In honor of this month's moon, Nick Drake's sweetly melodious and vaguely threatening song:
"I saw it written and I saw it say
Pink moon is on it's way
And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon's gonna get you all"
As an aside, because poor Nick Drake was gone long before my time, this song reminds me of the moment I realized I was finally the target demographic for car commercials
Whatever the case, let's hope the pink moon lets us off the hook this time.
It's the 30th of April, Walpurgisnacht, witches eve, and my husband's birthday.
Even though Saint Walpurga offers protection from witchcraft, we don't feel the need. It's not witches that worry us, it's regular old misfortune and malfeasance that keep us up at night. So grabbing on to the energy of the evening and the thinness of the veil, we walked the boundaries of the land and asked for protection for ourselves and our loved ones in the coming season. As we did, a cool fresh wind kicked up and the katydids began to sing.
A stand of Widow's Tears has sprung up in the garden, a testament to how wet this Spring has been.
On a vaguely related note, last night I heard a chuck-will's-widow in the woods, by far the earliest in the year I've ever heard one. Their call is the quintessential sound of a summer night.
As a kid, whenever we went to the zoo, I imagined the aquarium building was a temple dedicated to a mermaid goddess. It looked just the thing, with its seashell facade and cool blue interior.
I was silently pondering this during a recent trip there with my family, how despite Atargatis, Aphrodite or the sirens, and despite the deep sea being more mysterious even than outer space, we tend to see mermaids in terms of mythology but not spirituality.
The moon jellies were a particular favorite, by the way
I was still thinking about it in the car the next day; I suppose it stuck with me because I've never really gotten over moving inland. I was born amid this limestone karst, but the ocean brings me a certain sort of peace that a river can never match. I miss the salty sea air.
So we were driving, and I looked to up from my reverie to see, rather amusingly, this mermaid waving at passersby.
Many people who've known me have pointed out that I don't seem very American, but here is one instance where I really fit the stereotype - I love this sort of kitschy roadside art. I also love synchronicites, and coming upon a mermaid while you are pondering mermaids would certainly count as one. A good sign, perhaps?
It gets better - just that week, I discovered, the city of San Marcos had installed a number of painted mermaid sculptures and holy cow, there's a map. You know how I feel about maps.
mermaid sculptures waiting in the beautiful bleakness of a storage unit
The relationship between San Marcos and mermaids, I assume, has to do with Aquarena Springs and its Aquamaids and possibly a legend of a Native girl who made a bargain with a magical catfish. However, these are not motifs that traveled even a few miles west to my town
Soon I will pop over to San Marcos and track down the statues. It will be an adventure.True, these are river mermaids and not the ocean, but still I feel the touch of something otherworldly in this string of synchronicities. Perhaps the mermaid goddess lives after all.
Much of my childhood was spent in the dimly lit netherworld of movie theaters and skating rinks. One of the theaters my brother managed had a rather eerie atmosphere. These pictures are modern - the building has undergone quite a bit of renovation in recent years - but it gives a hint at least of how it looked back those days. Despite any resident ghosts, the place was a sort of safe haven for me, a place of endless Twizzlers and SweeTarts and fizzy orange soda.
I originally posted the tale of my experiences at another site, which I've reposted here:
Back in the 80's, my brother was the manager of a movie theater. It was a huge old building, built during the age of the silent movie palace. I spent a good chunk of my childhood there - bro would put me to work cleaning the auditoriums between shows and making popcorn at the concession stand. The rest of the time I'd roam the place, which was full of nooks and crannies. It was a bit maze-like, so that was pretty fun. I was quite fond of the place.
Probably all theaters have a creepy feeling after hours. When my cousins would visit, we'd listen to what my cousin Nancy called "theater echoes" - those sort of faint, disembodied voices you hear in a place like that. I suppose it's the acoustics that cause it, I liked to imagine it's some sort of trapped sound that just bounces around for years and years. Anyway, that's probably not too unusual in a place like that, but it did add to the atmosphere.
