The Last of Summer; or, A Feast Unknown

High Summer. The cicadas scream in the trees. It was July, many years ago now.

All that month, information seemed to crackle through the air, blowing like the wind through the house. The house itself was like a sailboat on a sea of grass atop the hill.

It was all very secretive.Word had come from down the coast that our cousins, Anna and Edward, would be coming to stay. We weren't supposed to know why, but of course we did - anyone who thinks they can hide things from children is a fool - so of course we knew their parents, along with our other aunts and uncles, would be attending to Serious Family Business. We just had to pretend not to know.

This sounds much darker than we felt at the time. For once, there was no trace of anything ominous in the air. School was out, the weather was fine, our parents were otherwise occupied. What wasn't to love? Our family drama had become part of the background by then, just another thing we weren't allowed to talk about. There was nothing to do but carry on.

At Grandmother's house in the next county, all the family had arrived. If our own house was like a sailboat, grandmother's house was like a tall ship in a storm. The adults sat around the kitchen table and whispered while the rest of us cousins (how many by then, 20? 24?) ran about like wild things, playing with Anna's little dog or swapping cassette tapes and comic books. At nightfall, Anna and Edward would be coming home with us, dog included. The dog! Over mother's hysterical protestations, the dog had to come too, there was no way around it. She tried to insist it be kept in cardboard box for the duration, a plan that fell apart within the hour. Score one for us.

That night, at the Sac-n-Pac on the edge of town, we raided the candy aisle for packets of Razzles and those cheap wax bottles with kool-aid inside.When mother didn't give us the death glare but simply paid up, it occurred to me that the rules were different for cousins. We sat in the back of the station wagon with the dog and our candy, the night wind whipping our faces. For the moment, adult tribulations had given us free pass.
...

I'd never thought our house was mysterious, or not very, or at least not for a long time. With Anna in it, it became mysterious. I suppose it was seeing it through someone else's eyes, but then again I'm inclined to say it was because Anna herself was mysterious. A curious sense of anticipation bubbled up in the corners when she was there. As we sat on the floor of my bedroom, Anna unpacked her belongings, full of arcane things like Blondie records and old issues of Punk magazine. Our ages weren't even in the double digits yet, so how the girl had laid hands on Punk magazine I can't imagine, but there they were. We put the magazines in the stack along with my collection of Nancy Drews. We did not find this even slightly ironic at the time.

Anna had brought her piano music, too, so we could play duets and she could keep up with her lessons while she was away. What this really meant was that we played duets while making up rude lyrics to every song in the Leila Fletcher piano course, books two and three.

All around the neighborhood we ranged that month. This was a new thing for me - I'd never previously been allowed to wander, but again, rules were different with cousins. Besides, we had to walk the dog. While our brothers exploded leftover fireworks in the yard, Anna and I clattered down the hills in our Dr Scholls, plotting and scheming while her little dog nosed around in the sweet-smelling grass. Once, we walked to the river with mother, who gossiped with the neighbors on the way. Mr. Jonas next door said how much I looked like Lady Diana. Anna snorted at this, but I recognized it as the compliment it was meant to be, maybe the first compliment I'd ever had. Anna twirled her Jordache purse with studied casualness, and said she'd rather look like Debbie Harry anyway.

Inside the house, we were up to no good. When we weren't watching The Facts of Life and eating Chef Boyardee pizza, we were inventing secret codes and signals. Surveillance was gleefully carried out with tape recorders, messages passed through windows. All sightlines in the house and yard were carefully noted, as well as the silhouette of mother in her studio, where she spent hours on the phone.

One afternoon, the house seemed unusually empty. The brothers must have been out somewhere, and Anna was nowhere in evidence. She wasn't spying through the fence out back or in the ash tree out front. Nor was she at the piano, the utility room or the shed. She wasn't  even in the bathroom, where the curtain flapped (in a certain lonely way) in the breeze. Clouds were billowing up in the west and the wind chimes were just beginning to ring  when I finally found her around the corner of the house. She had a secretive smile on her face.

"Look at this" she whispered, pulling out a book from behind her back. "It was in the bathroom." She tried to stifle a laugh. I didn't get the joke - it was just one of my brother's sci-fi /fantasy books that propagated like mushrooms around the house. I'd seen this one a thousand times. It was called "A Feast Unknown" by Philip Jose Farmer.

"Well, did you ever look at it?"
"Of course not. Why would I read my brother's books? Especially if it's been in the bathroom. Ugh."

Anna looked around surreptitiously then thrust the book in my hands. "you mean to tell me there's dirty books lying around the house and you don't even notice!"
Indeed. I looked at the text and saw with alarm that it seemed to describe some kind of naked wrestling match. One of the naked wrestlers may have been Tarzan. And my brother had left it in plain sight, so sure that no one in the house would pick it up. Well, he was right, but he hadn't bargained for Anna.

