'Clothed in Truth, I Stand Before You NAKED.' - Pain.... and A Peek into the Past -

'Clothe in Truth, I Stand Before You NAKED.' 

I know pain. Pain is something I carry around with me, buried DEEP because that is the only way I knew how to survive all that I have been through. I have carried pain with me for so long that pain is now as much a part of me as the brilliant smile I brandish.... sometimes.

Pain has become a part of  the protective shell I have wrapped around my heart in the hope that the kind of experience that teaches wisdom will be enough to prevent new pain from seeping in.

But I have learnt that pain is consistent, an ever present companion that has existed side by side with happiness from time immemorial. Eighteenth century poet Emily Dickinson wrote about the irony of pain's insistence on showing up with happiness and waiting in the wings for its turn. "For each ecstatic instant, we MUST an anguish pay in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy." - ED (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)


Pain became part of my emotional DNA so much that for years as a young journalist I was subconsciously drawn to situations that involved the deep suffering of others. It's as if by telling their stories and providing solutions to their problems I think I got some measure of satisfaction and relief from the personal anguish I had deliberately buried.

At the Gleaner newspaper where I worked for three years, I quickly became friends with people who some of my colleagues at that lofty 7 North Street establishment would regard as 'common' folk.  I somehow felt more comfortable with them than with my colleagues who were supposed to be my counterparts. Life was simpler with those ordinary, down to earth people. When they smiled they meant it and they spoke their mind with candour and I, with my sharp tongue and nimble wit, didn't have to mince my words with them. I didn't have to search for possible double meanings in their interactions with me as their actions were not cloaked  in diplomacy and all those cumbersome things.

The cleaners and I were also very good friends and many mornings they and I were the only ones at the office  exchanging good-natured banter sometimes quite loudly when I would arrive before 5am for my early morning round up shifts during the six months I wrote for the Star newspaper before being transferred to the Gleaner's Features Desk.

The people who worked in the canteen and I were also on very good terms and the security guards always knew that I was the best reporter to call whenever someone came by the Gleaner lobby with a sad story appealing for help. If I was out on an assignment at the time, although I had many colleagues who would be upstairs and available, they would simply have them wait until I showed up. Many times I would arrive hot, tired and hungry to find someone waiting downstairs to talk to me.

"Siddung right dehso, the lady who mi want yuh fi talk to no deh yah now but she soon come," any one of the three female security guards would tell them and I would often delay my much anticipated lunch or even breakfast to sit and listen to them sharing their pain.

Afterwards I would write as if possessed by the teller of the tale. Transferring their pain and frustration with their situation onto my computer screen which would later be pressed into the powerful pages of the Gleaner newspaper which would get picked up and read the next day by people who could do something to help. And in almost all cases they did.

My Brother Paul - Brought Back to Life

I am convinced that my brother, Paul was a Rastaman who never grew his locks. When I was growing up I remember a story told and re-told by my other brothers with morbid glee of a propa buss arse given to Paul by my father Eustace or Blood as he was more commonly called (due to his job as a butcher when he worked in Mass Campbell's butcher shop in Retrieve, a district close to Cambridge in St. James.) According to my brothers, Paul, when he was very young, refused to eat meat and in particular, flat out refused to eat pork my father would carry home from the butcher shop and which my mother would cook for dinner.

It appeared that Paul, who all his life was very different from my parents other children, was just too renegade and different for my father to understand and the murderation in front the yard one Sunday morning over the whole meat and pork eating thing seemed to have been my father's tragic attempt to prove to Paul that he Paul, was no more man than him (my father). Or, maybe my father saw Paul's rejection of the meat or 'flenga, flenga' as my mother and brothers disparagingly referred to the pieces of meat my father used to take home as part of his wages for helping Mass Campbell to butcher mainly cows and the occasional pigs; as a rejection of him, Blood.

My father was a man who was very quiet and unassuming, only gaining bravado and finding his tongue when he was well and truly drunk. He was unable to provide adequately for all of us as was to be expected when my mother, influenced by the child birthing tendencies in those days, took it upon herself to 'have out her lot' which resulted with her giving birth to 12 children, most born a year apart.

Therefore, my father's ability to bring home the pieces of meat regardless of the condition they were in, gave him some measure of pride, as he was able to feed his family and since he couldn't buy rum with the meat, many week ends that is all he ended up coming home with as he usually drank most of his earnings and what he didn't drink probably ended up lost or stolen from his pockets when he lay in drunken stupor sometimes on the very side of the road he was attempting to walk home on. Although few vehicles ran on Marchmont Road in those days, it still is a marvel that he was never run over by one of them and killed.