Always remember to cling to one another

(We started on http://ceaseill.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-crazy-wedding-story_07.html but feel free to read below, it stands well enough on its own.)




The urgency was contagious; against the efforts of no less than four or five of his adorable cousins, she managed to get out the door and into his hands. It was all one big game to them. He'd simply disappeared from Papa's side to reach her through her bedroom door, and barefoot the two of them fled to his getaway car, as the slightest early spring rain began to fall once more.
The chaos and bemusement left in their wake was barely apparent to the two of them.
"Are they going to elope?"
"They BETTER not, after all the trouble we went to arrange a nice wedding on short notice!" "They're going to break up!" "You don't know them, they're more likely to elope than break up." "They'll be back. Maybe it's just the pressure of the day." "Maybe they figured out they are in over their heads. I wonder what will happen next?"
Maybe Lewis and Gina only needed to exchange a comforting message or two; a text with a warm joke, a silly photo, a brief conversation. The confusion it would've saved even in the wake of their sudden exodus, too, may have led to the sister deciding to go through with the wedding song she'd planned, abandoned with the hurt realization now that her shadow had joined another in a profound way. It's so easy to do today---if you can afford your phone, and you almost can't afford NOT to have a phone---it's easy to take for granted what the gulf between them felt like, when their feelings and thoughts were centered completely around one another.
How could she deny her heart?
She couldn't. The same set of impulses that drove her to his side for life drove her to him now. Together, they pulled her through the doorway filled with laughing and screaming young cousins who blocked it. Barefoot, they ran out the back door. He picked her up in his arms and hopped over the mud puddles, saving her white wedding dress. He turned his back and used his elbow to open the gate to the waiting car, and they sped away.
The mixed-up household in their wake was forgotten a few minutes, as he drove around her small hometown and they talked, so glad to be together. They kissed as the light drizzle evaporated, and he complimented her on her dress, a converted Prom number found by her frugal family just the week before. He took a few drops of rain from the wind and began to wipe away some of her excess make-up. "There's my baby," he said. "There's the girl I fell in love with."
The sudden flood of his affections, her very first flower, her very first time being truly swept, literally off her feet, and his dazzling offer to run away together only days after their first kiss filled a hole too profound for light. Caring little else for herself, she trusted him, taking the chance to know such love, even should he change his mind and leave her behind. His proposal came the day after his offer to travel to Colorado, and she accepted it without hesitation. He'd re-enacted it many times by now, including one memorable time in the Pardee's parking lot beside Floyd Hospital. He left no question as to his adamant feelings; while some swear so fervently, to this day he loves her still.
The vows revisited in that car seat held them together for all the days to come. The quiet and calm of one another's presence---they were barely out of their teens---gave Lewis the strength and consideration to head back towards the house, with the 2:30 pm wedding start date still in mind.
As they were a few minutes late, speculation and amusement hit a fever pitch. His friends couldn't help but laugh at the minor debacle; who knows what their thoughts were? By now Dixie was in angry tears, feeling left out of anything in her little sister's life for the first time.
Her brother Ash, previously asked to give her away, stood by smiling with his bandaged hand as they entered together. He had smashed it, moving a keg at Stefan’s during a little welcome back party the night before. Perhaps there was no other way, given the circumstances, not the least of which, the spectacle their absence had created, but also, the nature of their courtship, which had transported the two to a unique plane.
The most predictable and obedient child of the family now returned with her rebel to her father's side. Her half an hour of prodigality, apparently, was passed. He laughed and picked up the ceremony with gladness. No one could be said to believe more in the power of love than he, and his words from the Bible and his sincere gift of ceremony to his young daughter moved them both.
The oblivious best man, chosen painfully to avoid choosing over two dear friends, was not necessary for the fortitude offered so often to the groom, although, with some words of communication, perhaps he could've dissolved the confusion. He performed his simple function with great amusement, already prepared for the surreal experience of Lewis's wedding in much the same way one prepares for a Pink Floyd concert.
To add to the surprise, Chris Painter arrived. “I’m sorry I’m busting in here, late!” he said cheerily, if contritely. He only wanted a place on the porch, looking in the window to the living room.
Lewis stopped things for a moment, to rush out and talk to him.
“I didn’t think you were coming!”
“I had to call in at work,” he admitted, “but hey, all the way from Athens, no speeding ticket!”
“Look, I’ve got an idea. It’s stopped raining.”
There was another slight delay. Lewis asked his newly-alert bride something in a whisper. She looked dismayed, but then smiled. Now Lewis asked Benjamin if they could move the vows over to the park.
“I don’t care that it’s not decorated. But half the people here can’t see anyway!”
“Well, it’s your wedding,” chuckled Benjamin. “They sometimes say, ‘it’s your funeral,’ but it’s your call.”
Now, a procession began. It was not so easy for a few of the party to take their numb behinds out of their seats, but soon the street was filled with guests in their Sunday best, a march down the wet street towards the park, just two blocks away. Holding hands, Lewis and Gina walked at its head, with skipping little cousins heralding them loudly all the way.
Lewis came up beside Dixie, who was scowling. “Dixie!” he said, with a conciliatory look behind his smile. “Dixie, darlin’, I’m so sorry. We just wanted to see each other.”
“I know,” she said, sulkily. He realized it was this one bit of mischief Gina had found without her big sister. It just so happened to be the beginning of life on their own. Dixie had accepted all of this, matter-of-factly, but when the two fled right before the ceremony, it had hit her emotionally in a way that made her feel left out. She had planned a lovely song to sing for the two of them, a plan she’d scrapped in her sullen mood. His own mood shifted, as he asked her to please sing anyway. She gave him a big hug. Gina joined in. “I’ll sing it with you, if you want, Dixie,” she said. “You, me and Hannah, too, if you would like.”
“Nah, I got this,” she said, patting her sister’s back. “This is your big day. It’s my pleasure.”
This time, he invited his guy friends to come up with him to walkway. “Okay, dudes,” he said, “you’re all three in charge of making sure I don’t run off again!”
Ed brought him the twelve string guitar Benjamin had brought to the park. Lewis slung the homemade strap over his neck. Hours of practice came down to this, the hardest thing he’d tried to play in his half a year with the instrument. Strumming one simple chord at a time, so that he could keep up with proper fingering and sing, he swallowed his nerves and gave his wedding song a try. It was “In My Life,” a song John Lennon wrote not long after the Beatles had first become an American sensation. He choked up on the words in the middle, as he faced the friends and family around him, some of whom he might never see again. He focused on Gina for strength, and kept it together to the falsetto at the end. He was too nervous to try the simple guitar figure note for note, so he ended it with its signature chords.
“I plan to love you forever,” he told his bride. She could barely resist kissing him.
Now the two walked, hand in hand, up to her father. After the familiar passage by St. Paul, Gina gave her vows from the top of her head.
“I just know that I love you in a way I could love no one else,” she began, “and Lewis King, I want to spend the rest of my life with you. You opened a light into my life, took my hand, and walked with me from my personal darkness. Now I want to walk with you into a future we shape together, every step of the way, with every breath of my life.”
“Beautiful, my darling,” he told her. “Gina Archer, you became the very breath of my life, when you brought your sweet smile, your truth and your spirit, into my presence. All that I looked for with my heart, I found in you. We’ll share a safe harbor between us, wherever we may sail. I wouldn’t choose another day without your laughter, your insight, and your caring. Your beauty, inside and out, will give me inspiration, comfort, and support in everything I try to nurture. Your love has changed my world, and our love together will change the world around us for the better. You have my heartfelt trust, and not one problem, not one fear, will ever keep me from finding freedom in your arms. You have my love until the end of the world, my sweetness. With your courage and honesty and humor, there’s no road I will not dare. Thank you for all you have opened and shown me, of life and my inner self, and thank you for the blessing of your companionship, from the edge of despair to the worlds of eternal bliss. I hope to honor the gift of your life, with the gift of mine, and in giving myself to you, learn a better way of life than any other I’ve ever known. Now and always, I love you.”
Dad Archer pronounced the two husband and wife. Then, shutting the Good Book, he leaned in to hug them both in his strong arms. "Always remember," he said happily, tearfully, "to cling to one another.
The wedding itself, filled with Baptists, did not break out in dancing, though there was great cheer. Covered first in cake, and then in hugs and kisses from their grandmothers and well-wishers, Lewis and Gina tried to spend a little time with every single person there. Lewis did manage to snag the guitar again to play for a few minutes, his cousins twirling and hopping along.
Aunt Victoria came up to congratulate the couple, and insisted on seeing Gina’s ring. Her own daughter had gone through two pre-engagement rings, one engagement diamond, and a wedding ring. She eyed the simple band with an open mouth. “Oh,” she said, with visible disappointment.
Somehow, a picture with Uncle Logan and four or five cousins throwing the bird was made out on the porch.
A conspiracy to meet back at Lewis’ apartment began to circulate among the young adults. The newlywed pair drove away amid a great clangor, and stopped off at Stefan’s Bar and Grill on the way. They pulled the car off several yards away from the dumpster, under the riverside trees. Quickly they made it into the back seat, where her post-wedding outfit became a heap in the back window. They kissed passionately, elated to have endured the ceremony, thrilled to be, for the moment, alone. As Lewis took his new bride quickly, a pair of kitchen workers came out the rear exit. Whether they intended to dump the days trash or just have a quick smoke, they chuckled and steered clear of the blissfully rocking vehicle.
The tent party back at the Juniper Street apartment was remembered for the fifteen or so people crowded within the tent, set up in his sister's room to evoke a sense of romance, as the air filled with the strains of the Beatles' "Revolver" album. When Lewis put on “Norwegian Wood,” he stepped into the tent and smiled to see co-workers and old friends and Dixie, too, gathered, laughing and talking. Before side two, Gina and Lewis had slipped away again to his room. The enormity of the day began to sink in. The amorous nature of their union, however, brought them nothing but pleasure.



