I stay up a lot at night. Creatively Controlled Insomnia. This early hour of morning still night caught me in the art room painting Mother's birthday present; a misty blue and purple Shiprock,New Mexico, a pottery urn and an old tree in winter casting its dark twig shadow over a stretch of southwest desert. I was thinking how happy she would be knowing that I have returned to the brushes once again. She always feared more than appreciated my writings. My paintings did not speak. She is going to love this one, I mumbled to myself.

The raw ringing jangled my nerves.
I continued mumbling, this is not an okay phone call.

My brother's voice was strained and the wrong pitch. "Gay", he said, "It's Mother. Sharron and I are on our way to Mart. Tammy called and Mother's house is on fire and she is in it. We know nothing else. Tammy is hysterical; Doug was burned trying to get into the front door; they cannot find the emergency key."

"WHAT?", I screamed into the phone.

"Get a plane ticket, Gay."

The phone went dead.

"Jay, don't leave me," I screamed into the dead phone.

"Damn cell phones: they are always half dead, on the wrong channel, or the satellite is broken, or stoned on meteors," I muttered to myself.

Staring at the phone with a blaze in front of my eyes, "Mama", I whispered to the air. "Wake up, get up, get out."

The phone again: "What! Jay, What?"

"Gay, we were cut off. This is all we know. I will call you when we get there. We are almost out of Waco and getting onto the highway to Mart. Get the ticket."

The phone was silent again. Damned infernal land of death by fire.

I was through with painting; through with thinking.
I sat staring at the phone again: this time it kept quiet.

The voice of my friend, Steve, spoke to my mind,
"Gaylee, be where your feet are."
My legs feel like lead pipes.

The phone rang, "Mother is gone."

Jay had watched the blaze. Mother: smoke and ashes in the Texas starlight. The EMT was with Jay, Sharron crying but incredibly strong: her mind with the living and hiding underlying panic for Jay's heart health.

A good wife is a wife who will take the helm in a storm.

I need a funeral dress.

Doug got my plane tickets: Thank God for my world traveler son. Melanie called the family: where did she get this measure of controlled calm? Zeb made coffee, readied the car, and waited for me to get to get packed, never saying a word. Zeb will be making coffee when the big meteor hits earth.

At the airport I realize I am not thinking: I am in some remote control state. But I am where my feet are. Steve would be proud. I must remember to tell him that I am learning the path.

5:40 a.m.: The jet engines roared. My chest felt the force of take-off. The power of machine and men caused a calm to come over me. I remembered when I went sound to sleep during the drum solo at a Hampton Roads Grateful Dead Concert. It was that same kind of peace. The mind puts strange events together in a crisis.

During the next three/plus hours of waking dream sleep, I traveled through Dawn Boy's early morning efforts to hoist the sun up off of the horizon and into the waiting sky. I looked out the window into the clouds reflecting rainbow sunlight off the tail of the plane and mentally viewed eighty-one years of Mother's earth walk.

During the painting of Shiprock I have been thinking all good things about Mama. Our phone calls were often, light and cheery. They all ended on an 'up' note. This was new. Months and not one disagreement. Lord God, I am so glad we didn't close our last chapter on a 'down' note. She sounded old and frail but strong of heart and mind. She was angry that the Texas wind had blown her over in front of J.I. Read's Supermarket. There was a determined attitude that I took to be healthy. Over the past couple of months, she had not sounded depressed. Over and over we would hear her say, "This is my last Thanksgiving. This is my last Christmas. I made it to 2000: I always wanted to do that. I will not have another birthday: I won't make it to 82."

She had been saying stuff like this since Daddy, at 81, died in 1984.

We did not guess that this would be the serious year. We all did the "Oh, Mother, we have you pegged for 96 at least." We just didn't hear or see. All she wanted for Christmas of '99 was a paper shredder. We joked and called her Ollie North.

Children deny what they do not want to see, hear, or believe about their parents.

