Meg Sefton's Blog, page 40

Kitchen Mouse

Image from page 35 of “The tailor of Gloucester” (1903), Internet Book Archive Images, flickr

There once was a woman who wanted unconditional love from her father, the King. Yet, somehow, she had been consigned to polishing his crown, shining his shoes, preparing his royal throne. No one knew how this came about, not even the woman herself for while she should have been asking herself this question, she was busy focusing on what he said, how he thought, what she could do to finally cause him to love her without conditions. When she was a little girl, he loved her blond curls. And maybe, thinking back on it now as she made the a feast for the royal family, he loved her silence.

As many teen princesses will do, they will both attempt to please their royal parents and to rebel. It is hard to work out where Father and Mother end and where they begin, so such princesses pull away to see what happens, to try to detect the division, to confirm it actually exists, and to find out if love exists when there is separation. This young lady learned early that love does not always exist when you pull away. But there had still been hope for her: She could marry royally, and so she did, though there were still demands to appear at court, to raise children in royal traditions, and never tarnish the name of King and Queen.

As time went on, and the fanfare of royal weddings and the celebrations of royal births were distant memories, the woman met a kitchen mouse who whispered to her secrets about other worlds, other realities, places where children were valued for simply being alive. This perspective opened a door in the mind of the aging, royal princess, a special room she could return to again and again, an imaginary world where children were messy and chaotic, parents didn’t always have answers, and families simply gathered and let conversation unfold. The princess was so engaged with this dream she became inattentive for large portions of the day. Her children were grown and so there was only her husband to care for, but she forgot to order food and the pressing of his clothes. She didn’t attend royal gatherings and she didn’t attend to her father.

The ineffectual princess stumbled upon an island during one of her royal visits to the colonies, a visit her father insisted she take to clear her mind and restore her sense of duty to the Kingdom. And yet, the island struck her as a perfect place to daydream. What’s more, she met people on the island who liked to daydream too. Their conversations were free and easy. They took long, meandering walks. They sat for hours, simply waiting for the sun to set. They did not wait for special occasions to celebrate. Every day was a celebration. They were like children together and she insisted they were not treat her as a princess.

Word came from her Father the King by royal messenger on a royal boat: Come back or be forever disowned. Expect Me to never approve of your life forthwith. Your Husband has already deserted you as reason dictates. You will receive no Royal Inheritance nor Title. I will always treat you as a peasant, a mere servant for your disobedience, your lack of loyalty to God’s anointed.

It occurred to the princess that she was already a peasant behind close doors. And she was in a worse situation than a peasant because everyone assumed she was being treated as a princess. She laughed so hard the messenger departed, confused and offended.

It didn’t take long for her grown children to visit. They were shocked by her casual attire and attitude. Her son lectured her and her daughter became watchfully silent. But the princess begged them to spend time with her, to not let their discomfort dictate an immediate departure. They relented, and over time, they began to relax with the ebb and flow of the tide, with the free form of island life. She watched something new arise in them, a comfort to speak with her more naturally. This state of circumstances felt like the dream life the kitchen mouse had whispered to her years ago.

“Mom, I don’t want to be a prince,” said her son. “I don’t want to be next in line to the throne.”

And her daughter said: “I want to be an artist, I have many dreams.”

To my readers: I am a writer of dark stories but I will not insist all dreams are tarnished by darkness. I believe in whispering kitchen mice. And I believe in bright islands where there is love and acceptance, even joy. And as silly as it sounds for dark writers to say so, I believe in a better new year, even if I am proven wrong. I don’t know, exactly, what happened in this family of this little story of mine. And I don’t know what the grown children eventually became, and where they decided to live, and how they relayed these decisions to the Throne and the Kingdom’s subjects. I don’t know how long the princess lived after finding freedom and happiness. But I argue for the open ending. We don’t know, do we, what will happen in our world. We are suffering, yes, but there may be an island, a space between the pain in which we draw breath, long enough to dream of something: What could be.

New Year’s surprise

I just received the best New Year’s gift ever: I have been accepted into the University of Washington certificate in editing program! I had been waitlisted as of a few days ago but I just received word I will start classes on Monday. This is a very good program. I really feel so happy, relieved, and excited.

Magic turtle

turtle by Alexandru Stoian, flickr

There is a magic turtle whose shell is pure gold. He is the most powerful animal of all animals in the swamp. And yet he is a silly little turtle: Whenever he tries to help others, he changes his mind, snaps, and retreats into his shell, lest his magic disappears.

New Year’s Eve

I start my New Year’s Eve with one of my favorite band’s farewell tour. If you are as old as I am, you may appreciate this. To me, these guys sounded as great in later years as they did when they began, even better. On the eve of terrible blunders in our government, small comforts are real. The last time I listened to a recorded Eagles’ album, I decided to drive across town to my old childhood home just to do a drive-by reminisce. I don’t think I will do that today being that it’s New Year’s and I’m avoiding the roads. Crashed cars litter the road already. Instead, I will pretend I am at a live concert and try to pack up some nostalgia along with my Christmas decorations. Peace, Meg

p.s. This list is so good and equally apt….Love, love.

