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.