Notes - what difference does that make?

         A visit with Dr. Bajaj this morning. Soup and salad for lunch at Olive Garden. You spent the afternoon working on updating and clarifying your health files and appointments for Medicare, Aetna, the family doctor, three specialists and an eye doctor as well as blood test results, prescriptions, payments and the like. Then to Kroger’s to pick up more supplies. Tomorrow Scott is coming to replace the outside basement door and frame. A surprise for the budget. – Amorella

         Lately, the real world has been showing itself and I am preoccupied the household obligations rather than wonderings and imagination. At least it has been unseasonably warm – today it was up to sixty and tomorrow fifty-eight, not bad for the end of January. No snow shovels either. We will take February one week at a time. The first week is supposed to continue mild with rain showers now and then. If we can get too March without snow or at least much of it, then next month will be a lot easier to handle – even if we have a big snow it won’t stay on the ground forever.

         This scene with Arthur and Merlyn will bring in some horniness – that is, imagination, as they talk about Vivian and Guinevere and the way it was in life. – Amorella

         That seems childish. I mean, they are mature men and dead, why would they want to talk about such things?

         Men or boys, alive or dead, the human condition remains in these books. Remember David’s thoughts in Grandma’s Story?

         I had forgotten this little story. I remember being concerned writing about David and Bathsheba because they are Biblical and I was concerned it might be offensive to G---D. It was/is my upbringing. Mother instilled in me at a young age that the Bible was/is sacred. I think she believed it was the direct word of G---D written down – like the Ten Commandments or something. Always a conflict growing up. A lot of pressure to fit in the norm. I don’t know why. Mom and Dad were fairly independent themselves.         

 ** **

Grandma’s Story – Chapter Eleven [Braided Dreams]

We return to three thousand years or so before the present, to a King and Queen in the Middle East. One summer day King David stood on the roof of his palace, and he noticed a woman with dark hair and dark features in a bath on a roof over what would be almost a city block away. Beauty is not the word he would have used. Perfection immediately came to mind and elsewhere too. How is this, he wondered, that perfection is so close to me when my perfection has now departed to G-d. Perhaps this perfection is a gift from G-d, he thought. I am king in his name, or I should be. I have done good works. I am of the loins of Abraham and Sarah. I am as Abraham still living. Perhaps she is a gift.

            He quickly found who the woman was. Bathsheba, wife of his good and loyal general, Uriah the Hittite, who loved soldiering and war more than anything else in the world. I have to touch this woman, thought David, she is heaven sent for a king no question about it.

            David felt justified as king that G-d would give him a present. It seemed the natural thing for G-d to do, to help him through his recent personal sorrows. When she arrived as ordered, David touched her and surprisingly, Bathsheba touched him back. She was not perfect. Perfection would elude even a king. His intuition about the woman below on a neighboring roof was quickly set straight in his mind and elsewhere too.

            Lust rushed in and stuck in his mind as an enemy spear. David became instantly terror struck. Lust is a present from G-d? I am stronger than that, he thought, and he sat and he confessed to this woman he had never met before what had almost over come him.

Bathsheba sat with him surprised at his unpretentious manner and understood how it felt to have lost a love as she once had years before. She held him in her arms as he cried like a child. He dismissed her at her own bidding so he might have some privacy and she too. This feeling of attachment was new to both of them.

When they met again, this time in secret, they made love in a passion that neither expected. They bathed in a mist of passion so fine that both could see the same rainbow in their heart of hearts. The unexpected happened, as did the expected.

A few weeks later, she called on David and he responded immediately. “I am pregnant with your child, David,” she said. “I will be stoned to death for adultery.”

“Have you not slept with your husband?” he questioned.

“No. He is busy soldiering and will not be bothered.”

“I will not have you stoned, with or without my child,” said King David without thinking. “I will come up with something.”

It was then that Bathsheba realized she was in love with the king. He would not let her die even if the child was not his or her husband’s child. “I love you,” she said abruptly and without forethought.

“I love you, too,” he responded. Again, he thought, this woman commanded the situation. She will make a good queen. How can this be? She is my general’s wife. I have many wives, but he has only one. I cannot take her from him, and I will not. It was then that he thought on how Bathsheba could still be God’s gift to him. Only if the general dies a good death in battle will I wed her. If he does not I shall allow her compensation and protect her from stoning. I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

Very soon, almost too soon, there was a battle afoot and brave Uriah, the general was up front with his men as always. Uriah was a good and loyal general through his last battle. Thus, it came to be that Bathsheba married King David. Their son died young. Nathan the Prophet, told the king his son’s death was partial payment for the king’s adultery, but David asked, “if this is so, why did G-d take my son and not myself?”

