Meditations. Words. That Which Cometh Out of a Man.

I am the same which spake,
and the world was made,
and all things came by me.
D&C 38:3

I stutter.
It can get worse when I am tired. Or if I audition for a play. Sometimes in church settings. Stress, too.
Or none of these things at all.

My family says they do not hear it.
In the car we discuss the movie we have seen, a king trying to take words from inside him and pour them out his mouth and into his people. As we discuss the story of the king and the therapist and stammering and stuttering and I talk about the ways in which I am similar to and different from the king, the painter says, "The trouble, the problem, with you is that you don't stutter enough."

Do you have those moments when your understanding of English, of communion between humans, of myriad meanings and any sort of guessing as to another person's possible intent, flees, deserts you and you stare, empty; the most inner space which should be warm and whispering and teeming with thoughts and feelings and what you are planning to say next desolate and whistling as outside air blows frozen and unimpeded across your perfectly blank mind?
I looked at the painter, when he said that, from such a place. I could not for the life of me figure out his words.

Insufficient stuttering is not the trouble, the problem, with me.

I stutter. I stutter a lot.

That's not what he meant, of course. His meaning didn't match the words he used. What he meant is that he has lost his ability to grasp it, the stuttering, to pull up from his memory stumbling specimens for examination, to tease my speech apart and figure it out. There's no longer enough of it for him to grab hold. It is not gone; it is gone from him.

I know I do it. I am strategic. I make choices, mindfully breathing, picking and choosing from among thousands of words those least likely to trip me up, to knock me down. Still, as my sister says, at some point you're gonna have to face using words that begin with W. Like, for example, word. Like that. You may be able to think of a few more W words difficult to avoid. And then Y is tricky. L is nasty. My daughter's name begins with L. S can be a problem-- obvious difficulties there. Watch me take a careful breath before I tell you my name. Watch me stumble anyway. You will lean forward, tiny frown, tiny smile. "What's that? What was--I didn't catch--"
Watch me. Another breath. Second try will be much better. Or much, much worse.
Watch me do this all my life.

I'm just shaping the sound,
I'm just turning the syllables round.
Dipping my toe in the water
and watching you drown.
-Keane, Again and Again

I know I stutter because people misunderstand. I misstep, hit the first syllable of a word twice and people react to what they heard, repeat it; amused and/or annoyed that I have made a stupid and mildly funny joke, a broken pun, an annoying embroidery on a bit of conversation. They throw it back at me, ha, this is funny-dumb, you said a dumb-funny thing, ha. I have to look at them, have to say into their eyes, "No, I didn't say that. I stutter." Clatter, smash. You can hear that word go to pieces on the stones at the bottom of polite conversation. I stutter. Like a special parking permit. Allows me to stop this friendly flow of unexamined words in their tracks. Baby, nobody adult wants you to say I stutter when they have just tossed a casual, a thoughtless-- no-- an unconsidered slur on something you've said. Makes them, suddenly, nakedly, afraid they might actually, after all, secretly, be not so nice people. As they feared all along.
You should try it.

And the Lord said unto him,
Who hath made man's mouth?
or who maketh the dumb,
or deaf,
or the seeing,
or the blind?
have not I the Lord?
Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth,
and teach thee what thou shalt say.
-Exodus 4:11&12

A woman comes to me at church after I have taught a lesson. "You stutter," she announces without preamble or introductions (lucky for me), "you stutter and stutter and look at you! Just look at you!" I look at me. I do not know what she is talking about. Has she come up to me after class, made all this social effort in order to hand me an atta-boy award? "Look how it doesn't stop you, how you think you can just talk anyway." She goes on, flows and gushes on, words pouring unbroken and pure from her so I have not time to perceive, let alone give form to the aghast thoughts rising and fluttering in masses inside my head. "My daughter stutters and she will not speak. Will not. I can't get her to speak even with us, even with people who don't care. She just has stopped talking and I just wish," she's holding on to my arm, crying a little and twisting it, "that she could have heard you give this lovely lesson and stutter!"

I sift through words in order to speak. I re-order. I substitute. It's a habit. I listen. I think. I will take your sentence apart and put it back together.
...will not speak...even with people who don't care.
She doesn't mean this thing she's said, exactly.
She means her daughter will no longer speak; of course, she must have once spoken. Will no longer speak even with people who do care. People who do care about this girl enough to want her words limping and crippled, who still care so much for her they want her insides to show on the outside. People willing to trade caring about the form and precision and beauty of spoken words (because they do care, they do, we all care, observe our love affair with the British accent) for a share in this girl's thoughts and opinions and bad jokes, however marred, however fragmented.

...you think you can just talk anyway.
It is a new world this nice, concerned and moved Mormon lady opens to me. One I had not before considered. I might, in my life, have chosen a different world. I might have chosen silence.

Then I said, Woe is Me!
for I am undone;
because I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
for mine eyes have seen the King,
the Lord of hosts.
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me,
having a live coal in his hand,
which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar:
And he laid it upon my mouth,
and said
Lo, this hath touched thy lips;
and thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin is purged.
Isaiah 6:5-7

I stutter. And I talk too much.
I talk all the time. Incessantly. About everything. Need something said? I work for free. And I never shy away from anything except asking people questions about their lives. That's yucky, but the rest of spoken everything is free game. Ask me a question. My response may or may not include a long and detailed story about my life, ruminations on word origins and connotative meanings, digressions into the causes of the Battle of Hastings and speculations as to its effect on fast food in America and some pointed observations on modern Mormon mores. If you can keep your wits about you and your focus sharp (if you can stay awake) you will see all those words will be my answer to your question. Sometimes a friend will ask a question innocently and unguardedly and I will take a breath and there's this suspended moment when we look at each other and then I say, "Do you really want this answer? Or shall I say, 'It was fine' ?" and they think about it. Some go one way, some go another.
I talk.
To people. All, all, all the time.
Hands, face, body, words, words, words.
I'm the one who says, "That's a cheap answer. That's easy to say."
The book club girl who says, "Huh. I don't think it means that at all. And by the way I didn't like this book."
The one who says, "Wait a minute-- what did you just say?"
The one who says, "What could that possibly mean? What on earth do you think they thought they were saying?"
I say, "Wait, I don't understand. You lost me. What are you talking about?"
"What do you mean," I say, "Why?" "How so?" "And is that true? Do you think that's true?"
My friend says, stopped in his tracks, caught short by some query, "Man, you are just the one to stick people with tough questions, aren't you?" I have stuck him by asking him to explain why he chose those words he has just used.
Look how it doesn't stop you, how you think you can just talk anyway.

But it might have been different. This had simply never occurred to me.

And behold, the glory of the Lord was upon Moses,
so that Moses stood in the presence of God,
and talked with him face to face.
And the Lord God said unto Moses,
For mine own purpose have I made these things.
Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me.
And by the word of my power have I created them...
-Moses 1:31&32

Lately I am plagued by people running from their own words. People who claim not to have meant what they said, who cast from themselves the words of their own making like so many bastard children. Sorry, Son, whatever it was in my head that I meant at the time I certainly never meant to make you. Distancing themselves as if these things out of their mouths were not things made, chosen, but things that came upon them in some sort of fit, outside their control, like storm squalls or tax law.
That was said in anger, it was because I was desperate, I don't know why you feel this way about what I said, I'm not sure I want to be held to those words, just because I said it he thinks I meant it, she is holding me to what I said but---
but
but
I want to not be held
to,
by,
these words
I have made.

they're only words they're only words they're only words

DAMN IT, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.

What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself;
and though the heavens and the earth pass away,
my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled,
whether by mine own voice, or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.
-D&C 1:38

Begin picking words, selecting between them, at about the age of three. Take careful breaths. Listen. Otherwise, if I cannot get some control of this thing outside my control, I will have to spend more time with the school speech pathologist. We met, the pathologist and I, when I was in third grade. He was the first ever adult I realized was unable to keep up his end of a conversation. I tried to speak very carefully around my teachers after that so as to minimize therapy and contact. Breathe. Think about all the words that do not begin with W, L, S, Y...

