Dear Readers ~

This week the story told by the nineteen-year-old closes as she prepares to turn twenty.

Thank you for being here and for witnessing this one-year journey.

Being the scribe for the nineteen-year-old I have learned to trust the creative process in new ways. I have gained an additional depth of awareness (add to traditional meditation and nature observation practices) as to how empowering it is to sit still and listen.

I hope you recalled or discovered a cord of strength to draw upon in your own life as you read her story.

Somewhere along the way were you reminded of an earlier time that may have been foundational in your education? Might you have noticed that this part, this Younger Self, may have become frozen or gotten lost in the busyness of your life? Did you know early on what you were born for? Did you find ways to follow that heartfelt urge, or did you forget? What would you have done if you had been in ‘her shoes’ at different points along the way? What guidance would you have provided for her? Have you received gifts to support your journey? What were they? Do you still enlist those gifts?

One of my takeaways from the story shared by the nineteen-year-old is that she had a naturalist’s ability to be the observer as well as an unassuming innocence. This combination seems to have protected her from becoming a victim of her circumstance. Somehow throughout this year, she was able to remain fluid. She continually yearned to learn from the messages in the books given to her by the band manager and the doctor. She also had the tangible experience of The Medicine given (which completely altered her perspective) and The Farm/seeing Jesus/meeting Alice, then weeks later receiving the life-changing letter. These elements formed a value system that kept her moving forward.

What values and beliefs provide momentum for you? Do they serve you when life is challenging? Your on-going comments and email messages have been a support for the courage of the young woman to keep coming forward and taking the risk to be seen. I recall how I, at my current age, hesitated to engage in ‘bringing up the past.’ I have long placed my focus upon a commitment to ‘be present.’ Yet what I learned from listening to the inner prompt to share this story is that pieces and parts of us can become frozen in time. They do not flow forward. These frozen fragments remain stuck creating mischiefs such as ill-health, accident, and disruptive relationship with self and others.

I was fortunate to have been introduced and deeply inspired by The Transcendentalists. My high school English teacher gave me access to the words and worldview of Emerson, Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, and others.

As the nineteen-year-old approaches twenty, she has many hurdles ahead. As this year of experience closes she recalls:

Great is the soul and plain.
It is no flatterer, it is no follower,
It never appeals from itself.
It always believes in itself…
I am born into the great, the universal mind.
I, the imperfect, adore my own perfect…
more and more the surges of everlasting
nature enter into me, and I become
public and human in my regards and
actions. So come I to live thoughts
and act with energies which are immortal…
with Divine Unity.

Emerson

 

Everything changes dramatically and fast.  

Shortly after Medicine Man takes me to visit The Farm, he and three other men have a court date.

I did not read much news throughout the year. I was hidden away experiencing unrest, as well as violence. I heard about protests following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4. I would remember Robert Kennedy, not only for his humanity but because he was buried on June 8, the day that I gave birth. I listened to news of the Glenville riots, I picked up bits and pieces about Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers (Huey Newton running for President of the United States), Stokley Carmichael, and the Black Nationalists through hearing conversations on Friday nights. The Man in Charge was the president of the Cleveland Chapter of the Black Nationalist Party, making his house a ground zero for organizing against control by white systems.

I did not know of the Cleveland Plain Dealer front-page news published in May while I was hidden in the bungalow. I did not know that Medicine Man and three other men were featured in the article about the largest LSD drug dealing arrest in city history.

Medicine Man is gone.

I will no longer go to the airport with Funny Man on Tuesday. Wednesday at the laundromat stopped after Beautiful Girl shattered the bathroom door with Handsome Man’s handgun. No more dinners at local restaurants before shooting gallery deliveries. I will not see the attack dogs biting the floor, the Man in Charge will no longer engulf me in aromatic bear hugs, I won’t see other dashiki clad black men negotiating weapon and drug deals around the tables, no more provocatively dressed white girls, my age, brought in by pimps in flashy outfits. No more Saturday night concerts with top-billed Rock n’ Roll bands, no gatherings in the Green Room over-flowing with food, flowers, and the open bar. No watching the one hundred dollar bills being tightly rolled as musicians and groupies inhale white powder off small square mirrors or from the ornate silver spoon on the chain around the neck slipped easily back inside the silk shirt or fringed leather jacket.

At the beginning of next month, the apartment will no longer be paid for by Medicine Man.

Medicine Man is gone.

A few days after his court date and transfer to the county jail the phone rings on the kitchen wall and D picks up. He quickly hands the receiver to me. An authoritative voice tells me, “I’m calling for Medicine Man with instructions.  Listen carefully. When you come to visit bring several dime bags, wear a coat with deep pockets, arrive early in the afternoon.”

For several weeks, I adhere to those instructions visiting Medicine Man as he waits to receive his sentence. On my first visit, I learn the routine. Arrive just before lunch hour, stand in line with other visitors. When it is my turn to be cleared for entry a giant black guard moves toward me. He smiles (gleaming gold tooth flashes) and surprises me by saying, “Call me Rabbit.” He gently pats down my coat then mimes the way I am to extend my hands. He silently demonstrates how to turn my palms toward the floor. His gigantic hands slide down my coat covered arms. He runs his hands down to my left hand, sliding his hand under my palm. The plastic bags, which were deep in my pocket, are moved inside my sleeve then transferred smoothly to his hand. He slides the bags into his uniform sleeve then authoritatively flags me as cleared while I move to another pat-down/checkpoint before entering a narrow hall moving into the low-acoustical tile ceilinged visiting room. Harsh fluorescent tubes buzz and stutter encased in covers filled with dead flies and wasps.

