Writings while at Omega
First
Omega Writing
Inadequacy
I think I feel inadequate in most situations. I mean I talk
to a counselor every week about how to make decisions. I always weigh
everything moving back and forth with alternatives like dipping in and out of
different ponds, one will hit me, this pond is the best, coolest, warmest, or
cleanest or safest or deepest.
Recently a colleague invited me to her place in Cape Cod. I
had to weigh, figure out how long I’d be there; my first impulse was to say yes
which weekend and just go. But then I thought about the bedroom whether the
house was air-conditioned even if the bath was close, how far were they from
the beach, were the pillows soft, how would I amuse myself, how much would I
have to spend to take her to dinner, how would I amuse myself, was there a
place to write? Who else would be there? Would the other artists be up to my
level? Would I end up having to teach? Why was community important anyway?
Hadn’t I had enough already? Would this colleague even have time for me if she
were teaching classes all day? If my husband went, would he get along with her
husband? Didn’t this colleague invite everyone up to her place? I mean I hardly
knew her.
Couldn’t I do better staying home and just writing without
going out and all these distractions of a new place. Wow it tired me just to
think about it.
I could talk myself out of a new friend or any opportunity.
What if Bob (my husband really hated it. What if he had to leave and get a
hotel room? How far would we be from the beach? Which weekend would be best?
(Repeated thoughts confirming my insecurity.
Was it wise to go alone with these ankles? Who else would
want to go with me? Could Bob amuse himself when I was in workshop. Pretty much
the vitality was fading now. I was becoming tired, not enthused by the thought.
I recall a friend who had gone to a similar place on a similar visit and she
didn’t like it. Said it was not illuminating like Omega. If I got to know this
new colleague I would see her flaws. She wouldn’t b4e a saint to me and I
couldn’t worship her from afar.
I had difficulty breathing for a second. There was a chasm
between the seekers and the sought after. Couldn’t I stay alone and keep
writing and be satisfied and try not to befriend someone further along in the
journey. If this colleague were further along why would she want to give time
to me? Was she trying to make money off me? Was this a set up so I would later
take her class? Surely she has so much more money than me we wouldn’t shop in
the same places.
Was I interested in her because she was older, seemed to
know more like the seniors in high school. Was I just befriending her because
she knew rich important people who might finance my writing?
Oh lord all these reservations were clouding my vision.
Reservations kept me from acting. A certain amount of research is good. But you
could spend your life running between pools.
I felt insecure about going to Ecuador with this friend in
seventh grade and I’ve always regretted not seeing the Galapagos turtles. I let
my fear overwhelm me. I was afraid to leave my parents and home and go with my
best friend and family to he home there. I now see that would have been a fantastic experience. But
my parents coddled me and soothed my fears so I didn’t go.
Many times I have imagined those Galapagos turtles that
Williams eulogizes in suddenly last summer and I see as a writer I need to see
those seeds for new seeds to my work and life.
Practically speaking you give others a chance and new
vistas appear more delicious than not.
I know Emily Dickinson never went anywhere but she did
practice writing poetry a lot. “I never saw a wave. I never saw the sea…must
be.”
Probably this fear of making a quick decision comes from
years of women having the second or last choice.
Second Omega Writing
Dinner at our House
I was rich, but didn’t know it; seared porterhouse steak,
peppered, salted almost flaming brought in on a silver tray placed by servants
in front of Dad, shining silver platter; feeling sick to stomach, how do you
talk to him; an unfeeling man, you had to get him at the right moment. Ma said
usually right after dinner steamed corn on the cob, sterling corn holders,
buttered garlic bread passed around; served on the right, cleared from the
left. Servants in wilted whites; cook with starched jacket popped open
unpressed. Ma got the servants deodorant, but Dad didn’t want to spend too much
on the uniforms and they hated wearing them; kept them downstairs in servants
quarters, along with ironing board, spray starch and snuck to their broken red
and blue trucks, or dad’s discarded old cars to drive home. Buttered peas and
yes little almonds in silver dishes by the original Blue Willowware plates
(everyday china). Ma to Dad’s left smiling, by saying nothing as he complained
about a bill, a daily communicant, rising at six to go to Mass and read Theard
de Chardin. Oh god didn’t she want to scream at him. He was insulting her
again. Get me out of here. Somebody please! Homemade peach ice cream. Yum. Yum.
