Elegy to Mebs
Oh Lynnie, last night, a priest
scooped me up to carry me off.
I told him I know the Monsignor in our town.
He put me back into bed and was gone.
Do I hear regret?
There was once a Catholic boy whom your mother forbade.
Did you, in your dotage, once again let him fade away?
You send out, like Morse code, these demented stories
distracted offerings to your visitor, your only child, me.
Distanced like a scientist, I listen, fascinated
a hidden treasure cache amid the lacunae of your mind.
Nearing the end, still unmendable, this habit of missing
between us, like fragile, cracked china.
Later, a thousand miles from me, you soar off
on the wings of a high fever. No one sees you go.
No one, not husband nor sisters nor I
gather to say godspeed, farewell.
Your ashes mingle, untended, with others.
Now your ghost, unhoused, visits my rooms
tobacco smoke pricking my nostrils.
Pungent fumes, hard memories. I cry out
Free me Momma free me
until I see it has been me, suspended
waiting still for words of love.
From: A Joyful Encounter: My Mother, My Alzheimer Clients, and Me.
A Memoir by Lynn Scott (Publisher due date: 11/05)
Books through a long life
by Lynn Scott
- Selected writing from Sonoma County's Women's Voices
(By, For, and About Women)
September 2006
The first book I remember reading compulsively and clinging to was Tammy and That Puppy. I must have been eight or nine. It's the story of a Scots terrier whose solitary central place in his family is overshadowed by a new puppy. Tammy runs away, unmissed for days.
That theme of feeling unseen just may have tied into my experience during my teen and early married years. Books recommended to me were by and about men. In 1947 when I graduated from high school, politics, medicine, music, religion were about men; I even accepted the societal idea that God was a He. No goddesses in sight.
As a young and unhappy wife, I fell in love with Eleanor Roosevelt when she spoke at a Quaker conference. Then I found Janet Flanner, Pearl Buck, Dorothy Day, Carson McCullers, for example. Suddenly there were strong women with something to say. I also spent those years reading psychological/spiritual books like Kim Chernin's Reinventing Eve, Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life, David Spangler's Emergence, Carol Pearson's The Hero Within, and editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams's Meeting the Shadow. From these and many others, I came to understand what defenses I would have to change in order to walk the path to wholeness.
Albert Camus, Franz Fanon, and other writers from colonial countries or from areas in my own country, opened me to our own colonial oppression in the writings about native Americans, which led me to a vision quest with Sun Bear, a Chippewa medicine man--my teacher for several years.
It took the women's movement to wake me to women writers of color from around the world, both fiction and non-fiction authors. I was an active therapist in the lesbian liberation times, and read Jill Johnston to Mary Daly.
Did all these narrators shape my life, presenting themselves to me at each phase of my life, just when I needed a new friend? I don't know for sure, but I feel that books drop off the bookstore shelf into my hands without much effort on my part.
Now I count my writer colleagues as my most satisfying friends. Teresa LeYung Ryan, with whom I will share half a booth at the Sonoma County Book Festival, certainly had a far different life from my own white suburban middle class one. Yet, we've both written books about mothers and daughters that draw us together in universal themes.
Another conundrum. Did all those books I read lead me to write my own book? Or was that drive already in me when I landed in a world where teachers were highly accessible? I've read enough books about poor women from uneducated backgrounds (Bastard out of Carolina, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) to understand that drive to write, and be inspired in my far less dramatic environs.
Now, sliding far too rapidly toward my eighties, I look for books that bring together, simply, my spiritual streams (Christianity, Quakerism, native American wisdom, A Course in Miracles, and Buddhism). Thich Nhat Hanh and a host of Buddhist teachers, whose books grace the store at Spirit Rock, fill that need. Recently I saw a documentary about Helen Keller on Channel 22. Her wisdom in Light in my Darkness is the next book I'll seek in the library.
I'm about to become a hospice volunteer. Imagine the stories I will write as I help a client through that ultimate life experience! Books that serve as guides to gentle our small minds into the Big Mind seem to be what the world desperately needs right now.
From: Sonoma County's Women's Voices (By, For, and About Women)
September 2006
