my ability to survive on my own by taking all the money from the shared banking accounts, and then selling the house and keeping all the contents, things I had bought as well as his own. Even after all these years, his vindictiveness was potent like the burning underground coal fields in Pennsylvania. Naturally I gave back the seashell collection and drove home (the house I bought myself with my own earnings), glad to be free of them - Mike, his mother, and the world he created with his mental illness. I felt then and now, pity but also a wary fear of the power of this mental unbalance and the destruction it can wreak upon the lives of those near.

This kind of possessiveness and control is a big plot device in much classic European literature, think Anna Karenina. Men keeping the children when the women leave, depriving them of the means of support in the days when women had no legal rights and couldn't inherit or even keep their own wages if they had any. And it is very evident in our contemporary American politics - Trump's infinite vindictiveness toward former adversaries. The far right threat to take away women's right to vote along with our reproductive freedom.

That seashell collection is kind of a symbol of the poison in my marriage born of Mike's mental instability for which I can't blame him as it was inherited, but he never did anything to heal himself and refused to take responsibility in any way for his own misfortunes - both his first and second failed marriages and all the trouble in his life. He wouldn't or couldn't see it and do anything to fix it. He took the easy route of blaming everyone else and acting out his seething anger on those closest to him - his mother, his wives.

At 80, often when these memories from the past arise, I realize that most of the people in them are now dead! By 80 a lot of people are dead, so I recognise it is a privilege to succeed to this age. Many of my former boyfriends and lovers are dead. My daughter's father lives, at 70, and Mike is still alive in Colorado at 82. His parents lived well into their 80's so he might too. I wish the LSD, the pot, ad all the reading about Zen Buddhism and other books on enlightenment he experienced in the 1970's could have helped Mike more to understand he was making the world he lived in and could have helped him get a better focus and insight on himselfand his emotions.

This blog is like a trunk in the attic with old letters and photographs in it. This memory is another old letter. I wonder where the seashell collection is now, and perhaps I should have left those shells on the beach anyhow.

Happy Trails in the here and now, as well as in the there and then. wrightj45@yahoo.com