The Existence of elves, Revisited (July, 2009)

My family life was pretty much about living in a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between. I've said that on many occasions. Lately, I've been writing about the hard stuff, and I know that both Robin Hood, from yesterday, and When I Awoke to the Notion of Being a Writer from a couple of weeks ago are two such entries. I have been given so much support for them, that it has renewed the impetus as I move forward with my book.

However, I wanted to revisit an early entry here. I had a whole lot of magic in my early life, and when I started writing the blog I began with some of them. I had almost no followers. Not that it's a crowd now, but quantity hasn't been my goal. I simply wanted to work on my writing--the craft, the art, and the notion that one can convey pain without graphically sticking to horrifying detail!  However, more people have decided to stay and perhaps you might be getting a skewed view of what my childhood was!

One commenter felt he could not live my life with all I have gone through.  I put this little piece in here once more, for those who have never read it, to remind you that I LOVE my mom. And that Jack and I had some magical times. That our world held every single color imaginable, and, yes, to lighten up.

NOTE: I have scattered a few Garth Williams illustrations because THIS is the image of elves I had as a child, from the book Elves and Fairies.  I just thought it might evoke memories for boomers, and give others a feel for the fifties, when my memories were the living events.  At one time I asked my mom whether I could grow up to be Garth Williams and she told me that I would have to work on growing up to be Jetty.  I sulked for easily a whole fifteen minutes.

Enough intro  ... Onward... From July, 2009--moved to today

... [There] were moments of pure joy and absolute beauty in my childhood. In fact, they took up more time and space, and as I explore this art form of memoir in my blog, I think I would rather start here. I would rather begin with the magic that was my mom, Jean Margaret. We'll leave the darkness for other times...
***

Me, around 2
in ecstasy over a feather

Flying Lessons: Proof of the Existence of Elves

Spirituality is a strange thing in the heart of a child. It has wings sometimes; it flies up from the leaves, the grass, through water, from everywhere at once. More than half a century later, I feel it and taste it, hear the echoes of that day. Grown ups call what children feel so deeply “magic,” then try to teach them it’s God. They don’t seem to ever get it; children need no teaching. We know it is all the same, whatever name we give It. The Keeper of all Magic is God.

On the other hand, when I was not yet four and my brother was already six, for us, the Keeper of the Magic was Mommy.

Especially on sunny mornings, when the light threw rainbows all over the kitchen, and she'd wipe her hands on her apron, not even finishing the breakfast dishes, turn to us and whisper, "picnic!" Out would come the hard-boiled eggs ever-ready in the fridge, for deviling. Jacky would make the chocolate milk. I would rinse the grapes. Before you knew it, Jack's enormous red wagon appeared, the thermos was full, picnic packed, and we were gone.

This particular day, Mommy had said to me, "Always remember, Jetty, there is always something more compelling in life than housework."

***

We always stopped on the dirt road beside the hole in the bridge. She’d let us look down at the water rushing miles below. It was on our picnic that particular day that we learned about elves.

“Lie on your backs and don’t make a sound,” said Mommy, doing this herself. “Just look at the clouds and listen.”

At first I didn’t hear much, but gradually I heard it. Soft rustlings, small feet, rushing sounds that had no familiarity.

“Now look at where you hear the sounds,” she said. “You can’t see anything, can you, except a few ants. They are much too small to make such sounds.”

We were stumped. We waited, looking at our mother with full confidence that some new axiom was about to be shared.

“Elves,” she said. “Well, and fairies, too, but primarily elves because fairies tend to fly. It’s the only explanation. They are invisible to us, but they make sounds. What else could it be? If it were birds or animals, we’d have seen them. We have them all around here.” She waved her arms, encompassing the whole woods, it seemed. “And we have them outside the kitchen window, too. Jean Ellen saw them yesterday. We decided you two should know about it, because we want you to help us make them some furniture.”

“In the window box, Mom?” asked Jacky.

“Precisely.”

We sat up and opened our sandwich cookies in solemn wonder. Elves. At our house. First a picnic, now this. Lunchtime drifted lazily into early afternoon, as we named cloud shapes, studied three ants trying to move one large crumb to their home. Mommy wouldn’t let us squash it.

“Only in the house. Outside, this is their spot and we’re guests.”

And so it came to pass that Daddy came home for dinner to find four of his family painting folded paper furniture, and stringing twig bows for a family of window box-elves with whom he wasn’t even formally acquainted. My older brother Jim was watching T.V. He was nine and too old for this “junk.” Jean Ellen was twelve and it didn’t phase her in the least. It was all right, though, because Jim wasn’t much into anything Jacky and I cared about.

