Meg Sefton's Blog, page 34

Classical Saturday

With everything opening up and with new travels, I am feeling both grateful and overwhelmed. I was sick with a bad cold for about a week and a half after flying to see family. And when I got home, I became acutely aware of a neglected social life in my hometown. But normalcy will not happen overnight.

I do feel such a relief to sit in a bookstore and not worry about a mask, to leisurely enjoy the work people have created and written for our edification.

Tonight, I feel a little relief, on the whole, regarding the general state of things, and am spending my classical Saturday on a repeat of a lovely piece of music. Be well. — Meg

seamstress

Photo by Roberto Martinez on Unsplash

There was once a young woman who lived deep in a wood. She was deft with her labors, keen in her mind, strong in her body. She loved the children who would visit her during the day while she worked. She fed them fresh-baked cookies and pies. The sweetness from the oven wafted from the windows of her little cabin so that even wildlife gathered round in hopes of a few crumbs or a stale crust. She was also a skilled seamstress who made everything from gowns and wedding dresses to tailored suits and children’s clothing. ball gowns and corsets and wedding dresses and suits. Never did she turn away the company of a child, no matter how mean his appearance. Nor did she refuse to make clothing for those who were poor but needed raiment for the winter. Somehow, the young woman was never in need and this abundance overflowed to what she was able to give to others.

On the other side of the wood, there was a village with shops, a town hall, a church. One evening at a town hall meeting a woman, a stranger, stood up and began interrogating the town: Who is this woman who lives in the wood and is so generous? Where did she come from? Why is she there? What does she want? Who are her parents? For a while, the villagers just stared, for they didn’t know this strange woman. They hadn’t seen her enter, and she had a strange appearance. She wasn’t like them, these hardy folk who worked hard and whose hands were rough and yet who wore smiles and assumed nothing. She was chalky and thin and had long, dark dull hair, and long yellow nails and teeth. Yet despite her unpleasing aspect, they began to wonder: Who was this child among them, this generous young woman? Who were her parents? Where did she come from and why was she here?

By day, the old hag drug herself around their shops and ran her yellow nailed fingers over their goods and she began whispering inanities: The girl was actually a witch who was actually a goat practicing the dark arts so that the souls of the children who visited her home would become ensnared and lost to wickedness. She would turn the children into goats and they could become other beings, little devils in disguise, who would slowly bring the world into ruination and suffering. She wears a lovely face, doesn’t she? the old hag would say, grimacing which was her interpretation of a smile.

People laughed about the hag in private. They sat over teacups and coffee pots and thought said at least they’ve finally got some entertainment. They wondered if they should tell the young woman what was being said about her, for she never attended town hall meetings, but they decided the woman was better off left undisturbed: probably why she didn’t attend was to avoid such foolishness, and good on her, and let’s honor that, and so forth.

One night one of the children had a terrible dream. It was about a goat who stood in a field and called his name. It looked at him with its wild nonhuman slits-for-pupils eyes and said “Daniel!” There was something terrible about the goat, said little Daniel, and it had blood dripping from its mouth and down on its legs. Then it ran away, into the forest, where the young seamstress lived.

Daniel’s mother was shaken to her bones. “Now lookie,” she said to Daniel’s father. “Now just lookie here! What that crazy old bat said was true! Look what this child’s dream portends!” And then she melted in tears over her son’s small body as it lay on his narrow bed.

“Now, now,” said Daniel’s father, smoothing his wife’s hair. “Let’s not run away with this. It was just a dream.” But in his heart, something had begun to pick away at him.

The next day, Daniel felt badly that his mother had reacted so to his dream. He had heard the rumors the old hag had whispered about the seamstress, but had rejected them out of hand. He regretted his emotions and fear for he loved the seamstress. She always treated him with special kindness for his parents couldn’t always afford the school clothing she made for him every autumn and she even made him fine leather shoes as well. He should have kept the horror of the dream to himself.

However, he had to investigate, to see for himself, for he was a curious boy, and prided himself on knowing facts even though he knew the seamstress very well for he had visited her over one hundred times at the open window of the Dutch door where she handed out cookies to hungry children. And he had been inside her cabin to be measured and fitted for his school clothing upwards of about twenty times. Even so, he set off for the wood the next day after eating his breakfast in order to banish from his mind any doubts and fears sown by the old hag.