Original text, 2011

If cell phones were every where in those days, none of this would've went down quite the same...I imagine.


Maybe Lou and Gina only needed to exchange a comforting message or two; a text with
a warm joke, a silly photo, a brief conversation. The confusion it would've saved even in the wake of their sudden exodus, too, may have led to the sister deciding to go through with the wedding song she'd planned, abandoned with the hurt realization now that her shadow had joined another in a profound way. It's so easy to do today---if you can afford your phone, and you almost can't afford NOT to have a phone---it's easy to take for granted what the gulf between them felt like, when their feelings and thoughts were centered completely around one another.


A deeply intimate experience united them, and in Lou's rush to get the wedding date set as soon as possible, there was very little time to adjust to sharing their wonderful secret with everyone. Perhaps a less superstitious and silly old fashioned motive of young girls who could hardly fathom all of this would've led to a brief conference in the hallway. This created the desperation that led him to the outside of Gina's room, bright notes in the key of 'G' insistently prying his young bride to the window.

"This is bullshit, honey!" he declared. "I want to see you! I want to talk with you!"

How could she deny her heart?

She couldn't. The same set of impulses that drove her to his side for life drove her to him now. Together, they pulled her through the doorway filled with laughing and screaming young cousins who blocked it. Barefoot, they ran out the back door, around the gate to the waiting car, and sped away.

The mixed-up household in their wake was forgotten a few minutes, as he drove around her small hometown and they talked, so glad to be together. They kissed as the light drizzle evaporated, and he complimented her on her dress, a converted Prom number found by her frugal family just the week before. He took a few drops of rain from the wind and began to wipe away some of her excess make-up. "There's my baby," he said. "There's the girl I fell in love with."