I would say that I'm sorry if it would do any good
But to never regret means you have to forget
and I don't think that I could.

Don't say words you don't mean,
When I'm gone please speak well of me.
-The Weepies, Please Speak Well of Me

It's a story we tell, a world we make and we make it all out of words. What do I know of you? Your dress, your countenance, your movements, your deeds, your words. Nuances of dress may elude you, your face is what you wore into the world, all we can do to be known is move our limbs and shape the air that passes from our lungs. Marks on paper, movements through time and space, vibrations of air across vocal cords. Of such tiny stuff are our whole selves made, as far as concerns others and their knowing of us. How to connect, ever, worlds without end, except through our saying? And then, that anyone would desire, embrace, pursue, seek to disown their words? To be separated, divided, from their own making of meaning?
How terrifying.
Not that we wouldn't take back. Not that we wouldn't regret. Not that there's no place in the world for an editor (heaven knows). Not that anyone can get it right.
It's a question of ownership.

Not much for conversation
I still find need to pray
Sometimes I get tired of walking
Through these ordinary days
If nothing else I get to see you
Even if we never speak
The harm of words is sometimes
We don't quite know
What they really mean
-Jars of Clay, Ordinary Days

In the beginning was the Word.
And,
the Word was God.

My niece is small, three years old. Pretty, blond, a good girl. Earnest. Smart. She began stuttering one day. Out of the blue. Fully developed inability to get sounds out.
Why?
And how you gonna get along without W words, baby?
She tries. Deliberately. Carefully. Breathes. Tries. Heartbreaking to watch.
One day, playing with her cousins, she breaks. Cries, stops speaking. Withdraws.
...even with people who don't care.
Her mother is good, a good mama. We have spoken, counseled, she is sensible, not making too great a fuss, exerting any sort of pressure or weight, we know this is common, will probably not last, is not the end of the world.
Only, of course, it might be. It might be the end of that world in which this little girl speaks freely.
Look at you...how you think you can just talk anyway.
Her momma tries to comfort a despair too huge for only three years of living. "Maybe, maybe tonight we can pray to Jesus and He can start to take this away, to help you." Words said in hope, to push away pain. The little girl grasps them, the words, takes them, makes them real. She goes immediately, prays. By herself. Makes words and gives them to God and no one hears those words but God. We will not know if she had to chose between tricky words and the faithful friends. She has not stuttered since that conversation with the God she loves and trusts, to whom she has spoken.

But remember that all my judgments are not given unto men;
and as the words have gone forth out of my mouth even so shall they be fulfilled,
that the first shall be last,
and that the last shall be first in all things
whatsoever I have created by the word of my power,
which is the power of my spirit.
D&C 29:30

Never occurred to me, that there might have been a different world.

In the movie the king makes his speech. "Breathe," says his therapist, just before the terrible moment, the crisis. And after, after the words have come out and not come out, after the great and terrible, limping success, the therapist tells the king he did stumble on some of the W's. He had to leave those in, the king says, had to put them there so the people would know it was him.

I stutter. You know it's me.

For it is my voice which speaketh them unto you;
for they are given by my spirit unto you,
and by my power you can read them one to another;
and save it were by my power you could not have them;
Wherefore you can testify that you have heard my voice,
and know my words.
D&C 18:35&36


Noah's photos

Meditations. Do Unto.

Of the Remembrance of Benefits

Gesta Romanorum

There was a knight who devoted much of his time to hunting. It happened one day, as he was pursuing this diversion, that he was met by a lame lion, who showed him his foot. The knight dismounted, and drew from it a sharp thorn; and then applied an unguent to the wound, which speedily healed it.

A while after this, the king of the country hunted in the same wood, and caught that lion, and held him captive for many years.

Now, the knight, having offended the king, fled from his anger to the very forest in which he had been accustomed to hunt. There he betook himself to plunder, and spoiled and slew a multitude of travelers. But the king's sufferance was exhausted; he sent out an army, captured, and condemned him to be delivered to a fasting lion. The knight was accordingly thrown into a pit, and remained in terrified expectation of the hour when he should be devoured. But the lion, considering him attentively, and remembering his former friend, fawned upon him; and remained seven days with him destitute of food.

When this reached the ears of the king, he was struck with wonder, and directed the knight to be taken from the pit. "Friend," said he, "by what means have you been able to render the lion harmless?"

"As I once rode along the forest, my lord, that lion met me lame. I extracted from his foot a large thorn, and afterward healed the wound, and therefore he has spared me."

"Well," returned the king, "since the lion has spared you, I will for this time ratify your pardon. Study to amend your life."

The knight gave thanks to the king, and ever afterward conducted himself with all propriety. He lived to a good old age, and ended his days in peace.

My beloved, the knight is the world; the lame lion is the human race; the thorn, original sin, drawn out by baptism. The pit represents penitence, whence safety is derived.

---

Source: Gesta Romanorum, translated by Charles Swan, revised and corrected by Wynnard Hooper (London: George Bell and Sons, 1906)

*****

Some of us went to the coast, or to the beach, really only to the beach, for a few days with friends. From the beach house you could step out the backdoor, take four magical strides, fall over the sea wall, roll just a little way down the sand and be in the water. You'd never want to do that, it'd be dumb, but you could. Nearly all the days were sand and salt water, golden rainstorms and soft, soft sea air. Good things for a dried out Millard County girl.

We talked and ate and took walks and one day the painter oversaw the making of a monstrous sand worm, but mostly we did all the body boarding we could do and then some. After the first day spent almost solidly in the water I felt like I'd been in a serious car accident. Wonderful. I took a sleeping pill, which, I guess, did its best. After the second day I felt like I'd been in a serious car accident the day before. The first day had the best waves, totally worth a car accident; also worth, but only just, the wild abrasion I acquired and am sporting above my left knee. I'd have put in a picture of it here, I deeply considered it, but it would gross you out and I'm not about that. Maybe I'll post it on Facebook. To be honest, I was a little bit worried you'd think it was fake. It looks fake, or like something you'd see and say, "AaaaaH! What the-!-!-!-oh, wait, that's fake. It's fake, right? I mean, look at it. That's got to be fake," because you just so totally hope that if someone has that on their body it's fake, maybe yucky body art or some sort of dare.

I'll tell you how it happened. It was sort of a dare.
Toward evening there came a truly huge wave and my sweet youngest child, boarding for the first time, watching it mounting, growing toward us, blocking out the view of the distant islands, blocking more of the western sky than we were used to, said, "Oh. We're going to die."
And then, "I'm not going to try this one."
A tiny interior voice said to me, ooh, she's smart, not dying is smart.
I jumped on the wave.

*****

LAVINIA. I can't help you, friend. I can't tell you not to save your own life. Something willful in me wants to see you fight your way into heaven.

George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

*****

Through the wave, into the wave, I don't know, but not in front of it in an organized and manageable fashion. Too big for me, too pushy, too powerful. Broke me up completely, ate me alive. Bubbles go up, I reminded myself, blowing a little air to figure which way that was. A minute or so after I had got so I could breathe and see at the same time, we saw another big wave coming, like the one that had just messed me up. I held up my board and ran out to it. Oh. Good. I'm doing it this time. And I did.

*****
A lion roaming through the forest, got a thorn in his foot, and, meeting a shepherd, asked him to remove it. The shepherd did so, and the lion, having just surfeited himself on another shepherd, went away without harming him.

Some time afterward the shepherd was condemned on a false accusation to be cast to the lions in the amphitheater.

When they were about to devour him, one of them said, "This is the man who removed the thorn from my foot."

