ScribeGirl checks inlive from starship Art Studio, making a last orbit ‘round Motherearth before docking later today.
All aboard the starship is ahum.
Scribegirl has her back to the goings on of her artist buddies behind her, but she can hear and feel the hum even through the Krishna Das chanting tape she is listening to. The chanting, and the application of a first layer of paint, in concert with a medium iced-coffee from Dunkins have worked their alchemy and begun to launch her into the mysterious and wonderful place of Making. Her body looks present, as does everyone else’s in the starship. However her Self and likely the Self of her compadres, has begun spinning and twirling in some astral orbit, picking up Shards of This and Slips of That to play with, to turn over and move and stare at, for the delicious purpose of turning them into a Something Else. The Chant turns to something especially heartful and devotional and she sighs. And listens, staring out at the spring-green trees, and feels her heart lift in reply. This is one of the very the best places for her to be in her life, her heart and her ears turned, tuned, like a tuning fork. Listening.
Listening for what? For the flow, the words that arise, it would seem, like incense from this place. When it goes like this, writing is not torture but is really and truly Scribing. Listening and scribing. How can she manage to get here more often, she always wonders whenever she is here. Because it seems so. . . HOME. So. . . like Home. A funny memory pops into her mind.
She got to see Jacoby Ellsbury steal home one Sunday night just about a year ago. It was April 26, 2009, and she, her sweetie, Anton, and his buddy Roger were seated right behind third base, as Jacoby stole home in a Red Sox game against the Yankees. Not only did she get to see it, but moments before in a burst of words that just bubbled up from inside her, probably from the same inner radio channel that the writing often arrives on, she predicted his next move.
“Watch,” she had said to her companions, “he’s gonna steal home.”
“Nah,” responded Roger, an old pal of her hubby’s. “They don’t really do that, and besides, they’re gonna walk this guy.”
She had shaken her head.
“No, you watch. He’s gonna steal home,” she replied having no idea on earth why she was saying this. Her knowledge of baseball could be collected on the head of a pin, or maybe the point, though she did enjoy the characters and the various & sundry stories, legends and dramas that the game gives birth to.
Moments later, Ellsbury, like some archetype of the fearless young warrior, took off like a bolt and threw himself, butt first, across home plate. She had been so sure, her hand had reached for her camera and she was ready, capturing the shot as he skidded feet first, across the bag.
She had known.
Where on earth DID that come from? she wondered to herself as her friends’ mouths fell open. No idea. Except that it was sufficiently connected , she sensed, to this place where writing & artmaking come from, that she had somehow recognized the voice and trusted it.
Jacoby just went for it.
“People don't typically steal home,” Roger had repeated to her later as if in his own defense. But Jacoby just did. He watched and waited for his moment, saw it arrive and then threw himself heart, soul and body into it.
It got Scribegirl thinking. About stealing home. How to steal more Home.
It seems just as unlikely, nearly as impossible as stealing home base, to figure out how to make more time to be at this table, beneath this writing canopy, listening for the words. But surely, surely, a lesson can be learned from the young warrior about singlemindedness, about intent.
There are certain things that would make a difference. It is, it seems, a matter of fierceness. Maybe not just, not only, but it is something like that lead that Jacoby grabs when he steps off the bag and starts leaning everything he has toward his target. That step, that leaning, increase the odds exponentially that when the opportunity to run presents itself, he’s got one foot already out the door and his body headed down the baseline. Before your eyes can focus, he’s there.
Of course between she and the Scribing table, there are the other things that come up – the sundry and not so sundry other folk and tasks that are part of her life on this planet. She bets Jacoby isn’t worried about his mother going into a nursing home for example. She doubts he has a pile of papers on his dining room table and another pile in his car having to do with setting this very possibilty in motion. She doubts he had a good cry last night after a phone call with his mom, after a conversation in which she announced that she thought she just might need to go to said nursing home sooner rather than later. She doubts he approached the plate preoccupied, as she seems to be, with how much this changes so many levels of her mom’s life, and her own, including the very meaning of home.
Home for the longest time has meant her mother’s teeny tiny apartment, which also just happens to be housed in the very school building where the Scribe spent all her Catholic school years from grades one through 12.
So, Home Squared.
The little apartment. Modest only begins to describe it. But dear to her, especially the little kitchen where you can stand and look through the cut out wall into the living room, never having to break your conversation, and, eyes still traveling, can gaze out the windows up into the hills. Home. Her mother’s home, for the Scribe never lived there. But the place she and Anton go back to, the place they have stayed and thus made home and launched from, lo these many Christmas Eves and long weekends, and wakes and funerals and birthday celebrations and Memorial Day picnics, and well, you get the picture. Her mother’s home, which has been her satellite home for nearly 20 years.
Her mom is talking about leaving one home, for another. Sizing up the moment and readying to go for it. Her -yes the word once again is fierce- her fiercely independent mother – so completely and fully compis mentis – is preparing herself to relinquish her prided independence. Last night she said “Yes it's about the falling” and, she said, “I’m getting tired of thinking so hard about all of it- the medicines, the groceries, the caretakers. I can’t remember to keep using my walker,” she says. “Too many things to remember.”
It sits heavy on the heart, this particular letting go. A change we are not ready to embrace. But inevitable perhaps, after nine decades, with knees and balance gone, no matter how sharp the mind.
And points to another inevitable change that looms now, out there on the horizon. It feels as if she is sizing up the time she has before she makes a final run for it and this time really goes for Home. Where, she believes with every cell and fibre of her 93 year old being, she will be greeted not by the roar of the crowd, but by something far superior. She believes she will be greeted by her beloved Jesus and His mother Mary, and her husband of over 50 years Colby, and her beloved daughter Kathy and a whole cast of near & dear ones, many of whom, she herself nursed as they made their own runs, and who have gone on ahead. She is making ready to break for the Home she has been pointing herself toward all her life.
This tiny woman with her puffy sweatshirts festooned with seasonal motifs, her candy-apple red walker and her fringe of white hair ? Well, she could teach Jacoby a thing or three about fierceness. And, warrior that she is, she too is readying herself, to steal Home.
