Is it simply nostalgia- and part of the deeper desire, that those who sacrificed for me, not be forgotten?
Or do I open myself to communication? Are they anywhere at all- or do my memories deliver words and impressions so convincingly, I might believe ghosts commune at our side?
Is more than a familiar feeling, necessary? Or even desirable? In such a time, when irrational beliefs have led us to danger, can one afford a precious spiritual world, accepting whatever illogic might then follow?
Once, my aunt, her teaching position finished at Trinity Academy, lived off whatever money remained from the sale of the store, and then, decided to tutor students. My own academy job, and my wife's, are now gone. Now, it's me looking at tutoring. It's me, following a Braves game, an echo of what an institution it was to my Aunt Linda. Stats, plays, injury charts- I never knew anyone more devoted. She subscribed to the Baseball Digest, which I would sit and read in the dining room. After Grandmother became mentally ill, that dining room almost never hosted a gathering- those could be handled around the kitchen table. Aunt Linda never moved out on her own again.
Charlie Morton's fibia broke in the first game, struck by a hit. The bullpen's done a terrific job filling in the innings, but today it's catching up with them. The Astros came back from a 5-4 lead, to lead 9-5. Now it's the ninth inning. I considered moving on, but I left the game playing in my own living room.
What a difference a missing person makes.
I think of my departed friend, David Anthony Kraft: I hear songs he loved, and stories of visiting shows, from Jim- but those stories of New York, his Marvel Comics Group stories- his wit. You can’t compare and not miss him. He awaits in other stories: my talks with his wife, his son, and his inspiration to the Demon Skull stories begun with my first new online game, Give Up Your Earthly Possessions.https://gamescreate.com/games/show/5024I think of my Uncle Roger, who died the day my job of the past three years also died. He’d be happy to enjoy some Bravos, too. Like me, I think he loved rock and roll music more.
I listen to Korean artists appropriating Black Culture in a way that reminds me of rock and roll, but they haven’t really come about it with the original gospel and country inspirations of early rock. So that can be done. By us. Along with other plans.The Korean will be the outlier ingredient for a while.
My wife’s brother Chris seems faintly reincarnated all around us these days: the cooking jobs we took to make ends meet are like an homage to his years in the restaurant business. He was Chris, her Bubba. I was my sister’s Bubba, until I turned the name away one day, after pumping gas for my aunt at the old highway 53 station. I didn’t want to be a ‘bubba.’ I was a Junior, but I went now by my father’s name. Now, at work, we’re surrounded by a Bubba, a Chris, and a Junior. I had a chance to tell his son Nicholas this- in exchanged messages, at least.
We talk often of her mother. That lady never showed me anything other than love and acceptance.
My wife comments at times on her approval, on the endorsement by these mentioned, of the life we presently live. It is good to have peace with the dead. Many stories begin with the idea of struggling with the memory of a spirit. It would be quite dramatic, to have a poltergeist, to have a guilty conscience gnaw at its bound captive. If I see the Braves make the World Series, and remember when I talked once with Chris about the sacrifices of the new stadium- and here, the true sports fan, he is correct, it’s five years later and they are World Series-worthy- is that insight a memory brought to light by Truth, a word of companionship from Beyond, and is there anything between, or any need for further definition?
I remembered today, while loosening my sore back and tightened calves and hamstrings, what it is, to feel one’s intelligence might dispose a person to take part in the serious business of running some part of the world- to wonder why the path has instead led back to the world of my father, my aunt. My father and mother once stood side-by-side working the hours away in their own restaurant- that’s what they did after the hardware store sold. Now, my wife’s spent four days, as her online job plays out to its end, training by my side, working the same fry and grill job with me. Time with her is always something I claimed as my most treasured reward.
I didn’t have any cornbread with the pintos she made me, tonight. It’s too bad I didn’t take home some Jim had made. Around my home- around my grandfather, my aunt? A pone of cornbread could be found any time, on the marble shelves of that country kitchen.
