tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23463606431560424162024-03-13T09:17:55.638-07:00Heartfelt Excerpts from Bob Fahey's Novels.Fine literary scenes at their most touching.Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-22492599115356093522011-08-16T09:54:00.000-07:002011-08-16T09:54:44.058-07:00The Difference between Naked & Nude. <style>
@font-face {
font-family: "Cambria";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
</style> <div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 200%;">William Butler Yeats:</span></u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy,</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic"; font-size: 16pt;">Bare Introductions.</span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here I was with my first naked woman ever, not a stitch on her, she kept squirming closer, and I kept jabbing paint into her eyes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>“Or maybe, ‘Crippled Innocence?’ ” she suggested, “Maybe you could call my portrait something like that?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Uhhh, Yeahhh …” My lips and jaw worked around for a while, but only that one word edged out. Trying to think of something charming or eloquent to say is like digging around through cooling street tar with a straw wrapper. In a borrowed white tux. I’m guaranteed to make a mess of things.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well, at least I’d managed more than a grunt this time; I’d dredged up one whole word. Though maybe I should have said Yes, Ma’am, rather than Yeah.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">No; that’s too formal. Yes, that is a patently good idea, Ma’am, although I generally don’t assign titles to my various artistic renderings.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She flipped her hair away from the front of her shoulders. Freckles surfed the soft white swells of her shimmying breasts.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Stop! Don’t look down there! I jerked my eyes back up.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Say something, moron, maybe she didn’t notice.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dang it; open your mouth. Say something. Anything. You know a ton of words; pick out any three. Everybody else can talk.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">By the time I can think of anything to say, I’ve been rummaging around for days, and the other guy’s gone home.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Hello; are you in there?” she asked. “You don’t talk much, do ya?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I started crushing more paint into the canvas, shooting a quick sideways look at her nose. Then back at the portrait. I studied her neck. As I braked against letting my gaze drift any lower, my breath bottled up in my ears. I felt even more exposed than she was. Fully clothed, I felt like I was the one who was naked. That she could see I had nothing on under my armor.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And yet, there she was, standing right beside me; not a hairpin, not a Band-Aid; bubbling over with laughter she wasn’t even trying to hold in. And an occasional snort when she tried. I could have looked anywhere, everywhere, studied every one of her curves, folds, and follicles.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She watched the internal civil war I was waging on her behalf and found it hilarious.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I was naked; she was nude. They’d taught us the difference in Art History. If someone looks exposed, awkward, struggling to keep his guard up, he’s naked. He looks tight and unnatural, and we feel bad looking at him. He didn’t want to be caught there that way.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A nude feels cozy and free. She has no guard to drop. A nude has no inhibitions. If you let her, she just might melt yours. If some repressed artist paints a wind-tossed cloth across her privates, it looks unnatural and you just know she’d rather tear it away and feel the breeze between her thighs. She’s like sunshine and doesn’t deal well with clouds.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Knock, knock, are you in there?” She’d caught me again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Irish folks can’t hide our embarrassment. It blossoms like red wine through white linen all over our faces, our ears, our necks. She saw that, too. She tried not to laugh at me, but a little snort erupted. Then she dabbed at my shoulder with apologies. The touch of her bare hand sent quivers through parts of me I hadn’t noticed before.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She paused; her hand nestled softly against my chest. She looked directly into my eyes with feeling, like she wanted to say, “Oh, you poor, dear, baby.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You’re sweet,” she told me.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I kept slapping my brush against the palette until I’d heaped up a big blob of greenish – brown - purple. I searched the whole canvas for some obscure corner I could blend that ugly mess into, but had to give up and wipe the brush off on a rag.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She was quiet for a while, and I snuck another peek up at her. She was studying me with the strangest, most curious, the sweetest smile I could have imagined.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">If I’d ever dared let myself imagine a pretty girl smiling at me.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You’re kinda …” She paused, and it was as though she was attempting to palpate a cobweb. “You're kind of shy, aren’t you?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I kept focusing in on her eyes, only the eyes. It took every bit of concentration I had.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I think I like shy.” She contemplated the concept; her eyes, soft and unfocussed, seemed to ride distant waves. But then they drew down into hardness. “Guys I know are so fulla themselves,” she said. “Treat you like they own you. You’re their damned property. Like all you are is your tits.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My eyes dived for an instant, as though her breasts had whistled for me. I sucked in a lungful and dragged them back up. Cripe, I wished she’d stop saying things like that.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I started slathering paint onto the canvas so feverishly her eyes must’ve stood out by a full quarter inch. Green Irish eyes with golden flecks; huge pupils that kept growing bigger.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The first few days of class, she had wandered the circle of freshman art students, gazing at each of our life studies quietly, but then she’d started settling in by mine. She had been moving about, studying our paintings, wearing nothing but a ratty, home-friendly robe I had desperately, achingly, wanted her to pull closed. Then this time, she hadn’t brought the robe.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The rest of the class had gone to lunch, but she’d slid in beside me and I’d kept painting, hoping she couldn’t see everything churning and broiling, and slamming shut inside me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to show her disrespect by looking at parts a woman would normally keep hidden; I was terrified. No one had ever tried to be my friend before.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Crippled Innocence,” she said again now, studying the painting, “Something like that. Maybe you could call it something like that.” I had noticed she walked with a bit of a twist, raising one foot like a limp fish.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>“Uhhh, yeah…. Maybe,” I said, but then our eyes snagged for a moment.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Mmmm,” she said, holding my gaze. It was like she was snuggling into the sound; an intonation, a melody that just eased out, halfway between a murmur and a purr. Like a woman half stirring from a sweet, delicious dream; burrowing more deeply into her fresh cool pillow, but not quite waking up.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of her legs slipped behind mine. She leaned in, passing her arm slowly around me, her hand stroking empty air above the painting. She spoke softly into my ear. I couldn’t clutch myself together enough to catch actual words. I knew she couldn’t be thinking romantically, so maybe she was just being cruel, like girls had in junior high. She had to be just teasing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The warmth of her breast drew close to my arm. Something akin to a purr or a grumble rolled through my own heart and lower belly. If I had tried to speak in that moment, it would have come out as a squeak.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then we touched, and I was in no particular hurry to pull out of it, though I worked hard at acting like I didn’t notice. The hairs on the back of my arm brushed her nipple with each breath. I’ve probably never been so aware of my breathing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She whispered, “Can I ask you something?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Anything,” I managed to squeeze out of the top of my skull.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Why do they call you Gooseboy?” She brushed me again. Much more firmly this time. She lingered there. Held herself against me.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Unhh owahh mmm?” was the best I could come up with.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My head swam as I tried again, but the “Unhh” only came out in a higher pitch.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She laughed; her breast swayed, bounced, floated along my triceps. I fought to pull myself together. My quavering voice did manage to force a few words out, splayed by pauses. “Mmm - childhood. Ugly - duckling - thing. Never grew into a swan.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Swans are nasty,” she whispered, her lips so close to my ear she could’ve bitten it. “I’m sick of swans. Get hung up on their looks, you’re gonna pay for being so damned stupid. Embarrass me in front of my friends. Like it’s <i>me</i> never says anything worth listening to. Yeah, right. So damned full of themselves. Damn … swans.” She stepped out from behind me, caught my eyes drifting down over her delicately hued nipples. The gentle white curves of her belly. Her shadowed slit of navel. “I like the little ducks in the back. The ones who don’t quite fit in. I just wanna pick ’em up, and cuddle them, and hold their little heads close to my ...” We tried to unravel ourselves from that imagery. “They’re the ones I want to feed.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I drew in a breath and held it until it dawned on me I couldn’t form words without letting some of it back out. “Well … thanks … but I’ve got some stale bed …” I wanted to point back at my supplies with my thumb, but all my parts had frozen into position. “In my brackpack. – I mean, stale bed. Bread. In my – backpack. If I get hungry.” She laughed as I kept chattering. “I’ll just stand out by the fountain and toss it at myself,” I told her. “Maybe I’ll even fight over it.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Her nipples started to draw in, tighter and darker. They rose out. Like lips wanting a kiss.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Guessing she was cold, I offered her the jacket from my chair.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She started prodding me with devilish grins, asking what made her look cold. She wouldn’t let me off the hook.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">After a few minutes of teasing, she sighed and turned her head away. The muscles of her long, slender neck carried my gaze down to the notch of her clavicle. I studied her freckles, but didn’t try to paint them. I followed them lower, to where her skin was its absolute whitest. Her puff of reddish blonde hair looked so soft, and fluffy. I wondered if she brushed, or shampooed it. Her long, slender legs spread wider as she relaxed her left knee. I studied her sweet nubs of toes. The graceful arches of her feet. Feet had never struck me as sexy before.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But she had apparently turned away just so she could flip back and catch me savoring her, because when I looked back up, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">she</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> was studying </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">me</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I tried to force a casual smile, but it twisted out of my face like a grimace. I didn’t let her into my thoughts; didn’t let myself into my feelings. I wrenched for words. “I – I like that - color. Of your nail polish. It’s – it’s so - bright! Red. Bet you don’t have any trouble finding your feet in the dark!”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She broke loose laughing like she’d been saving it up in a sealed can for years. A free-spirited nude, like any true artist, seems always in a moment of birth.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I don’t have that painting anymore. I was told it was one of my best. That people saw strange things inside it. Almost mystical layerings of pain, and purity. And longing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I gave it to the model. I don’t remember her name. I never saw her outside that circle of easels, and trunks filled with props. She’d bring sandwiches, and we’d sit through our breaks, but I never had much to say; I was terrified. Big bold lives and beautiful friends; beautiful women; were meant for other people. Adventurous people. Deserving people.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">How could I have guessed back then that I’d one day be hanging out with naked presidents, notorious lawyers, and women so sexy men would lust for them in every language on the planet? I’d shove my way through a future where the bizarre and the miraculous became so normal I’d miss them when things ran too smoothly. I’d be attacked by ghosts, torn open by a hurricane, and come close to dying deep in a Mexican desert, all because I needed to meet God face-to-face if it killed me. If there even was one. I needed some answers.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That first model stayed warm and open for a few weeks or months, but slowly she grew a little sad. I was really, really good at closing people out. Which always left me horribly alone. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Our family didn’t talk about our passions or terrors, though, about what churned and ate away at us from inside. Dad said all we needed to know was in our little catechisms, or brightly colored Bible tales, but anything deep and hurtful; anything that didn’t make any sense, just wasn’t fair, and we really, really needed to come to grips with? Well, that was “Just one of God’s glorious mysteries,” he always told us, end of story.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Not for me, it wasn’t.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I waited for him a long time in the parking lot after class that Day of the Breast, hoping he’d remember to pick me up. He tended to lose track of time sitting in some bar, car dealership, or small business, waiting for owners who rarely showed. He kept trying to sell them pencils and rulers imprinted with their ads that they could then donate to area schools. Must’ve been awfully tough talking a funeral director into advertising his mortuary on book covers for the junior high, but Dad made a sale now and then. He never touched the dullest edge of success. He was on his third mortgage. Our used car was almost ours, and had been for a long, long time; since the previous one had broken down when it had still only been <i>almost</i> ours. Now his big purple chariot hung suspended with the rest of us in that dank gray limbo of almost.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I hated the way Dad’s face slammed white when bill collectors came to our door. He tried to hide it, but I was vulnerable to other people’s emotions and felt the stress going for his heart. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That day, after I’d discovered how a breast felt against my arm, I fumed for almost two hours standing there, waiting, but never called home to check. Who was I to think I counted? How many times in my childhood had he left me in the car with no books or toys as he’d seen clients in their homes? He’d just take the keys and tell me to stay put. I’d watch kids with puppies run by; bunnies, birds, and squirrels hop about in yards; but I hadn’t even rolled down a window. With nothing to play with but buttons on the dash, I’d push the cigarette lighter in and out. A couple of times I’d burnt my finger pressing its tip against the glowing coil. At least that had offered some distraction. So I’d been tempted to do it again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I never complained, figuring that was my proper place in the universe; a hard wooden stool in an unlighted basement while everyone else ate ice cream in the park.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There had been times, though, when I’d almost felt like somebody’s son. Sitting side-by-side on barstools as he’d waited for small business owners. That fresh furniture polish and alcohol smell in the mid-afternoon, my little boy hands around a cold, sweating beer mug of root beer. Sharing that treasured dim light and quiet with my dad. The soft swoosh of the Ski ball disc along shining powdered wood; the spirited ‘Bing!’ as it bounced off the backboard. That disc, shiny silver metal with black rubber edges, had looked so inconsequential in his beefy hand; felt so sturdy and manly in mine.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dad did show up at college that day. He hadn’t forgotten me after all. I was overjoyed, but held it in, shoving my relief back inside and clamping it down. I climbed in with controlled, respectful decorum. Passion wasn’t welcomed in my family. As always, he asked how my day went without turning to actually look at me. As always, I said, “Fine, Sir,” facing forward, my hands kneading sketchbooks.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Anyway, what could I say? A beautiful naked woman rubbed her breast on my bare skin, Dad! We were all alone and she slipped her leg around me. She had freckles around her nipples! Her woman’s hair looked so soft! Do you think they brush that hair down there, Dad?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now where would that fit in among his Bible stories?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I was quiet for the rest of the ride as my father kept sneaking concerned glances. I searched for things to say, but nothing broke free. My eyes pressed rigidly forward. All those accumulated years and layers of feelings he couldn’t share, of words I couldn’t speak, all those ponderous slabs of angst, were like concrete hardening as it’s poured.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I suspect he knew he might be dying. He was in great pain, but never told us. Now I hate myself for closing off when he was trying to show he cared in the only way he could. He was just trying to get a few final words out of his son as I failed him again, as I hurt him even worse.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-87584997682039070132011-08-14T08:36:00.000-07:002011-08-14T08:36:05.698-07:00The Men in her Life. <style>
@font-face {
font-family: "Cambria";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
</style> <br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt;">Paramahansa Yogananda</span></u><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">:</span></u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">“One whose heart is filled with the love of God cannot willfully hurt anyone.”</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic"; font-size: 16pt;">Chapter Six.</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";">The Men in Her Life.</span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fucker skipped on you again.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Ray, please, Honey; not in front of your sisters.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli looked around the table. The two older girls were stabbing at their portions of the pork foo yung like they wanted to tear its heart out. She turned in her chair to watch people from their neighborhood who could have pretty teapots and tiny cups, and their kids could each order something different. They didn’t have to pick one dinner and cut off little pieces. They could have food left over, and get to carry it home in white boxes. If they forgot them on the table, Charli would go over and get them. Sometimes people came back and asked where their stuff was, but the little oriental men would only look over toward her, but not say anything, so she got to keep it. She didn’t understand how people could not eat everything they had, or how the Chinese men could just throw food away. She’d want to ask if her mom could have some of it; but instead she’d just walk over, take what looked good, and carry it back to her family.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But now other kids and their parents weren’t even eating. If they weren’t openly staring at her brother and her mom, or studying Charli and her sisters, they were at least sneaking peeks.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>“Your dad just had to talk to one of the men he works with about some fossils; that’s all,” their mom said. “You heard him talking on the phone. He told us he’d be right back.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“He always says that.” Pammie thrust her knife into a chunk of pink meat.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Oh, Honey; but he will this time. He even told us to order dessert, didn’t he? He doesn’t always say that, now, does he? Hey, how about some of that nice green ice cream you like? We’ll order some of that, okay? Wouldn’t that be nice?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pammie twisted the knife until every piece of pork flesh was torn to tiny shreds. Francine just dropped her hands and stared at the table.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You like that nice ice cream, don’t you?” Their mom seemed so distracted the kids couldn’t tell whom she was talking to, but they weren’t really listening, anyway. “He said there’s been a very important new discovery! Now, that’s exciting, isn’t it? Some big, scary dinosaur? Maybe he’ll bring us pictures.” She turned to Charli. “Here, eat, Honey,” she said. “Let me help you with that. Daddy will be right back.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli lifted her purse up off her lap, and laid it on the table. Her mom stopped cutting the little girl’s food to fight back tears. Charli said, “Here. You can have all my money, Mommy.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The sounds of scraping and poking against plates stopped at tables all around her. Charli tried to catch the attention of her brother, or one of her sisters, to suggest they all pitch in, but nobody in her family would look up.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fuck this!” her brother said. “I’m not paying for this shit!” He stood, and started shouting at waiters. “You hear me? This is crap! I wouldn’t feed this shit to my dog. Hell, I’d rather eat the dog than this crap!” He launched his plate. A customer across the room ducked just before it shattered on the wall behind her.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Their mother reached for her glass, but it only held water.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fuck this!” Ray shouted and slammed out the front door.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli climbed down off her chair and tried to follow, but had trouble with the door. She managed to shove and lunge her way through, then ran to where the car had been. Standing in the empty space, she called, “Daddy? Daddy! It’s your little Charli; it’s me. Don’t go, Daddy.