One man’s trash is not another man’s treasure

Fragments by Roger Marks, flickr

In an ill temper, the leader of the free world ordered the marble in his Florida mansion ripped out. Some had the idea of repurposing the stone for grave markers for the poor dead, the unvaccinated. Apparently, however, corpses would nightly topple the headstones, preferring instead humble wildflowers.

“Yearly Departed,” Amazon Prime

New-Year’s-Mask_brookeduckart by Brooke Duckart, flickr

This special has received some criticism, but honestly, my first time watching it without the jading influence of the nitpickers, I loved it. Female comics pack up 2020 in the way it deserves: With a spiked heel or laced-up boot to the backside.

One thing I liked about it, besides the line-up and cathartic hilarity, is that it acknowledges the things we’ve had to say good bye to for the foreseeable future, things that are good, things that have to do with our social selves.

But mostly, these ladies make short work of the things better off dead, things that never should have been alive in the first place. And they do so with comedic brilliance.

Watch it with what remains of your liquor and/or whatever mixer can be found at the back of your refrigerator.

You’re welcome. lol.

Love,

Meg

Old Stories for a New Year

manikins by Peter Clark, flickr

One of my favorite “Christmas adjacent” stories is by the late German author Heinrich Böll. (My son and I get a kick out of the descriptor “Christmas adjacent” in referring to movies which are set at the holidays but which are not solely focused on Christmas, such as our viewing preference “Die Hard.”) Heinrich Böll’s story “And there was the evening and then the morning…,” published in 1966 in his collection 18 Stories, has to do with love and forgiveness. The story is set at Christmas. The aspect of gift giving plays a role though a great deal of the story is nonetheless “Christmas adjacent.”

Heinrich Böll won the Nobel prize for literature in 1972 and is considered one of Germany’s finest post World War II writers. He was born into a pacifist Roman Catholic family and refused to join the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. He fought in the war and afterwards married and had a family and worked various jobs. He took the plunge into full-time writing when he was thirty and went on to become an acclaimed novelist, short story writer, essayist, and writer of radio plays.

Here is a lovely Wikipedia description of his work:

Despite the variety of themes and content in his work, there are certain recurring patterns: many of his novels and stories describe intimate and personal life struggling to sustain itself against the wider background of war, terrorism, political divisions, and profound economic and social transition. In a number of his books there are protagonists who are stubborn and eccentric individualists opposed to the mechanisms of the state or of public institutions.

I want to excerpt from the very short story “And there was the evening and then the morning…” I will leave the heart of the story out for the curious to pursue. Heinrich Böll’s 18 Stories is available, used, via online merchants and so maybe you would like to read the whole thing. I looked for it on Project Gutenberg, but no dice. So here, I will simply excerpt a small passage, so flawless in ironic tone and meticulous observation. It applies to the turning of the season and our final celebration of the year.

…[Brenig] walked slowly across the square…and looked in a store window where the window dressers were exchanging Santa Clauses and angels for other dummies: ladies in décolleté, their bare shoulders sprinkled with confetti, their wrists festooned with paper streamers. Their escorts, male dummies with graying temples, were being hurriedly placed on barstools, champagne corks scattered on the floor, one dummy was having its wings and curls taken off, and Brenig was surprised how quickly an angel could be turned into a bartender…

Another “old story” is told in the form of a novel by the late William Maxwell – prolific writer, fiction editor at The New Yorker, legendary mentor. It is called They Came Like Swallows. It is set at the time of The Spanish Flu and was published in 1937. Just like the work of Heinrich Böll, the work of William Maxwell continues to ring out so strongly in our times. It is simply gorgeous and gripping. (I apologize for this tasteless alliteration.) I studied it carefully in graduate school, analyzed it for my thesis, and prayed some aspect of it would rub off on me. I hope to unearth it among my books to read it yet again as we turn to a new year in which old stories have much to say.

Cocoa Beach Christmas

I created this short story a few years ago and wanted to share it with you this holiday season. Peace and health to you. Sincerely, Meg

Within A Forest Dark

Daddy drove us nine hundred miles to Florida the Christmas after Mama passed. It was just me, Daddy, and my little sister Lulu. Daddy said there wasn’t anything in Florida that wasn’t all around the world and that was Christmas love and reindeers and Santa. He didn’t want to see snow, he said, or get a tree or eat turkey. These things reminded him of Mama and he needed a break from feeling sad. He said she would have wanted us to go to Florida for Christmas. In fact, he said, she probably knew what we were up to right now and it made her happy.

