On a road trip with a group of women.  They were bored of me.  I decided to take off on my own, and wanted to make a case for myself with a bright idea.  I dyed millet seeds red and green, gave each color a discrete electrostatic charge, and blew it all into the wind, where it sought its proper place in the charged design I had hung in the air.  It made floating art, much like the trailing messages pulled by airplanes over wildly populated beaches and other crazily attended venues in the twentieth century of this planetary habitation.  When it tired of itself, like I often did of me being me, and fell to the ground, it seeded millet, a whole new round of greenery for the habitat to enjoy.

Then I took off for home and a new round of fanciful doings.  Why should I, having learned so much and lived so long, just give up and reconcile myself to being old?  There is too much to do, and I have nothing left but time.  I might as well have some fun.  By the way, what did the sign say?  “GRAMBO AWAKES.”

That was what I did in my dreams the night of January 21, 2022.  What I did when indeed I awoke the next morning was to remember what I had written back in 2011.  I hopped on my Microsoft Pavillion and kicked it into sentient service.  There it was!

~ ~ ~ Grambo ~ ~ ~

What the world needs is a wonder-woman.  Her name will be Grambo.  The challenge is to create a superhero based, not on a mild-mannered male with a penchant for lurking in telephone booths, but on a gloriously mature female of the species, who is coincidentally a mother of three, grandmother of seven, and great-grandmother still catching and counting.  Once a geeky kid, now an old lady, who still gets off on learning, she at last fits together the collective insights of a lifetime into her very own theory of everything.  Making a place for herself in traditional science and engineering seems at last irrelevant to her understanding of what’s what.  As she is presented with heroic challenges, she meets them with passion, intuition, and grace.  Long a trail-breaker in fields of male endeavor, turning over every rock and cow pie, questioning absolutely everything, she confronts the strictures of psychological assessment, trying to give delusions of grandeur a good name.  Always ahead of her time, she struggles with peer derision, self-doubt, and the tyranny of the normal.  She obviously has something interesting going on.  Slowly it becomes clear that it is simply what every ovarian human has in her personal tool-chest.  She is fully, unapologetically  female.  She celebrates using both sides of her brain that dance a consistent do-si-do, her corpus callosum providing a robust bridge for cross-talk.  She decides to prove that women, far from being the weaker sex, are in many ways the stronger.  Having spent nearly a lifetime wishing she were good enough, she discovers that she and her sisters are actually on the path to becoming the wise ones.  Armed with this empowerment, she leads women to redeem the men in their lives as they, finally in true partnership, move the species toward a new way to walk in beauty and balance.

Along the way, she will experience all the afflictions of age and meet them with humor, wisdom, and courage.  Joint replacements will be greeted as blessings of technology, leading to bionic inevitability.  When she finally must accept a wheelchair, it will be a jet-powered one that she rides like a wheeled steed that leaps tall buildings leaving a con-trail of haiku verse. Afflicted with the dementia of age, she in a last gasp of creativity will write a computer program that extends her viable intellect far into a functioning future of otherwise Q-signified oblivion. Death is anticipated and accepted.  She pre-writes her own obituary and designs a funerary event for the ages, wherein family is cherished, consoled, and challenged, and her grand adventure is memorialized, tongue stuck in cheek and fire stoked in belly.

This should be good for a long run of sequelae and will surely be snapped up by Paramount for a run of feature films, complete with action figures, toys, and video game franchises.  Grambo will at long last rest in peace, but not before she haunts multiple generations of progeny with reminders to follow Nike’s winning slogan; “Just Do It”.

                                                                    * * *

When first I became a grandmother, I was freaked by the whole proposition.  I agreed to the job, but only if I could have a title that guided me and my excellent progeny to a whole and healthy understanding of what it means to be an exemplary matriarch.  We shook on it.  Lissa, Brianna, and Jimmy were to address me as Grambo, or I kept on reading.  Remington and Gunner followed.  Then there was Jackson and Daisy (recently changed to Archer, a name she decided would be less limiting to her capabilities).  I have high hopes for this army of Grambo’s Grands.

Life breaks me open.

The I am must be known.

Too quiet is this solitude.

Thoughts yearn to speak,

but image meaning      

in my world alone,

where all in quiet waits,

clear as star straked sky,

all questing answered

in compassionate reply,

snowflakes of forgiveness

that slake the coals of rage.

*

Know me God.  I live.

Conserve what truth is me.

Enfold me. Hold me.

Let anguish steal away,

with blessing part,

for sorrow, my old friend

cannot but be missed.

What will keep me then,

when sadness slips away?

Grief has been my constant,

my anchor, and my stay.

