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Superstitions. I can thank my late grandmother for most of them. She was "to the manor born," well-travelled in her younger days, a divorcee in unenlightened times, artistic... and an earthy woman used to hard work. She was also suspicious of people (to the extreme), and forever seeing signs and wonders in everything... and taught her descendants the same. I still see, in my mind's eye, when she still lived in the bungalow. Two horseshoes were tacked to the redwood siding, turned up like a "U"... to hold the good luck in. It was insisted that no blacksnake live in her presence, and the remains were to be draped over a branch to "make it rain." Baffle the grandkids with bullshit. Mostly, my brother and I thought her slightly giddy, and accepted her comments with a nudge and a wink... but never forgot them. Difficult, when our mother (also divorced, and at times articulate and headstrong, at others depressed and intoxicated) always had her astrological charts, books on psychic sciences, and various runic things scattered about. Both looking for answers and a source of control. How like life. But there is no control, really. Despite how superficially ordered we hope the world to be, chaos is a bombstrike away. Or a bounced check. An unnoticed mole on the skin. Enough chaotic episodes endured while living on the brink, and "why" becomes more an obsession than a question. And the legacy continues.... Sometimes, I notice little things... just at the periphery. No chain-clanking, split-pea spewing, or firey-brimstone events. Subtlety. Like recalling uncomfortable nights in places where we later learned of tragedy. Being rear-ended by a tractor-trailer... noticing, when the dust settled, the odometer of the Trooper was on 667. My brushes with strange coincidences on the mountain. And others. Yeah, signs and wonders. They suck. A family of wrens have taken up residence on our front porch, in one of the potted plants. They don't seem to care that we constantly walk past noisily...they're just raising young ones. Symbiosis. We all just get along. But it was inevitable that, sooner or later, one of them would find their way into the house. Like this morning. Ooo... Bad Mojo. "A bird in the house means death in the family," echoes as I herded her through the rooms, opening a window here, a door there, as means of escape. They're all back together, now, but there's that little homily etched on the mystery eightball to ponder. Do I remember the last time, when Miss Jane's parents passed, within a month of each other? Or accept chaos as ongoing? Punching the keys on this addition to my life at three AM, you're bound to forget the punchline, occasionally. What I meant to relate concerned a movie I taped late Friday, to watch in the doldrums of Saturday night. Fright nite. "Stigmata" was the choice, seemingly a less smarmy, less T&A & cut&slasher...more of the mental variety. And what were the recurring motifs? The usual Exorcist-ic options of devilish manifestations, buckets of blood... and birds in the house. Let an image make an impression, and it won't let you go. Fucking superstitions. Gee thanks, Grandmother. |
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