Hearing this, the others honorably abstained, and the claimant ate the shepherd all himself.

---

Source: Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1899)

*****

Not dying is smart and body boarding is fun and big waves are very cool. It took so much of me, staying on top of that wave, I just completely neglected my legs, lost touch, forgot to keep them lifted, ground my knee hard and serious across sixteen miles of sand. Maybe more. Salt water. Stings, you know. Examining the damage after, I found myself missing my boy Noah. He's got such a weak stomach, so easily tipped over by skin and bones and sutures and splints but he's fascinated by blood running across wet skin. And he loves to play in the waves. Eden plays hard too and if she hadn't had to stay behind in Utah, a slave to her senior year, she'd have photographed the knee with her cell phone, adding record of my arrogant carelessness to the gallery of softball, volleyball and dance injury pics she carries around with her (ooh, look, you can see the stitching on the ball in the bruise; man, look at the swelling!; oh, gross, this one's still got sand in it).

Ever since I washed, smashed up, out of the ocean and into the hot tub and from there climbed carefully into a wet suit that covered the destroyed knee, ever since I had to begin dealing with the hole I have torn in my fabric, ever since then a little, long lost memory has come tumbling over and over into my mind, like a bright bit of beach glass in the surf. The memory, over and over, and then gratitude. And also relief, huge gratitude and relief.

*****

LAVINIA. Blessing, Caesar, and forgiveness!

CAESAR (turning in some surprise at the salutation) There is no forgiveness for Christianity.

LAVINIA. I did not mean that, Caesar. I mean that WE forgive YOU.

METELLUS. An inconceivable liberty! Do you not know, woman, the Emperor can do no wrong and therefore cannot be forgiven?

LAVINIA. I expect the Emperor knows better. Anyhow, we forgive him.

THE CHRISTIANS. Amen!

CAESAR. Metellus: you see now the disadvantage of too much severity. These people have no hope; therefore they have nothing to restrain them from saying what they like to me. They are almost as impertinent as the gladiators.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

This is the memory. One summer, when I was home from school, from college, a friend from high school days showed up in Kanosh, living in a house his parents had moved away from but not sold. People do that in Kanosh, leave town, never come back, hang on to their real estate. They think they want to retire there, come back if they ever get a decent job, hide out when society goes to hell in a handbasket, sell when the market is better or after all their relatives die. Whatever. My friend was living in his parents' spare Kanosh house, working a summer job. I saw him around a couple of times, no big deal, we liked each other well enough and had always been friends of a single degree of separation; he had, for a longish while, been my best friend's boyfriend, that sort of thing. One evening that summer he took a hard, fast slide along a goodly stretch of road, still mostly wearing his motorcycle.
And went home, alone, to a spare house to recover.

*****

LAVINIA. (laughing) You know,Ferrovius, I am not always a Christian. I don't think anybody is. There are moments when I forget all about it, and something comes out quite naturally, as it did then.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

No one in Kanosh did anything for him, of course, they are not inclined to extend themselves on behalf of (comparably) healthy young adult males who really should be on missions but aren't, whose relatives are too tenuously connected to the core handful of long-time town families, boys who are not exactly troublemakers but might be, someday, maybe, maybe not. Since as the twig is bent, the tree will grow, I am firmly Kanoshian in many/most of my views on human relations, devoutly believing not only that most people mostly ought to take care of themselves, but that most of them truly, deeply would prefer to if allowed, but thank you very much. This doesn't mean I don't help lost children or stop to give directions or make cell phone calls to report crimes or hold open doors for folks who have their hands full. It does mean I would never dream of opening your door myself, just to check, just to see if you maybe could use some help for no reason other than that I suspect you may have your hands full.

*****

Androcles. No: it's very kind of you: but I feel I can't save myself that way.

The Editor. But I don't ask you to do it to save yourself: I ask you to do it to oblige me personally.

Androcles. (scrambling up in the greatest agitation) Oh, please, don't say that. That is dreadful. You mean so kindly by me that it seems quite horrible to disoblige you...But I must go into the arena with the rest. My honor, you know.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

But. I was moved with compassion for my friend. No idea why. Nothing at all romantic in our history, not even near misses, though some possible romantic something had certainly been examined, contemplated. All the kids in a small town are closely considered, willy nilly, by every adult as possible matches for every other kid in town, without regard for the personal inclinations and preferences of the actual, living kids and these imaginary pairings result in greater and lesser degrees of foreboding and/or delight among the adults (and may have been a tiny part of the reason we moved. shhh). As a victim of this conversational, parental shuffling, I had, only a few years before he spread his DNA across an intersection, actually phoned Road Rash Boy (after three days of frozen, horrified, concentrated inability to do so) and asked him to be my choice at a girls' choice dance, the only girl's choice dance I ever attended. My mother prodded me, knew best, bucked me up, drove me into it (I think she had already talked to his mother. I mean, I know she had). That calling, that asking, was without doubt the worst thing I had undergone in all my life to that point. After he said yes, after I got the phone back onto the cradle (historical reference, some of you may have to ask an old adult about that one) but before I stilled the shaking and caught all my breath, I closed my eyes and promised God that I would say yes to every boy who asked me on a date as a tribute to their incredible bravery and in memorial to the things I had just myself suffered. That promise would itself wreck a considerable amount of damage, of course, but I meant well. And the date was fine, just fine, first because nothing could possibly be as awful as the asking but also because he was really a great guy, very cute and smart and funny and unfailingly polite to adults. Which is why my mom wanted me to go out with him, I'm sure. I think I remember we were a bit bored on our date, this being in the ages before people dated in pods and myself not being much of a planner. He asked me if he could kiss me to fill some time and I found I couldn't just step into that in cold blood. Perhaps if he hadn't asked first...well. At any rate. The point of that story is, I went to the spare house offering my assistance with no prior commitment, no history save that which is common to mankind nor any blood at all between us, bad or good.

*****

THE CAPTAIN. You are right: it was silly thing to say. (In a lower tone, humane and urgent) Lavinia: do Christians know how to love?

LAVINIA. (composedly) Yes, Captain: they love even their enemies.

The Captain. Is that easy?

Lavinia. Very easy, when their enemies are as handsome as you.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

Nope. I only felt a sudden wave of terrible sorrow for him, like contemplation of dental procedures, like homesickness, like the memory or foreboding of a breakup, and was sure, positive, he had no medical supplies in that spare house. I gathered an armload of my mom's stuff and made my dad drive me over (as I had no license yet; another story). He didn't like this, my dad, me alone with a young male person in a spare house but I scoffed him into silence. Pish. What could possible happen? I'm not attracted to road rash, scabs are not sexy to me. I promised to call my dad for a ride back (as he was suddenly, singularly concerned. Under other circumstances, many, many other circumstances, I had walked lots further than that, but, you know, boys and stuff). I knocked at the door while he waited (hovered, really, but that would sound funny) in the car and thought my friend shouted something from inside; a noise, it could have been anything. I nodded and smiled to my dad in the car and confidently pushed my way in, shouldered the door right open, just as if I had been invited, just as if I had heard a come in. Dusky in his den, the light all blue from the TV. I sat down with my armload of medicines by the patient on the sofa who, having had no call upon his voice, no reason to speak since the day before, could only make a harsh strangle when he tried to yell an answer to my knock. The first thing I did for my friend, who was so thankful, undone, pitiably grateful, to see any human enter his spare house, was to help him get up so he could creep down the hall to the bathroom. It was a slow getting up, some of him was stuck to the sofa.

I applied Neosporin and strategic Bandaids and set out food and water around him and changed the channel on the TV and talked, called my dad, waited a bit awkwardly till he came, and left.

I climbed into the car with my dad, smiled to show how unharmed I still was, smiled silently out the window because my eyes and mind were filled with stills and with short movies of arms and shoulders and torn skin.
Huh, I thought in the car.

And later,
Maybe.
Maybe not.