*

And yet…

*

Is there an Advent halo

circling my heart?

Breath of baby Jesus?

Blessings from a byre?

Caress of maiden mother

smoothing silken brow?

All reach across the aching years

and bid me also laugh and live.

*

It must be bells of Christmas ringing,

tolling out my name,

mythos cast from melt of years,

happiness distilled from tears.

Calling a complete stranger and striking up a conversation is a scary thing to do, but that’s exactly what I must do if I am to stay on the good side of Elisa, my physical therapist at the JCC (Jewish Community Center).  Working out kinks in the musculature of my ageing body leads to a superb level of understanding.  Elisa and I have a meeting of minds.  There is mutuality, but I suspect the depth of wisdom is mostly on her side of the discussion.  She has decided that I am surely a dear friend of her mother-in-law, Nancy Travis, who lives with her husband of many years in New York City and who simply adores opera.

It was at New York’s Metropolitan that I saw my first opera, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.  It was the beginning of a love affair that was to last a lifetime and bring joy to an otherwise tangled web of motherhood, livelihood, marriage, and religion.  As a sixteen-year-old wannabe coloratura doing housework to pay for voice lessons, opera represented the epitome of a life of singing that began as a toddler occupying the various laps of my mother’s Glad Girl’s Glee Club.

As soon as I could stand on a stage, Mother had me soloing for whosoever would listen, typically her Baptist Sunday School.  Year after year choral singing was as natural as breathing, and it lead to classical vocal repertoire and eventually to opera.  Opera is a spectacle for the well-heeled, and I was typically on my own to afford—or not to afford— enjoyment of such beauty.  The result is that I am not really an expert.  I just like to sing opera, and typically request that Alexa play Italian Opera, such as Verdi, or Puccini to keep me company in my little-old-lady Senior apartment.  Classical Baroque is a nice change, but I always return to first loves.  Like Vivian hearing Violetta’s Aria for the first time in Pretty Woman, it never fails to make me cry.

Given this kind of love for drama set to music, Elisa is surely right about Nancy Travis and Dorothy Martin having things worth discussing, but picking up the phone is another story.  What if we can’t think of anything to say?  I always ask myself that question.  Blabbing on the phone has never come naturally to me.  Even as a farm wife on an isolated West Virginia farmstead, where getting chores done so as to enjoy party-line palaver with other isolated wives was what energized the day’s work, I just couldn’t pick up that phone.  Mostly the talk was about weather or kid’s problems, or how was the garden growing, or what was for dinner, and what would go well with those new green beans.   Even if I could join in, there was the surety that up and down the line, other people were tuned in.  That’s what folks did before there was TV and Days of Our Lives.  We had to generate our own soap operas.

My life tended toward drama, and I had no need to enjoy others vicariously.  But that was then.  This is now.  Most of what I wanted to do is done.  It’s mostly over, but that’s OK.  At eighty-two, I don’t need a day filled with challenge.  I just would like to visit peacefully with age mates about things that pique mutual interests.  My rooms are quiet, a welcome change, but not lonely.  It would be nice to have some company, but a cat must be fed, medications administered, litterbox attended.  There is much to be paid for the benefit of a purring compatriot that greets arrivals with meows and body-swipes against legs in anticipation of the grinding crank of one more can being opened. 

There is always the possibility of yet another husband, but they snore.  They might hold forth on interesting subjects, but will they listen?  Not likely.  The household income might benefit, but the ratio of person to person power might become irrevocably imbalanced.  Would I have any say at all?  Elisa has a good idea.  What could possibly be more delightful than chatting up an old lady who likes opera?

White everywhere and divided into three-dimensional spaces, defined by length, width, and height.  People and things belonged inside, the demarcations appropriate to their certain essences.  My box was where I was permitted to think and feel; I was to simply be what I was—that— no more, no less.

Exiting my box and peering to the right I was given a view of my next box neighbor.  A stately Negress, she stood tall, inspecting a mirrored wall up and down, verifying that she was prepared to reflect a positive image.  Her coloration eluded me as immaterial.  It was her regal erect posture that put me in mind of an African queen.  She slipped out of her own box and went her way toward whatever destination.

Outside our boxes a complex manifold offered many choices of exit strategy.  Most interesting was a double sized aperture that accommodated a spread of garden soil.  In its center sprouted a single aloe plant that propagated only a bifurcation of scrawny green branches.  They were not spectacular in their will to survive.  I felt sympathy for the puny planting and slipped by, determined not to add shame to the anguish of the paltry growth, which was doing the best it could.  After a time of being off doing something or other, I returned.  My neighbor was entertaining company and had enlivened her drab costume with a fork of bright Kelly green trousers.  It was a chic habiliment.