Daddy said, “Elves. I see. I’ll go read the paper for a while.” He didn’t even grump about dinner. Just got a beer from the fridge and wandered, chuckling, into the living room. We put the furniture and three bows into the window box and tried not to look for signs of life more than ten times before bed.

I was in the kitchen by 6:00 the next morning, when Mom was putting the water on for hers and Daddy’s tea. I dragged a chair to the window, knocking into washing machine and the mop bucket.

“Hold your horses, Jetty, just hold your horses,” Daddy’s voice was his laughing voice as his hands lifted me onto the chair.

The furniture had been moved and the bows were gone.

“Jacky!” I shrieked. Fortunately, he was on his way down the stairs.

A small, bumpy blue bag was on the edge of the box by the house, in the left corner, the spot most accessible from the kitchen. I let Jacky pick it up and he let me unfold the small note inside, as he emptied out a small mound of marbles of every description. In the tiniest printing that ever was, Daddy read, 'Thank you for the furniture. It’s very comfortable. And the bows work great. Yours truly, the window box elves.'

Later that summer, when I was four, Mommy said we were moving to a new house in someplace called Manchester a whole twenty minutes away. I started crying because there would be no elves.

The very first thing she did, when she got me out of the car at the new house, was take me to our side yard. There was a tree with twisty branches and giant leaves, as big as plates.

“This is a catalpa tree, Jetty. I prefer to call it an elf’s tree.”

I looked hard at the tree, expecting to see a tiny pair of eyes look back.

“Elves use these leaves for clothing, for their bows and arrows, to make their homes, and they use the catalpa beans for food and the pods for boats. It’s the perfect tree for them. Just last week, I believe your father saw an elf or two right on our back porch. Next week, we’ll have to make some gifts as a sort of housewarming, okay?”

Years later, I found her talking to my soon-to-be stepdaughter at the picnic table beneath that tree. All I heard were the words “What else could those sounds be? Catalpa trees are elf trees, actually…” and I went back into the house. Jessie started calling my mother grandma that very day.

***

That was one type of punctuation to bracket regular life. Most days we told her we were bored and had nothing to do, to which she would absently pat our heads, kiss us, and say, “That’s too bad. I’m not.” And she’d leave us to find something to do, not knowing how to be mad at her exactly. She yelled at us when we were bad, shooed us when she was busy, was impatient more than was probably right at times. She was the rule-maker and the sun at the center of our lives, like most Moms. She also held a terrible darkness that could block out the brightest day.

Most of our days, though, as small children, were the stuff of everyone’s childhood in the 1950s and early 60s. The difference was the magic of a Mom who would drop everything to give us pure joy, to find the adventure in an ordinary moment. We had elves. We had rainbows. And we had lazy, deviled-egg picnics that supplanted housework on the priority list for living.

This morning I saw a dust rhino gallop across the living room floor. I thought I'd best vacuum. The sun hit the prism in my window and I went out into the garden instead. I am not sure, but I may have seen an elf leap off the six foot tall lily by my front door.

Small Addendum

How many people got a mom like that? Or ever really KNEW about elves and fairies? Or knew there was something more important, more compelling than housework. Like blogging, for instance?  I miss my mom. On the other hand, I DID teach Claire and Adam all about Santa Claus and how I knew about him through my dad. Yes, and of course, they did not have an elf TREE, but they had a birdhouse with a magic garden around it, and ultimately the elves found that... There is no garden or catalpa tree. I guess next spring, I'll have to make an elf planter because I am really  not sure I want to live somewhere they cannot be, you know?

Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister

I've tried a dozen times to write about her, to capture her. What it was to have a sister who lived her life with on section of her soul in past lives, one part in this life, and one part in whatever came next.  She always expressed her spirituality in terms of our being on an eternal continuum, that this time here, now, was just a section along the way.  She'd have visceral feelings of déja vu, but talked about them to very few people.

She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers.  She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"

She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.

But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before.  Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."

Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."

Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."

"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."

"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"

"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."

We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately  my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.

By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.

Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."

I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands.  I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."

All was right in our world.

***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks.  I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that.  Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand.  We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.

"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.

"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.

"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."

We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....

Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...

I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.

Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."

Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.

We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters.  We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet.  We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine.  We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...

But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.

We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment.  The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello.  All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town.  We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast.  A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay.  The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.

We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.

We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.

And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.

I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She  mourned my  not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet.  I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection.  He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.

But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives.  We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed.  She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.

I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave.  She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."

The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.

When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.

"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"

The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...

My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...

The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."

But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."

I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum.  I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.


Before  I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."

I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.

At dawn.