Arms and shoulders and a boy who made no sound when I pulled off bandaids, hard and fast.

Maybe.

I went back some more times, maybe every night for as long as a week; maybe it was a short week. Till he didn't need me anymore for doctoring, only for company, and then I missed a night and now I have grown old I realize I don't know what happened to him; he left the spare house and I never saw him again.
Or thought of him. Til now.

*****

LAVINIA. Remember me for a fortnight, handsome Captain. I shall be watching you, perhaps.

THE CAPTAIN. From the skies? Do not deceive yourself, Lavinia. There is no future for you beyond the grave.

LAVINIA. What does that matter? Do you think I am only running away from the terrors of life into the comfort of heaven? If there were no future, or if the future were one of torment, I should have to go just the same. The hand of God is upon me.

Shaw, Androcles

*****

My leg is surprisingly, stupidly, painful, red and hot. It has a fever, I think. When I pack it with the herbs I have come to use on open wounds I am appalled that it...well, it kills. Really. Embarrassing, inconvenient. The pain subsides, I remind myself, and it does after longer than I want to write about. I lie back in bed, a taut, bright rivulet of pain shooting out one edge of the scrape, minuscule screaming demons riding booted and spurred up the side of my thigh. Effleurage. Deep breaths. Wait it out.

Hurt nearly always makes a memory, for me, that's why I so often write about it. It sticks, I remember those moments. I remember and remember my friend, scraped and ground to a fare-thee-well, as my mom says. He must have hurt so big, so bad, those days alone in the spare house, the blue TV evenings with no one to talk to, listening, maybe, for a girl from down the street who had not promised to come back, had not asked what else he might need, a girl who ran her hands gently over his scabs and did not speak all her thoughts. The pain will subside, I say to him in my mind, and I know that it did, after more time passed than he wanted to talk about, time that was only a couple of very long days. This is the whole point of the story, Beloved, that it was not a big deal, going to him, putting on some bandages, taking off old ones, quickly. Buying a Mountain Dew against my better judgment ( bring Dr. Pepper for the sick and afflicted, dude). I take off my bandage, quickly, and am buoyed, floated, by this memory in this moment, a fortunate and prosperous time to recall that one time when I did something, opened a door when I knew somebody had their hands full just to see if there was help I could give. I receive it back to myself, my need so much less than his but still great enough, thank you very much, for me. For now. Not dying is smart. A friend to get you off the sofa is a friend indeed. A spare house is no place like home. An armload of home medicines is saving me. And one time, long ago before I became too old, I didn't let somebody down, though I owed nothing, had made no promise. Sweet, sweet, to me, sweet.

*****

FERROVIUS. In my youth I worshipped Mars, the God of War. I turned from him to serve the Christian god; but today the Christian god forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The Christian god is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

THE EMPEROR. Very wisely said. All really sensible men agree that the prudent course is to be neither bigoted in our attachment to the old nor rash and unpractical in keeping an open mind for the new, but to make the best of both dispensations.

THE CAPTAIN. What do you say, Lavinia? Will you too be prudent?

LAVINIA (on the stair) No: I'll strive for the coming of the God who is not yet.

THE CAPTAIN. May I come and argue with you occasionally?

Shaw, Androcles

*****
When I tore open my knee in the salt water no magical blond boy arose, like a Greek god from the seafoam, to carry me to the hot tub and run after bandages and ointments (have I yet mentioned that Road Rash Boy looked like a Greek god? Because, he did, dang it, though the Greek gods were unquestionably taller. Not that I fault him in this, without doubt they were showing off) because once I had helped him, had lingered on him in my thoughts and he had lingered on me, in his turn, and awaited the day I would scrape myself badly and foolishly enough that he might come to me for the end, the summation, of our story and this, Beloved, is the whole point of the story.

In the real of my life no one arose to carry me anywhere and they'd have been summarily dismissed if they had. Because I was going to get there on my own steam (more like fumes, at that point). Because I had to say it was nothing, a small hole, an easily repaired tear. And I had to go back for a few more hours in the water. I'm a tough chick; it's what we do. And it was pretty nice that a man loaned me a wet suit to cover my hole. He was nice, too, and pretty. He did this thing at the prompting of his wife, who could recognize a thorn when she saw one. And I was grateful to her, and relieved.

It's the temptation to make, to have made, my friend into a story; to wish for the why of it, the what happened because of and also the after. It's the too great longing for those tellings where he, the magical, injured god, saves me, the broken girl, since only he can see I need repair. And happens to have the tools on hand; he carries them with him for just such a chance as this. The heart's yearning toward discernible motives, explication, denouement, reward.
As,

She nursed him and he loved her; she saw deep into his heart in his suffering and her heart softened to his. When at last he could stand unaided they were married.

No.

She nursed him and he never forgot her and when he died he left her his fortune.

She nursed him when all others abandoned him and, later, she needed a kidney and he gave her one.

They threw him to the lions and one lion recognized him, from services rendered of old, and did not eat him but honored him and did him great service.

No, wait.

He took a thorn out of the lion's foot, so later the lion took a thorn out of his foot.

Once a person helped a lion in peril, which was a brave and stupid act. The lion, sensing this person was both stupid and brave and fearing what might follow, ran away as soon as it could, frightened and not so hungry. Later the person made up stories in which people figured prominently and lions could not get along without them. And sold the stories to other people, though the lions were not buying them.

*****

The locus classicus of the story is found in the fifth book of Aulus Gellius... of which Apion himself claimed to have personally witnessed in Rome...The emperor pardons the slave on the spot, in recognition of this testimony to the power of friendship, and he is left in possession of the lion.
"Afterwards we used to see Androcles with the lion attached to a slender leash, making the rounds of the tabernae throughout the city; Androcles was given money, the lion was sprinkled with flowers, and everyone who met them anywhere exclaimed: "This is the lion, a man's friend; this is the man, a lion's doctor".

Wikipedia, Androcles and the Lion

*****
Tony Hillerman, in an essay, told of a beautiful and miraculous natural story he and a friend watched unfold. The friend said, after, "This will be a wonderful moment in a book." But Mr. Hillerman already knew, sadly, that he could never use that miracle in fiction. "No one," he lamented, "would believe it."

Real life miracles are not what stories are all about. Story miracles do not make for real life.

It's the terrible, seductive desire to belong to a story, not just to events, to come away with something of your own, something to keep. A devoted lion. A beautiful boy. Someone to gather you into their arms and soothe away ugly scrapes. Something to keep. A hearty, well done thou good and faithful, at the very least. Even if it's not what actually happened. Even if you have to make it up. A life-friend. Someone owed you because once you were better than you had to be.

*****

THE CAPTAIN. Are you then going to die for nothing?

LAVINIA. Yes: that is the wonderful thing. It is since all the stories and dreams have gone that I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories.

THE CAPTAIN. But for what?

LAVINIA. I don't know. If it were for anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I'm going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough to die for.

THE CAPTAIN. What is God?

LAVINIA. When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves.

Shaw, Androcles

*****
Once a man came upon a lion, wounded and dying in the mouth of a dank cave, a man who disregarded his own life, whether bravely or foolishly, sufficiently to render the lion service, to go on his knees before it and to climb between its very paws, one paw badly torn by a terrible thorn which the man removed, though the lion could not. The man told no one this story for though he was brave enough for the telling he was not such a fool as to expect anyone would believe. He kept the thorn, for a time, but remembered it less and less often til finally he lost both the thorn and the story.
But the lion, who recovered, never forgot.
When, later, in his extremis, the man met the lion again, he did not recognize it, but nor did the lion recognize him, for men and lions do not so much love each other that either tribe has learned to know one among hundreds of strangers. The man, knowing not how he might face bravely or foolishly a fate so appalling, simply stood before the lion and cried silently. The lion, however, whose mind was not clouded by any fear of death and rending, observed still its habit acquired in the intervening years; it approached its prey softly, gently, raising one paw and holding it out to the man for a moment, waiting. To his astonishment, the man saw upon the pad of the great paw a ragged scar, made by a terrible thorn. As he had once before, the man fell upon his knees before the lion and wept tears, hot and gushing, onto the scar, in recognition of his lost friend and in relief, for his heart told him he had, all unlooked for, regained his own life. The lion, having long ceased to wonder at the ways of men, waited kindly, breathing on the back of the man's neck, small and weak before him, and onto the man's hair where his head was bowed before the lion. The lion did the man no harm then or ever, because they were friends.

