Word of the Week - 37

Seaside village from Kirsty Elson Designs.

Michelle Holmes Embroidery.

Word(s) of the Week:  PLAYING FOR TIME

There is a sensibility with which I identify in the work of Kirsty Elson and Michelle Holmes.  Their wooden seaside encampments and understated embroidered vignettes express visually some of what I hope to capture in the ongoing story on my blog of Gloria. The Reading Man and life in Billington's Cove.  In the saga of 60-some episodes (so far), I arrived at a pivotal moment and its details have not yet become clear.

Because the characters and their place found me, not the other way around, I've learned to be trusting and patient.  They will spill the beans when they are ready.  They resist, which I've come to respect, any of my attempts to give them false moments, contrived musings, inauthentic action.  They and their setting do not belong to ordinary reality as to time and space.  I consider them not only imaginary friends but more.  They seem able to gauge the tides of my heart and inform me accordingly.  I have come to know myself better through them.  With their help I am clearer about what I believe, how the world, the universe even, works.

What happens after the dance, I mean THE DANCE, I have no idea.  It is not the ultimate moment in their story, yet it is much more than just a moment.  My great wish is that I not muddy any part of it by rushing them.

Once upon a time I meditated daily.  In the way of things, I somehow grew apart from that beneficial practice.  In the last few weeks, joining Oprah and Deepak Chopra, I've found what may be the way back to the states of mind that result from meditation.  My first thought was unattractively judgmental.  After the first session, I was grateful for the ease of the exercise.  It may be the lazy woman's path and I'm fine with that.  My rather elderly joints and muscles need comfort in order to focus.  I am either dreaming more or am more aware of my dreams.  I've had moments of being more connected to aspects of myself that I forgot existed.  I am able to slip into a state of detachment from daily stuff and let images appear, either during the meditation or other parts of the day.

In one of these "states," I saw a younger Reading Man standing in a field, talking in a soft animal voice to a horse for whom he obviously had great affection.  Their heads together, they seemed halves of the same whole.  Any stilling of the chattering, fretting mind allows the veil to thin.  I love going there.

I hope it won't be too much longer before my undeclared lovebirds and I resume our adventure.  I think of them as absent friends or a phantom limb, not as inventions of my imagination.  Until we meet again.  xo

Previews of Coming Attractions in Billington's Cove

So help me, I will do my best to have a blog post - Gloria and anything else that demands attention - tomorrow. Meanwhile, two images to ponder.

A Small Fiction continues

A Flinty Resolve.  That wouldn’t have been a bad name for Gloria’s tea shoppe. It was her, at least one aspect.  Gloria was, as I suppose we all hope to be, greater than the sum of her parts.  And her parts were many.

A childhood friend of Gloria’s once told that her mother had learned to make baklava from their neighbor, Mrs. Dalgarian.  The test, said Mrs. D., was to have dough thin enough to read the newspaper through and would determine the perfection by doing just that.  The friend’s mother being the contrarian that she was, chose to use the Sunday funnies rather than a page of news articles.  Mrs. D. assumed it was a cultural thing, this insistence on doing it some other way than the teacher said, not knowing that her pupil would have taken another path no matter what the instructions.  She did, however, the friend reported,  learn to make very acceptably authentic-tasting baklava, a skill that served her well the rest of her life.  Gloria was like that, a perfectionist about her pastry but how could she be anything else?  In the first place, it was one of her passions and, secondly, it had a pleasing margin of profit as a shop specialty.  The shortbread crust on the tarts, layers and layers of puff pastry on the creme horns and turnovers and her bar cookies?  Nearly scandal-producing in their rich variations.  The most abstemious patron would think little or nothing of ordering a “wee” plate of six different varieties, then using a moistened fingertip to press up the crumbs.  There was more licking going on at Gloria’s than most people would be comfortable knowing about.

Raspberry Rhapsody, Toffee-Coffee Sandwich, Don’t Blink Meringue-topped Cherry Squares, Floodgates Brown Sugar Fudge Insinuations.  The names went on and on, some downright bizarre, some usefully descriptive, all well-known to and unashamedly asked for by regulars.  If one of the regular customers tried to point to a treat by way of ordering, rather than saying the full and sometimes silly name out loud, Gloria feigned a hearing problem.  She beamed with approval when a first-timer read the name from the card at the end of the tray, standing there smartly in its careful Copperplate hand (Gloria’s, of course) as though introducing thrice-removed royalty at the Viscount’s ball.  When she heard them spoken as she intended, Gloria could taste not only the finished treat as it rested on the bisque-colored enamel tray; she could taste each ingredient as it had been added to the mix.  Her palate was a genius at compartmentalization.

Billington’s Cove, the finely arched eyebrow of pebbly shore that lay just south of Greater West Elba,  faced slightly more south than west and thus was graced with warmer currents which often appeared as gemstone bright  aqua ribbons in the clear green water.  Those more tropical eddies delivered the fish bonanza which meant money in the bank for Cove-ites going back six or more generations.  It was not considered an “industry,” it had not been modernized with processing plants and the like.  It was catch:sell.  Catch:cook.  Catch:share.  Fish were currency in the Cove and surrounding communities.  Fish could be traded - and had been - for just about anything.  A fish-based economy could lead to taking them up, one at a time, as a means of self-defense or pungent aggression.  Gloria permitted time to study herself in the gold-leaf-framed ornamental mirror that reflected head and torso and smile as she chose or recalled a finned and meaty fellow who accentuated the pinkish-red of her abundant hair or contrasted handsomely with the hue of her frock.