The Power Animals Of Scotland, Part Two

Mom emailed me detailed instructions for every step of my journey to Iona--including reminding me to ask at the bus station ticket counter "which pole to stand by" to catch the correct bus--so I am able to walk from the ferry dock to her B&B without hesitation. I call for her at the bottom of the stairs and there is no answer. "Just go up," the owner says.

I knock and there is a pause and then the door opens. She is wearing a purple zippered fleece sweater and dark green fleece pants, a genre of outfit I swore to myself I would never wear, even alone, when I left Michigan. The skin under her eyes is puffy and her face looks tired. I think she has been crying. "I was just meditating," she says.

What is wrong, I quickly begin calculating--in fact, I have been calculating what might be wrong for the last several days. "I wanted to be there when you came. I can't believe I wasn't there to meet you. I feel really bad I wasn't there." She twines her hands and tears start to leak out of her eyes. I give her a hug, step into her room and sit down on the twin bed opposite hers. I twine my hands. The room is several shades paler than the purple of her fleece, brightly lit by sunlight with a view of the sea; the walls seem to be resonating with her shirt.

"This is a nice room for you." She seems confused by this. "It matches your shirt."
I offer to help her with her digital camera. She gets up and looks for it, sits down, gets up and looks in another place, sits down. She tells me how since November her thyroid has been "off"--the level of something in her blood a hundred times the normal level--"But WHAT is the substance?" I say over and over, until I feel like she must be deaf or my vocal chords not functioning. Three long straight gray strands of hair hang down over the center of her face and as she talks they tap airily against her nose and the bridge of her glasses. I wish very much that she would push them back but she does not. She tells me how from November to February she was sleeping three hours a night and editing for twelve hours or fourteen.

My mother writes books. For years--perhaps 15--I buried this fact from myself because I too write and I could not be like her. Last Christmas I asked her to send me the two that have been published--one by herself and one by a small new-agey press. I have managed to read through the introductions. The rest of the text in each is a explanation of the 144 levels of color/light/love that a person on a spiritual journey has to pass through to get to--something like enlightenment, I guess. The books detail helpful correspondences between material objects and spiritual journey, with sections on clothing, continents, pets (particularly dogs), food, plants and trees...

I have avoided this information wholesale in the same way I ignored what my sisters and I termed "the apocalypse kit" she gave each of us a few years later after the power animals. This was the first or second year I went off to college in Connecticut. Mom was convinced that there was a shift happening from a 2,000 year dominance of the universe by "masculine energy" to a new reign of "feminine energy", which was evident if you studied what the sunspots were currently doing. She warned us that there would be global disturbances as this power shift was taking place, and made me promise that if she called me I would drive to a bed and breakfast she liked in Northhampton, MA, because there might very well be flooding as far as Hartford.

For herself she purchased a large RV, so that she could drive around and visit us once the apocalypse untethered her from her house--unphased by my repeated "Where are you going to get the gas for it if there really is an apocalypse?-- and for each of us she assembled a large bundle of things to help us survive the "disturbances". My bundle stayed in the trunk of my car, unopened, for years after college. I finally raided it before going on a long backpacking trip, because I remembered her saying she had bought us each a campstove. There was indeed a stove, which I have just been using in Scotland. There were also several pairs of good wool socks. There was a snowsuit. A bag of cough drops, bandaids and expired antibiotics. A spray bottle of Chloroseptic.

I was glad for the socks and the stove, and angry about the rest. This was what I was supposed to survive on in the event of natural disasters and mass panic? Chloroseptic and bandaids?

Now she is telling me about how my dog, who she has been taking care of while I travel, became "really weird" and was preventing her from sleeping just before she left--nevermind that she was taking sleeping pills every night and her thyroid levels were bouncing back and forth between a hundred times too high and six times too low. She won't let the dog sleep in her bedroom--fair enough--because she says the dog would keep her awake. So the dog sleeps in my bedroom.

"But the week before I left, she got really--weird."

"Weird how? What do you mean, weird?"

"I don't know--just kind of strange and--almost threatening. I was really nice to her, but at night her eyes would get really big, and her tongue would start hanging out. Like she was slavering. And at night she would go back and forth outside the door, and slam her body against it. Just slamming and slamming. I barricaded the door, but I couldn't sleep. I don't know, it was creepy."