That enhancement played many-fold as I passed by again and again and yet again.  Indeed, the most recent sortie from my personal rectangle, and past hers, displayed a veritable, as well as virtual, chorus line of dancers, garbed in kaleidoscopic green and black and white.  They moved in sync, matching time, demonstrating how folk might cooperate and have fun doing it.  Their high kicks and fancy foot work projected an exhilaration that rubbed off onto me as I passed the aperture of their domain.  I smiled in spite of myself and moved on, my step quickening along with the thunder of happy feet—theirs and mine.

Upon revisiting the aloe plant, it had become a different expression of herbage.  Where previously there had been two branches, now there were eight, angular displacements equally divided, their octagonally spaced arches conquering the garden space entire, mimicking a grand herbaceous arachnid.  Noting what it had accomplished made me happy for a plant that had become sovereign of its garden, its purpose to provide healing to any and all passersby.  What must the plant feel, as a visitor breaks off a portion of aloe persona and tucks it away to use against some future pain of rash or abrasion?  That’s what people do to aloe plants.  Given the contract evolved between plant life and animal life, aloe must surely rejoice in having fulfilled its duty to assuage the pain of its opposite kingdom.  If it had a chest, it would take a deep lung inflating breath and be proud.  Perhaps it simply activates its chlorophyll to transform an extra measure of sunlight.  Everything has a way to feel proud and happy.

Other than the aloe plant and the Kelly dancers, I had no sense of what was happening in any of the other spaces, except to know that they were enlivened with purpose-filled entities, every bit as real as my own.  It seemed odd that we could so closely co-exist but not have any real understanding of others’ lives.  While they were making the best of their time in the place of white boxes, I had no sense of any creative achievement in mine.  Perhaps I will visit this place again, and do better next time.  This dream-time reverie smacks suspiciously of Zoom.  Could it be so?

Two hundred thousand years or so ago an isolated group of primates evolved into a species that became aware of itself.  Like a child peering into a looking glass, it was fascinated by what it saw looking back from still water.  “That is me,” it marveled.  “I am.”  It was the discovery of the ages, the beginning of a complexity that is still being unraveled to this very day, gathering together in a special place, performing certain actions together in shared awe and wonderment.

Until that first excursion into fascination with the narcissistic self, our natural animal instincts were directed outward: pure erotic delight in the passionate other; instinctual sacrifice of self as mother (and later claiming authorship of sperm as father), in joined adoration of child; numinous enchantment with perceived beauty expressed as art.  But that primitive discovery of self as prepossessing all other amazements stands as the actual original sin, tales of munching apples in mythical gardens at the instigation of wily serpents notwithstanding.  As homo-sapiens-sapiens, we knew at some deep level that fascination with self was wrong.  It flew in the face of two hundred million years of evolution becoming mammals.  Suckling one’s child creates love, teaches that it is important to value another beyond one’s own needs, even to the death.  Who would not die to preserve one’s child?

Directing love outward, subsuming all-consuming self-involvement, as a purposeful endeavor, created worship.  We gathered together, for in numbers there is strength, and acknowledged our foolish ways.  Does this suggest we invented God?  No.  He was there all along, waiting for us to awaken to Him and accept the love that waited for us as own, His magnum opus.  The magnificent arithmetic, the algorithms of Truth that pre-existed all bangs, big or small, were there waiting for us to name that lovely abstraction “God.”  Our salvation lay in discovery that it is not we, who matter, but God and valuing His creation.

Worship is a together happening; Prayer can be solitary, but in worship we bare our narcissistic selves to each other and to God.  Primitive worship featured song, dance, and visual art.  These summoned spirit, not so much from far, far away, but from within.  Painting on cave walls, the art of the ancients, captured the power of symbol.  Fire leapt as metaphoric embodiment of life and spirit.  Sacrifice, an early attempt to negotiate with the divine, was once part of worship, but now passing the plate replaces ritualistic blood-letting.  Drumming, echoing beat of heart, combined with ululation as celebration of breath, generated excitement, more than any crass modern football competition.

Language, a late arrival, provided elegant tools to express “a love so amazing, so divine, it demands my soul, my life, my all.”  Of all the fruits of carbon based life on this third planet, only we, homo-sapiens-sapiens, define and love God.  In our worship, we honor and celebrate that as miracle.  Methodism, an off-shoot of the Christian trifurcation of God worship, especially honors the place of music in liturgy, thanks to John Wesley its founder.  The world-around, similar religions know God as incarnate.   Methodist hymnody shares that musical art with a great many Christian denominations, describing devotion to a savior-God, not as fact but as Truth.  For example:

      When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died,

      My richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.

      Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the death of Christ, my Lord;

      All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.

      See from His head, His hands, His feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down;

      Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?

      Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small.

      Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. 

(Isaac Watts 1674-1748)

Worship as expression of such devotion, away from self, toward God as beloved, is surely an effective antidote to the self-absorption that characterizes narcissism.  An old friend Lydia, a thirty-year Methodist, was a cradle Baptist, a familiar of tent-revivals and altar-calls.  The first time the Holy Spirit spoke to her, it led her down the aisle to fall on her knees, while “Just As I Am” played a tender accompaniment.   Her relationship with God is a personal one.  In these her own words she recalls her first Christmas service as the one responsible for the ritual:  “An altar candle’s wick just wouldn’t light in spite of holding more than enough oil.  Anxiety choked me.   I was terrified, feeling not just a little resentment at being asked to do more than my share.  Then a light went on in my head.  How could I possibly resent doing anything for my Jesus?  I prayed, Get a grip! It’s not about my perfect details.  Just relax and be a joyful servant.  Then the flame caught.”  She had cracked the nut of her wisdom: “Worship is about God, not about me.”

That is such a small story to be lingering in my hippocampus for so many years.  Its longevity speaks to how central, how profound, is the point it makes.  How sweetly it settles into remembrances of things past, a reminder that worship is a together thing.

She stood, eyes accusing, arms relaxed in a gentle hug of her matronly form, dumpy printed three-quarter sleeved housedress shrouding a body that abdicated any claim to sexual suggestion.  She was there to monitor me, to make sure that I was as androgynous as she.  It was a standard office accommodation, though no desks were evident, only a pit in the floor where a monumental cut crystal shaft suspended from a steel cable descended, impaling the earth and then withdrawing.  Up and down, up and down it reciprocated — up to be delighted in, down to be deplored.  Matron wasn’t required to actuate any switch, had only to visualize vectored motion, and the massive twinkling hulk moved up or down acknowledging the caprice of her will.

She called me into what seemed to be her office and demanded an accounting.  I hemmed and hawed, a stupid obfuscation.  Why did she ask?  She knew.  Suddenly it occurred to me to leave—out the door, across the lawn, to the edge of the property where a fence stood, unsure of itself.  It was made of stone, but claimed a structure akin to wood, with granite posts that supported concrete slabs secured in between each pair of uprights.  I clambered onto the confused fence, straddling a slab, and slid to the ground.  Dragging skin across the rough concrete hurt, leaving a trail of blood and gravel, but it was a relief connecting to a trustworthy earth.

Safe on solid ground, I paced along the stone fence around to the back of the building where fence shaped slabs lay flat in a tidy row across the expanse.  The closest one resisted my prying but finally succumbed, with a complaining release of suction between its flat under-surface, married to the clay of damp soil.  I inspected the area beneath the slab, and satisfied no entity sheltered there waiting to do me harm, I blessed the silent square of dark earth and lowered the stone back to its rightful place.  So far, so good!  Next I moved to the second in the ordered cohort of rectangles.  It, too, must be raised and inspected to make sure it was just a stone shape and hid nothing fearsome.

I levered up and looked underneath every slab, even though by the time most had been raised, it was obvious that no offending entity would be found.  What persona could lurk to threaten from such an unlikely refuge?  But is that any more whimsical than trolls residing under a bridge, and they have earned a place in our culture?  These questions suggested that each slab might represent an abstract concept that needed to be investigated.  Length versus width is all that’s needed to postulate a slice of reality.  It defines a surface or a rectilinear plane.  Thickness, as third dimension assumed by the concrete, suggests a heft that is dense and weighty, something worthy of being reckoned with.

Dreams could save time just bypassing metaphor, but perhaps they enjoy the game of stashing concept in the belly of a metaphor and watching us struggle with making meaning out of the meal.  Perhaps our brains delight in keeping us entertained during the wee hours trying to figure out what our nighttime selves want to say to our daytime ones.  It would be so much more expeditious to simply complain that my disarticulated understanding of dear old mom would be improved by inspecting some of my ill-founded conceptualizations.  It’s disappointing that in spite of looking underneath each and every stone, nothing was found but an earthworm and a few of Darwin’s ubiquitous beetles.  If my subconscious were more creative, it might have conjectured something truly terrifying.  I might as well just accept being passably sane.

But, not so fast!  What if the weird fence in front of the office were an allusion to the sentences I like to scribe using components that are unnecessarily weighty?  The aquamarine shape oscillating into and out of the solidity of earth, might be setting the rhythm of prosody as it alternatively accepts then rejects precious truth, as mother earth puzzles whether she is being loved or raped.  That, too, fits the shape of this metaphor.