Fresh chocolate pudding; home made whipped cream chicory coffee and yes we’re
in Mississippi. Our front the Gulf of Mexico, a hot sun. In 2005, that water
would flatten it all. Leveling the big house with twelve-inch walls, turning
the 50 acres into a briar patch with snakes scrambling over each other at the
front of the drive.
But oh the food on that table, broccoli with cheese, and
sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows a top, homemade biscuits made from
scratch. The chauffeur driving to get chilled blue Nun wins and putting it in
chilled baccarat glasses. Dad ringing a bell for each new course. So many
rules: no swimsuits at table, no raising of the voice, no discussing private
issues while the help were in the room and oh goodness don’t bring your plate
to the kitchen. The help were there for that. Say may I be excused? Say your
grace before meals don’t eat till everyone is served. Don’t scrape your plate.
But mostly don’t defend yourself or talk too much. Kids were only allowed at
the main table when older than 10. It was a special honor to engage in adult
conversation. Mostly Dad talking about his money and investments and slyly
undercutting Mother. She had been a rich debutante and he worked his way from
the streets. “I lived between a bar and a parking lot,” he’d say Mad had had
gold) 14k) diaper pins
Dad wanted the glamour but didn’t want to pay for it. Ma
never balanced an account. Just asked him for money when she overdrew.
I never knew my father, till he was old and senile, and
happy to smile at me deaf though he was and listen to me to talk although he
couldn’t hear. “Bring your friends to supper,” he would say, “as many as you
want. Ma watched and his only Companions were the servants, who had been trained not to
talk. He sat at the 12’empty table (at the opposite end, looking out, rolling
his napkin ring, saying, “I’m a little deaf.”
……………
The hardest thing is writing
about the hardest thing. I get my coffee, line up my pencil, get a side glass
of ice water. Hardest thing is silence. Death, death, and more death. Nothing
to say. Pleasantries, excuses, jokes, past history, forgiveness. What to say?
Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Burying my mother. I guess. Harder I
thought stay in the present. Don’t think of her young Sit on the sofa by the
casket, protect her body so sweet in her favorite peacock blue suit, the lace hankie covering the
bruises from the i. v.s on her hands. Her face now younger, less wrinkles,
is it the filler or the absence of tubes in her nose. The lip were never that
full and pink and rather beautiful. She looks now like I remember her as a
child. On the sofa opposite me, my aunt Roma sits. She is a year younger than
Mom, Ma’s first friend and last. She’s so much stronger now, full faced, hipped
her husband had died young and a fortune had buffeted her. Does she think
she’ll be?
I’m dressed right, black suit, pumps, nylon house. Be the
person your mother would want you to be. Stay present. She was gone pieces;
like little deaths each day, thoughts gone, bodily functions gone, first the
cane then the walker then the wheel chair, then the bed, portable toilet, bed
pan. The last time I visited she was immobile on her bed like a marble statue
in a sheet. I asked if she knew she and me heaved pushing out bubbles from her
mouth. Dad behind me peeking through the door saying,” What will we do with
mother? He had said he was only staying alive to take care of her but now she
was dead and he was still alive
The hardest thing is getting old in America. You can’t
count on anyone even yourself to be in the same place. ) Broken ankles brought
me to a nursing home where there’s a sign. Don’t defecate or cough or
expectorate in the pool. What’s that? I’m moving my feet two hours a day in
that warm women and hearing women in their 80s talk about all their hip
replacements, ear, replacements, knee replacements, spinal injuries, infected
cataracts, swollen shoulder and lymph glands.
The wild ones still ride run in marathons though they walk
with a limp, drop their cans off (to collect the recycle fees) clip coupons for
old meat discounted n the grocery.
Only women are in the pool. Except one husband who holds on
to a pin styrophone tube while his wife pulls or leads him around the parameter
of the pool. That says something. Either we’ve outlived the men or they’re too
frightened to come. His wife leads one elderly professor with Parkinson’s
around the pool. He hold the end of a Styrofoam tube and she the other while he
walks the perimeter. The pool is four foot deep. Still one 80- yr. old Irish
woman almost drowned when someone mistakenly made her take her take her floater
off. When you leave the pool, you walk past a sea of blue, gray
haired women sprinkled with men, drinking wine by a sign that announces
birthdays, long anniversaries.
