"Jack"

I tell myself I’m not actually hearing my name across a parking lot. No, this is in my head. (It happens now and again, my hearing music or voices no one else does.) She isn’t manifesting in the here-and-now. I’m tired. I don’t want a visit from Her. But I know that voice, though I haven’t heard it in years. Thirty? Thirty-two? Mother, what game are you playing now? I turn to see.

“Do you know who I am?”

I think I smile. It wouldn’t be polite to burst out laughing as if I’d lost my mind, which I’m close to doing. I focus on the face that used to occupy all my waking moments and most of my semi-unconscious ones. (I didn’t sleep much when this particular aspect of the Universe opened the gates in my mind and let the suppressed come out to play with a Muse.) I tell myself that she (the human she) is no longer a young woman. I am no longer a smitten drunk hell-bent to accomplish a suicidal binge. (Buck up boy. You can survive this.) The cages in my head rattle. The Suppressed would still worship this one, just to punish me for caging them.

I allow I know her, though I doubt “the her” looking at me through dark sunglasses has any idea how many “hers” I actually see. There is the young woman flickering in and out of the mature woman’s hesitant smile. She is obviously present, and the Muse. I want to run away, but I’m too slow witted to escape. The suppressed in my head are howling now. Their laughter should be heard across the parking lot, but she (the flesh and blood she) just smiles and says she has some poems I wrote. Do I remember them? Would I like to have them back?

And Her trap closes. I feel the hook pierce. I’m aware now of the game and not so easily played. Trapped? Yes. But I don’t have to play. I know what’s up and I can escape. Only I don’t. Gods what an idiot I am! I want to read those sheets she/She offers me. I want to see if memory comes even close to the pain that drove me then! The Suppressed are gibbering manically now. Their laughter and cage clanging helping to seal my fate. (I hate the things in my head. That’s why I have them caged.)

I’m not sure when I began suppressing aspects of myself. Likely, I’ve been at it since becoming aware. Dad was big, loud (if angry) and scary. I never saw him hurl a lightening bolt, but his voice shook houses with its commanding rumble. It was best not to draw his attention. Mom was easier to be a kid around, though she was more likely to spank me if I was too much a boy. By the time I started school I was thought to be shy. Hardly. I had long since learned to suppress the more out-going, boisterous aspects of myself, especially in public. By the time I hit high school, and had learned to bank the anger building in me, I was very much in control of my caged self. And then I found alcohol.

The altered states following alcohol consumption were a revelation. I became aware of, under its influence, just what I had caged. Trapped within me were people who occasionally slipped their constraints while I was intoxicated. A dancer, furious that I denied him the training to dance like Fred Astaire.

A gentleman, who politely suggested I cut my hair, buy a suit, or at least casual clothes and allow him to make a presentable man of me. Someone that might have been suave and debonair with the ladies, had I not choked him into submission.

And a poet; some shriveled aspect of the want-to-be writer I kicked and stomped until it whimpered and fell silent.

Those and others welled up in me, fought for a place in the frontal lobe and with enough alcohol, fell into babbling contention and the dominate “me” won out as the collective “we” crashed, yet again, in drunken stupor. Yee haw for the bully!

She (I was unaware of Her in those days, having yet to meet and sit among the Pagans) had long played me with a Muse aspect of Herself. I’ve lost count of the sleepless hours I’ve sat scribbling, or pecking words on paper, or computer monitor as my mind raced beyond my fingers with story upon story, frustration upon frustration, as I screamed at myself for not knowing grammar, hell, even correct spelling! I was aware of the Muse, but not the Other, or Her games.

We were at Edgewood Lanes along the Old Emmitsburg Road in PA for some reason (for the life of me I can’t remember why) when a young woman I thought might someday become a friend reached out and playfully tugged on my beard. To this day I remember a “click” sounding in my head as if a light had come on, or cage doors had been opened. Everything changed.

Her face burnt into my mind, her voice embedded deeply so I knew it 30 some years later. Everything I had spent years suppressing and caging came stampeding full-blown into my mind. Thankfully, most of the aspects of myself had atrophied so badly they were mere shells as I stood there slack jawed. I’d beaten them, or denied them for so long they had power only to niggle me, but not take over. Except the poet. He had lain so quietly dormant I’d forgotten him. The Muse, freakin’ harpy that she can be, grabbed hold of the poet and slammed all my defenses down, stomped them deep into the mud that was my mind and took advantage of the alcohol haze to punish me, seemingly without end.

The poet, the shambling wreck I’d made of him, rose up and took his revenge. Lacking an education, lacking anything but a desire to speak and punish, he tormented me without mercy. Doggerel. Pages upon pages of rhyming doggerel spewed out of me onto paper. The Muse whispered in my ear, the poet shrieked at me. It got so bad I began to think in rhyme! It took a conscious effort not to speak in rhyme!

I regret dragging the innocent beard tugger into my nightmare. That she kept some of the doggerel rhymes all these years surprised me. That She is manipulating me with them does not. Reading those long ago lines produces a mild sense of the misery I wallowed in then, but stirs nothing I have lived in fear of. Mostly I laugh at my feeble efforts at rhyme. (The want-to-be poet had his fling; he’ll not get out again this turn of the Wheel.)

My mind eased of that particular burden; I raise a glass in thanks to Her, the young woman and the Muse. Now I need to figure out what I’m supposed to do next. I know damned well She didn’t set this in motion so I could sleep better!

