Part Two: Aunt Lola

When and if I remember a dream it’s because it has some potent element to it; I’d like to think I made that point, clearly enough, in yesterday’s blog. And certainly, I would think so with the Billie Holiday dream; and those precious and upsetting few that have come true…all of which I’ve shared with you.

God is in there somewhere.

But the potency, when it’s there, is one that is, that must be, for me, necessarily Fascinating and Disturbing in its minutiae, as it invades my mind, my lobes, with its obsessive and small details; isn’t that where God is, according to van der Rohe? I make no bones about how my dreams are often too vivid and verbal, to the point of Hamletian madness; I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I lose what little sense I have left by Christmas.  (But, I would imagine, we all have dreams like that…and that we’ll all be mad by Christmas.  That seems to be the universal deadline).

So, true to fashion, here’s the Aunt Lola dream, one that has bothered me and moved me in myserious ways, since I dreamed it a couple of years ago. It has a residue that I can’t shake from off my soul.

I dreamed that I was running late for class, for Kay’s class, (this was toward the end of my graduate degree). I got to campus and there taped on the door was a scripted note telling me that she’d changed locations at the last minute, to an abandoned nursing home, one that I’d driven by many times, and wondered why it still stood. It was such an eyesore.

It seems as if she’d made this decision because of some research-oriented assignment – I vaguely could recall, I thought, her mentioning this, the research assignment, in a class the week before but in that announcement we were going to meet at the zoo in Jackson; no one, though, was upset either by the fact that we hadn’t gone to the zoo, as promised, nor by the fact that we were sitting on the floor in the large dining hall of this abandoned nursing home. Of course, being an Educator, we’re always striving to enhance the informational exchange rate, so to speak, so nothing really surprises us: zoos, nursing homes, a cow with a glass window in her one of her stomachs (this can be actually and physically viewed and touched at the Wise Center, the famous Vet School at Mississippi State University – look it up).  

Anyway, I’m late, and there’s the obligatory long hall that I’m desperately running down, (is that Archetypal? It seems so collectively Jungian) and there’s Kay, sitting crosslegged in the doorway of the dining hall. She’s motioning for me to hurry. We’re in the process of giving presentations today, and I’m next, she mouths. Did I forget?

I did, but I’m almost to the room when I realize that I’ve got to go the bathroom, immediately, and I mouth this back, in response, to Kay, who grins (in real life, I often have to go to the bathroom; I say it’s because I have a tipped kidney), but she’s also silently adamant that I not miss my turn to go. She appreciates order and routine.

I won’t miss my turn, I assure her. I just need a minute or two.

I come out of the bathroom and am on my way to the “class”room, to give my presentation, when a voice to my right calls my name. I turn and it’s my Aunt Lola, who passed away several years ago, at the age of 98. She’s the same age, now, standing there looking at me, but without any complications, and most notably, without that crook in her back that bent her toward the grave before the rest of her was ready. I’d heard her say that many times before.

She looks radiant, youthful, active, if you will. She’s wearing a blue nightgown and matching robe, and again, I can’t quite describe it, but she’s beautiful, a light. There’s a corona, edging beyond her, that I am afraid to enter, to approach, and yet, I’m delighted that this fear has put me at a crossroads, a carrefour, especially in the presence of a woman I loved so deeply, as a child. This must be what happens to the dead; they become a tendril to their corporeal life. I’m sure they do that just as an effort to put us at ease, but slightly. I’m not saying I believe in apparitions anymore than I’m saying I don’t.

I cry, “How can you be here? How can you be alive?”

I’m ecstatic that she is, and I want everyone to know that God must be real, how else could she have returned; its’s so natural a thing to believe, blinded as I am by her softness. I mean, there’s no other way she could be talking to me if not for the fact that all my life the faith I’ve held in Christ and God is actual. She’s proof, right?

So, I rush down the hall to the class because I want them to know the truth, this truth.

You've been here before, right?

I’ve rarely been this fervent in real life, about anything, but all of a sudden, in my dream, this is what I must tell everyone. I must bring them into the hall and show them Aunt Lola. She will prove all things. I know this, you understand, in the dream. But Aunt Lola refuses.

Kay looks at me, upset, that I’d interrupt her class at so crucial a time.

“We’re doing presentations, for chrissake, Kris,” she says.

Aunt Lola pulls me back into the hall of this abandoned nursing home, and looks up into my face. I’m now racked with guilt. I admit to her how sorry I was that I didn’t ‘do right by her dying.’ I was indifferent; I was immature; I was afraid to see her stilled, against that plush casket. I tried looking at her in the casket, at Nowell’s, but I couldn’t. I was too overwhelmed; I’d never before been flooded with such simple reasons to not want someone to die: her homemade meatloaf, those beds and beds of calla lillies, helping her pick up pecans from the front yard.

It didn’t make sense. How amazingly, these simple things made her great in my eyes. I should have looked at her in the casket, I know, I should have. She overlooks this weakness, “Forget that. I have to tell you something.”

I can hardly look at her, she’s so bright, and she says, “You almost died the other night.”

This is the residue part. It is a chilling thing to have someone tell you that you almost died.

“I’ve come to tell you that it’s ok; it’s not time yet. Soon, but not yet. You need to live, first.”

“I am living,” I argue. I’m upset now, not just that I almost died, but also because she’d waste such time on so old a cliche. I’m hysterical at this point. She remains gentle; the dead, in my dreams, are always so gentle. She won’t tell me what I almost died from, what almost was responsible for taking my life; instead, she implies that I am not appreciating the normal, the mundane, and the ordinary.

So, now, of course, I intend to be suspicious of everything plain.

This shoe closet is messy. Sadly, it's also mine.

