“Davy Jones Locker”
Mixed Media Assemblage
17″ X 21.5 “
by Judy Dykstra-Brown
Davy Jones‘ Locker is a metaphor for the bottom of the sea—the final
resting place for sailors who are the victims of shipwrecks and is used
as a euphemism for drowning. Silver coins spilling from a pirate chest
seem to be doing these victims of shipwreck at sea no good at all. Media
includes sand and shells collected from various Mexican beaches by the artist.
The slingshot, cloth and even the plastic cup were found on the beach. The cup is covered with coral and was obviously once on its way to being incorporated into a coral reef. The tiny chest, the silver fish and the skeletons were the only objects added to help tell the story that were not collected on beaches.
For Jez’s Water Water Everywhere prompt
Other People’s Children
I’m 57 years old and I’ve never had a child. No one would have predicted this. I’ve always been absolutely gaga about babies. When I was five, when my mother went to her Progressive Study Club, I’d spend the whole afternoon watching the babies laid out on the bed in the middle of a pile of coats. I would barely take my eyes off them. They seemed precious, beautiful and endlessly fascinating. In any crowd, my eyes fell on the babies. Whenever my much older sister had a child, I’d go to visit and the baby would sleep in my room.
So why did I never have a child and do I regret it? I never had a child because I was too busy living my life and somehow it always seemed that a child would interfere. I was selfish, yes, and last night I had a dream that adequately depicted that selfishness. In the dream, I was going to a concert. I went next door to my neighbors, who had many children, and asked if I could take one of them to the concert.
“Take me, take me!” each indicated by raising his arms or coming into my view. I took one of the smallest. It wasn’t until after the concert when I was again home that I realized that I’d left the child at the concert and worse to tell, I couldn’t even remember which one I’d taken! It was as though the minute I’d picked the child up that I’d forgotten it. The guilt was crushing but I seemed more worried about how I’d admit it to the parent than what might have happened to the child. I wondered whether to return to the concert or to go to the parent, which I dreaded. In the end, I went to see the parent and the child was there with her so I didn’t even mention that I’d lost her child. Afterwards I thought that I should go to the child and apologize, but I never did.
This dream ties in to a lifetime of dreams where I forget to feed and put more water in the tank of my fish and go down to find them transformed into fake fish lying on the bottom of a waterless tank, or have kittens or babies I forget to feed. It’s perfectly clear that this dream comes from some part of me that has always feared that I wouldn’t be an adequate caretaker over the long run. And so in the past, I always confined my caretaking to a few weeks in the summer, when I have my niece and nephews to visit, or Saturday visits from neighborhood kids for painting or singing or games.
Now at 57, I prefer to feed the child in the adults I find. To nourish their missing parts, care for the untended places in their souls. It’s like I’m a delayed parent, making up for the lacks in their pasts.
Twenty years ago, when I’d first met the man who was to become my husband, I went to a psychic to discover why he looked so familiar to me from the start, why I saw dozens of faces when I looked at him, all of those faces familiar. She took me back in a supposed past life progression, During that time, a little girl spoke to me. She said she was meant to be my child in this lifetime, but that since I’d been a mother in so many of my more recent past lives that she understood why I might want to spend this present life entirely on my self. “If you decide not to have me,” she said. “I’ll come to you some other way. So don’t worry. Just enjoy this life for yourself.”
So every time I meet a little girl or see the little girl or boy in an adult who has never resolved past issues, I wonder if that is the little girl trying to find me. And I try to respond.
This is the full extent of my mothering, and I must say that I’ve really never regretted not having a child. When I see a friend focusing her full attention and enjoyment on her daughter, I realize that I have that same relationship with my friends, and when I think of the friend whose son gambled away their retirement or the other friend who is raising her second grandchild, I know that life has turned out just right for me. Yes, I have children, but I get to decide when I see and care for them. And I get to continue to feed my own inner child. Selfish, perhaps, but somehow I think I’m just filling the exact niche I was born to fill.
—Dec. 6, 2004
Note: In lieu of the rhymed and metered poems to prompts that I’ve written and put on my blog daily over the past ten years, I’ve decided to start publishing excerpts from the journals I’ve been keeping for the past 22 years, hoping this will prompt me to transform them into a book. I welcome your comments about whether you find these peeks into my past interesting enough to warrant that effort.
