CoCo's Anthology - by Zid - "Through a Darkened Pane"...

by ziddina 45 Replies latest jw friends

ziddina

CoCo's post #6906...
She read Shakespeare and Plato; in addition, she spoke French, some of which she passed on to her son, and that of no little benefit to him. Apparently Sarah Nason, nee Butler, wished her son to ponder matters other than the merely mundane: fish, weather, sleep. Regarding the outlay of funds for educational purposes in their district of Arundel, the citizenry were wont to decry the prodigal expenditure of fifty pounds a year. I have reason to believe that Steven rose above the loutishness of his neighbors, though he did not consider himself a man well versed in letters.
In like manner, with regard to the above comments relative to parents' mentorship of their malleable offspring, my siblings and I were encased, as it were, with books of every description. Whether the virtual overflow of every sort of reading matter in our cluttered bungalow had been principally for Elizabeth's personal enjoyment and, collaterally, that of us children, I do not know for certain my mother's prime motivation. Surely, she encouraged and promoted our literary travels by leading her enthusiastic bookworms each week to the ancient Carnegie Library of stone and ivy. I cried when the city tore down the venerable edifice where adventure and learning had come together and borne me. The replacement contained the same books of paper, spines and hardback covers, but the former atmosphere (one of enlightened decay) among the stacks was missing. The sanitized air of the new building did not sit well with me. I was just a kid; I didn't know why.
Somehow this dirty old house, whose true character I'm still not certain of, is in concert, silently so, with Elizabeth Vincent's container of books.
I must dig in further.
ziddina

CoCo's post #6919...
It is snowing. Silence falls upon the landscape and envelopes it, the ensuing stillness my outside and my inside.
I look upward toward my beautiful Moon's place of dwelling (we had been communing only days ago) but she has cycled out, waned her way once more into dark oblivion. Besides, what we call a snow sky - a smothering, featureless blanket of the softest gray - would, at the very least, block out her visage, if not her unbridled moonshine.
I am breathing easier. Drawing it in, blowing it out.
Momentarily removed from the life-sucking decay of the house, I enter once again into the realm of the present, the renewing, hopeful now. This drifting in and out of consciousness - how else might I describe crossing so effortlessly from flesh-and-blood reality to the pondering of memories past? - has me nonplussed. Elizabeth Vincent (mother? mentor? phantom?) has reconnected with her son who, in spite of his own accelerating advance toward the darkened, preternatural home of his parents, still deems himself in touch with the real world.
Somewhat so.
[ooo! one of my favorite passages!! Zid]
CoCo's post #6925...
Partial inventory of contents of container addressed to:
Elizabeth Vincent, Old House on the Hill, Barberry Road, Tangle Town, NA, Zone 34:
Pavilion of Women, Dragon Seed, The Good Earth: Pearl S. Buck
The Egg and I, Onions in the Stew, The Plague and I, Anybody Can Do Anything: Betty MacDonald
Just Be Yourself: Mary Bard [sister to Betty MacDonald]
The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew: Margaret Sidney
The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair: Laura Lee Hope
Lost Horizon: James Hilton
Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island, Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft: Thor Heyerdahl
Seven Years in Tibet: Heinrich Harrer
Paradise Lost and Other Poems: John Milton
Autobiography: Benjamin Franklin
Selected Poems: Robert Browning
Swiss Family Robinson: Johann David Wyss
Treasure Island: Robert Louis Stevenson
Life Among the Savages, The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson
Please Don't Eat the Daisies: Jean Kerr
In One Era and Out the Other: Sam Levenson
Piles of magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, LOOK, Life, Astrology Today, Argosy, Popular Mechanics, ad infinitum ...
MORE books, including paperbacks.

Numerous letters, manuscripts (haven't yet perused them), several dictionaries, one huge, very old Webster's Unabridged, a stack of folders containing loose papers, et cetera, et cetera ...
ziddina