Of course, after that, we went into our brothers' room and scoured through the rest of their books. That's how we found out that sci-fi was surprisingly filthy. We were the picture of innocence when they came home, scoffing and mocking the way they usually did. We were untroubled, content in our superiority. We knew their secret. They read dirty books.

It was August by then, and the corn was being harvested in the fields below town. A lone corn husk, blown by some updraft, sailed into the neighborhood and into the yard. I knew then that summer was almost over.

The night before my cousins had to leave,  I dreamt that we were searching for Anna's dog, lost  in the dark. I stumbled into a secret passage behind the fence, a tunnel of wild brush and flowers all limned with the most beautiful light. I crawled along in this mysterious place, where I found the dog playing with luminous moths that fluttered in the grass. I woke to the sound of Anna calling her dog and the sharp slam of the car door. I knew from the cold look in my mother's eye that my reprieve was over, the fun was all over. A rumble of thunder in the distance added the finishing touch.

 The memories would remain, though, in places the adults couldn't reach.

Cicadas in the trees, moths in the grass, a bend in the road, the rustle of corn fields at the end of summer.

Stars

In honor of the Perseid meteor shower, a little dancing under the stars.

Whitebrush

When the whitebrush wave their thin, whippy branches in the evening, they give the appearance of restless ghosts.

Whirlwind And Shadow

It was one of those blinding bright days, silent except for the hot wind blowing. A dust devil appeared in the white gravel dust of the driveway, man-high. It traveled a few feet, then disappeared as if it had never been.

A red-tailed hawk dived, casting its shadow over me. Some folks may have taken these things as bad omens, but not me, never.

The only thing to do was be amazed.

*There was no time to take photos, so this pic is actually a dust devil on Mars, courtesy of NASA. Mars, Texas  - same difference.

A Rainbow Web and The Glowering Tree

On a recent nature walk, in the tree we call the glowering tree, we discovered  an abandoned  spider web shining iridescently in the sun. 

The tree seems to be very disgruntled about the web, you can tell by the way he's eying it so severely in the last photo. But then, the glowering tree seems disgruntled about pretty much everything. 

It's just his way.

Cat In The Moon

And later that same night, I convinced my cat to pose in front of the moon.

The Thinning Of the Veil

Leaving aside my ramblings on memory for the moment, because it's difficult and I'm stuck, let us take a different path for the moment. 

During our walk this evening, I pointed out something that I thought was fairly silly, but felt was worth mentioning nonetheless

"It's one of those nights when things look a bit strange. The landscape looks different. Kind of fairytale-ish. At least that's what I used to think when I was small."
"Yes", says my mate. "it does that sometimes. Takes on a different character. Reminds me of The Wind in The Willows, or something of that nature."

I was surprised by this, thinking it had been my own imagination. There's nothing very fairytale-like about the place we live. There are no lush meadows or babbling streams. Instead, we have rocks and cacti and dense underbrush with thorns. Plus withering heat. Not exactly the stuff of fantasy.

We talked about it on the way home, why the landscape would suddenly seem to change its character on some days, but not others, not most of the time. Maybe it was weather conditions, or the evening sun reflecting on the rocks. Who knew? Mostly, we thought it felt mysterious. Secretive, almost. Secretive? Wasn't that just personifying the landscape? Whatever, it felt secretive. And anticipatory. Like it was waiting for something. But waiting for what?

I told him that in my youth, I'd stay up late on nights like these, waiting for that thing that felt like it was going to happen, but it never came. Meanwhile, the dog was going uncharacteristically nuts, trying to escape her lead, as if she could feel it too.

I pulled out my camera and a took some snaps, as ever trying to capture something I could only feel.

 The pictures did look different from the hundreds I'd taken before - during the night, during the daytime, at all hours of the exact same places - though why, I can't say.

The sky was turning pink with sunset and the dog was whining after something we couldn't see. A doe and her fawns came right up and stared at us, almost close enough to touch. The spirit of the wild was afoot, maybe. Or it was one of those times, as they say, when they veil between worlds becomes thin.

Whatever it was, we decided to leave it to itself and went home to dinner.

The Persistence Of Memory, Part 1

25 memories, of varying personal importance, in no particular order:

1. The first week of 6th grade, the first Friday, I think. In the crowded, echoing  hallway before the last class of the day, a friend - Rosalia, I think her name was - told me that when her dad was a kid, he'd hidden out in one of the bathrooms and been locked inside the school all night. This struck us as a grand adventure (though as an adult, it frankly seems a bit less than grand).

2. Summer, sitting up late with son #3, watching cartoons.
This song:

3. Dancing in a club with friends. The club was in a dark basement and had a huge picture of Kate Moss on the wall, probably lifted from the perfume counter at Dillard's. Someone had drawn vampire teeth on Kate, and her befanged face flickered in the strobe lights.