It was never a story about a boy, but about a thorn and torn fabric and what came of the mending.
Though all our pain subsides, we shall know each other by the scars.

*****

You sit there in your heartache
Waitin' on some beautiful boy to
Save you from your old ways.
You play forgiveness, watch it now,
Here he comes.
He doesn't look a thing like Jesus
But he talks like a gentleman
Like you imagined when you were young.

The Killers, When You Were Young

Meditations. About Secrets

Sing your life
La la la la la,
Sing your life
La la la la la

Recently, for a reason, the painter and I were discussing a friend of ours, who I will call Friend. The painter was noticing, suddenly, that in many ways we haven't come to know Friend well though we really, really like him. This is because, while Friend will gladly talk to you endlessly and gracefully about lots of interesting and distracting subjects, you will realize, if you think back, not one word will have touched any of the personal life he must be carrying around inside his head. I mean, right? Smart, funny people have an interior life, that's a given, isn't it? Friend tells stories, he is a Storyteller, but all his stories are of other people's lives or of slight, charming, wandering moments of no import, funny to hear and cleverly told. These things being what they are, at the end of the day you don't know him as well as you might if things were different, if, for example, he ever came clean about having any personal likes and dislikes, problems, trials, doubts, stuff of that sort. The apprehension of not knowing was startling, unbalancing, to the painter, a surprise to him that, when closely examined, Friend was so closed, so private. The painter sort of assumes he has come to know people by occupying the same room with them and talking to them about himself.

Sing your life.
Walk right up to the microphone
And name
All the things you love
All the things that you loathe.
Sing your life.

*****

Another day I was talking to another friend who, perhaps in small part because she is a girl, a smart girl, a beautiful, creative girl, a broken-and-repaired girl, an embrace-the-world-and-then-stagger-home-to-sleep-it-off-with-a-fever girl, a girl grown so used to alone days she must at all times hear the beating of her capable, breakable heart, perhaps because she is such a girl, wants awfully to be known and needs deep knowing of others by turns but this is hard, hurts her. I watch as she breaks herself against being known, as if a sharp and dangerous rock stood between us two, a rock only she could run against since only she can perceive it. Strangely one-sided for me to watch, like seeing a person miming an inability to connect. She throws lovely words out desperately, hopelessly civilized, utterly alone. Our talk is important to me, too, and she makes me sleep hard because I have to think so much. I send her ornately worked messages in corked bottles borne by carrier pigeons. On this day our words, I can't remember how, turned to claims of secrets held and kept. When I told her I was a secretkeeper from of old and she told me she was one too, we were not trying to gain the other's trust for sharing but trying to one up each other. We both assured the other that the secrets we each carried, secrets we would never tell, no matter what, were huge, staggering, more impressive, in fact, than any paltry, token confidence the other might carry in her heart's pockets. It became a game, a pointless game since by its rules neither one could put forth evidence, could clinch, could score. We played with gusto, anyway, both assuring the other that one day when it all came out, one day when all was known, the weight and strangeness of our hoarded mysteries, the careful guarding we had given, would vindicate us before the other and each would be brought to confess the other had born the greater burden. Now, we are Christians, believing in an afterlife, a judgment, rewards and retribution, but why, I wondered suddenly, do we both hold the deep and unexamined belief that on some day all will be made known? Every silent, hoarded confidence spoken, hung in the bright open air for all the world's ears to hear? That each little lead secret people have lobbed at us, here, catch and don't you ever tell, all of them rolling weighty and separate in our souls, each secret which we obediently lugged about ever after, listing from them, sinking, straightening step by step, would one day be spoken and shed? Shouted from the rooftops, as the scripture says. Do I believe in that God, I wondered? A God who would one day look at His divine timepiece and intone, "IT IS TIME. SPILL," and everyone would split, heave, cleanse, gush out all the things they promised never, ever to say? Do we take up a forever-secret with a half-formed notion that this ugly or lovely little thing sits in our hearts only on a hundred year lease and one day will be flung free to find its own way, good or ill, to its true owner, whoever and however far removed from the original teller that may be? Are we willing to salt down the secrets because we bargain with ourselves, alright, this for now, but one day...
And won't they all be surprised.

Make no mistake my friend,
All of this will end
So sing it now.

*****

Secret people all around me, never saying what they really think, except those crazy few, harrying us all, trumpeting their whims and passions, fancies and follies, orders and half-cooked, half-cocked notions, poems and philosophies no one outside their originator's heads should ever, ever, hear.

I watch a woman issue orders, marshal her dinner guests, form us up into troops of fun-havers, and I think, ooh. And then, is this me? Am I this person? I have parties, I run things, I'm a director, for crying out loud. Is this me? I could ask my friends, of course, and of course that would be just too much to ask of friends, they couldn't tell me. Am I like that, I could ask and I can hear the answer, good heavens, no, do you think if you were we would...

Do you think if you were we would tell you?

It'd be a secret.

Do you like my hat?
Does this make me look fat?
Do you like him?
Is she pretty?
Have you read anything good?
Don't you love this song?
I made up the recipe, isn't it fantastic?
Does that sound crazy?
Did you like...
Have you met...
Do you remember...
Would you be worried...
Would you have time to...


Lies I tell.
Truths I will never speak.

"It's like this," I said once, to a man, "it's always like this. No one ever says what they really think or we'd just solve things and there'd be no drama, no texture to life. Every Jane Austen novel turns on this point, no one ever saying what they really mean, what they actually think. That's where plot comes from." It was ok to say this to him, he knew Jane Austen novels. And it's true, what I said to him. In books for small children, events move plot, things start happening for better or worse when one or more parent is removed, when the shield parents wield against plot both in life and in art is riven. The moment, however, we step out of childhood into an adult world it will be our words that kidnap us, ensorcel us, dangle us helplessly bound and impotent. My daughter comes home from high school seething at a tiny melodrama, not a teacup tragedy, more of a sports drink drama, spinning out from a girls' choice dance and what came of it; one girl who gave a certain answer to be "nice," and, disliking the consequences, became nasty. "You should have told the truth," my daughter recounts herself saying, "or shut up about it. If you're going to be "nice," you have to keep being "nice" all the way through." Sounds like she speaks her mind, doesn't it? But that's an illusion; the drama spins out and out and my daughter is also piqued that she herself was "nice" and went along with someone else's plan which was rotten, went sour, left all the girls holding sour, rotten feelings and tangled in it all, not able to speak the truths that would free them, send them all crashing into reality. You should have told the truth, or shut up about it.

Others sang your life
But now is a chance to shine
And have the pleasure of
Saying what you mean
Have the pleasure of
Meaning what you sing.