CoCo, post #6929... [not sure if it belongs here, but...]
As child I languished somewhere between unsteady ambulatory and down-and-out sickly. Somehow or other I did manage to attend school (and make the weekly rounds to the library, of course!) between bouts of sinusitis and catarrh. I still don't know if they're the same affliction. The medical terms discussed back and forth between the doctor and Mother stuck in my noggin as thickly and unrelentingly as the ever-present mucous. That doesn't mean, however, I could understand Latin.
When housebound, I would meander gravely to the living room and stare forlornly through mullioned panes of puttied-in glass. They were seldom unadorned: sometime after a combo Halloween/Thanksgiving extravaganza of boos and gobbles, the glass transformed into gaily decorated Christmas scenes. The medium of choice was tempera. The hand of the artist was the one creatively attached to Elizabeth Vincent's wrist.
These "seasons greetings" remained intact months and months beyond December, eventually washed away with ample reluctance on the artist's part, and that barely in time for the Easter Bunny and his hard-shelled retinue. Despite the opacity of a stylized old Saint Nick, his Donners and Blitzens, assorted foolishly grinning elves and an unreasonable facsimile of the North Pole, I was able to glimpse through gaps of high art the neighbor children playing kick-the-can or dodge ball. Billy Tobias was always pushing his little sister Sally Anne away when she tried to join in. Her consequent kicking and screaming made me laugh out loud, but that made me cough, so I had to contain my mirth.
I rarely had the pleasure of kicking the can or their amiable company.
As a result of chronic childhood illness, I spent untold, joyful hours traveling the world ... and beyond ... my bed, a magic carpet....
CoCo's post #6944...
Billy Tobias is a scarecrow of a 12-year old boy, with lank blond hair that's always in his eyes. Freckles dot his pale but clear adolescent face, and he has that can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it type of cuteness that doesn't go unnoticed by the blossoming Marys and Jills and Shirleys of the neighborhood that the Vincents inhabit. He possesses a keenness of spirit that transcends his chronological age. That attribute, in its turn, does not go unnoticed by his teachers, his friend's parents and much older but far less astute grownups.
It's been a wild game of dodge ball this early evening, played in the middle of quiet, tree-lined Hernandez Terrace. The occasional automobile cuts through the frenzied game, momentarily putting the rag-tag band of urchins on the sidelines. Effie Watson hums by in her '51 Nash Statesman Custom, Rose Packard motors through, from the opposing direction, in majestic elegance, enthroned high upon reversible cushions, in her rose '56 Packard 400. George Spalding has returned from a long, tiring day at the tax bureau, pulling his green '54 Chevy sedan stodgily into the carport.
It grows darker, the sweaty band of dodgers/throwers breaks up, and pesky but adorable Sally Anne Tobias pouts her bruised way home to 236 Hernandez Terrace. She wanted to play (Billy begrudgingly gave in), and it seems she was the ball's principal target. A conspiracy of sorts? Sally dashes up treads and risers of New York style carpeting to her frilly bedroom. Once plopped firmly and unmovable upon her four-poster, she pours out her heart to a little girl's one true confidante: Raggedy Ann.
Billy stays behind as his pals go their separate ways, home to scrubbing up and supper. "Bobby, come and get your supper" is routinely wailed out each evening through a battered screen door by Maggie Reese, beckoning her only child to come home and put some more meat on his stout bones. Mrs. Tobias hasn't returned home yet to fix the family dinner; she's chairing this or that committee to raise funds for this or that worthy cause du jour. Sally falls asleep, exhausted but secretly overjoyed that this time her creepy big brother relented and let her play, even if she is bruised and battered. Raggedy Ann keeps a button-eye on the alert for interlopers.
The young man Tobias drops to the grass in the only empty lot on the block. It is a plum orchard, a very well tended plum orchard, owned by cranky old man Peters, whose home fronts the next street over, Wraight Street. Though clearly a jock in the making - kick-the-can- kicker-into-the-middle-of-next-year pro, expert dodger of the meanest kickball in town, and slugger par excellence of a routine softball - Billy is deeper on the inside than the simple and commonplace boyish bravado that the outside would suggest. Lying serenely and strangely camouflaged in a high but maintained carpet of green, Billy, lying on his belly, chin cupped upon his thumbs, and fingers interlaced like the proverbial church of human digits, looks intently across the asphalt toward 248.
He's thinking about his best pal, whom he doesn't see outside as often as he would like. As they both would like. The two boys formed a bond instantly when the Tobiases moved in down the street some 8 years earlier and the boys looked upon each other for the first time. They continue to look at each other, and at this moment they are looking at each other ...
Separated only by a pane of glass.
ziddina