What do these people talk about? One woman that I used to
know from Church wanders about the lobby looking for something to do or say.
Another plays a puzzle and sits by the front door as if looking for someone a
third positions outside in a rocker comments on the weather.
Now I want to be someone different. I’m going to position
myself in a position where I have to give, where I use my talents, dear god
please let my intellect grow. It’s the harder choice to force yourself to do
things with broken ankles, broken hip,
broken family, broken car, broken phone in a broken America. But what’s the
alternative. So we must say life, life and more life. Even if it means we go
forth impaired and alone. The fan rattles in the dining hall a knife clicks on
an old plate at Omega. These things bring joy and too are old.
Third Writing
I should have known when I entered that NYC playwriting
workshop that sending out emails about my play readings would, make people hate
me, I should have known that I was a great writer and should have known that
the competition was so rough the other writers might want to destroy me. I
should have known the director of my piece was an insecure double crossing
bitch and her love for my writing would vanish on other’s destruction. I should
have known the market is saturated with playwrights reading, sending,
subscribing, introducing shorter and shorter scenes of their work to get it
seen. I think there is now a
2-minute play and I know the 10-minute vehicle is taking over America. I should
have known there was no money in Playwriting. Weren’t all the playwrights going
into TV? I should also have known it’s a youth market. Isn’t 30 the mid career writer now? I
should have known that you need time to do yet another draft, and hungry eyes,
lean pocketbooks and vampires wanting to parasitize your talent were begging on
every corner.
I should have known that the sharks dominate those playwriting
studios where actors pour their hearts out (why is pain seen as profound and
humor not)
I should have know how many people make money off artists;
teaching, producing, editing, rewriting photographing, binding, coaching and
that any one of those professions would be more lucrative.
But I didn’t know that and so it’s taken me 25 years 25
years to keep writing the saleable piece, 25years to run a theatre and teach, 25 yeas
to get published and then you break your ankle, you lie on your back keep
writing in bed because you have learned to love it. Then magically I should
have known some stranger finds your play on line and magically the universe
sees it’s produced.
I should have known someone else was guiding me all along.
All along my stories were teaching me, lifting me, releasing me, clearing me,
making the path. Oh god just let me keep the old girl walking, writing reaching
up.
I should have known writing would bring me joy, lift the
curtain, make the blind girl see; with writing I’m never alone in the emergency
room I’m writing in recovery I’m writing in the ambulance. I’m taking notes.
Seeing god.
I should have known writing was the god in me; writing is
the nasty friend, writing is the missing partner, child, colleague. Writing
that little girl still trying to see what is it I’m suppose to do before I die.
Writing is the pen, the paper, the computer, the tape recorder that helps me
see make everything bearable, keeps life in perspective makes me get up early,
tells me time is running out. It’s the tick tock of life you start to see. The
alarm going off in your car. The darling husband you forgot to like.
Gobble gobble gobble; writing gobbles up the days maybe one
third of this page will survive the next pen surgery when I go thru. Striking
lines, sticking in smells, sights, sounds; maybe if I keep writing god will let
me stumble into something forgotten seething smoking looming bouncing beneath
the surface. God I hope so. I hope this sacrificial paper is not just for
shredding. If only I could illuminate myself not see my flaws but save time
save time save time. Help others see. In this youth-driven America, writers are
seers, the grandmothers, the teachers, the wizards, the priest therapists.
I should have known being a writer is actually like being a
nun. Kind of wonderful the black robes, the ghostly chanting, the candle
flickering in the gothic church under the moon, all of us humming, and filing
and preaching together.
Fourth Reading A Time You Weren’t Invited
I wasn’t invited back into Stella Adler’s Advanced Acting
Class. I cried and didn’t answer the phone for 2 weeks. She was the guru of NYC
Stanislavski training, part of the royal three, Strasberg, Hagen, and Adler.
I had commuted from Princeton into Stella’s class in NYC
with suitcases of props for my psycho-realistic scenes; I had dissected each
line of memorized text for my action, objective, obstacle, inner image. I had
written the character history: who am I? Where am I what time is it? What am I
doing? What do I want? What’s in the way?
