Dear Reader, I was mistaken …

PLEASE NOTE: there is no warning with this post. Read on …

This listening role that I have been given by the younger self is revealing a fascinating aspect of the creative process. As a trained artist and an intuitive painter, I allow my hand to be guided by an inner impulse that I trust. Each studio work comes to meet me bit by bit. I am given direction and eventually, the piece lets me know that it is complete. I then step away. I no longer have ownership, the painting belongs to itself. 

In experiencing this new art form, that of stepping back and allowing this long-hidden part of myself to come forward as her own story-teller, I also (at my current age) encounter new levels of learning.

I witness my nineteen-year-old. She is alone in a completely unknown environment. She has no contact with her family or the past and has lost more than she can comprehend. In the midst, she is, thanks to the three gifts, able to begin exploring survival strategies.

My current self feels protective. I want to spare this young woman from embarrassing herself due to what I judge as her ignorance. I am able to own decades of thinking that she ought to have ‘known better.’

Even with years and years of healing modalities, I realize that in so many ways I have unknowingly intellectualized her trauma. I have done her additional harm, even violence, by slapping an unconscious label to ‘get over it and get on with it.’

I have been complicit in rendering her invisible.

As we approach the next piece of her year-long story I hear her saying, “Not yet.” She says this, I now realize, because of my membership in the ‘keep it a secret society.’

I see my mother in myself. I see the part of myself that feels ashamed and embarrassed. I can understand my mother looking for a ‘Chicago.’

The nineteen-year-old is very young. She is not sophisticated. She is doing her best to position herself. She wants to get back to work. She was raised by Dad to think that she must, “Make yourself useful.” Mother reminded her repeatedly to, “Cut the ‘T’ off C A N ‘ T.”

I think I can.

I think I can.

She feels pulled to hold true to her promise to the unborn child that she relinquished less than six months earlier. She wants to believe that as Jesus offered from the trees at the farm: All is Well. She is wanting to follow her star.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to
make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

I have long had the habit of waking up before daylight. In school, I found it easier to tackle homework at 4 am rather than 4 pm.

This morning my eyes open before the sun comes up. I stretch, turn on the bedside lamp, and automatically reach for my current self-appointed homework. I am reading chapter fifteen in the book that the doctor recommended:

Life Force __

The Secret of Healing and the Secret of Youth

 

I believe that the physical body, including the physical brain and nervous system, is a machine composed of numerous smaller mechanisms all purposeful, or goal-directed. I do not believe, however, that MAN is a machine. I believe that the essence of MAN is that which animates the machine; that which inhabits the machine directs, and controls it,
and uses it as a vehicle.
Man himself is not the machine, any more than electricity is the wire over which it flows or the motor which it turns.

I believe that the essence of MAN is what Dr. J. B. Rhine calls “extra-physical” __ his life, or vitality; his consciousness;
his intelligence and sense of identity; that which he calls “I.”

 

                                                                        

The infection is cleared. I feel eager for this thing called ‘Life Force.’ I remind Medicine Man that I am ready to meet the shop owner who is offering me a job. He assures me that the meeting will happen soon. I first asked him weeks ago. It was then that he suggests I make Wednesday my laundry day. He wants to give me more responsibility.

He instructs me to walk, carrying my pillowcase with my sheets and other items, two-blocks over to the Laundromat.

These links provide a window into this historic part of the city:

   https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/35

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Circle#Little_Italy

It feels good to be in the sunshine. This neighborhood reminds me of the other side of town in the ethnic pocket where dad grew up. I feel lucky to have lived there for my first ten years. There are voices calling from all directions. Young guys gather at the corners smoking and bantering. I ignore the wolf-whistle as I pass.  Thick slate sidewalks, like those I once roller-skated on, take me past narrow lots. There is a building near the road, often with a glass front store at street level, an apartment above, windows open, an old man watching as I hoist my pillowcase. A low chainlink fence cascades with morning glory vines here, squash plants blossoming there, bees, and butterflies flitting about. I catch a glimpse of the small houses that sit in the back of almost every lot. Cars honk, radios blast. I pick up bits and pieces of the banter of old people tending small garden plots, flowers, vegetables, and ancient weeping fig trees. This feels like dad’s ‘old neighborhood’ to me. Here comes a train! I love the sounds of the clattering along the track. The raised tracks create the boundary between Little Italy, Case Western Reserve University, Severance Hall, and the many museums. The art school that I had dreamed to attend is within a few block’s walk, I notice the kids my age carrying their portfolios. They are heading in the opposite direction.

