Samhain 2007

Tonight, the summer ends and the dark half of the year begins. It is a time to reap the final harvest, a time to cull the herd. A time to stock our larders and cellars against the snowy moons ahead.

Long ago we would all light our hearths from the bonfire that blazed on the village green to strengthen our ties to one another. From that point forward, we were all one in warmth and light for the remainder of the year. We would all see each other through the lean months of winter, sharing what we had to offer in ritual feasts meant to hold back the night. Today we hide these rituals behind closed doors and tightly shuttered windows. Tonight, hidden from the prying eyes of judgment, we purify ourselves in fire and prepare to receive our dead.

We feast our dead to honor them, to celebrate them, to comfort them. We want them to know that we remember them and that we still care. We want them to be happy when they visit, not restless or annoyed, not bound to a life they have transitioned beyond. Though we rarely admit it, we still talk to them in quiet or desperate moments. We look to them for guidance as we hope others might look to us even after we fade from the light of this world into the light of another. Our dead are our anchors to the past, stabilizing us in this life.

Centuries ago, invaders from the far side of the dyke christened our spirits into saints with angled names and converted our dead into demons beneath their saxsam knives. They coveted our holy days, coveted our three-faced gods, cleaving them from us, cleaving them to their own. Substituting their beliefs for ours by dominion and sleight of hand as though such a trade was an equitable exchange in the agora of ideas.

Today, even the hallowed substitute they provided has become a parody, a harlequin comedy, a farce played out by a wandering troop of motley fools and children. The communal bonfire has dwindled to a votive tended by crones in black just as maternal aunts tend the markers of our family. In the fading light, the dead become no more feared than children playing dress-up, no more respected than their parents playing make-believe. But do we always know the face behind the mask we bribe with sweets? Perhaps a few of our dead, reduced to beggary and thieving, return tonight to reclaim their portion for the year.

We abandoned the old ways face down in the bog, garroted like criminals before a feast day. The skulls of tradition are piled upon the roots of ancient oaks which have grown heavy and thick from blood yet remain hungry. But the lords of the forest are also patient. Silently lifting their limbs to their arboreal gods, they pray we might return before they too are hewn to feed the furnaces that warm our homes and distance our lives from theirs. Or feed the pyres that reduce our dead to the ashes we sow like seeds on the wind rather than tend among the spirits of their kindred.

Today, too many of us fear belief more than the restless spirits of our ancestors. Unanchored, we allow the living to pull us headlong in whatever direction they desire, thinking that is our future, while our path wanders aimlessly because our dead are dead to us.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

The Monkey Howls

Deep within the jungle the monkey howls, unsure how it became trapped within a carpeted cage of concrete and gypsum. It awakens matted and alone, bereft of the soothing ritual of mutual grooming, uncertain what became of its troop, its tribe, its family, unable to comprehend the rules that regulate its primal needs.

It screams its frustration to the darkness. No one listens.

Each day we beat the monkey down, relegating its desires to the cold-blooded landscape between sentience and survival. It dwells in the reptilian depths, only surfacing with frustration and anger at the Other, the one who does not belong, the one encroaching on its territory, its mate, its life, its existence. The one threatening the first of its tree, the women of its troop, the children of its line. Then it growls and howls and shakes the bars of our frontal lobes.

We camouflage our hairy hides beneath a cloak of civilization whose thin leather cracks and peels as those around us abandon the conventions upon which we thought we had all agreed. Others no longer turn their faces away but reclaim eye for blind eye confident the magic of their shamans will grant them second sight. Fear sends us huddling to one another, terrified that the shadow stalking the night is a hungry leopard rather than a tame and playful housecat.

Each morning the monkey raises its voice with the dawn, chattering its protests, its anger, its discontent. That cathartic cry rises to a warning wail of loneliness to the wilderness we fear may claim our souls again.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Shards

I gaze out the window straining to capture the scene in sketches. Each sentence becomes a contour, each phrase a dark smudge of charcoal against the page. Colored pencils highlight the flame of dawn reflected beneath the clouds, or the golden aura radiating from the grass.

Do those short, sharp stokes capture the landscape before me, or do I need to spend more time shading with a flat blade of words?

Some days practice brings a steadier hand hour by hour. Today, words clog my thinking, dripping with an incessant tick, tick, tick rather than opening my mind to breathe.