4. 4th grade, at the Catholic school. After our school play in the evening, we took advantage of the chaos backstage to escape down the secret passage to the school cafeteria. We ran amok in our peasant costumes, thinking that we'd seen a ghost, but it was probably just the pilot light on the boiler.

5.Walking into the mall with son #1. We were laughing that the giant decorative urns out front looked like the battle urns in Okage: Shadow King. We started to chant the silly, yet ominous dungeon music from the game.

6. A pair of blue Chinese slippers that my friend Clara gave me. They had red roses embroidered on the tops. I wore them all that summer.

7. One bright afternoon, down at the shopping center on Navarro street (where the HEB was until they built the new one where the K-mart used to be) I bought some Flintstone's vitamins and Ryvita crackers, then hung around Sally Beauty Supply, looking at nail polish.

8. The beach in Indianola. Son #2 runs along in his red galoshes and yellow slicker. We are searching for shells that do not contain hermit crabs. We think we succeed, but it turns out the shells we bring home have crabs in them anyway. (Son #2, who loves marine animals, is thrilled).

9. That patch of sun-stricken lawn over there, in the neighbor's yard. My neighbor Kevin and I are sunbathing. This is in the 80's, when sunbathing was cool. He's reading The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I ask him if it's any good. He says no, really it's profoundly boring.

10. Going to the cash machine with a girlfriend one night and discovering that her PIN code was a truly offensive word. She said "well, no one is going to guess I'd pick that one, would they?"

11. My cousin and I, at K-mart, the one on Navarro street that later became the HEB. We are doing some late night shopping (that is, if you call buying toilet paper with which you're going to wrap your friend's truck "shopping".) On a whim I pick up some candy made from raspberry tea. It's one of these I'm chewing on the night I meet my future husband. Years later, he says that ever after, the smell of raspberries reminds him of this.

12. The cool, blue surrealness of the water park. Some things never change, for which I am grateful.

13. Down the street from my grandmother's house in the next town was a robo-wash, with a green seahorse painted on the side. If we could find a willing relative to take us, we'd  pile into the back of the station wagon and shriek whenever the robotic arms passed by to squirt soap on the windows. This was the best thing ever and what passed for entertainment in the 70's.

14. We take son #4, the dinosaur fanatic of all dinosaur fanatics, to see some real dinosaur fossils. The look of amazement on his face is priceless.

15. Stepson and son #1 are playing an elaborate game of hide and seek. I am tracking them around the apartment complex, and they are tracking me. We look for clues and signs of each other in the landscape. They are wily and quick, always out of sight. Near the pool, I see their damp footprints, just beginning to fade in the heat.

16. Driving by Citizen's hospital late at night (usually on my way to the Maverick Market for a surreptitious pack of powdered donuts) I could see the lighted windows up and down the staircase at the side of the building. I would have a terrible urge to stop and run all the way up the stairs and back, but I never did.

17. Our wacky cats, and the way they'd surveil us from their hidey holes while we did the cooking...

          or anything else, for that matter.

18. The day son #1 graduated from military boot camp. This one is tough, because I wanted to keep this list strictly positive to neutral memories, and I did feel some distress at seeing him become a soldier. However, I was also very proud that he had become an adult and had achieved what he set out to do, so I suppose it balances out.

19. The radio station in Victoria, and how spooky it was at night. The silent and heavily carpeted corridors, soundproof, no one about but these life-size cardboard cutouts of  music artists lurking in the corners. They nearly made me jump out of my skin when I'd come upon one unexpectedly. Faith Hill has never been so terrifying.

20. Working in the bath department at the linens store, folding luxurious, fluffy towels while the Moody Blues played quietly on the sound system. In each box of towels was a slip of paper, saying "inspected by (name)". I got to know the names of each of the inspectors at each of the factories. My favorite was Nora Duck, from the factory in North Carolina. I always felt a little better when the towels were inspected by Nora Duck.

21. My first car, a battered 1984 Chevy Cavalier. It cost $600 and I was proud of the fact that I could leave it with the doors unlocked, keys in the ignition, a full tank of gas and a sign in the window that said "please steal me" and nobody would.

22. There are a surprising number of happy memories connected with this soda machine*, everything from the older kids using it as a base in tag to the younger kids trying to buy sodas with chocolate gelt. It's even very nearly the site of the footprints in item 15. But if I have to limit myself to one, I suppose it will be this - one night, I was buying a Coke, but the machine did not return the change it owed me. I said, "hey, where's my nickel?" Just then, I heard a gentle clinking sound about 5 feet behind me. I knew, even before I looked, that it was my nickel, falling from the heavens where it must have taken a detour. 

*I took this picture from a youtube video, since I never bothered to take a photo of the machine myself, because - well, who does? It's only when such ordinary things are long gone do they become Significant.