No one had quite understood her loneliness at the point she met Lou; Gina's love life had been disappointing even in its newness, and seemed a lost cause by the time they'd met. Her feelings for him were a kind of sweet torture; it was well known he was departing town, but his smile and friendship had been the one bright spot in her private misery. Her weight, carefully shorn away by consistent exercise, had dropped precipitously, her frame carrying less than ninety pounds, and some of that owing to the generous nature of her sister Louemmie, who thoughtfully would sneak bits of chicken into her salads at work. Her despair was a debilitation with which she could work; the wishes of others had always taken precedent, as though she genuinely had little idea how to live for herself.

The sudden flood of his affections, her very first flower, her very first time being truly swept, literally off her feet, and his dazzling offer to run away together only days after their first kiss filled a hole too profound for light. Caring little else for herself, she trusted him, taking the chance to know such love, even should he change his mind and leave her behind. His proposal came the day after his offer to travel to Colorado, and she accepted it without hesitation. He'd re-enacted it many times by now, including one memorable time in the Hardee's parking lot beside Floyd Hospital. He left no question as to his adamant feelings; while some swear so fervently, to this day he loves her still.


The vows revisited in that car seat held them together for all the days to come. The quiet and calm of one another's presence---they were barely out of their teens---gave Lou the strength and consideration to head back towards the house, with the 2:30 pm wedding start date still in mind.

As they were a few minutes late, speculation and amusement hit a fever pitch. His friends couldn't help but laugh at the minor debacle; who knows what their thoughts were? By now sister was in angry tears, feeling left out of anything in her little sister's life for the first time.




Her brother, asked to give her away, stood by smiling with his bandaged hand as they entered together. Perhaps there was no other way, given the circumstances, not the least of which, the spectacle their absence had created, but also, the nature of their courtship, which had transported the two to a unique plane.

The most predictable and obedient child of the family now returned with her rebel to her father's side, and he laughed and picked up the ceremony with gladness. No one could be said to believe more in the power of love than he, and his words from the Bible and his sincere gift of ceremony to his young daughter moved them both. The oblivious best man, chosen painfully to avoid choosing over two dear friends, was not necessary for the fortitude offered so often to the groom, although, with some words of communication, perhaps he could've dissolved the confusion. He performed his simple function with great amusement, already prepared for the surreal experience of Lou's wedding in much the same way one prepares for a Pink Floyd concert.

As for the vows: the distant video camera to this day tells us nothing of what was said, words all nervously improvised but steadily delivered. Lou spoke his vows to the ceiling, as though that was where God could hear them. The gentle father pronounced the two husband and wife, and then, shutting the Good Book, leaned in to hug them both in his strong arms. "Always remember," he said happily, tearfully, "to cling to one another."

And that they did. They always will.

The wedding itself, filled with Baptists, did not break out in dancing, though there was great cheer. The tent party back at the apartment he shared with his sister and her fiance, his original roommate, is remembered for the fifteen or so people crowded within the tent, set up in his sister's room to evoke a sense of romance, as the air filled with the strains of the Beatles' "Revolver" album. Lou and Gina met his dear friend at the Waffle House later for warm congratulation. By the light of the next morning, the car was packed with a tent, food, pans and clothes, and away they left to honeymoon at a commune they'd heard about, somewhere outside Nashville...

...and that, I assure you, is another adventure, itself, that never really has, even today, reached THE END.

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Celebrate Your Fake Holiday with True Love

American culture's as driven to group us off in mating pairs as any prospective dog breeder ever could be. Nonetheless, this Valentine's Day I find myself remembering a masked man, stalking a riverside bar and grill patio with a secretive purpose...

You know, frankly, people inspired by romance don't need a designated day, moreso than anyone should need a day for thanks or one for giving (though harvest and Yule have perfectly poetic meanings, in days gone by). What can I say? I'm very contrary about being told when to feel what, much less what to do. (Ask the poor manager of said bar & grill). Be sure, those who've found their truth in a solitary lot don't need the Hallmark "holiday," however little they may begrudge others their pookie-poo.

Well, if you're going to put up with a romantic tale may as well have a comedy.

Cease met a girl, who we'll call "Angela Dawn", at that very bar&grill where his roomie & sis worked, one Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday (the teens were on the prowl, free from school). I picture as though it happened to me! Oh, yeah, it did. Cue first person narration:

She waits on me and my roomie; I have a Heinekin, the beer of choice for celebrating black holidays, of course. With my new license still in flux, she decides to be cute and card me. She lets me slide with my temporary permit. She also neglects to tell a rather obnoxious girl, who "worked" as the hostess, that I'm present, blissfully unaware of our sordid past, celebrated by said girl in gushing terms of friendship.

Our Angela Dawn waitress turns out to be great friends with Sis & Roomie. One day, as classic rock ---was it Neil Young's first solo record? He was even counter-culture trendy, right about then---played out of my adjoining bedroom, we realize she's sitting in my lap while my sister & all of us are playing in the living room. We were pushing each other off the back of the couch, which we treated as a place to stand, and in the rotation of shoving, we end up in said position, holding hands. We like it. "I've been waiting for you...and you've been coming to me...for such a long time now..." Neil sang. But really...it's casual!

It must've been around that time, about a week after we met, that I was walking from the riverside bar & grill to one of my last shifts at Red Lobster. I'd already served my notice; with my meager savings, I was going to throw my life to the winds and take a bus ride to Colorado, maybe Boulder, work some crappy landscaping job and write songs on my guitar. Change was in the air. Unfortunately, so was my sister's generously-loaned Corsica, which I promptly, in a fit of oblivious day dreaming, drove over the parking stop outside, suspending the front wheels just out of reach of the precious traction needed to back up. With everyone coming out during the slow afternoon shift to admire my handiwork, including my fuming sis, Angela Dawn comes up and throws her arms around the back of me, cajoling: "he's JUST a man..."