As I struggle to describe a flower that makes my eyes ache, a veil of clouds thickens like the strands of mold binding the dead leaves in the garden, fading the sky a uniform white tinged with the dingy gray of old sheets drawn across its window like cheap curtains. Vivid colors dull like the ungroomed fur of an aging cat drooping across old bones.

A southern wind tinged with moisture augurs the transition from dry to humid, from cool to jungle hot. The breeze murmurs as it sways a pine, rubbing its trunk across guy wires like a rosined bow set to the untuned strings of a creaky standup bass. It becomes difficult to distinguish between distant, imaginary voices and the sounds the wind creates.

The morning slips by in slow agitation, my heart pounding against the coming change. Finally, my concentration shatters. Fragments of thoughts tumble one against the other, pulled by the same inescapable force. Each catches my attention for instant as it flashes a reflection before shading itself from the light as it spirals downward.

Routine transforms into a quest to the clear the glass daggers from my mind. A translucent film of blood stains each reflection as I grasp at it. My fingers slip and instinctively clutch tighter until the pain slices deeper and they reluctantly release the sliver which shatters further as I let it go.

Thoughts come in flashes between the ringing blows of a migraine driven through my right eye like a ten-penny nail. The shards will lay where they rest until I sweep them aside in a day or two, brooding at the lack of fractured faces staring back at me, the distorted semblance of an audience responding to my pain.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Learning to Fly

The fog has lifted this morning. After two nights of restless sleep with intense dreams, last night passed heavily with little memory. Unlike days where I can see the fog, the past two concealed themselves behind an invisible veil, washing out the colors of the world, distancing them, detaching them from my eyes in a way that made me anxious and annoyed without quite knowing why.

The morning light rends the fabric, piercing deep into my eyes. The day is flinty and bright as the honed edge of a Damascus steel blade. Its sharpness brings clarity, freedom to think, to explore, to chronicle my journey more legibly than the hastily rendered map sketched the days before. A day I wish would go on forever, a day I feel light and able to fly.

Doubts nibble at my wings, feasting on this newfound energy, weighing me down. Bursts of light drive them away only to see them creep forward again as it fades. These small creatures will eventually recloud my mind as either the weather or my mood turns.

But not today.

Today, they remain on the periphery, hiding. Today, I can focus to the horizon. Even the smallest details draw my attention, making me wonder how I could have overlooked them before. The color, scent and texture of scenes are rendered with the smallest and lightest strokes. Pieces of the puzzle find their mates at a glance instead of through painstaking repetition. The voices of characters babble in my head like a stream tumbling down a mountain after rain. Threads of ideas untangle, slipping from one another as smoothly as spun silk instead clinging in their normal scratchy wool.

I want to share days like today even though the shadows whisper that what I write will likely become garbled when filtered through the fog of someone else's morning. But that doesn't matter. I never know what scrawled line might bring color to someone else's world like a rainbow after tears.

Thoughts resonate within my mind, filling it against the days when it feels hollow and empty. Days when it echoes like a canyon, when one phrase or line might reflect back from a day like today. Those words are the voice that guides me through the fog. They call me to the edge and one step beyond to savor the wind until the ground jolts me awake to ponder another pale dawn outside my bedroom window wondering if it foreshadows another day in the sky.

Days like today the fall is worth the pain of impact knowing that one day I might learn to fly.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Faeries

Thoughts flit in and out of my subconscious like faeries on the wing. Some are shy and flirtatious, concealing themselves in the thinnest gossamer spun from spider's silk. Others are more playful, sparkling as their jewelry flashes in the sun.

Gregarious by nature, one attracts another until dozens vie for my attention. Some days, they draw up sides to wage an impromptu battle of conflicting ideas, delighting as their miniature swords prick my imagination. Other days they go into seclusion, refusing to reveal themselves for some perceived slight. Then without warning, they streak across the periphery, making me hunt them in an elaborate game of hide and seek. Most days, they converse in tones just beyond my comprehension like the babble of distant water imitating voices.

They love to try on different colors just to see which camouflages them the best. They cloak themselves in the deep blues of a winter sky and in the hazy whites of summer, in the yellow-greens of spring returned and in the myriad flames of fall. They peek out from the gray and dun fur of a chattering squirrel, from the iridescent indigo feathers of a watchful crow, from the charcoal and pearl clouds of approaching rain. Anything that catches my eye or sparks my imagination.