When I wasn’t keeping my sister occupied with books and games of eye spy, I was watching the landscape change from naked trees and gray skies to thick grass and fat palms and I was watching for Mama to see if she was watching…

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Amica the Christmas Tree

I created this a couple of years ago and thought I would share it again. Blessings during this holiday season. Peace, Meg

Within A Forest Dark

Washington Christmas Tree Farm, Washington State Department of Agriculture, flickr

It was the time of year in Orlando when evergreen trees were brought in from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Washington to be sold to loving families who would decorate their arms with lights and chains of beads, glass ornaments, homely and sentimental ornaments, ornaments collected from trips and black Friday sales and school and church craft shows, regifted gift ornaments, white elephant ornaments, grandmother’s ornaments, Christmas wedding shower ornaments, estate and garage sale ornaments, ornaments from the Winter Park Art Festival, the Orlando Museum of Art, Disney, the flea market.

Valentine Halle was a prominent socialite in town who, every year, could make several trees last for almost an eternity, until the end of February, ignoring all pleas of her husband and family to strip the trees bare and put them on the curb already. But according to Valentine, to…

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Men and their dreams

Moody Evening by State of Chaos, flickr

They say the selkie is a shapeshifter, a seal who becomes woman. When I lost you in New York, it occurred to me you may be this creature, the unreality of your presence and beauty has that quality of something otherworldly. And it occurred to me you may have returned to the sea.

The first day of spring dozens of seals washed up along the Jersey shore and it was among this wreckage of creatures I searched for you. How else to account for your disappearance into Grand Central the day we watched the silent protestors lying down to mark the murder of an innocent woman gunned down by the police? We met under the Pisces constellation; do you remember? I held your hand. When I let go of you, you disappeared into the crush of people.

They say a man can capture a selkie and make her his wife if he captures the skin she lays aside while she sunbathes and frolics in the sea. He must hide it, or she will put it back on and swim away. You may be somewhere off the shore. We have been told not to go near the seals along the beach, as if I have ever had the right to approach you in your freedom. But still I miss you, Maire.

I lit a candle for you at St Patrick’s. I listened to the young choir, their voices piercing the clutter of scaffolding, caressing the Pieta partially obscured by a tarp. A rose lay at the feet of Christ and Mary, the mother of sacrificing and long suffering. I went back to Grand Central and looked for you among the people who may have seen you in the station. I described your long dark hair, your chocolate eyes, your long limbs. I spoke with the man who slept beneath Orion’s belt, to the woman playing a saw with a bow, to the copper man still as a statue. I wondered if they may enjoy some special frequency not accessible to the rest of us as they lay closer to ground tremors, stars, tears, accidents.

You used to say whenever we visited the city it didn’t matter we didn’t have a plan. We must at least always meet here, at the Station, by the café, the place of our first meeting where we each enjoyed a madeleine and cappuccino. We agreed upon this. Do you remember? Remember when we spoke to the Portuguese couple new to the United States, whose grandparents had migrated through Ellis Island a century ago? They were so proud to use their newfound mother tongue. And I learned something about you too, as we spoke to this couple. I learned of your Irish roots.

I cannot find you and I cannot find the skin you left along the shore. As I said, the police have told us not to approach the seals who will bite. Is it any coincidence I still have the marks from where you bit me? Was that a sign, warning, a portent? We are told the seals are hungry and have come closer to shore to wait for the tide to bring them herring.

Are you happier there, in the deep? Is that where you are? I would like to be gentler with you now in my attitude toward you. I would like to be able to say I am happy if you are happy. But here is what I think: You may as well be dead, you are so thoroughly missing and no one has been of assistance, not even the police in all their brutality and misguided energies.

I have not given up hope. I have found the remnants of a seal, long perished, not quite the skin as in the legend, so I did not embark upon that turn. But I will find the skin of your being and take it for my own and hide it in a place you will never go and you will have no choice but to love me if you are still among us and not lost to the abyss.

Today, I consulted the woman playing the saw. She sat near the entrance to the crosstown train releasing into the air a song like the music of the spheres, of the sirens. She said to expect you, but that you would not come in the way that is proscribed but through an alternate portal. I was to go lie on a grave in Brooklyn and she wrote a plot number down on a piece of trash. How did she die? I say. But the woman who plays the saw pretended not to hear and so did not answer.

I have no proof to myself now whether you were real or wholly imagined, we never exchanged rings or any little thing, only intimacies and whisperings, shiftings between sheets, our bodies in light and shadow. And yet how to explain this hank of hair I keep in my pocket?

I boarded the train to Brooklyn. Passengers boarded a train on a parallel track. We leave together, both trains, going at the same speed, passing through tunnels and stations, the pillars between us framing parallel cars like the frames of an old movie. Do you move parallel to me now? At the cemetery, where I am directed, there is no sign of you.

At day’s end, the day before I must leave the city, I go to the museum and find a giant statue of a woman, made of candles, burning. I stand for hours, watching her melting, thinking of you shedding your pelt. I want to put my hands into the melting wax, feel its softness and heat but the museum guard is watching. What if I told him what I was searching for, would it matter to him? Perhaps he had a love like mine. Perhaps he had only a dream, would it matter? Shouldn’t men share their dreams?

I should talk to this man, brusque and stern, share what I found of a selkie song. I copied it from a big book at the library and keep it in my pocket so now the paper is soft and worn, the writing faded. Shouldn’t men share their dreams?