I had rehearsed in the Bronx, Queens, upper west side,
Brooklyn, Soho with actor strangers, always rushing to their places because
only one scene partner would take the train all the way to Princeton. I had a
Ph.D., was teaching college (actually actress-in-residence was my official
title. I had read Stella’s book four times, even attended class the Tuesday
before I was married, and asked for an excuse to go to my own wedding. I had
learned how to wok myself into an emotional pitch quietly sitting in class
while the actors in the scene before mine emoted. Between scenes you only had
one minute to set up your scene furniture; if you couldn’t get into character
quick, wow you weren’t admitted back into class. This made for a lot of
pathological colleagues, the most brilliant one now in Belleview.
I couldn’t believe I had been rejected while my scene
partner Pete (tall, gorgeous) once Clint Eastwood’s understudy had been
accepted. He was wooden, contemporary guttural in Shakespeare and his line
readings were stiff. The variety that came though rehearsal testing listening
watching was noticeably. Pete was a manager of a deli/restaurant and
entertained nightly. Red Flag.
I couldn’t believe Stella didn’t like me. Should I take
classes at her studio that didn’t require an audition when I was the head of
the acting program of my college? Sneak around actors in leotards going ma,
mei, me mo moo or squats in place. I was young and beautiful brilliant, not
humble yet, but I was being kicked out.
Why? Why? Why? On reflecting there are 11 roles for men to
one role for woman. 2. I didn’t socialize. Pete had rented later purchased a
summerhouse by Stella’s 3. For every man that auditioned for anything in class
or scene or play 25 women showed up who could sing dance act (the triple
threat) and were often more beautiful than me. My agent had showed me his book
of shockingly gorgeous clients and said I have 40 girls who like you, (pageboy
haircuts, turtle necks, short skirts to expose the leggy flesh) then he said,
“What do you that’s different? I said? What I do that’s different I gave up. (I
had worked hard to kill all traces of being Southern. (I had cut my hair, standardized
my speech, saying “her” not “huh,” “there” not “they-ah,”“morning”, not
“mawnin.” He said, “Well get it back.”
Long story short I returned to New Orleans, founded a
theatre where I could produce Southern Plays reclaimed my Southern accent.
Became a Southern writer because I could practice it, be unique, and writing
was cheaper (Actors need new resumes, dance, voice fencing classes…need I go
on. Writers just need a pencil.
Okay looking back I wasn’t invited into most plays I
auditioned for. I mean 500 girls auditioning for one role, what are the odds. I
was an auditioner not an actor.
Writing allows me to talk aloud. I thought writers hid. Now
people keep saying get up and read your work. I love your accent. Tell me about
yourself and they listen whereas when I auditioned, it was “Show me something.
You got 2 minutes.”
You could read
the play, memorize the audition side (actors at Yale are taught to do that in 5
minutes, wait in line for an hour (having gotten there early to get a slot)
have to read with the stage manager (peeping quietly your cues.) And then in
the midst of a practiced “tell me about yourself response,” hear the fatal
words, “Next. Or, “We’ll call you.”
I wasn’t invited into the world of acting but I drove
myself through the gates of writing.
Fifth Meditation
I am present to what is here for me now. I breathe deep
into the uncertainty. I am alone, old ancient for a writer), two feet off the
ground. So many artists I thought who have been ahead of me or beside me or
behind me catching up have gone. A bird whistles. Who is that? My friend, the
poet is in France. My god I thought we’d be running out own studio the one I
started, now closed. She moved across the pond—Europe. Does everyone slows down
in a warmer climate? My best friend from school evolving into a real Floridian
whatever that is (it’s a careful more real pace); my three children sprouting
wings all over the US, Ashland, Phoenix, Kansas. How do you throw out a net to
keep everyone in the same place?
Are we meant to stay grounded in one
place? Again the bird whistle. Is it someone who has passed? My friend, a
playwright colleague who looked up smiling at me in the waiting room of the
Cancer Center is gone. How slowly are quickly did she go? Is she still
suffering? Has she been diminished to a bird, free but far?