*****

I am the oldest sister and of the many specific functions I have held among the sisters, secretkeeper was never one, with a single, marked exception. Not as a confidant for the older two, they never told me anything and that became a lifelong conversational setting. I am not, in any group, church, school, business or social, one who knows. Ask somebody else, there's always someone who knows, who's heard the latest. No, among the sisters I was only entrusted with a specific set of secrets. They used me as a testing ground for medical issues. It went like this.
A sister would approach and, by way of conversational opener, request that I keep an unnamed secret and never, ever, tell. "Suzanne, there's something I have to show you and you have to promise you won't tell Mom." My automatic internal reservations flared even as I gave the requisite promise. The fact that I had those reservations probably completely explains why they only ever shared health-related secrets with me; I truly could not (can not) be trusted, I really would tell if things were bad, and while that would preclude any confidences touching moral or legal concerns, in a backwards way it was just what the doctor ordered, if a doctor were required. "OK, I promise not to tell."
"Do you swear?"
"Yes, I swear, of course I swear. Show me," and the sister would present the owie. Most of these just got a pass and a caution to wash it with soap and I never told what I had seen, just as promised. No one would have cared, so I never had to tell. Some, however, like the large, yellow abscess above the eye tooth or the jellybean sized and shaped black and purple cabochon on the bottom of a foot the sister said was a "sliver," produced instant, unconsidered, unapologetic breach of contract. "MOM," turning from the shocked and outraged (heavy on the rage) sister, "MOM. C'mere." Medical intervention followed, with the sister screaming from over or under parental arms and shoulders, "YOU PROMISED! I'LL NEVER TELL YOU ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!!!!"
I had told, I explained again and again after the trauma was cleaned up, because I had to. "It was bad. Mom and Dad had to know," I pled to the back of a sister's head that would never, ever, forgive me. And never did forgive, but most assuredly told me the next time there was real worry for life and limb, knowing I would do just as I had done before. You always told, they still say, grown up and sort of laughing and sort of mad. Yes, I did, and look at you now, with all your fingers and toes and teeth still attached.
I am still one people come to when they are scared for life, and I still make them tell, when I think it's bad.

*****

Once, in a hostel in Liverpool, Leah and Zoe were too short to be real people. Their heads were below the range of the light sensors in the showers. We didn't know this at first of course, didn't know it till the screaming started in the shower after the automatic timer had ticked away the grace period since it had last sensed anybody large enough to be real and total darkness engulfed them, and then we had a tough time figuring out what was happening only to them. The moment anyone else (everyone else was taller) entered the bathroom their superior height accidentally ended the crisis. Hard to know, when we did get it sorted out, how to help them; they were flatly uninterested in taller company during their ablutions. In the end we had to leave them to shift as best they could, screaming (which didn't help but which relieved their feelings), jumping and waving their arms when the dark overtook them, defiantly asserting their reality. Too small too be sensed mechanically. Secret people.

*****

In a Chinese restaurant I make everyone read their fortunes out loud (make them, I really am that terrible sort of bossy, arranging woman and no one is ever going to save me from myself because it's a stupid secret) till I open mine last. Everyone is laughing and teasing so when I see the tiny words there, words that drill me and expose me and reveal me, no one notices. And since I cannot read this secret out loud (does God control fortune cookie fortunes? and if so, did He think this was some kind of funny?) I do my best dissolving act, which is very, very good. Some people think they are good at dissolving; I truly excel. No one can see me anymore and no one notices since I was the one making the reading happen and no one else cared. I take the charged paper home and hide it.
Secret.

Don't leave it all unsaid
Somewhere in the wasteland of your head, oh
Head, oh, head, oh, head, oh,
Sing your life.

*****

The painter and I sing in the car. We work at it, hard. Or rather he does, making harmonies for himself to twine around my melodies, since that's all I can ever hear. Don't toss me a note and expect me to toss it back, it'll just land on the ground where we'll both regard it sadly and feel disappointed in each other. Sing a phrase so I can catch the melody, till I'll be able to sing along and then alone and you can go do your harmony thing and I'll be solid in the one thing I can do. Only this will never happen because I'll never, never sing with you. Singing with people, where they can hear me, isn't natural to me anymore. Every child sings its way into the world with a brave and natural voice but not every child grows to be a conversant, singing adult. The painter was the first person I ever tried to sing with, rather than alongside of, and it wasn't easy. Truthfully, he was awful about it. This was long ago, back when he was specializing in awful. Though things are better now I learned then that singing is a place of peril and danger. So, ever one to slay all my dragons silent and solitary by my lonesome, I no longer hazard it, no longer sing in front of people. I sing alone and alone with the painter. For all anyone will ever know of it, our work with words and notes might never have been, since, thanks to me, no one ever hears it. If you catch me unawares, if you lull me into confidence, if you dissolve completely into a background blur, maybe, maybe. Oddly, funnily but not funny, the person most upheaved by my locked down voice is the painter, he wants to sing for people, sure they want to listen. His frustration, gently expressed nowadays, feels very distant to me, very removed. This is the bed you made, I think, and you must lie in it. Odd, too, that he sleeps there so much more easily than I do.

So sing it now,
All the things you love,
All the things that you loathe,
Sing your life.

*****

Here's the truth about Friend. I nearly never became real friends with him because of all this not-truth-telling. He was nice enough from the start, a friend of the painter and a great guy, but not for me, not my style. Too much of that bland niceness spreading out in waves and billows, like thick butter over every food, like boring, sheer curtains softening every view. A relationship where I'd have to do all the serious honesty work, all the heavy lifting. No grit, no tooth to his conversation, just big happy smiles, genial, appreciative laughter and pleasant agreeableness. Who needs that? Nothing to get a hold of so I was always sliding off, slipping away into not having this conversation. Oops! Sorry, forgot you were still in the room. Of course I'd never voice any of this. Never challenge, never ask if there was anything he didn't like, didn't agree with, wasn't amused by. I'd walk my distance secretly, my dishonesty as great as his, no one ever saying anything real, anything from inside. Don't want to raise any eyelids, the painter said once, misspeaking and making wonderful, terrible meaning. Double portions of politeness all round, another helping for my friend here, this one's on me. The two of us, ships slipping away, coasting by, unchallenged, unhailed, in a sea of oily unreality. Where's the tragedy in that? Happens every day, in fact, it's what happens. No monster storms threatening off my bow to send me seeking or offering aid, no sprung water barrels forcing me to send up a flare and I'm not a pirate, grappling, boarding, claiming, gaining the intimacy born of violence. At the last possible moment, just before he disappears over the horizon, just before I fall asleep forever and miss him entirely, Friend mentions, through a toothy grin, how he dislikes certain of his relatives. Crunch, grind, shudder and we have run aground.
Land ho!
Hmph. Now you tell us.

Saved.

But before you go
Can you look at the truth?
You have a lovely singing voice,
A lovely singing voice.
And all of those
Who sing on key
They stole the notion
From you and me
So sing your life.

Morrissey
Sing Your Life (slightly rearranged)




Noah's photos

Life. Telling Stories Again

A Big Thing in the Wilderness 1992 Brian Kershisnik

Only a ghost could wait as long as I have in this.
Jars of Clay

My youngest child and I are telling stories tomorrow night at her school. We were working on hers. The children are supposed to tell an old story, a folktale or a fairytale; something that, in the librarian's words, "has stood the test of time and people have thought it was a good story for a long, long time. For years." In other words, not anything the children make up themselves.
I have to understand the librarian's concern. I worked with the kids on their stories and heard their ideas. I know that the presence of a spacemonster or a magicpony or superrabbit, no matter how splendidly endowed, will not insure a winning tale. Nor, for that matter are burps and buggers always funny nor enchanted kisses always spellbinding. Awkward is my middle daughter's word-of-the-week for a reason. But you've got to weep, too, a little, when the rules are that a tiny person is not to make things up. In the too short span of life before we learn the expected flow, the accepted ways and forms, when one of us hits a story squarely, well, there just isn't anything better. Richer, more satisfying. More grown up. Go find and read Axe Cop on the net (I'm sorry I can't bring myself to leave you a link. Embedded links trouble me. They make me feel like a newspaper. And Axe Cop is pretty great. What if you never came back?)