The Holy Days

Man, I’ve come to hate the Xmas crap DW insists I endure each year. Xmas is supposed to be Christmas, a religious holiday I don’t participate in because I’m not an Xian let alone a Christian. Having to be part of the commercial bull crap that her family (and damned near everyone else) demands each year rubs my cantankerous self in every wrong way.

I’ve mostly given up explaining that Scrooge was a miser and I’m anything but. Money flows through my fingers faster than an ATM can read a magnetic strip! I love giving gifts for no reason other than I can. And I love gifting any day of the year but Xmas. Explaining things to emotional, close-minded people is a waste of time and energy. So when DW says “Take me to a store, I need to buy Xmas crap (she doesn’t quite say it that way, that’s how I hear it) I carp and grumble as I drive to wherever she’s going to torment me with questions like “Do you think blah blah would like this? Or should we get blah blah this?”

My, “What’s this WE crap? Leave me the hell out of this!” get’s me the one eyed squint and I wander off to look at hammers and contemplate the murder of commercial Xmas.

The last few years we’ve begun a tradition of a New Year’s Day feast that brings a handful of people to our table for steamed shrimp and whatever else we feel like cooking for those who gather. Because we spend a lot more than we can afford on the New Year’s vittles I tend to keep my anger over Xmas to a low grumble. We have to begin buying shrimp in September in order to have close to 20 pounds by the first of January. If I irritate DW too much with my Xmas rants she’ll balk at my shrimp buying.

The 2013 feast was almost cancelled due to my not wanting to clean and rearrange our house to accommodate the seven or so guests that usually turn up. My being so grouchy about Xmas that year didn’t inspire feelings of sharing either. Simona spent a hour lecturing me about our feast being the one day of the year she does not have to prepare a meal and serve us! She allowed I owed her that one day of her being a guest!

I snarled and snapped (I hate being trapped) and pleaded that getting the house in order was simply too much work! She came back with not caring about the condition of our house; she would endure that to be a guest at our table. “This is the day I look forward to all year! Do not take this away from me! Your family, and this day, is as close to being with my family as I can get in this country!”

Damn. So we rearranged and cleaned, and gathered foods, and prepared. And Simona, and several other invited guests came down with a flu.

This year we prepared the unoccupied upstairs apartment for the feast. Twenty-two pounds of shrimp were steamed, four loaves of bread baked. Oxtail mushroom gravy, chicken Alfredo, roasted veggies and buttered egg noodles were set out. A roasted chicken and a duck were dissected and presented. Wine bottles were open, jugs of tea offered. DW brought out her broccoli salad, Harvey Wallbanger cake and gluten-free brownies.

Simona, a better cook than I on any day, tasted everything and offered that I had outdone myself. She would have to turn the table on me and show me up with some feast of her own! I argued that everything I offered was more accident than planned. Considering how much had gone wrong over the 3 days of meal prepping I’m surprised anything turned out edible! The Mad One did not care! I had set a table that impressed her and she took that as a challenge!

Simona turned from her plate and smiled. “This is all very good. How will you do better next year?”

“I’m already planning next year’s feast.” I said without a smile. She frowned and said something about outdoing me in the meantime. Cousin Luke rolled his eyes and groaned. He muttered something about “Here we go, a food war.”

Out of nowhere, the Mad One asks about the cabbages. “How are they doing?”

I don’t know if she was hoping I’d made a mess of them as I had two years ago, but I thought they were doing well enough so I took her to the back room to see the ferment bucket. (Because most people think fermenting cabbages stink I have to keep the bucket out of DW’s parts of the house.) Simona lifted the lid from the bucket and commented the scum that bubbled across the surface meant the ferment was ongoing. A good sign.

She stuck her finger into the brine and stuck the scum-covered digit into her mouth. He eyes expanded as she dashed out of the room for the sink. I caught something like “How did you do this?” She rushed back in with a cup, dipped brine from the bucket, and began sipping it as if I’d introduced her to a wine I was making!

“This is so good! This is so much better than my cabbages. What did you do?”

I’m confused by this time. “What did I do? Hell, I did what you told me to do!”

“Then why is yours so much better than mine? Oh, the dill comes through nicely and the horseradish undertones assert themselves after the wonderful salty dill fades away. This is SO good! How did you do this?”

“I followed the recipe you got from you dad.”

We return to the feast where people look at us as if we’re nuts. We’re talking about why the brine is saltier than her dad’s when we’ve followed his instructions. (She decides he makes a 55-gallon barrel of fermented cabbages while we’re working with two or three heads that can only absorb so much salt.) I’m explaining that I’ve found seeds for cabbages breed for just what we’re doing. I don’t tell her that next year’s garden is part of my next New Year’s Day feast plan.

Most everything DW and I prepared and set before the guests came from a supermarket. Some of it we assembled from boxed mixes, some came about as blends of whole foods and canned. Other than the garlic I roasted with the taters, celery, carrots and onions nothing was grown by us. Next year I plan to change as much of that as proves possible.

Should the garden come close to what we have planned, should we have laying hens and feeder lambs, perhaps a deer in the freezer, I intend to set a table fit for a Bulgarian foodie!

I’m going to have to learn to cook first. And there will have to be a tradeoff to my having to learn something I’m not wild about. Those who gather are going to have to feast on my holiday and that ain’t New Year’s Day. It’s the day of the Winter Solstice.