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Inside The China Pagoda, she knew, her mom would be ordering wine, but then wouldn’t know how to pay for it. Remembering the money in her piggybank, Charli ran the few blocks to their home, slowing to a stop outside the garage. It took her a long time to talk herself out of checking her daddy’s red toolbox. This time, she decided, she didn’t want to know.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She crawled in through the dog door. Walking slowly across the living room, smelling the dust and the sour odor of old food spills, touching each piece of furniture as she passed, everything hurt her so badly. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair; a home should have a daddy in it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She climbed the stairs to her room, but then didn’t have to reach under her bed. Mr. Pigg was broken open all over her dresser. All her money was gone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Little Charli just kept moving, taking short quick breaths high in her chest to keep from crying. In her sisters’ room, she dug through all their hiding places, but he’d taken theirs, too.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Heading downstairs, she made for the garage. The big red toolbox was empty.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">All the nice wrapped presents she’d seen in there were gone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That poor tiny child could only afford to stand there staring, feeling terribly empty, for a minute or so, her little hands wiping back tears that had never actually broken to the surface. She knew her mom would be talking funny and blubbering by now. The waiters would be wringing their hands and all their neighbors would be talking about her family out loud and saying terrible, ugly things. Money or no money, Charli was going to have to get her mommy out of there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Their dad didn’t come home that night. Ray became “Death Ray” again, breaking lamps and dishes, slashing at the cat with belts and fireplace pokers, leaving it cowering and spitting under the couch. Then he headed for the special school, to beat up on “retards.” Pammie searched the streets for Cambodian and Mexican girls she could knock down and kick because they “couldn’t even talk English.” Their mom passed out on the couch watching some old movie with James Cagney shooting and punching everybody, even his girlfriend. Francine finished up her mom’s wine. She was only eleven, but had been drinking for years. Charli decided to spend the night at Gramma Peggy’s. She took her Barbie with her so Ray wouldn’t come back and tear it to pieces.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When she got there, the garage door was closed, so she knew Grampa Ron wasn’t out there spending a little quality time with his one true friend, Jim Beam. The house itself was dark, though, which was strange; they always left “lights on for the burglars” if they went out. Charli climbed up into their olive tree to study things for a while, try to figure out what was going on. She didn’t like it; something wasn’t right. Everywhere she turned, the world scared her.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She didn’t hear Grampa’s radio in the garage, but didn’t see anyone moving in the house. Nestling her doll into a comfortable pad of leaves, she climbed down without it, and snuck up to the living room window like an Indian. Gramma Peggy wasn’t watching Gunsmoke. Their TV wasn’t even turned on. She stared in for a long time, but didn’t see anyone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli slid through the night, working the wagon of garden tools over to the loose board in the backyard wall, propping the milk box up on it, and climbing through. She managed to drag a bench over to a back screen window so she could listen. Inside the house somewhere, she heard “Brownie the Mutt” whimpering. Listening harder then, she heard him scratching at something wooden. Something was wrong. Gramps never let him whine like that. He kicked and cussed the “damned ugly mongrel,” then swore harder because the dog was making him spill his drink.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Too scared to call out, Charli crept around, trying windows until she found a space she could squeeze through. A cast iron skillet lay on the dining room floor. A towel in the hall was soaked with blood.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She couldn’t take any more. The tiny child broke down into heaving bursts of terror, crying out,<span> </span>“Gramma. Gramma! Gramma; it’s me; it’s little Charli. Gramma; where are you? Gramma!”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">No one answered. Brownie the Mutt came to peek out from the bedroom for just a moment, then trotted back in to start scratching and whimpering again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Feeling like every joint and muscle in her body, other than her pounding heart, had frozen solid and was holding her back, Charli fought for control, forcing herself to <b><u>walk</u></b> very slowly down the hall. She found Brownie staring at the closed bathroom door. Now and then he’d scratch at it with his paw. It took a moment for Charli to hear her grandmother sobbing on the other side.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Gramma, Gramma,” the child kept calling.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was a long time before she answered, and then very weakly. “It’s okay, Honey, Gramma will be alright. You just go home now, Honey.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli stayed put. She kept crying, but wouldn’t step any closer to that door.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then it all broke loose. She dropped to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably until she just couldn’t breathe.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That sweet, broken child heard the bathroom door open, but couldn’t stand up, run to her gramma, or even stop weeping. She felt the soft, gentle hand of the woman who’d practically raised her, the woman she’d always thought of as her real mom, stroking her heaving shoulders, and her hair. Then she heard her grandmother’s voice. “You just have to understand, Sweetheart; your grandfather doesn’t mean to get this way; it’s just the liquor.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“And anyway, he’s a doctor, or we wouldn’t have this nice house, or any food to eat.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli, still crumpled over herself, stared at the floor by the blue glow of the nightlight, watching a big drop of her gramma’s blood spread out through the shared pooling of their tears.<br clear="ALL" style="page-break-before: always;" /> </span></div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-53467006803795143512011-08-06T14:21:00.000-07:002011-08-06T14:21:46.990-07:00“Entertaining Naked People” Excerpt.<style>
@font-face {
font-family: "Cambria";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
</style> <br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <u>Blown Tires in Heaven.</u></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">When my siblings and I were kids, Mom and Dad used to take us on educational daytrips. One time they loaded up the station wagon and headed us off to picnic at Valley Forge, but Dad missed the first exit. A truck with a blown tire blocked the second. We ended up spending the night in Gettysburg, missing school the next day. For me, it was a wondrous, but agonizing place. Over the years, they took us to antique homes, forts, and buildings. In some, I tapped into lives that had been lived and maybe lost there. They just kind of reached out and grabbed me. But in Gettysburg I felt buried in the deaths. Even at full noon and a hundred years later, the fields were dark with the dying; strewn with groaning agony; with unending hours spent waiting for death to finally get around to these skinny, patched kids who felt so very, very far from home. It tore at me from everywhere, along with their terror, naiveté, and a palpable conviction of glory. As though in this bloody clash there was no right or wrong because each side had God firing, stabbing, and slashing right beside them. Maybe in some awful way, I thought, He was.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We spent the next night in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. My pain was so intense there I could have found my way blindfolded to where they’d hanged John Brown. I knew nothing of his history; I’d never heard of the man, and didn’t know why they’d killed him; but his rage ate away at me for months.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In some old homes I felt fragments of lives lived, meals cooked, of babies carried, but then all too soon buried out back somewhere. I felt their bonding through adversities, and the hard-edged love that grew out of that. I felt their resignation as much as anything, and knew those times must have been awfully hard. Endless days of labor that beat at their bodies; weary evenings of trying to hang on. I felt people sitting around in dim light and heavy air.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Feelings chewed through me with such sweetly sad intensity. Like lingering nostalgia for days I couldn’t quite recall. Old lives and times seemed wistful, more real, alive, more steeped in buried sweetness than the lost and broken sadness of my now.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I took on the pain of others like festering sores draining the spirit out of me. At home, I hid in my room from the clash of emotions my family could hide only from themselves. When my arms grew long and strong enough I started pulling myself up onto the roof where I could lie back under the stars, praying for their vast peace to drain off some of the hurt.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sometimes it worked; they welcomed me in among them and nestled me closer to God. Everything dissolved into pure, aching sweetness, beyond the furthest reaches of time and thought. How vast love can be when we don’t hack off a chunk and hoard it, call it ours, or chain it to someone; when it isn’t love <i>for</i> some thing or some one, just love.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But love got me trapped in their pain. If I stopped to ponder that, though, if I thought about anything at all, I’d get stuck in my head again, where all that beauty couldn’t reach me. If an annoying itch sent me back hunting for my body, then that was all it took; I’d chosen the physical, mental, emotional world over that which belonged only to the soul, and I’d locked myself back out of heaven.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I was only allowed brief visits, and couldn’t bring the bliss back with me. Trying to hold onto that soul piercing, excruciating sweetness was like tearing my heart apart; but getting dumped back into this pain-wracked world of anxieties, barriers, and failure was like it had died.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">So night after night, as my family watched TV, I holed up at the other end of the house with my books. Deep in bedroom shadows, mythic heroes fought on, through pain and desperation, searching for what only they could see, as something unyielding cried out from their souls. I crawled through each passage with fingers and tears as King Arthur battled onward and inward, conquering and ceding back, sacrificing everyone and everything he cared about, driven like a madman to the point of self-immolation, ever trying to slash his way free. </span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">For a tale of heroism, that one sure reeked of darkness. Heroes are supposed to be born for the job, all shiny clean and courageous. They eat their vegetables, thank their moms, and cross themselves twice saying grace. Good is good, evil is evil, and bad guys ride black horses. But with Arthur’s gang, everyone seemed to be thrashing against something ugly and menacing hanging back in his own shadows. Something painfully personal.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the real world, obedience was pounded into our butts; discipline nailed each to the cross of his own life. I fought so hard to just shut up and buckle under, but I just couldn’t confine myself to this tiny and hurting world everybody else lived in. It got so it was like St. Michael slaying the dragon, with me as both the saint, and his dragon.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My heroes followed some deep hidden light through dark and horrid times, and I knew what drove them; I had touched that light.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’d also tasted the darkness.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As I knotted myself over each grave, heroic tale, I felt it clawing free.</span></div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-30537243744413842992011-08-06T07:46:00.000-07:002011-08-09T10:56:25.465-07:00Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-44555280382502197812011-08-05T14:18:00.000-07:002011-08-05T14:19:05.844-07:00Chapter 3 - Memoirs. - What Lies Beyond the Grave?<style>
@font-face {
font-family: "ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Lucida Grande";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
</style> <br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt;">From the</span></u><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"> I Ching:</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">It is early morning and work begins.</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">The mind has been closed to the outside world in sleep;</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin: 0in 0.7in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">now its connections to the world begin again.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; margin-right: 0.7in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic"; font-size: 16pt;">Chapter Three.</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt; text-align: center;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";">Seeds Take Root Where the Light Can’t Reach.</span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 15pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Our front window looked out across a blood-drenched sidewalk onto a life-sized war hero, sword raised. Baltimore was “The City of Memorials.” Its people treasured the honorable, the heroic, and the unholy. I found all three in one graveyard that first week.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I should have been unpacking with Gary and Wadlow, but the fading light was calling and only I heard it. Weighted down since childhood with a dread of trying anything new, I needed to walk off some of that fermenting angst of beginning a new life in our first apartment.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My last night home, my family had watched “The Ten Commandments.” Dad had wanted us to feel The Lord’s Mighty Power as I headed off to take the world on. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Instead, I saw myself jumping blindly into the hands of that same Divine Overseer who’d forced Moses to take a life or death stand against the pharaoh, wander the desert for forty years, everybody abusing him, but then, after all that, told him, “Mood swing! Everyone can go in but you. You just have to stand outside and watch.” And that’s not even counting all those poor innocent horses He drowned. God was killing children right and left, but then told Moses he shalt not kill. Told Moses to lie to the Pharaoh, but then made it a commandment not to. Some great, inspiring flick that turned out to be. I was going to need a much kinder God to pray to, and one that was easier to understand. And if a bush started mumbling anywhere near me, I was just going to walk right on by.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Someone had to have gotten a bit drunk around some of those campfires and bollixed up a few of those stories. That Old Testament God seemed mean, violent, arbitrary, and vindictive, and now here I was, betting my whole life on His good graces.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And yet, I’d known a God who’d called to me gently as a child, soothed me when I’d felt lost, which had been pretty much most of the time. That magic spirit I’d known when tiny and innocent had loved Nature and all life. This wasn’t a God who’d go flooding us all out, even snuggly puppies, letting only one man build a boat. He wouldn’t make bets with the devil on how much we’d put up with. He wouldn’t have us swallowed by a great fish and keep us in there for days with nothing to eat, and no one for company but a puppet.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or maybe that was a different story. Anyway, that God I’d loved since toddlerhood still hummed to me sometimes through the stars. He was everywhere, looking out from inside every one of us, but I still couldn’t find Him. Native Americans had sung and danced with this vast, very personal spirit. They’d honored their brotherhood with all life. So we’d dead-marched them off along the Trail of Tears and nailed crosses over their bunks in Bible schools, beating them until they accepted the fact that God only liked white folks.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But I knew He cried for them, too. Did He still whisper to them through their campfires? Could I at least listen in? I knew He was out there, waiting, but somehow I’d shut Him out; the God I loved would never have abandoned me.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Moving into our new place with two art students from back home, I found myself just standing, unmoving, in the middle of the floor, first in one room, then another, staring into emptiness, as the other guys hustled their clothes, toiletries, and school supplies in around me, grabbing all the best corners and drawers. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Finally, I just headed out and started walking. With a pair of socks in one hand that I set down somewhere and forgot to bring back.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I went for a long, meandering pilgrimage, sucked forward through emptiness. Along toward dank of evening, I came upon a crumbled knot of graves crying out with their neglect. Sagging marble steps led up into a sealed church as it gathered the twilight in around it. I never feel quite settled into a place until I’ve found a church with more spirit than words. It doesn’t even have to be a happy, hopeful spirit; I just need to know there’s more to it than stone walls, wood benches, and empty sermons. I need to feel clearly that God knows it’s there. That I could catch a whiff of Him inside, a taste of His simmering compassion. Feel Him sharing their sorrows, and feeding their joys. That He could find me there if He ever really wanted to.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Even if the doors are chained, and I’m locked out; I just need to know I can still feel Him.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I leaned against the cast-iron grit of huge gates heavy-laden with age and unanswered sorrows. Beyond them, ancient, worn markers were strewn through the weeds. I’ve always been drawn to untended graves. I grieve for those whose loved ones haven’t visited for generations. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">One monstrous gate, hanging crooked on its hinges, wedged in hard and heavy against the other. I heaved against it until I could barely scrape through to stand amid scattered marble, bleached white, and crumbled to powder. You could tell they’d once been engraved in ancient script, but could no longer make out who’d been settled in beneath them, or when. I paid respect at each grave, knowing nothing of the lives they’d lived, or of who had once missed them. By now, even their beloved had been long buried and forgotten.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">One slab had been laid across supports like a bench. Its vague, lingering worm trails, once honoring somebody’s life, merits, and worth, had been ground away by Baltimore’s uncaring rains. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A few yards farther in, tiny mausoleum sheds interspersed among the weeds. I edged between them and worked my way along a gutter, stepping down onto a flat stone wedged under one end to hold back erosion. Lifting my foot up from it, I saw words: “Age six months.” The child hadn’t even been named.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My heart shriveled. I’d stepped on the stone of an infant who’d never had a fair shot at life. Now I was disrespecting her in death.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">More slabs and blocks trailed around behind, some from the 1700’s. One man, way in the back, inside a tiny fence scraggy with weeds, had apparently fought in the Revolution.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">More tiny mausoleums faced the rear wall of the church; one with horrific carvings of skulls. One held, I vaguely recall, an early Maryland governor, or some such dignitary.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The back of the church was raised up from the ground. Tossed in among its supports were what looked like moldering bones.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My heart ached so much for these poor souls, neglected even after death, I turned away to head back, but managed only a few burdened steps.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I drew up abruptly and froze.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">An old, worn marker, standing off by itself, grabbed at my heart.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was Edgar Alan Poe.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He fit in so perfectly there. Maybe I did, too. His sorrow and pain ate through me as I stood there, head lowered. Can’t even death let us step away from our darkness? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then, it was like he was scratching a warning into the dirt with his finger, and like he meant it specifically for me. Each of us has to work out his own salvation, he seemed to say, not wait around for sermons to wash him clean; for death or drugs to close his eyes. We don’t dare sit around expecting God to come roaring in with fresh troops to drive away the darkness we’ve walled our own souls up inside; buried alive like some of Poe’s characters.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I meandered home slowly that night, through the dark of a strange bloodstained city.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Poking through death and birth, I suspected they really weren’t so very different. Each was a matter of squeezing under pressure from dark into light. We need to be forced out, or we’d never let go. We don’t want to leave the confinement of everything we’ve learned to count on. Or hide behind. So how else can we be drawn out into that vast bright unknown?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">What was I eking out into in Baltimore? Darkness, or Light? Or were they the same?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Approaching our apartment, my heart gripped up higher in my chest. I took mincing steps around dark brown ripples soaking the concrete in a wide spill out front.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As Gary tells it, someone had murdered a drug dealer. He says cops with clipboards had questioned us in our living room as we were moving in, but I hadn’t told them I’d gone out to break into a graveyard.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He says two black guys showed up at our place the next night, looking for drugs, and had felt sorry for us. “You don’t got shit!” they’d said. Not a TV, not one soda in the fridge, not a sock that we hadn’t worn thin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I don’t remember any of that. Just the darkness of that unfading stain. It marred the sidewalk for months, maybe years. No one could scour it away.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I didn’t even try.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was all that was left of someone.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I still carry that in my heart.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There had to be more to life and death than just that.</span></div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-18738110051017933662011-08-05T14:14:00.000-07:002011-08-05T14:14:44.188-07:00Chapter 2 - Memoirs - Vietnam.<style>