They are drawn to the quiet of the morning and the solitude of night. Deep stillness makes them curious. As I doze in the autumn sun, they light upon my face, tickling my nose with the slippered cat's whiskers of their feet, fanning my cheeks like newly emerged butterflies drying their wings. Through half-shaded eyes I can sometimes see them flitting back and forth like hummingbirds scenting nectar. Should my eyes burst open, they startle and take flight.

On good days the faeries dance before my eyes like dappled sunlight through the maples, whispering gold into my ears in tiny chimes of laughter on the wind. On the best days, I dance with them. I find the motion soothes me.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Recollection

Two things happened last night that haven't happened in well over 20 years, one driving the other though not intentionally.

First, I received a phone call from someone I hadn't heard from since just after high school. Catching up with that voice from my past caused us to leave later than we would have otherwise to run some errands. Which put at the intersection of alt 19 and 102 just in time to dodge around a car parked in the right-hand traffic lane. Which gave us just enough time to see but not quite avoid the detritus in the center lane strewn around a work-belt and a five gallon pickle bucket. Which ended our trip prematurely with a thump, thump, thump coming from the right rear tire that most of us are familiar with.

Minutes later as I was struggling to free the pneumatically tightened lug nuts with an old-school, x-shaped tire iron ,which Karen fortunately had in her car, and she was relating our information to AAA on the cell in case I didn't succeed, I flashed back to an older encounter, a different night on a different road nearly 35 years ago.

I was eight and my parents had decided to take my sister and I on the classic American family vacation, a driving and camping tour of the great, natural places out west, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, Carlsbad Caverns, the works. I think it was supposed to save their marriage, but only ended up prolonging it another couple years. But they didn't know that at the time so they packed us into a green, four door Galaxy 500, strapped a Starcraft pop-up camper to the hitch and headed for the interstate. This would be in the early 70's. There were no cell phones and roadside assistance wasn't quite as common as it is today.

It is late afternoon and we are on an interstate littered with blown out truck tires somewhere in Texas when we hear a POW like a gunshot followed by a rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump behind us. My father throws on the flashers, pulls onto the narrow shoulder and gets out to look. Traffic whizzes by at alarming speed and closeness. My mother, afraid someone will hit the car while it is stopped, has my sister and I get out through the passenger side doors and has us sit in the grass as far from the car as we could get, just on the other side of grass-filled ditch against a barbed-wire fence. My father reports that the rear tire on the Galaxy is shredded completely, and the shrapnel has taken one of the camper tires with it.

The camper spare is hung below the camper, a pain, but not too difficult to reach. The spare for the car is in the bottom of the trunk, which is packed with all the things a then modern family with two children needed to survive for three weeks on the road. The Galaxy is a throw-back to the 60's, so you could easily fit five bodies in the trunk should you ever have the need. Had our luggage been dead mobsters, we would have squeezed in a sixth.

While my mother distracts my sister and I with an impromptu dinner from whatever she can scrape up quickly from the car and camper, my father proceeds to empty the trunk and pile our belongings on the side of the road. The now intermittent traffic is still cruising by, whipping the corners of his clothing in each draft. He finally excavates to the bottom of the trunk and pulls the jack and the tire iron free. Again, this is the 70's so the jack is the old-style ratchet you no longer see. He has a choice of tire irons, the curved classic that came with the car and doubles as the jack handle that you now see only in the hands of angry bikers in old movies, and an x-shaped iron that fits three different sized lugs and has a pry. Both are longer and capable of generating more torque than anything you find in a car today.

My father starts with the car, thinking if worse comes to worst, we can drive somewhere safer to continue with the camper. He doesn't have to pull the hubcap as the concussion of the failure sent it speeding past the car somewhere farther up the shoulder. He sets the first iron around the lug nut, pulls, then repositions and pushes. It won't budge. Not even a hint. Not even a tiny creak of metal on metal that tells you that maybe, just maybe you'll be able to break it free if you work hard enough. He switches lug nuts. No go. He switches tire irons. Nothing. We can see he is getting frustrated, but there is nothing any of us can do to help. It's him versus the tire.

He struggles and strains. He curses and mumbles. Finally he switches to the camper tire, changing it without too much trouble just to get a sense of accomplishment. With a victory behind him, he approaches the car again. He studies it, checking it from every angle, measuring, calculating. He tries again with a fresh perspective. Budged. He tries stepping on the tire iron, using weight instead of strength to generate the torque. Nothing.