CoCo's post #6945...
I awoke with a start and sat bolt upright in bed.
I was dreaming ... perhaps I still am. There is no doubt about the house, however. That house. At this present moment are set before me the orderliness and tidiness of Mr. Clean and Jeeves himself. I am home. My own home. Yet the smell and disarray of a dwelling long neglected persists in my nostrils and before my disbelieving eyes. Those who held title to this sinister house could not have known they would never be welcomed here. Not truly. I have no idea why I said that; perhaps it's just a feeling. Why I should think it, much less say it ... Like I said before, I could still be dreaming. Scenes from my dreamscapes make sense like visions of Alice in her little world of wonder make sense.
Whatever this all purports to mean, I am certain of what I heard, what I saw. Something at the top of the stairway was moving. I was finished, at least for the moment, with taking inventory of the large container addressed to my mother. Time to investigate. I'm past fear. Well, we'll see.
Grabbing the banister - not unduly concerned about its filthy state - I pulled myself upward, slowly, as though my legs alone could not adequately perform the climb. However dark the upper landing might be, there was a sensation of movement that my gut picked up on, let alone my eyes straining to discern even what should have been the most obvious indicators of a presence. Atop the landing - at long last, it seemed - I clearly saw what had been moving, though I heard nothing but a muffled sort of cry. A door was swinging open, swinging partially shut, ever so slowly, gently, back and forth, from what could only have been, to my way of thinking, some draft. Perhaps an open window in the room behind the door. I hesitated momentarily, not initially from fear, but because that muffled cry broke sharply into a cutting sob. I felt myself blanch. A tingle shuddered noisily up the spine.
The door, of its own accord - so it would seem - opened fully before me. I looked cautiously into the spacious room, a bedroom ...
A young woman was sobbing, her shoulders quaking violently. Some control over her near hysteria was maintained by the firmly draped arm of a tall blond man around her shoulders. He was quietly weeping, wiping away the tears with the back of his free hand. I could not determine at first who this young couple was and why they were so cut up. They were oblivious to my entry and even much more so despite my letting out a piercing cry of my own ...
There, on the bed, was a life-size doll - Raggedy Andy - but with the face of a young man.
The face of Elizabeth Vincent's son.
ziddina

CoCo's post #6951...
I throw my back against the wall, as though this act alone will steady me, saving me from collapsing to my knees. Hopeless. Helpless. Now it is I who am shaking violently, my stomach doing several flips of its own, eventually to land in a heap only God knows where. I force myself to look up again and see nothing, nobody in the immediate foreground ... Who were they ... why Raggedy And ... my fa...?
I stated at the very outset that I do have a colorful imagination, but this? Who in his right mind would or could conjure up this nonsense? If not, then, in my "right" mind, my "wrong" mind? It's the only mind I possess, and I really wonder if I'm losing it. All there is before me now is an empty room. An open window. Tattered curtains swooshing to-and-fro in the light breeze that seems to me the only vestige of reality, one of Nature herself, that I am currently linked to.
Composed - hardly - but needing to get out of here, I run down the stairs and make for the door. My mind (whatever's left of it) signals my feet to an abrupt halt though I want only to bolt out the front door. I turn in robotic fashion, my head cocked to the side in anticipation of another shock to body and senses and my eyes come to rest in a fixed stare upon Elizabeth Vincent's box of items. Stuff mostly known to me but of downright unknown sendership.
Upon the container is one manila envelope, crisply brittle, fragile with advanced age. I recall handling a slew of envelopes as part of the inventory but not placing any of them outside the box. Picking up the stuffed packet with trembling, I read slowly and with incredulity words that may just as well have been in a foreign tongue for all the sense they did not make:
The life of Andrew J. Vincent: 1944 - 1975
compound complex

I understood them to say my dialogue was inept, I was deplorably weak in delineating character, knew nothing about plot-structure, couldn't interpret history adequately and, generally speaking, would be well advised to turn to other means of livelihood. I'd worked hard on those books for [six] years without any noticeable reward or acclaim; and their reception and sales were discouraging in the extreme so much so that I was broke and on the verge of abandoning the course I'd charted for myself [six] years before.
[The words of Kenneth Roberts, author of Arundel; he was despondent over the above assessment of his opera]
ziddina

(And I think the story takes a turn here...)
CoCo's post #6954...
It is snowing in my neighborhood.
The falling snow creates a world of silence, a blessed silence that deadens the hammering in my head. A blanket of the purest white covers a multitude of sins: un-redeeming architectural details of badly designed homes, poorly tended gardens, new but ugly automobiles and some unknown sin of my past. I pass from a state of purposeless thinking into one of essence, of being. I stand motionless, allowing uncountable snowflakes to encase me, to cover my multitude of sins.
Fog, following directly on the heels of the snow, shrouds in ghostly vapor newly whitened trees in the middle ground and swallows up totally the giant sentinels of the background. The hills no longer exist for the heavy, impenetrable drapery of clinging moisture. They have disappeared, as though by magic.
I am grateful because the house on the hill is enveloped and out of my sight.
Out of sight, out of mind.
For now.
ziddina

(But CoCo... Didn't he ultimately become successful???)
I am grateful because the house on the hill is enveloped and out of my sight.
Out of sight, out of mind.
For now.
ziddina

CoCo's post #6962...
I have returned to the walls that close in about me, those of my tiny but cozy studio.
It is warm, furnace warm. I do miss the open fire of the rough-hewn fireplace in my childhood home. Inefficient, to be sure, roasting to a near crisp our fronts as our rears froze. Still, it was beautiful and enchanting, those flames dancing upon the grate, their stage, and throwing their blazing kisses out to an adoring, albeit half-baked audience, front row, Living Room, USA.

