The color of silence

Silence, so profound you can hear the angels dancing on pinhead, doing that old soft shoe. What you were expecting, Swan Lake? Yes, ballet more suits the dancing angels, than vaudeville, but my angels tended to be an irreverent lot, was it because the nuns told us we had to leave a space on the pew between us for our guardian angels? That I began to put together an odd tapestry of faith? I couldn’t imagine my guardian angel sitting there with nothing to do but twiddle his thumbs or wings, or whatever they do when they we were stuck in church, each isolated from the other by one body width. I was never sure how much space to leave on the pew on account of their wingspan and all. Then I got worried about the technical details, and I forgot why I was there. Sure, the nuns’ ploy worked, silence was golden, silence was maintained, but I began to see they were busy breaking God‘s rules just to keep us under a tight rein. When it came to maintaining orders, they were so busy making up white lies, they never suspected that the bottom was dropping out of my faith. Or at least my ability to believe. But, even at the age of four, I had a mind like a steel trap. If someone said something that tried my logic, I turned it over and over again and struggled with a dichotomy, having no place to put it, it made me a silent, contemplative child, distrustful of adults who told the most preposterous lies and expected me to believe them. Like the time my uncle took my nose and showed me his thumb. I knew it was his thumb, but he insisted it was my nose, so I felt it, and it was right where it always was. Then there was the time when the nun said God was crying because we were being so bad in church. That’s why it was raining. My mind was working on other possibilities and if God‘s tears were raining, then maybe he was just pissing on us for our stupidity. The erosion of faith. I wonder about Mary. And what about the fib where the world is flat? Where if you walk too far, you would fall off the end of the earth into the void? Is it visible or invisible? Would I fall into the void, though it looked to be made of substance? Then there’s the Soviet system of keep silence and don’t question, don’t rock the boat, don’t voice opinions. But the dichotomy comes when you can no longer keep silent for your own safety and well-being. When atrocities were being committed in our name, like now with the Iraqi war. Silence is the color of blood. The angels are having trouble finding room on the pinhead, there’s no dancing at all just the vulgar boatman shuffle. Poisonous silence descends. Be still in my beating heart. I found the sublime state of silence as I rode my horse on the back country fire trails. The empty bowl of faith was found in nature, not in the houses of God. Angels in the wind. Silence, a tremble of wings. Silence of early morning, the sound of sunlight, through a window pain, a tranquil, brief moment before the onslaught of the day.  

6/30/06 Writers’ Group

Write about the best time you’ve ever had

Best time… So many to choose from. Where to even begin? This is the throat clearing. There have been moments that are sublime, hard, earned ones, where, after a struggle I’ve been exalted—like the time the fog parted at the Sungate of Machu Picchu, the sacred city emerged, and later that day, after we had hoisted ourselves up the robust cable to the peak above the city, to the temple of the sun and moon. 

There were times we had to crawl through live rock passages carved by Inca hands. Passages where you had to stoop over and if you were the enemy, your head was smitten off as you stood there. The narrow passages were like keyholes, birth chambers or entrances to other worlds. And once you passed through that portal, you were irrevocably changed, you could never go back to who you were. 

Soon, we arrived at the temple, an alter of stone. Huaca del Sol, and as we gazed back on that sacred city time converged. When I was a child, I loved to read my grandmother‘s secret books on the bookshelf near her bed. I remember her reading Hiram Bingham‘s story of Machu Picchu. I used to gaze at the cover, it was a cheap pulp fiction pocketbook older than I was, with edges turned mahogany over time. 

At that moment, looking down at the city, time converged, but before we left for the Andes, my grandmother had already died. And I was heartsick, devastated, my world had fallen apart. She was my anchor, my foundation. The woman who raised me from childhood, because my mother was insane, not cut out for motherhood. 

When I was young, she left me and my young brother on the doorstep like foundlings. Better there than on a church step. This was how I discovered I had a brother. One hot summer morning, there he was, crying. She literally had dumped him and ran. I was so insanely jealous, because my grandmother spent all her time with the baby. I was four going on five but genetics linked us as surely as it did to my granny. 

At the temple of the sun, I cut a lock of hair with an old brass pocket knife of my grandfather’s, with its worn mother of pearl handle, and dull brass hasps where the pearl had broken off. It made a strange sawing sound as it severed a chunk of hair so close to my left ear, I was leaving a genetic marker on top of the dolman. 

Dolman, and old-world term for a new world marker of the spirit world. These were portals, markers to the underworld. Rocks raised as huacas, as alters on the ceiling of the world. Dolman in Ireland. Huaca here, but the same intent the world over and I was standing with a foot in two, maybe three worlds. The old world, and the southern world on the new continent. The new world south of the equator.

Standing on the equator that was another euphoric moment. Standing with the foot straddling two hemispheres was astounding, but was I traveling for myself or for my grandmother? Was I my grandmother‘s eyes, traveling to places I had never been, living the life she never had, because in her era it was never possible? 

She was caught up in the realm of the last vestiges of the Victorian Age where women were wives, and they had children. They didn’t vote, but she had her suffragette dreams to write and paint and live alone in a bee-loud glade. 

Wanting to please her, I lived the life she never had. I was seeing the world, I was bearing witness to the wonders of the world. But she was dead, gone, past, and only with the spirit realm was she bearing witness to what I saw with these mortal eyes. 

