Drive

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Island Blog – Lonely, Again

Here’s a thing. That is a ridonculous phrase, but, nonetheless an invitation to stay put and listen. At least that’s what I hope. I am upside down right now. If I cast my eyes back to what has happened over the past forever, particularly the most recent past, I can allow myself this. However, and But, why would those events be knocking me off my feet now? Well, when I ask such a question with absolutely nobody here to engage with, to consider, to respond, t’is only me who answers. She, actually. She is so damn sensible. If I could catch her, I just might incur damage. And, yet, she is the one who walks with me. In this lonely life, and it is a lonely life, I must be cautious around death threats to the one who is always right beside me. I know this.

My day is organised to a great degree. There are many hours in a daylight day, and, as I write this, I chuckle. I remember endless days that seemed to nibble up the hours, condensing them into what I decided was a conspiracy, a plan set to falter me, to confound, to bring me down. Now the hours move like a snail on morphine. I wonder on all the others who might nod at that, although it isn’t always, so. If I have managed to set encounters in place, such as meeting a friend for coffee or lunch, or deciding that valeting my mini is an opportunity for huge laughter and fun, or to decide to drive very slowly over the switchback, setting off very early, noticing ducks and buzzards and white-tailed eagles, flowers, other drivers who do know about island road. I might park and watch, look, pay attention to the ripples on a hill loch, watch a cow lumber away, see her calf jink and bounce. I might play tunes as I ride. I might clean my wee home, marvel at the view, know I am safe and warm and free.

Even then, I am lonely. And, I don’t think it is just me. I remember feeling lonely in a crowd, around friends, in a marriage. Lonely is a thing. And a very big thing, a thing that doesn’t leave just because I don’t want it, or when i try to swat it away in all my pretending. It has a voice, a presence. It is solid and here to stay. Oh, I could fill my days with endless meets and commitments, jobs and nesessaryness, but lonely lurks in the shadows, well fed and just waiting to slide into the room. I don’t feel gloomy. I feel furious. I think, that, as any new shit hits the lifeline fan, the lonely, like an unburied ghost, finds opportunity, and grabs it.

My oldest friend died. Oh hallo lonely. I refuse, btw the way to give you a capital beginning. I know you. In you come. Again.

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Island Blog – Still a Light

I watch the days and the nights. The sharp twist of frost overnight, the sun big as a baron in his barony, wide smiled and warm as a beacon. A light to guide. Jack Frost holds on as long as he can, but even he is no match for that burning fire star. Beaten, for a few hours, Jack slinks back to Winterland for a chilly snooze, biding his time. The switchback road is icy or it looks like it despite the gritter of last night, for it is still zero degrees. The sky is cerulean with whisper clouds, the ground flat and brown and decorated with frosted grasses. Sunlight catches the icy spider webs, diamonds in the bog willow and heather. I meet no cars at all. Ah, the perfection of island life in winter!

I am driving, not Miss Daisy, god bless her and RIP. By now she may appear recycled as a sardine tin and I sigh at the thought. So not how she would ever have seen herself. She may have had rusty underpinnings and found it a bit hard to fire into life of a chilly morning, but she was a strong spirited old girl and kept going till a very definite end. Out, as they say, like a light, which she was. It thinks me, about my own life, the light of it for me and, hopefully, for others. To remain in memories long after your drive belt, or shaft, or whatever has broken is a very uplifting thought. As we grow old, with rusty underpinnings and the struggle to fire up, we have a choice. We are sentient beings, spirited and intelligent and we can make that choice, no matter how crap we might feel, no matter our anxieties, aches, botherments and tiddleypoms. And they are, for the lucky ones, very tiddley indeed. As we readers and curiositors know very well, there is always a choice on how we present ourselves. I know of those, as you do, who have faced, are facing very dire internal horribles, whose lives are actively under threat and yet who still decide to be cheerful. I have nonesuch troubles but I like the ethic and choose it for myself. Ideally, I would like to live a good long life and to have my drive belt snap politely in a beautiful place with eagles soaring overhead and close to home, inside it, ideally. Miss Daisy almost managed the latter, but not quite. Her life ended just as we turned down the hill to home, thus allowing me the relief of knowing that we could freewheel all the way into the village. It could have happened on an upward bend, in snow, with the gritter coming at me like a huge yellow monster, but it didn’t.