“For further punishment,” hailed Nathan the righteous and the wise.

“How do you know this?” commanded King David, “That G-d should speak to you before he would speak to me in private.”

This was a loaded question and Nathan quickly reassessed the situation. “I do not know, my king,’ he responded somberly.

“We shall have another child,” snapped David the King.

Nathan was verbally bruised and dismissed.

It was then David realized the depth of his love for Bathsheba. He realized that G-d may have been talking to him through Nathan because he was a powerful prophet, but David did not know that G-d was not also talking to him the king.

Years later, Bathsheba asked a much older David, “Will our son be king?”

“Yes,” he responded with no hesitation. “I shall do as you wish, Solomon will become king while I am still alive to see it.”

Bathsheba smiled, but knew she had no need to thank David for what his heart had told him to do. From her point of view, from that time long before when she told the king she was pregnant, she had come to realize a truth about love. Love, like true beauty, works from the inside out not the outside in. She was content with the king’s response that Solomon would be king. David was content that she was content.

Solomon saw this joint contentment in his parents and said to himself, ‘true wisdom, like true love, must come from the heart first and the soul must concur. The absence of one from the other will lead but to a shadow of wisdom and not wisdom itself.

That’s Grandma’s story. I had to do some telling in this one because that is how people have heard it. Grandma smiled knowingly and winked in delight.”

When Grandma’s story is done there’s a wake that will follow,

In the river of deep thoughts and its shallow;

The great bend in the river between the slave and the free,

With a marked separation where you may want to be.

A guilt for being born human causes much strife,

And the free human unshackles this slave in their life

By accepting what one is, a piece of humankind --

Filled with imperfect sails for the strong winds in the mind.

Words flow free as small letters by Merlyn’s own hand

Across a crammed flowing fiction carrying earth, floaters and sand.

From Braided Dreams by rho

***

         I know where some of this comes from and it is not the Bible. It is not a memory of lust either. Sincere emotions. Memories, some real some tangled with wishful thinking and other imaginations. I think where I first had this sense was in the fifth or sixth grade when I read Mark Twain and Tom being stuck in the cave with Becky. Wow! That jogs the mind.

         A Google for the thought and a quick online re-read.

** **

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain

A Selection from Chapter 31

A frightened look in Becky's face brought Tom to his senses and he saw that he had made a blunder. Becky was not to have gone home that night! The children became silent and thoughtful. In a moment a new burst of grief from Becky showed Tom that the thing in his mind had struck hers also— that the Sabbath morning might be half spent before Mrs. Thatcher discovered that Becky was not at Mrs. Harper's.

The children fastened their eyes upon their bit of candle and watched it melt slowly and pitilessly away; saw the half inch of wick stand alone at last; saw the feeble flame rise and fall, climb the thin column of smoke, linger at its top a moment, and then— the horror of utter darkness reigned!

How long afterward it was that Becky came to a slow consciousness that she was crying in Tom's arms, neither could tell. All that they knew was, that after what seemed a mighty stretch of time, both awoke out of a dead stupor of sleep and resumed their miseries once more.

         Tom said it might be Sunday, now— maybe Monday. He tried to get Becky to talk, but her sorrows were too oppressive, all her hopes were gone. Tom said that they must have been missed long ago, and no doubt the search was going on. He would shout and maybe some one would come. He tried it; but in the darkness the distant echoes sounded so hideously that he tried it no more.


From: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

***

         That was the place I stopped to think out the situation. Then I thought of the two girls I would have liked to have been stuck in the cave with. I wouldn’t know what to do, just as Tom didn’t know. Love was complicated already and I had no idea what love was. I still don’t know what love is, but I don’t think love is the be all and end all of human matters. It is an important part, but the whole of humanity is greater than the emotion of love. I didn’t use to think this but somewhere along the line I changed my mind. In this sense I am not the romantic I once was back in my younger days.

         The point here, boy, is that you have not lost how it was being in the fifth or sixth grade being absorbed in Tom Sawyer. Here you are sixty-nine years old and you can remember such a moment in your life. Allow the same for Arthur and Merlyn even though they are long gone from this world of the living. And, maybe they never were, perhaps both were fiction from the beginning. What difference does that make in your heart, boy? You tell me. Post. - Amorella