For Cee’s FOTD
Today, I have been working on Chapter 12 of a book about my first few years in Mexico. This one was written in my journal a little over a month after I moved here in 2001. As will be obvious by my packing crate desk, I still didn’t have furniture! Please let me know if this chapter holds your interest.
Natural Rhythms
Yesterday during the sunny part of late afternoon, I noticed the dust and streaks on the kitchen and sala windows. I knew the windows hadn’t been washed since their initial washing when I moved in a few months before, but I hated telling either Jesus or Sofia what to do. I felt like they both had a pretty good handle on what needed to be done and I liked the idea of a natural rhythm being established that pulsed along on its own. So I didn’t say anything to Sofia about the windows.
She had come late again, although I didn’t notice how late. Immediately, she came into the guest room, where I had moved my computer in anticipation of the visit of the electrician. In removing breakable objects from his path, I was doing my part. “Senora,” she said excitedly in her normal fashion. She then proceeded to cough and sniff and show in sign language that she had contracted my flu symptoms.
“Is possible trabajar?” I asked, meaning not that I was worried if she could work but that I was worried whether she should.
“Si, si,” she insisted, but we moved to the kitchen to make tea together for both of us. There I dosed her with echinacea and goldenseal––the horrible liquid variety that I hated so much that I couldn’t make myself take it. But she is more stoic and swallowed the glass of water with drops in it with two horrible grimaces and a general trembling of the body. We chased it with a glass of peach juice. Next time, take it with less water, I instructed, a bit late for her present comfort.
Later, I heard much talking and splashing out on the terraza. I had been hearing the loud voices for over a half hour but had screened them out. Now I realized that it was Sofia talking to Jesus in a voice made lower and almost unrecognizable from her cold. She had been outside for most of the morning, talking as he swept and watered. What was she doing?
“Senora, Senora!” I heard.
I ran out of the sliders that led from the guest room all the way around the house and finally found them in the back terraza. Jesus was happily giggling and sweeping water from the fieldstone patio floor. Sofia was squirting water on the windows. Sofia was washing windows! My house’s needs were being met according to that long seamless communication that required only my silence.
“Did you call me?” I asked.
“No, Senora,” said Sofia. It was the third time that day that I’d heard her calling me and had gone to find her only to have her say she hadn’t called. Perhaps some mental telepathy was in play. First the windows, now this. My life was being simplified. Like a mother whose children had sailed off seamlessly into their own lives, I felt content.
Later, after the electrician had left, my plumber arrived and found the cause for our lack of water pressure for so long. It seemed to be a faulty water filter. More mysteries solved. I moved out onto the front patio to look at plants newly planted. The white of the repaired dome stood sorely against the sky like a bandaged elbow. One day I would have to figure out the color scheme for the repainting project. House projects stretched out in front of me like the line of leaf cutter ants that marched the edge of the terraza. Individual ants stood out clearly today, since each carried the pipestem of a vivid red lipstick blossom. At times they looked like the wings of vividly colored moths as they wove together and apart. Some carried their loads straight upright like periscopes or stovepipes. Others had cut off cross sections so their loads looked more like fat hula hoops.
Ant generals three or four times larger than the rest patrolled the lines, getting smaller ants out of difficulties, lifting caught flower barrels over higher zigs of stone or helping to disentangle plant collisions. One small ant struggled to try to extricate its load from a depression. It was carrying a piece of succulent shaped like a small pompon on a green stem, the pompon consisting of a dozen tiny green balls. Top-heavy, it kept landing in bowled depressions in the fieldstone and getting stuck. Time after time, other ants would come to help. They tugged and pulled and pushed. Again and again the small ant would get it balanced and start off again to land in yet another depression. Finally, he was well on his way over a particularly flat few inches of stone when the wind came up and lifted the load from his jaws, blowing it a good six inches out of the way. The same was true of an entire leaf being carried by one of the general ants, but in this case, the ant did not let go of his load and instead was blown with the leaf across the patio. The ants both abandoned their Herculean tasks, scurrying back in the opposite direction, fate having relieved them of annoying tasks their ant natures would not allow them to abandon.
A necklace of bright red lipstick blossoms bobbed before and after them. Who was the Mamacita being regaled with all of this floral bounty? Was it fiesta time in the ant world or was this just some particularly succulent provision that was worth the extra labor of traversing the entire terraza to obtain just it? Under the sink in the kitchen were six sticks of the insecticide chalk that had effectively stopped the onslaught of these leaf cutter ants against my hibiscus bush, but I couldn’t bring myself to end this gay procession, let alone to kill all of its participants. It was too wonderful, this colorful parade––its participants too determined and focused.