This day I drive Miss Pixty, a sassy mini cooper who is a bit of a speed freak if I’m honest. I need to rein her in quite often, but she is great at turning on a sixpence, parking in tiny spaces and responding immediately to whatever I need her to respond to. She will outlive me, this teenager, and we have become fast friends. She is going for her full service, which means, I tell her, that handsome mechanics will be checking her personals. She blushes. It’s okay, I say. They are good lads and it will only take an hour or so. I meet an old friend for coffee. Neither she nor I admit to ‘old’ for we know that there are doddery old 90 year olds about, but because we have known each other for over 45 years. We laugh about getting older, learning acceptance, wisdom and humour at the various small demises we both encounter such as forgetments, bent fingers, slower walking and the strong likelihood of us walking through the town with our frocks tucked into our knickers. Together we can laugh. Alone we blush with embarrassment. We agree that connectivity at such a time is reassuring, uplifting, allowing us to feel we are not the only one going through this process none of us prepared for, one that came so quick, like a thief in the night.

I wander to various shops run by those I knew as children, not five minutes ago, those who now have teenage children of their own. It wonders me. Time, though an illusion, has such power to confuse a mind. She, Time, can scoot the years whilst also managed to dawdle an hour until I am screaming for the clock to hurry up and arrive at the end of itself. The smiles of welcome are heart warming. I wonder what they see as I fankle with the door handle, burst in, laugh at my fankle bursting thing. I surreptitiously check my frock is not tucked in anywhere and straighten, re-aligning the arrangement of island made soaps and candles and creams that almost toppled at my inburst. All well. We chat, I purchase and move on. More chat, more purchase. The island shops are wonderful, offering not Scottish Tat, thank the holy grail, but island-made, inventive and inspirational and I am proud to be an islander in a world that seems to have swapped quality for plastic.

Mis Pixty awaits me and she visibly relaxes as I say hallo and take my seat. How was it? I ask her, flicking on the engine. She growls a bit, then a sassy note comes into her voice. I know that sound. Although she has suffered various underskirt poking and proddings, she has also had her throat cleared and she is raring to go. Steady, I say, Gently, I say and then Let’s Go! And we do, driving round corners, hugging the road and meeting absolutely no-one. As we pass the graveyard, where Miss Daisy died quietly I look across at where Himself lies. The sun catches the stonewords, all of them, not just his. You all lived good lives, I say. Some hard, sometimes hard, some easy, sometimes easy. You had days of dire and days of ire and days of fire and sunlight when a child’s laughter, a moment of intimate love, a glass raised at Hogmanay lifted you above and out of yourself for just a little while. You read a book that smiled you, spent an hour in the pub with a friend chewing over old time, old memories when you were someone else, younger stronger, vibrant and fluid. Then came Time to fickle you. You didn’t invite her in, nobody ever does, but she came anyway and dulled your wits, challenged your dignity, unalughed your laugh. I hope, I continue, that you chose to present the great untruth when someone asked How Are You Today? Or, more unfortunately, and please take this one very seriously, How Are We Today? Eish, never ever ask that one. And, the great untruth is a wonderful light to give out because it lightens everyone you speak to. The bumbling, faltering slide into old age is no news to we bumblers and falterers. We know it, it wakens us in the night, it reminds us of itself all through the day but my questions are these:

How do you want to be thought of right now?

How do you want to be remembered?

What do you want to say about growing old?

This last is important. Young people say they don’t want to grow old, as did I. Now I am here. And I am still a light.

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Island Blog – Into the Mirror

Last night I dreamed the strangest of dreams. Everything is acceptable, believable, in dreams. The craziest happenings are, well, just normal. I had driven miles to a place in the middle of nowhere, a place of one house at a time and hundreds of miles apart. In between, vast cornfields. Poppies and other wildflowers grew at the edge of one such field, although I never found the responding edge. Chances are it was a three day drive away, so huge was this crop of golden stems. Man food. I considered those who were here before, the wildflowers, the great trees, the wildlife, all working together in a synergy we have never successfully simulated.

I parked at the end of a track but could see the guest house nestled in a halo of man-planted, fast growing shrubbery and whiskery trees. I was extremely tired and considered, for a while, sleeping in my car. But the longing to lie down between crisp cotton sheets overtook such thought and propelled me towards the door and check-in.

My room had no walls. Not one. It seemed quite normal to me. Furniture, a desk, a cupboard with hangers, a chest of drawers and a chair created the illusion of a contained space. There was even a door in a frame, attached to nothing. I lay awake a while staring out at the cornfield, watching it vanish as the dark intensified. Then I slept and deeply.