He passed through the meadow where he had dreamed a bloody goat was calling out to him and he tromped down into the dark wood, where there appeared to be a specter of darkness hovering about the copse of trees that surrounded his beloved seamstress’ home. There were dark clouds directly above the little cabin, so low as to be below the treetops. He approached with care, hugging the outer wall of the cabin, and slowly raising himself above the windowsill.

What appeared at the sewing table where the seamstress normally worked was a bearded hag with a chalky face and long dark hair, two horns, long floppy ears, eyes with slits for pupils. Threads of gold, pearl buttons, strips of leather, silken and brocaded fabrics hovered about its horrible head and appeared stitching themselves together while the goat sat, hooves upon the table, eating from a table of weeds.

Daniel scrambled away from the window. But the goat must have heard the thump of his back against the outer wall, for it clomp, clomp, clomped with its massive hooves on the wooden planks of the porch and said “Daniel!” just like in his dream. “Come out, boy!” And so, Daniel rounded the corner of the cabin to gaze on the terrible specter of a goat on its hind legs, its horned head casting a shadow over his face.

The goat jumped down from the porch onto on all fours, and nearly rammed the child from behind but Daniel scrambled up a tree. Daniel sat patiently on a branch while the sun set and as an inky blackness settled on the forest. When the goat fell asleep, Daniel went home.

He decided not to speak about what had happened. He wondered if anyone would believe him or whether they would think he was possessed and then he would have to be subject to the insistent, ancient Father Janneth who would try to take the devil out. He quietly cried himself to sleep that night, not just because of this new fear of what had happened, but because something inside of him was different, and it made him feel sad.

As the weeks passed, nothing appeared changed in the town. There were still praises for the seamstress’s handiwork and her generosity and eventually the hag and rumors and rumors about the hag died down. It was said she must have moved on to other places.

But Daniel never saw the seamstress again. He refused to go to her cabin in the wood. He didn’t even want sweet things to eat.

Daniel never married nor had children. He became known as the town eccentric. He took in dogs. He trained them to hunt and protect children and help the blind and frail. He knew some lightness had left him when he had gained a dark knowledge of the seamstress, but could never puzzle it out. He never really understood if it was real, or if it stood for something else.

At any rate, his faith and happiness were found in animals. He became a quiet man who kept to himself, but he was not altogether unhappy.

Little Cinder

Tinkerbell by Chris Alcoran, Flickr

There was nothing more than Daddy Pappy had wanted to do than to make sure Little Cinder could see Tinker Bell fly down from Cinderella’s castle. (Little Cinder was Cinderella’s namesake, after all.)

Little Cinder was Daddy Pappy’s only grandkid, his son having died in Afghanistan a few years before. Little Cinder spent most days and nights with him and Mammy Grand while Cinder’s Mama worked at the diner and as a maid at the hotel. It would have meant so much to his son to be present for this Disney moment with Little Cinder, but in his absence, Daddy Pappy did his darnedest.

They had saved all year for the Disney tickets but then the pandemic struck and they had to wait. At last, in July of the following year, the hottest and most popular time at the theme park, Daddy Pappy stationed his wheelchair in front of the roses before the castle. Even so, Little Cinder couldn’t see. He abandoned his wheelchair and pulled himself deep into the garden between the bushes, telling Little Cinder to follow, ignoring Mammy Grand who was scolding him from the chain link fence.

Little Cinder could stand on a little rise in front of a tree and that way no one could obscure her view. There was even a light breeze blowing the roses this way and that, and Mammy Grand, having finished with her disapproving looks, smiled at them and shook her head. Daddy Pappy knew she was worried about them breaking park rules but she would know because she knew him that he didn’t give a damn. At that moment, a huge blast of trumpets rose from hidden speakers, the park lights went dim, and an an announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, please welcome a special guest here to meet you on this most magical night!” And music blossomed out – “When You Wish Upon a Star!” Spotlights shone on the high turrets of Cinderella’s castle, where a beautiful, sparkling sprite with wings rode a zipline over the crowd.