It was part of the workings of my house this day: Sofia now sweeping the floor, bringing out fresh flan, Jesus finished with his sidewalk sweeping and off to pay his electric bill, I moving my stool away from where I had pulled it to watch the ants and back to its position by my packing crate desk. The world moved around us, catching us up in its pulse and pulling us along. No boss. No list too organized. Rather, dozens of small lists lost in coat pockets and blown into corners. Someday everything would be finished. In the meantime, everything was here jumbled together. Things uncomplicated in their messiness were doing themselves, being done to, doing back. Something was being taught to me as I sat very still, letting myself be taught.
I love this bush. So do the hummingbirds and butterflies! It is a regular wildlife cafeteria!
For Cee’s FOTD
Memoirs of a Frequent Flier
It was in the spring of 1953 when I first realized that I could fly. It had been coming on by degrees—first in dreams, where I would hold my arms straight out, crucifixion style, and then pump them straight up and down until I rose from the ground to float through the air, feet hanging straight down below me, swimming through the air propelled by those pumping arms.
In the dreams, no one ever noticed me. Not the other kids playing “New Orleans” in my yard below me, not my dad out mowing the grass or my mom hanging clothes on the line. Birds flew by in their usual manner without changing their course, whizzing by so close to my ears that I became convinced that I was invisible to all nature–man and beast.
I was never stung by mosquitos when I was in flying mode, and for some reason, even during that long summer two years later when I was eight years old and flying every day, it never rained when I was flying. A few times the first raindrop fell just as my feet came into contact with the ground and I had to shift my mind to remember how to move my legs to propel myself and avoid getting soaked to the skin by one of those July rainstorms so dreaded by farmers trying to get their summer wheat crop combined before the heavy rain, or even worse, hail.
Hail! What would happen if it were to hail while I was flying? Would I be able to soar above the hail—to watch it fall to the earth below me–a wall of white water stones creating themselves just inches below my toes and falling straight down away from me? Could I see them forming? Turning to ice where seconds before there had been nothing, each one of millions a little miracle in itself?
I don’t remember how old I was when I stopped flying. All I can remember is one day remembering that I used to fly, long before, and wondering if the whole experience of that long summer when I was eight and less frequently in the years afterwards were just memories stitched together from dreams. Like so many other things, I can remember clearly when they began but have no memory of when they stopped. Perhaps they haven’t. Perhaps only the memory of this talent unique to me has faded, daily, as soon as my feet touch earth.
But I wonder, in these days of drones so easily and cheaply purchased on the internet, if flight such as mine has become an impossibility. With more people looking up at the sky, what is my likelihood of avoiding being noticed and if I were noticed, what effect would it have on my life? All the news agencies would call. Then Oprah and perhaps even the president. Perhaps Donald Trump would call wanting to make me into a reality show. Perhaps I’d be encouraged to launch a blog penned from above. How high up does Wi-Fi go, I wonder, and would I have to attach a Wi-Fi antenna to a beanie on my head and post the blog orally as both hands would be necessary for my flight, to prevent my plummeting to earth?
No, better that this miracle of flight be left behind with other marks of my adolescence: pimples and wet dreams and all those insecurities of coming of age. Perhaps they were what prompted my need to raise myself above it all. Now that I am well past being fully matured and in fact have embarked on that course that will eventually result in my sinking back into that earth I once rose above, I can make do with pleasures of that earth—chocolate and fresh ripe figs and a 5 o’clock Martini enough to raise me above the norm. And that truth that once I was unique is enough to assure that I still am—here in my Barclay Lounger with my New Yorker Magazine, my feet up on the step stool and commands that I can give through air simply by a push of the finger via remote control. Checking in to Oprah to see who she has found to fill my place this week. Keeping my secret. Knowing how thrilled she would have been. Rating my potential story against theirs. And in my own mind, I know that I would rise above them all.
Closets
The signs of my leaving were clear. Closets were open in every location of the house where clothes could be stored, for gradually over the years, as each family member in turn left our house, they left not only a space in my heart, but also an extra closet for me to appropriate.
