3 posts tagged “harlot's sauce”
Sleepy Hollow, Northern California. “What a perfect place for a writer to live,” I thought, when I moved here almost five years ago. And I did get a lot of writing done, when I wasn’t in my garden, that is.
Our house is surrounded by woods and high hills, with a seasonal creek dancing along the right edge of our property, lined by a sentinel of three giant rocks. “We’re butt up against nature here,” is what my husband likes to say.
When I saw it, apart from thinking about the quaint name of the area and of its street names, like “Van Winkle Drive,” and “Ichabod Lane,” I also imagined that I could, at long last, have a garden. Having lived all my life in small flats in a city or by the sea, I’d made do with potted flowers on my windowsills and balconies. Now I had almost a full acre of dirt to plant and I couldn’t wait to get started.
Testing the soil, mapping the sunny and shady areas of the ground, I bought containers and containers of colourful blooms and planted them with enthusiasm and care. I toiled in that garden daily, my nails turning jagged and brown as I dug in eggshells and coffee grinds to fertilize the earth, picked off caterpillars and crinkled dead stems from each plant, watered and weeded carefully and methodically. Week after week, month after month I worked, until my garden was rich and full and I could revel in the vibrancy of it.
Then the deer came. Dozens of them, grown and small, with antlers and without; they came down from the rise of trees behind our house. To someone who’d never seen them up close before, they looked splendid, graceful and gentle. A gift from nature, a blessing, even.
Until I woke up one morning and wandered out into my garden to discover it no longer existed. I could see only the remnants of it left by a savage marauder who thought every blossom, every leaf I’d lovingly attended, was nothing more than dinner salad. The deer had eaten their way through bougainvillea, geraniums, lobelia, impatiens, petunias, pansies, azalea bushes, rose bushes, and when nothing else was left, even ivy vines. I stood in horrified dismay looking down at the concrete and the grass where scattered specks of green, blue, red, pink, purple, and yellow, which had once been my beloved, beautiful flowers, lay strewn and still, as though they’d tried to run and escape from a terrible siege, but had perished in their efforts, anyway.
The deer became my enemy then, and my war with them was on. Armed with powdered blood meal, deer netting, and a foul smelling spray made of garlic and eggs, I attacked. They retreated for a while. Then I woke up one morning again to discover that during the night, the hungry deer had somehow managed to nibbled under the netting. They’d also concluded that both powdered blood meal and rotten egg/garlic spray made delightful salad dressings. My flowers were murdered a second time. Not only did this make me cry, it made me furious.
My husband could not understand my perspective. Growing up on a farm and living in rural areas all his life, he’d shared space with various wild animals since he’d been born. To him, the presence of deer in our garden had the same feeling about it you get when you shrug on an old coat. It wasn’t necessarily attractive, but it felt familiar and comfortable. But in just the way I splashed delightedly into the sea in Greece while he stood there shivering and thinking of sharks; or slid easily between passengers on a New York City subway while he thought of pickpockets, the deer were as alien to me as those experiences were to him. Somehow, he'd missed that.
“Why not just plant things they won’t eat?” he asked pragmatically, not even trying to hide his impatience with me.
“What, you mean lavender?” I replied, sardonically, not even trying to hide my annoyance with him.
To me, just having purple buds in the garden looked dull. Judging by the preponderance of lavender and oleander in the area, everyone else had surrendered to the deer. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t even like oleander, although the fact that it was poisonous and that the deer just might get hungry enough to eat it, was an entertaining thought by that time.
My focus on the deer and their activities in our garden became a bone of contention between my husband and me. Now I’d graduated to running outdoors whenever I saw one, to clap my hands at it and “shoo” it away, spraying them with the hose when I was out watering in my garden, hovering by the windows whenever I heard any suspicious rustling outside, and even throwing small pebbles at their feet so they’d flee. But though they’d scramble away, they’d only come back again when they knew I wasn’t looking. Those devils.
And when I’d complain that they’d managed to foil me again, my husband would say, “It’s not personal, dammit. Stop planting deer food and they won’t come.”
I despised the deer for not being discouraged by my efforts to thwart them, and I was hurt and irritated with my husband for not knowing what was at stake for me.
Then, two years ago, on Father’s Day, I was out in my garden and heard a strange bleating sound, just up the hill behind the house on the other side of the creek. As I began to walk across our lawn towards the creek to investigate, a doe stepped out from behind a tree on the hill where she’d been hiding, and looked down at me in a way I’d never seen a deer look. Her ears and head were actually bent foward in an aggressive position and she was staring directly at me. A head-on stare was an unusual pose for a deer, as they ordinarily looked out at me from the sides of their eyes. Not only that, but she was making a peculiar, snorting sound I’d never heard a deer make, either. It was as though she were growling a warning. I stopped still and looked up at her as the bleating continued, much closer this time. That’s when I realised: She was guarding her fawn. The cry I was hearing was the sound of her newborn. I stepped back and nodded. A mother looking out for her baby. Fair enough. I wasn’t about to chase them, that was for sure.