23. With a heap of cousins, listening to ABBA records and reading The Thing at the Foot of the Bed, wearing a pair of Luv-it's jeans with satin hearts on the pockets. To this day, this still seems like an awesome combination.

24. Roller skating, The skating rink with its pastel lights and smell like watermelon Jolly Ranchers. Where my best friend, the DJ, (may he rest in peace) kept playing Rush, which in retrospect seems a little odd. Still, I maintain there is no happier occupation than roller skating. Even when you are Old.

25. Finally, this one: The Boomerang Boomeraction Jonny Quest bumper music. Because when you have a family full of boys, you will have heard this. A lot.

 

So, 25 memories. No trauma, no sorrow.
It reminds you that things sometimes can be okay.

Rooster

Ain't found a way to kill me yet

Eyes burn with stinging sweat

Seems every path leads me to nowhere

Rooster - Alice In Chains

When I first left my hometown twenty years ago, it might be too dramatic to say I ran for my life. Or maybe not. I knew my prognosis for survival was not good then, and I've had no reason to change my assessment of that time since.

Having come back to this place, I find myself bothered by the idea that a young person's sorrow carries little weight. That it's somehow insubstantial or temporary; You're young - you'll get over it. It's not as bad as you think.

From this distance, I can safely say that by the time I was 21, I'd had more grief than I would ever be able to swallow. What had only been a suspicion back then is confirmed with time. No, it doesn't always go away. It's so strange, the way loss can feel like a weight, and more loss is more weight until you can barely breathe. How can absence feel so heavy?

But it does, and since it does, there is no reason it would weigh less for the young.

It's not for my own benefit I say this now - I really am too old to need validation for my feelings. The years have forced me to come to terms with it one way or another. No, it's for the vulnerable ones who are walking that same path, who are going to be reminded that because others might have it worse, they have no right to feel bad at all. That awful phrase where callousness masquerades as compassion. 

There is no arbiter of grief who gets to decide how much your suffering matters, though it may certainly seem that way. In my more cynical moments, I would imagine a pain-o-meter that spit out a numerical value for misery. Poverty, homelessness, abuse? Maybe a 3 or 4. Death of a loved one? Higher, but it depends. Rape victim? Oh, shit - you may actually owe us for that one! All of the above? Look, you might want to wait in the other room - your misfortune might be contagious and we can't have that.

No, there is no arbiter of grief, at least here on earth, and thank god for that.

In those days I was pretty and fragile; now I'm old and worn. When I walk down certain streets, I get a little nervous I might encounter my own ghost. Perhaps I want to think my grief was so meaningful as to leave a mark on the place, instead of haunting me alone. That all that pain had meant something, at least. This little forlorn ghost, wandering the downtown streets. I fantasize: what would happen if I met her? I can only hope I'd show compassion.

Acts of compassion mean a lot, even fleeting ones. A woman named Adriana, who'd lost her child, gave me a ride home in a rainstorm. A woman named Linda - calling out in the shimmering heat - reminded me that even though we were strangers, I was still loved. Behind these figures, a formless mass of cruelty recedes. Maybe it doesn't sound like much, but it was everything. It might have even been the difference between life and death in those days, the difference between having the strength to leave a grim situation and giving up altogether. 

Perhaps compassion really is everything. Compassion for the lonely, the grieving, the abandoned, the outcast. Compassion for the self, too, even if it seems in short supply. Compassion may create a path out of despair, perhaps it's the only thing that can. Who knows? I'm no expert. But compassion is so easy, there is no excuse not to try.

The first step merely requires recognizing - regardless of age - the validity of  another person's suffering.

Tom's Van

 In the darkest parts of winter, I always remember Tom.

It was some years ago now, when we lived in the little Victorian house at the end of the lane. Tom and Debbie were our neighbors. They were nice neighbors, as neighbors go; though usually we only saw them in passing.

I was lonely a lot in that house, and as lonely people tend to do, I kept to myself. Especially in winter, when it was dark and cold. I'd huddle in my room with the heat on, drinking endless cups of tea and listening to Turn On The Bright Lights. Outside, the neighbors would go about their business, coming and going or chatting in the street, their breath rising in clouds of steam. This much I could see from my window at the side of the house, in the gaps between the blinds. I learned the sound of all the neighborhood cars as they made their rounds, and watched their taillights disappear into the night. Somehow their red glow brought a sort of comfort.

Tom had a little blue van, I can't recall any more whether it was a Ford or a Dodge, though I don't suppose it really matters. The van was an older model and made a distinctive rattling sound, like a bag full of glass bottles when you take it to the recycling plant. I always knew when Tom arrived home in the evening or drove to the corner store to buy gas. The rattle was a dead giveaway.

It's hard to hide when you have a noisy car.

While Tom and Debbie had seemed like a solid couple, in January of that year Debbie made a surprise move - she threw Tom out of the house and by the next weekend had moved a new man into his place. If it was a surprise to me, it must have been even more of a surprise to Tom.

 "Oh, him, he drank too much" said Debbie, by way of explanation. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't. The new man smiled like the cat that ate the canary. I didn't like him at all.

Meanwhile, late at night, I could hear the distinctive sound of Tom's van as he roamed the neighborhood, driving past the place where he had so recently lived. He would come from different directions, winding casually toward his old house. He'd creep down the maze of darkened side streets, then turn as if he were merely passing on his way to somewhere else. Perhaps he was trying to be surreptitious. For all the good it did.

In my lonely room with the yellow lights and the tea and the gloomy music, I felt sympathy. Not that it was any of my business, and not that I approved of stalking, but I understood it must have been hard to find yourself cast out and replaced in a matter of days. It's never pleasant to be unwanted. How does a person find closure? I can't say for sure that I wouldn't have done the same.

The next few nights, as the rattling van approached from afar, I began to imagine the sound (which I knew very well was probably a busted catalytic converter) was really what it sounded like - a bunch of hidden liquor bottles stowed in the back, evidence of the secret drinking that got him into this mess. Driving in circles, a cacophony of shame. I'd wave at him from my window as he passed by, a gesture of fellow-feeling from a fellow outcast. Yeah, it was probably the catalytic converter, but truth be told, I'll never know for sure. I only know the rattle made me feel less alone.

It wasn't long before Tom gave it up and moved on, maybe a week at most. The new man was settled in to stay. His truck made a strange whistling sound that became familiar but was never comforting.
After that, I'd only hear the sound of Tom's van by chance, if we happened to be driving on the same street in town, and only until the next inspection came up - that catalytic converter would have to be replaced.

I never saw Tom again after that, and Debbie eventually fled after getting on the wrong side of the Mexican Mafia. I never saw her, or the new man again either. Some new neighbors moved in, and another chapter came to an end on our little street.

I'm still lonely, though. I suppose that's one thing that will never change.

The Girl Who Was Witched Away

It's December and a dread anniversary is approaching fast. The Christmas season is always hard. A vague sense of horror drifts down from the plains, with leaden skies and a landscape that seems impossibly bleak.It happened when I was ten; I really can't say more, otherwise I will freeze and not write another word.

It interests me, though, in an uncomfortable sort of way, to remember that I had two main books I was reading at the time. One was Tales of Terror, by Ida Chittum, and the other was Angela Carter's translation of The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault. One was given to me by my sister. The other was a gift from my brother.Tales of Terror is still in my possession, but the fairy tale book was lost long ago. Perhaps I disposed of it in secret, as I found it unbearably creepy.

Indeed, I hadn't made the link with that translated book of fairy tales before I read Carter's classic The Bloody Chamber years later, but after reading only a few lines I was immediately hit with that sense of childhood dread. They had to have been written by the same person. An image search bore fruit - the illustrations by Martin Ware were burned into my brain.

I asked my mate, who'd never seen the book, to take a look at these illustrations and tell me what he thought.

"Good God" he said. "Is that from an Aleister Crowley manuscript? It's terrifying." 

It was good to know I hadn't been imagining things back then. All that winter, I'd been troubled by the spectre of Bluebeard's wife: the forbidden key bleeding endlessly in her pocket, forever marked by her shame.

The Tales of Terror book was much more comforting for being overtly scary, and the illustrations by Franz Altschuler were meant to be frightening, unlike Ware's stark, hard-to-put-your-finger-on unease. Actually, I had spent months gazing at it hopefully in Waldenbooks, itching to make it mine. It came as a present for Halloween, and by December of that year I had read it many times. 

The front cover is striking enough. The green ghosts rather reminded me of my old relatives, so it just seemed familiar and friendly, as strange as that may sound.

It was the back cover I really found unsettling.The plainness of the landscape. The sense of isolation. The shadows, which might indicate the time is just past noon. 

A lonely farmhouse on the hill. We all knew what happened in places like that. Or if not, we soon would. The landscape was familiar, even though I didn't live in the Ozarks. The Texas hill country looks much the same, especially as you wind upward where the towns get further and further apart. 

As it happened, we did make such a journey that December, in that gray empty space between traumas. We drove though Gruene on the way, which was still mostly a ghost town then - all abandoned buildings, fallow fields and the sound of rusted windmill blades turning. The water tower which looms on the horizon is notable for being the site of a suicide; the town manager, they say, tied a rope around his neck and flung himself off this mortal coil. All this is to say that the place disturbed me in a way that's hard to describe. You wouldn't recognize the town, the way it is now. Or maybe only a little. The old feeling is still there, in between the touristy shops. You just have to know what you're looking for. It shouldn't matter, except it does. I don't know why I recall traveling through that particular village that December. We kept driving and driving, beyond Austin and to God knows where, and I lay down in the back of the station wagon to shut out the sight of the hills and fields that seemed to go on forever.

Perhaps music could have been a distraction, but pop music was in a bad way then. Everything was ballads and minor keys and depressing. Or at least it seemed that way. The arpeggio and sighing chorus of Strawberry Letter chilled me to the bones. I couldn't shake it. Everything was wrong, but there was nothing I could do about it. I just lay there in the cold grayness, wondering if the feelings would ever stop. I couldn't foresee an end. That's one of the things trauma does to you - it takes away your future. 

There is an illustration from Tales of Terror that brings these feelings back for me, from The Woman Who Turned To Paper.

It was the one story in the book that was patently silly, but the illustration haunts me the way December haunts me. Somehow, it feels so much the same. And it's kind of funny, looking at what I've written above, one wouldn't think this would have had much influence on my artistic style. A person like me prefers to avoid old horrors,  not indulge them. Yet going through pictures for this post I found this little throwaway sketch:

I was somewhere between amused and disturbed to find it's nearly a combination of the Ware and Altschuler trees, above. It's amazing, what gets buried in the back of your mind.

There is one more book to mention here, or rather a story, though I hadn't read it yet. My copy of The Dynamite Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses had not arrived from the Scholastic book club before school let out for the holidays. This was a disappointment, but it turned out my cousin had a copy at home, down south where she lived. She told me about it as we played around the area of the church where the hearses drive in, under the what do you call it, the porte-cochere. The first story in the book was called The Girl Who Was Witched Away, about a young girl who was proud of her red boots, but after the witch got her, all that was left were her bloody footprints in the snow. 

Above us, the sky was full of ice.

I don't have an illustration for this story, only one I made myself, years later.

from a photo. aged 10

The Girl Who Was Witched Away had been my primary reason for ordering the book, but by the time school resumed in January, I was rather a different person. Trails of blood in the snow and girls who went missing had lost all appeal. It's only in recent years I began to understand my childhood horror of tales like Red Riding Hood and Donkey Skin, the knowledge that lay beneath the surface without ever being spoken. No one in our family talked about the dangers of being female, but we knew it just the same.Carter's cautionary moral at the end of Bluebeard makes it clear that the young wife's travails were her own fault, after all.

It had nothing to do with justice or fairness, this knowledge; only the reality of death on the edge of winter. 

Two Little Ghosts

There is a story that's supposed to go with this picture, but I don't have permission to write it yet. What I can tell you is that a dozen years ago, I had a very strange dream. I stepped outside into a whirl of blowing leaves, and when the leaves scattered on the sidewalk, there was a painting of two faces there. It seemed like I should know them, but somehow I didn't know them at all. The second thing I can tell you is that only one of the faces is a ghost.

Drawing Down The Moon

If you look at things in a certain way, even that muddy puddle at the end of the drive seems like magic. :p

As Above, So Below

After the recent rains, I was surprised to see acres of white flowers spring up overnight. After all, it's the end of a drought-stricken summer, when nearly everything is dead-brown dry and long since given up the ghost.

  

At first (not knowing overmuch about flowers) I thought they were wild onions, but when evening came and clouds of glorious lemony-vanilla scent started wafting from the fields, I realized they must be rain lilies.

In the dark, the fields of luminous white blossoms seemed to mimic the field of stars in the sky. I thought, "as above, so below". 

Although as far as I know, the stars in the sky do not smell like lemony-vanilla. 

It would be pretty awesome if they did, though. :)

Conversational Ghosties and Standing Stones

I've never seen a megalith, though I hope to one day. I have seen ghosts, though never in conversation. ;)

Mementos

It's been a long time since I've posted, months and months. Not because I haven't wanted to; it's just the circumstances of my life have been too difficult to allow for blogging. It's been a hard slog and that's no lie. It's hard not to lose oneself in the middle of so many demands. But maybe making an effort will do some good. While poking around in the storage shed, I found these sketches in a drawer. I made them a couple of years ago and while I didn't want to throw them away at the time, I didn't think much of them - hence the bottom-of-the-drawer treatment. Looking at them now, they don't seem so bad. Not perfect by any means, but kind of cute in an off-beat way. At any rate, it's nice to find a memento from happier times.

What Once Was (Or, Guess What, Victoria Is Still Creepy)

(note: I wrote this back in December. I'm just now dragging it out of draft.)

Last month, I went back to Victoria, returning to a house I once stayed in many years ago. It was a bit sad and nostalgic, because it was at a major turning point that I had come to stay back then, on the eve of starting a new life in a new place. Now that time has long passed, the couple who lived in that house are gone, the people we worked with are gone, everything is irrevocably changed.  