At the spectacle, everyone gasped in surprise. Little Cinder jumped up and down, clapping her hands and cheering. Then suddenly, in a rush of feeling, she flung her arms around Daddy Pappy’s neck.

It would be years later that Daddy Pappy, on one of his last days, remembered that very moment. He never said this to anybody lest anyone feel competitive with Little Cinder, but this moment when Little Cinder hugged him in a sudden rush of joy was truly the best moment of his life.

Flesh

Free Texture by JJ Ott, flickr

What Kristofel heard when he broke off a tiny piece of the white clapboard was a loud cry, as if he had pulled a tooth. He was hungry and desperate and something smelled subtly sweet to him, something in the clapboard.

Monika had told him not to touch the house, not to even walk up on the porch. There was something not right. For miles, they had hiked through the Florida north wood, dense with undergrowth, until they had come upon a clearing, demarcated by white horse fencing, and in this broad clearing there stood a house.

Kristofel had been drawn to something fleshy in the board, like coconut. When he put the piece into his mouth and started to chew, there was more crying, and groaning too, but he didn’t care. He went back for more. He filled his belly.

Kristofel’s eyes were wide as two blue sauces, his hair a curly carrot red. Monika was a slim, dark beauty. She tended to keep to herself. But she and Kristofel had been drawn to each other since childhood, for they didn’t fit.

“I want to eat this whole house!” said Kristofel. “I’m starving!”

“I have one thing better,” said a pair of white lips in the clapboard.

Monika felt her stomach lurch.

“Come inside and I will feed you roasted animal flesh.”

Ignoring Monika’s protest, Kristofel entered the front door. A white witch stood in the center of a room. There were raw wooden beams holding up the tin roof, a fire burning in a pit under a giant flu. The witch looked as if she had been painted white – both her skin and her clothes – and her white painted hair stood on end in spikes. “Something told me you would come.” She smiled and her teeth were spears.

Monika followed Kristofel into the large room. When you looked around to the periphery, there appeared to be little mouths in the unpainted walls, mouths the color of the raw wood with wood knots for eyes. Monika felt a thrumming in her neck and ears.

“Please, have a seat,” said the old woman, indicating what appeared to be a sheet covering a hay bale.

She filled two tin cups of water from an indoor pump. The water tasted sweet and of underground caves.

A drowsiness overtook Kristofel and Monika. They nodded off onto the hay. And when they awoke, they realized they had been strung together from the ceiling in the sheet, like a bouquet garni.

“I need flavoring and fat for the roast,” said the witch, and lowered them into a boiling vat of water with the aid of a pulley. The two clung together in agony and the woods knew them no more.

In a few weeks’ time, a boy hiking in the woods with a girl came across a house in a clearing. Instinct told him to test a bit of the weatherboard in his teeth for he was hungry. A dead girl recently alive spoke an invitation with her lips from the board. “Come inside,” she said, inviting the boy and girl in to eat a satisfying meal. The lips of the dead girl sneered when he blindly obeyed. What is it about unwanted children and their hunger that makes them fools? Nothing else matters but that they should be satisfied.

Rare Songbird

Boas by Jenny J, flicker

This afternoon, I have watched the Janis Joplin documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue. Again. Maybe it’s my third or fourth time. I’m losing count. A male acquaintance in town, a writer, and someone who reviews music, once listed on his blog favorite singers and bands, but created a separate category for Joplin. “I hate her voice,” he said.

But I take exception. She is, at times, challenging, and as the documentary points out, she had to work to control her voice so that she wouldn’t lapse into shouting, an occasional tendency. But few could rock a stage like she did, few could sing with as much feeling and expression and power. And few do now.

Once you see this documentary once, you’ll want to go back: What was up with that huge train of feathers billowing out from her head? Why was she so maligned in her younger life? And what about that intense pain, when she is speaking sometimes about something personal and shattering? She can barely face her inquisitor, and certainly never the camera. And yet, she also found freedom and happiness, particularly when she was on stage. I have yet to watch the recording of her performance of “Ball and Chain” at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 without crying. It is what is meant by a tour de force.

