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��������������������������������������������������� 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, |