The Cats Console Me

"Body of Christ," said the priest up at the altar and held up the Host.  

"What's that?" my sister asked, now five years old, a year younger than I.   

"A little wafer of special bread.  The priest blessed it.  Shhhh," said my mother.

"I have to go to the bathroom.  Really bad," said my other sister, who was four, barely.  

"Now?" my mom looked at her anxious face and saw real urgency.  They gathered themselves up and shuffled out of the pew and left me and my sister sitting on the hard bench.  


"Behave yourselves while I'm gone," my mom whispered and made the shush sign with her finger over her lips.  


"Peas be with you.  I thought he said peas be with you.  Get it?" I looked at my sister, and I snorted as I tried to keep from laughing out loud.  She made a face back at me and tugged at her dress, scratched her hair under her bobby-pinned circlet of lace.  I looked at the backs of all the adults in front of me, pew after pew, dark suit jackets and the edges of the women's skirts.  I thought about my snort and how funny it sounded.  I felt my laughter building up in my chest, and I snorted again.  My sister caught my giggling mood and we started to laugh inside and mess around with our feet on the padded short bench below us where we had knelt.  We were thrashing our ankles clad in anklet socks and our patent-leather Sunday shoes.  


We sisters in a pew in the back of the small church lost track of the mass being said, forgot about keeping up with the kneeling-standing-kneeling-sitting-standing-kneeling that the adults were doing around us.  We rustled, snorted, giggled, mimicked noises we heard.  Everything became hilarious so that we would not be left in boredom by the incomprehensible sermon, and so we could ignore the bloody Christ hanging from a cross beyond the altar, beyond the wan and smiling Mary who looked like she had never been a girl.  


My mother and my younger sister shuffled sideways down the pew until they reached us, my mom scowling at us.  The look said, "You are going to catch it when you get home," but I was just glad to have her with us again.  It was better that way.  I grinned at her.  


"Hi Mom!" I whispered loudly.  She concentrated on scowling some more, but I saw her suppress a smile.  


Finally, I saw the priest between some of the adult elbows in front of me, waving his hands in the cupped upright position that priests always held their hands in during Mass.  He was signaling the Sign of the Cross and the adults were moving around and gathering up their sweaters and purses and hats and beginning to genuflect and leave reverently.  We did that too, as we had been taught, but much more quickly, a token bend of the knee and a swatting motion of the hand around the four corners as we crossed ourselves.  I made my way outside with my family where I inhaled fresh air like it was the last chance to inhale deeply ever again, so grateful was I to take it.  The adults were clotting around in the yard with their voices rumbling and murmuring saying words in their tedious adult language.  I moved away from them, looked for other kids, but saw no friendly ones. 


I spotted the car and dashed for it, fiendishly happy to be moving quickly with my muscles bursting with energy.  I tagged the car, using it to slow myself down and then turned and waited for everyone to join me.  I saw my sister tugging on my mother's arm, as if she were a horse hauling a woman out of a tar pit, with all her might.  


"Come on, mom.  Can we go?  Please?"  My sister was desperate to get away from the slow adult movements and tedious conversations they never seemed to end.  "Pleeeeease?" she whined, an unparalleled nuisance and nag hanging onto the arm over her head.  


Finally, we were all in the Chevy station wagon and rolling away from the church, all of us giggling about how awful that had been.  "I thought we were going to die!" we yelled to each other, making puns and laughing hysterically about almost nothing.  


Suddenly, the car stopped.


"Roll down your window.  There's Father Juan.  He wants to say something.  See?"  my mom said, looking excited.  I rolled down the window and looked up into the Latin face of our parish priest, a Spaniard with an accent and charm that captivated my mother's attention every Sunday.  Because she liked him, I liked him, and because I liked him, I assumed he liked me.  I grinned at him winningly.


Father Juan gripped my arm in a fierce vise of strong fingers and smiled at me but said in a low angry voice, "I have no doubt you fully enjoyed the Mass today.  I am looking forward to your full attention next week."  The fingers released, and his voice wished us a happy Sunday.  My mom waved good-bye and said, "What did he say?  I didn't hear him."  


"I don't know," I said and went silent.  I still felt the pain of the grip.  I was pitched into a dark anger and felt intensely betrayed.  I had not understood his sarcasm and only felt the vicious grip, felt the shock of his anger hitting my stomach.  I hated him now, but there wasn't anything I could do.  He was the priest and we went to that church, and that was it.  


I thought about the fake little wafer Father Juan had held up earlier, pretending it was Christ, about the tepid smile on Mary's face, the way adults looked at each other and laughed together and then complained about each other later.  I didn't trust any of it.  