A week more passes, and we're back at the shared apartment, fresh off a breezy trip including my mysterious errand alone into the Kroger grocery store, where, Angela and my sister speculated, I was purchasing Preparation H. When we return, we discover we're locked out, with the keys located with our roomie at, yes, the bar & grill. (Geez, I just realized this whole thing should be an extended apology to my little sister!) Apparently this was just too much for my groove: I kicked open the door without hesitation. At the top of the stairs, I turn to Angela and hand her a carnation, press my finger to my lips, and walk into my room and shut the door. I had just sensed a deep need to bring some cheer to the girl, who, despite her friendliness, exuded a sadness, a lack of appetite, that I simply found unjust. If I cared to cheer anyone up, perhaps it would've been my sister, who in response to her newly-broken front door, decimated a Pepto Bismol bottle in the bathroom, rather than her erratic older brother.

Angela Dawn's sister simply wanted to cheer the poor girl up, too; she would sneak chicken into her salad at work in a ploy to keep some meat on her bones. She knew her sis well--they were practically twins---and while the sisters (mine included) went out bowling the next night, her older sis grabbed Angela softly by the arms and chanted my name three times, just to see her smile. Of course, falling for a guy who was leaving town held little promise; it was just an unhappiness, so profound as to cloud the very hope of tomorrow. What drove that sadness, only she could say, and eventually, she would, the first time we were truly alone. Thanks to my sister, who blabbed my importance to the forlorn girl, that happened the very next night.

It's nine o'clock; Angela Dawn's the first cut on a slow night, cleaning up her section. My sister called me to come up and join everyone. Shortly after arriving, I put a couple of songs on the jukebox, and while sharing a sip of Honey Brown Lager, I ask her to dance with me while "Crazy" by Patsy Cline of all things plays. I take her for a walk, leading us over the lighted bridge to a one-eyed black man who asks if we're married. "Not yet!" I reply, cheekily. Of course, he's locked out of the house that night, but he keeps us company by the gazebo for a while, then hits me up for a buck.

We improvise a piggy-back ride down the bank, and turn down Broad Street on our winding way back to the bar & grill. In the middle of an old backstage passage quaintly dubbed "Opera Alley" by the tourist bureau, I look up, say I'm looking for a sign. She begins looking for a billboard of some kind, but whatever she imagined I wanted her to find ended up in our first kiss.

Soon, her sister has us sitting in their shared Mercury Topaz, running down the plot of JOB by Robert A. Heinlein, a story about two people whose affair is constantly interrupted by shifting alternate Earth dimensions, wherein they must survive and find each other, again and again. Reality led us all back to their house, where I serendipitously found the first family to ever sit up entertaining an unexpected guest with unreserved friendliness into the wee hours of the morning. On that couch Angela Dawn unburdened herself to me, and by the morning light, when they gave me a lift back into town, I told her we'd simply take things one day at a time, always with free choice. If some providence might shine, or we're really, really good, dedicated and true and open-minded, we will know what it is to form a bond with someone else, so life-changing as the one forged that day. To love someone so much as we would love, from that friendship, is to know a love for all creation.

Free choice led me to pop the unconventional question "come West with me" maybe three days later, and hey, while we're at it, on the next I simply asked her to marry me. We then had a very special next day that will not here be narrated, and to the extreme surprise of every one, we set a day for her ordained minister father to tie our knot with the rest of the world as our witness, six weeks after we first met.

Oh, there's a couple of good stories connected to that date setting, too...but for now, let me tell you the next week found her scrawling her new married name on her styrofoam cup at work, still wondering exactly how to spell that strange new appellation. It's on this Valentine's Day that a young man in a bandanna stealthily entered the side door from the patio with her first rose---he'd just learned, that pink carnation was her first Flower---left on the podium, seen only by a heartily laughing waitress friend of ours, who soon afterwards expressed a certain pang of envy, that her own true love might need to step on it and pop the question. Well, the joke was on her---he did that night, I believe. So it's likely a Valentine's Day none of us will forget.

I hope this one, in its own way, will be memorable to you, as well, my friends.