Piping hot coffee comforts me now. It takes the sting out of the chill too long seeping into my bones. The shiver from snow and fog invigorates, awakens the bearer of vaporous or frozen moisture to a keener sense of awareness. A keener perception of reality.
One could wish as much.
CoCo's post #6968...
As I drift from a state of hazy perception to one of daylight consciousness - perhaps vice versa; I can make no sense of the last several days - I endeavor to piece together my recollections of childhood with my hallucinations (but they seem so real) and those mental distortions with what I know absolutely to be my day-to-day existence.
Yes, I spent most of my childhood at 248 Hernandez Terrace, and Billy Tobias was my best friend in the world. We played kick-the-can and dodge ball on the street from spring through late fall, my erratic health permitting. As a young man I was intent on saving the world, and someone found me, recruited me and assured me that there was only one way to save humanity - the Boss's Way. I believed and, with missionary zeal, sought out willing souls. Some were not so willing. As I think back on my good intentions and the manner in which I persuaded those heathen islanders to accept unreservedly the One True Way, I wonder in these, my autumn years of careful reflection, if those sweet, open-hearted souls would have been better off left in the unadulterated soil of their simple paganism.
Today I occupy a studio in a mountain community called Miners' Point, not far from what is probably the most famous lake in the US of A. Many of my mother's books and possessions are here, in my sight. Not in a giant box. And that manila envelope ... I can't wrap my head around that one ... I don't want to try. Change of subject coming up NOW!
Everyone's life is a jigsaw puzzle. Some puzzles are composed of few and large, easily assembled pieces. No mystery, no hours passed in fervid pursuit of making it all fit. At a glance you size up the pieces, mentally arrange them and, finally, with what would appear to onlookers as well practiced ease, interlock each piece. On the other hand, some individuals become their complex manner of life, totally identifiable with the external trappings of what it is they do, they think, they influence. They and their life are a puzzle of a thousand pieces of inscrutable design that resist proper assemblage by finite humans.
Where, exactly, do my pieces fit in?
ziddina

CoCo's post #6973...
I had to get out and shake off the mentally-disabling hell of a wet autumn's afternoon of cabin fever.
I have no aversion to getting wet, walking in the rain. Sometimes, however, I just can't get past that old wives' tale - the one kept alive and well by Mother especially for the sake of us ones not so well - that I'd catch my death if I got wet. That, I'm assuming, is out-of-doors wet, not bathtub, hot-water-wet (we had one of those claw foot jobs). When I could get away with it, I'd dash out the front door - when I had energy, I had energy - without jacket, hat and galoshes and revel maniacally in the cats-and-dogs downpour.
Straight for the gulley-washer river of fallen rain that was flash-flooding the street I charged. Standing at the curb, where concrete met asphalt, I would jump up with all my might and land squarely in the roiling, guttered waters. I was reckless and loved getting away with murder, or to my mom's exasperated way of putting it on those occasions she caught me, getting away with my own suicide. Incidentally, our curbs were different from any I had seen then or since. Rather than form a right angle from sidewalk to street, they sloped at a gentle angle, one eminently negotiable by roller skates. Rolling smoothly from sidewalk to street, back up again to the walk, down again ... Of course, this was a real boon when riding a bike....
Back to the present - but actually, the very recent past, like 2 hours ago - I beat the onset of today's cabin fever by going to the local market. Having come into a few bucks for an odd job, I thought I'd treat myself to something different for dinner. Turkey has been daily fare since Thanksgiving. Everyone knows the drill and does it perfunctorily for at least a full week following the slaughter of that venerable fowl. Turkey soup, sandwiches, fricassee, popovers, loaf, salad, mousse....
So I bought a chicken. I talked to the ever patient and helpful Julia, who's the butcher's assistant. Sometimes I forget my glasses and can't read the price, so she tells me. Then she suggests how I might roast the bird and, with the leftovers, make soup, or sandwiches, or ...
Pullet Surprise.

CoCo's Anthology - by Zid - "Through a Darkened Pane"...

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