Well, one thing is the same, something I'd forgotten after being away for over a year. In my current town, you couldn't take a spooky-looking picture if you tried. In Victoria, all you have to do is point your camera at random and snap:

See? Which was really the idea behind this blog - my wish to document what made that particular town so very strange, even if the strangeness went unnoticed - or at least unmentioned - by the majority of people (the minority who did mention it admitted to being spooked as all hell). 

It did catch me by surprise, though, after all this time. Snapping away with the camera, mostly out of boredom,.and seeing something very different turning up in the viewfinder than what I'd seen with my own eyes.

Case in point - 

 I don't like posting my own photo on this blog in any recognizable fashion, but it's kind of necessary here. I had entered the bedroom I once slept in, nigh on twenty years ago when I was but a young thing, and I thought, ah, let me take a picture for memory's sake. Here is the mirror I once gazed at, the daybed I once slept in, exactly as I remember it, an ordinary little room in an ordinary little frame house, nothing special or unique outside of personal attachment...

Oh, no, wait a minute. Apparently I had been sleeping in Dr. Dread's Mausoleum of Doom without realizing it. (enlarge to get the full effect)

Sadly, there are no non-creepy photos to compare these against. I took plenty, but some things are just too terrible to bear looking at.

This was all very interesting, so I got a little curious about how the rest of the house would photograph. How would I, product of the 70's, look in the 70's era kitchen? The 70's weren't creepy. They were tacky, but not creepy.

Well, it was fine, except in the photo it looks like a potential crime scene: Or like that bit in a movie right before something bad happens:

After that, I ventured into the room in the house that I did find overtly creepy, the den everyone had always seemed to avoid. I would soon find out why.

While setting up the camera and finding a suitably dramatic pose, I think I manged to tick off whatever was in there, because I definitely began to feel a presence. It was not pleased. The self-timer was set to take three shots, but I was so spooked that I couldn't manage to stay long enough for all three.

I'm normally more curious than afraid when it comes to haunted houses and mysterious presences, but this was a truly awful feeling.

There is something really wrong with these photos, something besides bad lighting and noise. I often take photos with poor light experimentally, to better understand how lighting affects the image. No, it's something else. Something looks wrong with my shadow, like it's someone else, standing behind me...

And another thing, harder to pinpoint. It's as if I don't want to look too hard, because there might be something there I don't want to see hiding in the image. It's like that with all of the photos I took that night, the sense of another presence there, watching the camera watching me.

Maybe that's the thing about Victoria, for those who notice it  - it's not just the sodden air and the swollen ground, the isolation or the tension and angst swirling like a low-lying fog - those things are obvious, only those in deepest denial could miss them. It's something else there - the spirit of the place, immaterial, watching, just out of sight.

Or maybe it's just all those bloody clowns...

The Tale of Heinrich and Peggy*

*names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the awkward.

Heinrich and me

Heinrich was a friend of mine, in part because he was friendly to everyone, but mainly because we were weird. I don't mean the benign sort of weirdness that seems to be an esthetic choice, but the deep-down, painful sort of weird that necessitated many school lunch hours spent hiding in the library.

I guess there's a special bond that springs up between those who could never fake normal long enough to blend in.

As an adult, I tried - somewhat successfully - to channel my blatant strangeness into a more genteel eccentricity. Heinrich, on the other hand, had given up any charade of normalcy and just let his freak flag fly. The first time I saw him, he was wearing a headscarf, love beads and a Brooks Brothers suit, running furiously from something I couldn't see. "it's the Nagual!" he said, desperately. "it's after me! What should I do?"

Now, if Heinrich had said something like "how are you?" I might have been at a loss as for what to say, but being weird, I was perfectly equipped to handle this one. "Well, first you have to find your center." I told him. "Do you know any yoga?"

"Yoga! Perfect!" he shouted, catapulting himself into a complex ashtanga pose in the grass next to my front porch. "Why didn't I think of that?"

So began my friendship with Heinrich.

Peggy

On the other side of the courtyard, my neighbor Peggy watched all this with a disapproving eye. "You certainly have some strange friends" she said, meaningly. I shrugged. What could I say? Peggy was a very conventional girl. Not that there's anything wrong with being conventional. Conventional people tend to have an easier time in life; they face fewer struggles achieving their goals than those who are congenitally unable to fit with the crowd. But I can't pretend to truly comprehend them. Our values were very different, Peggy's and mine. I couldn't understand why she collected cow creamers. She couldn't understand why I worried about karma. But people are people, and they are what they are.

Heinrich and Peggy

As time progressed though, something strange happened...Peggy fell in love with Heinrich. The first sign of this was when she came down to the sidewalk where we were making chalk drawings and proceeded to put the moves on him. It was so very odd, Peggy twirling his hair and saying "why don't you come up and see me sometime" like a sort of ersatz Mae West that Heinrich at first couldn't figure out why she would want him to. "Er. Well, okay. Sometime." he said, nonplussed.

Peggy did not give up, however, and eventually Heinrich got the message. They went out on a few dates. That's when the war between the conventional and the unconventional began.

