From Sunrise County in the Universe
For many people, worship – or even spirituality – is a way of escaping everyday life and conflict.
For Friends, in contrast, worship is a place and time to embrace it, face it, transform it, find harmony and appropriate action.
Not that I would have said that before. In fact, for years the high I felt in the hour did provide me a weekly respite.
The fact is I’ve gone through much of life with a vague sense of incomprehension or at least in a blur.
Perhaps I shouldn’t care, either?
I promised my first lover I’d never write about her, meaning in my books. And I promised another that no matter what, I’d always leave the door open.
So while neither of them is outwardly present, my novels originate in heartbreak. There, I’ve said it. And also in hope.
Yes, I promised her I would never write about her, even though I’m pretty sure she’s never read anything I’ve written in the past 54 years.
It’s not that she didn’t cast a shadow over the story, but rather that her spot on the stage is abstracted into a more universal figure, perhaps even an archetype. Details from later lovers have also been woven in to the point a composite female emerges.
How could I deny the passionate devotion or yearning? Like so much else of the hippie outbreak, it could be embarrassing today.
I did ceremonially burn the letters I had kept until moving to Dover. It was a long fire.
~*~
It’s unlikely that my life would have gone in the direction it did if she hadn’t appeared in my life.
The hippie side, definitely.
And my yoga, while she veered off with the Sufis.
I didn’t realize just how rich they were or how much of my ancestral farmland they were buying up. Her parents were still quite supportive of me, anyway.
I still needed someone to fill her place in my novel Daffodil Uprising.
~*~
Much of what followed turns up in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, including my first Summer of Love.
I’m curious to hear their side of the story. Most likely, I was pretty pathetic. I certainly was naïve and not the most savvy romantic. Like what did I really have to offer anyone? In my revisions, I was able to include details from twenty-some years later, my second Summer of Love, but Peace and Love had more grittier aspects than the dippy love songs present. Let’s turn to the blues.
For me, at least, the experiences turned out to be very confusing.
At one stage in the later drafts, as I tried to come to grips with the conflicting accounts of one character’s past she had revealed to me (the real-life person, not the abstracted figure in the story), I actually broke down weeping as I sensed she had been a victim of sexual abuse from at least several directions. No wonder her accounts to me hadn’t added up.
We did reconnect online, but I didn’t dare broach the possibility. Was she even aware of them or was she still in denial. There was no way to ask, though. Besides, she barely recalled me, though she had been a big thing for me.
~*~
The love life definitely came into play with Nearly Canaan, though the abstraction underwent greater transposition. Ages and genders changed, for one thing. Tracking real life, the relationship turned into marriage now mirrored in the marriages around the central couple.
I was really dashed when one literary agent said she didn’t like the character based on my now ex-wife, someone I still saw on a pedestal. Back to the drawing board, along with some therapy sessions for a clearer understanding. My remarriage helped me recast much of this, too.
If only I could have kept this within the bounds of a Romance genre, I might have had a bestseller. Right?
Last year, a spate of deaths altered my position in a greater hierarchy.
First, a cousin born a few months before my dad, passed, having reached 100. Shortly after his death in 2009, we had a fruitful exchange of correspondence answering many of my questions about my grandparents, which now appear as Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber on my Orphan George blog.
Also participating in that exchange was my dad’s youngest sister, who was halfway between him and me in age, as it turned out. She, too, died this year, shortly after her husband. They were the last of the generation in my close linage. So I’m now the eldest male in my grandfather’s descendants.
The year also had a series of deaths in Dover Friends Meeting, including a former clerk, a cherished elder (bishop), a fine minister, a very dedicated longtime treasurer, and a prominent social activist. That leaves me as the oldest surviving clerk of the congregation but living a distance away. The collective memory shrinks, in effect.
What I’m left facing is the reality that there’s no longer that umbrella of older, wiser figures over me, sheltering or guiding me. Instead, that’s now my role in reverse. Frankly, I feel inadequate.
It’s a responsibility, all the same. And a debt.
Rather than what the French call la petite mort – little death.
Even with the big grin or two.
I awaken to a horrible surprise, the feminine face of death.
Well, at least in the dream.
I’VE BEEN DIGNOSED WITH a terminal illness. Suppose what or who was on my mind was the retirement or “brand-value” issues. Somehow Ohio was in this or related sequences as someone was trying to reconnect with me or seduce me … while I kept moving on to my own lover and eventual wife and projects.
I’ll label this part Disturbing.
Woman: “I’m pregnant.”
Man: “I’m leaving.”
I’ll even nominate it for best flash fiction.
Now, let’s contrast that to today, the Nativity narrative.
As well as all the merry, merry, plus gratitude.
I’m sticking around. How about you?
That is, PFAs, as we’re known among the locals.
I haven’t encountered the negative reaction some report, but feel myself among those warmly welcomed.
Part of it is, I believe, an openness to approach what’s here without wanting to totally “improve” it. I mean, if you can’t stand the smell of cow manure, you shouldn’t move into farm country. Or, for much of Maine, the stench of a paper mill.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot to contribute, but we need to be respectful in acknowledging what’s attracted us as well as the dirty work that needs to be done. You know, the equivalent of washing dishes.
Or loving someone warts and all.
Touring a Roman Catholic church that’s known for its graves, the ones inside around the sanctuary and in chambers off to the side and, presumably, in the basement. The ceiling is relatively low and the dominant color a light yellow. Feels something like a Mount Auburn Cemetery and may have been surrounded by the like.
Noticing a man who’s obviously perplexed (he may have even been in clerical garb, I now sense), I approach and offer my help. He has a map that may simply have some directions, but he’s looking for such-and-such Avenue. Together we circle the inside of the building and come upon a stone wall that’s been painted black and both agree that’s where we should have found his destination. We’re both baffled.
We then join a small group in a chapel or, considering the slanted floor, lecture hall auditorium where a nun’s doing an end-of-tour kind of Q&A session. She keeps overlooking any questions hands up from either me or the man; I’m three rows back and in the center, he’s at the back about four rows behind me. Finally, I shout out my question about the black wall. “It’s the Williams family,” she answers, as if everyone should know they owned the property long before the church was erected.
We scatter to make way for some kind of ecumenical program in the sanctuary that evening.
Our Greek Orthodox priest is already there, sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, with his family.
To counter the effects of a boring conversation from the get-go, be the more interesting person by asking questions like:
By taking the initiative and making the conversation about the other person, this selfless act of shining the spotlight on someone else first gives you the edge – making you the more interesting person in the room.
Gee, I am wondering where I copped this.
Jnana's Red Barn 