She tells me that’s ridiculous, guessing at my suspicion. She implies that God has put in these plain things a necessary, if to me, rudimentary, exuberance that surpasses human understanding. She is telling me to slow down, to take notice, and to take a breath.

And so that morning, when I woke up, I let my initial disappointment ebb, and found that I was quite happy, content. I crawled out of bed, and that’s when I rediscovered, and rather accidentally, a lost pair of favorite shoes.

Would that work as something simple? I felt that it would.

And that meant the whole world to me.

The philosophy of Frogism.

One time, when I was small child, a friend of mine and I beat frogs to death with red, plastic shovels after a rain storm, mid-afternoon on a Saturday. It was just one of those things that you do when you’re a kid.

I was never a particularly violent child. Though, perhaps I skirted the state line of crazy for a band of years during my adolescence, like, ages Birth to Present…but, believe me, it’s in our blood.  I’ve managed to escape, cleanly enough so far, and that’s it’s own definition of success.

To this day, I pray for those frogs’ souls, though.

And, for good measure, I will not eat frog legs.  (But, that’s hardly penance since I wouldn’t have eaten them anyway).

I’m not even sure why I even thought it would be a good idea to kill those frogs, in the first place; I felt the same about Karyn White’s one hit single and tight-rolling jeans, but all the same, I bought the cassette tape and locked my denim firmly above my ankles every day for an entire year. And, of course, I picked up that shovel.

The things we do just to do them.

The opposite now has become a personal truism: I adore animals, all kinds, to the point of choosing them often over people, even in fictional terms. For instance, I felt so sorry for Jenny (the mule) in Richard Wright’s short story, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” that I ached for her as if the story were true, as if she’d been my mule. I began to question why I should even make my students read this story.  Despite it’s beauty and local color, why should they be subjected to such a piteous, if accidental, murder?  What was the point?

Uncle Larry said, “Because that’s what happened.  And happens still.” 

I said, “I don’t know of one person who has killed a mule. Ever.”

“Mules, men, what’s the difference,” he said.

And that right there is the hook. There really isn’t a difference, is there?  Except this: Wright’s lesson was made up, or at the least, embellished to achieve, elicit, a response from the reader.

But, I killed those frogs, that Saturday, without any point at all, without any reason whatsoever.  Just because.

It’s been a haunting flaw in my personality ever since, so entrenched a flaw that even publishing a poem about it didn’t erase the memory. 

frogism 

when we were fat

but never full,

& eleven years old

with cartoons,

& jelly,

& biscuits,

& sugar

& molasses

& butter

after Saturdays that

were just as fat

& never full

with rain,

the frogs

would pop up

& sit

on top of rocks,

in the drippings

& we would,

in our sugar high,

drag the shovels

from the mower shed

& sneak up

on the frogs

& beat them

flat until the

metal had gone

through the frog

& was only

hitting rock,

it’d be that

certain racket

that drove

Momma mad,

but she’d say, oh

boys are

being boys,

& that Christmas

is when Daddy

bought

us guns,

I never knew a shovel could do that to a kid, that such a rudimentary yard tool could carry so deep a scar, but this one did. I grew up in and at the speed of one swing of a shovel, and years later, when I realized that’s where the callouses between my thumbs and forefingers had come from, I saw that it was ugly and made handshakes just too difficult, and prayer nearly impossible.

Whatever thy hand findeth to do.

I didn’t want to be that kind of man. I wanted to be able to shake hands; to wave, at will; to be forgiven.     

For the longest time, I thought I’d simply have to keep writing until that happened.  I thought, Maybe that’s why we write at all – we’re driven to prove our worth, and what makes us worthy of being forgiven. I thought, Or, maybe that’s just me. 

Sometimes, it’s the art of retrospect, which for me comes with writing, that puts things in clear and plain perspective, regardless of where those things originate: whether in childish fancies, or neglect and abuse, or in innocent game-playing, or in absolute, all-out, and terrible sincerity.

I’ve learned what matters is that you know enough to recognize the origin, the root.

Like, today. 

Today, I’m sitting in a hospital, the cancer wing, with one of my favorite people on this earth, as she endures, with a grace and patience that must come directly from the laughter of the Good Lord Himself, is my hands-down best guess, yet another chemo treatment.

Me, I sit in over the corner, speechlessly typing this day’s blog, surrounded by several IVs and boxes of hypoallergenic gloves and needles and biohazard receptacles as red and plastic as that shovel was, sitting with every medical fear of the ages one could imagine, underneath the TV, the one, mechanical hand held out to anything I recognize beyond these white walls, I’m sitting here observing in her a soft and quiet strength that is so holy it causes me to pray, instantly.

Nothing I’ve ever done is as important as this moment, and it’s not because I’m here, in the role of a friend, but because she’s allowed me to see the price her plea for Job has cost.  She’s letting me see where it comes from, and my God, it’s a lot:  the loss and pain, the fear and worry, the reminder. 

I’m sure she’d rather you could get it at Target. 

But, it doesn’t ebb her peace of mind. 

And that’s when I’m truly reminded of the Whole Point , as the second IV bag empties, and she wonders what would work for a late lunch?, and I ask her if Mexican food for a late lunch would work, it hits me:  When all else fails, and you can’t write yourself to forgiveness, you can always ask.  I forget that, time and time again. Because,  if you’re like me, you feel awkward talking out loud in a hospital. If that’s the case, though, remember – you can just sit quietly in the corner and watch it in action, too. 

It’s going to hurt your eyes, at first, know that upfront. But after the glare of the panegyric fades, what you see, finally, in the end-glow is fairly nearly Damascan. 

It’s what you’ve been looking for all along – redemption.