At home, we scattered to our rooms to play before our midday meal.  I went outside and found a sleeping pile of warm cats and buried my face in their musty fur.  I explained to them how much I hated church, hated the stupid priest and his dumb church and congratulated the cats on the wisdom of not going to church.  They purred and I was consoled by their simplicity and acceptance of my wailing sadness.  Then, healed by this, I went inside to change out of my constricting dress and stiff black shoes whose gloss was now gone.  

Mary In Darkness

"I remember the moment I saw her, and my life hasn't been the same since then."

I don't remember the first time I saw my mother, and I didn't ever think about being loved or loving back.  That was no more a decision or consideration than having to decide how to digest a meal.  It was part of my life.  It would have been ludicrous to think otherwise, make it a conscious choice or evaluate the quality of love, just like it was ludicrous for Mary to assume the opposite.  She had no more idea about love than I did about fear, especially her fear, which consumed her.

It could have been a mistake to have been so naturally loved and unconcerned with the bigger world around me, but that was my existence.  I lived, I was healthy and I was confident.  I grew strong among a family of five, thrived on many things that were good in life for children.  My life was good.

Childhood memory begins at some point when the brain is developed enough to retain it.  Maybe many points in time are blended into a softly blurred image, a quiet development of solid clear memory.  The effect is that your memory has no exact starting point; you just exist and life moves forward and then you start to be able to recall things that happened before the present time.

That's true if your life is serene and tranquil.  If you're like Mary, thin and trembling, with meager clothes and a spooked appearance, nothing is safe, and many memories are horrors.  She was the older of two children and was one year older than me.  I had seen newborn foals in movies, and she was built like one, all gangly and awkward, with sweet pale blue eyes, but she was not growing strong like a foal does.  Instead, she had haunted eyes that seemed very old.  She seemed something other than alive, but I was too new at life myself to know what she might need.  I knew who she was, but her life was unknown to me almost entirely.

Her brother Johnny was as quiet as Mary and had no friends.  He stuck beans in his nose and wrote scrawling doodles on his papers.  He was incomprehensible to me, but I had no point of reference other than my own safe existence with which to compare.  I watched him sometimes at his desk, a few rows over from my own.  His hair was cut with sheep shears, and it stood up here and there in tufts.  He had a few small bruises on his arms and he rubbed his ears.  He couldn't answer questions and was left alone eventually, sitting still, going nowhere, not even forward.  There was something about him that did not invite friendship nor did it repel it.  It was almost as if he didn't really exist in spite of his small, odd behaviors.

I saw Mary sometimes at our church, and I noticed eventually that she wore one dress almost all the time, and I began to wonder what a girl was like who had one dress and was so quiet.  The memories I had stored in my mind that included her by then amounted to a girl who did not move or speak or laugh with the same joy that I felt.  I saw that she shrank away from people and looked down at her shoes most of the time.

By the time I was nine, I had known of Johnny and Mary for about two years, but they could have been around longer.  Their reticence and my lack of outward awareness prevented clearer images of them.  They remained thin, always thin and ragged.  I was swept along on my way by a thousand things to notice and feel every day, so I did, and most of the time I had no awareness in the slightest about Mary and Johnny.  I am pretty certain the entire community experienced them in the same way, as if they were thin ghost-like resemblances of children who did absolutely nothing to draw attention to themselves.

One night, while I was at home with my family, I heard my parents begin an animated talk, an agitated interchange that caught our attention.  My brother and sisters and I moved toward the talk and began to overhear the words.  "...found at the post office lobby, cold, by herself..."  and "...crying, shaking..."  My hair began to prickle, a new sensation for me.  We glanced at each other and sidled closer to hear better.

"The sheriff is trying to contact someone, but they think she's been hurt.  She can't talk."

"Mom," I called.  "Mom, what's going on?" I was trying to imagine someone hurt, but my mind could only think of scraped knees and cut fingers. It was all I had to go on.

"You know Mary?  She's about your age?  Older?  Someone found her at the post office, in the front part, the lobby.  She was all curled up in a ball, crying, and can't talk.  She could have been abused by that awful father of hers, but they're not sure. She won't go home, so it's kind of a mess.  No one knows..."

Mary had an awful father?  I'd never seen her father, but now I remembered hearing some whispers about him, how he was loud and mean at home, but even that information was barely more than words to me.  I felt a shock inside, a small jolt of recognition, of dots connecting, the words "awful father" and the appearance of Mary and Johnny, ragged and uncertain.  I'd been missing something.  Now it was big, frightening and the thin boy and girl were in danger.  Wherever they lived was an ugly place.

"Mary and Johnny's parents are alcoholics, and they have been hurting their children.  No one did anything about it because...They wanted to.  I mean, that is, the kids probably wanted to say something.  We weren't sure what we should do.  Parents are allowed to keep their own children even if they are rough on them.  No one wanted to interfere, butt in, but I guess they should have.  Something bad must have happened for Mary to go hide at the post office in the middle of the night."  My mother was standing near a doorway glancing outside of it, as if the world out there was going to shove its way inside and confront her.  She looked edgy and unhappy.