With a deep sigh of frustration, he calls my mother away from us for a conference. They huddle, talking, arguing. All we see is him pointing up the road and her shaking her head. We only hear a few words from him, "walk," "gas station," "tow truck." My mother crosses her arms crossed, "two kids," "dark," "alone." You have to remember, my parents are Bostonians transplanted into Florida. To them, remote Texas is the Deep South, alien, perhaps hostile territory in the early 70's. Civil Rights is a fresh wound here, recently been imposed by Northerners just like themselves.

By now twilight has started to fall. We have been stranded well over an hour. While there was traffic, no one stopped. Now there is no more than the occasional big-rig screaming by. I am scared and I think my sister, who is older than me, is too though she does a better job of disguising it. "Sally, what do you want me to do?" my father asks my mother in exasperation. She has no answer. Now it's almost completely dark.

A pick-up truck passes us. It is beat-up, dented, chalky white and rusting. And big. Today, it would be an F-350 or better. Or maybe that's just a child's eyes making everything larger in memory. It slows, then stops, overshooting our car by 100 yards. It backs up on the shoulder until it has us blocked in. My father tenses, unsure what to expect.

A man hops down from the truck. The first thing I notice is that he is short, much shorter than my father who is over six feet. This man is more my mother's size, five foot four maybe five six, but stocky and strong. The second thing I notice is that this man is missing his right arm from just below the elbow. He is older than my father, perhaps by ten or fifteen years.

"Looks like you folks could use some help."

"Yeah," my father says nodding, obviously dubious of what kind of help this one-armed man can render other than perhaps a ride. "We blew out a tire, and the lug nuts are seized." My mother holds us back protectively.

"Damned mechanics always over-tighten them with those pneumatic wrenches." The man hops back into his truck. "Give me a second to turn this thing around."

He pulls a three point turn using the shoulder and one lane of the highway, then stops nose to nose with the Galaxy. his headlights shine into the windshield of our car. He leave the engine running. He gets out again and heads for the hood of his pick-up, lifting it with his only hand, sliding the pole into the slot of the hood with the crook of his other elbow to brace it open. He does this with the practiced ease of a man quite used to his "disability." He reaches into the cavernous hood of the truck and comes out with a shop light, the kind with a reflective metal cowling, which he hands to my father.

"Go ahead and get some light on that tire," he says as he uncoils the cord, feeding it to my father.

As my father positions the light on the ground near the tire, the man roots around under the hood again, trying to unbolt something with his one hand. When he finally frees it, he emerges with something that looks like a giant drill.

"Since the mechanics never listen, I had this installed." He hefts the drill. "Out here, you never know when you'll need it and no help is around. Let's see what size lug you've got."

He continues chattering at my father as he checks the lug nuts, finds the appropriate socket, installs it on the drill and wanders up to the tire. My sister and I squirm, but my mother holds us back.

"Don't worry about them," he says to her. "They'll be fine."

She lets us go, saying we can watch but to stay out of the way. We approach, openly curious and cautious as only children and animals can be.

I watch as the man squats down before each lug, holding the drill in his one hand, bracing behind it with the crook of his other elbow and leaning into it. The drill bucks a bit, making the sound of an angry Bengal tiger. He drops the first nut into my father's open palm. Four more growls, four more lug nuts in my father's hand. He finishes in seconds what my father couldn't accomplish in more than an hour. Simple, easy, efficient.

But the man isn't done. He insists on helping my father wrestle the spare out of the trunk. My father jacks up the car, then the two of them wrangle off the shredded tire, then wrangle on the spare. They tighten the lug nuts with the tire iron. They pack the spare back into the trunk. My mother stuffs our belongings around the spare and into the back seat, knowing the spare will have to be replaced.

My father thanks the man profusely. The man simply responds that he knows what it's like.

"Let me follow you up to the next exit. There's a garage up there that can probably replace that tire. You don't want to be stuck out here after dark." He stows his tools, pivots his truck to face the right direction again and waves my father around. He follows us to the next exit and makes sure the garage attendant doesn't completely rip us off for a new tire before he heads back on his way.

My father still tells the story in his own semi-sardonic style of how the only one-armed man in all of east Texas with a pneumatic drill installed in his truck helped him change a tire one night.

The thing is, this man, if he's still alive, probably doesn't remember me, my father or our family. He just seemed to do what came naturally to him, helping people in need, probably not much special to him. But I remember him precisely because what he did for us was so much more important in our eyes than it was in his.

