Sing A New Song

My friend Margareta DIDN'T die! She came pretty close to it last November ( The Last Mile ), but she pulled herself back from the brink with the loving care of her son Loarne, who took leave from his Friary to watch  over her, encouraging her to eat, drink, move around, take her meds, and do everything else necessary to ensure a miracle.

So, Margareta and I embarked upon a longer journey.  

Margareta tells her story over and over. An authoritarian father who was disappointed in her, a sister who criticises everything she does. Even to this day, nothing Margareta does is good enough, she isn't clever enough, articulate enough ... On and on. I listen, I nod sympathetically, I make the right noises. Until yesterday, that is, when something in me woke up.

"Margareta, you have to stop this!"

I hold her hand and remind her of the wonderful things she has made with her hands, the beautiful home she has created that she shares so gererously with others, her kindness, steadfastness, intellect ...

I tell her how loved and appreciated she is, and I watch her shake her head in disbelief.

Is it possible to stop her carrying the disapproval of her father around, or to shut her ears to the critical voice of her sister? I don't know, but I'm not going to stop trying.

Oddly enough, when leading bible studies, Margareta would strive to make her students aware of who they really are. So much more than a finite creature in a decaying body.  She looked at me, aghast when I told her to stop her ears to the lies from the past, start listening to a new song, and sing it to herself.

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#MicroblogMondays: Storyteller

The Storyteller

My aunty loved a man from New York
The grown-ups whispered disapproval with
Well-scrubbed minds.

The child I was, heard the words
With luminous ignorance and made
A carousel with the sounds:

"New York"!

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A Time To Grieve

I didn't attend my father's funeral, and I never regretted it. I sat by his side in his final days, he, too weak, too close to dying to want to talk, I, waiting with him, silently, or telling him how much I loved him, not trying to imagine a world without him.

I wrote his obituary, and read it to him the night before he died so he knew how precious he was. That was our farewell. Two days later, I flew to South Africa to complete the work in a village school he had sponsored. "You go!" He said, believing I would be away when he died. I went, and my Xhosa friends sang for him, and I went to this beach and cast into the ocean a wreath I made with vines and flowers from the rain forest.

I then scratched his name, along with my mother's, in a hidden place in the rocks nearby.

This thanksgiving for my father's life was a special and deeply meaningful ritual. Far away from home, I grieved for my father and there, in my heart, which was pounding with the ocean, I laid him to rest.

 

 

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#MicroblogMondays: A Moment In Time

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I am sitting in the third floor cafe in Debenhams overlooking King's Square, Gloucester. The first time I sat here, or whereabouts, I was a child. The square below was the terminus for the buses, a car park and public toilets interspersed between the bus stops. The Matson bus, number 6 stopped over to the left, and the number three 'way over to the right. That was the bus we took to visit my aunty.
There have been many changes in the sixty years since this was a Bon Marche, and I drank milk! But the hills in the background have always looked the same: the beautiful Cotswold escarpment.
I'm about to finish my peppermint tea and head for the station to catch a train to Bristol to spend a couple of days with my youngest daughter.
Much has happened to me, good and not so good, but here I am, having outlasted it all. Everything changes, nothing stays the same. Sometimes that is a scarey thought, but today, it's a source of comfort.

King's Square in 1950's:

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