"I WAS going to call you but...but then.....a man in a car stopped to ask if I was Ok.... and my friends gave me tissues, and...and.. the bleeding stopped, and they bought me an ice-cream and I knew...I knew like if I called you I'd have to like come home." The boss has returned from town, her sister in anxious attendance, with a bruised and lacerated lip, some little beast from a gang of beasts having stoned herself and her two little girl friends in the Park. Why? No particular reason. They were just there. The police assure me that there would be little point in making a complaint the beasts being juveniles etc etc. I don't agree. The boss is reluctant to make a complaint, name names. I tell her she is not a punch bag for anyone's low-grade craziness. And that her days of roaming free in town with her girls pals are over. She must content herself with the village till she is much much older.(At least twenty five) The boss is dauntless, and will get about, but she is still a child. Mine.
Afterwards I think of three young girls, the spinning stone, finding only her. She has a history. She it was who might have lost an eye last year in a bizarre swimming pool incident, a wave maker incompetently managed, and she collected shivering and shocked from school before that, mugged by a flying fire extinguisher. And so and so forth back to when she was pinned underneath the car wheel, two years old, in a driveway car reversal nightmare.We were lucky then, a broken leg the outcome. And back back yet when she was five weeks old, a foot slip as I began to ascend the stairs, and flying from my flailing arms she bounced on every step down.down before my agonized gaze. "Yeah I think we got away with it just about, this time", the doc told me later in Outpatients,
The thing is, some folks are always in the frame, first up in the firing line. . One of my brothers, a bright and open hearted child, was such. He it was who caught the flying yard fork carelessly tossed, in his face, the falling bricks from the outhouse on his sweet head, and he who waited in the path of the car wheel when the brake slipped, and later still his fingers smashed by the threshing bullock. No one else. Him, her,. such folk..
Good Friday. No work. My husbands comes to me having left the fearsome three to the train station.. A special day. The holy space, the break from the world. I keep my childhood memories of church, much and many mass, the sonorous chanting procession around the stations of the cross, the arrest before each dark and bloody picture. I light a metaphorical candle to the break out in my dizzy twenties, the frantic house parties devoted to drinking, the pubs being closed. For the whole day.
I think of the gnostic principle; as within, so it is without. Took me years to get that. Now I get it fleetingly. What happens to you in the world being neither random or punishment, but reflecting an inner interpretation, unconscious, implacable. An old role tacitly given and accepted, playing out. . I think of the boss, the brother, the Catholic notion of Christ crucified on the cross for the sins of the world. Another mystery in enigma wrapped as we see through a glass darkly having sucked up those Lethe waters good. Stoned.
Afterwards I think of three young girls, the spinning stone, finding only her. She has a history. She it was who might have lost an eye last year in a bizarre swimming pool incident, a wave maker incompetently managed, and she collected shivering and shocked from school before that, mugged by a flying fire extinguisher. And so and so forth back to when she was pinned underneath the car wheel, two years old, in a driveway car reversal nightmare.We were lucky then, a broken leg the outcome. And back back yet when she was five weeks old, a foot slip as I began to ascend the stairs, and flying from my flailing arms she bounced on every step down.down before my agonized gaze. "Yeah I think we got away with it just about, this time", the doc told me later in Outpatients,
The thing is, some folks are always in the frame, first up in the firing line. . One of my brothers, a bright and open hearted child, was such. He it was who caught the flying yard fork carelessly tossed, in his face, the falling bricks from the outhouse on his sweet head, and he who waited in the path of the car wheel when the brake slipped, and later still his fingers smashed by the threshing bullock. No one else. Him, her,. such folk..
Good Friday. No work. My husbands comes to me having left the fearsome three to the train station.. A special day. The holy space, the break from the world. I keep my childhood memories of church, much and many mass, the sonorous chanting procession around the stations of the cross, the arrest before each dark and bloody picture. I light a metaphorical candle to the break out in my dizzy twenties, the frantic house parties devoted to drinking, the pubs being closed. For the whole day.
I think of the gnostic principle; as within, so it is without. Took me years to get that. Now I get it fleetingly. What happens to you in the world being neither random or punishment, but reflecting an inner interpretation, unconscious, implacable. An old role tacitly given and accepted, playing out. . I think of the boss, the brother, the Catholic notion of Christ crucified on the cross for the sins of the world. Another mystery in enigma wrapped as we see through a glass darkly having sucked up those Lethe waters good. Stoned.
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