Words matter.  We know they do.  One of my early attempts at publication was a commentary on the Joy of Fishing that I submitted to my local Pennsboro, West Virginia weekly rag.  I had referenced “a worm wriggling on a barb of steel.”  The local editor, in his superior wisdom, changed it to “wiggling.”  His correction changed “the torture of agony” into “a mindless twitching.”  I have never forgiven that desecration of my poesy, nor have I forgotten.  I will carry the dignity of that wriggling nematode to my very grave, defending his cachet, and mine, to the very end.  Perhaps there are multiple layers of metaphor that the subconscious tinkers with as part of this game: Perhaps the androgynous dream female is a mother figure, and maybe she is also a personification of literary criticism, the kind that wants words to be pedestrian so as to convey just the facts, Ma’am—just the facts.  And then she just might be I, my very self, admitting that I just don’t understand.

There’s only so much room in a human brain, or any other confabulation of neurons.  It is, after all, only a tangle of wily cells that convene and collude.  They pass along information out of joy.  Why else would beats of energy course down paths they have already pulsed, and to what avail?  No wonder it hurts to think about being old, with so much to remember.  How many books have I read?  How many idle hours spent gawking at pixelated depictions of other people’s thoughts?  All of that I hope to remember and never ever forget.  And we don’t forget—completely.

Grab a book you might have read but can’t be sure.  Open it and start traipsing across lines of letters.  Familiarity raises its silly head and mocks your attempt to make new acquaintances out of lexicon.  “I’ve read this before,” it chortles.  You might ignore it and continue to peruse.  What, after all, is the resolution of all this texty perturbation?  Can you reach into the mire of memory and pluck out the final denouement?  Probably not, but if you determine to read it anyway, it will open itself like a love-sick girl begging you to enter her very core.  And you don’t stop.  You read anyway and take a stupid pleasure in piling remembrances on top of amazements as if this were something new, after all is read and done.  Such dilemmas pose their plight anew each line and wait for you to throw the tome aside and seek another.  It’s a virgin read you want, one that tempts with mysterium of never-read-before, where every line is pristine to your ravenous intent to know what you have never known, and did not of yourself invent. 

There is a purpose to my rave.  I am out to prove that we do remember all we read, perhaps not with precision, but with predictable fidelity and honest intuition of the somehow familiar.  If that is the case, can memory press on into some undefinable future?  Is brain a bottomless pit of wanting to know?  Surely there are only so many ways to ply the axons of cranial maze, and we will run out of space and acronyms of purposeful complexity.  What happens then?  Might we have evolved some cunning ploy to conserve, a judicious perspicacity to set aside a request for mnemonic retrieval and then wait a bit for information to rise unbidden on its own.  The senior moment seems to describe just such a ploy.  Accepting this shenanigan as a normal healthy activity of an ageing brain might lower anxiety and allow to work whatever will.

A case in point is my encountering a Jodi Picoult book vulnerable to my acquisition, just perched on the shelf at Oakley Library.  It was unusual to find it so disarmed, so available, with no need to work my IT demands that it be where I want it to be.  It just slid it right off the shelf into my hands.  A new one not read before?  Surely not.  I have, after all, read all of them by now.  I wagged it home, heavy in my book bag, prickling with possibility of being a pristine read, a virgin.  Eschewing foreplay and irradiated Lean Cuisine, I took it straight to bed, lit with bedside lamp, hot-water-bottle cooked to toe-warming bliss, and snuggled down for a read.

I smoothed the slick library cover, taking in the blue, a nebulous coloration that gives away nothing, just suggests a gentle aura of sadness.  Even the title, Leaving Time, gives away nothing, simply titillating at-the-ready synapses.  The book is about a girl whose mother, an over-educated scientific pachyderm whisperer, suddenly disappears.  This leave-taking sets the stage for a young girl’s entire lifetime of sleuthing.  Where did Mommy go, and why?

I know after a few paragraphs that I have read this book before, but what happened?  How did it end?  As I scan each line there is the sweet reminiscence of having been this way before, but since I can’t place the terminus, it might be useful to fill some time with revisiting those pleasant hours.  Picoult is always a good read, maybe even good enough to read again, given the beauty of her language and how she tinkers with the words while I watch her poetry unfurl, my fixation a veritable verbal voyeur.  Is it a waste of time and alliteration, or shall I read at least until I remember how it all unwinds?  As senility works its will, perhaps there is some consolation in the possibility of meeting minds anew, that we have erstwhile loved and lost.  We do not, after all, apologize for cherishing melodies that have graced listening ears a thousand times before.  It’s their very familiarity that measures how we love them.  I would gladly hear La Traviata sung again and yet again as long as ears parse sounds and lips shape smiles.

