Prose 2022

The matriarch on my father's side was reputed not to need an education, based on her alarming mental faculties. Her dry speech, hypnotic in routine delivery, intimidated the many relatives and friends who encountered her. When I became an adult, I visited her. She was elderly, and nearly deaf. At that time I taught in a community college and thought learning was the raison d'etre of the entire human species. Learning of the nearness of a community college, I suggested she enroll in courses, to which she retorted, "My dear, I know all I care to know." 

Martina wore her oboe. It was her jewelry that set off pale silken fabric that further set off her labored cheeks that puffed out when she played. She expected the antagonistic fibers and the inevitable  travails of sewing the reed and winding the red wire to hold it, knowing it would fray within a week. Just like her nerves that knew the drinking habits of her paramour, a lug who failed to bow to woodwinds. She had a trio that rehearsed together and performed beyond the metronome that unified their heartbeats and the fingerings. The man she was supposed to love would count the measures and the moments until cocktail hour that followed her performances. She knew they were not made for each other, nor was she made for the routine that overtook whatever life she might have had.

He has a personality the size of mainland China. A heart twice that size, if either could be quantified. Everyone he knows loves him except the one he loves the most. She tells her friends, "Why would I love him? Look how much he does for me now. How could he do more?"  Each day he wakes up dreaming she'll return. Each night he knows his dream has not come true. He hopes for better the next morning.  His friends don't want to say anything. They know that if they did he would be sad. The truth has scars and needs a coat of paint. Why won't anyone do something? They've all learned to tell themselves, "He has to want this change of heart; we can't do it for him." Same convenient excuse for those who face a drunk and lack the courage to confront. Convenience and comfort keep the world complicit.  One morning on a whim he glances in the mirror and recognizes a young face hidden behind the wiser eyes. He feels the urge to protect that child and learns

Hostile Hannah's defunct. Our lives ship shape themselves into beauty again. Faces resurge with flowery skin. We're young, we're free, and dowdy dumb buns from the corner has slipped underground. Thank the deity for an infinity of free zones. Now we can relax and breathe and be enjoyed and so enjoy the natural wonder of each person we meet and hear and learn to love. The nightmare held on pause lifts to stray pasture returning us to worlds alive beyond our dreams.

Once we were deemed adults, we visited her in the wooded home. She took us to her studio of wool with sections sorted by color and geometry. All those quilts had come from what she had collected here. She was usually hard at work stitching together warmth. Then as if by virtue of a sudden recess, she took out a vast collection of tiny wind-up toys that tocked along and bobbed their heads atop the table. She laughed loudly, revealing at last her favorite recreation. We laughed, too, disbelieving the level of pleasure she derived from hearing the little automatons moving along with no incentive needed, just that burst of battery fuel and her laughter and eye light. 

She had a Rotweiler aura and a hostile resting face. Arrived late to the virtual meeting and proceeded to declare her territory. Others heard politely and mildly deferentially as she grabbed at what she did not understand. As if by instinct, an unspoken bond was formed among attendees who began to find things to admire in one another. Afternoon, replete with sunlight, overtook accumulating syllables that fell into a distance giving comfort. The center of attention shifted to a shared place where faces progressively read other faces and began to change into a unified resistance to the frightened one hoping to frighten them while gradually becoming irrelevant. 

"It's not like that," my gurus say to me from various distances as they listen to my mind stretch, suspect, and seek to understand what is around me. I feel their trying to convey my partial picture is a sliver that reveals a direction that misleads. I stir, I simplify, I reach, and find a path cluttered with weeds and several stunning and intended plants. I tiptoe along, unable to discern among the routine growth and glorious mistakes. Is every spiritual discovery this way, some magic I could not have found or made? Decades of my life included memorizing the Latin Mass and finding truth in sound more than translation. I host myself amid what seems clutter versus arrangements of reality as I am learning it.