The front bedroom, which had been first Jodie’s room and then Chris’s—stepchildren now gone on to new lives—was now the guardian of my heavy winter coats, extra robes and the too-flamboyant clothes of my thirties. In the basement closet of what had formerly been a guest bedroom, then converted into my metalsmithing studio, I stored sizes 10 through twelve, suggestive lingerie from my past, Halloween costumes and spring jackets.
My “fat” clothes, unfortunately, were presently residing in the closets of the master bedroom–size 14 through 16 in my own closet, sizes 18 through 1X hanging like abandoned lives in “my” portion of Bob’s closet, his clothes having been culled by five of his kids and their spouses and girlfriends who, just weeks ago, had gathered for his funeral. I wish I had taken a photo of them as they stood around the nearly empty TV room, each of them in a pair of his wild pants or one of his t-shirts or both, wearing their recently departed dad or near-dad like a skin. He had been a wild dresser. Red suede sneakers, drawstring puffy-legged pants we’d had made from batik in Bali, Guatemalan shirts.
Now, beside his few remaining garments, hung mine. It was like a major filing system spread throughout the house. Unfortunately, clothes seemed to migrate from closet to closet–my hot pink suede cowboy boots walking over for a visit with my old office clothes or my winter capes winding up mysteriously amidst teddies and feather boas.
So it was that closet doors all over the house stood open as I searched for items that would cover climatic necessities from thirty below zero to tropical.
The floor was covered by my big suitcase and my small suitcase, peeled open like bananas awaiting their stuffing. Around the suitcases, the floor was littered by various personal items that had spilled out from a dropped cardboard box. I lay belly down now, my hand swinging out in arcs in search of the flashlight which had rolled under the bed when it tumbled from the box.. Like the Halloween “body parts” game wherein in a darkened room a peeled grape became an eyeball and cold spaghetti was reputed to be intestines, my hand skittered over various small objects. A dust ball that felt like a small mouse, hairpins, paperclips, a missing black sock, before finally settling on the flashlight .
I tossed it into the front zippered compartment of my canvas suitcase. I believed in being prepared for any contingency in travel and so I carried a mini drugstore that would cover emergencies from scorpion bite to constipation as well as a small tool kit, flashlight, book light, alarm clock and mini umbrella all tucked into the front two zippered sections of my suitcase that I had dubbed my “utility” compartments.
“You won’t need all that stuff,” Jayson had told my as he surveyed my knitted muffler and mittens and winter coat. “Isn’t it pretty much hot all year round in Mexico?”
“Yes, but I have friends and relatives in Wyoming and Minnesota. I might visit them. Or take that trip up the west coast of Canada to the Northwest Passage that Bob and I always meant to take. No need to have to buy new clothes. And the Mexico house has lots of closets, too.”
Surreptitiously, I slipped Bob’s Mudcloth African shirt ornamented with the x-shaped metal studs into one of the boxes, along with a pair of Bali pants the daughters-in-law had overlooked, and his “Art Can’t Hurt You” T-shirt that I had thought would be cremated with him, but instead had arrived back intact with his ashes, along with his red suede sneakers, another pair of batik pants and his metal dental crown, complete with fake teeth. I packed them, too, setting aside his cremation urn, for which I had a special place. The family would all come down to Mexico in the spring to help my spread his ashes in Lake Chapala. In the mountains above it was the beautiful domed house we had meant to make our retirement home, but we had waited too long to find it. Now I would soon start the long journey down to it, from Boulder Creek, CA to Mexico, where I would fill out the closets of a new home.
I folded my Mother’s Japanese cotton kimono jacket and slid it into the box. It had been an old man’s housejacket, my Japanese friend had told me, and please not to wear it when I met her family. But, my mother and I had loved it when we found it in Nobu, a Japanese shop in Santa Monica, and she had worn it for years before dying just three months before Bob and I left for Mexico to find a new home, buy it, and return to California to sell our home of 14 years. Two months later, although we had not sold the house, we had sold most of its contents. We had packed most of the van—mainly with books and tools, reserving packing our clothes to the very end, thinking we could perhaps stick them into the cracks between other items–– before discovering, during our last-minute medical check-ups, that he had cancer. He lived for three weeks.
So, I’d be moving alone to Mexico, but would always have the option to be surrounded by my dearly departed. My closets would be full of my own past and present selves, but one small portion of them would carry Bob and my mother with me as well.