But as I stepped back, the doe did an odd thing. She began to sway on her feet. Then, in the most ungraceful way I’d ever seen a deer move, she seemed to stagger across the hill, directly across from where I stood on the lawn, and away from her baby. She stumbled dizzily, and then ---God help me--- her knees gave way and she collapsed. I gasped in shock as she began sliding down the hill towards me, unable to stop her fall. I knew any moment she would come tumbling over the retaining wall and onto the lawn where I stood.
It was a pile of logs gathered at the base of the fence that prevented her complete tumble over the wall. Now, as I watched in horror, she was lying on her side, thrashing, her legs tangled up in logs, desperately trying, but unable to get her footing back on the hill. After a few moments, she sank down and gave up. Laying her head back on the dirt she twisted around, and from her lying position, feebly but determinedly, she lifted her back head up and looked at me.
She wore that startled look one always sees on a deer. The look of prey that knows they are prey. You might think she was fearing for herself in her look, afraid of me, because she knew I’d always chased her kind away.
No. ... There was something else… I felt something else in that look. It was the look of one mother to another. It went straight through my heart as surely as if she’d spoken to me. And, as though I were reading that mother’s look from my spirit instead of my brain, I looked back at her, too, directly into her eyes, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll find your baby. I promise. And I promise she won’t be harmed.”
She held my look as though she were listening and understanding my words, my English words, which I’d said out loud to an animal, a wild creature that couldn’t speak. Then with one weak nod, she lay her head back one final time, looked up at the sky and... I saw her die. Hoping I was wrong in everything I was witnessing, I stayed to see if she might move. But as I stayed and watched her, those brown doe eyes slowly filmed over white. For sure, she was gone.
I turned and ran into the house, calling for my husband. He was on the phone with Tim, one of our sons, who’d called to wish him a “Happy Father’s Day.” He asked Tim to hold on a moment as he listened to my agitated words. Then he said into the phone, “Tim, I’ll have to let you go. We’ve got another deer emergency.”
And with that smart aleck remark, my husband followed me as I pointed out to where the doe lay, and then to where I knew I’d heard her fawn.
That remark to our son about ‘another’ deer emergency hadn’t done it, but what he said next did. “She’s not dead. She’s probably just resting. And I’m fairly certain there is no fawn.”
I turned on him. “I may not have been raised on a farm, but I’m not an idiot, “I snapped. “That deer is as dead as you can get, and her fawn is over there, on the other side of our creek.”
He could tell I meant business then, so with sigh, he climbed up over the retaining wall and gingerly approached that poor doe. Peering at her, he confirmed what I knew. “Yeah. She’s gone, alright.” Then standing he turned to me and asked, “Where did you hear the fawn?” When I pointed in the direction again, he said, “We’ll have to approach very quietly, or we might scare it.”
I followed him across the creek. I couldn’t see anything, but a moment later, he lifted his arm and whispered, “there.”
Sure enough, sitting comfortably in a bed of leaves, her front legs crossed, looking directly at us, with curiosity and no fear whatsoever, was the tiniest fawn I’d ever seen.
My husband’s tone was very different now. “Listen, if that doe died after giving birth, she probably was too old or too sick to survive it. That might mean she wasn’t able to feed this little thing, either. And that’s not good. If Animal Services can’t get any milk into her, she won’t make it.”
I was beside myself at those words. I’d made a promise and I was already trying to figure out, if my husband’s verdict were true, how I, a woman who’d spent the last three years chasing deer from her garden, was going to save this one.
Animal Services estimation was not so bleak, however. It took two of their vans to our home --- one for the live animal and one for the dead --- but they determined that the fawn would survive. She’d been fed one last time by her mother, and in fact still had a belly full of milk. She’d be cared for, then released when she was able to survive on her own. She’d probably live to eat my flowers another day.
As for her mother, I watched the man from Animal Services gently close her eyes. Then he and my husband wrapped her in a sheet and carried her down the hill into the back of the second waiting transport van. I watched as it drove away.
I am not a Hindu. But, the Anahata is the fourth primary chakra according to Hindi Yogic and Tantric traditions. It symbolises the consciousness of love, empathy, selflessness and devotion. On the psychic level, this centre of force inspires the human being to love, be compassionate, altruistic, devoted and to accept the things that happen in a divine way.
