|
The Blessing of Grace, Childanah childes I have been convinced my grandmother, Grace,
was a Buddhist or a Sufi, perhaps a woman on "the path". She did not have what has been placed
generously before me-- spiritual guides.
I suppose it’s presumption to say "I do and she did not", yet
her blackened hair, distended belly, whorish red lips--her life was portrayed
with exclamations. All this screams
she was not like other women. She was
colourful and full of depth and lived among the temporal. She was just unaware of "why?". Her mind paved paths that others just did not see. R.
and I are spooned into one another. We
have been cupping in and out of lovemaking for two days. We have begun to drone sentences of our
lives together in a dance of share revealing the intimate people involved in
the physical passion tussling. I pull
his arm close to my face and smell the dark hairs on his forearms. Occasionally he reacts with a mirror move
except I feel his face bury into my chestnut hair and his full sweep of inhale
draws more than my scent--he inhales my spirit. I
love R's. voice and his happy laughter , when he releases it--swallows my head
whole and I crawl in with it not
wanting to remain headless. I think at
times it would be enough to translate into a relationship of length. He is older and his body is older. There is not a man of youth and vigor to be
captured by, but a man of stories and a fleshed out soul who knows what brings
him pleasure and he conducts his life accordingly. I like his literary feel in my path. I cannot step over him. I
must allow us to fuse and flow through one another on the path to our
salvation. He has countless times told
me it is the act of sexuality that is his chosen road to enlightenment and
after the two days twined I am glad I can be a church and sanctuary to
him. I unfold and accept his offerings
and our scriptures and mantras are prolific and sound like "holy, holy,
holy"--when we are just climaxing "f-ck, f-ck, f-ck". Intimacy
leads to the verbal writing of our life histories on one another. He
takes the expanse of my lean back and begins his tale. I feel his fingers writing details of his childhood and mother and his
scurrilous barrister father--"man of the high seas." The
Buddhists create shrines to their ancestors.
R. is fascinated with his ancestry and has traced it past Mississippi
and the Virginias. His strange
connection with me is his grandmother was born in Eden, Texas. I am from Texas and R somehow thinks we are
kindred spirits because of this. "You
remind me of one of my Texas cousins," he says. I
ask, "Do you screw your cousins?"
I
have taken a pilgrimage to Eden in search of Cain or perhaps solely as a day
trip to escape real battery in a real marriage gone distasteful. There is a prison in Eden so I suppose Cain
is tucked away in one of the facilities.
Abel is a memory now and Adam and Eve probably never send their
"other son" care packages.
Now, in Eden, there is a wonderful nook of a bookstore in the
square--probably contains a Bible and a copy of Herman Hesse's Demian.
When I committed my pilgrimage I just stood on the corner and noticed
the flow of wind from east to west. I
was made aware recently through forays into good reading that the earth rolls
from west to east--and I somehow think this is the natural progression of a
man's mind from the materialism of western thought to the flow of the eastern
mind. It is where any mind of any
intellect eventually returns --to the philosophies of the east. Mankind's middle east ancestry eventually
overtakes us all. Tucked
in the cuddle moments between our copulating is the phrase R. whisks out at
me--"perhaps it is my father you
should be making love to." R is
aware I love large people with large minds.
R is large and needs no stand-in for his grand persona. However he continues with his drone about
his father and how R Sr. had been
somewhat a rogue on the high seas.
Swash-buckling proportions it seems--spending a large amount of his life
in Japan and the east. Probably much
like R, f-cking too many women and demanding that his tall person be seen. R reveals that once when he was in Hong Kong
participating in the bar scene a man approached him and said that he wanted to
see this son of THE R. Senior--and that the resemblance was remarkable. R does have an ancient mariner look to
him. His head bends forward as if all
his life he has strained against the force of gale and the rock of the
boat. R's beard cuts a swath across my
expanse of skin and the ocean is very near to all our lovemaking. I can climb to the top of the golden hill
outside his Eichler home and find the San Francisco Bay waiting. Perhaps R
subconsciously settled here in hopes of his father returning via some large
freighter skimming the waters below--coming to take possession of his son. The
Buddhist shrine to the ancestor rests on R's dresser. A picture of a woman of the forties era. She is a woman with a
clear gaze--a faded woman of elitism and beauty in her fifties--and at the
bottom of the picture there is a written gift of verbosity. It is generic but I read some great love
story between the written obvious. The
woman was the wife of some man who became the vice president of the United States. I have no names to fill in the blanks
here. I wish I had listened more
closely to the stories R told me--but the trance of too much s-x cross
pollinated with the sweet of hemp-smoked produced a netherworld where the real plays in the fields of R's path and
mine joined to a perversion of the truth.