I awoke to the sound of the door opening. A manservant (I knew him by his dress and his demeanour) came in with a silver coffee pot to fill my cup. I asked him the time and when he told me it was 9 am I was astonished. I never sleep beyond 6. I rose, dressed and headed out for a cornfield walk. A man walked by on stilts and I greeted him, watching him lope through the corn in long easy strides. Two children played with a stuffed giraffe. I heard their laughter before I saw them. This giraffe was a fully grown male, or had been, once and it was lying on its side. The children jumped over his neck, a skipping game of their own devise. The girl, breathless, sank down to wrap her arms around the long neck, her little fingers scratching over the glass eye. I watched them a while. All still perfectly normal.

On my return, I found a woman entirely dressed in pink in a warm motherly sort of way, sitting at a trestle table upon which sat pots and bowls of red jelly and a round mirror on a stand. She tipped jelly from one container to another, studied her work and noted her findings down in a little book. I stopped to greet her, thinking she was my hostess but she assured me she was not. I lingered awhile watching her work. She was lost in it until she suddenly came back to me and smiled, turning the mirror around until I saw me looking back.

It thinks me; not what it all meant because dream divination is not my skill, nor my interest, but more, why the mirror? I know that at the end of every road is a mirror. I read it once, heard it said often. The mirror shows me, me. It also shows what is behind me, the places I have been, my part in a created past, my past, my creation. How I felt, how I feel when catching sight of my reflected self is always a surprise. I look like that? Seriously? From behind these eyes of mine I see ahead. I see you but I don’t see me and when I do, it takes me a few seconds to acknowledge my own face. It brings me back to me and a lot of questions. Am I happy with myself, proud of my achievements? Am I kind and compassionate, strong and vulnerable, humble and yet ready to fight for my beliefs, for others, for justice? Only when I have made answer, settled my initial fright, can I turn back to looking out.

I remember one counsellor (been to hundreds) suggesting mirror work. Back then I could barely look myself in the eye, turning hurriedly from a snap reflection in a shop window. Now I get it. The mirror is vital as a reminder that life is not someone else’s problem, but my own. The walking out, of Me, matters. Not just to others but much more so to myself. All the great and good know this, taught it and still do. All religions hold loving self as a basic truth, a first step, the very heartbeat of life. Until we can look long and steady into that mirror, sorting out all those failings that make us turn away, we will live only half a life. We will snap back into our shame and blame as great pretenders. We will arrive at the final day and wonder what happened.

I want to meet that last mirror with a long hard look, no secrets, no shame. I want to see the miles and miles of my past just as it was and know I did more than okay. And then, to move on.

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Island Blog 54 – All Roads Lead

Island Blog 54

 

I had arrived as a surprise.  My daughter met me in the hallway and we hugged and exchanged greetings.  A little voice from deep inside the house asked ‘Where is Granny talking from Mummy?’ and we both laughed, as did the little girl once she found me.

I could have been using skype as my road, or the house phone on loudspeaker.  Her last thought was that she would round the corner and find me standing there.

But there are many roads we cannot see, such as a span of years or a scene from the past.  We can only find a shape to those inside our imaginations, and no two imaginations will find the same route, although the destination is the same.

Driving Miss Daisy the other day, through the wintry  island wasteland,  I pointed out a wonderful stone formation, obviously man-built as support for the rise of a narrow track, that wound its way down towards the Atlantic shoreline.  There was not a drop of mortar holding it together, but only the skill of the dry stone builder.

We considered the time when this track would have carried man and his animals, and nothing weightier than a pony and cart loaded with hay or feed for the hungry animals. We could hear in our imaginations, the slow march of a day long gone by, the lowing of the cattle, the call of a ewe to her lambs, the odd shout or whistle of the shepherd, and the bark of his dogs.  For a moment we could count the day in hours, smell the changing seasons, according to the rise and fall of the sun, or the flow and ebb of the moon tides.

But our pictures would have been very different.

Sometimes in the clipping season, or when the ewes are brought in for dosing, the hill road from the little town grinds to a halt. The local shepherdess is gathering her flock and calling for them to follow her, through the open window of her truck.  Those of us forming an ever-growing snake are required to dig for patience as we lurch and stall in the wake of a hundred woolly legs. There is no opportunity to overtake, and no possibility of speeding up.

Some of us click our tongues and roll our eyes impatiently.  Some of us smile, knowing we have arrived in an afternoon where time is not the issue, and to hurry along would be to risk lambs becoming separated from their mothers. And we can notice, at this slow pace, the first buds on the heather, the marsh harrier overhead, the way the clouds change and reform into new shapes above the gentle roll of the hills.  We can catch the soft calls to ‘follow!’ as they float back to us on a breeze.

And we will all arrive at our destination.

In the end