Sometimes I'd get the distinct feeling I was being watched, but I put that down to the cranky old projectionist - he'd been working there since the 1920's and I was forbidden to go into his booth (which was covered in nudie pictures the times I did sneak a look!) But some other things weren't so easy to pass off. One was the thing we called "the bat" It wasn't a real bat (though occasionally one got in) because it would have to have been huge, able to move at warp speed and disappear from even an enclosed space instantly. The thing we would see was a large black shape like a wing that would appear in the corner of our eye. Turn to look at it, and it would appear in the corner of our other eye. I recall sitting on the stairs one day for ages, intently watching the thing flit through my peripheral vision - I was determined to look at it properly, you understand. But no luck.
This wasn't scary at all, just weird, and I thought it was just me until one day the staff were standing around and started talking about it - same large black shape, same peripheral flitting.
Then there were some nights, at 12 or 1 in the morning, my brother would be up in the offices finishing the day's paperwork when we'd hear distinctly human sounding footsteps slowly pacing the roof of the building. I recall bro saying that this happened all the time, and not being especially concerned about it. The roof wasn't flat though, so it couldn't have just been someone taking a stroll up there.
the basement
What was somewhat scarier was the basement. That's where the marquee letters were kept, and we'd have to go down there late at night when it was time to change the sign. The basement had a dirt floor and was always cold. Some of the older staff members attributed any haunting activities to this place, because years back one of the workers, a janitor who'd been allowed to sleep there, had died of a heart attack. I tried to stay away from there, not the least because the basement door was inside the men's restroom - the horror stories practically write themselves.
But the thing that really, truly convinced me the place was haunted were the candy machines. For decades, there'd been a couple of candy machines in the lobby, selling gumballs or candied peanuts for a nickel. Probably these machines has been used thousands of times over the years, but while my brother was working there, they'd decided to remove them. Still, after hours when everything was quiet, you could still hear them loud and clear - non-existent coin going into the slot, turn of the invisible crank, immaterial candy rattling down the chute. Over and over, clear as a bell. Everyone who worked there knew the sound.
This is probably the most harmless and innocent of all ghostly manifestations, but very convincing to me.
Looking back, I think this place wasn't seriously frightening because any hauntings were strictly of the Stone Tape variety.
Edit - I've just looked it up and found an article claiming the theater is haunted - but blaming all the haunting on the ghost of the pervy projectionist! Silly. They should have asked me. Although I'm sure his shade is still hanging around.
At the medical center in Victoria was this imposing caduceus sculpture. It always struck me as a little strange. Victoria being such a conservative place in general, it seemed even less likely that the medical center would be possessed of such a flight of modernity. Especially one verging on a sort of Pagan spookiness.
It was one of those places where the dullness of Victoria had cracked and weirdness leaked through.
My son, who is 16, was listening to Nirvana's Uplugged In New York on the way to school the other morning. I thought to myself, it must be coming around to the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death soon. 24 years ago. How time flies.
I knew it not because of my memory - which is good for this sort of thing, yes - but because of the feeling in the air, the deathly smell of Spring.
It's understood that Spring is the season of rebirth, but those of us who tangle with despair know the other side of it - that beneath all the new green is the sickening smell of decay. There are terrible things down in the leaf mould and humus, things that don't bear thinking about if you know what's good for you. It makes sense to me that suicides increase when the growing season begins.
My son wonders what it was like back then, when Nirvana were the big music act and grunge was the thing. I tell him, there was a reason we liked our music so aggressively, appealingly* glum. It was relevant. It was the mood of the time.
Case in point - on the day Cobain died, I was visiting my neighbor Kathy and her brother Darren at their parents house, up at the lake. They were house-sitting while their folks were away, and for my part I was just glad to be out of town. The change of season had done nothing to ease the damp chill of my apartment or the dark pall inside it. There was a lot wrong in my life - Kathy knew this, I think, that's why she'd invited me - and I desperately needed a break.
Diary entry, April 5, 1994
Pain is measured in dols
Triptych - a three panel painting
Gold - Au
Paroxysm - a fit
Sibilant - hissing
Apocryphal - mythical
Alfred Nobel invented a number of explosives
A creepy, creepy day. Cold and humid and dark. I woke in the night and thought "winter is coming" and was filled with dread, as if it really were Autumn and it would all be to do again. The eeriness I feel is so big it's beyond describing.
....