@font-face {
font-family: "ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Lucida Grande";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
</style> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 2.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span></span><u><span style="font-size: 10pt;">From</span></u><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"> Light on the Path:</span></u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">“<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">When you have found the beginning of the way</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">the star of your soul will show its light;</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">and by that light you will perceive how great is the darkness in which it burns.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic"; font-size: 16pt;">Chapter Two.</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";">Blood Makes Rich Fertilizer.</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dinner chat wasn’t as joyful as it had been once upon a time. Voices were quieter, more subdued. My brother and sisters took turns. They passed food sometimes in silence, in thoughtful pauses, or in pauses as they tried not to think. For long hours in the living room, Sharon thumbed through her childhood catechisms and Bible tales until their colors faded and dulled to thin grays. Kath put hers back on the shelf, where it got buried behind her Nancy Drew collection. Tim was kicked out of high school for cutting too many days. </span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I set up an altar in my bedroom, placing prayer books and my favorite pictures of saints on it. In a Philadelphia church I stood by the glass coffined body of St. John Neumann, praying for all my soul was worth. I bought a tiny crumb of his backbone and positioned it reverently on my altar beside the crucifix my grandmother had given me when I’d gone deaf for a few months, and the little rosary in a plastic pack I’d carried to church every Sunday back when I’d still worn red clip-on bowties. There were prayer cards from my grandfather’s funeral, and those of dead neighbors, like the little girl up the street who’d lost her battle against a blood disease she wasn’t even old enough to spell.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We spent way too much time looking down into coffins, never quite understanding why.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the center of the altar stood a ceramic Mary in a lovely blue dress Grandma and I had painted sitting side-by-side at her tiny table. Mary had the most beatific expression on her young, untroubled face; a smile so soft and gentle you could disappear into it; especially by candlelight, wisps of incense smelling as I imagined a Tibetan monastery might. The St. Christopher’s medal my uncle had worn landing fighters on carriers in World War II lay at her feet. Crystals from my rock collection poked in along the walls in case they really did offer some kind of healing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Visits to New York art museums were diverted into pilgrimages to St. Pat’s Cathedral, praying for hours, lighting candles, and leaving what change I could spare.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The frayed and gritty edges of everyone’s world were worried away by neighbors you’d never noticed until the air spilled over with the tragedy of their loss. How the war had taken them or their children; killed them, lost them, torn off body parts, sent them back brain-fried.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or, in the best of stories, trailing heaps of pain-wrenched glory. Somehow, though, even those tales of heroism, those dim lights you searched for through psychological and spiritual famine, groping desperately through all that gloom, even those somehow seemed to just ping off the surface of the pain they carried inside them. They sounded so defensive; like the good parts were mostly just make-believe. Friends of friends poured out each loved one’s heroism with swelled chest, but always followed the script, those same exact words, every time exactly the same, as though they never dared vary one single word, go wandering off, thinking things through. Tales fell from hearts in heavy, wet tones of grief and confusion.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Even when rare moments of relative calm and clarity crept briefly through our days, they crawled in with head hanging through that most familiar of all tunnels, our sense of loss. Each new friend seemed only to step in and announce himself with his last breath. Why hadn’t we loved him earlier when there had been more time?</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That overriding sense of loss was the crusted-over peephole through which you viewed the world. Dreading life’s relentless advance, but knowing your locks could never keep it out.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Jack down the street was a gunner in Nam. Chopper took some flak. Forced ’em down, props all knocked loose and ridin’ low. Stood up into it unloading a wounded buddy. Lousy time to be 6’4”. First week there. You remember Jack. You went to school with his sister. Only a year or two ahead of you. Died a man’s death. God-awful how it always takes the good ones.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yeah, I remembered Crazy Jack. Used to steal my towel in the locker room. Cops picked him up three, four times for drinking and stealing cars before he was old enough they could hold him. Even rumors of a stick-up, but you know small towns. Joined the military to sidestep a prison rap, or so they said. And suddenly he’s my hero? Yeah, I remembered Jack. Jack and a dozen Jacks like him.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Joe Whatsisname. Almost dated your sister. You remember Joe. Went completely bald when they blew up his brother and sent home the pieces. Joe … Joe … Uhhh - You remember Joe. Not a hair on his head. Only fifteen. That war grabs everybody. Even ones’t don’t go.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah, well, I know a guy who …”</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As the late 60’s gave in and died, and I trudged my way through my first years in college, even the old folks were growing up. Their World War II glories clouded over. We’d all been dragged out of our warm, snuggly innocence.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">People seemed infested by life, that dire contagion, burdened by the stifling weight of it, until we could only force shallow, labored breaths. Each new day was just an old one playing through again, a dust-laden August, a storm always riding right on top of you that never quite cut loose a hellin’. It settled into your joints until they grew achy, too heavy to lift; tarring all hearts with a dark, heavy plaque. Days stuck together as walking and breathing grew tedious. Until even my bubbly sister couldn’t offer up a smile without a shadow lurking inside it. We trudged through life like molasses as our mighty nation killed our sons and broke our buddies, defending itself from skinny barefoot farmers with sticks, in some rice swamps, somewhere on the other side of existence, where you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Some lost tiny nowhere that hadn’t even existed when you’d been a kid; when the world had been innocent and untainted. Back when Father Knew Best, Beaver’s mom fed his dad all the answers, and Annie Oakley never had to shoot to kill.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My dad, Tiny Tim, the fat jolly Irishman, had always been too big to buy his clothes in stores. When we’d been tiny, he’d have Mom make sports shirts for the six of us out of the gaudiest prints they could find, the females condemned to matching shorts. Newspaper photos from around the country showed us standing out at Kiwanis conventions; my skinny arms poking out of some grotesque print of green doughnuts, or purple and orange palm trees, all six of us dressed exactly the same. Dad loved the attention, with his purple station wagon, gaudy sports shirts, his booming Irish laughter, and infectious joviality.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He still wore the shirts. Few people saw them. He lost more and more time on the couch, his socks drooping, his face hanging low as he fought hard against his weight, against smoking; and, secretly, against a world that no longer seemed decent, no longer made sense; though he would never, ever, ever say a word against our always-honorable American government.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Two years later, after his funeral, after I’d dropped out of school and he’d died within a month, a broken man, Mom would find fingerprints dragged along the hall, as though he’d groped his way out to us, blinded by pain, but then straightened up and put on a brave face.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mom had been hit by lightning as a child and been terrified of thunder ever since. Dad had found her cowering down behind a bed one time when we were bitty, during a loud, and terrifying storm. He’d told her to buck up and not scare the children.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Our personal terrors were not to be put on display.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In my two years at the local college, if somehow I managed to keep my grades just above flushable, it wasn’t from any excess of confidence, competence, or zeal. Mainly my academic scores kept me afloat, though not really kicking very hard. I still sucked at Color & Design Fundamentals, expressing myself best through black & white photos and paintings; in ink and pencil drawings that sometimes writhed in silent screams like the deeply troubled work of Kathe Kollwitz. Eighteen years later, my wife would take me aside at public events to berate me: “You’re wearing blue pants with green socks again. You embarrass me. You can’t ever get anything right.” Apparently I was colorblind. Before our next event, I’d try holding up pants, asking her which was the black pair and which the navy. She’d shrivel me with a look of disdain that would reek its way through to my core, but say nothing to help.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charli would wage a long, bitter war to grind into my bones that the world was your cashbox. That faith was a childish weakness, a pathology best torn out harshly. That bright illusions grow up into disillusionment. But back in college during the years of the Vietnam War, I was still trying to see the world as an expression of light, without all the shadows, evils and grays. I was still trying to paint with colors; still holding God as the center of everything, trusting that God and goodness would always be enough. It had to be enough; it’s all I had.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My friend Yorke said the universe demanded more of us and we should demand more of ourselves. He stood out from any crowd, trimmed his Van Dyck to a finely honed point, kept his Ben Franklin glasses balanced on the tip of his patrician nose. He parted his hair down the middle like a 1920’s banker. Yorke cut a trim, sophisticated, if intentionally anachronistic appearance in double-breasted linen vests and silk jackets, often dressing in pinstripes. He drove a Ford Model-T with a New York cabbie’s license from the 40’s pinned to its visor.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He and his twin, Gordon, were all but indistinguishable from the neck up, but Gordon dressed more late twentieth century conservative. Neither would wear t-shirts or shorts, but Gordon could have blended in among Republicans at a luncheon discussing how to lower wages, take the vote away from darker races, and stamp out labor rights.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yorke was political. I wasn’t. It hurt both of us deeply that soldiers were killing and being killed, but he tried to do something about it. He tried to stir up some campus activism, signed on for what few and meager protests a tiny handful of students managed to mount. There were never any marches, no sit-ins, nobody held signs; Bucks County was too conservative for anything like that. The fires of his passions singed him through to the threadbare fibers of his soul. The world, as it was, hurt him deeply.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My heart knew the same pain, but it wasn’t my nature to make a fuss, to stand up for or against anything. I think that kept us from growing closer, Yorke and I. His passions were more in-your-face. He lived them, despite getting blocked, abused, and insulted at every turn. I kept mine locked away, and he could never deal with that in me. I shouldn’t have been able to either.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yorke closed himself off in a garage with his beloved Model-T one bright and sunny spring afternoon. He turned on the engine, and died. </span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mom spent that hour searching <i>our</i> house, miles away; sniffing corners, asking if we smelled gas. She’d never met Yorke, he lived in another town, but she, too, could be painfully empathetic.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He wouldn’t talk with me again for years after that, though his ghost would continue to visit his brother in their Ford. I wouldn’t have a chance to understand, to put things to rest, until one evening, six years later, when I caught<span> </span>him slipping away from a dark occult library and he’d finally stop in to explain things. But in the years immediately following his death, I still hurt for that resolution, carrying his fatal act of violence against himself in my fibers and tissues like a deep and very personal wound I didn’t dare pick at. I only knew that a friend hadn’t been able to take any more. That he’d taken the world’s gathering ugliness out on himself.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some shared pain in me somehow understood. Some pain I didn’t dare stir.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As a photography major, I liked experimenting: smearing lenses, cracking or melting films in chemical baths; surprising myself with unpredictable special effects. One portrait of Yorke came out looking like he was dissolving into clouds. I was never able to repeat that effect. Months later he did just that.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">His mom bought that photo at a student art exhibition. I never entered another show. Now and then I managed an impressive drawing or photo, and somehow squeaked through. Teachers managed to pull a few strings to let me tag along with four other kids who’d been accepted to an art college in another state; another world. On my own for the very first time as cities tore themselves apart in protests and race riots where I could be caught hiding the wrong political convictions, or wearing the wrong color skin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I was terrified.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And as always, I hurt for my dad. He’d suffered enough even if he hadn’t let his family see it. He’d driven himself into debt to put his pathologically sensitive son through useless, impractical art lessons where I poured out passions that no one could see. If I didn’t make it, I’d fail him again, drag him down into my own morose sense of futility.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He had once tried to teach me survival skills, pushing me to try selling pencils or calendars door-to-door that some customer had stiffed him on. I was only about seven. At each door I’d just hung my head, mumbled, and walked away.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At most houses, I hadn’t even rung the bell.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’d been born without a thread of aggression, couldn’t force anything on anyone; could never put my own needs first. So, failing art, starvation seemed my only moral choice.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I didn’t belong in a world like that anyway.<br clear="ALL" style="page-break-before: always;" /> </span></div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-46895954585504949982011-02-03T15:24:00.000-08:002011-02-03T19:55:01.851-08:00Losing Everything by Loving too Hard.<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></b></span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">From my as yet unpublished autobiography,</span></b></span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">"Entertaining Naked Folks":</span></b></span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><u><br />
</u></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt;">From</span></u><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"> Light on the Path:</span></u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">“… the light of the world … is beyond you,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">because when you reach it you have lost yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">It is unattainable, because it forever recedes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">You will enter the light, but you will never touch the Flame.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic"; font-size: 16pt;">Chapter Sixteen.<o:p></o:p></span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";">Julie.<o:p></o:p></span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie and I met when we “happened to” move to Olcott, an occult center in a tiny town, on the same day but from different parts of the country. It was St. Patty’s Day; a traditional day of joy, magic, and bizarre good fortune. Of leprechauns, pots of gold, and wicked curses put on those who try to own what’s not rightfully theirs.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We saw each other for the first time at a staff meeting that afternoon, across a circle of chairs on an outside patio. She’d gotten lost in her unpacking and showed up late, taking a seat directly across from mine. She was strikingly beautiful. Her soft, natural grace communicated class, intelligence, and that humble kind of confidence only the gifted can afford. Dora, the center president, was listening to other residents pipe in about purloined laundry soap and needing extra help in the kitchen. Then this stunning beauty walked up, took a good look at me, and paused. Cool spring breezes refreshed my spirits as they stirred her sunny reddish hair and the small silk scarf she’d tied so tastefully, almost casually around her neck. Then she sat down, still watching. I treasure the photo I shot of her in her green blouse our first minutes together. She’s studying me with such focused intent.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In a matter of days we opened our lives and bared our souls to each other. I started sneaking over to her building, then creeping back to my own just before sunrise. We could make love three times while drifting off to sleep all entwined, each trying to dig ever deeper into the other’s embrace, and soul. We’d wake up, chat about the dreams we had just dreamed together, then make love again. She’d snuggle back into her covers as I headed home.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She treasured long afternoon soaks in hot, scented bubble baths as I spread out my red checked shirt on her grass-green carpet like a picnic cloth, set out candles and plates. She could soak for an hour if she felt like it, but eventually she’d climb out, a rich, deep scarlet, her flesh plumped with moisture. I’d kiss away each lingering drop of blessed dew from her warm, pulsing flesh, let those caught in her pubic hair linger on my tongue. We’d settle down onto the floor, piecing through an intimate naked picnic and luxurious exploration. We made love with deep caring, and passionate appreciation, spent hours absorbed in honoring and treasuring each rich and wondrous nuance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Olcott was a vegetarian, no smoking, no drinking; just meditating, doing paperwork, and studying kind of place. Once a month I’d have to sneak across the street to a Burger King to have it my way. Sometimes others would come along. Julie might ask for a whopper with extra sauce and onions, hold the burger. Sometimes they charged extra for that, sometimes they’d have to call in a manager first, and sometimes we’d get it with a side order of consternation.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">One night, she snuck a bottle of champagne onto the grounds, though we’d never be disrespectful enough to carry it inside. We sat off under a canopy of trees, taking sips to toast each other. As we drew deeper into communion and caring, she shared every ache in her heart. It was a sweet, pain-wracked, unforgettable night.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Everyone in her Tennessee family was named T. J. Crenna: Tyler James Crenna, Tamara Jean, Tara Jenna Crenna … She sobbed her heart out through horrendous tales of her drunk and raging father forcing his tiny daughters to their knees. He’d held a knife to their shrieking, weeping mama’s throat, threatening to kill her in front of the girls. He’d driven every lesson home with horrifying, graphic descriptions of what he’d do to them if they didn’t mind him.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Somehow she grew up. She fled to college and married a football coach who abused her, told her she was insane when she didn’t want to be used in ways he used her. She bared her soul to me that night about imprisonment in the role of perfect housewife and token arm candy at faculty gatherings. About that Christian Tennessee coach telling her if, when, and under what conditions he <i>might</i> allow her to have friends.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie was fighting to escape the control of abusive men, so I knew I could never hold her back from anyone who wanted to love her, just as long as he cared for her gently. It would hurt terribly if I wasn’t enough for her and she needed to fly free, but nothing could be sweeter than the love I felt inside that blessed pain.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She cried streaks of mascara into my handkerchief and the shoulder of my white cable knit sweater that night. I never washed either again. I’d carry them around the country in a gift box with a pair of shoes she left behind when she moved on. With a menu, and a receipt from a hotel we stayed in when we took a trip together. A small collection of cards and notes and I Love You’s in her handwriting. A napkin with a luscious red kiss. A matchbox and a small incense burner. Through the decades that followed, whatever strange worlds grabbed hold and dug in, I could always anchor my heart in our love.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But even that night had to end. When I walked back into my building, Randy, a senior department head, was waiting just inside the door.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He was a great-looking young man with eyes like a hypnotist in some over-the-top 1920’s film. He got to know every even halfway attractive young lady in his apartment their first night there, but I sensed he took it as an affront that the most beautiful one had settled for me, though she would definitely have cramped his style.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I drifted in, smudged with mascara and floating on tenderness. He tried to shrivel me with a glare of rebuke. But I was in love and walked right on past.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He made a point of walking downstairs to use my photocopier the next morning. He tried several times to berate me for mixing alcohol with psychic development, but I kept blowing him off with smart-ass remarks about how I’d somehow manage to survive if my chakras spun backwards for a while.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Launching one final condescending glare, he strode out, willing himself to appear nonchalant and unbent. Inside he was marching on my head, grinding my face into gravel. Pitying me for my vast inferiority.