so yet one more day of the Old Cowboy. This one, with the Hospice medical social worker Tana. Who came and sat down at the table with No Agenda. None. She was simply there to
receive.
and for three hours she did. What is the Beauty here?. That she Listened. She listened care FULL y and asked about what she thought she was hearing. He told her his Whole Story in small vignettes.
I was so proud of him. How he has learned to do that. To skip the "John Wayne" stuff and as i would ask him, "just tell me the picture in your head". When they got to the part about his daughter, the story slowed. Came one sentence at a time. and i went over to get her photograph from the cabinet. Tana sat looking while the story was told. and somewhere during it, she turned the frame over and opened it, moving the photograph, looking. Silently. She asked for a little tape. If we had a little tape. Yes, i got it and OCB asked what she was doing and she said the photograph had slid a little and she was centering it. Soon after, he went to the bathroom and she asked me if i had ever seen what was behind the photograph and i hadn't. It was a handwritten letter to OCB's mother, her grandmother, telling her she was so excited to soon be seeing her. She never made it. Just days before her highschool graduation and before the anticipated trip to Colorado, she was killed in a car accident in California. OCB had not seen her in over 10 years since her mother took her and left.
Things like this. If you take the Time, they just come out. Tana appeared to have all the Time in the World. and OCB was able to go In to where those memories are and bring them forward. Tell her.
It was extraordinarily Beauty FULL. the time spent. Watching silently as he brought forward everything that was important about himSelf. Watching her listen. Him always circling back around to how he has lived enough. Wants to die a "natural death". Her over and over telling him that this can happen. That things can be just ok.
I am still very uhhh, softened by all this. it will absorb into me over the days. it will become now MY memory. As today will become Her memory. We carry shared memory.
this morning before i left, i looked for this. It's in the beautyfull black notebook of Stuff. It's a drawing of something i ReMembered seeing i don't remember where. So it's not an original image, but a remembered image. I drew it in the beautyfull black notebook because i loved it. for maybe 20-30 years. I drew it there maybe 10 or so years ago? An Old MemoryImage.
Jude, over at Small Journeys, Spirit Cloth blog, is telling about
holes.
the progression went from her talking about holes to me remembering a Cloth, a very intense Magnificant Cloth that belong to someone i loved, Dora, who had the numbers of the concentration camp tatooed on her forearm, who went to become a Tai Chi master, collector of Cloth things. I wrote about her before here somewhere long ago. Dora. She had a Cloth. It had a rectangular hole in it. What i remember is that it was a women's ceremonial robe of the Shango Ceremony…the Babalawo tribe, Nigeria. There is more to this Memory but this is enough right now. It was, coupled with Jude's work, enough this morning to make me look for this drawing.
so.
i want to make a cloth of the drawing. I want to use these pieces of fabric. One, some linen that Maria sent me. It is VERY soft and of Undeterminate Color. Then a piece of walnut dyed Old silk noile, so so soft. Then something that i dyed here, again an old linen i think in Elderberry. This is all i know right now. But for Years i wanted to make a mask like this. Now i will. And as i looked today, i see that the Eyes are Goat eyes. the rectangular pupil. How memories MOVE through time from person to person….until they are again, Told anew.
LATER
it's still light…..
go OUT
They are in the middle Place. I am in the Way Back. I call. I call them in nonsense language, that is supposed to sound like Navajo
the language of this Land
they Think. and decide.
and Her. I love them. Beyond any kind of Love i know
windthread 
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