My feet are raised on the bed, left
one weak, but I can stand with a cane, and I can paint. I’ve had two quick
passes with death (both cancer.) Were there others I didn’t recognize? In this
circle of souls we are trying to move forward, but forward to where? Should I
keep writing hoping for genius to pop out like some strange bird unrecognizable
to myself or should I relax deeper into the breath, the quiet, the throat
already tense. Again the bird. I hear people talking in another place. I want
to stay in the present, not go back or forward, disregard the pain in my head,
the sore chest, the stiff back.
How conscious can anyone be? What is
the inner god world we are all to find? Someone sniffs back a tear in the
circle. I don’t want to die alone. One day the judgment will come. The sweet
smiling doctor won’t say, “This is serious. You’re on the border of a difficult
journey,” he’ll say you’ve got 5 days to live. My god the birds are whistling,
cawing as if celebrating that thought; a thrill of sound now; are those friends
welcoming me to the land beyond, higher up or deeper in.
“Passing” I hate that word. Who wants to pass from life? It’s great,
grand, wonderful with arias from “La Boheme”, paintings from Renoir, chocolates
from Godiva. The touch of soft velvet and leather and the taste of mushrooms,
soft and spicy and fresh greens with balsamic dressing, and grits with butter.
Again someone is sniffing. Is she nearer to death than me?
The only reason I would want to die
was if I knew, coward like, living meant burying one my children or having to
be in agony of pain. Or, a vegetable in a nursing home, head bobbing on my
chest in front of a soundless TV or over a paper I can’t read with glasses
falling off my nose, or with feces in my bedpan unremoved for an hour? But even
so how can we” pass” to a something state we don’t know. We see body in the
earth, we see people lighthearted lifting our spirits, do we lift up? Lift up
to what, where; has anyone definitively determined where God is.
I
think it’s amazing the search for god, and when I’m writing I’m not oscillating
back and forth like a fan, I’m totally happy. I’m so focused in the present on
just letting god come through my fingers. I’m okay. Hip hip hooray, like Monet
painting in the fields while bombs dropped on France knowing his purpose was to
paint. He just kept on going. Again someone with a really deep sniff.
God I wish I was profound. You’d think with all this writing, I’d hit
some gold go deep. Am I just a shallow net trolling for gems; well thank god I
haven’t hit a shark. Still no answers just a sense of god in me as I write and
thankfulness for being on this side, two feet on the ground that work.
Sixth Meditation
Sound of plane ahead getting louder, loud flipping wings
leading me to Conchi my sister-in-law dead from breast cancer. God it could
have been me. She floats before me through thick, viscous clouds smiling
serene. I can’t catch up. She is leading me somewhere but do I want to be led?
Blurry fog to the left and right and below me. Am I already dead? I’m out of
breath, leaning down, she vanishes again. Then pops up. Oh I would like to talk
to her; we only talked once those last six months when she got the terminal
report. She rolled into her cocoon bed, surrounded by her close chosen few,
(her kids and husband) I wasn’t one. I wasn’t invited into the inner circle of
her death, in the hope against hoping of her need to stay alive.
Now she is young like
I remembered her, full haired, lithe; not like the last picture my brother
took, full smile, baldhead with frizz, big cream framed glasses. I never
recalled her face being so small inside those frames. Smile almost over the
face as if it had to hold up the jaw. How many “hope to stay alive pills and vitamins”
was she taking, 70, 80, 12 an hour?
Maybe she was sick of
it all and wanted to scream at her long armed young daughters, let me go. Where
did Conchi travel to in that dark of the moon place, in those dark hours in her
cocoon bed, hoping to get the energy to maybe eat one nice dinner again or stay
awake one more hour. At the end she was awake four hours a day and so thrilled
to have that.
What am I doing with my
24-hour days, 18 of them wide awake. Am I using them or zoning out on some
useless TV show and staying with people who bore me. What am I eating relishing
each day, what am I drinking and delighting in: fresh chicory coffee, real
cream, ice tea with fresh mint from the garden, a New Orleans Bloody Mary with
pickles, hot beans, carrots, celery--a vegetable drink in tomato sauce?
Conchi loved the angels. Has she become one? Often I feel her around me,
so happy saying nothing just there. Why do we blanket death with so much sorrow
and evil? My husband says we never see birds’ corpses on the ground because
buzzards and other wild animals scoop them up quickly and take them off.