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie and I rented a car to spend a weekend in Evanston. In and around Chicago, a couple of guys calling themselves </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Lettuce Entertain You, Inc.,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> had opened a few theme restaurants, like </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Jonathan Livingston Seafood,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Lawrence of Oregano</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">. We ate at </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Fritz, That’s It</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, where the menu sat in the middle of each table, wrapped around a toilet paper roll. I kept the whole roll for a while, but eventually just flattened out the menu and put it in my box of treasures under a handkerchief and sweater laced with mascara and tears.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We toured Fermilab Nuclear Testing facilities, where they were working out the underpinnings of our </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">material</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> world. On the other end of reality, we visited the Baha’i temple with its nine lovely gardens honoring nine great world teachers and the truths they brought. Progressive Revelation, they called it. Moses brought some of the truth, Jesus revealed more. Mohammed and the Buddha taught what the world was ready for in their own times and cultures. Sermons from any religion could be offered there, any holy songs sung, any great teacher, wisdom, or deity shared.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I sat in its center, exploding with passion like never before. Twining columns carried my eyes and spirit ever upward through an intricate calligraphy skylight as I flooded over with tears of joy, my heart and soul bursting with love. I’d spent my whole life searching for that oneness everywhere, in pain and in beauty and sometimes both at once. In starry skies, and sermons, and pictures of Jesus. It all felt so vast and yet so personal. So complete and intact, yet formless and flowing everywhere. Never had I felt my whole Being so alive, and yet numbed by the vastness and beauty of God’s love.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That night, in our hotel room, Julie’s tears of joy tore through my heart as we burned with a conflagration of bliss. And I knew that even genital love could be God love.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In July came the curtain incident. Raised in an era when women did all the housework while men mowed lawns and shoveled snow; I could keep things clean and tidy, but couldn’t sew. I barely knew which end of the needle to thread. After moving into a tiny room at Olcott with no door I’d bought a spring-loaded curtain rod and about seven feet of textured green material. I’d tried to sew a seam to slip the rod through, but after a long bout of back-aching, tongue-straining labor, had nothing but a big green maze of puckers and sags. So I fixed it to the rod in a ridiculous, wavering, only very remote semblance of a seam with paperclips, safety pins, adhesive tape, duct tape, packing tape, and whatever else I could scrounge up. When a section came loose, I’d go hunting for another kind of tape.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Five months into our romance, Julie uncovered her sewing machine and offered to finally and properly hem this poor frayed mutant with some dignity.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And so, one hellacious hot day in the cruel heart of summer, as I was wearing a sleeveless shirt, I grabbed the material off the rod and wadded it up under my arm, trotted downstairs and over to her building. By the time I got there, I had every kind of tape, adhesive, and scunge known to man, melted in wads through my underarm hair.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It took days of scrubbing with Borax and printing press cleaner to get it all out.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But Julie did a beautiful hem! And I got a lot of fine hearty laughs and </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">Oh, you poor baby</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s over the armpit mess every time I told another pal my classic tale of idiocy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I still haven’t learned to sew, but I’m more careful now with what I wear when I’m carrying tape.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Later that summer, at our Lake Geneva convention, Julie went sailing with Randy. They capsized and she turned blue in the icy waters. She rushed to me afterward and the horror of it consumed me. We’d all nearly lost her; I felt so helpless and small.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hours later, Randy gave me a look that could only be described as smug.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Inside my tiny cellar of worthlessness sprouted seeds of contempt and terror. Had he taken her out at least partly to get me back for slighting him? Was he showing me she’d still come when he summoned? Was whatever panic she had suffered less important to him than reigning uncontested and supreme?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I saw more clearly than ever before that she wasn’t mine and never could be. I would always carry the love; I could never lose that; but you can’t own what needs to fly free.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Not if you love her, you can’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She took a couple of trips with mutual male buddies. I sent her off with love and wished her joy. They’d been good friends for both of us, and I’m sure their time together was innocent, but even if it hadn’t been, she was not mine to control.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In our few months together, I threw not only my whole heart at her, but crammed every tid and wittle of my existence into worshiping each vibration of her being; into praise to the heavens for the very fact that she existed; until not even the wildest drug-induced dream could have held all that passion. Certainly, no delicate beauty seeded in a sadistic childhood deserved confinement in such hero worship.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She’d been imprisoned in a horrifying childhood had escaped only through marriage. Then her husband had crammed her into a tight locked box of dutiful wife and underling. Of backdrop at social events with </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">his</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> colleagues only. Where had Julie ever been fully Julie?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She’d finally escaped by fleeing to Olcott, where I’d bound her up in romance and adoration.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie started spending more and more time with a close friend who called herself Mike and had no real use for men. I could feel a distance settling between us, growing jealous of every lost moment, but still cherished her too much to grip tightly. She’d been squeezed by too many men, and too harshly; so I could only release her as gently as I could manage through tears she never saw.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We still had many wonderful moments, but I wanted nothing in my future but Julie, while she was just beginning to open to life. I tried to step out of her way by shutting myself down so she could grab more of everything else. Each moment together we came more alive, while slowly a mute part of me was fading.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She took to spending days on end at Mike’s house. Mike encouraged her to move out and take up her education again. Julie’s dream-sapping husband had stolen her post-graduate college career. He’d let her finance his, but then reneged on his promise to return the favor.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Once Julie set her heart on that, so did I. She headed off to Kansas City under the care, protection, and generosity of a good-looking doctor, and no matter how hard I tried to let her go with blessings, I wept.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She sent me cassette tapes from Kansas City. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot; picturing what we’ve had together. But for right now, I’m experiencing things I’ve never had a chance to before: Being alone, living alone, going to bed and getting up whenever I feel like, and just sort of keeping company with myself. It’s giving me a chance to look inside, to be with my own thoughts more. To write, and read, listen to music; to dance, and cook, and think.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Even doing eighty driving out here, I was in an altered state. I completely lost track of hours at a time. I felt like part of the landscape, the car, part of everything. It was a vast new feeling of wholeness, and quietness.” I wanted her to live in that wholeness.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then, watching “Sybil” again had stirred up a lot of her old hurts. A little girl personality, Peggy, imagines the doctor holding her, but then starts crying. “She just can’t believe,” Julie told me on tape, “anyone could ever really care for her. That they don’t just want something, or want to make her feel good, but could actually care for her.” Julie wept, then, and it tore me apart.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She said, “I guess that’s still a real big part of me. Not believing I could be loved. My God, Honey, you show me so much beautiful love and affection, and I can feel it. I know it’s real; I feel that same love for you. But all this pain, this crippling, self-blinding pain is from years and years and years before I met you. It’s still there, and it still hurts so terribly.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tears I heard but couldn’t touch ate right through me. That such a sweet, gentle being would have all those years and abuses to work through. My God! I wanted to take her in, and rock her; let her feel that no one ever need hurt her again. From now on, there’d be two of us there to stand up against all the world’s bullies.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But she needed to face the first of them alone. The woman I adored, the only one who had ever completed me, was so far away and might never come back. And yet she needed that more than anything my love could have offered by holding her close inside it, letting her know I’d always be there. She still had to heal from those who hadn’t been.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She had the courage to step outside the protection and power of our romance to take that on alone. I could only love and admire her all the more for that.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie had had a real catharsis watching Sybil. She wanted to dig up, explore, unfold every bit of herself. She’d taken my chart with her to an astrologer, who had started by telling her I had creative talent, but things I’d been born with would keep me from being recognized for it. That I’d be doing a lot of traveling, working with different people and moving on. She told Julie we were each exactly what the other wanted, “But that I have a lot of trouble trusting you,” I heard her poor, choking voice tell me. “I know exactly what she meant. I always have trouble trusting in our relationship. It’s too perfect; too beautiful. Beauty this bright, love like yours can’t be mine. The glamour of our romance, the beauty of what we have; it couldn’t last.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Ohhh, I want to make you mine! To show you I’m the very best for you; that you could never like anyone as much as me. But then I meet a beautiful, brilliant, very special woman, and I think, Wow, I can see Bob with somebody like that; really being happy, and I feel like I’m growing, just thinking of you with someone wonderful.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I guess I’m trying to work through to where I can release you for that. I want you to have that. – If you <u>want</u> it. You’ve just begun to come alive in your sexuality; your confidence. Your lack of confidence had always held you down before. But now to limit yourself to just me might deny you a chance to meet other people who could show you who you are. I see so much in you, Honey! Sometimes maybe you think, ‘Well. She’s prejudiced. I’m glad she sees me that way, but that’s not really how I am.’ But if several women could get to know you, you could see common threads. ‘So I must be okay. I must be handsome. I must be a beautiful person…’<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I’m not encouraging anything. I’m just saying it’s important for our future to not deny yourself anything for my sake – for our sake; not at this point, not right now. Something in me says, If he’s given himself freedom to look around, he’s been with other women, and he still chooses me, then I’ll see it’s true, but I’m afraid I might not trust your feelings toward me. That maybe what we have is just so far and above anything you’ve ever had before, I just </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">seem</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> like what you want.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I tried to send her unsullied blessings for every new growth, discovery, joy, and freedom her poor tortured heart could handle, while my own was festering and bleeding out. It all sounded too ominous. My deep-seated “I suck” kept turning her every selfless word against me: See? You weren’t good enough to hold on to such a bright and wondrous beauty! She’s had enough of you and wants to move on. She’s just being polite, trying to let you down easy, but she’s had enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I’ve been thinking about how Ron always got really upset about ‘Why, if we’re married, would you be willing to even talk to another man?’ It really bothered him. So I don’t wanna treat you that way, Honey; I know how that hurts, so I don’t want to hurt you by holding you back. Don’t shut yourself off for me like I had to do. I love you too much to do that to you. I’m still trying to get over his rejection. How I deal with relationships is coming very slowly. Trying to experience different kinds of people, and test out different things.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">There. She said it. She wants to date other men.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I so terribly fear that some time much later, once you and I have committed ourselves, and we’ve more or less moved through this tremendous romantic pull between us, and the glamour, and the excitement; I’m afraid, maybe you’ll start looking around; maybe have an affair or two. I have no moral feelings against that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well, why the hell not? I sure do.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I love you. - So much! I keep searching for seeds of things that might cause problems later on. I shouldn’t … I know that. I also want to give myself the freedom to find out who I am; to become who I might become, not lock myself into any one particular slot too soon.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">How could I listen to all this love, to her self-sacrificing heart, and feel so terribly, terribly hurt? Between the lines, was she was telling me I should find some other woman because she didn’t want to be with me? I couldn’t imagine ever wanting or loving anyone but her.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Oh, Bob, we share so many wonderful things; such a <u>tremendous</u> spiritual oneness. Little bits and essences from past lifetimes we shared are just now coming together; what we have is the heart of our spiritual journey. I keep thinking about our love. And our happiness. And our fun. And our – <u>SEX!</u>” She laughs. “Laughter, and our jokes, and nicknames, and our walks and special places. And laying together, talking, and cuddling closely. And I feel so happy.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Ohhh, I love you, Honey. I pray that you’re happy. You’re so beautiful, Bob! So beautiful! I need you to help me not clutch at you, or wanna possess you. If I can face you being with other women, it’ll be a major breakthrough for me. I’m trying so hard to release you to your own growth; not try to hold on to you in <u>any</u> way out of fear of losing you. You’re able to do that for me in such a major, major way; I have to be able to do that for you, Honey, or we’re not gonna be good for each other.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But I hadn’t let her go; not really. Everything in me was tearing itself apart even trying to.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I love you an <u>awful</u> lot! I’m so glad we’ve met again in this lifetime, too. I’ll never forget meditating together and seeing so very clearly how you’ve been <u>so</u> important to me. In several past lives. So <u>tremendously</u> important to me. Meditating; picturing you so clearly before I even met you. And then, there you were. - We meet again at the perfect moment, when we both need so badly to feel <u>our</u> special love again. And there you were! You <u>know</u> that has to be karmic, Honey. I’m so grateful for you, Honey. I just think you are really … Amazing!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I <u>love you</u> dearly; I wanna be able to do it with the same unpossessiveness, generosity, and compassion you love me with, Honey. Thank you so much for everything.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I <u>love</u> you!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">From “Living in the Light,” by Shakti Gawain: “… I was going through a place that all of us must pass through at one time or another – what the mystics call piercing the veil of illusion. It’s the point where we truly recognize that our physical world is not the ultimate reality and we begin to turn inward to discover the true nature of existence. … we usually feel emotionally that we are hitting bottom, but as we actually hit the bottom, we fall through the trap door into a bright new world – the realm of spiritual truth. Only by moving fully into the darkness can we move through into the light.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I made arrangements to move out and head back to my own part of the country. I started training a new resident, Isaiah, as my replacement. He was learning to run the printing press one morning when my thoughts faded to incoherence and I had trouble forming sentences. I grew confused. Nausea welled up within me that I knew wasn’t my own. I was flooded by an overwhelming realization that Julie was in trouble, hundreds of miles away, and she needed me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I told Isaiah what was going on, said I was going up to my room, and didn’t know when I’d be back.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">By then I was living in a room with a door. I shut it behind me, left the light off, and lay down on the bed. The darkness was deep and rich with her beauty; and with her need.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The nausea hit hard. I drove right through thick, dull colored fog to grab hold of her, buried myself in her stupor and confusion, looking around at nothing solid or recognizable. I knew she was lost, wandering blindly, groping, and frightened; that she didn’t know where she was, and saw me as her anchor. I interpreted that as her being in surgery and starting to slip dangerously away. Fighting off my terror for her, I sent her only positive, supportive, thoughts, telling her with all the focus I could force into my mind and heart, “I’m with you, Honey. I love you. We’ll be fine”. I told her not to panic - to just trust in us, and I’d carry her out of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She responded almost immediately. It felt like we were pushing for the surface of some thick murky lake. I had no sense of time, but it seemed only moments before our heads broke the surface and we were clear. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And then, just as suddenly, it was over. She was safe. It was like awakening from a kind, refreshing nap. For several long minutes I felt around for her, and for that other realm we’d just moved through together, but it had closed me out. I was back in my room. She was gone. I was sure she would now be okay.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Down in the print shop then, Isaiah asked no questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie phoned from Kansas City to thank me that night. We had no money for long distance calls and may not have chatted in weeks. She said she’d had minor surgery; then the doctor had left her alone. She’d tried to get up too soon, had radically over-reacted to the drugs, and fallen to the floor. Disoriented and terrified, she had reached out to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And I’d heard her.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She had felt me come into her.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Once she’d found her way back to the bed, lain down, and felt safe again, she’d thanked me in her heart, and our connection had dissolved. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was sad, but always beautiful to hear her sweet voice again.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But her surgery had been a tubal ligation. So I was supportive, but had to pull away a bit inside. It’s not like anything really changed, and yet everything was different, completely and forever, and all in an instant. That moment, and all time before it, was never coming back.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I knew then that it was all over.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Except for a love beyond all imagining</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";">.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Bold';"><b><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Several Months, and One Chapter Later:</span></span></u></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Bold';"><b><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
