For JWB

I was determined not to fall in love with you, back in 1976, and I thought I was doing a good job. After all, my heart completely belonged to someone else, someone whom I thought of night and day, someone whose every word to me I memorized, someone whom I savored the slightest connection with. (I was nineteen.) I had no room for you.

I met you at a party that I attended with somebody else, another young man who mysteriously had to go home right afterwards, who dropped me off at my door and sped away in his early-70's Ford Maverick. That happened to me a lot; in fact, every time I went out with a guy, which wasn't often. I was not only lonely, like I had been all through high school; I was now also confused. I didn't pay particular attention to you at the time, but I must have noticed you, because I remember running into another person I hadn't met before that party, who I had thought was your friend, and asking after you, but he said he hadn't known you.

I saw you again at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream store where you worked, and you gave me the key to your Maverick, and had me go out to the parking lot and bring in some pictures that were in your car. They were photos of me and my sister at the party, that you had taken and printed in your darkroom, and you gave me a print. After that, you slipped me free ice cream when I came in the store, and you brought ice cream to my family when you came and took me away in the Maverick. We rode around in the country, to places I had not been before, often to creeks, lakes or the riverside. I did not drive, and you had spent many hours alone, exploring in your car, and you seemed to know what lay down every dirt road. We would go somewhere and just sit, hardly talking at all, just watching the water for hours. I began to value silence.

I knew many people at the University who were supposed to be interesting, and some of them were. Some of them were fun and interesting, but so guarded, drugged, opaque or just strange that I couldn't get a sense of who they were. Some were intelligent and intellectual but had no depth or hidden places to their personalities. The first sort, I figured I could never know anything about, and the second sort, I figured I knew all about shortly after I met them. Of course, the vast majority of people I met were not even interesting or worthwhile at all. I could tell you were very different. I didn't know how yet, but the quality of your silence held an intriguing mystery. We spent more and more time together. You fed me crab soup and told me you loved me. You quit taking me home, and I moved in with you. You wanted me, after all.

It didn't matter that we weren't even speaking to each other two years later when we got married. By the time I realized I loved you, there was nothing that would change it. Our day-to-day life was on the surface, and had little to do with the underlying fact of our togetherness. There was no one but you for me. I intuitively understood your thinking, all those things you were unable to express. We enjoyed and wanted the same things, liked living the same way, thought about things the same way. There were things that we didn't agree on, but they didn't cause conflicts or prevent either of us from doing what we wanted. We were poor, but we were happy. As long as we were poor, we were happy.

I was so happy when you got a good job that took advantage of your unique talents. You could do anything. You could open something up, take a look at it, see how it was supposed to work, why it wasn't working, and fix it. You could build things, and create what wasn't there before. You could look at something really beat-up and ugly, unfinished, or trashed, and see what it would look like when it was restored or refinished. When you got an idea into your head, for whatever reason, I had to live with it, because you would do what you wanted. But the things you started out with and made beautiful and useful through your skill, when you decided to keep on until the finish, were amazing. Unfortunately, less and less of your projects got finished. Money and time would be invested in something that would keep your mind occupied for a short time, then would be dropped. You made more money and bought yourself toys you never had before. Things like sitting down and paying bills were not pleasant, something you would get around to later. And I was starting to get on your nerves: bitching about the electricity getting cut off again, bitching about not having enough money for the house payment when it wasn't even the end of the month yet, bitching about how I hated my job. All you really wanted was to sit down and watch a few hours of documentaries about World War II on TV, maybe have me curl up and watch it with you. I complained about everything, but I wouldn't do anything you liked, like go see your favorite band play in a bar on a Tuesday night about ten o'clock.

Soon, you started to disappear. At first, you would be gone one, maybe two nights a week. I would watch the door, listening for the sound of your car. I couldn't do anything but wait for you. The most important thing in my life was still looking into those very dark blue eyes and seeing a change come over them, a softening when you looked at me, that told me that you loved me. You asked me for everything I had, and I gave it to you. All I wanted was to give you more of myself, but you were fading away more and more. Sometimes you would come home and seem to be completely inhabiting your body, and we would do something we had always done together; look at antiques or eat at one of our favorite places. But mostly I went my way and you either were not around, or, when you were at home, you walked like a zombie or a ghost. I could no longer intuit what you were thinking. The magical connection was gone, and you were a stranger with the most familiar body and face in my life.