I woke up screaming.  That’s the way it seems to be these nights.  Squatting there on my bed, right in the middle, as if he had a proprietary interest in the location, perched a black wolf.  He sat upright and alert, haunches gathered under his rump, forelegs straight and frontal, nose directing all his attention to me and my unseemly response to his presence.  While he faced me he evidenced little interest in my own actual being-ness.  It wasn’t lost on me that he manifested as black—a luxuriant ebony coat that cloaked him in all the warmth a canid could ever imagine and divulge to the workings of my primate psyche—the same aspect of beauty at play as when I chose to raise purebred black Andalusian horses, eschewing all other equine possibilities.  Black is always most beautiful when it incarnates as living creature.

Wolf sat silent, naught to say—no howl curling in his gut gathering to ply the night air.  He merely captured my gaze and pirouetted in place lifting alternating front paws in a lithe little dance, eloquent in expression.   “I am beauty,” he suggested.  “thanking you for taking note of all that I am and was and might ever have become.”  Then like all waking dreams he absorbed into that overwhelming darkness that makes of reality a soft blanket.

“Larry is dead,” my lips formed the words but let them hang unuttered.  His son and mine, Kurt had been dreading the leave-taking of his sort-of-estranged father for a while.  His last report from bedside Seattle, a sharing from his sister Ruth, described a paternal gathering to depart.  A morphine drip mercifully soothed the transition, but it was sure to come—and soon.  A good son, he had been reaching for his dad every way that such things are possible.  Always Larry vowed to do better, to write, phone, text, all the ways intelligent technology ameliorates saying to beloved persons the things that need to be said—and soon.  But those things failed to morph from promises to completions.  “Whose fault?”  The question ruffled like cirrus clouds riding the air between Cascades and Shenandoas—never asked; never answered.

I pulled covers over head and dived back into sleep, only to surface again after 9:00, teeth clenched, determined to face the day.  Sure enough, iPhone declared that a text from Kurt waited:  “Dad passed away last night,” was the core of a text that spoke from the pit of his grief, that demon who drops in for a friendly visit to suggest that not enough was ever done—and now never can be—and whose fault is that anyway?  “I can’t talk,” Kurt’s letters spell, “just need some time alone.”

Kurt, short for Conrad, is very much an authentic American male.  He shares all the agony of sons who lose fathers and wonder how life will proceed without them being there even a continent away.  Responding to what he must be suffering, I text:

Take solace in your silence.  It is yours alone.  But be consoled by knowing that as long as you walk the fragrant earth, he breathes.  Half of you is him.  Move nobly into your days.  They are gifts from those who braved their own fraught journeys to tear open a path to guide your steps.  This you will do as the noble counselor that you are.  When you wonder if you disappointed him, know that the last question falling from his lips was, “Did he disappoint you?”

The original sin of our species is and always has been gender bifurcation.  The subtleties of Darwinian selection fashioned two disparate living entities, male and female, each specialized in support of biological imperatives that ultimately defined their genders.  All that evolution required was to perpetuate an extant species through facilitation of ribonucleic acid reproduction.  It ought to be a simple story, but it is unspeakably complex.

The natural urge of intelligent creatures is to relate to and love others, especially prominent for mammalia who on second thought return to their mothers for sustenance beyond once hospitable wombs.  We are hard-wired to reach to others for comfort.  That makes us a lovely, as well as lively, species.  The ways we reach for each other are different, often disparate, creating conflict within and without.  Addressing these mechanisms of thought, speech, titillation, and exchange of fluids has filled many a book. 

Like incipiently fertile bird species, human females yearn to build nests.  The hormones that dictate gathering twigs and grass are similar to the ones that suggest a search of www.rent.com.  While the elegant crest of the male Cardinal can be seen feathering a hopeful nest, and it is presumed the human groom will be picking up the U-Haul, while the human mother-to-be pines over lists of infant-haberdashery  and day-dreams cuddling baby-at-breast.  For her a nest is where she settles in to make her dreams become her future; for him a nest is what he creates and protects with everything that he is and can become.  Both are equally noble, testament to homo-sapiens survival to this very day.  While the joined goal is the same, there are subtle differences that can lead to strangeness of execution.  Given the inherent complexities of both genders, it’s no wonder that the whole concept of sex is fraught. 

People are definitely weird about sex.  I need to look no further than my own puberty to illustrate.  When I was twelve, my guardian Aunt Judy arranged at considerable inconvenience to have my cousin Jeanne, eight years my senior, come and officially talk to me about something called birds and bees while my Aunt and Uncle made dishwashing noises in the kitchen.  That was awkward. 