What in God's name was she thinking when she walked down the hall for the last time? Where was her sharp and quick brain as she passed all the family's memorabilia: years of it hanging on the walls? We don't have her and we don't have our stuff: years of wonderful stuff with memories designed to comfort us and give us ancestors to worship through memories. The basic religion of America was snuffed out.

I kicked the hard black clay now impossible sticky mud from fire hoses. I leaned over the yellow police tape to hold onto the scorched tree that shaded the swinging yard swing seat that Daddy had built forty years ago: the place where all family photos were taken during those gatherings of the clan.

Eddie Nell was born in Death Valley during an earthquake on Friday the 13th, June, 1918; by chance her own mother's 40th birthday.

The mid-wife knew money when she saw it. The spider web cowl on Eddie Nell's head quickly was snatched off and placed into a small leather pouch to sell at a high price to some orient bound sailor who could not swim. It was the gift of life to him. The cowl was drowning insurance and he would pay with everything he owned to obtain it.

The mid-wife was an entrepreneur.

The story goes: The mid-wife literally threw the un-named child into a wooden fruitbox; covered her with a feed sack and pronounced her "soon dead". The strange foreign gypsy woman then took to stopping the mother's constant bleeding. Excellent at her chosen trade, disregarding the age of her patient, she succeeded.

Eddie Nell would often say, "I do not fear death, I was born dead."

She was raised the youngest of four girls. They were told often: "Take care of Little Eddie Nell, she is sickly and could die." The older girls hated it. "Take care of Ed Nell, take care of Ed Nell." The chant never ceased to ring in their ears.

There were eight pregnancies to Bertha Eda's credit. The four girls lived. The boys didn't. The youngest boy born after Eddie Nell lived two years and died from eating a green pecan. All the boy babies died one way or the other.

California Gold, the dry desert and the vast ocean was not to be the answer for my grandfather and his tiny harem. They returned to El Paso, Texas. Both the land and the ecomomy were not producing. What will always be called The Great Depression and The Dust Bowl was on the horizon. Educated men sold apples on corners to buy bread and bread lines were long; filled with fear and anger. Prohibition became federal law and took the last hope of peaceful nights out of the reach of the common man. The wealthy had all the liquor they wanted. The best of Scotland and Ireland was within easy reach of their pocket books, but not for my grandmother; not my Mammie.

Mammie started a boarding house on Fountain Ave.
Mammie made bathtub gin and beer in the basement. People found a way.
Mammie was an entrepreneur and knew how to create her own fountain.

Unfortunately, the boarding house filled with non-paying, out of work relatives. Family brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles began to occupy the house; empty pockets, hands out, grateful for Mammie's keen sense of meeting needs.

Eddie Nell's bed was behind the kitchen stove, summer and winter.
Mammie would say, "She is sickly and could die."
Eddie Nell learned to taunt her siblings,
"I sleep behind the kitchen stove, I hear everything through the stove pipe vents." The cowl upon her unborn face may have made her the psychic of the clan, but it was her astute sense of opportunistic ingenuity that gave her the edge which she honed with purpose. Perhaps that was the true gift of the mystic cowl.

Mama died in the spring:
A-mid storms and lightening flying across the sky;
Thunder rolling, rolling, rolling.
Bluebonnets tipped with white covering the fields;
Water colored waves and foam, the prairie’s sea.
Our Viking sailed a fiery ship across western pastures:
Seeking those already gone to Valhalla;
The ones who left her here alone, the last of her clan.
She sought the end of her beginnings.
She sought the beginning of no endings;
Utopian Peace.
Ride on fiery lightening bolt;
Valkyrie of life;
Ride on.
June 13th, 1918—April 10th, 2000

SHOCK/DISBELIEF

Monday Morning April 10th, 10:00 a.m. Houston Airport.

I have been up most of the night; since Jay's call around 1:30 this morning caught me in the art room painting Mother's birthday present (Shiprock,New Mexico; a pottery urn and an old tree in winter). I was thinking how happy she would be knowing that I have returned to the brushes once again. She always feared more than appreciated my writings.