Perhaps I heard what just sounded romantically large. R, regardless of the intimacy--and the long
intense stares we exchange during our bodies unity--never ventures to tell me
he loves me. And I do not expect the
phrase--but I feel it underneath the rise and fall of the wave of us. I want to be his lover and stain his mind
like perhaps the woman stained R's father’s mind. I won't leave a picture but amidst the week I pen a poem and
leave it on his immaculate study desk.
Nothing in R's glass house is
ill-placed. It is a womb and
for the week it serves just that purpose.
Womb of us. R's daughter and her boyfriend arrive on the last night of my
stay. R has not moved the poem from
where it lies flat on his desk. I want
his daughter to read it and know her father is passionate. Her father is every bit as large as his
ancestor father that roamed the high seas with a Japanese family tucked away on
the islands. Daughters need to know
their parents are passionate. My own
father seems to view passion as a sin--and I view passion as a gift from the
g-ds. Ancestry is insidious attacking us
daily. I have a blessing that has
followed me all my life. As R wilts
into my loins, I wonder if his father's high adventure whips him forward on top
of women--is there something to live up
to here?--or is it just the mutated version of father to son--and
procession of ancestral spirit dipping and drawing a continuous line
through the centuries. I see R's face looking amazingly like the
distorted face of some Scottish king when he climaxes--this is no common soul
delivering his seed to me. There are
no common souls. My ancestry intends to haunt
me. I need not place shrines. My mother in a later phone conversation
heaps upon me--"you will not be a Grace Child" and the phrase darkens
the daylight pinned to the wood floors I am sitting upon. My mother has just indicted me with the
family curse--Grace Child--my father's mother.
I have asked my father repeatedly the story surrounding Grace--he in
bitter refrain--lashes--"my, you pick such great heroines to
emulate". For me it is nothing of emulation but all of understanding. I know why she ran. Grace just did not know the sanctuary of
her own soul--she looked to find peace in the soul of another. My life is not following the expected path
that my parents would wish for their child as Grace's did not follow the
traditional Mississippi woman's path.
The perfect cause for comparison.
When
my father was an infant, Grace left her son with the fraternal
grandparents. I have seen the
intervening years and I intuit the similarities between Grace and me. She was a wanderer, nomadic--but her life
was lived in the Mississippi sharecropper lands and new age reasoning and
eastern philosophies of "in the flow" were not even known. She could not put a name to her temporal
state of mind. I have never known
enough of her. She is the family
secret. She was mad. I should repent for feeling the tight connection
to her life splattered with a procession of men. Was she in search of the eternal truth--the wisdom that would set
her free? Did she go mad because there
was no name for her affliction of separateness? I am thankful sometimes for my status of prophet. I want men to find the knoll of flesh above
my pubic hair their altar. Grace did
not know her own name. I am guessing
she spent her life looking for a sanctuary of grace for her visions--altering
her perceptions to fill in the hole she believed others thought she should
inhabit. "Grace" large
enough to accept her division from the masses desiring her to change. "Grace,
child, scares me." Grace
means there must be a foray into the wasteland of excess to feel the monumental
cover of the love of g-d. I have
lived in Texas most of my life and during the heat of August--the hot breath
blown from the south lies down flat on me like a blanket fragrant with dying
grasses. In this late state of the
blast of summer, the earth refuses to squirm and lies and takes the rape of
heat. No need to protest, it will come
and it will be. Grace
is non-existent without committed acts needful of acceptance and pardon. Grace is positive and warm--and above all,
grace listens to the trespasser’s excuse and smiles and pardons. I
love the hope of my fraternal grandmother's name--Grace Child. In my own name I have owned and borrowed
names via birth and marriage. My first
two given names I have experimented with all my life and I have finally woven
the first and middle into a tapestry of one word--and the last name is losing
any stronghold--it will drop eventually.