by the Shiz-Nite
Preview to new story below

Love a short story

Love
Troubles left behind swirl, blessed, released, among images of family far from Burkina Faso. Slowly these vanish with a growing sense of morning. Somewhere between dreaming and waking, Mary has a sense of the healing vitality underlying existence, in the improbable corners of states of being. She meant to grasp something from its hold, even while she had little idea what that state is. Something inside that held her cue to being alive...
From her viewpoint beside a few weary-looking stocks of wheat atop the maison soukala, the flat terrace roof connected to the compound below by a ladder, Mary orients herself to the birds She rises from her bedding---she is still trying to achieve restfulness, such as she encountered her very first day here as a reaction to the sheer exhaustion of her one way journey to the place her mother visited before ("when I was near her, in spirit?"): a village lying about one hour away from the one airstrip in this part of the country Burkina Faso, former Upper Volta. Like every village for miles around, they call it "Dano."
The radio---a Panasonic, two decades vintage---plays out of the neighboring hut, African pop music from a station in Ougaoudao. In French---a little attention in high school has taken her a long way---a disc jockey excitedly extols a coming film festival. The golden stallions, she'd deduced, were the awards. There was more talk of horses out here than she'd ever associated with Africa, so at first she couldn't be sure. She'd tuned out commercials before, but tucked away in this village, they seemed to present a fantasy of the city, far down the flat dirt roads past the gum tree grove.
With the relief of curving her torso down to her knees in the darkness of the earthen hut, Mary's heart energies flow over her head, blood enriching her tissue with a warm sense of being. Before long, everyone will rise and share greetings; for now, those who gather water, risen early in the well, must walk with earthen pots, to questions of sweet dreams and stories riverside to tell.
Her mind drifts back to the fleet leopards in the W Nazinga Park, spotted out of her periphery during her visit there with Aaron and Wobogo. "It's strange, how there's no place for romantic love, in the usual 'boy meets girl' sense. But Aaron is so different from the villagers in many ways---and his Dagara people in the Ivory Coast might be more Westernized, and he's been a journalist. Who's to say there's not a spiritual connection everyone will recognize, anyway? At least I've had a strong connection! " She realizes she's gotten very identified with the village ways in this new life; already she anticipates having their opinions, help and acceptance should this become a love.
In light of this being her last hurrah, the very idea of loving someone intimately suggests a faith for days to come. What do you know? I've built confidence for a hope in this life.
She imagines, miles distant, the lions sleeping away the day long, except for these mornings, the time of the hunt. Once, she'd watched a wildlife program, cautioning of their possible extinction; yet before her eyes a pride had emerged, evoking singing within her wild self---the very life force that kept her living. No longer was she here to only die in peace. She gazes upon a green mask with stripes of tiger-like energy, Kourgi Kambire's creation, upon the compound wall of the maison soukala, on the side of his closest male kin. She knows that mask is a call towards understanding, a gentleness, acceptance, and ancestral wisdom concerning friendship. Every piece of art has several meanings, a lesson that evolves with the viewer's immediate situation, the sharing of inner selves—a point of rituals.
In the early morning's faint embers, Kulinah passes a cart of yams, fresh from the labors of the day before. Yams, two feet long! The rains, now patiently awaited in these hottest days, had been kind, swelling the plant life with nourishment. As she and Sapla and two dozen others had tended the harvesting together, Desiree had come outside with the newly finished dress for Osun's wedding. The dress, too, had meaning, in the renewal of her relationship. Aside from the opportunity every five days to freshen their commitment in ash circles, the wedding holds a broader celebration of one another. "Every wedding is a chance for the whole tribe to marry," Sapla had said, many times. "Everyone's spirits are wedded!"
At the moment, she sees Sapla, whose sight makes her as happy as cartoons of childhood.
"What sweet thing came to your dreams, Sapla?" she asks with a broadening smile.
"The comfort of a happy friend," she replies, "who's come to join the beginning of the day." Sapla sometimes wakens a little slowly, remembers Mary, who notes sluggishness in her demeanor.
"And Sisquekwo---all ready, gagner petit?" she says, putting a soothing hand to each of Sapla's sides. "Before the ancestors on the other side, baby Thurisaz parle, 'je demande la route' (I'm on my way home!) She immediately realizes a connection in her question and Sapla's state of mind.
"C'est caillon, "she replies, shaking her head. "Yesterday, we thought the child was coming, as well as many times in the night. But she is having trouble breathing and her dilations are not wide enough." Sapla tears up, looks off to nowhere particular above Mary's strong shoulder. "We are trying to keep hope, be wise and strong…but we were not yet sure what type of ritual we'll need, after all."
They embrace a long moment, eyes closed, sensing the touch and the wafting smell of shea butter.
"Mary Kulinah, you are welcome to pray in our thilde when you get time in your chores."
"Je suis en bouill"---I'll go wherever you like. Sapla loads up her lovely red calabash of water and shambles away, as Mary completes filling her calabashes and pots as well.
"Oh, God, no," says Mary, weeping. "Oh, no, please, no, you can't"---the word pours forth from her quivering lips, dissolving into an impassioned sob. "Oh, please, oh, please," she cries pleadingly, to the source of the world inside herself. She pictures some hazy figure, clad in a kaftans robe, standing over Sisqekwo, holding her baby, for whom she's waited since the day the Dano villagers greeted her, acknowledging her, welcoming her, enfolding her into the embrace of the tribe. "Thur-i-za," Mary would sing, joined in the work of daily life, "little Thuriza…" so happily as a child's heart, when gentleness settles therein. At this moment, many of her fellows come along to collect water as well.
The kindness of people of all ages made Mary celebrate her decision to be here. When she arrived, fresh from the crossroads that took her from incarceration to this village, she'd only sought some way to fill her remaining days with hope. She left behind the betrayal which painted her the "ringleader" of the Robin Hood ploy to cyber swipe money already stolen inside the company---but she could not erase the Crohn's Disease, discovered in her last prison physical. With the 'honeymoon' of culture shock and a friendliness that she considered "down home," she'd begun the great mental distance from fear, captivity.
At first, she'd resisted. Then she watched what belief was doing, how free of unnecessary cares one could become, face to face with cooperation. The fear became her possession through ritual; she began to live from a part of herself beyond disease, beyond death.
Now, at least, she feels better, and someone else feels good. And if sadness is to be, between them all, the separation may not feel so painfully lonesome. In fact, the conditions for a spirit to visit---to be treated as a presence, felt beyond mortal fear---could they be any finer? Everyone would understand. An entire community knows. The character of fear, the bereavement, could be transmuted---is that the word? Still, she watches the visiting Mossi trader parking his motorcycle, detached, with a bubble of sorrow inflating now, and takes a deeper breath with heavier eyes...
Thurisa, she thinks, willing a thread of power between herself and the baby she wishes to comfort. Here is my life. Take my warmth---please don't be afraid.
In the tension, Mary's bowels trouble her. Mary believed she'd quietly side-stepped her death sentence; the diarrhea she feared would dehydrate her body has been absent so long. Wasn't I the fool, believing some place is beyond harm---as though we can be good and wish it away!
She crouches, remaining concealed for privacy as she watches more of the new arrivals fleeing the Congo, passing here in Dano. Their wretchedness state of clothing marks the refugees. If only our neighboring countries weren't so torn with greed and killing, there wouldn't be so many still born children. Or refugees. Sick to her stomach with anger, she realizes she must calm herself, ashamed at her unwelcome towards those proceeding to the water, life preserving, without which the tribe passes away.
So that is what it is like to fear the downtrodden.
An image of her friend Thomas---my gay magician buddy---eases her mind, brings an awareness of the fear itself, like the joy, childlike in equal measure. She blinks back tears, resolving to see him after delivering water to her hut.
Unless someone asks, I'll keep this to myself, I can't spread this feeling! How can I greet everyone 'good morning'? Happy things can be said, even when days begin in unhappy things. What of the birds, singing in the baobob tree on the left hand side of the path? Her evaluations shrink quietly, like one of many obstacles an ant might notice upon the ground.
She continues vacillating between sorrow and solace until she reaches the hut, tears welling in eyes lit by dawn as she kneels with the pots and calabashes. By night only, she shares this earthen hut, always safe, hearing, feeling the breathing of the women and children, even when she'd first arrived, when the thilduu, the hearth shrine, was still enfolded in mystery, brightly colored carvings. In a way, knowing of the ancestors, the closeness of their world, its place in the hearts and imaginations of her precious Dagara only deepens the mystery, though all her alarm over the supernatural---she'd avoided thinking about it 'too much' at first---faded as she saw it naturally incorporated. Life was less sophisticated by a material standard here, yes; did she find, in sophistication's place, an honesty nonpareil, based on love and appreciation? Isn't that worth the hardships we bear?, she implores, to some witness self within. Is it?