Jeanne made much of getting seated right next to me on the living room couch, pencil and paper at the ready.  After a flurry of nasty diagrams, she told me that babies get made when the daddy puts his “thing” inside the mommy.  Then nine months later a baby comes out.  I was embarrassed, not about the making of babies, but about everybody thinking I didn’t know.  I knew, but I didn’t want them to know I knew.  Piqued, I played their silly game, acting dumb but in actuality shaping only my own discomfiture.  When she asked if I had any questions, I demanded to know how his “thing” got through the mommy’s nightgown.  Jeanne blushed and whispered, “I guess she can pull it up.” 

Judy must have been listening, because at that point she charged out of the kitchen to the rescue.  With a smile that was way too wide, she queried, “How’s it going, y’all?  Ready for some fresh lemonade?”

“Gotta do my homework” I mumbled, mostly at my feet, sidestepping and shillyshallying toward my room, shaking my head.  Why did Judy go to so much trouble to feed me information about babies, and why didn’t she just tell me herself?  I already had guessed that stuff Jeanne told me—just knew—from visits to Grandpa’s farm.  Kids at school made jokes I didn’t understand, but I didn’t know any of the girls well enough to compare assumptions.

So much for “the big lesson.”  Jeanne piled into Uncle C.J.’s Buick and began the tedious drive all the way from Oak Cliff’s Kessler Park, through downtown Dallas, past the old book depository, where Kennedy was shot, then on to Highland Park.  I was left to wonder, but not dare to ask, what was going on.

I knew about the yucky pink thing that Wesson dangled below his shorts while he made morning coffee.  It made me feel nauseous, not that it had anything whatsoever to do with me, but that he knew I saw it and wanted me to see it.  Everything Wesson did had some evil intent.  He despised me because Judy pictured me as the daughter she had always wanted, a pure affection that Wesson could never emulate, nor did he try.  His kind of lovemaking with Judy must surely have been a one-dimensional affair, selfish, crude, and hurtful.  Inexplicable to my childish understanding, Judy enjoyed Wesson’s attentions.  She would put on a slinky ruffled teddy, pottering about the house on weekends, affecting a “little woman” domesticity while Wesson mowed the lawn, trimmed hedges, and made much ado of his manly chores.  He would come in occasionally to get a fresh beer and snuggle up against Judy’s backside while she peeled veggies.  He would slip his hand inside the loose silk while Judy giggled and shrugged him away.  Judy was not the giggling type; she better expressed her statuesque elegant nature dressed for a day of professional commerce in an exquisitely tailored suit, silk blouse, leather shoulder bag and suave up-do. 

This remembered scene of Judy costumed for the boudoir, a grotesquerie of enticement, had a watercolor quality to it, a Monet camouflaged in its own reticulated light, a softening of truth to something remotely safe to envision.  Even in memory, I cringe.  She would shoo him out of the kitchen, clucking, “Don’t do that in front of the child,” the child” being me.  Didn’t she know it was me, watching, seeing, feeling?  She surely felt the same as me inside, where the tight pull of belly strings told me all I needed to know about womanliness.  That’s what she must have been feeling.  Wesson was showing off for me, bragging wordlessly about what I was missing, what I would never enjoy no matter how much Judy loved my sweet little girl self.  His favorite diatribe when he could catch me alone began, “Mommy’s sweet little thing.  You think you’re so special.  Your crazy mother is the only one who thinks you’re worth anything.” 

If Judy didn’t want him to do that to her, she wouldn’t have put on that swishy outfit.  She did want his hand inside the silk, touching her skin, making her smile.  Why could she want his affection, when she knew sometime soon he would again break bones and make ugly bruises on that same tender skin?  I was awash with questions never to be asked.

***

Soon I was fifteen and spent weekends helping my voice teacher’s lazy daughter complete her last year of high school by writing term papers as payment for my singing lessons.  Sexual feelings continued to be something that I didn’t talk about.  My teacher lived in Darien, Connecticut.  She was well situated to host week-end parties inviting musical young people from the area for salon performance and socializing.  I typically got paired up with Alvin, a pretty decent violinist, nice and good-looking to boot.  He was sixteen, with an old jalopy and a new driver’s license.  We rode around or went to the movies or the Soda Shoppe and then returned to the teacher’s house before my curfew.  Before escorting me inside, Alvin always kissed me goodnight.  It was something I looked forward to all evening.  I didn’t care all that much about the movie or the sodas or the pizza; I just wanted to go back to the house and feel his soft lips on mine.