I waited for you again. I waited for three years. I did everything I could think of to bring your soul and your personality back to your body and back to me. I had never experienced such pain as I did when you were physically present and nothing I did could reach you. I called you a zombie. I called you a chindi, because it seemed that all the good in you had died and only a malevolent ghost remained. I was good to you, hoping you would respond and love me. I was vicious to you, hoping you would get angry enough to break out of your fog. I went to the strip club you frequented, where you introduced me to the woman you were obsessed with talking to, not having sex with. I left you once, and you said you would kill yourself. I left you again, and you said you would kill me. Both times, I wanted to call and beg you. I waited for you to call me. You were admitted to the no-shoelaces ward at the hospital, and I visited you every day and cried. I cried every day for three years. All I wanted was for you to love me even a little bit, and you could not do that. You broke my heart over and over again. I still loved you, but you were gone. I waited for you to come back. I had seen glimpses of you that told me you might not be dead.

The you that was was not like anyone else I have ever known, and I will never know anyone like him again. He still fascinates me. I have known of many men with his bad qualities, and some with some or another of his good qualities, but no one with the combination of unusual and mysterious personality quirks he had. He is dead, and I continue to mourn him. He visits my dreams. I think of him often, and I cry again. I am now a widow, and I long for the day I will be relieved of my grief.

nice, churchgoing black ladies

I work with some very nice, churchgoing black ladies. The sort who are very sweet and kind people who can be counted on to always be honest and do the right thing. Not a mean or duplicitous thing about them. Loyal, dependable, intelligent, and with some of the most peculiarly skewed and limited worldview I have ever encountered.

I have a very dear and close friend of over thirty years, who now lives in another state. A couple of years ago, to the joy and surprise of all his old friends, he announced that he was being ordained as an Episcopal priest in the small town where he had become active in the church. Several of us here packed up on short notice to take a couple of days off to visit for his ordination, his first mass, and some attendant partying. I was excited to tell my coworkers why I was going to be out for a day or two.

When I returned, one of my favorite coworkers in the category in the heading greeted me and asked if my friend had successfully been made Pope. I had a few minutes to spare, so I explained to her that my friend was merely a priest, that there was only one Pope, and that he was head of the Catholic church anyway, and my friend was Episcopalian. She said oh, okay, but not as if she understood. So I went on to tell her, as simply as I could, that in the early days of the Christian church, Peter was the first Pope, being the rock on which Christ built his church, and all the others were supposed to have followed directly from him, taking on the authority which Jesus gave to Peter. After fifteen hundred or so years, when people were really getting upset with the excesses of the Church, it began to split up, and new, Protestant churches were founded by Christians who denied the authority of the Pope. The Episcopal church was descended from the church started by Henry the Eighth, who got mad at the Pope when he wouldn't let him get married as many times as he wanted.

My friend listened to all this with interest as if it were something that she had never heard of before, at least anything that happened after Jesus and St. Peter. She nodded, and said, mmmmmm-Hmmmmm. Then, she said something polite, to the effect of, well, that's an interesting thing to believe....

Not only hadn't she ever heard of anything that happened after the Acts of the Apostles were written, but she didn't think I was giving her a lesson in history... She thought I was telling her about some kind of strange, white-folks', intellectual, Yankee, suspect alternative religious belief which was likely to get me in trouble in the afterlife, although she was too polite to say so!

It goes beyond boggling my mind. It makes my head hurt. It makes flashes of sputtering light in my brain like a defective neon sign, just to think that people would not know, not want to know, and not have it occur to them that there even WAS a history of their own church. I guess this is the kind of thinking that lets people live with the kind of contradictions there are between their church and their religious faith. It's also the kind of thinking, for example, that lets these same nice churchgoing black ladies believe (because they have told me they do) that homosexuals are a kind of pervert who are different from the rest of us, and who do not have any interest in "normal" sexual relations because they only want what's abnormal, and the normal and abnormal never co-exist. I believe that this unshakable denial has to be one reason why AIDS is spreading fastest in the US among heterosexual black women.

Quiet Saturday

It's been a quiet day in the cave. Sorry to say, I have followed my natural inclination, which is to say, waking up late, reading and napping. Every so often, I've gone online to see if there's anybody there I wanted to chat with, but apparently, they all have something constructive to do. I have something constructive to do also, and even something destructive, which would be much more fun. Alas, the inclination just isn't there. It has been just about exactly a year since the other fish was finally persuaded to leave the cave, and things have not gone from the messy transitional state to a nice, settled, stripped-down state yet. One might say that the sand is still stirred up. The cave needs a lot of work. A lot of rocks need to be picked up and spit out onto the ocean floor.