I placed the thick strands of my hair, tinted with fire, so like her own hair as to be nearly indistinguishable on the stone altar, placing white crystal rocks gleaned from our lower field in Forest Knolls, after heavy rainfall when the gopherholes became conduits for the rain runoff, leaving white quartz treasures in the small alluvial fans that framed each hole. Small quartz teeth of the mountain to hold down my hair in this strange land.

6/26/06 Writers’ Group

Waiting for Grace

We are waiting, waiting with, waiting for... Prepositions aside, we are always a juxtaposition. Just suppose.  I’m waiting, something I’m not very good at. Not a happy camper. So I learn to be a modified bag lady for the infrequent doctor visits, I hate the waiting room. True Godot. Where is Estragon when you need him? 

There are so many forms of waiting, we hardly notice, we are so programmed. Patient sheep. I usually bring a snack, some water, a novel, a notepad, receipts, handcream. Anything to keep me entertained. Not a purse, mind you. All the purse-like vitals go into my front pocket. A purse is a big target.

The deal I had made with myself in order to be an artist in residence was to carry the absolute minimum. Be at the ready because danger, though always present, was never clear. I travel through so many dicey neighborhoods. Hunter's Point is the absolute worst, not a good place for white folks to aimlessly wander. 

My second cousin, Pat D'Arcy, a redhead who lived in the dicy hood, gained serious street cred and respect when he pulled out a chainsaw to cut up some cardboard boxes. They gave him a wide berth after that. 

I drove a rickety old truck named Blue Lazarus, the back filled with art supplies. I had no cell phone, no way to contact the outside world if things went south. But the deal was I could walk into the school with whatever I had in my pockets. My backpack was merely a decoy. The goods were always on me. 

Always carry your money close. Something I picked up in South America. Keep your valuables in your front pockets because the razoristas were true artists and they could slice a back pocket open in seconds and you couldn’t feel a thing. No blood. Backpacks were an easy target. We wore our daypacks in front like kangaroos pouches. There’s always a lot of waiting around when you travel, in transito, todo el Mundo. 

One time we were traveling from the Petén jungle of Tikál enroute to El Salvador, but the US invaded Honduras. Tegucigalpa. And there we were, stuck in transito, call it purgatory, and everyone was on the move, with nowhere to go. Nothing like a little US sanctioned banana republic war to spice things up. We waited a very long time in the Guatemalan airport greasing the palms of airline clerks with morditas to get a seat on the plane to anywhere. We weren't choosy. 

Guatemala City was already uneasy, seething with hostility—and twice now, grace waited with us. Once, outside Atitlán, the guerrillas were disappearing tourists and the Guatemalan Army was pulling people off buses and shooting them. They pulled over the bus in front, and the one behind, but not our bus. We walked with grace. We were allowed to travel onward. In the Petén Jungle the Guatemalan Army stopping us again but we were allowed to continue onward. We were waiting with grace there too. 

At the airport luck followed us a third time. We bore witness to first, and second-hand stories of the ones who were not so lucky. The man who gave us a lift out of the Petén Jungle after our taxi man abandoned us 40 km from civilization. He was searching for a sister who is a nurse. We never found out if she was one of the lucky ones or like us, or one of the disappeared. 

The journey goes ever forward and we will never wait we never waited for Grace. We kept moving on, Grace was within us. But for years I couldn’t stop dreaming of snipers in the jungle waiting for us. We were walking charmed life 

6/16 2006 Writers' Group

Power shopping

Well, you said mundane and I was already spooked by the temptation of the sacred so I picked the most mundane, if not least important part of my day. Being at Costco with only 20 minutes to spare, to shop for staples, and to return the furry bagels, all green in their penicillin splendor. I blindly grabbed a handful of receipts this morning in the dark, hoping one of them was last week's Costco receipt. 

In the parking lot, after I tanked up—why does Neil let the tank go dry, then randomly reset the trip odometer, and never records the results, let alone, fill the tank? So at 6 AM, as we sped down the freeway we didn't know how much gas was left in the tank because my gas gauge doesn’t work. The meter lies somewhere near the 1/3 tank mark leaving us guessing as to how much gas is actually in the tank. 

I can’t stand the suspense, we are running late and Shell is open, but I don’t like Shell's politics in South Africa. They helped invent apartheid. But we only buy 1 gallon to assuage the gods. I still don’t buy grapes out of respect to the César Chavez strike way back in the 1970s, but when it comes to wine I’m suddenly myopic. I don’t see past the rim of my wine glass. 

It made me think of other gas stations where I hunt for the best deals online before the gas gas goes up another $.10. But I digress, so I'm in Costco slaloming around the leisurely paced shoppers who have all the time in the world. One woman yells to her mother: Coming through! as I careened around the corner, and I thanked them. I say I’m power shopping. Don’t worry I don’t drive like this. But wait, I do! I ram it down the aisles, snagging snacks enroute to the counter. In and out in 20 minutes, a world record. I broke my own personal best. 

But the woman in front of me was in suspended animation time. She slowly picked up each item contemplating it as if it were a rare jewel, taking it up to the conveyor belt, leaving no room for me whatsoever. So, when her head was turned, I shoved her stuff closer together, slicing my thumb on a plastic package of tomatoes. There, I’ve even given blood to the god of power shopping. I will race to the school and Neil will be 45 minutes late. I will sit in the sun hot sun in the parking lot and take a deep breath. Breathe.

6/3/06 Writers' Group