She starts the fire for the largest kettle. I can take Sisquekwo warm water. Maybe Wobogo or someone can help me get it there. That's what I love---no one has to do anything alone.
There's a soft tug at her sleeve as she stares into the fire, lofting some hopeful part of her from the ashes, hope that slowly descends, mist-like, her presence comforting Sisqekwo and all her house. She turns from this inner sanctity to find it reflected without, in the face of little Naylan, watching her, awakened by the shoveling of ashes, stirred from dream to hug her unconditionally.
"Mam nanga feom," Naylan Da says.
"Mam nanga feom (I love you!)" replies Mary, stroking his head, shaven for summer.
They speak of their dreams, as Sankanthu Da, who remembers no dreams, arises to play with Naylan and aid in morning chores. They take great delight in Naylan's tale of reptile giants, like crocodiles, shaping the world with new mountains and oceans.
"Maybe you dreamt of the creation of the world," says Sakanthu. "I've never heard it that way!"
Mary dismisses herself from their company and the warming water, departing for Thomas Sankara's hut.
"I think we will go welcome Thurisa today," Naylan says, provoking cooing from Sakanthu. "When she comes, we will all know happiness."
Still sometimes I hurry, Kulinah thinks, grateful to head straightaway to her objective. Early on, she'd beg excuse for the embarrassing irregularities of her condition, only to find no one was particularly bothered, even offering ritualistic health. Her resistance to ritual lessened, and then in time, she found the rituals had replaced the anxieties, even most of the effects!
A quick dismissal doesn't seem appropriate in the presence of Osun, one third of the Hienbe wedding party planned for the next day. They'd first met, chasing the elephants out of the strained rivulets of the cracked riverbed; the elephants tended to keep a trail near water. She'd introduced Mary to "monkey bread," the sweetly, slightly acidic enormous oval sacs, picked off the trees for a delicious jolt.
"Kibari, Kulinah!" says the topless, stately young woman, with the Yoruban first name and Fulani looks. She'd attained baskets of leaves for shea butter from a kerlite tree, doubtlessly to prepare cooking. She puts them down for a hug. Something in Osun's love, thinks Mary, is full of every one's love! She wonders about her, the wedded life ahead. She replies, squeezing Osun tightly as she speaks:
"What joy you must feel, making your vows open to all!" She finds, in the strange language, an eloquence here, after the burdensome clichés piled unthinkingly into most of her life, erased by new talk in this ancient land.
"And you are most welcome, too, my far-away bird!"
"Are you nervous?"
"Oh! Unafraid, but yes, so much attention! What did I ever do to deserve so much, besides follow my path?"
Something deep within Mary-Kulinah stirs, a point of view open between dream and waking, an idea that titillates and comforts simultaneously. Perhaps, she thinks to herself, of something so irrational, yet possibly magical, so long denied.
"Osun, come with me if you want to share conversation. We are going to see our thildar friend."
Osun pauses thoughtfully. "The gateway Thomas?"
"That's the perfect way to say it, yes!" she replies, taking the hand offered, with its aloe scent wafting in the breeze-born rustling.
"Na an bi baro ke (let's hang out)!" Osun says. "Nib'I fe (I like you!) Ed looge (let's go!)"
*Mary listens to Osun's joyous chirping , as she caresses a gaa tree reaching out of sight into the sky. They pad the cool, red earth; a kerlite tree rustles nearby, as Osun hums before speaking.
"Oh, the yolon! My wedding will have a balaphon player! You know, like 'tinka tinka tink-tink'," she says, pantomiming a xylophone, hammering its bars to some danceable rhythm. "I'm sure you didn't know at first how many people have taken on the name Thomas Sankara. That was one rare president! No air conditioner and one refrigerator; an honest, four hundred-fifty dollar a month salary, an all-woman motorcycle honor guard, a guitar, and a mind full of compassion for what all the tribes need."
"He sounds like one of us," says Kulinah. Us.
"He still is one of us," says Osun with cheer. Mary Kulinah contemplates how happiness marks Burkina Faso, is part of its identity as surely as poverty and the danger of malaria. But why doesn't that joy survive the education process more often? Why couldn't a few more tribes people acquire Western-style skills for improving the quality of life? What could anyone now do for Thurisa? Who could save Sisquewo?
"You have a furrow in your brow," says Osun. "With that place to plant your millet, you are already for the rains!"
"Ha ha! You darling," says Kulinah. "Tell me of your wedding some more. I like your thinking."
"You know, Kulinah, the wedding is a happy occasion, but the exciting part is soon, when we gather at the caves, and the three seeds and the four seeds, girl and boy, will be rubbed across my skin, and I will call to the baby we will have!" Osun squeezes Mary's hand as they come to the gnarled little tree beside Thomas' door. "Maybe you will be there, praying with me. All these people, their loves and cares, chose to be here, to do all wrongs and sometimes, in spite of themselves, do right. So much goes right, I suppose we must stay all right with whatever comes our way, so that we may continue receiving also the good that is our due, and continue to attract that, also!"
Did you read my mind? You read my heart.
"If you were fishing and caught an old shoe," Mary responds aloud, "you'd remember there's still fish to be had."
"And if the shoe's still useful," says Osun, vibrantly, "perhaps you'll catch the mate!"
They laugh, they touch each others' arms; each shares energy, as they stand before the antechamber of Thomas Gateway's, the small enclave added to a larger compound, a place to hold a few useful things.
“I wonder if he’s home,” Mary says, “Thomas gads about the village at any time.” Since the entire village is a good place to think, Thomas chooses not to confine himself for his mystical traveling. The village helped him quite incidentally make time for others. He suddenly appears without a knock.
“Osun! Mary Kulinah! Won’t you come inside?” He embraces them, exchanging a few rapid-fire phrases in Fulani with Osun before pear-shaped Maura arrives, excitedly beckoning her elsewhere.
“Yell ka ye’ (no problems)!” says Osun. Behind her retreating figure, Mary observes Raoul and Johmay nearby, closing a conversation for a casual moment of silence, as though the inspiration has quickly occurred to them both to acknowledge a pervasive, quieting force, momentarily exposing the simplicity of being. The silences in being together are an everyday sight throughout the village, indubitably respecting the need for something like solitude without loneliness. Here, I felt, fit to burst, to spill sorrows to a completely receptive friend. Could it just be enough to know I could, and not add to the burdens others carry?
But what I want to ask---about this life, with the chance to catch that other shoe---it’s been---“
“Ooo, come inside, I need you if you please!” says Thomas, already pulling at her wrist.
The horror of what was done to her---the betrayal she felt she’d always feel from the justice system, the terminal reputation of the disease inhabiting her body---none of the things without redress could haunt this shared life for long, and memories of pain became too small and selfish a shell to contain the growth of her new form. If this village could not shelter her from further disappointment, was not proof against all irresolution, still she could not find the fault within herself. She wonders, in the balance of things, if her life doesn’t belong to Thurisa---belong to the dream. In what way?
“I have much to prepare today,” says Thomas, simultaneously plopping on the floor before his handmade wicker chair, suggesting Mary take it. “So if you please, take this shea butter and rub my feet! It is all in the world I need. I will be so very strong for everyone, but I need to be served, too, thank you, that’s soo good! I’m recuperating rapidly! But not too rapidly,” he adds with a cocked grin, “I want you to get all you need from my feet!”
If ever there was a man who was in this world but not of it, my friend qualifies. And where I grew up, you’d only laugh at the idea of a bisexual witch doctor---yet here is the most natural person I know. She reapplies lotion, awakening nerve endings in Thomas’ toes, thinking of these feet, their steps putting his wisdom and healthiness in the ways of those his soul intended. He had showed her how not to keep the raging storms of emotions pinned, nor to allow them to rove the subconscious unacknowledged. When she sat in the ash circle and vented her bitterness---however undeserving she felt about embracing her hurt initially---she lived a new way, open minded and open hearted, as she had been before the Robinhood scam, but with greater self-respect, for choosing to bear the trials with meaning and grace.
“The ancestors share our concerns over beings flowing into their new forms,” says Thomas, returning the favor now on her feet. “Mary Kulinah, dear, take time to love the red clay with your hands as you do with your feet. With each step is a kiss, an agreement to make a way for you, your own. Before you went inside your mother, before you became a part of this world, without earthly expectations, you selected a life of your needs and your service. You decided on this foot rub, and the breakfast you’ve forgotten about, and every friend and every word, even if you didn’t quite know them yet as they are! My namesake was executed at the hands of his best friend, whose justice was taking over the presidency.”
“I never knew that!”
“Yes! But in a fundamental way, they both made that choice—because of a lesson, an example towards which neither realized they were working in life---and then, there it was! And these lessons are worth our lives---even very good lives of forgiveness are laid down---because these choices are for borrowed things.”
“All our time is borrowed,” she replies quietly.
“All time is made for borrowing,” he says, draping his right arm around her shoulders, he, a few inches shorter than she. “All the experience is your own. Well, your water’s ready to share when you arrive home.” Did he mean the water boiling at the compound? A metaphor? He meant to send her on her way, gently, so signified with a kiss atop her head and a light squeeze on her shoulder.
“I’ve borrowed your time enough, Thomas,” she says, “but I’ll repay it everywhere.”
“I’m the one who’s borrowed you,” he replies, as she makes for the doorway. “See you!”