That was a nice comment, thank you. You may continue stroking my ego, along with everything else.

Writing this reminds me of my English class in my senior year of high school. For some reason, all my friends were put into the college-prep class, and I was not. It wasn't formally designated as a college-prep class, because at that time, all classes were officially the same. Some parents had, apparently, at some point, been offended that their children were put with other children of a similar academic proficiency. They thought they were being labeled as retarded. After this, for years, any attempts at categorizing students was verboten. I was placed into a class with a bunch of underperformers who couldn't read. That's not an exaggeration. One day we were studying Shakespeare - by the time-honored educational method of taking turns reading from the textbook - when the teacher asked a lanky lout in the back of the room to take the next turn. He declined, on the basis that he couldn't read. He was excused, because she believed him.

The leader of this educational expedition was a frail blonde not much older than we were. I remember she suffered from severe personal problems which kept her out of the classroom for months, and prevented her from actually teaching the class for most of the rest of the year. Her favorite teaching-avoiding tactic was assigning the class to "write something" at the beginning of the hour, then scribbling frantically at her personal papers, reading something that had nothing to do with English literature, or disappearing altogether. For a period of time, she made the writing assignment every day. She never specified any subject matter or style; just "write something." I started out racking my brain for interesting subject matter, stunning metaphors, charming descriptions and heart-wrenching emotion. As time went by, and the writing assignments weren't returned and weren't commented on, and certainly weren't graded, and I quickly ran out of serious, poetic essays, I came to the conclusion that this busywork wasn't even being read. After all, when would Frail Blonde have time, aside from anything else? She was certainly too busy with other things to hold class. I began to write silly things. I wrote sillier things. Still no reaction, still no sign that anything was being graded, read, or pausing on its way straight to the Dumpster. Finally, when I wrote the story involving talking rolls of toilet paper, I got her attention. Most of the circumstances surrounding this incident, along with the rest of high school, have been erased from my memory. But I seem to remember she had me stand and read the story to the class because she thought it was so hilarious. NOW she pays attention. Typical of my entire academic career, and, by extension, my life.

Story of the Coelacanth

Why Coelacanth? If I am a fish, which I am for reasons I won't go into here, coelacanth is the appropriate species. I could be said to live in a cave. In fact, my previous, virtual (imaginary) Internet identity was the Cyberhermit, whose website, if it had existed, would have been known as the Cave of the Cyberhermit. In the offline world, I even live in a dark house with low ceilings and some amount of encrustation.

The coelacanth, latimeria chalumnae, is older than the dinosaurs, and supposedly one of the last of the critters in the evolutionary progression to live in the primordial sea before somebody crept up onto land during the late Devouring period. We hang out in our caves during the day, and only come out at night, when we eat unwary squid and octopus squirting along the seabed in the very deep ocean. We are unique animals, not to be mistaken for any other fish. Even the pattern of whitish spots on our blue scales, which camouflages us against the sponges on the walls of our deep blue caves, varies with the individual.

Somebody else is blogging under the name Coelacanth, but not on Blogspot. What the hell, it's a big Internet.

There are two cats in my cave, but they have easy access to high-quality cat food, and they're not going to bother hunting down a bony fish who's much bigger than they are. Lazy beasts. They only chase what runs from them.

This cave is not as cool as it should be. Global warming is a fact. Hang around minding your own business for 450 million years, and somebody comes along and fucks everything up.

Introductory Blog

This is the first post on the new blog from the Coelacanth. My good friend Joe Kimbuck has been after me to start a blog called "Tales From the Cave" almost since I've known him, so here goes. I don't know what to write about, but he says he'll read anything I write, and that anyone else will, too. Judging by some of the other stuff I've seen on here, randomly sampling blogs, I don't seem to have anything less to say than anybody else does.

I haven't put anything on the profile, because I thought it would be better to reveal myself as I went along. A little bit of background information: I am a single woman, born in the 1950's. I live in the Deep South now, but I was born in Quincy, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. This is important to me, because, just as the Father of Waters gathers the rain from the surface of the entire country, I feel a connection to all of America. It is as if the history of the land and all of the people were soaked through the earth along with the water, and brought along the tributaries like blood to the heart of the country. I don't know if this is cause and effect or just coincidence, but I think that my birth across the river from the hometown of Mark Twain is appropriate.

I intend to write more about my immigrant ancestors in the future, and my take on history, among many other things. I will try to keep it civil and literate. I encourage anyone out there to let me know if you are reading this, and to respond, and to please keep it civil and literate as well.