IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

 

“Resurrection” as illustrated in Christianity’s Easter and “indictment,” as attached to America’s former president are top of mind just now. Surely I am not the only one to take note of the irony. Religion and politics don’t have a lock on such goings-on. While usually narrower in their reach and impact, such stories abound across all sectors of humankind:

 

IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

We lived in the tight, inner-city streets and on our spacious porches as much as inside our homes when I was a scruffy kid. A mishmash of early, twentieth-century Victorians, freestanding doubles, multi-family townhouses and apartment buildings—brick or asbestos-shingled masses packed together like sardines in a tin can—our homes were separated only by slim spans of pockmarked, concrete sidewalks and face-to-face across narrow streets paved in bricks. The streets were edged with skimpy strips of weedy greenspaces and broad walkways. Graffiti was an ever-present feature of the streets and walkways, chalk-doodled and scrawled as they were with our hopscotch grids and hide-and-seek bases and baseball diamonds. We could depend as well on hearts and flowers in chalked messages of love blooming in the clay and concrete, the hard surfaces that were the avenues of our transportation and commerce and recreation.

            Oddities, injustices, cruelties, as well as charity and compassion abounded at every point of the compass—the kind of fodder about which writers dream. There was the brewery, the brick and river-stones behemoth around which our dwellings were clustered and that provided employment for so many of the locals, a place that belched poisonous, sinus-scorching and tear-wringing fumes in the air every afternoon. And who couldn’t guess that on the other side of the street, positioned in a straight line with the entrance of the brewery was the most heavily trafficked beer joint within several blocks? Of course, one of the city’s oldest and most revered Catholic Churches right around the corner from the watering hole is worthy of a mention, for it was, among other notable reasons, a house of worship famous for its standing-room-only confessional.

Two streets south of us was the cloistered district tagged by bigoted outsiders as “Fly Town.” It was the DO NOT ENTER place that was the stomping grounds of the black people in our midst. On many Sunday mornings, I sneaked across that invisible boundary of segregation and stood outside their small church and listened to the glorious music that soared through the walls of the building—spirituals and gospels, “Amen” music as it is commonly known—music that sent chills of wonder down my spine. Oh, how I wanted to go inside and join them. While I was drawn to that kind of spiritual abandon, it also scared me, and I didn’t dare cross that barrier.

Feral cats and stray dogs roamed the area at will. The standout in my memory was an imposing, black Chow Chow, a bear-like beast that was in constant battle with other dogs and cats and that terrified every human being it encountered. Across the alley just west of our house lived Freddy, a kid of my same age and a Ted Bundy in the making. Freddy’s pastime of choice was to catch a feral cat of the day, swing it around by its tail and then bash its shrieking head against a telephone pole. The terrorized cats usually survived Freddy’s assaults while I and the other kids in witness were traumatized forevermore by his violence. Freddy and the Chow Chow would have made good bedfellows.

            The house directly across the street from us, clad in shamrock-green shingles and like most of the freestanding houses of the area, featured a spacious front porch. It was the residence of Catherine, a World War II widow and stay-at-home mother of my friend Molly. Molly was the only person of that name whom I have ever known. There was the Unsinkable Molly Brown who survived the sinking of the Titanic and Molly the cloned sheep that had its 15 minutes of fame in 1997. Molly, my friend, also had the distinction of being a genetic double of her mother. They were both petite, blue-eyed blonds. Their physical features weren’t remarkable in a neighborhood of a preponderance of little and pale females. The odd thing about them was that during the nine years I knew them, Molly had a parade of new fathers and with each new father, she had a new last name. Catherine’s free-hand with Molly had its limits, however. It turned to out and out suppression in other ways. For instance, Catherine denied Molly’s every plea to cross the street, or to play in it or on the sidewalks with the rest of us kids. Molly’s porch was her private and only playground. I see so clearly in my mind’s eye that lonely, little girl standing at the edge of the porch watching us play, her bottom lip quivering and her tears dripping from her trembling chin.

I lost contact with Molly when my family and I moved out of the neighborhood. Both Molly and I were fifteen at the time. Six years later, in a peculiar mix of serendipities, I ran into Molly among the New Year’s Eve throng gathered at Times Square in New York City. What were the odds of happening upon a person I used to know from two states away and all those years before? I recognized her instantly, as she did me. “Mollyyyyy,” my mind flipped through the long list of her various last names for the appropriate one. I would have expected Molly’s face to have been ruined by the emotional wounds that surely were the legacy of her swinging-door fathers and conflicted mother, but it was nothing of the sort. Molly’s face was fresh and as sparkling as the crystal ball that a few minutes later dropped into the New Year.

 

She recognized my bewilderment and said through a kindly smile, “It’s just Molly now. All those last names sent me into therapy for a long time. I came away from it simply as Molly.”

 

“That’s cool!” I declared, and I wrapped her in a big hug. I pulled away and added, “Cher and Madonna have done quite well for themselves that way.”

 

“Exactly!” Molly affirmed. We laughed and there was no need for further discussion on the matter.

The incident brought Freddy to mind. Did he ever make it to an analyst’s couch or a church’s pew? Did he have nightmares about the cats he tortured? I had to be content with knowing that at least Molly had made it to the light. And what about Catherine? At the time, I still held to the opinion that she was bat-&hit-crazy. Years later, my assessment of her grew more flexible—when I became one of those desperate mothers trapped in a frantic search of a substitute father for my children.©  

   

#Easter, #Indictment, #Resurrection, #VictorianHouses, #Townhouses, #ApartmentBuildings, #TedBundy, #FeralCats, #StrayDogs, #ChowChows, #MothersAndDaughters, #GardenOfTheSpiritsOfThePots, #LindaLeeGreene

 

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Multi-award-winning artist and author Linda Lee Greene’s GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS: A Spiritual Odyssey, is a novella in which ex-pat American Nicholas Plato relocates to Sydney, Australia to escape the mental torture of devastating losses back home. Strange encounters in Australia’s outback with an Indigenous potter reveal to Nicholas unexpected blessings and a new way of living. The novella is available in eBook and/or paperback. Just click the following link and it will take you straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase the book.

https://www.amazon.com/GARDEN-SPIRITS-POTS-SPIRITUAL-ODYSSEY-ebook/dp/B09JM7YL6F/