"Mom, why does she always wear the same dress?"  I asked, looking past her out into the dark yard.  "She's so skinny.  Where do they live?"  I felt sick for Mary, did not know where to begin, but also felt a strange sense of curiosity.

"We'll wait to hear from the sheriff if they need help.  It's time for you to go to bed now.  Try not to think about it."

Naturally, I couldn't stop thinking about it at all.  Eventually I fell asleep with unclear and jumping images of a girl in a dress she always wore hiding in a cold place where strangers found her crying and shaking.  I woke up in the morning with the same shivering cold ideas in my head.  I was resolved to do something though.  My sleep had given me an idea.  

(to be continued)

Puff! A Dragon Returns

I wandered in the backyard long ago, when I was very young, and I sang out loud, lost in the inner realm of magic, song and aimless play.  I was cast adrift, on the loose, at the mercy of my changing moods and ideas.  Happy usually, preoccupied with dreams, oblivious at first to the bigger world.  My world was simple and promised to be endless.

"PUFF! the magic dragon lived by the sea..."

I walked in deep powdery silt, fine as flour, stamping my bare feet to make it shoot up between my toes in puffs while I sang loudly as my voice could go.  "PUFF!"  I had my own large dragon when I sang.  Or, I was a dragon, too, and yelled my own name out loud.  "PUFF!"  We flew around of course, taking turns to ride or fly; we traded forms and places.  Magic dragons do that.  The one I imagined was beautiful, muscular and sinuous, could move like a flash of light.  His skin glittered like the shiniest thing I could imagine:  Tin foil Christmas tree light reflectors, all different colors, brilliant and true.

I danced on the rainbows of innocence, full of myself, certain I could live in the treetops, leap from mountain top to mountain top.  Napkins became sails that filled with a gusting golden wind, puddles were lakes with fantastic waterworks and furniture made fortresses on rainy days.

"PUFF! the magic dragon lived by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mist..."

I created my universe, flew in my dreams as easily as a dandelion lifts on the wind.  It was all possible, without end, infinite in joy and sweetness.  All things were absolutely real and timelessly changeable.

I was seven years and had no idea about anything uncertain, devious, ugly or mean.  I was a little girl then and knew just enough about adult life to realize that I wanted no part of it, had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up - on purpose.  Adults lived behind a curtain of mystery and strangeness, came and went, said things that made no sense in my world.

"Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff..."  But his green scales fell like rain.  Doubt sifted into the corners of my reality.  Large things gradually became smaller, less magical, but I resisted it strongly, sadly, even angrily at times.

I yelled "PUFF! the magic dragon!" to counter the tears, give him courage and embolden his heart.  There were other kids besides Jackie for Puff to hang out with, kids who would not abandon their fantasies and magic friends.  Like me.  Puff, I'll play with you, I promised.  Forever.  I am not going to be a grownup.  Ever.  I will never do the things grownups do, will never be odd, or frightening or cruel.  I will always run, sing and dance.  I will always tell the truth, no matter what.

Something was gradually pulling me away from everything I loved and wanted to do, to know.  Criticism, judgement, my own imperfection was revealed to me in small nuances and hints.  Was this what adulthood was going to mean for me?

The song changed me.  I never wanted to hear the last part, only the first.  The realization that something was ahead for me, a sadness, melancholia, seemed so wrong, so upsetting that I was angry whenever I heard the ending verses.  I countered them by singing the first verse loudly with my own fearless roar, as a cheer for wild freedom and innocence, safety from ugliness and devious harms.  I'd loved my unlimited exploration of the world around me so much that limits I felt settling around my wrists and ankles, gossamer shackles placed by culture and expectation, gave me as much urge and need to escape as a wild horse does when first roped.

"PUFF! The magic dragon!"

Years later, when I was 30 or so, I was in an audience on the lawn on a summer night in San Diego.  Paul Stookey was singing the old song, just like he had when I was seven.  There was a roar coming from deep in the bones of every person standing, all rocking from left to right and back again, moving in a trance of nearly forgotten flight on the back of dragons they'd had in childhood.  Every time the song got to the magic word PUFF, we all yelled it and then paused, listening to it echo on the hills.  Tears flowed down every cheek, trails of memories begun in the early 60s when magic was not yet stolen from our hands.

I say puff very lightly now, but I hear the echoing shouts of a few thousand grown and aged children who had wandered far from their younger days, hardly aware of leaving them behind, sad that they'd had to.  Puff, and it's gone, just like morning mist on a warming summer day, turning the corner to autumn.