54. Impossible Intimacy? Black Panthers

Another consideration for Sarah's inability to stand up to her sister, Rebecca, is that Sarah has had very little experience in intimacy with another person. To my recollection, she has only lived with two people, both long ago. She lived briefly with a man in Boston in the sixties, and a little later, lived for four years with another man in a tree house on a commune in Vermont. This was a period of free love, drugs, alchohol, and rock and roll, and I doubt that boundaries, which is precisely what she needs to enforce with Rebecca, were prevalent. Since then Sarah has lived alone and raised two sons. While they are extremely intelligent, articulate, and assertive, they are your children, and the situation is different. Sarah does not have the experience of give and take found in a continued, intimate relationship. Such a relationship is replete with arguements since we are all individuals and different from each other in innumerable ways. These differences need to be ironed out in an intimate relationship, but Sarah has not had one in forty years if ever. Having been raised by a rooster, she had precious little opportunity to argue at home. I do remember her refusing to go back to school one year after the summer vacation unless she had a pair of Weejuns. My parents did not want to spend the money necessary to buy the shoes, and it looked like Sarah would refuse to go to school. I think this was after she had gone to the police station, saying that life at home was hell, and she would not return. Thus, my father knew he could push Sarah only so far, and then the authorities would be involved. Thus, he was forced to get her the Weejuns, but this was hardly a healthty resolution of an arguement. You sinply were not supposed to argue in my family: it was drummed into us that children were to be seen and not heard. I believe Sarah has precious little experience in constructive arguing, and the psychosomatic symptoms she gets when Rebecca berates her go back to her dysfunctional childhood.
In picking up the black panther story, I believe I stopped last time after Hawkeye, my fourteen year old son, shot a buck deer. I drapped the buck around my shoulders and carried him out, knowing the it wouldn't be much longer before Bobby was big enough to carry the deer out, and I would be too old and weak to. It was a sweet and sour realization, but I was proud of his hunting skills and the fact that I, at fifty-two could put a buck deer on my shoulders and walk him out of the woods.
After putting the deer on the tailgate of the Ford F-150, we stopped at the Tide Swamp Unit Game Management Area on the way home. It was a large jungle-woods on the Gulf of Mexico next to our hunt club. Hawkeye and I were hoping to find Ken Carlyle, a chiropractor from Gainesville, Florida. We had hunted with him the previous year on a dairy farm in Gilchrist County until we could get acquainted with Florida since we had just moved here from Williamsburg, Virginia. I had joinded the Sandhill Hunt Club which stretched from Steinhatchee, which was then a small fishing village on the Gulf of Mexico, to Perry, known as the Pine Tree Capital of the South. Perry was about 31 miles from Steinhatchee so our club was very long and a couple of miles wide. Containing 100,000 acres, the club had 500 members, but on weekdays I could drive for hours on club roads and never seen another person. Coming from crowded Tidewater, Virginia, it was an unsettling experience at first. Bobby and I did not see Ken's car, but at the Dallus check-in station, I started a conversation with the friendly young woman who worked there. All big game killed in the game management area was required to be brought out to her so she could record whether it was a boar, turkey, or deer and weight him. She would post the name of each animal killed and his weight on a big board outside the station for the edification and encouragement of the hunters. In the course of our chat, the young woman, Wendy, told me she had seen a black panther twice in the game management area.
"I drove my car down the Dallus Road in broad daylight, and there he was on the side of the road. He was on my left. I was lookintg right out of my car window at him, a few feet away. He stared at me for a while and then disappeared into the woods. It was a big, black cat with a long, very thick tail."