I wait at the Formica four-top table. Medicine Man, always shocking to see in an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit, is brought in wearing handcuffs and ankle chains. We nod and visit. I tell him that I need his help. I let him know that back at the apartment the phone rings every afternoon. D picks up, raises his eyebrows, shrugs handing me the receiver. I tell Medicine Man, “Every day it is the unmistakable Barry White baritone voice of the Man in Charge. He tells me, “I promised your man that I would take good care of you while he is away. All I need is your address. Get yourself ready. Where am I sending the car?”  I tell Medicine Man. “You need to do something about this.”

He scrawls a phone number (no name) on a scrap of paper with my pen telling me, “Call Bert. He’ll take care of it.”  The three of us had breakfast at Irv’s numerous times the month before Medicine Man was sent away. Bert had just been released from prison, having served time for counterfeiting. Later that afternoon I call and tell Bert about Man in Charge. He says, “Never you mind, Sweetheart. Done”

Within weeks Medicine Man receives his sentence, is transferred to a minimum-security federal prison in Allentown, Pennsylvania: two years.

Each day, in my mind, I ‘visit The Farm’ and ‘watch a movie’ where I spend time with Alice. Every day I practice being creative and leaning into her strength. A strength “that comes from Beyond.”

I read Chapter Thirteen in the book from the doctor over and over:

How to Turn a Crisis Into a Creative Opportunity

Crisis Brings Power …

How wonderful is the way in which, with quite ordinary folk, power leaps to our aid in any time of emergency.
We lead timid lives, shrinking from difficult tasks till perhaps we are forced into them or ourselves determine on them,
and immediately we seem to unlock unseen forces. When we have to face danger, then courage comes; when trial
puts a long-continued strain upon us, we find ourselves possessed by the power to endure;
or when disaster ultimately brings the fall which we so long dreaded, we feel underneath us the strength as of everlasting arms.
Common experience teaches that, when great demands are made upon us, if only we fearlessly accept the challenge and confidently expend our strength, every danger or difficulty brings its own strength. The secret lies in the attitude of “fearlessly accepting the challenge,” and “confidently expending our strength.”

“No matter what happens, I can handle it, or I can see it through, rather than, “I hope nothing happens.”  

The following Tuesday Funny Man comes by as usual only today we are not going to the airport. Those days are gone. Today he drives me to a classified ad address just up the hill. We drive the steep incline bordered by the high stone wall to the north framing in the sprawl of the cemetery within walking distance of the shop where I will now work full time. He parks at the curb in front of the two-story brick apartment building. He waits in the car while I walk through the double glass front doors past the wall of brass mailbox slots and through the next set of glass doors into the dimly lit tiled hallway. I see that the first apartment door on the right is open. I follow a smoldering odor and the loud sound of bantering voices down the long hall past the small bath and one bedroom. Fresh white paint throughout.

In the kitchen, I find two elderly men at the stove. The one dressed in overalls is using a piece of lumber to stir something in a huge aluminum canning kettle on the front burner. Turning to greet me the balding, taller one, dressed casually in slacks and polo shirt explains the odd scene. “We have a small leak up on the roof, sorry about the bad smell, need to heat the tar to make it spreadable.”  The janitor in t-shirt and coveralls, a rag stuck in his back pocket, a bandana around his neck, pulls the kerchief up over his nose and mouth as he transfers the steaming black ooze into a bucket on the clean tile floor without spilling a drop. He leaves by the open kitchen door, his heavy workboots make their way up the steel ladder, balancing the steaming pail to the roof while Apartment Building Owner shows me around. He explains the rules. Within thirty minutes I have placed my signature onto a one-year lease. The first check from my new bank account covers the first-month rent now in his hand. 

I have nothing in the way of household goods, yet space alone brings me joy.

I waste no time in creating an oasis for myself. I buy heavy paper and markers making a poster to hang on the inside of my front door.

To this day I have the original poster with my chosen handwritten quotes from Dandelion Wine Green Town #1 by Ray Bradbury:

“In a few days I will be dead. No. She put up her hand. I don’t want you to say a thing. I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived you lose that too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster too, and I can come to terms with it. She motioned with her hands. “But enough of that. The important thing is that I shant be seeing you again. There will be no services. I believe that a woman who has passed through that particular door has as much right to privacy as a woman who has retired for the night.

“And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rainfall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from the hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness.”

“We’ve had a nice time, haven’t we? It has been very special here, talking every day. It was that much overburdened and worn phrase referred to as a ‘meeting of the minds.’” She turned to the blue envelope in her hands. “I’ve always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuse the knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for night. It’s essentially nocturnal. But what if the mind is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours or a whole lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don’t know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much more to talk about, but we must save it for another time.”

I step out of my new apartment into the fresh crisp winter air. Large leafless trees arch over the road in both directions. I gaze past the traffic into Lakeview Cemetery. This 285-acre arboretum is nearly as large as The Farm. The grounds are a treasure of quiet path-like winding roads, exceptional sculptured monuments, the beautiful chapel adorned with Tiffany leaded glass windows, thousands of ornamental trees, and mature woods along the perimeter enclosing this glacial moraine complete with a meandering stream and large concrete dam. From the front door of my new address, I catch a glimpse of the tower topping the burial monument to President Garfield.

Beyond the high wrought-iron entryway across the busy road, I now have the cemetery/nature preserve to explore to my heart’s content.

I walk to the corner of Mayfield and Coventry, passing the pet store and antique shop. Today is special. For my birthday I am stopping to buy my new bicycle at Pee Wee’s Bike Shop before going to work with the Lovely Lady surrounded by the exotic assortment of antique jewelry, intricately engraved gold pocket watches, esoteric books, surreal art, imported clothing, and elegant music-making instruments.

One door has closed, another has opened … as I turn twenty.