</span></u></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></u></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt;">From</span></u><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"> Light on the Path:</span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">“… do not be deceived by your own heart.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">For now, at the threshold, a mistake can be corrected.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;">But carry it on with you and it will grow and come to fruition<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic"; font-size: 10pt;"> or else you must suffer bitterly in its destruction.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic"; font-size: 16pt;">Chapter Eighteen.<o:p></o:p></span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold Italic";">Every Good Flower Deserves Manure.<o:p></o:p></span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Julie found work at a methadone clinic for street addicts. To get to classes, she had to park in a high crime area and walk in, terrified at every step she was about to get mugged. I wanted to pull her out of there, or move in myself, but she wanted to step out into her life, and her terrors, alone. As I tried to send nothing but love, I felt only panic, depression, and loss. Every night, her family’s rejection clawed at her in nightmares. Was it wrong wanting to hold her through her darkest hours until she had nothing to feel in the night but adoration? Did I really have to stand back and let them overwhelm her? When I spoke of marriage; she couldn’t handle the concept; but I couldn’t handle not having her beside me, to love every night through forever. She knew I was hurting, but my way of giving her space was by telling her those were </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">my</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> necessary growing pains and I’d be big enough to handle them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Oh, why couldn’t we just have faced our battles together?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We couldn’t afford phone calls, so we sent the same cassette back and forth. A mere recording of her sweet soft voice told me, “I listened to your tape last night, and I just went crazy. It was like being with you again. These past few weeks without you have been almost impossible.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then why were there so many miles between us? Thin strips of tape could stretch only so far, and we were in so much pain. I had no one to hold. I couldn’t even tell her, “Goodnight, sweet loved one,” and “Good Morning, Lovelight.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I had to hunch over a cheap Radio Shack recorder to learn she was battling anemia and hypoglycemia, having big problems with scholarships, being threatened by addicts. How could anyone just sit through those terrors from so far away? I wanted to fly out there and hug her and find a job for both of us. She said she’d been on the pill for five years and maybe that’s why she was having such health issues. She didn’t ever want to have children, hence the tubal ligation. How could she mention so casually that she was going to find others to have sex with? I loved her terribly, and everything inside me, everything she told me, hurt.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She said “I know how strong your feelings must be about my dating another man. I really respect you so much for how you can consciously direct your feelings into being so unselfish.” How cold and empty it sounded when she put it that way. Who wants to be respected that badly? Who even wants to be conscious? Directing my emotions was exactly what the psychic had told me I had to stop doing for my own sanity. It had never been harder to subdue passions with intellect. It became impossible. I did not want her with another man.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And yet, if she could find even small breaks from what hurt her, I’d destroy myself to set her free.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I didn’t tell her that. I just swallowed all the hurt and told her, “Sure. I understand.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She told me, “That takes an awfully big person.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well, the bigger I was, the more room for all that agony.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I fought the need to slam the tape deck’s off switch as she rubbed it in. “He’s excruciatingly good looking. Very, very handsome. He’s very, very nice. And gentlemanly. And kind. He’s very friendly. I really enjoy dating him when he’s in town. I like him a lot.” I prayed for her every happiness, but it felt like a shrapnel missile to the heart that she could be so casual about sharing the details with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She said, “I’m being asked out quite a lot by a lot of guys, but I’ve refused. My time alone is important to me. I won’t go out just to be going out.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But she was so beautiful they would keep asking. What chance did I have? It was over.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“But with him it’s like a friendship. We talk, and joke, but don’t take each other too seriously. But as for what’s most vitally important to me above all, what you and I share, he just thinks I’m weird, and we’d end up polarized. It’s not based on anything substantial. It will probably just wear itself out.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">My heart, mind and soul were in chaos. The constant thunder of adoration roared through clouds I couldn’t deal with. The tape said, “My feelings toward him are very, very warm. But it’s nowhere near the nature of <i>our</i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">relationship. With you and I there’s a great deal of potential. We share passions, interests, the driving force of our life. So don’t put this in a category with our relationship. I love you dearly, Honey.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I sent her my own tape, trying to play it cool. “I got four letters today from my sweet love. Some real extremes of emotions there. But you don’t need to apologize. You and I have always been able to vent our feelings, and get things out. I’m perfectly okay with that.” But I wasn’t. “If you can’t get them off your chest with <i>me</i>, how could you do it? Whatever it is, write it down; I won’t be hurt.” Was I lying, or dangerously naive?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I could hear her fighting back the anger locked and quivering in her voice as she said, “I get so frustrated by our letters getting to each other so slowly!” I told her, “I know. I know. I’m writing you four or five times a day. Neither of us has money for phone calls, but I couldn’t possibly love you any more. That’s been burning so hard since I don’t know when.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She wrote, “I’m amazed at how well your healing classes are going. I am so proud of you.” I wrote back, “I don’t think anyone’s ever told me they were proud of me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I wrote, “People talk about how lovely you are, and I just beam! I spend a lot of hours sending you love. I just can’t conceive of my love for you ever moving on to someone else. I’m trying so hard to work past clutching at you, not wanting to let go. I’m sorry I sound so possessive.” I struggled to tell her I was glad she was dating, to not hold back, but the words never came out feeling real.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tears splotched her handwriting, and lipstick sealed each letter, but you can’t hug a tear. And when you keep trying to, again and again, slowly the lipstick will fade.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">That winter hit everybody at Olcott pretty hard. It snowed at least once a week, and never reached above freezing. Large bushes were buried as ice kept rising to swallow everything. Confined indoors, working and living in the same small spaces, with the same people, no money, no movies, no entertainment or unwinding. Those of us who lived like receptacles for the moods of other’s sucked it all in. I dove into my deep, wracking feelings of rejection and loss. There was no way to climb out. I tried to shut my emotions down so Julie would only feel love from me. but failed miserably. I had no way to spare that poor, vulnerable lady the extremes of my passions polluting hers. Neither of us could deal with the throes and storms of depression I plummeted down through as I shared all my weak sides with the woman I’d love forever. I told her, “My love for you gives me the power and drive to conquer everything – even myself.” But self-destruction would have to be the first step toward reconstruction.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Her voice cracked on tape, wracked with caring and frustration.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I don’t want you to feel so bad you may have hurt me because you haven’t. I over-reacted. Just because you feel so strongly you want to marry me when that isn’t where I am right now, it doesn’t make you, or your feelings, wrong. Maybe it’s me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We were both trying so hard to be understanding; why did it feel we were digging ourselves deeper into separation?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Her tape said, “I don’t want you to be miserable. Oh, I don’t want you to hurt! I don’t want you to hurt! I don’t want you to hurt! I guess I need to be able to allow that, too, but I hurt when you hurt. We’re both feeling so awfully isolated and alone. Anything we try makes things worse. What’s missing in our lives seems so obvious. It’s so very lonely now, for both of us. No one can live up to what we need. <i><u>N</u></i><u>o one!</u> We have each other; we know that. If I focus just on the love I felt …” Felt? Past tense? “… but our needs aren’t being met. So we flounder around in these seas of emotions we can’t break free of.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> “Oh, Honey, I’m gonna cry! I wanna see you; I wanna talk to you right now! Oh, I love you! I almost called you three times tonight. I keep thinking I can use a friend’s credit card, and just call you and then pay later. But I shouldn’t do that. And, anyway, it was ten at night, and by the time someone at Olcott picked up, and then found you …<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Honey, I don’t want you to hurt. I understand what you said in your letters that whatever you’re feeling, you have to pull yourself up through it. Not be dependent on someone else. I know what you mean; I’m in the same place. It’s vital to my self-concept to know I can go it alone. Be able to pull myself up. Once you’ve pulled away all the props and superficial things holding you up –you’re left with nothing but yourself. Then, if you pull yourself through it, you have confidence you never had before. I guess that’s what we’re both caught in now. Learning to fall back on ourselves. - And we’ll do it! I know we will.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“This one sided communication we have to endure is really bothering me. With no immediate feedback, we have no chance to clear up misunderstandings.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“It’s not easy, is it, Sweetie Pie?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“But you get here on the day after your sweet birthday. So it’s just two weeks and two days until I see you. Oh, Travis, Oh, Snookums. Sweetheart, I love you so much! Bob, I love you! I love you, Honey! I want you to feel that.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“We’re in a real uncomfortable place between us right now. I think there’s a lot of misunderstandings or something. I’m feeling like something’s closed down between us. Whether it’s from your reaction to what I said, or maybe my insensitivity to you, or something I said, or what, I don’t know; but I feel like there’s some kind of barrier between us right now, that only being together can get rid of. But I’m sure we can, Sweetie…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I love you very much, Honey. Just remember that, okay? Be good to yourself. And keep feeling my love around you during the day. Know that it’s true; it’s real. And I’ll be sending it to you constantly. I love you, Sweetheart.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Good night, Honey.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Bye bye.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And that’s it. My last recorded words from sweet J-love.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">On December 29<sup>th</sup>, I arrived in Kansas City. Bursting with joy to see me, she charged across the airport into my arms with the brightest smile I had ever seen. My joy reached its peak in that moment. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her for an instant along that whole drive back from the airport, and we kept pulling over to the road shoulder for hugs and kisses and soul-warming cuddles. We stepped in through the door to her apartment, dropped luggage, tore each other’s clothes off and made long, passionate, heart-bursting love on the floor.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But then later she told me she was dating. She had needs.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It felt like someone had slammed a log through my chest.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She walked around her apartment nude and cheerful for the rest of that day and the next while I fought to be okay with completely releasing her to her fulfillment. To let her open to all the joys, beauty, and love she could ever call into her life. She had certainly paid her dues.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Should I have been less disciplined and self-sacrificing? If we’d made love one more time, and I’d held her, and told her I didn’t want her to go, that I’d stay if she wanted, would that have changed things? Did she not really want me to pull back and let her walk away?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">No, I’d been a maudlin, pain-wracked freak over this whole thing; I had not managed to hold myself together at all; and in trying to hide as much of that as I could from her, I had cut off our honest and healthy sharing. She’d heard nothing from me but moaning and false bravado for so long, I’d have kicked me out, too. Who could ever want to be with someone who could sink to such dire depths of depression?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I just could not rally my spirits from that blow. She stayed cheerful. And nude. Sweet and beautiful. And nude. She lay down right in front of me on the floor, her delicious butt tasting the cool apartment air below my face as she wrote out notes for me to pass on to friends. She squatted nude by her stereo to put soft jazz on she thought I would like. She sipped tea nude.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It felt cruel.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I left early. My brother was a reservations clerk for Amtrak, and got me onto an all-nighter back home. Kids around me folded their seats back, played cards, invited me into games and chats, but I had to throw every bit of willpower I had into damming up the tears. I wanted to weep, but for much of that trip, anyway, I think I managed to hold most of the sobs, groans, and convulsions of grief in. But still the other kids pulled away.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I dug myself into a cavernous depression I couldn’t crawl out of.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’d lost my dad on the night after my twenty-first birthday, and my love the night after my twenty-seventh. Christmas; that most magical, blessed, and hopeful of nights; is not what it once was for me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I would dearly love to end this little story by telling you that some years later, Julie and I ran into each other in a laundromat in some ragged town in Middle America. That we took right up where we’d left off, got hitched, and everything’s been all peaches and roses ever since.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But we didn’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I might even be willing to give this tale a heart-wrenching twist, telling you I ‘d finally tracked her down on her deathbed after wandering my own desert for thirty-some years. That I told her there would have to be more shared lives ahead so I could love her for ages to come.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I really did believe that for years. It was the driving passion of my life. Maybe I still hold out some hope.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In this tale, I’d have her smile up at me through both of our tears; tell me that through all our lost decades she had nursed that same dream. That now she could finally die, having heard our one dream in my voice.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We’d make a pact: “Let’s meet each other earlier next life. And let’s not blow it this time. Let’s get together before all the bad stuff hits us.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We’d agree to meet younger, and at all costs hang onto it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But that never happened.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Somewhere out there, she may or may not still be. I pray she’s been healthy and happy. In my heart she is still joy and light. Giggles and cuddles. Hot soaks, blue eyes, and picnics on a shirt. That soft, sweet Tennessee voice.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Enough love to have made all my years of wandering, before and since, worth the struggles.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">But this really isn’t fiction. This is my life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And I can’t tweak the ending.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-51756759797594591512011-01-28T06:32:00.000-08:002011-08-16T09:39:25.585-07:00<br />
Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-30241223008549829282011-01-07T07:57:00.000-08:002011-01-08T20:30:12.612-08:00"Hummingburp." From my unpublished autobiographical novel, "Entertaining Naked Folks."<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 10pt;">From</span></u><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic'; font-size: 10pt;"> Light on the Path:</span></u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic'; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic'; font-size: 10pt;">“Know, O disciple, that those who have passed through the silence,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic'; font-size: 10pt;">and felt its peace and retained its strength,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic'; font-size: 10pt;">they long that you shall pass through it also.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Bold Italic'; font-size: 16pt;">Chapter Twenty-one.<o:p></o:p></span></u></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Bold Italic';">Magic in the Desert.<o:p></o:p></span></u></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">San Diego has been called the best climate in the world, forever blossoming into spring. Homes were hedged with lavender and roses. Eucalyptus, cypress, olive, and frangipani trees accented their yards. Fields bloomed in acres of flowers for florists to ship all over the world. Life was a fragrant, sensuous celebration of joy, beauty, and unbridled delight.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In class we learned one body part at a time. They’d teach us a session for the front of the arms, one for neck and shoulders, and so on until we had enough to integrate into whole body sessions. Every hour or so, in that big open room, there’d be fifteen students taking all of their clothes off and climbing onto tables as their partners were getting dressed right beside them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">One teacher sometimes brought in a psychologist buddy, and had the whole class strip naked and line up around the walls where we’d talk about how it felt to be completely naked in front of strangers. That buddy was later arrested for some kind of perversion with his clients.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Graduation parties from the first level of training were held nude in private rooms at public hot tubs, but by that time, we didn’t much care. We were exhausted. Those of us continuing on just wanted to rest up for the advanced classes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As we moved on, work got harder and friendships more intimate. Our anatomy and physiology teacher, Tony, was a breasty, brassy, ballsy nurse who twisted things into bawdy jokes and sexual innuendoes. I’d never met a woman so openly raunchy. She singled out a few male students and leaned in over our notes to drive her dirty jokes home.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But I loved the brilliance and clarity of her mind, how clearly she communicated tough concepts. We learned so much in so little time. I stayed late after her second class to thank her and she asked me to rub her shoulders. Early on in massage school, you rub everyone around you, but her groans sounded different than most…</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">… Back at my place, Tony had taped a note to my door. She was out of her car and heading toward me as I read it. We walked the beach, chatting about our lives. She touched me with her wisdom and compassion. So much mouth, mind, and heart in one woman. At Mt. Soledad we sat quietly together, gazing out over the ocean, the city, and Mexico at night. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But she got a headache and drove me to her place where I could do some Therapeutic Touch on her. As I rubbed knots out of her shoulders, she started groaning and writhing. That woman was achingly sensuous, but that’s where we cut it off; that’s how we left it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A couple weeks later, we were just sitting around her apartment, chatting, when she disappeared. She was gone a while, but then stepped back down the hall and just stood there at the edge of the room, hanging her head. She didn’t have any clothes on.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I caught my breath and fought to look her in the eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Would you rather I didn’t stare at you? I’m getting really good at sneaking peeks these days.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“I’ll bet you are,” she said.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Right now, though, Tony, I have got to admit, I’d really like to gawk.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She told me, “I just want to get this over with. Let you see I don’t have a great figure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“You don’t?” I said. “Well, then, whose is that, and when do you have to give it back?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She flew across the room, all booming laughter and soft, bouncing breasts, and threw herself all over me. We stayed that way the rest of the night, most of it knotted together in her rumpled, cracker crumb-strewn bed, but parts of it on the rug. I think there were crackers there, too.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We were lovers, but more than that, dear friends for months. And then one night, well after we’d moved on, she pounded on my door in the wee morning hours clutching a grocery bag full of Gatorade. She’d been carousing in Mexico and given herself diarrhea so bad she was on the edge of hallucinating. Tony gave me detailed instructions so I’d know when to call an ambulance. I settled her into my bed, then stood over her, studying her in the dark as I worried and prayed. I watched over her until the next afternoon without rest, trying to coax her back to sleep every few minutes after each bathroom stampede.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I cleaned the toilet after she’d left. We had stopped being lovers long before, but if we hadn’t, that one night might have driven some of the magic out of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I have pictures of a birthday party Theresa threw for me, in which of the other five guests, three of the women, including Tony, had been my lovers. We were all over each other for the camera. But I was also finding out that there are deeper levels of intimacy than sex.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">One friend had her house broken into and her purse stolen. Then someone broke in and raped her. She started coming by my place for cookies; what a lot of folks did when they needed to talk something out. She wanted to scream out to the world that she’d been raped, but never quite managed to. She’d just eat her cookies, share her feelings, and try to keep going back to get naked in massage classes. If the sun had set before she left my apartment, I’d walk her to her car. The world had become a scary place.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She wanted to move in with me, but I had a roommate named Dorothy, and Dorothy had a boyfriend who sometimes stayed over. It wouldn’t have been fair to them. I found two lady friends to take her in, but on evenings when the sun set while she was in class I’d walk to school and meet her there so she’d have a friend to chat playfully with on the way to her car.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She graduated, moved home to Alabama, and we wrote each other for years.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The business director offered me a job as a massage teacher before I’d finished all the courses. I hadn’t even asked for one. Life was definitely changing around.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I met a young lady named Gayla at a party one night. Not the Gayla I’d eventually marry, but my world’s always been such a maze of intertwining “coincidences” that I had long before stopped believing in that whole concept. Now I worry maybe something’s gone wrong with my life if nothing truly bizarre has plowed through me in a while; if my days and nights have been listing toward normalcy. So it doesn’t seem odd to me that I’ve loved two women named Gayla, even spelled the same way, and that each took me camping in the desert for our first date.