They gave me peace. I never appreciated how much opportunity I had to study, or even stick with a sport (I never caught on fast enough to play games). I look back now and see that peace was the one difference that ever gave me a chance to change my life. Even if I presently am letting my ‘caste’ have me. Now, the peace I find, I must earn on my own.
One aspect is, now the hours of my life are tied to tasks to bring me money. I may find myself washing dishes, but I do not think then I am not a writer. I may wash my own dishes, before allowing myself to sit with the newly-arrived banquet of ideas. I may think I am not a writer, then, but a washer and dryer of dishes. (We’re out of dish pods, and I keep liquid on hand because Why Not Do It By Hand Some.)
I had recently seen a dingy, greasy opportunity, to fill my hands with breaded vegetables and cheese to deep-fry, to wash my hands and build Philly Cheesesteaks and Nediterranean Burgers (named after a Ned- the place is filled with history that no one explains to me). To sit under the sunny sky on days with nice weather, with my best friend here in Colorado, Savage Beast of Love, who shares a naughty and expansive flow of ideas with my distant best friend Johann in Australia, toke, breathe, laugh, share thoughts, share silence. Massive crows, one so great as to spread like a wraith as it flaps over the back fence, instilling some primal feeling of visitation by our Elders. An opportunity to hear new stories of other lives. Let sixty-one year old Jim tell me how his mother and grandmother inspired him to cook, as mine did not, and hear about drunken nights at concerts by the hundreds, while the music of his youth and mine plays over Bubba’s karaoke speaker. A place to share a beer shot with the man I stayed to help. I helped and waited out seven or eight others who shared that line cook position, until Bubba and I were It. I’ll tell you sometime how he kept his word to me so I could work out a notice that we quietly canceled. Then I brought in Angie, who needed a job now herself for the same reason I had. First four days, we spent most of the time exploring how we think things are done around there-I was hired two days before the first Buffs home game- and quickly, we’re becoming as solid a team as the store can presently need.
No, it’s not my store, to have or lose as business goes. My parents only went in it to have their own place in the communities of Shannon and Johnson, be their own bosses (like Angie and I, in our three years of ESL online), and earn a living, which meant, make profit, from delicious short order food. They simply didn’t have a chef on hand like Jim, nor a pizza oven, and therefore, nothing like Tannis, Bubba’s brother by another mother (but brother by the same father, I think). So, no Anime enthusiast blaring heavy metal, “Come On, Eilene,” or the marriage of Figaro, between rap songs and screamo, with such a serious demeanor as to make me think I must cast him as a martial arts master, speaking his instruction to the half-clued-in pilgrim.
It’s not my store, to run at a loss for tax write-offs, or renovate and promote and imbue with love. It’s a place I keep clean and keep open, in a time so many are only now finding Life under the layers of work, as I did once. I keep it open for the people who work there, and warm the stomachs of people I only glimpse in passing. I have all the anonymity any star ever craves. I stretch and rest and bide my time: the creative self will return with Peace, and is always this close.
Before I fill out applications where I must shine in presenting who I am, there is something about being on this underdog BackCountry Pizza and Tap House kitchen crew- it’s really just seven of us now, with Chris the waiter pitching in, even with his scooter-wrecked shoulder, working five days a week- being critical to this thing that will – fall apart without us? I know again what it was to be on the ships, in a life found near a thousand solar turns in the past.
I cleaned up my home, dumped the cat box, and asked her to join me, finding sprigs of evergreen for our ritual. For, as years go, Halloween is New Year’s Eve, for Samhein is Summer’s End, and in the descent into darkness, harvest done, a year ends, and all endings contain beginnings, it’s said. Even if said ending is the absence of some being, now, when the body has reunited with the Earth.
I slept.