Finally, requisite social group activity completed, we headed home.  Outside, we cuddled while the car idled, holding back the winter chill.  Then he pulled me close and gently covered my mouth with the soft warmth of his own.  Hesitant, my tongue traced the slit.  The center of my belly lurched.  The world dropped, and I hung weightless.  Then I slapped him and ran for the house.

This inexplicable pattern of behavior repeated itself several times, until one day Alvin finally asked me, “Why the slaps?”

I gulped, and began; “I saw a movie with Claudette Colbert and Jimmie Stewart.  That’s what she did when he kissed her.  Wouldn’t you think I’m fast if I liked it?”

“But you do like it?” he asked, taking my hand, his violin sensitive fingers tracing its outline, softly circling my palm. 

I dropped my eyes and whispered, “Yes.”

Fingertip lifting my chin, he looked me straight in the eyes and pronounced, “Good.”  That bit of truth negotiated, we puckered up for a real kiss, imagined, actualized, enjoyed, and discussed in the immediacy of the present.  We laughed, locked up the car, and headed for the front door.

Alvin and I had an understanding, maybe even a gentle friendship.  We enjoyed our occasional date smooches until I took off for Carnegie Tech to study physics, where my virginity remained resolutely intact.  I was singularly unimpressed by engineering freshmen, whose idea of scholarly competition was to compare whose slide-rule was the longest.  I was out of the running, having chosen a round rule which is quicker and arguably more accurate.

I only slapped one of those silly boys, only a single time, and that was when he pinched my bottom in General Chemistry lab while I was setting up a distillation.  My instincts were pure, completely bypassing interval reaction time.  He pinched; I slapped.  The cavernous room rang with the impact.  I didn’t miss a beat, continuing with my procedure while the other students grinned and whispered behind their hands.

Later, while settling into the pleasurable realities of marriage, I still retained my reticence about kissing and telling.  I insisted, to my mother-in-law, for instance, that nothing had “happened” between James and me, until a swelling belly proved otherwise.  I hadn’t sworn James to secrecy, so it still isn’t clear why, when he was presented with the fact of his impending paternity, he declared it must have been somebody else’s doing, swearing he had done nothing, absolutely nothing. 

Why are people so conflicted about sex?  Why did it take Freud so long to realize he was onto something, and for the rest of us to catch on?  The biology and mechanics are easy; it’s the psychology that’s hard—and hopefully the member.  All this would be much simpler if we were a parthenogenic species, but not nearly so much fun.

I found him by accident, quite by luck it seemed.  Coming off a riff of sleep; dead to everything, almost to even me.  I couldn’t feel my left index finger.  It didn’t exist in the natural world.  Same with whole right arm.  Flop over onto back and wait.  Blood can flow.  Sense comes raging back.

But knowing is a lagging indicator.  It hesitates; it waits; then it sees a world of being coalesce.  I stand on solid marble, magma long congealed.  Square, foursquare it is, and firm as earth can call to being.  In this place down is down, and up is unequivocally up.  I like it here.  It plays.  Another plate is attached and another on beyond.  I belly up to my firm flat plat and wait.  On my belly is the place to be, hugging all of earth in one cosmic sweet embrace. 

He manifests.  There, standing on my plate.  A male energy; two legs, two arms, one head.  No phallus.  Why so bereft?  What would he do with it?  With no need to dominate, impregnate, urinate, why waste skin on an atavistic appendage?  So why then is he here, standing with attitude on my substrate?  I have called him; that’s sure.  I want validity. 

“See me,” I demand.  “Know me.  Acknowledge my unique self.  I ask this.  It is my prayer.”

No ears protrude from any apex, carapace nor crown.  He has no need to hear.  I have no need to speak except to align words to my will and admire them.  Even forming words into coherent concept is a power play.  What do I have to prove and to whom?  But he knows whereof I speak, or would speak if I had a mouth.  I seem to have become thought, pure thought, as I form knowing into strings of testament.  I hear no answer with my not-ears.  I close my not-eyes and slide across the smooth plane, on my not-belly, arriving at an edge.  There it stops, but another one begins.  It, too, is a familiar plane, a home.  I step across and slide to yet another edge.  I recognize three plates—three—a magic number.  They are all mine to explore at will, if that is something I would do.

I awake to lack of breath.  I breathe.  In the world of friendly plates I had no need to respirate.  What would not-lungs do with air?  It is a strange world this awakening, where breathing is an act of will.  If I am to face this yet-another-day, I must arise and claim it.  And that’s exactly what I do.

As an afterthought, I wonder what his name was.  “Easy,” my inner voice replies.  It’s Psi!”