Centered Life (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

The year was 1973 and I was exploring the world around me, enjoying my newfound freedom and living my life in a manner that was totally different from the way I was raised. My sister and I were living fast and hard; we had every recreational drug available to us whenever and wherever we wanted them. We smoked a joint to get our day started, and the weekends were filled with a myriad of drugs; uppers and downers, whatever it took to keep us going. The freezer always had five or six hits of coke, and we kept a shoe box of weed in the cabinet of the living room table along with all of the weed paraphernalia. Bennies (uppers) were given to me by the jarful. We both worked very hard and played even harder. I was in my early twenties and a single mother of a three-year-old daughter (Ieshia). My sister had no children and no plans to have one anytime soon. We were feeling a new kind of freedom and great distance from the very large, deeply religious, constricted family we were born into. We had escaped the small-town drudgery of Monrovia, where we grew up and moved on to the big city, the bright lights and a smorgasbord of new adventures in Long Beach.

My sister worked at a fish cannery in San Pedro while I held down a job in a local lamp factory. We weren’t making a lot of money, but for that time it was enough for us to live on and have some fun on. We enjoyed the basic necessities and some extras, like my shoe collection and my brand new bright yellow Volkswagen bug with the Rolls Royce front end. Wow, I thought I was hot stuff. I enjoyed the fact that it was a four speed, because if I was high, shifting the gears would keep me alert, and there were more nights than I care to remember that the shifting worked and got me home safely. The phrase “Living for the weekend” became our motto. We worked all week just so we could party all weekend. I always had two or three wigs ready to wear, and my platforms were always in style and ready for dancing. We would start getting ready about 6 p.m. on Friday night – make-up was put on with meticulous artistry and utmost care. Most of the time something new and brightly colored that revealed lots of skin in all the right places covered my tall, slim, but curvy body. Hot pants were really in and combining them with a mid-drift top was the norm, or maybe just a hot pant jumpsuit would do the trick. I would finish off the look with a pair of the latest platform shoes and by 9:30 p.m. I was ready for the first leg of the weekend.

My running partner was another young mother named Hilary. Hilary had three small children and her family lived nearby, so she always had a built-in babysitter. My sister didn’t always run with us; she had several partners she ran with, but a lot of the time we all ended up together at the latest hotspots in LA. Most clubs closed at 2 a.m. but there was always the after-hours clubs that didn’t close until 6 or 7 a.m. and of course we had to have breakfast at the local Denny’s, which meant we didn’t get home most times until 9 or 10 a.m. This was our lifestyle and we were totally immersed in this lifestyle. If we weren’t at the clubs, we’d be at some hip house party of one of my sister’s friends from the cannery, or a concert of whatever artist was in town. My sister and I had gotten completely away from our roots; the strict religious upbringing that was devoid of the recreational drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and partying of our new world.

Rewind about five or six months earlier; our mother sent word that our bishop wanted my sister and me to come to church. He wanted to talk to us about our lifestyle, so off we went to visit church. Three of my brothers at three different times had also visited us and told us to move out of Long Beach and come home prior to my mother’s invitation from the Bishop. So we agreed to go and see what the big deal was. We went to church, great service, but we didn’t really know what was going on, we were just there, being obedient. So right after church we stopped to talk to the Bishop as he requested; he always had some tid-bits of wisdom to share or some future prophecy to look forward to. I jumped in front of my sister because I wanted to be the one to sit closest to the Bishop in hopes that he would share some special prophecy with me, something that would uplift my life, for in my heart I knew my life was totally out of control. The Bishop gasped when I sat down, and said, “You just took her place”. I had no idea at that time what he was talking about, but I was surely going to find out.

Bishop Holmes was a soft spoken man and he often spoke in parables when giving a message, but this time he was very straightforward and told us we needed to change our wicked ways and rein ourselves in, for if we didn’t we would surely perish. He told us about a spiritual experience in which he stepped into a star trying to save the life of a woman named Sis McMillan. She was new to the church, and her son had tried to kill her and had succeeded in killing her mother—his grandmother—and leaving his mother, Sis McMillan, in a coma. He told us after reaching Sis McMillan and rescuing her spirit, how on his way back from this experience he saw my sister and me, and as he tried to get to us, a lamb got between him and us and he couldn’t reach us. Now at the time this meant nothing to me. I didn’t understand any of it and thought, what has that to do with me? I knew it was some kind of a warning, some kind of message, but I didn’t understand it. If my sister understood at the time she didn’t let on. The Bishop asked us to slow down and to come and visit the church more often. So we left that meeting promising to return to church and to change our wicked ways, but we didn’t. I knew I was young, healthy, good-looking, and made to party, so I figured I had time to come back into the fold, but it wasn’t going to be right away. I knew that then was not the time; I was having too much fun.

We went right back to our life as if nothing had been said; I continued to work at the lamp factory during the week and partied the weekends away. Then one morning I got up feeling sick to my stomach. I didn’t think much of it, I just thought I had partied too hard, and I would stay home and rest – things would be better tomorrow. How wrong I was. I got sicker and sicker. I was in such pain I went to the emergency room, but they couldn’t find anything wrong, so they gave me some antacids and sent me home. I made that trip to the emergency room several more times, hoping to get some relief. Sometimes my sister was right there with me, other times I drove myself to the hospital. I went again and again, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. I kept going to emergency because I didn’t have a general practitioner at the time; sickness was not a part of my lifestyle hence no need for a doctor. I was so sick I couldn’t hold any food down; I threw up everything I ate. They would give me something to settle my stomach at the hospital and something for the pain, but no answers. I was truly scared; I knew I was really, really sick. I had lost so much weight that my bones were visible through my clothing. I could see and count every rib, and I could see the outline of my pelvic bones. I looked like a skeleton. Still no answer from the emergency room visits.

I had been absent from work for about three weeks and I felt like I needed to go back. Once my bowels moved, I started to feel a little better, although still very weak but at least I wasn’t throwing up anymore. So I showed up to my factory job on that Monday morning bright and early, but something was terribly wrong. Everyone I passed seemed to have this strange look on his or her face as they stared at me. My supervisor came up to me and asked me to come into her office. Her face went pale and she was visibly shaken. She looked at me and told me to get to my doctor immediately, and have them test me for Yellow Jaundice or hepatitis because I was yellow and looked like walking death. I started to cry, hearing her words; I was just so tired and scared. I told her I had been back and forth to the hospital and got no answers, but at that moment in my supervisor’s office I felt a bit of relief. I had something to go on, like I had finally gotten some answers. She told me she couldn’t allow me to stay at work because I was really sick and needed to get to my doctor. I could be contagious and she couldn’t allow me to infect the rest of the workers.

I got into my yellow VW bug that matched my yellow skin and eyes, and drove straight to my gynecologist office, since that was the only doctor I had a relationship with on a regular basis. Once I arrived I asked if they would do a blood test on me for Yellow Jaundice or Hepatitis. The nurse took one look at me and sent me to the lab to have blood drawn. She told the lab to rush the testing, and to immediately send the results to the doctor. She told me to come back to their office so the doctor could see me with the results. My gynecologist confirmed it – Hepatitis. He gave me the name of a local Internist to make an appointment for treatment. I was no longer afraid I was numb and resigned. I remember thinking I was going to probably die because another girl that grew up with us (Brenda Ward) had just died of hepatitis. I didn’t know anything about this disease nor had I heard of it until Brenda died from it. She was so pretty and so young, with everything to live for, just like me--at least the young part. She left behind a little girl just as I was going to have to do – too many similarities. I felt a strange calmness; I was resigned to my...