And wouldn’t you know it? The animal it is represented by is the deer.
I am not a Hindu, I'll say again. But I know what I felt and I know what I experienced. That mother doe and I communicated that day. And by our bond of motherhood, we became more than two different species on opposites sides of an issue. We became more than predator and prey. With her dying breath, she looked at me, her enemy, and saw something in me that was like her. She knew she could ask me for help with the one thing left for her here to take care of, her one last, most precious thing.
I didn’t let her down.
My garden is very different now. I keep one giant pot of red geraniums up high on a porch where no animals can reach, as a reminder that beauty can never excuse arrogance. Now my yard is flooded with lavender.
And you know, it smells wonderful. What’s even more wonderful is seeing the deer there. We’re at peace with each other now.
I wish it were that easy to make peace within our species.
banner of Three Goddesses by Thalia Took
Anomalistic, Tropical, Sidereal, Eclipse, Gregorian.
Those are five different systems for calculating a complete year. Huh. Just one more thing I learned somewhere along the way that I’d completely forgotten until now. Oh, well. I hope you’ll have a delightful year as it goes along, no matter which method you use for counting it out.
Here it is Day Six of 2008 and I’ve already experienced in it a fantastic holiday with Hubs, which was immediately followed by freezing winds, a rain deluge and a power outage that lasted 36 hours and will probably occur again, as the storms here worsen. Just an aside for those who might be interested - we residents of California are plagued by a utility monopoly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, whose upper management is as greedy and inept as the government of any third world country. I mean it. PG&E merits a post in itself. And if I wrote it, it would be riddled with disgust. Anyway, with such opposing experiences of fun and frustration only five days in, it makes me wonder what kind of a year I’ll be having in its entirety.
2007 for me personally, was a year of adventure in many ways. One thing about it that I liked in particular was discovering VOX. My neighbourhood here is terrific and growing better by the day. Apart from all the intriguing things my neighbours posted and talked about, they even helped me with the development of my new novel. (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about and might like to, you’re welcome to have a look at this previous post. )
The responses I received to my questions were unique and thought-provoking. From the bottom of my heart, I thank everyone who took the time to write to me. Some neighbours even wrote whole entries of their answers on their own blogs. (You can see these, too, if you like. I have links to them at the end of this post.) As a result of everything that was written, I was able to flesh out the motivations of my main characters, three of whom happen to be ghosts.
Yeah, that’s right - I’ve gone from zany, sometimes sarcastic non-fiction, to frivolous fiction. After spending three gruelling years on a memoir, Harlot’s Sauce, which is now - at last - in its last editing stage and should (fingers crossed, touch wood,) be published sometime early this year, I decided to write something light-hearted and fun.
And believe it or not, something happened this past October that made me wonder if I should consider the possibility that perhaps…just maybe, mind…ghosts, or spirits, or whatever you want to call them, really do exist. And if they do exist, they surely exist on the Queen Mary, a ship which is now docked permanently in Long Beach, California and is used as an historic hotel and museum. What I didn’t know when I booked the Queen Mary, was that it's known for its ‘speculative spectre’ population. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I stayed on the Queen Mary for several days when I attended the California Women’s Conference. I’d been given the exciting task of taking production notes for the film crew of the convention and was very focussed on doing a good job. And when I’m focussed on work, I tell you, I am not thinking about anything else. Especially not the paranormal. But I received this assignment last minute and there were no other hotels available near the Long Beach Convention Centre. My main concern about the ship was that they didn’t have readily-accessible cell phone or internet service. And considering that I was in Long Beach to work, that was my worry, not whether or not there was a ghost in my cabin.
Nonetheless, I think there was. Some unusual events took place in my cabin while my mind was on work emails and cell phone reception. Like some of my things ending up in places I hadn’t left them. For example, my reading glasses. I’m sure I left them right next to my contact lens case on the vanity, not on my pillow. I know that seems like nothing more than a busy woman being forgetful, but you know, I’m very organised when I work. And when I moved my specs back, wondering how they got on my pillow, but still not thinking ‘ghosts’ nor even ‘intruder,’ they somehow were moved right back onto my pillow again within five minutes.
Now, those who read my blog know that peri-menopause and all the symptoms thereof, figure big time in my life these days. So at first, I thought this was all just me being hormonally-challenged and absent-minded as a result.
Until I heard the giggle. In my cabin. It sounded like a child’s giggle, perhaps a little girl. And that’s when it occurred to me that there might,…just might, be a spirit and a playful one at that, on board.
