from
Baubo in the kitchen (2)
Heading home in wet clothes, Mrs. Scattergood
was circled by memories. At least it
wasn’t dogs. Her memories were in need
of serious rehabilitation. Bits and pieces came back but nothing to say this is
who she was today. She needed a good
anchor too. Otherwise, who knows, maybe
tomorrow she would end up floating in the seaweed again. ‘This is who she was today’ was spinning
around her but nothing landed. She was a
bookie’s daughter. She was from Newark
but her life was always taken in two directions at the same time, even early
on. The ocean called her but Newark
owned her nine months out of the year.
She used to say, in her pride, that she loved the ocean more than her
mother. Now that her mother is gone, she
can tell you, it was never true. It’s a different kind of love. She didn’t know
there were so many kinds of love. She used to put everything into a hierarchy
that doesn’t mean anything to her anymore.
~
A whole host of other thoughts began
spinning in her kitchen when she got there. ‘This is who I am’ was a part of
the spinning. If you begin someplace, anyplace, and it’s not going to be
totally random after all because it comes from you, you should end up somewhere
familiar. It might be that it will be a smooth story and nobody can help that
sort of thing from happening. She felt
tired of plumbing the depths till she came up with the detail that held
everything like the shell the sound of the sea.
One detail could capture the truth the way a trunk load of metaphors can
avoid it. She did know about Newark and
returned there when she realized that she left something and had to pick it up.
~
Her father was a bookie. She got the numbers, the hits, from Nelson
every evening to see if her father had to pay out to his customers. It was fun
getting the numbers. Just like it’s fun for a kid to pay for something on their
own. Nelson always gave her two numbers.
Always something like 343 and 543 or 225 and 625. She later found out that they
got the two numbers from a designated track's take and then looked at the last
four digits so that if it ended in 525, the fourth digit being a four, the
second number was 425. Not a bad payout
either, $25 to every nickel played. When
someone tells you that they were nickel and dimed to death - it would be true
for a bookie on a bad day. A hit here
and there would cost a small fortune. We're talking chump change for some but a
lot of moolah for someone like her father who carried his entire bankroll in
his pocket with a rubber band around it.
~
Mrs. Scattergood didn’t know if that roll
was there when he died. Want to know
what a bookie's daughter and widow lives on?
Absolutely nothing. So much for a
bookie being cool. She didn't know about
her father's lack of financial planning back then. Hey that's in the past now.
But like all things that have already happened it's not really the obvious and
only truth. The past keeps happening too.
We shed our skin every seven years, part of the reason why we have to
dust the house so often. Our outer skin becomes
new again and we just become deeper. Our
memories and histories get buried like ancient cities with layers of living on
top but almost anything seismic or human can uncover the layers. And sometimes it seems so random. It's the
will of that energy in the world that brings events together in such a way that
we're sometimes struck by that cosmic dance of time and memory. The moments
when we feel most awake, alive to the memories, everything around us sparkles
and our place in memory's pool can make us feel like a silver fish swimming in
the sun. Absolutely mercurial but
something only the moment could hold like butterflies dancing their spiral
dance in the tubular heat waves of summer over the butterfly bush and tomato
vines. This is the heat of peat moss and
humus, planning and cultivation. This is
something a bookie wouldn't know about. But a bookie's daughter could.
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