So my daughter wants to tell a story and she is full of suggestions that, sure enough, make me uneasy. How do I let her make up her own mind when she has yet to grow some taste? Can't she just enjoy the freedom I allow her to express herself privately? "How about a scary story?" I ask. This is her weakness. It sucks her right in."How about telling about the Lantern Man?"
The Lantern Man. Local Legend from Kanosh, hometown of wildfires, deer hunters, ghosts and spiders and my youngest child. She clasps together her hands, draws in a great breath, makes big her eyes (I believe I mentioned we are a romantic people) and says, "Yes. That's what I want to tell. And," suddenly practical, "it will work well for me. You remember I saw him. On Halloween when we were walking past the park. When I was little."
I didn't remember.
And I've never seen the Lantern Man.

Though I do believe people believe they have. I must, as I know the people who tell the stories and I believe them when they say most other things, so I have to believe this, too. I saw Virge Christensen witch for water in our yard, I saw them dig down where he told them, I saw them find the pipe where the map said there was no pipe, I believe him when he tells about his encounter with the uncanny lantern light on the west desert in the dark night.

We start building a story.
She tells me she hadn't realized how many ghost stories there are about Kanosh and the area around it till her cousin told her. Recently. Alarmed, I ask her what she's heard. Eyes wide, leaning in, she tells me some pretty tame ones, skin walkers and stuff. OK. Those will do nicely for our purposes. I tell her she needs to explain how the town sits on the land, its relation to the mountains and to the west desert. The desert is where the Lantern Man is; sheltering by the mountains is where the rest of us are. I remind her of hellholes, lost mines, haunted valleys and gullies, lava tubes and hot springs. We can see a dead volcano from our front yard. The basalt flow where Indians left hundreds of pictures, the odd graves on the desert, the travertine quarry with machinery still in place and great blocks of marble standing waiting for wagons that never came to take it away. The dry and broken swimming pool and open air dance hall, desolate and dusty, on one of a hundred dirt roads snaking through the nothingness of the west desert. You'd never find it if you didn't know. Or if you did.
"Yes," she tells me. She nods solemnly. We are haunted indeed. "And Topaz. Think how many ghosts from Topaz."
Now that is a stunner. That is right out of left field. We are walking her to school during this conversation and I have to walk for many steps contemplating her silently because that is so very unexpected. And I'll tell you why. I grew up in Millard County and I never once considered Topaz as a source of unhappy spirits because I never heard of Topaz at all till I grew up. Probably at about the same time my little girl heard about it.
How can it be a part of her landscape of explantions if it was never a part of mine?
I knew the west desert was messed up all right, but I had never thought that some of that trouble might have been streaming out from where Topaz had been.
No one, no one ever mentioned it.
You hunted trilobites on the desert and some people hunted animals there or ran sheep or rolled Easter eggs down the sand dunes (you could most always see brightly dyed shell shards in the sand) or drove dune buggies there or looked for gemstones or arrowheads or lost gold mines. Sure. And search and rescue hunted for the lost people who'd been hunting for all those things and for geologists who'd been searching for who knew what. The wildly diverse minerals and the rock formations insured us more that our fair share of geologists. I recently met a very nice man who actually is a geologist and far more familiar with my old home desert that I am and was pleasantly surprised (and mildly disbelieving, at first) to hear him claim never to have been lost and rescued. I wasn't aware that happened. Where I come from, geologist is said with just the same tone and layers of meaning that other people build into the word hick.
But no one ever mentioned such a thing as Topaz.
It was not at all a part of the story of where I grew up.
There's a house in Meadow, the town just north of Kanosh, that is made of two Topaz houses put together. I guess people went out there and took the houses and stuff away after the Japanese people left, took them and used them. It's not like the older people, the grownups, wouldn't have known. Sure they did. But I didn't. Topaz is one of the gemstones you can find on the west desert, if you know where to look. That's all.

It was never part of the reason for things, there, all along, anyway, remembering itself, hoarding and muttering, complaining and enduring in the dusty wind that blows, hard, all all all the time. Waiting.

I'm remembering a conversation I had once with the artist.
I had met a woman he needed to know and I was trying to make him remember which one she was. I was pretty sure he had observed her; I had found her impossible to miss. I had stared. In a crafty and polite way.
I told him, "It was that woman with all the big amber jewelry. All over her, lots of it. Brown and yellow, too. Oh, come on, Bri, she was right by us."
He stared at me.
Have you seen The Fantastic Mr. Fox? How sometimes the animals' eyes are just great big white marbles with black swirls in the middle?
Exactly.
He said, "I didn't see that woman. She wasn't there. What's amber?"

I didn't know about it.
It wasn't there.
What's topaz?

Why should I be so surprised?
Why had I assumed if there were a ghost I'd have known?
Who on earth do I think I am?
I've never even seen the Lantern Man.

I wrote here, a while ago, that the Old State Capitol Museum in Fillmore was haunted, understanding all the while that if you apply the normal rules for building hauntings then the museum wasn't itself haunted, not the rooms, not the walls (whether or not they were able to speak--what would they say? bored bored boring boring), certainly not the uneven flagged pioneer walks and not even the very spooky stairs to the cellar, narrow, steep and atmospheric though they are. The museum building had all the aura, just none of the the history for haunting, the lives people would have had to live in its rooms seeping into the walls and floors, staining them with the unmistakable trace, the spiritual scent of people, real as oil from our hands and wear from our feet. But there is more than one way for people to stay on, leave themselves behind. My childhood museum got filled with hauntings not from lives lived within it but from charged objects brought to it, treasured and heaped up there after the owners were dead. Little stuff they held dear and close, soaking up desires, achings, musings, the bits of people's living shut up all together through hot days and cold, to give off and give back the feelings of rage or love or despair or hope or envy or resignation they had absorbed in all those years of rubbing against the living. Ghost stories, when you tell them, take long-dead feelings and thoughts and punch them up, give them shape and dimension, names and motives, deaths and a reason for lingering. That's why ghost stories are sad, someone is still trying, still striving, still needing to be heard. Listen, listen, look at me. Softly whispered words of the dead. This was my house, my comb, my picture, my anger, my stupid fault, my forgiveness.

The west desert on the other hand. That is something else all together. Here is all emptiness and failure to establish a toehold, to leave our mark. Here is the shore of Lake Enchantment, this eyeblindingly white, bonedusty depression in the alkaline dirt. This is the lake front property people from far away bought and came to view, proud owners of grit and nothing, not even sagebrush. Standing, stricken on the "shore," clutching their brightly colored, verdant brochures, unable to become reconciled to the con. Driving to the nearest town, asking at the store. "Where is...? But, are you sure?" My parents owned the store; my dad told me. Whatever emotions poured out of those poor people into the thirsty, brickhard clay of the lakefront community that never was, wouldn't the wind have torn them away, ground them to bits, tossed them to nothing between the burning sky and the burning ground?

White Boat 1995 Brian Kershisnik

Here is an abandoned government station. "What? what was it for?" "Don't know. They left it." What were you, big but oddly short cement cylinder sitting here like, what? like a tremendous grey Smartie of the desert. Lonely, dirty and broken, that's what you are. Stupid and expensive, that's all that's left behind here. Can there be a ghost of governmental waste? Then the west desert is its home, but I can't hear that ghost at all. Just the wind and the wind. Here's a foundation, an honest to goodness house once out here. Who thought this was a good idea? Or even possible? What kind of people? I stand in the empty kneehigh square that held up their shelter and I feel nothing. Empty, clean as an old bleached shell on the beach. I've never found a haunted seashell. This place is not haunted in a human sort of way. We don't soak into it and cling. I think it's the other way around.