Of course, on the the 5th of April, none of us knew that Cobain was dead. We only knew he was missing. There was some concern though, and there were updates on the TV news. Only a month before, he'd been in a coma, and things had seemed iffy for a while. I commented to Darren (no doubt sounding more callous than I'd meant) that if Cobain had passed away, he might be considered a legend, like Morrison or Joplin or Hendrix had been. I wasn't thinking about it so coldly, really. I was just pondering the strangeness of such a scene, in which one went from being a "troubled rock star" in the here and now to being something quite different in memory.
A few days later, I was back in my dismal apartment when the news broke that Cobain's body had been found. While I hadn't necessarily been convinced before that moment he hadn't just been hiding out somewhere, suddenly it seemed obvious that he could have met no other fate. Suddenly, it seemed that the anguish in his voice had contained a certain foreknowledge of doom.
But then, a downward spiral is always easy to see in retrospect.
I had no personal attachment to the band besides owning their albums; I hadn't even seen them live. Still, that day I felt something shift. It was subtle and nameless, but it was there. The song Heart Shaped Box played on the radio again and again, not that it had ever been away for long.
By then the weather was hot, as humid as steaming wool. I went for a walk among the warren of streets on the other side of Main. The leaves and grass were unfurling in a grotesque display of fecundity and the scent of decay was overwhelming. "The day was bright and shiny like a mirror" I wrote in my journal later, "but the underside of the mirror is death."
Indeed, half hidden under the overgrown shrubbery on Market street, I'd come upon a dead rooster in the gutter; his iridescent feathers shining blue and green. It seemed telling somehow that no one had bothered to retrieve the broken corpse. A terrible knowledge gnawed at my unconscious, and to this day I'm afraid to walk down that street. I have the uncanny feeling I might meet my own ghost.
This is how it was back in those days; It's hardly even symbolic. It was the mood of the time. Anguish and apathy buzzed like fat flies in the sodden heat. Hidden things festered out of sight. For a long time, a raw nerve had been thrumming in the background of the country.**We all felt it, we all knew it was there, but Kurt Cobain had helped give it voice.
How much all this would mean to my son, I don't know. It would be nice if it didn't have to mean anything. It would be nice if his generation had no need to deal with raw nerves and corruption and things hidden out of sight. But it seems that this will not be the case.
This Spring, the landscape has burst into greenery like I haven't seen since then. Pollen blows in waves, water drips from weeds. I feel shaky, remembering the dead rooster and my own ghost left on the side of the road. I'm middle-aged now. I tell myself I've been around, there's no need to be afraid. It's only Spring. It always passes, if you wait long enough.
I tell myself this, and hope this year that it's true.
I keep watch and wait for Summer to come.
*We were depressed as fuck, but we still grew up listening to Abba and The Knack. **For further reference re: my claim that something had been wrong in the background for a long time, see the article Kids In The Dark by David Breskin. The relevant point to me here is not the Satanic Panic angle or even so much the murder itself, but that a whole community of teenagers kept silent.
Driving down to the shop tonight, I saw a screech owl drop to the ground from the trees. I slowed to look at it; It turned and raised its wings and stared.
Oh, I know they live around here, I hear their eerie trills in the woods, but they are rarely seen. To see an owl is rife with portents. It causes a shiver down the spine. It's an uneasy feeling to be caught in the gaze of those predatory eyes.
But I've had them swoop over my head before and hoot outside my window, and nothing in particular came of it. Regardless, superstition is not so easy to dismiss. I had a dream once, years before I came back here, about seeing owls in that self-same creek.
I suppose if there is a meaning to be drawn from this, it's a reminder to be alert and aware. Polish your aura, cast out your demons and hope the fates are kind.
Last night, my youngest son and I made made his Easter nest for the bunny to fill with eggs in the morning. Because of all the hard freezes this Winter, there were not so many colorful wildflowers this year. We did have these nice irises, though.
The bunny provides. (The bunny was hard at work before sunrise, by the way)
The results of our family-wide cascarón war. Much like last year's chalk war, we all won. It's said that having a cascaron broken over one's head brings good luck. If this is the case, we are all set for the year. Now If I can just convince the others that cleaning up is just as lucky... I confess that this Easter I have felt a bit solemn. My youngest is 7 and it's suddenly clear that after all these many years, the clock is ticking on these old Easter traditions, for my own children, at least. Then I will have to wait until they have children of their own before I can play Easter bunny again. In the meantime, I will make the most of it.