I try to picture my seven year old overweight husky-lab mix dog as a slavering, B-movie horror-creature. It doesn't work very well. I concentrate on physically restraining myself from the strong desire I almost always have in the presence of my mother, which is to flee, or, if flight is impractical, to fly into a rage until I have managed to obliterate whatever she is saying or doing. In her presence I almost always feel that something else is going on, something invisible and unintelligible, which makes language useless. A swirling vortex of unpridictability, against which it is hopeless to reason or even listen, it defeats all communication.

"On Valentine's Day--I had been taking A--- [some sleeping pill], and I took some melatonin, too, because I had read that helped you with sleeping--I took a little extra. Just a little bit. And I felt like I was going to explode. I could feel all this blood in my head and my heart was beating really fast. I thought, this is it. I am going to die. So I went to the ER. Well, I did a healing too--that cleared a lot of it, and I could feel some of it lifting off--but I still went to the ER. They gave me medicine--not for blood pressure, but for anxiety. But my brain isn't right. I don't know, I just felt--" She is curled forward with her head to one side, and she puts clamps her fingers to either side of her temples to demonstrate the pressure. I resolve as I watch--or reresolve; it is like feeling over and over an old interior Braille--Never never never never never. I hunch also, and try to notice something specific, something factual, about the room. The yellow speckles in the brownish carpet. Stare at those, keep listening.

"My brain just isn't right. I am tired. I can't remember things. I don't know, I'm just--tired." She gets up and searches among her socks for her camera. Finally she finds it, and we start back down the road toward lunch. I take a few pictures of a weathered wooden bench in front of a cracked stone wall, the cracks fetchingly blossoming with violets. I show her how the zoom works. The camera is tiny, and there are only about three buttons on it. The day is sunny--unusually, for the western part of Scotland--and not too windy. There are sheep and lambs in the green fields, and little white flecks on the dark blue water. Mom has been planning on leaving her MA eco-community and moving to the Isle of Skye once her retirement fund kicks in, and starting a spiritual community that would include a small publishing house, organic gardening, eco-building, and some kind of program for "the children of the world". She has come here, this time, partly to scout out land and talk to builders.

"But I'm tired. I thought I would meet people but it hasn't happened. I might just give it all up. I'm almost sixty." She is wearing a thick purple parka and wooly calf-high boots; her hair is looped inside the neck of the parka and she looks to me like a purple turtle stumping on two legs down the road. I am surprised by her giving up, and sad, and surprised to be sad, as I have spent the whole time she has been talking about moving telling her not to get her hopes up, to take things one step at a time, and to not try to do too much at once. Is this the same woman who told me over the phone just before Christmas, full of righteous indignation, "Do you realize that 80 percent of Scotland is owned by about 400 British families?" Mom against the English. Mom against the land codes. Certainly it was always Mom against the school, whenever she thought a teacher wasn't being completely fair to one of us--as one of our old teachers laughed with some relief after Elizabeth graduated, "Well, finally no more, Look out, here comes Mrs. MacKenzie."

I remember, too, when I was little and she would dress up to go out to a play or a fancy dinner with our dad. She favored tiny low heels with tiny straps and buckles, and pastel dresses with fluted hems and tiny stiff pleats; she wore Tea Rose perfume and a long wool coat with a strip of fur that ran the length of the coat, ankle neck ankle. I used to rub my cheek against it; it was always cool, and I still remember its mild, slightly musky smell.

"Then this giant golden sun--a Masculine energy--came in and held me. For like, four hours! Just held me and held me, and said, you are mine. That never happens!" She is crying as she walks. "Then that night this Tao lady came--she was wearing a Chinese dress. And she was sending ocean waves through me. Like the moon. And I could feel them removing all these fear channels and terror things, lifting them off. I only slept like one and a half hours. Then I would wake up and more would come. All night, just lifting and lifting them."

As we walk I find myself turning into my father. I say, "Huh. Yeah," a lot, in an expressionless voice, and keep my hands in my pockets, staring at my shoes or out into a middle distance. The lambs are trimly fuzzy, like small stocky white poodles, with black spots on their faces and rumps. They duck their heads and then charge their mothers, bleating and butting them, and drop onto their two front elbows to nurse. Mom has been collecting beach glass and periwinkles, she tells me; which beaches have which shells, etc.

Over lunch I ask cautiously about St. Columba. "He killed someone in a church," my mother says, "and his punishment was to be exiled to where he couldn't see Ireland. So you can just barely not see Ireland from here. Maybe he killed several people."

"And he's a saint?" I ask, vaguely indignant.

"Well, it's all very male," my mother says.