More than I thought I wanted, but it was a Gothic day, floating damply above freezing. She danced to BTS, as I let my private illness- resistance, born of the need to recuperate, continue conditioning- and when I rose, I went through any Yoga postures for which I could feel a need. It is the only way to release the mind for new things, even to resume the activities before one labored. Slept more, again.
A few minutes more. Again. The sort of sleep I’d been taking, sometimes all I could get, as I agreed to a couple of different start times for Backcountry. Now we’re 9 to 5. What a way to make a living.
I don’t have actual cable, nor a dime to spend on this unexpected Braves World Series, which will now the first November Fall Classic game ever. I put together the game between real time check-ups with the radio broadcast merged with a streaming YouTube stat sheet with pitching tracker and timely batter updates, and recorded innings I selected. It is not the same when you already know what you’re looking for, but Dad would’ve enjoyed having the highlights at his finger tips.
I wrote, as the Astros climbed to victory, because the sound droning beneath my attention was the place where Dad, Aunt Linda, Paw Paw, Roger, her brother- so many- really spent the games. Her Dad had turned away from pro baseball in favor of checking out the Little League World Series each August and that was that. High game day attendance prices, you know. I like to remember who he was when he seemed happy to be in a family- his own, complete with his kids’ friends and spouses-and the early days when he’d been reading science fiction classics while working as a jailer. He always aspired to be a patrol man. I discovered I couldn’t be in my level of debt and ever take the job.
I arose, and gathered the altar.
The cloth has every color we ever need, but this time, a few beautiful Martin Acres leaves would’ve been nice. No way was I leaving our property today, though- the fall palette pleased me where it was, where it will mostly still be when the sun returns its smile to my neighborhood. Let the leaves hang and fall when they may. I was pleased to have evergreen sprigs, including the vibrancy of low-growing cedar, outside our apartment complex sometimes shadowed by the Flatirons.
Eight minutes to midnight, I sat and read from the Druid Handbook, a meditation I could’ve easily committed to memory, except I love the new life I find in it when I sit and read it. The Father Sun goes down into darkness, while Mother Earth garbs herself in brown mourning robes. Endings, begin anew. The breath is violet.
Clear as I could desire, as midnight approached, all these deceased super-imposed themselves in our kitchen, the newest Roger especially clear to make me believe, make me invest. Rockin’ |Roger. I realized, there’s only so much space in which to envision full-grown people standing spectrally. But every name intoned here, could I see, in non-corporeal form, those whose private anguish have I envisioned, whose life and loves and struggles I had honored with thought in my recent years of solitude.
And then, an epiphany.
In a moment of discursive meditation, I sit and understand, as we continue to the opening of this Samhain grove, not only the full apartment of visions, but every ancestor, also, was there, because we are here, as is true for you, and your ancestors. As I imagined the recurrent features among my ancestors, and tasks that beset these progenitors’ bodies, I went as far back instantly as possible when I told Angie, “it’s the dead who best know Peace, and Peace we need for this striving of ours in living (to balance). So here we are, much as we were, probably together, taking that first step out of the water onto land, right from the start.” And that was an ending of something, too. What if we’d gone the dolphin direction? In telling her this, I returned with a smile to my silence, and then, asked quietude of my thoughts, so a slender hint of Silence might be achieved. We opened the grove. I saw a picture of her late brother on our changing-photo-frame, as I proclaimed peace there to the North- for without peace, the work of the grove cannot proceed. We wound our way around the altar with each of four elements taken in hand, in turn. We then invoked the witnesses of words from before Time, with words imagined to be bond among Druids across all time.
Grant, o holy ones, thy strength and in strength, knowledge; and in knowledge, the love of justice
We completed the chant. From our throats, through our entire being, we chanted the name Awen, in its three syllables: Ah-oh-wen. Our voices together feel like a chorus of many each time.