I want to fall apart
and be scooped up quickly. The me of me doesn’t think I’ll die or when I have
this thick presence of myself inside myself I’m not afraid to die. Still that’s
fine when you’re not writing from a death knell state, when the doomed faces of
doctors a, b, c, d, e are not looking down. They come in groups on hospital
judgment day, to bear the news—of your death. Do they even say the
word, “death?” I can’t remember. I think it’s “It
doesn’t look good, we’re not sure we got it all, we’ve done all we could, now.”
Who is in charge here, I want to scream. “How many days hours minutes seconds
do I have?”
A bird caws swinging
through the air. Again the picture of Conchi before me. Others have taken this
journey up. When I fly through the clouds sometimes I imagine people inside the
big puffs but even in that metal tube high up cushioned by the thought that in
bad weather the orange mask fall down, I want to scream out, “Not now.” My aunt
92 screamed out her dying words. “I can’t go now. I’ve so much more to do.”
I
don’t feel god is in the head, I think he’s in the experience of being held up
by viscous soft filmy clouds like sweet cotton candy delicious to the taste,
sliding by like velvet. In the feeling of floating or being held up by the
hands of Conchi and others who have gone before and the wee ones toddling
behind.
Conchi’s daughter’s
face is lined with tears and grief so many wrinkles on the face of this young
woman, who now has mantled her schizophrenic sister formerly held tight to
Conchi’s side.
And my brother has a
new fiancé, found in his grief group a woman who got to him before the
casserole brigade by asking him to take her to weekly mass. Her husband had
dropped dead same time as Conchi and this widow was already wise enough to see
opportunity in the funeral workshop. They have visited over 20 churches in
their pursuit of god and believe their dead spouses created their new alliance.
Maybe so, maybe not. But to quote Will, “Death once done there is no more dying
now. “ Maybe that’s why Conchi is smiling.
Seventh Reading
The box. It’s brown, cardboard, hard to the touch. Do I
want to open it? No, could be something dangerous. From Conchi to me. She died
2 years ago.
Everyone in the circle here is
crying about some lost love. Oh god it’s awful. Does writing mean I have to
open up the empty box of myself, throat dry.
Look I want to laugh, that’s why I write. I want to escape to not think
about who’s next on the death list. I mean we’re all in the room, going to die. I don’t want to
see my ancestors. I have lost the pictures that were on the walls of my New
Orleans home; all drowned out in
hurricane Katrina. Yes I recall Ellen Quail Grandma’s mother. A pale beauty,
icy skin, hair in a bun, a colored photograph of a woman died of breast cancer.
something a hundred years later I survive. Is she whispering through me as we
gallop into the 21st century?
I recall Grandma telling me about her mother, they drove in a horse and
buggy hearses with the casket behind to the graveyard, and her Dad said, “This
is Mam’s last ride.” A century ago or maybe not even that and the experience
seems antique. But maybe it’s the silence that shroud death. My young great
grandma always looked old to me in the photo or was it a
miniature, but I have way lived longer.
All those whispering women that went before howling or shrinking quietly
inside death. I never knew them, spoke to them, heard them. I know somehow they
are in my veins and I must speak my truth because it’s theirs but my words
shake in my mouth, so small, tweak, chirp, small inside the power of death.
“Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” Emily
Dickinson. God she drove about in a carriage too and always wore shite and
never left her house, but my she dove deep, I experience my soul when I am
quietly secure embraced by an inner peace that slips in and out, and comes to
me unexpected, sliding over me like a glove or a warm towel or an electric
blanket just the right warmth.
But oh I don’t want to draw back the covers on my sister-in-law’s casket
or open the box of her disappeared memories or call back my ancestors in their
carriages less they appear suddenly and scoop me up and rip me away. When I
write I write for comedy to find the joy, the laugh, the loop hole that puts
toys in the box.
I
think you can read your way to god, or breathe your way, or thank your way but
in the presence of an empty box I don’t know…what is it? Not an empty box but a
vessel for me to fall. Didn’t Emily have that box with 3000 poems at the foot
of her bed? That have scattered peace and compassion and insight all over the
earth. No she has flown to the sky. Not one was published, not one was chosen
one let the house but somehow they made heir way to god. The ancestral women
were breathing behind her. Swoosh we all fly.