One of the reasons, I think, that Heinrich and I had such a fond friendship was because I understood that in his basic nature, he was a free spirit. He was a bit like a butterfly and about as harmless. He would flit around to other places and people, but sooner or later he'd flit back. When he did, one accepted him for what he was. There was no reason to expect different from him, really. To do so would invite disappointment.

"Disappointment" is a mild word for what soon began emanating in loud shrieks from Peggy's apartment whenever Heinrich was around. "Put on some proper shoes, you can't wear sandals in winter!" "No normal person drinks wheat grass juice!" "It's Saturday night, you're supposed to be here with me, not out playing guitar for hobos at the park!!" and so on and so forth. Finally, one night, there came the topper: "You must do as I say, Heinrich, because DAMMIT, I AM OLDER THAN YOU!!"

Heinrich, feeling the iron fist of authority bearing down on him, fled from Peggy even faster than he had from the Nagual. It was no surprise, really. As I said before, Peggy was a conventional girl, and while she may have fancied Heinrich in his natural state, no sooner had she got him than she tried to make him into a conventional boyfriend. It was doomed enterprise from the start

The story does not end there, however. Of course it doesn't, tales of lovers scorned rarely do. Besides, you're probably wondering how the shoe at the top of the page comes into this. Well, I will tell you.

In which the story becomes kind of embarrassing

Peggy was not pleased at Heinrich's having fled and was determined to get him back. No such luck. He was not interested. As he explained to me, he worried that spending time with Peggy was hindering his spiritual development. Well, he didn't use those words exactly. What he said was that he was worried her negative vibes were polluting his aura. Pretty much the same difference. We both agreed that there were better matches out there and that it was best to move on. He went on his way, seeking solace among a more accepting group of friends. That's when Peggy started stalking.

She pretended she wasn't, mind you, and was just happening to turn up wherever Heinrich went, but because we lived just across the way from each other, I knew she spent hours tracking his location by phone and planning her next move. It was in this way that she scored an invitation to a party given by a friend of Heinrich's friends - and Heinrich was going to be there. I wasn't going to the party, myself, but that evening still managed to produce one of the stranger images that has ever jammed itself into my memory.

The evening of the party, about 6 PM, Peggy sailed out onto her balcony. I knew she'd been in her apartment getting ready, since music was drifting from her windows and the front door was propped open with her cow-shaped doorstop, but this was the first time I'd seen her. She'd traded in her usual pantsuit and SAS shoes for a flowing patchwork dress and a pair of lace-up witch boots. Well, this was unusual. It really wasn't Peggy's style. Something about it bothered me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps the outfit was meant to impress Heinrich, I thought. If so, it was a miscalculation, since Heinrich was more likely to be impressed if she'd woven a dress out of cornshucks than any store-bought clothes. No, something was really off here. I didn't realize what it was until she began to dance.

A Maroon 5 song had come on the radio and this must have inspired Peggy, because she began to whirl and sway with a dreamy look on her face. As she added more dramatic movements to her dance and began to pirouette across the balcony, I realized - oh, holy hell, she was imitating me!

I mean, not that I'd ever dance around in public to Maroon 5, good god, no, but I could recognize my own peculiarities of style and gesture recycled by someone else. Actually, recycled is the wrong word. It was more like a fashion designer finding a strange, random dress at a charity shop and recreating it for Bloomingdale's or something. Peggy, who had the gift of being normal, was attempting to co-opt my own weirdness in order to fit in. Well, it was certainly interesting. But it didn't work. Not even close. It was pure fakery through and through, and it irritated me.

For years now, I've pondered why I found Peggy's imitation that night so unsettling and distasteful. What was it to me, really, how Peggy chose to act? It's not as if I'm in love with my spacey demeanor or my rummage sale clothes, or any of the other things that make people look at me as if I'm an alien. It's not as if I feel any proprietorship over such things. Some of my qualities, I would have traded many times over just to not have the stigma of being different. But that's the answer, isn't it? What Peggy didn't understand is that for Heinrich and me and many of the other misfits who clung together like survivors on a raft, being weird wasn't a costume we could put on and take off when it was convenient. For people like us, being unconventional was never a choice.

Perhaps Peggy found out the hard way. Certainly she came home from the party in a foul mood sans boyfriend, and I never saw the patchwork dress or witch boots again. And Heinrich, he again went on his way, eventually flitting off to a far country where he finally felt at home. That was the end of Heinrich and Peggy, and I guess if there is any moral to this story, it's that one should accept people for who they are, and to thine own self be true. Peggy was a conventional girl with conventional ways, and it would have been better had she embraced that than pretended to be what she wasn't.

Then again, a few months later, Peggy married a burglar she caught breaking into her apartment, which is far weirder than anything I've ever dreamed of doing, so really...what do I know? :p