What's haunted here is the land itself and if soft, damp people stay too long on its dry dry bones we can become set dressing in whatever tragedy it hangs on to, from history that doesn't flow at all like ours. The volcanoes are dead but they aren't gone. We built our little towns on the same fault line that blew them into life and being and that shifts and mutters under our corrals and gardens. Our house sits in an old stream bed. The weather changes so you can't easily grow the peaches that used to fill orchards, and the wind has taken to blowing all all all the time. It wasn't like that, even when I was little. The land changes and we watch it, trying to find it the way we remember it. But our memories are not the story it is telling. Every ghost waits for someone to listen. But people want a story like us, a story people have thought was a good story, middle beginning and end, for years and years. We only want to listen if we're going to understand. We collide with the dirt we live on, it burns us up, chokes us, we are lost and wandering till we fall over in the dirt and we lose. Even the sand is brutal to us.

I could tell you stories.

Now that I've thought it through, I don't think the desert is haunted by Topaz. I don't think people can leave a mark out there unless they carve it into the basalt where it depends on the continuance of the rock. My dad told me a story of a war, a story he said an old Indian told him that was told to the Indians by the people who lived there before these Indians came but was about the people who lived there even before them. Long before my ancestor pioneers, long before an American government, warring within and without, captived some of its people in inadequate little houses in a terrible desert. The man told my dad the Indians thought the trouble on the land was from that great, long ago war. Maybe, or maybe those misty, far off people lost control of their story to another history that didn't flow like theirs, got caught in the traces of a greater, older war, fought with volcanoes and shifting mountains, the decline of an inland sea. A war of heats and pressures that left gemstones carelessly heaped across the face of a desert for little people to hunt and save and treasure. Amethyst. Topaz. I think the land was like that from before and that's why Topaz ended up out there. It fit. Impermanence, injustice, insignificance. Great place to set a story you never intended to keep, that you don't really want to understand. No need to talk about it later. It never touched us. The wind blew it away. It was never here.

I tell my little girl the story of the Lantern Man. Is this a story that has stood the test of time? Have people thought it was a good story for years and years? Did it happen, or did a child make it up, nailing a story that was trying to be told of recurring loss and endless hunting? How can I explain the way the town sits on the land, its relation to the mountains and the west desert? Once there was a man who lived at the end of town and kept horses in the old rock corral, on the west desert. Do you remember that place?
She nods, suddenly shivering, rubbing goosebumps on her arms. "Now I'm scared," she says, "I never heard the story before."
What?
"Then why did you think you saw him?" I ask.
"No, I did see him. I knew there was a Lantern Man, I just never heard the story. It's sad. And creepy."
"So what did you see?"
"Just a lantern, going through the park, going west."

A light, low to the ground, moving at a man's walking pace. A man captive, searching, haunted by the desert, dry in its bones.

Pilgrim 1992 Brian Kershisnik

Stories. Maybe the Only Dog Story

Mother and Child with Dog Vomiting, Brian Kershisnik

When I was very small my grandparents on the distaff side raised dachshunds. I can hardly remember anything about those dogs other than that they were in all the houses on my mom's side of the family. That's honestly how I was first able to tell for sure which cousins were which. Gretel and Danke are the only two dog names I remember, though I have a hazy memory (I don't research these memories before I write them, because that would be recording family history, and I don't do that) of my dad calling someone (not a sister) Puddle. Or Piddle. Maybe Tinkle. Till I was an adult I had this hazy assumption that Danke meant something along the lines of "Pees on the Floor," (a Native American/Germanic name) even though I had been using that word to express thanks for forever. I don't remember caring much for these little creatures but I did love their puppies. All puppies are darling, but dachshund puppies are a special intervention of nature. A more improbable baby can scarcely be imagined. On one visit to Grandma's house I found my three year old heart breaking for them, for snaky little puppies to carry, to squeeze, to rub against my face, to chase and to fall over, laughing to death while they jumped and nipped.

My cousin Laura was at Grandma's, too. Laura was my most beloved child friend. She was also my blessed and everlasting inferior, having had no more sense than to be born six months after I was. I was always going to be older. The Oldest. Period. No appeal. Must have been awful, as I am not one to rest humbly on any sort of laurel. But Laura took it out of me in myriad ways. One of my very, very earliest memories is of her smashing my head onto the fender of a car and making one of my front teeth disappear. It hurt. I cried. My father was very surprised and upset. So was my mom. I kept looking for my tooth with my tongue. My parents looked for it on the ground. Then my uncle looked at my mouth and said my tooth was still there, it had just gone "up," and would come "down." Which I guess it must have done. Laura I loved as a part of me.

Laura ached for puppies, too, and went with me to ask Grandma to please have the dogs make us some. Grandma laughed to us in her special way, as though we were tiny darlings and as though she had heard not a thing we said. She would respond in that particular way to most of what we said to her all her life. Listen kid, she told us in her brisk, slangy grandma tone, the dogs can't just make puppies. They have to be bread. But, Grandma continued, in her special way that somehow led you to believe she was now addressing a new person , someone you were not altogether smart enough to see, we don't want the dogs to have puppies right now, do we? Who's we, white Grandma? But anyhow, who cared what she thought? She had tipped her grownup hand and now the secret was out. We knew how it was done.

Food magic.

Laura and I conferred. The solution to our puppy hunger, as accidentally explained by Grandma, was laughably simple. We didn't even think we needed to try to hide our actions. Just as well, we lacked the experience for successful deceit. I think our combined age was maybe six. We were not skilled (yet), rather, we were lucky in that most of the time no one looked at us. We strolled into the kitchen, pushed something movable and stable, maybe a chair, over to the counter, climbed onto the counter top, opened the cupboard, removed two loaves of whatever end-of-the-sixties-sliced-bread-in-a-bag my grandma had up there (not a baker, she) and went into the backyard to bread us some puppies. Two loaves so we each had a bag. It seemed an embarrassment of slices. Still, doesn't do to scrimp on spells to make offspring. Plenty of fairy tales preach the perils of that sort of miserliness. We commenced making the puppies, flinging bread in the soft southern California sun, happy in Grandma's backyard, almost knee deep in the ocean of her two heaving dachshunds. It was a idyllic moment of animal husbandry. We pair of blissful cousins, casting slices wide, cheerfully counting our puppies before they hatched, naming and apportioning them; dogs in a frenzy of adoration for us, gulping and snarfing processed white flour like they might never eat it again.

It seems a fair surmise, judging from events as they unfolded once we were noticed, that we were killing the dogs. With malice aforethought and extreme prejudice. We had certainly murdered some body's plans for lunch. Parents and other relations poured out of the house, summarily separating us from the dogs and from our bread before we knew what we were about and certainly before the spell had a chance to take. Carried shocked and sobbing into the house, I watched over some adult's shoulder as the useless, grownup dogs bobbed away into the distance with nary a puppy in sight. Nevernevernever, I mourned and hiccuped to myself, there will nevernevernever be any puppies now because Grandma doesn't want the dogs to have bread and she never will ever again. Noooo puppies. Too sad even to contemplate such a dark future.

To their credit, aside from the damage they had already done, they didn't officially punish us. I think they were a mite surprised at the screaming, lunging and grieving following our apprehension. (Good thing I grew out of all that. Sheesh.) They let us roll about for a bit, work it through our systems, then asked us, carefully, what exactly the matter was. That we answered, and answered truthfully, shows how terribly young we were. Later, we got older. While we explained, accused and told in lurid detail the terrible thing they had done, the adults started glancing quickly at each other in that dumb, sneaky way they have when they think they might laugh while somebody tiny is dying of a real problem that they have grown too big to remember isn't at all funny. This was a strange response and we faltered, our tale petering out in the face of their badly controlled amusement. What? Laughing at us? At thwarted but serious food magic?

"No, no, sweethearts," they explained, "that wouldn't have worked. (Gasp and giggle.) It isn't bread like that. It has to be with other dogs. Now, we know how much you love puppies but blah blah blah..." and they were gone in a swamp of fake understanding and trite comfort. It didn't matter. Laura and I exchanged looks of our own, tears stemmed as if by magic. We had the clue, the next part of the riddle.

Other dogs.