Eighth Reading
I keep falling asleep
during meditation, zone out, lone gone. Wow. Is that what death will be life
for me. Wonder what great-grandma’s (the one with breast cancer) goodbye words
were. She had a mirror and compact by her bed, and Grandma said when she went
into visit her, Ellen Quail, her Ma knocked over the mirror and it broke into
thousands of pieces. Her mother said, “Did the mirror break?” (A broken mirror
meant death—the worstest of worse bad luck) Ellen Quail was Irish. My Grandma
said, “No, Ma, the mirror didn’t break.” At 18, she already knew how to lie to
the shaken. But her heart fell and she knew her mother was doomed. Question: 1)
How could Ellen Quail not have seen the broken mirror pieces? 2) How did my
Grandma sneak in to pick them up?
My grandma is
speaking through me now. She was terrified of death. Made me and everyone
promise we would not tell her when she was going to die. We should go in the
room, and throw up the blinds, and let in the light and give her hope. “No
hope” she said, “is like a lance through the heart.”
She saw death in many superstitions: a bird in the house, a
hat on the bed, 13 at table (Christ was the 13th and the youngest
and died.) If 13 showed up for Sunday dinner at her grand table, presto, all
would stop and the table would be divided and reset.
Oh yes dreams of
teeth meant someone would die. (Dreams of death were okay they could mean
marriage.) Funerals and graveyards should be avoided. Grandma only went to 3
funerals in her life; her parents’ and her husband’s. If you had a house across
from a cemetery, the ghosts could come over and get you.
Now what are my
superstitions? I don’t like birds (one flew onto the table when my husband and
I went out to dinner,) and I insisted we move inside. I mean a sparrow pecking
at table is freaky. I mean didn’t Poe know this? “Quoth the Raven Never More.”
That Raven on the post of his door was cawing and screaming, “Death is here.”
Grandma couldn’t
stop death. “Death, death, and
more death.” She lived to 88, and fired terror in her grandchildren. All these
superstitions are just shields with no power. Unmask the fear Rosary; “speak
the speech I pray you trippingly on the tongue.” Keep writing but don’t turn
out the lights.
Is this fear of the dark not all the grandmothers
whispering at us let your voice your stronger self come out?
Ninth Reading
So I keep falling asleep. My head falls back. I nod off;
find my drooped to the side. I hear someone say go deeper deeper. Breathe in. I
fall off again nodding. You can begin to write, but write what for whom. It
takes so much time. I am sleeping. Does all this sleep improve anything? If I
don’t get enough sleep will sleepless hours stack up and then I’ll need a week,
just to put myself in a trance and go there.
I imagine a life with no touching. Could be ok, when little
I would like in bed next to my Mother; she had this long hair to her waist long
wavy brown hair. I used to like to touch it. I’d lie in bed next to her and
hold onto her hand to fall asleep and i felt safe and so secure. This peaceful
serenity when your nom is there. I miss her; it’s been 14 years since she died
but when I breathe in and out and look at my face n the mirror, it’s starting to
look like hers and I used to thin she was old. I didn’t miss sex as a child and
so why would I miss it when I got older except that the rush of sex felt great,
that rush of warmth between the legs, the need to have it somehow stopped and
released. Oh my goodness the sweet lushness of it. But do I want it that bad,
no I don’t want I more than writing, writing is a slower more peaceful way to
drain myself and feel myself with god. It’s a sacrificial life. You deny yourself sleep, fun chatting,
or shopping, and like a monk you gird yourself and write your experience of
life. You write although you know the depth of your conversation on the page
isn’t as good as George Elliot’s and the writing keeps you from friends and
forces you into a battle with your own mind, thoughts; wouldn’t it be more
fruitful to read philosophy or theology or psychology or history or Buddhism’s. Thee are so many truths waiting
out there to be found. Mama has
died. She won’t come back but weirdly when I think Mama she is there in a gentle
whisper in a confidence in myself n a bravery implanted beyond the long ago, in
the sturdy touch of my husband’s fingers in his too need for silence which I
understand in the avoidance of gossip [, silly chatter, banalities, in the
convent life of the writer accepting hoping that y small life will expand
inside others in this invisible web of god. Friends of god, searchers for god
through the talent we’ve been given.