With that touch with the creative power of the Universe, however, my clam was irritated to conceive a pearl, and set aside to rejoin with vocational intensity was this thought, underpinning this vision:
That nomadic dweller may have earned survival another day, alongside at least one partner, for this was no way to live alone, you see. Then, the rise to some particular hillside, or, if so gifted, mountainside, or if so gifted, ocean side, or riverside, or canyon butte- some vista. A place where striving ceases, though how different might be striving and strife, so long as Peace prevails? The rest.
The finished task of climbing, the wonder at what one has achieved by strength and fortuitous circumstance, in the height of one’s pause, in the breadth of one’s earned horizon.
My present inspiration of a rewarding climb was a cliff side, like the place I stopped while freehand hiking up the side of a chickenhead beside NCAR on Bear Creek Canyon Trail. The feeling I should stop, and take it all in a while, as a storm cloud- a thunder storm, something usually so far away in the skies of my youth- rolled across the mountain tops, following me all the way back down the mountain, along the path back to the bridge, where I took a photo, and to my car, where it dotted my windshield as I closed my door. I'd rested by the bosom of the clouds themselves.
On my altar sat the orange glittering skull, my playful tribute to the season. A skull is seen as a sign of death, decay, and sometimes, fear of those; a skull can be seen as a study point. It can be rendered basically with two circles and a rectangle to indicate the jawline. It is a place where even the most learned among us still do not completely know what is going on, much less those of us not generally committed to figuring out that space. What I mean is, the organic brain’s still mysterious, in its ability to house consciousness. If that’s indeed the seat of Experience.
The moments of the ritual pass so swiftly. They engage all possible attention, an act which is rewarded by requiring but a few, really; we can set up in seven minutes, from stripping down the table to assembly of the seven candles, the flora offering, the ‘Hirlas horn’ (in this case, her coffee thermos), the four elements (a lit stick of incense often signals Air, a burning piece of sage might say Fire), the invocation of our core principles, and the giving and receiving of blessings.
Tonight, I included our home guard, personally requested aloud, because Dixie had asked ‘send a blessing for us, too’ and here we were with Ceridjwen. If I say too much about the feathered cloak, I might limit you in seeing its colors and plumage as you will.
We held the coffee thermos aloft and then quaffed a choice of awakening, rather than sleepy wine. We set it down, and then offered our sprigs of evergreen. The new year began. I considered this time as a turning of the year- not the calendar of the Romans, nor the Gregorian calendar, but the true year, which dies with harvest, then awaits in emptiness while drifting most distantly with the sun.
Angie was most eager to remember to return the energy of the working to the Earth, so much so as to rush ahead in search of it, desirous not to miss this part that she forgot, momentarily, was about the first thing you do when closing the grove- perhaps it was so intense, but radiant in importance. It was good to move on.
From the rising sun, three rays of light from the living earth, three stones of witness, from the eye and mind and hand of wisdom, three rowan staves of all knowledge from the fire of the sun, the forge...
and a pledge by Excalibur then, to uphold our condition: Truth, Against the world. Like light before darkness, and hearing amid chaos. The name ‘Awen’ three times had the ancient feeling, the multiplicity of voices. There was once more now to walk around the circle. She prevented me from putting out the candles too soon, so still they shone brightly as we made our way.
If I am the last of my line- there’s simply nothing for sure but the depth of Love- then is my task to be only one specialist kind of Man, or to endure the stunning desire to communicate in every art possible, with no hope or fear of being master of any one? And beneath that…
Beneath that…
When we reach that point of absolute quiet- even if our Witness Self and Ego must respond as one, that is Life- is that consciousness then one we share with those who were human (or more) before us? Did they all achieve that point in their lifetimes, especially before technology intervened in the last seconds on the clock of human time? And is this, at very least, then, a connection with peace, and silence, and the formative power of the Universe manifesting, I share timelessly with all those- and not only those who donated to my lineage, but yes, they- who ever dwelt in that glimpse of sweetest serenity?
And in these words, to you...though from other worlds, do we resound?
-Cecil Disharoon, Jr. in the dead of four o’clock in the morning, 11/1/21
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