The phone jangled my nerves. My gut thought was, "this is not an okay call."

My brother's voice was strained and the wrong pitch. "Gay", he said, "It's Mother. Sharron and I are on our way to Mart. Tammy called and Mother's house is on fire and she is in it. We know nothing else. Tammy is hysterical; Doug was burned trying to get into the front door; they cannot find the emergency key."

"WHAT?", I screamed into the phone.

The phone went dead.

"Damn cell phones: they are always half dead, on the wrong channel, or the satillite is broken or stoned on meteors.", I muttered to myself.

I sat staring at the phone with a blaze in front of my eyes. "Mama", I whispered to the air. "Wake up, get up, get out."

The phone again: "What! Jay, What?"

"Gay, we were cut off: this is all we know. I will call you when we get there. We are almost out of Waco and getting onto the highway to Mart.

Jay had watched the blaze. Mother: smoke and ashes in the Texas starlight. The EMT was with Jay, Sharron crying but incredibly strong: her mind with the living and hiding underlying panic for Jay's heart health.

A good wife is a wife who will take the helm in a storm.

Doug got my plane tickets: Thank God for my world traveler son. Melanie called the family: where did she get this measure of controlled calm? Zeb made coffee, readied the car, and waited for me to get to get packed, never saying a word. Zeb will be making coffee when the meteor hits us.

At the airport I realize I am not thinking: I am in some remote control state. But I am where my feet are. Steve would be proud. I must remember to tell him that I am learning the path.

5:40 a.m.: The jet engines roared. My chest felt the force of take-off. The power of machine and men caused a calm to come over me. I remembered when I went sound to sleep during the drum solo at a Hampton Roads Grateful Dead Concert. It was that same kind of peace. The mind puts strange events together in a crisis.

During the next three/plus hours of waking dream sleep, I traveled through Dawn Boy's early morning efforts to hoist the sun off of the horizon and into the waiting sky. I looked out the window into the clouds reflecting rainbow sunlight off the tail of the plane and mentally viewed eighty-one years of Mother' earth walk.

During the painting of Shiprock I have been thinking all good things about Mama. Our phone calls were often, light and cheery. They all ended on an 'up' note. This was new. Months and not one disagreement. Lord God, I am so glad we didn't close our last chapter on a 'down' note. She sounded old and frail but strong of heart and mind. There was a determind attitude that I took to be healthy. She never, over the past couple of months sounded depressed. Over and over we would hear her say, "This is my last Thanksgiving. This is my last Christmas. I made it to 2000: I always wanted to do that. I will not have another birthday: I won't make it to 82."

She had been saying stuff like this since Daddy (age 81) died in 1984.

We did not guess that this would be the serious year.
We all did the "Oh, Mother, we have you pegged for 96 at least."
We just didn't hear or see.
All she wanted for Christmas of '99 was a paper shredder.
We joked and called her Ollie North.

Children deny what they do not want to see, hear, or believe about their parents.

What in God's name was she thinking when she walked down the hall for the last time? Where was her sharp and quick brain as she passed all the family's memorabilia: years of it hanging on the walls? We don't have her and we don't have our stuff: years of wonderful stuff with memories designed to comfort us and give us ancestor memories. The basic religion of America was snuffed out. I kicked the hard black clay now become impossible sticky mud from fire hoses. I leaned over the police tape to hold onto the scorched tree that shaded the swinging yard seat that Daddy had built forty years ago: the place where all family photos were taken during those gatherings of the clan.

This was all written in June and July of 2000:::::::
It is now, March 12th, 2003: one day prior to my 1st wedding anniversery to Paul Malone.

On July 4th through July 10th of 2000, my entire life woke up and changed course. All of this previous writing is water gone past and on its way to the ocean. The current creates the future. The streams that are un-clogged and filled with life are flowing toward me. All life before me now is new, cleansed and ready to begin a new and different race. The part that I realized this morning is: I need to end this section of the writing and take out my oil paints once again.