I arrive at the redbrick storefront entrance to the laundromat. No one else here. Empty the pillowcase, add soap, slide two quarters into the metal tray, push the coins in. The washer fills. When I hear the load begin to slosh, I walk to the tiny apartment next door. There I find Handsome Man and Beautiful Girl. Medicine Man has told me that Handsome Man’s father, a member of the underworld, was shot and killed in June. Sniper fire from the woods hit while playing golf. Mafia and mobsters. Frontpage news.

While the wash spins Handsome Man, Beautiful Girl and I tend to weekly Wednesday business. Handsome Man makes deliveries and handles neighborhood accounts for Medicine Man. The three of us sit on the brass bed forming a circle on top of their black satin sheets. In one fluid motion, Handsome Man strikes a match against the sole of his shoe, lights a joint, and reaches for the brown paper bag on the linoleum floor.

Sitting on the bed he empties the bag’s contents into space between us. A large pile of money fills the circle formed by our knees touching. This happens every Wednesday yet we still laugh at the sight of so much money! We usually break into a spontaneous game of toss. Ten, twenty, fifty, and one-hundred-dollar bills rise into the air! A rain of money falls all around us.

We fall over one another like pillow fighters at a sleepover. We tangle legs and arms together slipping and sliding seductively among the money and the satin. Beautiful Girl and Handsome Man rub money over one another’s arms, legs, torsos. The joint is passed. Inhaling, they kiss for a very long time, exhaling they collapse. 

I take the hint and dash next door. Slowly I transfer the load, slip three quarters into the dryer, start the machine, and stand in the doorway watching the scene, the woman watering her porch plants, the college kids heading to campus, a cyclist bumping down the cobblestone street. When I return I find that Handsome Man has gotten down to business. Beautiful Girl returns minutes later, pulling her long wet black hair into a ponytail, she’s wrapped in a short white silk robe, her three initials embroidered on the left sleeve in pink swirls and curls. We know what always happens next yet he still instructs us to get to work and divide the bills. Beautiful Girl plugs in the adding machine as we smooth bills. The tens, the twenties, fifties, hundreds each making a neat pile. The stacks are wrapped with preprinted bank bands, returned to the paper bag circled with the long calculator tally strip.

The paper bag in my pillowcase; we hug each other. I walk back the way I came, checking my reflection in one storefront after another. I tell myself that I am okay. I act normal. I have a place to stay. I have made new friends. I cross the main road dashing quickly between horns-blaring cars, drivers swearing at slow-moving pedestrians.

The bell is ringing in the tower of the Holy Rosary. The saints watching me from their high pedestals as I pass by.

I walk back to the apartment carrying more than just my laundry. Alice comes to mind. I think of ‘Strength from Beyond’. She has written, “your words plumbed the heights of my depths.”  I think about my star and where it will take me. 

I am carried by the words Alice has gifted me with as well as by the passage in the book from the doctor that I read in chapter fifteen this morning:

For many years individual scientists __ psychologists, physiologists, biologists __ have suspected that there was some sort of universal “energy” or vitality which “ran” the human-machine and that the amount of energy available and the way it was utilized, explained why some individuals were more resistant to disease than others; why some individuals aged faster than others; and why some hardy individuals lived longer than others. It was also fairly obvious that the source of this basic energy ___ whatever it might be __ was something other than the “surface energy” we obtain from the food we eat. Caloric energy does not explain why one individual can snap back quickly from a serious operation, or withstand long-continued stress situations, or outlive another. We speak of such persons as having a “strong constitution.”

D meets me at the kitchen door, his hand outstretched. I fish into the bottom of the pillowcase and hand him the brown bag containing the stack of cash. I head into my room and close the door to the blaring Top 40 sounds coming from D & K’s radio. I sit on my bed, eyes cloud with tears. “wherever you walk, I’ll be with you…my strength is vast, and From Beyond.”

I hold Alice in my mind. How could this be? I have no memory of writing to her. When would I have written my thank you note? When did I mail my letter to The Farm?

I am not able to track the map of time.