If my name had been Grace Child eventually I would have created a
version---"grace, child" and
perhaps it would have been the sign to all my checks. My grandmother's name was a philosophy of life. I wonder if my father understands the
reasons of why his mother left him as an infant. I wonder if he hears her
name and in light of my father's calling into the liturgical
lifestyle--realizes the magnitude of this family's fallen woman and the
covering of her name--"grace, child"? Grace
is nothing we ask for and everything we get in life--covering all aspects of
our human and spiritual beings. I
venture again to ask my father of his mother, Grace, as he sits on my
"patchouli house" front porch and desires to tell me he thinks I am
living a wrong lifestyle. Of
course, I never venture to tell my
parents I have spent a whole week f-cking the political son of a scurrilous sea
captain--and I suppose R would never share with his daughter or business
associate that he screwed a "universal waif", grand-daughter of
"grace, child". The playing
field appears equal and justice in the universe is that I get to lie on top of
a golden mountain overlooking the San Francisco Bay and skyline--and collect
totem buzzard feathers on the path downward from my spiritual trek. Who would understand the reasoning for the
union anyhow--I just seem to believe it was "grace, child" for two
misfit souls looking for a womb of comfort amidst awry marriages, miscalculated
chances, parents and ancestry that is inbred and impudent in it's demands on
two people that actually give a damn if change in the system occurs. Mismatched for a distinct reason. So I
monologue about Solomon to my father--and for the first time--perhaps it was
the prompting of the good f-ck from R that inspired this new-found voice of
sureness as I lean into my father with a philosophy that outclasses his. In phone conversation I call R, "Solomon" and he likes
that because he f-cks about as many
women. My father says he dislikes
Solomon and I am not surprised at this confession. My father of Biblical truth picks out who is culturally
acceptable and adopts them as his padres of validation. I keep reading new philosophies, inheriting
new friends, listening to new silences and divorcing all old precepts that do
not fit--this day. I will die a
heretic. Walt Whitman wrote, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am
large, I contain multitudes)." I
know for sure--for "grace, child"-- that the twine of long limbs that
at first glance appear mismatched--was match--is match. "Grace, Child" is all about
redemption--about every moment needed in unison to preserve the Whole. About every moment needed in unison to preserve
the whole. About every moment needed
in unison to preserve the whole. My
father says Grace would sometimes hitch-hike from one location to another. I laugh remembering the big deal it was to
my person to hitch-hike once from Lake Tahoe to San Francisco--I view it now as
the desire to rest in the supply and grace of the universe for personal
provision. "Grace, Child" was striking out on the path--she just had
no name and no directional guide for the end result. My parents have intimated Grace failed---this to me is more
telling than the wandering search of my grandmother ancestor. "Grace, child never fails." "Grace
is always proportionate to the strength of the depth of need." And I
note, when August heat has assaulted every ounce of my scantily clad tall
physique, I go and turn on the chill of shower water---strip, and only the bare of real flesh--is. I let the dribble and rush pelt my skin--it
is the individual force of grace--it is a good f-ck when your body screams for intimacy--it is a book
that is placed so divinely in your hands--it is ten chocolate-covered coffee
beans placed succinctly into your wind jacket and when you climb to the top of
the golden hill-- you adore eating them and lying and watching a bird of prey
soar -- 7,8,9 minutes before it flaps
once in it's continuous circular fly above you--it is Henry Miller
words--covering every inch of white page before you in search of the devil--it
is love unexpected--and groping and sureness…."grace, child" is
nothing you ask for and everything you get. © 2001 annah childs From annah childs, in lieu of a bio: furtive frank, |