I was born early in 1964, early enough to be an Aquarius and late enough to be a Chinese Dragon, in Newfoundland. I was a seventh child (eighth pregnancy, of which one was of two fraternal twins, and there were two miscarriages), born prematurely during a raging snowstorm, and a week after record high winds of close to 200 km/hr, and then spent a while in an incubator.
My mother Ellen (Nell) Hawco Dalton died at age 41 of a Lupus-related heart attack or brain aneurism in front of me (I was in the bath or being dressed just after a bath) when I was about a year and a half old. My father John Dalton died at age 45 when I was four, and I was then raised by older siblings, mainly my sister Anne, with help at first from aunts and uncles and nuns and other support.
My early life was relatively uneventful, just some occasional fainting spells, and once in a locker room felt as if I was floating out of my seated body for a second (never since), nothing more.
At age 12 I went to England and Wales for six weeks, including a visit to a stone circle near Cockermouth in the Lake District and to Vale Crucis Abbey and the River Dee in Llangolen, Wales, and to Chester and London and Liverpool/Birkenhead.
From looking at old pictures, there is a bit of an 11 year cycle of extroversion/introversion/mouth turn, though I am always a bit introverted. I mean that in 1976 I looked a bit down and then in 1986 I had a mild depression and then in 1996 my low years began (not low in terms of depression but low in terms of delusions and paranoia). That sounds like more of a ten year cycle but the low years have extended through 1997 and 1998 and 1999 and 2000 and 2001 though I have been stable and free of delusions since about early May of 1999. But I still think I am in the low years since I have certain minor symptoms that would not be minor if I wasn't on olanzapine and lithium. When the minor symptoms go away I will discuss coming off the olanzapine with my psychiatrist but will stay on the lithium.
In the spring of 1982, at age 18, I began having odd tummy pains, more often in Friday afternoon multidimensional integral and partial differential calculus (Math, like the Welsh little bear sky druid) class. Later that summer, when I was beginning to have some romantic hopes, this escalated suddenly. Tests found nothing, there was pain on both sides and no hardness or swelling. Later exploratory surgery revealed a "brewing appendix" which was removed. This (like earlier knee injury problems beginning at 14 and an odd rash at age 17) may not be significant at all.
From age 20--22 there were three odd instances when I ran away from internal conflict, off to the wilderness, and passed through briar/thorns briefly. In Newfoundland this type of episode was once called "running off to the fairies (nature spirits)." At age 22 there was a mild depression, which I came out of in early 1987. Then in 1989, I think, I had a bad panic attack from smoking marijuana or hash out of a homemade pipe made from a tin can, but slept it off fine (and rarely touched dope, and not since 1992, though it is fine in moderation for some).
I and some friends, who still remember this, were on a Victoria Day weekend camping trip to a site at The Old Mill in Avondale, about ten miles from my home at Lakeview on the Avalon peninsula of Newfoundland.
An uncle of mine was on his deathbed, from emphesyma fluid complications, though I thought he had a while longer.
It was a calm Sunday, and we had taken down our tent, and started to fold it up, and it was surrounded by camping gear, books, a ghetto blaster and more. Suddenly a friend's car drove up along the nearby river, and as it did so a freak gust of wind blew (on this calm day) under the car and lifted, like a mini-cyclone, all our gear, including the tape machine, about six feet straight up into the air and deposited it a short distance away.
I then found from the friend that my Uncle Vince had died and that I was to hurry home to get ready for his funeral, and I guess I had missed the wake.
This could possibly be explained arm-wavingly in terms of turbulent boundary layer flow effects, but it was rather spooky. Hmmm, actually a wind that gentle lifting a portable stereo six feet up in the air, I doubt that even the best meteorologists and fluid dynamicists could reproduce that one.
However my roots are over two centuries old in Newfoundland, and before that go back to, among others, to the families:
I have been steeped in celtic music from an early age, and even did sound for it quite often in Vancouver from 91--94, as well as soaking up influences at the Vancouver Folk Festival, Rogue Folk Club, Celtica Festival and here in St. John's again since Dec95. (See my long Newfoundland file for some of those influences.)
On to my sundance/thorn climb/blue rose
episode.
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