Prologue

Mother – Fucking:

The Saga of One Fucked Mother

 

Prologue

 

“Even if I am a Minority of One, the Truth is still the Truth.”

--- Mohandas K. Gandhi

 

 

True it is.  O, so head – bangingly true it is!  No one else ever thinks that your passions and your struggles are anywhere near as fantastically important as you yourself think that they are.  You can write letters to the editor, you can give speeches, even just little, daily ones, to anyone who’ll listen, you can send a passel of   e – mail transmissions to folks who are glad to hear from you and to the ones who never want to hear from you.  It doesn’t make a bit of difference. 

 

And so starts this one today.  This story.  This passion, this struggle I want to set down on paper before I am dead.  This one of mine.  A Friend from Bear Creek Meeting a smidgen north of Earlham said to me just yesterday that now is the time.  She is sooooo right, she is.  I motored my old and dusty, little black Nissan pickup with the single mattress and some raggedy blankets and pillows in the back down there to the Third Annual Native American Gathering that has finally brought The Music back to Dallas County.  My Friend accepted the charge of the hearth and all the gathering in of the foodstuffs for the weekend as she had done for the Celebrations the two previous Septembers.  When she calmly mentioned that it had taken so many, many more years than just the last three, actually over a decade at least, to get the last three going and off – or on to – the ground at all, that it just hadn’t been the right time before 1998, it hit me. 

 

It is the right time.  So right the time is.   And yet no one now breathing, I am certain of it, will ever feel the level of magnitude and impact about The Dance of mine that I am about to boogie on down out of this keyboard as I have felt it.  My Daddy would have.  But for the fact that he is, well, … a memory.  He is, that is, one not now breathing.  Would have felt, Daddy would have, on the order of the hero of that who - has – all – the - power – over – whom movie, Amistad.  I am sorry that I cannot recall his name; but when he is asked by some white guy, who acts like he wants ‘to help’, if he, the black guy, is going ‘to be all right’ in his prison cell after being forced there until his ‘owner’ can be located, he matter - of - factly replies, “O, me?  I’ll be just fine.  I’ll … I’ll be just fine.  My ancestors are with me.”   Daddy has always been right there, immediately right there, for me, sometimes literally running his lanky, bony legs off that held up his not – nearly – as  – strong cardiac muscle; and he still is.  I have to thank him right now for that because, like the Amistad hero continues, “The only reason they ever were, my ancestors? --- The only reason that they ever were … is --- for me now.”  Daddy would wholeheartedly agree.  No matter how much Daddy was when he walked on this Planet, and I will get to that later on, that is, about just how much Daddy was … No matter how much he was when he was breathing, his only purpose then or since, he would agree, is --- for me now.  That is the Legacy upon which I start to write this down today.

 

Timing being what it is, a combination of chance and luck and whimsy and something else I suppose but cannot define or even know, it is September 2000, on the white – guy, christ - guy calendar --- or as is said in Quakerism still, it is the Ninth Month 2000.  And specifically today, it is 11 Ninth Month 2000; and the Wiping of Tears anniversary commences again, again another year, for me.  Today I am 52 years old.  It is not my birthday, I am just stating that I am no less in years today as I begin to write my first long piece of crime and horror literature than the number of years in life William Shakespeare was, in total, when he stopped writing anything down altogether and ---- crossed over his final bar. 

 

Exactly ten years ago to this day I, and a few of the Entire World’s finest True Friends, stepped into a very small, county civil courtroom in Middle America, USA, the land that is the very Fecund Womb of food proliferation for that same Entire Globe, and into the nightmare of nightmares of all of my life.  Early winter 1994, I thought was the time to capture this maggot – infested mongrel from fouling under my tongue toward the choke of my throat so I began to tell the story then; but that was also a time of four, paying, part – time jobs to sustain the child support payments and to keep current on the hospitalization billing statements.  So time was it wasn’t the time to get it down apparently – because it did not happen.  Time and timing were so scarce and fragmented that I had no flow of thought.  Back then I hardly had minutes to put the brain, out of which had come any thoughts I, out of necessity, had had to entertain in order to survive, onto a pillow to rest and rejuvenate. 

 

While the four, juggled jobs continue to this hour, over the last half decade and more though, one of them has progressed to full time and … benefits!  So the vacation hours from that one began accruing; and, as was my nature also out of necessity, I began to save up those hours just like the therms and kilowatts and the long -, long – completed laboratory experiments’ notebooks, the thesis notes even, and the memories and the pantyhose with the runs in them and the long, smooth – necked, liter – or – so wine bottles and the beige shower curtain bedecked with butterflies that I still use today from the rental we’d had 21 years back alongside East Chocolate Avenue in Hershey P A and the memories and nearly everything else.  And, O, did I mention the memories?

 

To the point that, voila, today, I begin five weeks of earned leave.  Five weeks stored up.  “Squirreled away,” Daddy would’ve smiled, exactly for filming The Dance.  The Dance in its final version, just how it played out.  Consecutive moments and moments and moments of capturing the choreographed maneuvers!  Until I am done.  Those thoughts can freely now flow and continue to … until they quietly ebb and, then, finally cease. 

 

This mission will take, I can feel already, a passel of gastric – calming ginger and licorice tea breaks, some frequent splashing about my neck and shoulders of the scent of my youth, Blue Carnation, that is, Bleu Oeillet, of the fragrance moguls, RogeR and Gallet, still available to be had through shrewd online auction sniping, and some countless number of white, nondescript facial tissues to continue the clearing of my swollen nasal turbinates in order to deep - breathe in that wonderful flower memory --- so that that aroma can tamp down over and keep distant from my core being now these other memories as I type. 

 

As I put down Nothing But the Truth.   

 

So help me, Daddy. 

 

The one mantra, given a long, long life best by the words of Mahatma Gandhi, that I have always carried inside of me readily accessible, as I did, as well, into that fateful Storm County, Iowa courtroom on the morning of 11 Ninth Month 1990, bounces around inside my cranium today, “Even if I am a Minority of One, the Truth is still the Truth.”