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">With the second Gayla, we drove deep into the sands of Mexico until we ran out of roads, and then paths, and then gullies. Then we grabbed up what we could and started hiking. We packed in without a tent, but she did bring along an Australian named Digby.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That first Gayla took me into the Anza Borrego; just the two of us, no Australians, but at least we had a little tent. Among my fondest memories is her full-throated laughter as she cartwheeled nude over sand dunes. To this day I dream I’m cartwheeling, though I’ve never actually tried it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">With the second Gayla, the one whose childhood I’ve been telling you about, I remember rolling together down a grassy hill in a park, landing dizzy by the VW she lived in with Digby. Then she invited me to join them in the desert, where, on a romantic, moon-kissed night, she asked his permission to move from his sleeping bag to mine (he refused.) She would basically do the same thing to me later on. Only she wouldn’t ask my permission.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But there are two basic rules to story writing. Rule number one: Show; don’t tell.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 166.5pt; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Rule number two: Stick to one Gayla at a time.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I met that first Gayla at a party, and enticed her back to my apartment for a massage. I must’ve been a bit of a lust bucket back then, finally escaping so many years of repression. I didn’t respect myself for it, but I sure had fun. Gayla’s massage, though, was just a massage; no wandering hands, erotic interruptions, or primal afterbursts. Then she drove home in her pickup.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She called the next day, and the day after that. We started phoning each other two or three times a week. She kept writing and mailing letters from her job at the bank, telling me, “ Your wisdom, guidance, and deep spirituality are helping me straighten out my life.” So then she invited me out on a little road trip, where she put a new kink into mine.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Letting someone haul you out into the desert is like placing all your chips on forever. First, it seems to take that long to get there. Then, it seems like forever since you left that cozy apartment where you keep all your “stuff;” that stuff that keeps you anchored into who you are. Or at least who you </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic';">thought</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> you were. Forever since you saw that last place to buy gas, or stop for a snack or a nice iced tea. Forever since you’d consigned yourself to your fate and stopped wondering, why am I trusting this strange woman with my life? Forever since she’d first suggested it’d be a fun thing to do and you had thought, “Wow! What a great idea!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Gayla was tiny, high energy, and socially unfettered. I called her Hummingburp. She serenaded me in belches as she drove. We were crunching across the sands for a while before she finally just set the brake and shut off the engine. Why here, for God’s sake? Climbing out of the pickup and stretching, I scanned across vast reaches of nothing but bleak and barren. Stones scattered like the surface of the moon, hills like nubs of teeth, ground down by unfriendly eons. It’s like I could just search all the way through eternity in any direction; just peer completely across the world, around to the other side, and see myself standing there from behind, but all I’d find anywhere would be whispering sands, gnarled mesquite and cactus, and other dead things.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Dead, but stirring.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I had been warned. It’s things you don’t see that can get you. Anything you might step on in the night, anything you may disturb up out of the sands or dead wood could kill you. Snakes. Scorpions. We left our sleeping bags rolled and tied tightly in the back of the truck to make it harder for anything to crawl in before we did. After that, of course, all bets would be off.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I could see one of us writhing or paralyzed in pain for days (I prayed it wouldn’t be her), and then one morning just waking up dead. Some think dead is forever, though in my life the dead don’t always stay that way. But painful isn’t how I want to get there. I want to die on a cool, starry night, lying on my back in moist clover, floating through a chorus of crickets and katydids, gazing up into the Milky Way as it draws my soul home.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Scorpions would not be my first choice.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So I just shut myself off from thinking about all that. It was easy. Whether it’s in the desert; on a craggy, thundering shoreline; or gazing out from a steep mountain precipice; peering out into the heart of God entrances me deep into mindless wonder. I just hang there, suspended in bliss. And so that one night I stood, motionless, rapt, beside Gayla’s truck, giving myself over to that vast, inspiring emptiness. Darkness oozed out of gnarled shrubs, clumps, and rocks. It sang in brilliant scarlets and crimsons. Liquid vermilions and indigos bled slowly across the heavens, and pooled among shadows on the sands.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I turned to see if she was sharing in this magic, in this time beyond all time. If she and I were lost together in some ineffable essence that, like the name of God, could never be spoken.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She had yanked off her pants and was squatted beside me, peeing onto dirt.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’d never seen a woman do that. I jerked my head away to study nothing for a while, but I studied it very intensely.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I did watch, though, as she tossed her clothes across the hood, and just wandered off over the sands, wearing only flip flops and a head scarf. The woman was fascinating.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She found a flat spot, kicked off her shoes, and dived over onto her hands, raising up into a perfect handstand. She then held there, as though offering some yogic salutation to the setting sun; but on her own terms. Like those carved red rock spires in Utah, where you feel you’ve just landed on some bizarre alien planet, her beauty in that wasteland looked unnatural, even miraculous. Gayla arched to perfection. Each white curve of flesh set itself off against a deepening sky.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She offered her bare toes up to heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Slowly, then, she lowered her legs to the sides, and offered it her pubic hair.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She did have a lot of that. Sometimes I couldn’t tell my beard from hers.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Her scarf dropped away, leaving her nude in the desert.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I think maybe God had reached down and flicked it off Himself. His way of telling her, “With you, kiddo, it’s always all or nothing.” That’s how she ran through her life. Sending each moment up to all deities, in all realms, on the wings of her full-hearted laughter.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She held there for the longest time, then lowered her legs back to the sand. She stood up. Smirked at me. Started to slink slowly closer, vamping it up until I, too, had to laugh. When she reached me, she peeled off my clothes, too, and we didn’t put them back on for a couple of days.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She reached down and caught hold of me, but I won’t say where. Like she had a pet on a leash, she pulled me over by a cactus, pushed me down onto the sands, spread my limbs in all directions, and crawled all over me for a while.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">By the time we settled out from ecstasy, stars had spread themselves everywhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We searched out a flat stretch on which to set up her tiny blue tent and circle some stones for a fire. She’d brought one of those big five gallon bottles of water from a cooler. We put up the tent, but never went inside.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Instead, we sat quietly under the stars, and made love from time to time. But mostly we sat quietly under the stars. I don’t see how there could possibly be as many sparkling orbs in the universe as we gaped up at all that night. Maybe there aren’t. God probably ordered up a few thousand extra just for that one performance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sometimes you feel all of your soul is on the outside. That mystical night crawled up out of the desert floor. It reached through heavens more vast than the outer walls of imagination. So I gave in. All I’d ever known dissolved away until there was nothing left but pure magic. I felt lost and found at the same time. Saw time as just some dumb concept we’d made up when we had been old and foolish.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Temperature drops suddenly when night hits the wastelands. Small winds howl in greeting. I could feel shuffling and voices I couldn’t quite hear. Desert sands and spirits settled and stirred, whispered furtive secrets and sidled away. Why does sadness flow in with such sweetness; like recognition of some primordial loss?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> “Sprite would have been three now,” she told me softly in the darkness.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Sprite?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“My daughter.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“I didn’t. I lost her.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I reached beside me under starlight to rest my hand on hers.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Sometimes I come out here to hear her little voice.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I turned and listened; I wanted to hear her child, too; I wanted to share that with Gayla. I heard so many things that could have been a child. So many souls that may once have had a body, and a life. So many others that never had.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She crawled up onto my lap, wrapped her arms and her legs around my middle. She snuggled her smile, along with a few tears, in against my chest.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“I was a gymnast.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Really? I can see that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Yep. Loved it.” She turned back around to face forward, out into all that eerie, shifting mystery. I opened my legs so she could nestle down between them, then raised them up and crossed my ankles to wall her in. I wrapped a warm caring hug all around her. “Mmmm,” I murmured, loving her; and she drank it all in. I paused to admire the moonlight threading her hair before resting my chin on the top of her head.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Wanted to go all the way,” she said, after a time. “We traveled, exhibitions for kids in special homes, some competitions. Managed to get myself knocked up by a gymnast from another school. Now </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic';">that</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> was something to watch.” Her laughter rang off the rocks for a while.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She pulled my arms more firmly into her breasts, and laid her head sideways and back against my left shoulder. I snuggled a kiss softly into her hair, and rocked her for a while. We lost ourselves deep inside what felt like a long night of rocking, holding, and being held. But I sensed there was more she wanted to share.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“What happened? May I ask? Is it okay?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She laughed, but it didn’t echo this time. “He was cute is what happened. You should have seen his iron cross. And don’t get me started on those shoulders.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“No, I meant, with your daughter, with Sprite. Is it okay for me to ask?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Sure. She’s up there somewhere. Named a star after her. Can’t find it tonight in all that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She had snuggled one of her hands back between her butt and my lower belly and was absent-mindedly toying with some hair she found there. She’d dropped her other hand forward to rest it gently, caringly, mid-thigh on my inner leg. I reached down and lifted that one up. I held it, brushed the back of it, probed and explored each finger, each knuckle, each tendon. It was a strong hand, and yet so tiny in mine. Squarish and unmanicured. She turned her face up to watch me studying her, smiled up at me. “God, I love you!” she told me. Then, she reached to settle her other hand over mine. “I can’t see ever not having you in my life.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Four hands intertwined; oozing in and out of moon glow and shadows.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She let her words drift upwards after a while, as though sharing some rare and precious secret. “I feel you sending me some kind of energy sometimes. – Like you’re surrounding me with love when my boss is getting on me and I’m about ready to shove her stupid clay duck ashtray up her ass and storm outa there. But then I feel you hugging me and it’s like, ‘Mmmm.’ – Y’now? Like you just said to my hair?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Don’t give me too much credit; I’m no psychic or something. I’ve just been thinking about you fondly, sending you a little love. I like to think about you. You’re really fun.” Privately, I didn’t know whether or not to believe I’d sent her anything she could actually have picked up on; but if it was doing her some good to think I was capable of that, then I wasn’t about to take that away from her.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Still the same, I feel you,” she told me, her words snuggling in with her bare flesh.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Good.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She looked out across crawling shadows, and up among the hills, as we both turned outward to listen for her little girl’s voice.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Actually, she was never born,” she entrusted to me. “City bus sideswiped my pickup in my second trimester. They say I probably lost her instantly. Everyone was so sure I wasn’t going to live. Then they thought I’d never walk again. But guess what?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She climbed out and flipped more cartwheels at the stars. Any scorpions or copperheads lying in wait were just going to have to watch out for her! I sat on a rock, watching her dart, and roll, throwing her arms and legs wide and free, no hairs trimmed or waxed, the full moon rising up between her legs as her laughter rolled and frolicked across the sands. I sat there and wished I could join her, just wished I could ever feel that free.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In that one interminable moment she was ravishing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I called out to her, “You sure know how to throw one heck of a first date!”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“It won’t be our last,” she called back through her crotch as she barreled into me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She landed straddling my head, shoving me onto my back, with her knees by my ears.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Oh, skunk farts,” she said, hands on hips, looking down at me in mock perturbation, “Look why I done!” Her thighs were so short I only had to raise my face a few inches to kiss her.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We spent the rest of those hours until morning wrapped around each other in one way or another, most of them lying down in a still pile of wonder. She may have slept; I’m sure I didn’t. Spirits moved about, rustled and stirred. Gliding, pausing, shuffling all around us in a dance they had danced since before man, and time.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Spooky, yes. Absolutely. But by taking me into the desert, Gayla had set something free inside me. She’d probably been born that way, but I had to learn it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We continued to write almost every day. She wrote things like, “Hello, you beautiful man, you! I can’t stop thinking about all that we said and felt. I am beginning to connect with myself. The thought that maybe the time could ever come that I could not be part of your life is very unsettling and I am praying we will always be together. God I Love you! I Want You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! With you, I can become whole. I can finally learn to love.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I maybe should have found it a bit unnerving that she’d call me after each visit, before I could even reach home, to tell me she was already missing me, but all I could think was, God, she’s exciting!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Then she wrote, “Well, Mr. Hug Master, you gorgeous, lovely young man, I WILL be part of your life from now on.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She was nothing if not intense. And self-assured.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Words can’t come close to expressing the total fullness or intensity of Love I’ve never felt before. My soul has been crying out so long for you that it is hard to believe you are truly here and we have finally meet. Our paths have come together and we are partners. I now understand more of my purpose and can feel my Love for you reaching Oh, so deep into my soul. I am finally complete! Our Love … Our lives linked now as always and always.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">She got angry when classes kept me from spending weekends with her. We picnicked in the park. I told her where I hid my spare key. She typed and mailed me letters from her job.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I started finding them around my apartment. “I stopped by while you were at work and laundered your sheets and towels. I thought it could make up for last night. I thought you might think of me with all that freshness wrapped around you. Maybe you and I could start fresh? You Beautiful Man, I truely Love you. I’m sorry for all my mixed up feelings that sometimes must hurt. I keep getting all selfish wanting to be the only one in your life, above all else, but please don’t feel pressured by that. When I come to my senses I see there will always be others out there who need you like I have. I’m so very, very sorry. And so very happy to be a part of your life, even if I can’t be all of it - Yet.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">One day I came home from work to find a note on the scrap pad by my pillow. She’d apparently come over to take a nap on my side of the bed, and then had left her underwear there. “Hello, sweetheart. Just wanted to say ‘Thank you’ for all the caring and sharing you show me. The love I feel flowing from you is the sweetest, purest feeling I’ve ever known. Please know I Love you, too, although I may not always show it. I am striving for the same purity as the energy and love I feel you sending.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“God I want you!!!!!!! Maybe what I’m feeling isn’t <u>always</u> so pure?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“Forgive me?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Her best friend had been one of my massage students; a sweet and playful little lady. The three of us liked to picnic in the park. Right there in an open field in Kate Sessions, or Balboa Park, low-key couples lingering over lunch baskets and blankets scattered around us, Gayla would whip off her t-shirt and wave her tiny breasts in my face as she tied a red farmer’s bandanna around her chest like a sleeveless, backless, sideless blouse.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Then she’d flip out her handstands, cartwheels, and laughter for the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But there was one part of her free spirit I just was not prepared to handle.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Her naturopath practiced kundalini; bottling up one’s sexual energy, and channeling it into healing. I’d been taught to heal by bringing energy down through my crown and heart from the heavens. I’d always had a problem with any kundalini practices that brought it up from the sexual organs. But Gayla told me she and her doctor would lock into a sexual position, her seated on his lap, him inside her, and then go into meditation, unmoving. His wife was the receptionist in his outer office, so Gayla assured me it was all on the up and up.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But that whole kundalini thing never did settle in well with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Gayla had no time to wait for anyone so bound up and prudish, so one day she just up and ran off with the man I kept finding in her living room. A sailor of some kind. A friend of her cousin’s. And a much freer spirit than me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Hell, he may even have </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic';">been</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> her cousin.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-89865276922814865392011-01-05T11:55:00.000-08:002011-01-05T11:55:28.192-08:00From my as yet unpublished novel, "The Mourning After."<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dogs don’t echo in the city.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Under a low, sodden moon, one far distant and solitary beast<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">called out to a world that had turned away.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">His plaintive baying haunted me, echoing unanswered through the wooded hills.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">His loneliness drew up into a soft little fist of tears inside my chest.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The evening was just gathering;<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this poor empty creature would have a long time to cry uncomforted.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">- Then I sensed forsaken spirits wandering lost among the trees around me,<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">keeping silent company,<o:p></o:p></i></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">themselves uncherished and unanswered.<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><u><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When Spirits Speak.<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-pagination: none; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">It’s hard to think “was” about your mom.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I’d dropped down on the threshold, not quite inside, rocking a plain cardboard packing box on my lap. I was coming all apart, blubbering. I wanted so badly to hug it. I didn’t think I’d ever find the courage to open it again.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Inside it: nothing, really. A few old tarnished and thread-worn nothings anyone else might have thrown away. Mom’s fuzzy blue robe she’d always worn at the table over her Nescafe Instant Coffee on my rare visits home. I’d tried so many times to buy her special percolators and gold filters and exotic coffee grinds from Jamaica and Guatemala and beyond, but she’d always had to have her instant. She’d lean in over her cup, embracing it with both hands, listening intently to anything I wanted to share, no matter how trivial.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Her glasses. Glasses she’d never take off. I’d caught her dozing off in them once and asked if she wanted me to take them before she passed out and scrunched them into her face. She’d told me she’d forgotten she’d had them on. She’d been so used to them.