And yet she struggled to straddle different worlds: the world of conservative values and expectations of her family in Texas and her more freewheeling lifestyle in San Fransisco and on the road. And yet, she never appears bitter or harsh. She keeps attempting to reach out and stay open to everyone, even those who seem to be in some measure disappointed. To me, she seems only vulnerable, in both good ways and harmful ways. And yet, it seems it was that vulnerability that helped her create so marvelously, that touched so many. And it seems it was this same vulnerability that left her so open to pain. In some of her story, I can’t help but to over-identify with her. Maybe that was also part of her appeal, and maybe especially for women. She tore apart the neat categories people created for women and yet she always seemed to be herself, as difficult as that made her life at times.

The first Monterey Pop Festival took place the year before I was born. And if I had listened to these types of songs when I was younger, I would not have been drawn to them. For me, at least, it has taken a long time to really understand the connection between soul and art: What is it that gives art its resonance, its connection between artist and audience/reader/observer? In thinking about different types of art, from film to books, visual art, theater, and music, I think it’s soul. In many art forms, there are products that are competently made, products that divert and entertain. But the art that touches the soul is a rarity. In such a transaction, the artist is a shaman, a priest or priestess. Their gift is a gift from God, maybe only bestowed through the press of great suffering. But when we experience someone’s practice of their gift, there is a sense of recognition and relief. We are known. We take a breath. We feel alive once more. And we are strengthened to go on.

Martha’s Place

[image error]

On the Atlanta Highway in Montgomery, Alabama there is a restaurant called Martha’s Place.

Beside the parking lot is a huge sparkling double fountain set apart by brick, trees, and park benches where you can rest. In the windows are tall, one story high curtains flanking the generously portioned windows. Immediately, you think to yourself: I am underdressed. And disappointment and panic set in. This would not be a first. But no, there are bodies of all sorts, young and old, making their way to the entrance. They are enclothed variously and quite a few in the average casual dress of the street. You feel relief and grab your pandemic mask, your jacket.

Inside, at the hostess station, a woman charges you $11. There is no menu, no waitresses, but a large buffet. You think to yourself: Such a foreign sight in the midst of a pandemic. But of course, there are safety measures, and required gloves as well as masks. And you remember the now foreign process of communal meals, large gatherings, church dinners, weddings, funerals, potlucks. You are both depressed and happy because here it is, something like what you have hoped for all along.

You came here for good old Southern food. Not road food disguised as Southern food, but something a mama or grandmamma might make, an aunt or a favorite neighbor. And there it is: fried chicken and catfish, roast chicken, gravy, fried okra, greens, mashed potatoes. You order your iced tea unsweet, which a waitress does bring you, but you notice, thankfully, it needs nothing added to it, no fake sugars, just a squeeze of lemon. It is the best tea you have ever tasted. And as you sink into soul goodness, you begin to listen to what could be your relatives, all around, you, ‘Bama accents, people telling stories at their tables, a man who could have been your grandaddy telling his stuttering Bible salesman joke, and your Uncle Willie cackling, your grandmamma snickering.

It honestly feels like a teeny bit of heaven, a slice of memory, a piece of your life. I had to go and hit the road, and only had a quarter of an hour to invest in it, but I took my tea. It satisfied for hours later – the food, the memories, the tea.

You won’t feel unwelcome if you find yourself at Martha’s Place on Atlanta Highway in Montgomery, Alabama. Go. Tell them a weary and grateful traveler sent you along.

Breakthrough Queen

[image error] View of Chipola River from Porch, Florida Memory, flickr

The night my son graduated college I lay in my hotel room and dreamt I failed at my own assisted suicide. As I write this, I am happy to say, the dream had no real basis in my life and everything has been a success for my son. All efforts on my part to mold and help him have created a life of sorts for him, though I was in no way alone in these efforts and of course it has been with his own applied effort that he has seen success: his graduation with honors, his happiness, his friends, his securing of a promising job, his blossoming relationship with another. It was all I have wanted for him. Then why in my dream did I die, or want to?

In the dream, I survived my own suicide attempt, an assisted operation by a company offering death to those who had reached a dead end. It was all most clean and clinical. Reasonable, really. Nothing messy or obscene. They shaved your head and you lay down in your medical gown and you ingested a dram guaranteed to bring an end. In a probably not so original turn, I changed my mind after swilling my portion. But I emerged, having labored through the effects.

