Roaring Brook Fiddler - Julie Lyonn Lieberman

Roaring Brook Fiddler (eBook)

Julie Lyonn Lieberman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
340 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9105-7 (ISBN)

Julie was born into a family of creative artists. Deeply inspired by her parents' passion for human rights, peace and justice for all, Julie believed she could save the world through music. Midway into her journey, all she'd loved, all she'd worked for, was ripped away. This is the magnificently woven story of how her muse and her sixth sense saved her soul.

What does it take to live a creative life of conscience? To transition from a loving cocoon out into a harsh world that seeks the rational above fantasy, snubs creativity, and seeks money above all else?Julie was gifted a loving, close-knit artistic family of activists. Her education was supported, and her spirit, nurtured. But Julie's life path roared into the dark depths, forcing her to strip away all illusions about marriage, success, comfort and security. Only one pawn in a failing planet, determined to make a difference, she fought to keep her muse alive as she rode hurdle after hurdle into a new life.

VIRTUAL WHISKERS

I am five years old and dreaming. A large, multi-colored bird comes to me in the night and leads me up a narrow path to the top of a mountain. The bird and I are the same height and our climb is effortless. I am certain I have seen this path before and feel a mystical, age-old clarity as I commune with this beautiful creature. Standing side by side, we look out over the world and in that moment, I understand who I am. The bird becomes my icon, my guide.

Julie 1960

Though my knock-kneed, pigeon-toed legs had been corrected by wearing braces since the time I learned to crawl, once removed, a new physical challenge emerged. When I turned two, a high fever from chicken pox activated a dormant gene inherited from my father’s mother, Grandma Ida. My right eye veered into a life independent of my left eye, and I was diagnosed with strabismus, commonly called lazy eye. I was oblivious. Busy with important matters. Like how to make my cat Tawney purr. Or the ongoing stories I made up as I sat in the sandbox and changed voices for each character. I lacked depth perception, and my knees were scarred from constantly bumping into objects around me, but I thought that was normal.

I suspected I might be different when Mom would take me with her to buy groceries. Shoppers scrutinized one eye, then the other as if trying to decipher something distasteful about my face. This was extremely different from when my parents or my sister Jeannie looked at me. My family’s gazes made me whole. Normal. Loved. Strangers’ stares were cruelly invasive.

My parents managed to find a specialist in NJ. In second grade, I became one of the first two girls in the United States to participate in a new eye therapy just developed in Switzerland.

“Do you see an image of a butterfly?” Asked the specially trained vision therapist at the clinic.

“Yes.”

“Put these 3D glasses on, Julie, and look again at the page in this book … Now show me how far off the page its wings are.”

“What do you mean? It’s just a flat picture on a piece of plastic.”

“Use your index finger and point to the wings.”

“The wings are right here.” I stated emphatically as I touched the plastic with my right forefinger. But I could tell this was the wrong answer.

I squeezed my eyes tightly together until I was cross-eyed, hoping to see like others. Nothing changed.

“Julie, the wings should not look flat. They should look as if they’re coming off the page.”

Without the visual coordination to generate depth perception by looking with both eyes simultaneously, I could not see like other people. No matter how hard I tried, my butterfly’s wings would not fly.

At the end of the session, after a few more equally disappointing tests and exercises, the therapist placed a patch over my left eye and handed a box of brown patches to my mother. “Your daughter will need to wear a patch every day over her dominant eye, she droned as if I wasn’t there. “This will help strengthen her weaker eye.”

The idea that using my right eye all day long would stop its tendency to wander off into its own private world made sense, but my visual problems, and particularly the patch, branded me as an oddity in school. In self-defense, I retreated into my family and the creative arts: writing, dance, theatre, and music. A few months later, the doctor operated to shorten and tighten the muscles in my right eye. I woke up in a small hospital bed, my head wrapped in bandages.

The surgery made me look normal. But, according to the various eye doctors my parents took me to, my eyes still didn’t work well together. Each doctor performed the same tests again and again. The harder I tried to figure out what they wanted from me, the more broken I felt. I just wanted to be left alone.