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Those glasses had known her better than I had. I didn’t deserve to touch them.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Her ring. A mother’s ring with a single faded birthstone. Mine.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Looking up and far away between the trees, I watched the deflating sun flatten as it fell.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">With one last soul-draining sigh, it drenched the world in crimsons and blues, gnawing at my heart as something wept in the pit of my guts.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Slowly it gave up and let go, drooping away, down behind the fuzzy edge of nowhere. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Its fading residue lingered, cherishing Nature’s farewells, like that moody iridescence you sometimes catch wandering among graves.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I held the carton, rocking it oh so gently on my lap. I watched out into the gathering night and have rarely felt so lost.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Her last moments weep through me even now; as they did back then, holding that box; as they have most nights ever since when I haven’t been able to sleep.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Sitting with Mom day and night before the end. Rubbing that blue swelling out of her feet, trying to chat, but muted by helplessness and guilt. Massage school had taught me how to love with my hands, but not how to fully express my heart; taught me how to help, but not how to heal someone truly and irrevocably broken. It had left me useless and choking in the shadow of inevitability.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I could remember Mom coughing a few times when I’d phoned her but I just hadn’t put it together. She’d called it just a little cold, or another time maybe her allergies acting up. Maybe it was mildew during rainy spells. How long had she known? How long had she suffered the incoming fears without telling me? Had she just been marching to her death, always the brave soldier, as my father had? Had I suspected, but shaken off the most dire possibilities, denied her mortality and simply prayed harder? How blind, how foolish had I been? Or had I just been too selfish, too wrapped up in my own stuff, off somewhere in another part of the country? Should I have pressed her on it?</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I should have called her more. But it had hurt to hear the distance growing between me and the woman who had once formed, guided, even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">been</i> my whole world, knowing I was the one who’d been pulling away, leaving her alone and isolated. Abandoning his mom when she’d needed him. She’d never even hinted; never would have. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">In the hospital I spent her final days and nights crushed by all of that and more.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">That pallid, grey body in front of me had been my entire life. Those split lips had taught me to speak. She’d been my model, my teacher; she’d been my goal, and the only destiny I could imagine. She’d home-schooled me back when everyone had thought I’d die first, that I would never grow up to see this moment.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Tubes digging into her everywhere, strapped down to her bed so she couldn’t pull them loose. I prayed she was completely out of it, where that total and undeserved degradation couldn’t reach her, the pain, the chapped dry mouth. But there was still some selfish little boy part of me that wanted her to know I was there, loving her, rubbing the awful blue swelling out of her ankles and feet, to know that she wasn’t alone.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Nurses let me spend her last three days and nights by her bed, but her doctor told me she had no idea I was there, that rubbing her feet was just a waste of time, that I was doing it more for me than for her.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">How could they know? She was <u>my</u> mom. She was hurting. I was losing her.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Sometimes Mom opened her eyes just a little, but she never seemed to notice any of the ruckus around her in the ICU. That helped me focus back in on true priorities. Sometimes she even tried to smile. The doctors said that was impossible, what with that horrendous fat tube taped down her throat; all the drugs keeping her shut down and out of it. So maybe she smiled only in my imagination, or whatever other realms my mind’s always carried me off to, but I still believe it. I was just beginning to suspect at that time, that my “imagination” might actually be much more than that. Like some silent, low-riding flatboat, plying the heavy-laden shadows across the River Styx to a land where the dead and dying hurt to share with the living, but can’t. That sometimes I saw things that wanted to be seen. Even if no one else saw them.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Did she really speak to me? I think she must have. I went into that hospital with no thought at all for my father, my heart long closed and sealed to him, but then came out knowing he had loved me. Where would that have come from if not from her? I remember her words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Your father really loved you, you know. He just couldn’t show it. He knew you’d have to be tough to survive.” She’d never told me that before. Where else could I have heard it if not in some lost lucid moment in that hospital?</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">She told me, “When you first came home, all wrapped up in your tiny blue outfit, and your little blue blanket, all he saw was this bright round head with eyes that never wanted to close, peeking out over the rest of the world like you saw something maybe we didn’t. Your dad took one look at you and called you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moonface</i>.”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">She sighed.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Or I imagined she sighed. And then she added, “You were probably five years old before he stopped calling you that. He called you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moonface</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BubbleBum</i>. And sometimes still did back in our room late at night where you couldn’t hear him.”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">How could she have grabbed my hand when she was all trussed up like that? She couldn’t have. So where is this memory coming from? “You have no idea how hard that was on him, Sweetie,” Mom confided through tears.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I’m sure she looked away for a while.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Then she told me, without turning back, “He knew those weren’t strong names for a man.”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">And she was gone again.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I couldn’t be making this up.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">It feels too real.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">It hurts too bad.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">And yet all the while she was building a world for her frail little son, she had herself been sadly thwarted, cut off, diminished. She’d been the keeper of my keys, but in taking that on, she’d locked herself out of her own life and possibilities.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">As I’d survived, only because of her; and as I’d grown; I’d needed distance for my sake alone. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. hadn’t wanted to bury her any deeper when I’d left. While I’d been off gallivanting all over everywhere, the one woman who had always meant love to me had been dying.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I hadn’t even known it.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I’d raced, hell-bent, out of the childhood she’d worked so long, hard and selflessly to build and hold together, just as soon as my legs were big enough to carry me. I couldn’t wait to get away. I’d deserted the one woman who could never ever have deserted me.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Mom had pushed me off to study in another city, to learn to survive. “Your dad would’ve wanted you to.” She had forcefully cut the strings.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Now, a tumor the size of a grapefruit was eating away at her heart and lungs from behind, all wrapped up in the nerves from her backbone where surgeons couldn’t cut through to it. Her doctor and his team were standing right in front of me in the emergency room, face to face, telling me the tubes were just keeping her heart and lungs functioning, but that she wasn’t really alive. She’d never get better, never wake up or get out of that bed or open her eyes again. He was calling on me, the selfish son who’d abandoned her so long before, to finish the job. It was time; it was “what’s best for her” to pull the plug. He was asking me to kill my own Mom.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I stood there, all locked up inside, needing to do something right for her for a change, aching to end her suffering right now, this minute. But I was also that little kid with the bad heart who used to hide behind the couch, waiting for the world to go away, and all I could do was bury us both in her past. Hold on to our history a little bit longer.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I recalled how much my one and only friend, Emma, had loved my mom. She’d always want to come over to my house to be part of our classes. Sometimes we’d pull little pranks on Teacher, like trading her pencil for one that was all eraser, or giving her an apple out of the bowl of plastic fruit. Sometimes I’d wad up paper and toss it at Emma’s head; an easy shot since she’d sat right beside me. I’d have to lean way back and curl my hand to keep from swatting her as I’d released. She’d know it was coming, let it hit her, but keep right on listening to my mother, enthralled.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Mom had played along, pretending to punish us by making us lick sheets of Top Value stamps that had come with her groceries, and paste them into her bulging little books. Once she’d collected a few million stamps in a dozen books or so, she’d trade them in for a pillowcase or a can opener or something.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Mom had known all the time that we’d enjoyed all that licking and slapping, making faces at each other as the sticky stuff had built up on our tongues. She’d rewarded good behavior with Bazooka Bubble Gum. We’d carried on her tradition then, saving the comics that came with the gum for quietly exploding battleships or whistles Dad would never let us blow.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Dad had saved the Raleigh coupons that had come with his cigarettes, too, but would never have traded them in for anything. That would’ve been like admitting we’d been poor. The fact that he’d had to let Mom get a job at Woolworth’s toward the end of his life must have been like unfurling the blazing yellow banner of his defeat.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Back in the hospital, the doctor’s mouth was moving and then pausing and then moving again, but he hadn’t known my mom.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Emma and I used to get so excited in those classes we’d both be waving our hands for recognition as if there had been actual crowds to get lost in. Who else could have brought that out of two strange and silence-locked kids but my mom? She’d stand up in front of us so happy and proud.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 112.5pt; text-indent: .5in;">This doctor didn’t know that about her. Cripe, he may have gone to med school, but he was practically still a kid himself. What could he know about anything? How could he just stand there, so calmly, with such deadly arrogance, and ask anything that mean and ugly of anyone?</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">There were ducks outside the hospital windows, but Mom couldn’t see them. Or maybe she could. Maybe that anesthesia set her free of her body, let her spirit roam out by the lake, or back to her roses with Dad. I watched one ratty, wounded duck, kind of auburn and tan with a twisted foot, limping around, and imagined Mom out there bending over and talking gently to it, maybe even trying to heal it, somehow magically uncurl its foot. She and I had always been suckers for anything that limped.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">“Did you hear what I said?” The doctor broke through. “Look. I know how hard this must be…</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Where was all the joy Mom brought? And not just to me. Emma had laughed with a delightful little snorting giggle. She’d written with her right hand, but drawn with her left. Mom had called her her little Da Vinci. Her “second favorite genius.”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">“Mr. Tierney,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>Denys, Mr. Tierney, we need a decision.”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I hugged Mom as she died, watched her inside and out, saw her turning blue, and felt the gathering cold. The breathing machine kept clacking out its rhythm, but all her vital signs zeroed out. She slipped away quietly as I felt her love. She was eager to get on with it, but I felt her love. She came back just long enough to plant words in my head. Her hands were tied to the metal frame of her bed, but I felt both of them slip around one of mine, and I felt from her, of all things, gratitude.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I felt so loved it hurt.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I heard her words. “Your dad says,” and she kind of laughed. “He says he plumb forgot to tell you he’s always been proud of you. He hopes you’ll forgive his little oversight.”</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">And then inside her, all tears melted; and her smile was absorbed into a smile so vast I had to turn away. In that moment I lost her.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I didn’t look around as I parted the curtains with as much dignity and aloofness as I could muster for appearance’s sake, and walked quietly out and away.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I could feel others watching.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">They were holding themselves back. They were silent.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I walked out of Intensive Care, off the floor, to a quiet room near a bank of phones, where I cried, having no one to call.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I sat in that room wanting to be alone with my mom, but memories of my father kept forcing their ways in.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He’d had to fortify himself to come home to his family. I’d hear him out there in the driveway, belting out a robustly cadenced song about caissons rolling, and field artillery. No longing or reverence, just stampeding over the enemy with arrogant pride. He’d fought the Nazis on their own turf, hand-to-hand and face-to-face, but somehow come home with no stories, and no regrets. And least none he could bring into the house.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 28.0pt 56.0pt 84.0pt 112.0pt 140.0pt 168.0pt 196.0pt 224.0pt 3.5in 280.0pt 308.0pt 336.0pt; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mom and I would hear the war song and know where he’d been. We’d know he’d be coming in stinking of smokes and beer. He’d march to the vestibule, into the front room, and slam up against our alternate reality. I wouldn’t need to look up to watch his face and spirit sag as he was forced once again to acknowledge the son who would never be a hero. He probably figured if I didn’t actually watch him sigh, I wouldn’t hear it either.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 28.0pt 56.0pt 84.0pt 112.0pt 140.0pt 168.0pt 196.0pt 224.0pt 3.5in 280.0pt 308.0pt 336.0pt; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’d feel him staring at me as he greeted my Mom. Checking his disappointment at the door, stuffing his sense of loss into private pockets he thought we couldn’t poke into.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 28.0pt 56.0pt 84.0pt 112.0pt 140.0pt 168.0pt 196.0pt 224.0pt 3.5in 280.0pt 308.0pt 336.0pt; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">After a long moment of readjustment, of just standing there, putting his war buddies back on their shelves, he’d step the rest of the way into our home and, as much as he could, into our lives. He’d ease his sample case down onto the floor so slowly it wouldn’t make a sound. I’d try so hard to imagine his hand, hovering just over my head, almost ready to finally call me Son, maybe give me a little pat; but not quite.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 28.0pt 56.0pt 84.0pt 112.0pt 140.0pt 168.0pt 196.0pt 224.0pt 3.5in 280.0pt 308.0pt 336.0pt; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But then he would always ask my mom, “How’s the boy?”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">At her funeral, I finally reached a point after all those years, all the guilt and the pain and loss, when I just couldn’t take any more. I was bending over her coffin when it all busted loose.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I started to bawl.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Even after all those lost years I still recognized it. It was my father’s, old Sergeant Carl’s tight grip. Of course my logic tried to fight that off for a moment, but that was no time for logic. Then our history tried to tell me that if dad was really there, if he’d returned from his grave with a message, he must have been telling me to “suck it up,” not to cry – that it’s not manly. It’s not tough, like a man had to be.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">But all of that had to let go. There was no room in that moment for anything but love, and it was in a total state of love that I finally heard my dad; heard what he was, and what he had always been.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">In words just as clear as if he’d been standing there, breathing, I heard, “Attaboy, Son. Let ’er rip! I wish I could have cried like that.”</div><!--EndFragment-->Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-71218576083752465572011-01-05T11:51:00.000-08:002011-08-16T09:42:29.122-07:00Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-9686355683312714522011-01-05T11:49:00.000-08:002011-08-16T10:00:01.669-07:00From my as yet unpublished autobiographical novel, "Entertaining Naked Folks."<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;"><b><u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 200%;">Hide and Seek.<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I was drowning in grief and some days unable to move as I stayed at a friend’s apartment in Baltimore, surviving by sneaking fingers of peanut butter and an occasional vitamin when I grew desperately hungry. If I absolutely had to survive, if life was going to be forced on me, I’d have to start it all over from the beginning, because this old one was tearing me apart.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’d always crammed every opportunity into a box, sealing it in up on all sides with tapes saying, “I can’t.” The only thing I knew for sure was that if I ever actually tried anything, I could fail.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Then I had taken a half-hearted shot at college, but only because it had been forced on me. I ended up quitting. That’s when everything slammed shut that I’d never really opened in the first place. Within weeks, I dropped out, turned twenty-one, my dad died unexpectedly, my favorite cousin was sent home in pieces from Viet Nam, and an induction notice came to tell me I was next.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Such a chain of dire “coincidences” could only have been divine synchronicity. Or retribution as only heaven can sow it. Payback for something I must have done in some past life, since I sure hadn’t gotten out to do much damage in this one. I felt His breath whispered across every wracking, crawling moment. Could a God Who really cared be so cruel?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">My last night home before college, Dad had made the whole family watch “The Ten Commandments” again so we could feel “The Lord’s mighty power” as I headed off to take the world on. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It had scared the heck out of me.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I saw myself jumping blindly into the hands of that same Divine Overseer who’d forced Moses to take a life or death stand against the pharaoh, wander the desert for forty years, everybody attacking him, but then, after all that, told him, “Mood swing! Everyone can go in but you. You just have to stand outside and watch.” And that’s not even mentioning all those poor innocent horses He drowned. God was killing children right and left, but then told Moses he shalt not kill. Told Moses to lie to the Pharaoh, but then made it a commandment not to.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Some great, inspiring flick that turned out to be. I was going to need a much kinder God to pray to.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And yet, someone I had thought was God had called to me so gently when I’d been a child, soothed me when I’d felt lost; which had been pretty much most of the time. </span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; line-height: 200%;">He’d hugged me behind the couch when life and sadness had seemed the same thing. Or when I was holding pictures of Jesus. Or holding butterflies, or ladybugs. We petted bunnies and birds together when they came up to me in the yard. He fed chipmunks out of my hand. He smiled at me through sunshine and moon glow. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That God I’d loved since toddlerhood still hummed to me sometimes through the stars.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But then He started playing hide-and-seek and He always had to be the one who hid. I filled in the blank spots and lost years with doubts. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> I tried experimenting with services at different places of worship. </span>I’d never felt quite settled into a place until I’d found a church with more spirit than words. It didn’t even have to be a happy, hopeful spirit. I just needed to know there was more to it than stone walls, wood benches, and empty sermons. I needed to feel clearly that God knew it was there. That I could catch a whiff of Him inside, a taste of His simmering compassion. Feel Him sharing their sorrows, and feeding their joys. That He could have found me there if He ever really wanted to.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> But most of them seemed stuffed with stiff and itchy families who looked to be just reining it in and playing along for an hour or so a week.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But how would I know? I never gave anything a real try.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I’d thought that by sitting my life out on the sidelines I’d been handing it over to Him, but then everything kept falling apart. It felt like I’d been huddled in my tight nest of fears like a featherless bird baby, squeaking with my mouth open, waiting for someone to stuff in a half-eaten worm. Truth is, though, I was really getting really tired of trying to survive on just vomited worms.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So after that one awful month, when even those few things I had counted on had been jerked out from under me, I decided to head out, and start fresh.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I called the new me Devin Morgan; which meant </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman Italic';">sensitive poet</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> in my twenty-five cent pocket book of names. My druggy art school friend, Michael. called me Darvon. Another guy called me Dildo.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That was okay. I wasn’t all that committed to the name. Or to anything, really. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Something had to change. Whoever I was; Devin, Darvon, or Dildo; I’d never hitchhiked before, but one day just stepped out onto the road and stuck my thumb out with no plans on coming back. A young man, a clean cut Republican type, said he was off for Colorado and would go all the way with me. I didn’t realize that was street talk. When he found out I wasn’t gay, he left me on the side of the road before I’d even made it out of Pennsylvania.<o:p></o:p></span></div><style>