Well, after leaving the ship and doing some research on its history, it does turn out that there is- allegedly- a little girl haunting that ship. More research and interviews with several historians and, though I can’t believe I’m writing this- a ghost hunter - taught me all about her. She is, supposedly, one of several dozen ghosts who make their presence known aboard the Queen Mary.
Now, you are an intelligent group, so you can dismiss this as nonsense if you like. I wouldn’t blame you. However, being a writer, I just couldn’t let this go. I thought and thought about it:
If ghosts exist, why do they exist? Is it the shop-worn “unfinished business” explanation? I'm thinking, hasn’t everyone got unfinished business when they die? And if that is the explanation, it would have to be exceptional unfinished business, wouldn’t it, to keep someone hanging around after they’re dead? I mean, when they’ve got other worlds waiting, that we’ve been told at least, have more to offer a spirit whose flesh-and-blood body is no longer useable?
From all this contemplation and research, came a plot, which features four women, (all corporeal) who meet three ghosts. The ghosts seek out these women individually to help them solve a problem each has which is keeping them on this plane, rather than ‘moving on.’ By helping the ghosts, the women solve their own conflicts. I know, I know - this is a very ordinary plot, which is why I had to make my ghosts and other main characters extra-ordinary.
And that’s where my VOX neighbours came in. I asked questions about ghosts and unresolved lost love relationships, etc., and got sad, funny, thoughtful and amazing answers. One neighbour even has photos of ghosts to show me, she says. And another gentleman, Paxton, whose posts are always worthy of note, provided a matchless answer regarding a father-son relationship that gave me the sole motivation for one of my ghosts remaining behind. This ghost is here because he has to get a message to his son, before his son, who is already elderly, dies. Paxton gave me the idea for this motivation when he wrote, “My parents divorced when I was eight, and my father never made any attempt to stay in contact with me. He died of a heart attack when I was 19. It seems a shame, and something I feel some small guilt over, though intellectually I know very well that it was his responsibility, being the adult, to be a father to me, not mine to be a child to him.”
As a parent, this guilty feeling Paxton described tore at me. And I, too, had felt undeserved guilt regarding my own parents when I was a child. So then, what would a loving father do if he realised that by his death, he'd abandoned and inadvertently fostered unwarranted self-reproach in his son? The answer to me was that he would try to somehow get a message of love and approval to his child. However, those who know spirit lore know that ghosts are confined to the areas of their death, therefore, my ghost, who dies on a battleship, can only rely on a living person finding his still alive son and delivering his message. A message which is written in a sixty-year-old diary hidden on board.
The live woman to whom the ghost appears to help him deliver his message, has unresolved issues with her grown son, too. So, you see, they share a bond. The motivation for her actions and decisions came with the help of other answers I received from other neighbours.
The other live characters are all derived from women I’ve had the privilege of knowing in my own life. However, one female in the story is solely her own inspiration. I’ve based my character, Cynthia, on Mrs. Peel, a feisty, Brazilian woman who lives in the UK and writes on VOX. Despite her many challenges, which she candidly shares with all of us, she takes the time to reflect on other neighbours’ lives and has a well of compassion, love and humour that I find remarkable for someone who has so much heartache to bear in her own life. She openly admits she is financially-challenged and suffers from ill-health. Other than offering her friendship and a sympathetic ear, I cannot help her with these trials in real life. But on paper I can. So for my satisfaction and hers, the Cynthia in my story is, to use two clichés, “healthy as a horse and filthy rich.” She has also all the other marvellous qualities of her real counterpart - she’s warm, intelligent and fun-loving. Her actions in the story move events along to some madcap conclusions.
And I think that’s all I’m going to write about my new story. It’s on hold anyway, as I finished up the editing for Harlot’s Sauce in the next weeks. Writing for a living, rather than a pastime brings with it accountability. I have a contractual obligation to deliver my memoir in the best shape possible. So that’s what I’ll be working on these first few weeks of 2008. I have to put this new project aside for now, though I am very excited about all my characters who have come alive for me thanks to everyone who helped me. I’ve listed and linked my neighbours here to thank them again:
Absatou
Althea Romeo-Mark
Becky
ButterflyBaby
Crowseer
Foxsydee
Giuseppina
Grrrace
Icarus
Iniysa
IrishLuckyLass
Laurie
Lightchaser
London Yankee
Paxton
And thank you also to Michelle Solange who created the beautiful new banner for my VOX blog.