Much of her caar---her matrilineal clan---already had arrived. Many neighbors at rest outside the banco walls of the hut sing or pray or handle stones or light the candle way.
I am that child. I feel as though I am that life.
Gather around me---we’re going to top ourselves!
Traveller, dear---chiekuo or whatever you are, we’re all travelers here---If you find it unnecessary to cause this pain to your mother by leaving, please don’t. You’ve got to understand---you are where all understanding begins, and you know, as you begin your life, you will mean so much to these people. We’re here for you, wherever in the universe you go. With you, I understand how everyone thinks and feels, and love them like Thagba, like Christ loves them. From where you stand, in infinite mercy---from grace---everyone’s someone who is understood, who creates themselve s.


This is a sample of ch. 8 of my novel
Current mood: blissful
Category: Writing and Poetry

The Thread of Heaven: in memory of the Domies

I was excited we've found each other via the Internet. This is to my friend, Heaven:

your bountiful homemade yarn supply is going to the service of generosity in the coming week. This is how we can be close: let me tell you about the Journey of the Thread of Heaven (which is TOTALLY what the name "Vado Bujinka"'s name means in her culture; see, the person who inspired Vado and her novella most directly & originally is going to receive the first purse made from this dormant thread you share with us. This bit about the name could not have occured without a person who helped create that character in the dormant recesses in my adolescent mind: smart, strong, rebellious, yet with a bohemian austerity and something undeniable as class. A very attractive package.