Every test, every eye exercise only taught me to further distrust what I saw through my own eyes. But I gradually learned to navigate the objects around me by growing my own set of virtual ‘whiskers’ that operated not so differently than those of my orange-and-white striped cat, Tawney.

At first, my virtual whiskers helped me maneuver in the physical world. But then they acted more like antennae. I began to observe those around me differently. I started to notice that I did not “see” through my eyes like everyone else, nor “feel” through my sense of touch—though both were fully active. Nor did incoming information register in my mind with words.

Something else was going on, beyond anything I could describe or even consciously acknowledge. And no one else appeared to “see” what I perceived. At least no one was talking about it.

The first time I noticed my virtual whiskers was when a friend of my parents dropped by for dinner. After he left, Mom and Dad commented on his profound political wisdom, but I had seen his hidden world of loneliness and how he disguised it with lots of big, important words. There was a vast gap between his outer noise and inner despair.

Shortly after his visit, we packed to leave for a camping trip and without thinking about it, I went down into the basement, took a handful of nails and placed them in my miniature purse. When we reached the campsite, Dad exclaimed, “It’s going to rain, and I forgot to pack any nails to attach a tarp over our eating area.”

“I have some,” I called out jubilantly. My family joked about my purse, asking me what other treasures I had hidden inside of it. I forced out a few chuckles as they laughed. I couldn’t explain why I had thought to pack nails. I had never done that before.

My parents didn’t notice my hidden world. Only my cat Tawney was privy to my rituals and secret thoughts. I taught him how to read and write. I’d lie on my back under the kitchen table with Tawney nestled on my belly and guide his right paw to help him trace invisible letter patterns on the underside of the wooden table. I knew he understood everything I told him when, after complaining to him about my sister, he calmly walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and scratched her. I heard Jeannie shriek from the first floor. Tawney came back upstairs and rubbed against me, purring. “Thank you,” I whispered as I rubbed behind his ears.

The deeper I retreated into myself, the more I began to ‘see.’

It felt like there was a specific place inside yet simultaneously outside my body that provided a current of information and sensation, with little communication between the Julie who used words to express her thoughts and feelings and the Julie with ‘whiskers.’ There was only an extremely flimsy filament running between the two. Just enough for me to know I received information differently than those around me.

One extremely cold day after school when I was eight years old, I walked the few blocks home to our front door and discovered it was locked. I pounded on the door with my lightly gloved fist. Mom, where are you?

Tawney stared out the window at me from between the curtains.

I paced up and down the three front steps trying to figure out what to do and walked around the house rattling the side and back doors as I cried from the bitter chill. Then I heard a car horn.

My grandmother, Nanny, pulled up, tooting her horn. I threw myself into her arms before she was even halfway out of her little red car. She had the keys to the house. Once inside, she seated me in the green Lazy-Boy chair with a blanket wrapped around me.

“I was in the middle of cooking applesauce,” she explained, “when I suddenly grabbed the key to your house off a hook on my wall and jumped into my car to drive here. I don’t know why. I didn’t even think to call first to see if anyone was home.”

As she busied herself making me hot chocolate in the kitchen, I wondered if there was an invisible string running from Nanny to me, our own private keyhole through which she could see me. Did she, too, have invisible whiskers?

Over dinner, after numerous apologies for getting home late, my mother jokingly called Nanny, whose first name was Liz, “Saint Elizabeth.”

“It was just a whim,” was how Nanny described her impulsive rescue mission. “There’s no other explanation.”

“Maybe Nanny could hear my cries for help in her mind,” I suggested, eyes focused on my food.

“There’s no such thing as ESP. It’s just a hoax,” Dad chimed in. “When I was a journalist for the Newark Star Ledger before you were born, the paper sent me out on an assignment to cover several public personalities who’d advertised their ‘psychic powers.’ I proved they were all swindlers.”

I didn’t know what to say. Maybe the people he...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	11.2.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
ISBN-10	1-6678-9105-7 / 1667891057
ISBN-13	978-1-6678-9105-7 / 9781667891057

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