In my experience, it is often the things we think least about that have the most impact on others. Sometimes there is an odd causality to the world, a phone call that leads to a flat tire that leads to a memory that leads to a message delivered on the wings of a butterfly. What wind those wings stir, I cannot know. A positive one, I hope.

As a final note, I want to thank Sean for posting a similar experience with a radically different outcome on his blog. His got me thinking about how very fortunate my family was to have met that man on that night so many years ago. I wish he had been able to walk away with as positive a recollection.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Recollection (epilogue)

I sent this message prematurely, before the ink had fully dried on this incident.

As I was writing the message, I wasn't quite sure how to end it. Instead of sending the message on the wings of a butterfly, I almost said used the wings of a dragonfly, perhaps because they have long been a favorite for more than just their name. I love the flashing color of their opalescent bodies, the web-like transparency of their wings, the way they hover and flit from place to place with startling quickness and accuracy, the way they dry their wings perched on cattails and reeds within moments of emerging.

I should have listened to my instinct.

When we picked up Karen's car at the garage where we bought a new set of tires this afternoon, I spotted a dragonfly, bright green and iridescent, trapped in the plate glass window of the waiting area. Her instincts were at war with a reality she could not perceive. She was drawn to the light but had no way to comprehend the window held her captive. So she buzzed and bashed herself against the glass, hoping like the clinically insane that the same action repeated might yet yield a new outcome, not far from me some days. While she could see her destination clearly, she didn't have the ability to leave.

While Karen settled the bill, I coaxed her onto a finger. Each time I moved toward the door, she saw the sky move away from her and flew back toward the window. I couldn't give up on her. I finally thought to shade her eyes with my other hand so she couldn't see the motion as I carried her to the door. Her eyes cushioned against the reality she could no longer understand, she became content to rest on my finger, perched feather-light on her six dark legs within the cocoon of my palm. Just outside, I lifted my hand to reveal the sky. The last I saw her she was flying over the pavilion covering the gas pumps, a streak of green against the piercing blue of the afternoon sky.

I knew then the circle was complete, that this small creature was the final thread in a tapestry of causality spun some twenty four hours before. Not the wings of a butterfly raising a storm, rather a personal storm raising the wings of a dragonfly.

Driving home I knew it was worth the price of a new set of tires that we would have bought later anyway to see her fly free for her remaining hours or days, worth any inconvenience to set her back on the path of whatever her remaining destiny might be.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Memorial

He lies sleeping in stone, reclining on a pedestal devotedly polished by a thousand hands for his eternal rest. Resplendent in the armor that marked him as fearless on the battlefield, he is coifed and clad mail. The rings are bent but unbroken, his flesh bruised but whole just as it was before he entered his final battle. His hair, clean and even, peeks out in the wild twists and curls that marked his fierceness, his courage, his passion.

A sword has been worked into his hands, naked steel clutched to his chest like a talisman or a shield. Its tip rests near his boots as it had after so many victories when he dropped to one knee thanking his gods for the strength to overcome his adversaries, thanking his gods for their blessings and protection. His is pose of peace after conflict, marking him as a hero fallen in battle.

Three more swords adorn the pedestal, one building upon the next. At the top, the sword of his father marks the house and family whose honor he maintained. In the middle, the sword of his king and country, the realm he swore to defend from invasion and assault. At the bottom, the sword of his faith that formed the foundation of his every deed and action.

Passing strangers who view this monument see the end of an age. Some mourn a lost prince, the last Defender of their Faith, the final Protector of their Realm. Others believe he will rise reborn, returning in their time of need to shield their nation once again from enemies within and without. A few see this hero reborn each day in the eyes of the children whose parents worship him as a savior.

The handful who gather closer begin to perceive the flaws eating at the monument's structure and hierarchy. The swords set into pedestal are tarnished and discolored. To him family was more an obligation than real flesh and blood, his daily interactions sacrificed to duty. As Lord Protector, he stained his sword more with the blood of his countrymen than that of any outsiders or invaders. As Defender of the Faith, he aggressively wielded that sword to enforce the tenets of a religion based on peace. Even the sword poised upon his chest remains flecked with the blood of battle, no one having thought to clean it before committing him to stone. Unable to bear the weight above, the monument's foundation crumbles along its edges as gilt slowly flakes to rust.

Through the rain and ice and heat of each passing season, the memorial slowly cracks and splits open as if struggling to contain its secrets. Each year, his admirers patch the polished stone with concrete, hoping to conceal the nature of the man enshrined within.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III