On the long drive home from my son’s graduation, I encountered a cat at the hotel where I was staying. She was black and white. I don’t know why I assumed the cat was female. She was slight, so maybe that was it. I surmised she lived at the hotel where I was staying in Tallahassee where I stopped both on the way up to Alabama and on the way down to Orlando, which is home. The cat was scruffy and hung around the garbage cans. She was scrappy, a survivor. I was going to write a little story about her, about a prostitute who lived in that hotel and fed her, or about a child who stayed in that hotel and loved her. Maybe the child was kept there against her will and the cat represented her own little soul. Or maybe the child was the daughter of a preacher or hoodoo priest. She worked on her school lessons at the desk in her room and she soaked dreamily in the tub enclosed by the striped curtain while her daddy went out and healed people, sprinkling them with holy water, feeding them wine for sacrificial blood. Or simply grape juice for said blood. Maybe he cleansed people and their homes with Florida water, readying them for a spiritual encounter.

The hotel in Tallahassee seemed to attract human kinds of ghosts as well as cats, people who drifted around the property, including a man who gruffly approached me that night when I was on my way home. The man presumably hoped to get a light. I emitted a small shout of surprise when he started speaking. Passing semis on narrow highways all day can make you nervous. My son’s college town, campus, surrounding neighborhoods were shiny, beautiful, well kept. People walk with purpose, laugh a lot, smile. Likely in that place, people had their own lighters, if they smoked. Likely in that place, lighters were made of gold. When I left my Tallahassee hotel to hit the road for Orlando, the man was still in his car in the parking lot, a small beat up white number, a sporty vehicle popular in the eighties. Presumably, this was his overnight space.

On the road home, I wondered about the dream. I did survive cancer, so maybe this was it, the dream’s raison d’être. In a way, the treatment is voluntarily almost killing yourself in order to survive. I was not sure if that’s what the suicide dream was. I had also committed myself to surviving until my son’s graduation and Lord willing, without relapse. Mission accomplished. So maybe it was that ending point that triggered it.

Something else occurred to me regarding set purposes and deadlines – literal deadlines – and how such a dream as mine might have arisen in my subconscious. My preacher father recalled a story for all of us, all having dinner the night after my son’s big graduation day in Alabama. It was a story about his journey to the Dead Sea. He along with my mother regularly conducted a group to the Holy Land and on one occasion, at the shore of the Dead Sea, a group member told his wife: This has been the realization of my life. [Dad’s storytelling words were better, but this is the gist.] And then, on the spot, the man died! Such an incredible story had all of us reeling. It was a tale among many fabulous tales of the lives my parents have led and with which my father, when gently prompted, will regale us.

And also, what’s more, regarding my puzzling through the dream’s origins, there is this: I am bipolar. Suicidal ideation is an erstwhile friend, though never a realization, kept mostly at bay by effective meds and treatment. Surviving cancer treatment and bipolar together was no small feat. And I had, years before, learned my biological mother killed herself. When I passed the age at which she killed herself, I considered myself a victor. (As if you cannot tell, and can probably guess if you read my blog occasionally, a bipolar person can sometimes have an odd way of structuring her own reality.)

Furthermore, my own adopted parents – I consider them my only parents – having taken care of me since I was a baby, did so with considerable care and sacrifice. I do not feel myself identified with this foreign history. I am not the dream because it is my dark underbelly and fear, and that darkness is not me on the whole, though the dream suggests it is some part of me. I am a kind of cat, a black and white cat like my feline friend at the hotel.

At certain points, we are born into something we hadn’t anticipated and past histories fall away and we are left, blinking, having survived all self-destructive drams. We have rashly made promises to ourselves and set goals, not realizing that even lofty visions and hopes can be limiting. We become more more opaque as decades pass. We move on, hardly noticing one another, but we thankfully pick up the leftovers until we decide what to do, before we can clean up and start again.

American Icons

An amazing list. I hope you are having a good week. Happy hump day! — Meg

peaceful piano

This could take you through the remains of the day and into the night. So beautiful. – Meg

Audio: Ash Girl

Florida Memory, flickr