Day 57 Poetry

The fellow passengers as he calls them have discovered he is a song writer and beg him to write love letters to their wives.  In return for writing them he is paid in paper and Bic pens so he can write to me.  He confides that everything he writes for them is really what he is wishing for us.  Here is the latest one written for a fellow inmate who longs to return to his former lover:

Be My Rainbow

Though I am in a Hurricane
All I dream about is You
Though the Tempest is raging all around me
All I hear is a Melody, Your Name, Your Tune

You are the Rainbow
That has Graced my Heaven
In Your eyes I see the end of the Storm
You are the Sunshine Whispering all is Forgiven
Yours is the Heart keeping me warm

Your Image haunts me every Moment
I feel the rhythm of Your Heart
Your Dance, Your Sway, relieve my Torment
I imagine our Souls Enwrapped

I have met you in a Magic Garden
I have reached You out in cyberspace
We have touched and yet I beg Your Pardon
I just want to Kiss Your Face

So please consider Being my Rainbow
Let All of Your brilliant Colors Shine
Because when the Storm is over
You are the Treasure that I Yearn to Find

Day 54 The State of Western Union

So today I drive a half a dozen towns down the coast so I can privately send a small amount of money to my soul mate.  With his earning power currently at 17 cents per hour, he can hardly afford a high retail granola bar let alone a hair cut. Even the e-mails we get to send add up at a nickle a piece.  Imagine working an hour in a 100 degree kitchen scrubbing giant burnt on pans for what amounts to the privilege of sending 3 emails.  It is a long way from Wall Street baby....To add insult to injury he hasn't been able to work for almost 2 weeks because a cart hit him in the shin and as it bled profusely through his pants and all over the floor he was told he could not be spared to go get it looked after.  Later that day he was still not given permission to seek medical help and given a couple of band aids. The next morning he could barely walk on it.  It was hot, swollen and had greenish pus oozing from it. Later his "boss" allowed him to go where ever it is they go for medical attention.  The wound was examined and he was removed from work duty as they were afraid he may have come in contact with a staff infection - they sent a culture out just in case it was the deadly resistant, non treatable sort that is often cause for immediate amputation of the affected limb.
All this for 17 cents an hour.
So we wait for the lab test to come back.
Anyway, back to my trip to Western Union.  I live in a teeny town where everyone knows everyone. So, I am thinking that if I go to the local Safeway and have Mr. Oh So Helpful Customer Service Manager handle my Western Union transfer - it will  only take seconds for the entire town to know that I sent $$$ to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and to a certain someone that has a number following their name.  Thus, a  journey an hour down the road to a store I have never been in and a town I rarely frequent.  Nonetheless, it is still obvious that I am sending funds to a prisoner and it is also obvious that I am new to all this.  it is obvious because there is a certain code that I am missing.  The girl helping me is a big, heavyset blond, make up brightly applied, nails long and fashioned into curved talons. She calls me away from the help desk area where others are waiting their turn to a more discrete corner of the long counter.  With her voice lowered she looks at me knowingly and says, "honey, you need this special code to do this...I looked it up for you so you can just plug it in the next time."  I know I have nothing to be embarrassed of but my face turns cranberry red and I look around nervously to see if anyone has heard or if there is anyone there that I recognize.  I stammer something about helping a family friend and she says, " anyone can make a mistake."  I have a feeling she may have sent a few of these herself.
Still, I leave feeling sick to my stomach, though grateful he can buy a few little things at commissary and make a few more phone calls.

38 Days .....Justice for Some

Latest thing: E-mail......well sorta...He is now able to send e-mails to me for a nickle a letter.  They go through a special website that I can sign on to. I write him.  Someone reads it for acceptable content and then eventually he receives it.  Sometimes, it seems to have a lag time of an hour other times it comes in up to a day later.  I have noticed that if I ask him to call me at a certain time when I know I will be home - he gets the e-mail after the time I requested so he isn't able to reach me.  This has happened EVERY SINGLE TIME.  It really is like trying to communicate with the dead.

In the last email I got from him he had just found out that the person who had introduced him to the crooked attorney that landed him in this place to begin with; the man that was the mastermind behind the scheme had just received his sentence for concocting the mess.  Well, if you can call probation a sentence. That's right. Scam people out of hundreds of millions of dollars and get probation.  Run 45 minute meeting and give a report that your attorney asks you to give and get 4 years.    He is now seething with the injustice of it all. 

We tend to think it could never happen to us.........it does.

Day 33 Heaven or Hell

July 4th weekend.  My biggest decision is which beach bonfire and BBQ to go to. We are still incommunicado - apparently the phone minutes don't commence again until around the 7th.  In a way it is like he is kind of fading away - perhaps its because I didn't realize how the calls with all the shouting and clanking in the background were constant and painful reminders of where he is.  Without them, I write my daily letter to him and go on with my day, my life, my world of color and light and fresh air.
Selfish??  I don't think so.  I think of a message I heard from a Toltec teacher last week that said,

" In reality, no one can make us happy.  No one can make us unhappy.  You are the only one that can give you heaven.  You are the only one that can give you hell."

It is true.  I did not give him this hell.  I do not need to live in hell as a result of his choice.  I can still love him and choose heaven they are not mutually exclusive.  He can choose heaven too - now or when ever he decides he is finished punishing himself.  I have chosen to no longer be punished by his decisions.  I feel the day brighten even though the sky is a mass of clouds.