STEALING HOME

ScribeGirl checks in
live 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.

A Chapter Peek from the soup kitchen romance

So- here is what followed.
A draft- a partial draft only- of Chapter One of what turned out to be Lunchtime at Mercy Kitchen: A Soup Kitchen Romance, a work in progress. LMK as I have nicknamed it has been sitting under the towel, in a great big bowl being LEFT ALONE for a while now, to let the yeast of time and space work on it. I will be picking it up again shortly to re-edit and shape it, hopefully with new eyes, now that it's been 'resting' a while. Here is a little taste:


Chapter 1
Ablutions
Rosalinda Renee Rabidoux paused in the midst of her getting-ready-for-work routine, to satisfy a need that had nothing to do with working. She padded across the thick, pale pink carpeting to her bedroom, stood on the small stool in her walk-in closet, and stretched to reach the top shelf for the clear Tupperware shoe box labeled “Fancy-Red” in her splashy curving Catholic school script. She opened the container, perched on the bed, and slipped the brand-new magenta pumps onto her perfectly pedicured feet. They were every bit as gorgeous as she had remembered. A purchase from one of her bus-shopping adventures in the city with Cheryl, they had been sitting in her closet like royalty-in-hiding, awaiting the proper festivities to make an entrance and to receive the adulation of the masses. Or that’s how they seemed to her.
The wondrous shade of the textured silk, a perfect balance between red and purple, the perfectly sewn swirls of tiny sequins in rose and red and silver, the heart-stopping four-inch heels. She even loved the elegant label and red satin lining concealed beneath her foot. The pumps perfectly fulfilled all her personal wardrobe requirements. Just slipping them on, she felt crowned, delicious, more alive.
She sashayed around her room, preening in the morning sunlight before a full-length oval mirror stand. A small woman who was soft and round in all the woman places, she was groomed to perfection, her hair, a fiery corona of spirals scarcely contained within a glittery clasp, her blue eyes accentuated with bold lining and subtle shading in lavender and plum. She wore a silky kimono covered with soft flowers as she held herself and moved with the music from the radio, imagining exactly how she wanted it to be when Ernie pulled her in close and danced her around the floor in these very shoes.
There was a dance coming up this fall, a full, fancy dress shindig, the Fall Foliage Festival Ball. And what Rosalinda had been daydreaming into life for a while now, had been sashaying around that dance floor with the newest object of her hopes and prayers, Ernie Crawford, the former construction worker who took care of buildings and people at her church, Our Lady of Mercy. Ernie attended to the old building like it was his own home, fixing and fussing over it, keeping everything in the church purring. He also ran Mercy Kitchen, the parish’s twice-weekly lunch program for the needy, with a steady hand.
Dancing in the morning sunlight, in her kimono and her fancy shoes, she could see, right there in her oval mirror, she and Ernie, wrapped together, every move of one mirroring the other, moving to the music. She could feel the warmth and excitement of the moment, see her radiant face, snuggled into Ernie’s chest, beaming back at her from the mirror.
Just then, in mid fantasy, she froze. She realized that she had no idea if Ernie could dance. In fact, had never seen him take to the dance floor at any event she could remember. She caught herself as a flicker of anxiety began to rear itself, then stopped it dead in its tracks. She refused to entertain any thoughts of discouragement. She had another half hour before she had to finish dressing, time for another French Vanilla iced coffee and some time to think out her next moves. She carefully returned the shoes to their box in the closet to await further instructions. Then she settled in at her counter, with coffee and pen, and and sat up a little taller, as she pictured Ernie looking positively edible in his going-to-the-ball clothes. Whether or not she’d ever laid eyes on the man’s dance moves, she had a ripple of womanly intuition that once Ernie slid his hand around her waist and pulled her toward him, the dancing would take care of itself.
From: Lunchtime at Mercy Kitchen: A Soup Kitchen Romance copyright 2009

Scribings I: A Berkshire Girl Takes Holy Orders

SCRIBINGS I


A Berkshire Girl Takes Holy Orders

You might ask where all this ScribeGirl business comes from.
How on earth a Berkshire girl, a person of the female persuasion, born into a serious, good, and, at one time, robust little mill town in Berkshire county, came to be a scribe. A scribe being one who, in service to some higher purpose, sits for endless hours taking down words with the single goal of getting them all recorded properly. Who listens carefully, and faithfully makes notes just in case anyone else is interested. A person who, at the same time is also reasonably busy with other endeavors- working full time as a therapist, courting & marrying in mid-life, and showing up for all the sundry needs and celebrations that bubble up in the life of a large and loving family. One who, as a young woman, kept many what might be called ‘diaries, ’ a practice that had ferried her across the rough patches of her life, but who never exactly saw it as a calling- just a way to complain on paper and to register whatever the current rune, or psychic, or self-help book might be telling her would fix her life. That was all the pre-scribe writing and it got more or less put on low flame once life became more tolerable and graduate school papers sucked all the juice out of the scribe.
Something happened then that changed everything. While deliriously enjoying the season of falling in love at 43, along with building a career and sharing all this with a most wonderful circle of friends and family, the unthinkable came to visit. In the form, as it seems wont to do, of cancer. Not as in mine. My own cancer had been dealt with at some length in the registering-of-tribulations portion of the journals.
This time the cancer came to my sister. My dearie younger sister, my ‘Irish twin,’ born just 13 months almost to the day, after I was brought home from the hospital. The person, who, all my life ever since then, was right here at my elbow, hiding with me from the mean little Venerini nuns during our abortive stint in nursery school, sharing a bedroom wallpapered floor to ceiling with Beatle photos - tho’ one wall, it must be said, was reserved for her shrine to Carl Yaztremski. My Oscar to her Felix.
My little sister who later lived a few doors away with Wayne, the husband that I, in a burst of courage or madness, fixed her up with one New Year’s Eve, when they were both in danger of spending it alone. My sister who, more recently, came to take me by the hand to fetch me when I was, on a 90 degree August morning, late to my own wedding. Kathy, my sidekick, my confidante, my shopping buddy, my sister, was mortally sick. After endless walks at all hours in the wooded park near our home, sobbing to the trees and the wind, I was in desperate need of solace, of outlet, of distraction. That’s how it began. I had shyly, oh so shyly joined a creature called a cooperative artist studio in my new home in Boston. And there, Kate my coach, began to ask me: “Can you write about it, Maureen?”
We did a lot of playing then at the studio. Making plays with beans and feathers and fabrics and rocks. One object that kept turning up in my plays was a wicker basket filled with scraps of yarn. A basket of yarns. Kate handed it to me one day, and said “ Why don’t you take this home with you for a while?”
I had no idea what she meant, or why she made this suggestion. Only that around this time, living in a heightened state of holding opposites- the true bliss and blessing I was feeling in my personal life, and the shattering terror at the peril my sister and her family were in- I felt I needed something. Something bigger than myself, to contain all that was unfolding. I needed something to distract me, a place I could go in my mind where I could spin all I was feeling into something that would hearten me somehow to face, along with Kathy and Wayne, the battle ahead. A silly little romance, I thought to myself, thinking of the McCartney line about a silly little love song. I felt a surge of longing, for a story to contain the happiness that had fallen on me like grace, and to take me away for a bit from the overwhelming sadness and fear. So that when I needed to, which soon became pretty constantly, I would have heart to be there with her and for her.
And next thing I knew, I was standing in the shower when I heard the first line of a story. I dried off and got my pen. I listened carefully and started to scribe. Here is what began to show up.