Now flash forward so many years later, when my unorthodox friends introduced me to their lives openly, in a way dignified, earthy, and enormously stimulative to the imagination. The Dome was a place romantic in character, secreted in the woods, the casual brain child of my friend C. J., who saw it for what it was: the perfect place to create a flesh and blood facebook for anyone cool enough simply not to squeal. It was a nexus to every hip idealized American scene: early 60s New York City, late 60s San Fransisco. Rock and roll---but indeed every kind of music, poem or film, interesting book or personal experience related in the unforgettable sense of his breath and body wash---never had a better friend than "C.J.", who passed on What It's All About, as likely to hit you with a question as a diabtribe there beside San Fransisco concert organizer Bill Graham's larger than life poster, there beside the workstation where he did his jobs and his labors of love with passions that seemed to dictate to him as much as he seriously pursued their scheduling. He was annoyed with the bullshitters who just didn't get how well this world could easily run, but he never believed the world had no place for we the dreamers of the dreams.

His amors throughout life carried on as friends, some living there, others knowing it as a place of safe haven. It was also home to the most earth friendly, spirit-balancing parties I ever found, a more manageable Woodstock of sorts on special days and a quiet place to cycle souls or take in a movie or everyone cook, draw, read, play instruments, whatever the several acres could do to accomodate. No one I often found myself out there, in a place that was the road map of Cool Itself, a place I wanted to live, many times, and my spirit will touch forever. I see why only a few could ever live there at a time: keeping everyone out there spread in homes and lives and opportunities kept an anarchic spirit alive, free from ego trips and cult seige mentality.



I never saw someone
so wounded explore the possibilities of love with greater abandon; I was privileged to have been befriend by so free a spirit. I met science & language students, musicians, travellers, jewelry crafters, activists, babies, families and freethinkers, all blending beyond labels, with conversations full of exploration, punctuated with laughs, windows to the yards where played other ways of life.

One summer a Domie left to explore the language of native Arubans, and I took the occasion of her trip to begin creating for her the first draft of my fantasy, featuring Vado Bujinka, about whose name much could be related, involving Italian and Ninjitsu, and my gentle student experiences engrossing myself with a version of first hand knowledge of both.

Brother Hawk's spirit watches over and communicates mind-to-mind with Vado, particularly as featured in the first five chapters, written as themed by the chakras. His role occurs more on the spiritual plane, encountering more nebulous, analogous types of malevolent beings, as she enters the crystal bearing cave beneath the earth in the sixth and seventh parts. I was inspired by Homer, Conan comic books, and the ecletic music handed to me by Brother Hawk himself for the sake of passing along its sacred power to set a background of joy in our existence.

Strangely, there was an instant of Vado's prayer for her grandmother, which was too painful for my muse; in fact, such a great many of our friends had the story at the disposal, she was at some point convinced her pain had been exploited. (My own maternal grandmother died the November before). There were complexities at work beyond me and my intentions, yet we found some way to talk about it. She encouraged me to keep the story alive anyway, and I believe we may have stayed friends yet another summer. We'd learned so much about giving and how good, the feeling brought by its unattached form.



For seven months recently, my creativity went from a flurry to a slowly grinding, sporadically brilliant performance of less daily consistency. I was happy, but something was very out of tune after August, 2008: I thought we'd come out of Comic Con strong, still creating from completed issues and songs. For me, this gaze into the viscitudes of fortunes in the material world was something to be broken: I tried by putting my stalled interests on hold to become the assistant of Joe Phillips, whom I'd met at Comic Con.

That experience, while yielding some shared meals but no pay and some discouragement, would've been different perhaps if I'd found facebook a week or two earlier; but eventually, that empowered me to great effect. But some ill mystery haunted me when I was alone and not feeling inspired (chalk it up to trying to do it straight all the time). Try as I might, I could not create a comic book, record an album, or write an actual story!


Seven months after the fact, I received the news that the man who'd introduced me to the concept of building a World Access radio channel of brilliant Americana and world music and independent voices, who'd taught me about polyamory, Heinlein, commercial mediocrities and wicked centralization schemes circa 2000 had died without pain of a heart attack in the arms of Vado's mother.

She shares Vado's keen insight and search for lost language (a lost language was the "maguffin' at stake in her solo journey), someone who stuck out grad school and made time to help Brother Hawk grow organic gardens in their new little earthship made by their own endeavors, in the years after the geodesic domicile fell into other hands.

Angela cycled souls with her, loved her as did I, and thanks her for opening the world by her side in a beautiful time. She will make a new purse, after we heard in our reunion with the inspiration for the figure who roamed the Time of Timeless Time with the onomatapeia tongue of Dinkadoo present in the sounds as she climbed and explored the flesh of the Living Land. The purse is meant to carry whatever needs to be remembered.

to d'n'a:

I really hope we can collaborate on the Spanish chapters of my sequel (of sorts; it diverges from ch. 58 on, but incorporates themes that finished the 13 final chapters of Cervantes' original sequel.

I just found our girl S_______ again; that magnificent friend and quasi-adopted family member was wife, in custom, to the one man i considered my older brother, the man that carried the spirit of the 1960s in his life till it ended on a magnificent date, 8-11-08, a beautiful palindrome that spoke volumes about a man who loved to observe dates,who had a heart attack in her arms and left this plane without pain, save for that in wake of his passing.

On 3-11-09 word finally arrives at the Apartment of Ideas, via a facebook "re-friending", to paraphrase my pal Grant. heaven's thread is not only part of a comforting gift, but inspiration to revisit the novella they inspired in 2000, and see the lead character's name, in her own culture, as "Journey of Heaven's Thread", perhaps a more fitting title, even, than the original "The Remote Chance," as in, perhaps, "The Remote Chance she'd end up our girlfriend!

Well, as I've never quite said before, intention, especially while intoxicated with muses and mysteries, plays a lot of tricks like the Coyote Spirit, yet I've never failed to live to see a day when it again all makes sense. you only need look at your daughter to see that proposition take flesh and blood, amen? Things result in our amazement, and life reveals itself to be a happy surprise. But that, is another lead character.

Chivalrously Yours, Cecilbered, and through it will be weaved the Thread of heaven.


Finally, to Vado:

Thank you for letting me see into your world! Thank you for telling me to be bold and open up! Thank you for sharing with me the Dome Tribe.