@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Lucida Grande";
}@font-face {
font-family: "ヒラギノ角ゴ Pro W3";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: black; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
</style> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A hippie picked me up, his hair even longer than mine. That, and his beard, were all bushy scraggly, while I kept mine neatly trimmed and carefully under control, like my emotions. He, too, was heading for Colorado; probably more than mere coincidence. His van was classic painted-all-over hippie. His name was “Jeremy G. Tripe, the G stands for Gabriel, as my family is of a religious persuasion and right proud of the fact.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As I climbed in, he asked, “Y’all got a ink pen I could borra? Been drivin’ maybe forty miles with a thought scratchin’ around in my head just ain’t gonna leave me be ’til I git it wrote down. But I don’t got no pen.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’d just been writing on a piece of roadside scrap that had blown against my feet. He’d clunked and rattled to a stop just ahead of me. I didn’t even have my thumb out; my pen had pulled him over. I asked him, “What are the chances of that?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Oh, normally I’d say, pick some number on the slender side of zero,” he said, eyeing the ballpoint with finger-itchy hunger. I handed it over. “But if things is meant to happen, they’ll just find themselves a way.” He pointed to the glove box. “Got some paper in there somewheres under the wrenches. Might could be a bit greasy, but I can still dig a few words into it.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I reached, pushed the button, but it wouldn’t budge. I rammed harder, with my thumb, and then the heel of my hand. The door was jammed tight. I slammed at it, harder each time, but that latch had other ideas. Weeks, years, of bottled up angst came growling through like a coalmine threatening to give. “Dammit!” I gritted the word, temples throbbing. Shoring timbers began to creak. Under my breath, but then gradually louder: “DammitDammitDammitDammitDammit!”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“That your magic incantation for stuck buttons?” he asked with an ornery smile. “Does it work? I might could try it if it works.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>“Nothing ever works…”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Then maybe cussin’ at it ain’t your best first choice.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I slammed the latch button again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Now, ya might wanna try easing up on that a mite, friend; it falls all to shambles on a whisper.” He studied me. I fought off the urge to look back, sitting rigid in that brittle old seat, watching a train of cars crawl along behind a rusted-out sedan. He saw all that, in no particular hurry to jot his thought down. “Much like your life, lately, I suspect.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Oh, I’m okay,” I said. “Sorry.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Don’t look okay to me; settin’ there lookin’ like a smacked nerve. Them words dripped out of you like a squeezed out carwash sponge. Been under some pressure?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I guess.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Talkative fella, ain’t ya?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I’m sorry.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Sokay. Silence holds its own truth; you play yours close to the vest if you wanna. Just seems things been tryin’ to beat into my dim skull that you don’t get nowheres just sulking along not sayin’ much. Gotta learn to trust more than your horse. – And you ain’t even got a horse.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I just sat there.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>He started up again. “Got so I just had to talk to someone with a couple less legs.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Him and a family filled with Jesus and nothin’ but. So I just wandered on out into the world.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah, well, some of us can’t even get that right.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“All locked up inside, right? Feels like you just can’t cut your way out nohow?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah, I guess. - Uh-huh. - Exactly.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Ah-hyup. Know that’n, alright.” He turned away and studied his steering wheel for a while, petting long tracks through the prairie grit built up thick on the column. Then he said, “Y’know, sometimes the why of things just don’t much matter. Don’t none of us know the real why behind most things, anyways. But here we are, two strangers parked beside a long stretch of nowhere, trying to coax ourselves outa the same problems.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Karma again,” I said, mainly to myself.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Karma. Fate. Possibilities. Burnin’ off the old to take on the new. They say it ain’t where </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">you</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> think you wanna go that counts s’much as where life trips you up tryin’ to get there.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Never heard it put that way before.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He watched for a while; like he was meditating on me, waiting for me to stir. It was unnerving; me aching to let him, to let </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">anyone</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> in; him just quietly watching. “My roommate in college used to call me just an outsider looking in; said I wasn’t letting myself come alive.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Did ya try it any different after that? Did that work for ya?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Not really.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I started talking to this guy like I’d just been released from solitary confinement; told him about never being able to talk to people, especially those I most ached to be close to, about screwing up college, and my whole list of grievances. But just couldn’t get close to that hard-edged grief over my dad. “I’m just trying to get through life quietly. Do the right thing. Be a nice guy. But it’s like God doesn’t really care.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Ah-hyup!” he said, “Sometimes, sure feels like if God ain’t quite dead yet, He is most assuredly lying on his back in the doorway. But you know, deep inside us, there’s this little tiny light glowing just enough we don’t quite give up. Not quite; not entirely. It’s how things is all planned out. Otherwise the good folks woulda offed themselves long ago from caring too much.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He handed my pen back without writing. He reached down, shifted gears, stomped the pedals. The van lurched and belched, ground metal against metal, but didn’t quite move, and didn’t quite die. I thought hard about how much that was like my life, but didn’t say anything.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He caught it anyway. “Sometimes this old car does seem to be listening in on ya, don’t it?” he asked.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Bold";"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A red Trans Am roared past, horn blaring. “Okay, there, cowboy,” he said, watching it, but also me, “Got you some real twisty roads comin’ up; might wanna show ’em some respect, you ever wanna make it back home.” I didn’t know which of us he was talking to.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We broke down somewhere in Indiana near a buffalo farm.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Off in a field, crawling over the engine, he told himself, “Boy, Jeremy, you just do not have a thimbleful of brain cells to rub together in there, do ya? Couldn’t think your way outa bed in the mornin’ if Ma didn’t embroider instructions on your sheets.” He looked up at me. “Won’t be an expensive fix,” he said, “But I will have to ease her along to that service station we just passed. Good thing you come along or we’d never make it. May have to push her a bit. Poor old lady don’t seem to have much scoot in her gitalong no more, but we can still get there if we coax her real nice.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">We sat a while in a prairie that stretched out across forever, grass bowing to soothing breezes like waves across a gentle green sea, as the engine and I cooled. I sighed, stretched, letting go of things. I asked, “When you sit out here in the middle of nowhere and nothingness like this, do you feel like you’re running away from something; or towards it?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Feels like just being with it.” He tossed a clod of dirt. “Just losing m’self in the soul of things.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Well, now that seems ’bout right,” I drawled. He smiled. I sounded kinda like him.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At a seedy motel we found a clerk watching a tiny TV under a dull, matted buffalo head. When he heard the door open, he called without turning around, “Hey, how y’all doin’?” The dead, glass-eyed animal bothered me. Jeremy busted out in a grin as the little man stood up. He was wearing lime plaid Bermuda shorts, a t-shirt with a flag on it, and cowboy boots with high white socks. Through a gap-toothed smile he answered a question we hadn’t even asked. “Oh, cain’t complain,” he said. “Wouldn’t do no good, know what I mean?” And he laughed at his tired old joke like he hadn’t heard it a thousand times in a world looking out at life through shallow clichés. “Cain’t kick about it. Considering the alternative …Ha ha ha … Know what I mean? …”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Jeremy said, “Death? Oh, I don’t know; dead ain’t s’bad. Been dead myself many times.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I liked this guy. This was going to be an interesting evening.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You said your family’s religious?” I asked. Ours was one of maybe ten rooms in this long, flat motel; each, no doubt, with the same faded interiors. Each a tossed salad of Salvation Army furniture, a bland and mismatched scrapbook of stains, but they did share a porch looking out on the sunset. The two of us sat there, on gouged and splintered rockers, their cane backs unraveling. As I was. There were three or four old wrecks parked along the strip, a couple of them thrashing and moaning; occasional screams of, “Yes! Yes! Yes, Honey, Yes!” But we had the porch to ourselves.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Born again fundamentalist,” he told me. “Daddy was a minister. Seems in my family, at least, the earth’s only a few thousand years old. They all keep losing track of the exact number; can’t find the reference in the Bible nowheres, but they’d fight to the death it’s in there, and it’s true. Sun and stars orbit the earth. Just cause man’s here, no other reason. Rest of the world should bow down and kiss American butt cause Jesus is coming to save us, and us alone. Somethin’ to do with the flag, it seems.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I held my tongue. “Now me,” he said, “Guess I lean more toward being a kind of a pantheist.” He looked over at me, stopping to scratch at the knee of his jeans, watching as I felt the dull thud of the word ‘pantheist’ falling so casually from the mouth of a cowpoke who had earlier been talking about karma.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Does that mean you worship a whole bunch of Gods?” I asked.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Just means everything’s holy; everyone’s got their own layers of how it all fits together, and you gotta listen to everybody. All religions play their parts.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“That must’ve gone over big.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Didn’t set so well with Daddy, I’m afraid, no.” He shook his head slowly. “He was out there preachin’ some things that just didn’t quite fit in with how the world looked to me. When he wasn’t herding cattle, he was herding minds and souls. But you know, it’s kinda hard to keep ’em penned in once the cattle’s learned to think. So one day I just wandered off.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“To think things through your own way.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“More like listening. Seems you can figure out a lot by just listening in on the soul of things. Starts to look like there really is some kinda meaning out there and it’s not cutting us all apart; it’s taking us all somewheres together.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Who was this hippie cowboy? Why was I opening up to him; how was he drawing me out? “Like I read once in a book called ‘The Way of the Lonely Ones,’ …” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“The Path to God, Yup. That’s what they call it. Can go way beyond just being lonesome.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Right - so – yeah – but - if all I’m doing is just standing around listening, not doing anything with my own life, just listening in on everybody else’s, then what good am I really doing anybody?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“That there’s probably the first step.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Uhhh … mmm … What … where?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Wantin’ to do good for folks. Not just settin’ around waitin’ for God to drop your share in your lap. ‘I put my faith in Him, so He owes me.’ Been figger’n on that’n a long time. All things don’t necessarily come to folks who don’t do nothin’ </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman Italic";">but</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> wait. Even if they’re prayin’ while they’re settin’ there. You can put all the faith in God you want to, but you try crammin’ Him behind the wheel while you nap in the back seat; you’re still gonna drive into a tree.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’ve never been able to laugh full out, but he got a couple of snorts out of me with that one. I really liked this guy. I told him, “I’ve been writing this lady from this group called The Theosophical Society. She says we can draw special teachers into our lives. If we’re ready. I’m starting to think you might be one?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Don’t wanna give me too much credit, now. We’re all ready for somethin’; and meant to be each other’s teachers. It’s all about takin’ the heart and soul of ever’body ’n’ ever’thang in til it grows into just one great big hum. That there’s the singin’ voice of God. Then it just becomes a matter of how we’re gonna sing back. Still tryin’ to figure that’n out for m’self. Danged straight ain’t no theosophical adept, if that’s what you’re sayin’.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Adept? You know about the mahatmas, the great teachers?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“No more’n I’m meant to, I guess. Just seems if you’re ‘ready,’ as you call it, they might be listening in right now. You’d never know it. Seem to like answerin’ your best questions by dropping a letter on your head from the other side o’ the planet.” He suddenly crossed himself hurriedly, but with reverence. “Not that I’m makin’ sport of you folks,” he told the open air. “I’d never do that.” He waited a moment, as though listening. Then he laughed, relieved.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You know about the mahatma letters. This is great,” I told him. “I’ve been reading them. About Colonel Olcott and how their notes fell on his head on the train. Asks a question and the answer falls out of his napkin. There really is still magic in the world, isn’t there? They just hide it until people can handle it.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Kinda peeks out at ya when you’re a kid, just so’s you see it’s there; but then you gotta go huntin’ for it again. If you don’t go chasing magic, it’s never gonna catch ya.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“It wants you to chase it.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Seems that way.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“That thing you were saying about how it’s all about the journey, not the goal?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Could be.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>“Marie says that, too.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Marie Chord?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You know the name?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Sure. Used to live with her. Sweet little grey-haired angel.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You used to live with Marie Chord.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Well, no, not like that. We both lived, along with about forty or so other folks, at Olcott, at Theosophical Headquarters. Didn’t know her personally, no.” He made a quiet clucking sound. “So sweet, and gentle. All meek and unobtrusive. Cain’t much help but love her if you’re drawn to the quiet, bashful side o’ nature. Cain’t say we ever really talked none.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then something he’d said earlier struck home. The voice of God, he’d said. I’ve always wondered what people meant when they said God spoke to them. Especially now when I was beginning to have my doubts about a big bearded white guy in the clouds with a guard at the gate and streets of gold massed with billions of people. Did He actually have a voice?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I thought back to that time in the woods with Thomas’s German friend Angie, and how I’d felt my heart reaching out to tap into her unspoken pains and history. There hadn’t been any words, no one had said anything, but it had felt like listening. I thought of those old homes and battlefields of my childhood where long-stilled miseries had just seemed to invade me. I thought of brief visits with the eternal among the stars when I seemed to be hearing everyone and everything in the silence. I wondered how this all fed together.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And why was it just coming to me now? After all those years of suffering and searching why was it all plowing into me at once? The world had just torn everything away that I cared about, it had completely broken me, and <i>now</i> it was handing me a gift?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I felt my face and heart sucking in, like a hardening fist getting ready to strike.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What’s wrong?” he asked.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span> </span>“Karma, theosophy, all this weird stuff just keeps coming at me from everywhere these days. Which should be cool, which should be wonderful, but since all that’s been popping up, things have been getting awfully ugly, and harsh.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Really? Good for you.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Good for me? What do you mean, good for me?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Maybe it’s getting you ready for tryin’ on somethin’ a size bigger’n you was.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Why can’t I just keep quiet, mind my own business, and let God just drop all the good stuff on my plate where I don’t have to go out looking for it? You know; just cut it up in little bites, maybe even do the chewin’ for me?” I was starting to talk more like him.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Nope. Don’t work that way. Gotta earn it. Work yourself hard to get ready, then claw your way through to the deep stuff. If it’s all handed to ya, it just ain’t yours yet.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“That’s what Marie’s been telling me.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Sweet little Marie. Say ‘Hi’ for me, will ya?”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“We only write. She lives in Illinois. Don’t even know what she looks like. I seriously doubt I’m ever going to meet her.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah you will.” He turned back toward the sunset and lost himself inside it for a while before he spoke again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Without taking his eyes and heart out of the rich hues of approaching evening and the first tentative chirps of the locusts, he said, very quietly, but with conviction, “And you really gotta start workin’ on all this ‘seriously doubting’ business.”</span></div>Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2346360643156042416.post-22158908997741410212011-01-05T11:44:00.001-08:002011-01-05T11:44:42.803-08:00From my as yet unpublished political thriller, "Apocalypse Turns."<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 150%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .4in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span> Death was palpable in the city.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Like undertow, it forced its way through, unseen but irresistible. Silent. Invisible but for the lives it twisted and distorted to its rhythms. But here in the graveyard there was peace. Death had no more work to do here. These final resting places are islands this dark current flows under and around, but then leaves behind, quiet, all voices spent.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Father Clark had lost himself to weeks of burying his parishioners, consoling their families, closing down the rubble that had been his church, and trying to hang onto his faith. Now he stood by freshly-turned mounds and looked off across the graves, across the water, to Miami in the distance. He and Death worked closely together; and would until the day they joined hands, and it carried him back home to his Creator.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The priest knew Death intimately; how it ebbed and flowed, surged in and held back; and what he felt this day disturbed him dearly. He sensed it biding its time somewhere very near; holding back just offshore, resting and gathering strength.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">It was lying in wait out there. Watching for some dark signal; from above, or below.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then it would come thundering in, pouring down over everyone, tearing souls loose in devastating masses. What he’d witnessed in the church had been just a hint of what was to come.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">So just this once, even on his island sanctuary, its icy hand reached him, and the good priest shuddered.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 9.0pt 13.5pt .25in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">At that same moment, deeper into the graveyard, lost among a dense and sorry gathering of mournful old crypts, long-crumbling and sagging in toward each other, a man’s hooded Chemsheath peeked out from the thickly shadowed doorway of an ancient caretaker’s shack. After a long moment of detailed search, testing his fate, the rest of him slipped out into the gray grit of morning.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He held there then, and nothing moved.<o:p></o:p></span></div><!--EndFragment-->Robert Edward Faheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00518191781895417192noreply@blogger.com0