I saw every hour go by or the tender coils of forgetfulness or patterns emerge if you look long and deep enough or days filled with the kindness of memory

from Baubo in the kitchen (2)

As Mrs. Scattergood walked home she thought to blame her disoriented feeling on not getting enough sleep.  “I know I slept because I had some strange dreams but I also felt as if I looked at the clock and saw every hour go by.”  If given half a chance she’d blame everything on daylight savings time. She could never get a fix on that and she had a fair share of years at it already. Messes her up something fierce. She always did have a strained relationship with time.  To stay aware now she has to do a conscious version of the doggy paddle. The distance between the beach and her cottage was a buffer zone where she hoped, as she moved forward she’d lose her fog. The shore always acted like a buffer zone and triage for her spirits. 

~

     Mrs. Scattergood moved forward but still felt dog tired.  The air was damp with that moisture and snow was a whisper in the wind.  She noticed the smell of the wet wool jacket.  Despite being wet it still provided some warmth.  She liked the warmth from clothes that separated her from the cold.  It had a quality of its own apart from the warmth you might get from a house or a fireplace.  It was the fact of it being necessary that made it all the more comfortable when available. She tried to focus on getting home but sleep was calling her by name and she was beginning to wonder where could she lay down again hoping to reach for the tender coils of forgetfulness.

~         

     Memories pulled her along. Like the day she took Mrs. Scattergood as her name. Mrs. Scattergood was a character in the book Telltale that she was writing.  She connected all the characters but it was never explained how she knew each of them.  Mrs. Scattergood, the character, would send everyone pictures of the Mandelbrot set.  She found them beautiful. They captured the meaning of the world that she wasn’t able to articulate. The visualization of chaos theory. It wasn’t about the chaos but the sense that if you look long enough you see patterns that connect and similarities. Everything always looked like something else to Mrs. Scattergood. The living Mrs. Scattergood, with the fathomable knowledge deposited by time knew that part of chaos theory, the idea that patterns emerge if you look long and deep enough, was true.  She had many regrets that proved this theory.  Friends and family, siblings, Barry, lost before she knew what she would have liked to know before their passing.  Chaos for sure, those days that were consumed by her woeful memories.  But there were days filled with the kindness of memory too.

~

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

a bookie's daughter

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.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

Riding the waves of color in the mountain’s robes

Baubo in the kitchen (2) continued -

     Some people can look at a mountain and read the layers of the earth’s eras there the way some will open a holy book and read the steps one must take in the direction of a good life.  Without the geologist’s training or the adept’s familiarity with scripture we might only see the layers as different colors. We might only imagine the remains of all the life that moved and flowed in the wind during that particular time. The geological record is a compression of bones and sounds of what was green and reaching toward the sky or climbing on a nearby limb.  She imagined all the people, all that is green and gold and flies and swims or moves in waves with the wind; all the animals and insects and birds and mosses, the algae and fungus and the currents and streams, all of that life now in the beautiful bands of the mountain. All that moved or stood still or was as slow and overpowering as a glacier, all that is in the era’s name and the layer that you see. Layer on top of layer. Life on top of life. All that a color on the mountain’s robe.

~

     She pulled the seaweed off of her body as if she were peeling a layer of skin.  She was on her way home to make soup.  That’s how her mother belonged to the world.  Without knowing you learn things early on. And right now she felt a strong need to belong.

~

     Pablo Neruda wrote “…the traveler requires triangular stars, constellations like dice cut into squares by the cold...hands that distill hidden rivers in Antofagasta and restore to the water what its avarice lost in the desert.”  His words are part of the marrow in Mrs. Scattergood’s bones. In some way she too will be a part of a good soup one day herself.  She will be in the bands of color in the mountain’s side; part of the river’s wash at low tide.  You never know how the world will come into every part of your being, especially when you’re cooking. You just never know. For now, like all of us, she just has to stir the ingredients and restore to the water what her grief lost to the desert.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf