The Book of the City of Ghost Cats

The great Hurry Up and Wait has shifted into Hurry Up mode. Paperwork is being worked and signed. Photocopies and documentation are being procured. Checklists are getting checked (and aggressively added to.) The Undertoad is pulling at one’s ankles. All while I’m ostensibly on the last day of vacation.

Even vacation has been a reaping of whirlwinds. A week-long opportunity for precious people in my life to meet and spend time together. To experience the bright bites of mosquitoes in the Rocky Mountains, fight through the heat to enjoy the Colorado Renaissance Faire, and to learn about a disappearing commodity: my version of the here and now. If it sounds poetic, it’s only because it is.

The Long Farewell tour continues. I can come back, of course I can, and I’ll be back for Thanksgiving almost right away. But it’ll always be different for having gone. You know?

The week meant the Dearheart arrived from York, so I was seeing the end of this world not only through my eyes, but his. We watched an inordinate amount of good shows and bad movies that we wanted to watch together.

At some point, he helped me to bubble wrap some art. We’ve spoken of internet lines and setting up a UK phone and bank account. I sold off my bookcases. I’m hoping the TV goes sooner or later. Perhaps this evening. He was kind and marvelous and gracious to meet so many family members and I shall tell him so shortly. It was an emotional week for me.

But I managed to only really cry over two things (maybe three): Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and ending of The Life of Chuck. I won’t spoil the latter, but it mainly made me cry for the ending musical choice of The Parting Glass, a song I’ve tied to my parents.

The episode we watched of The Storyteller, however, reminded me profoundly of Dr. Martin Shaw and a type of storytelling I associate with the British Isles. While I don’t follow Dr. Shaw where he’s gone with exploring Christianity through myth, his ability to catch the truth in a story by its throat as it leaps, salmon-like into the air, to bend language into gold and light, is beyond inspirational for me. I read his book “Courting the Wild Twin” and felt like the top of my head was blown clean off. He is a bard in the truest sense.

What it all has to do with this moment, I’m not entirely sure. My head is absolutely filled with memories of the past week and things I should be doing rather than sitting here and thinking. But this is my nature. There’s a connection there. I’m thinking it through. I’m thinking of the Lindworm and of Tatterhood.

His Tatterhood was my first Tatterhood.

A story with a thousand facets like a diamond. You could turn it and turn it and never see it the same way twice. Tatterhood was a wild girl, born to a king and queen who wished for a child and who magic bent just so. She came out of the womb riding a goat and swinging a wooden spoon. She couldn’t be tamed. She was followed, moments later, by a beautiful princess who looked precisely as a beautiful princess might be imagined. Over time, and many adventures, the two girls or the two parts of a self as they may be understood, begin to integrate and understand one another. But it took coaxing for the Wild Twin to come out of the dark forest, just as it took the same bravery for the Princess to venture out of the safety of the castle.

He speaks to a deep, internal longing for stories that are bound to place, that we hunger for wilderness, and he speaks often of initiatory or transitional acts and the importance of story as a guide. All of us have that inner wild twin, mischievous, curious, bound to forces we can’t quite name.

Is the story guiding me The Odyssey? Is it Lewis and Clark? Is it any adventurer looking out to an ocean without knowing the true distance to the other side, only that love will light the stars. I don’t know. But she – this idea of a wild twin – appears in my life now and again and defends me from small, claustrophobic thinking. From limiting assumptions and fears about “whatever will people think?”

The third set of tears were for my grandmother who recited the poem Little Orphant Annie by James Whitcomb Riley. In all this moving, we’ve found it on cassette and I digitized it. I played it for my aunt who hadn’t heard her mother’s voice in many years. Grandma was a brilliant storyteller in her own right, a fearless and sometimes wild twin. My aunt said my grandmother – tall as me at 5’1″ – stood on a table in a pub in England on some vacation and recited the same poem to a rapt audience.

So much thinking when I ought to be packing my clothes.

It is going to be weird. We are loosing our tethers. We are strolling into dark forests. We are hanging up our lustrous fox furs on a hook by the fire. We’re walking for groceries in the village. We’re giving up Chipotle and the instant advisory board of our sisters. We’re leaving behind mountain lions and bugling elks and columbines.

For something else. Something new. Something wild.