Happy, healthy .prosperous 2008 to all. Let this be the year all conflicts in the world end. It’s something to hope for, at least and better than the usual New Year resolutions…
Image of Father Time by http://www.embellishments.us/images/mystical
Thanks to VOX, I’ve been having some very interesting philosophical, social and religious discussions with some of my new “netpals” from Australia. Their perspectives got me thinking about something I wrote in my memoir, Harlot’s Sauce, which has just been completed and which is being shopped around to publishers as we speak. So for this week’s blog I’m taking an excerpt on religion from that memoir and dedicated it to my new Aussie friends, most especially to one very deep thinker, Snowy.
I expect an extra drink from that still of yours for this one, Snowy. ; )
On Organised Religion
I was raised Catholic, as were many people I knew growing up. But, I had a few friends who were Protestant and then there was my friend, Margie, who was Jewish. When we were in high school, just for fun, we’d tag along to each other’s worship services occasionally. Even though Margie married a Catholic later on, ( another intriguing story, that) she was overwhelmed when she first walked into my Catholic church as a teenager. The depiction of Jesus nailed to a Cross terrified her and the smell of the benediction incense nearly gave her an asthma attack.
Despite that, Margie wasn’t as affected by Catholic services as much as I was affected the first time I attended Protestant services. Having attending Catholic services all my life, the Protestant Church seemed too... well…comfy. The service too upbeat and brief, there was nothing daunting about the altar and there was no forbidding priest looking down from a godly height.
In fact, the officiator, who was actually smiling from the ground-level pulpit at the people attending worship, was allowed to be black or even female, I was told. I also thought the parishioners’ role was too easy. They didn’t have to kiss the hands of priests, nor kneel in supplication when he started his wailing. (Which in this church, he never did.) After all this cheerfulness in church, I just didn’t feel browbeaten, as I was supposed to, after I’d left. Therefore, Protestant church couldn’t truly be church…could it? Not to me, at least. I was a “first-generation American” and our priests were from the 'old school.'
If you don’t know what it means to be a “first-generation American,” you’ll probably never understand the wide gap there was between those of us whose parents or grandparents had immigrated from other countries and those whose ancestors had been in the United States since the Constitution was signed. There are many differences between us, believe me, but they’re especially evident in our religions. Things might be different today, but when I was growing up, we first-generation ethnic groups had much more grinding religions than our more assimilated counterparts. As children, these religions kept us awake nights, terrified, our thoughts circling furiously. As adults, some of us became crushed followers or bitter atheists. Others tried intensive psychotherapy, but it didn’t help. Our spiritual educations were like deep moles in our skin. They were impossible to remove and could go bad at any moment.
Don’t misunderstand. I believe all religions based on the teachings of Abraham, Mohammed, Christ, or whomever else you’re partial to, started out as marvellous ideas. But here’s what I think happened:
One fateful day, Satan said to his minions, “I’ve just had a thought that might make this religion stuff work for me.”
With that, he went out and hired:
Tony Blair’s tailor
Sylvio Berlusconi’s plastic surgeon
The British Council
The U.S. Senate
The O.J. Simpson trial jury
Michael Moore’s film editors
Three tenured high school teachers
Six class valedictorians
Nine widowed old ladies who’d never had orgasms
Twelve zealots in pursuit of a cause, but who wanted to wear fur and eat meat and hadn’t read Orwell
He hit the jackpot when he signed on these last three:
Rupert Murdoch, Karl Rove and Bud Selig
Together, these dynamic disciples, whom I’ll name, “The Revelation Delegation," brainstormed a business plan, which re-scripted all the religions of the globe. Somehow, (here my theory needs more research,) they sold us the revised versions, through which we learned:
a) to memorize lists of sins, degrees of sin and the punishments for them.
b) which foods are “clean” and which foods are “dirty.”
c) that our babies are born permeated with vice and in order to purge them, we must pierce, peel, oil, splash, dunk, paint, decorate or bind them.
d) anything that’s too much fun or feels too good will send us to hell. (“Bingo Night” is okay, though.)
e) if we don’t do what they tell us with our hair, beards and head gear, our souls will stay soiled forever.
f) that shame, remorse, hunger, pain, abstention, untreated illness and Irritable Bowel Syndrome, are all virtues.
g) Good people follow our religion. Bad people don’t. We should try to change the bad people’s minds and make them be good, but if we can’t, it’s better for them if we torment or kill them.
h) Last and most essential, that when all benevolent religious leaders of the world stated, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” they did not mean, to quote from Bill and Ted, “Be excellent to each other” and “party on, dudes.” What they actually meant was, “Do It unto others before they Do It unto you.”
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And, that’s just a portion of what I’ve learned about organised religion. If you’d like to read more about this, go to www.harlotssauce.com and click on the Writings Excerpts Page. There you can read all about another aspect of certain religions, a thing some of us have never even heard of, but many of us know know well. It's called, “The Evil Eye.”
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