Gypsy,
Hippie, Fairy - Who will
write this page?
And the winner is . . . Fairy!
I finally threw all caution to the wind in
the early 1970s and allowed my hidden hippie
heart to surface. I didn't realize that Middle
Class
Fifties-Wife-and-Mother was morphing into the
protagonist of Patti Wilson's Earth Journey:
Book Two. My first clue was the
joy I experienced when I bought my first bell
bottom pants, followed by a pair of those white
boots that were made for walking that looked so
great with my first-ever mini-dress. Lots
of firsts were showing up in my life.
The next harbinger of change
was that 1969 poster that
I hung on our walnut-paneled dining room wall in
Gainesville, Florida. It had the same
words an instructor
mentioned in a psychology class at Santa Fe
Junior College. The poster had a slightly
different ending to what became known as the
"Gestalt prayer" penned by Dr. Fritz Perls.
Do you remember that 56-word
statement that was a classic expression of
Gestalt therapy? It opens with, "You do
your thing, I do my thing. I am not in this
world to live up to your expectations, and you
are not in this world to live up to mine."
Uh-oh! The winds of change were blowing.
The impetuous inner gypsy in my soul is
impatient to write about the years that
followed, and there will be a time for that, but
today is not that time.
Today demands a flashback to my innocent
beginnings which I like to liken to a little
fairy's lovely spirit. (Can you tell I
also like alliteration?) Fairies were not
included among the characters in my Catholic
Catechism, so they did not enter my field of
awareness as a child, not by name at
least. Like a fairy, my love of nature was
inborn and unusual for a child born and bred in
the concrete jungle of Williamsburg, on the
north side of Brooklyn, New York City, New York,
USA.
We honestly did have only one tree
growing bravely at my end of Conselyea Street,
close to the corner of Lorimer Street where the
Meat Store was back then. It was pretty close to
the fire hydrant city kids called a Johnny
Pump.
On a scorching summer afternoon, one
of the big boys would get a wrench and open up
the hydrant sending a cooling cascade of water
into the air for us to run through until the
cops came to turn it off. It wasn't quite Coney
Island, and seemed a little dangerous, because
we knew the cops would show up soon and give us
a warning and a threat that they'd tell our
parents and then we'd have hell to pay for it!
My playmates and I insisted our tree
was the very same Ailanthus
tree, commonly known as Tree of Heaven, made
famous in the 1943 book, A Tree Grows
in Brooklyn, Betty Smith's first novel
which sold three hundred thousand copies in the
first six weeks. It went on to sell three
million. Francie Nolan was the central
character in that famous book about the American
Dream. She was the adolescent daughter of turn
of the century Irish-American immigrants. My
friends and I were
second-generation Italian-Americans, so
Francie's life was easy to relate to. Each one
of us budding drama queens liked to fancy
herself the poor heroine with high aspirations
who would achieve success through education.
But it was our back yard that was my
secret garden with its morning glories clinging
to the wooden fence that separated our narrow
lot from the Spinelli family's house. Mr.
Spinelli was one of 25 children and an excellent
gardener. He built an overhead grape arbor that
filled his entire back yard, the precursor of
countless bottles of homemade wine. Clusters of
purple grapes, hot from the sun, spilled over
our fence to greet the eager hands of
neighborhood children who spit the seeds out
into the bed of yellow and orange marigolds when
Grandma Normandia was not keeping a watchful eye
on us from an upstairs window.
The crowning
glory of my secret garden was the
two-story high magnolia tree that
perfumed the summer breezes with
its large white lemon-scented flowers.
I watched it grow taller as I grew
taller during my childhood years from
four to fifteen. It was planted in front of
the modest rear house with the coal
cellar in its basement that
was only approachable from
outside, even on freezing winter
mornings when the cellar doors refused to
open in a timely fashion.
In the late 1800s, Italian-Americans
brought their love of gardening with them on the
steamships to America. The men would be called
Master Gardeners now. During World War II, the
BIG one, as Archie Bunker liked to say, most
houses in our neighborhood had a Victory Garden,
a small kitchen garden to relieve food
shortages. In the middle of Grandma's Victory
Garden stood one single fig tree. She was a very
intuitive and mystical healer and midwife, and
somehow she knew if I took more than my allotted
one ripe fig at a time from her beloved tree.
She was the four-foot, nine inch ruling
matriarch of the Normandia family and no one
dared disobey her, not even her married
40-something sons, or even Grandpa. However, I
was her darling granddaughter who lived in the
downstairs apartment of her converted one-family
house and, with her permission, one-at-a-time
often showed up more than once on any given day.
Grandpa Normandia built an overhead
trellis for Grandma so her zucchini and yellow
squash plants could go forth and multiply. In
the humid summers, they created a living ceiling
for our Girls' Club. The shaded area below
became a stage. Often the
setting turned into the perfect place for
elaborate tea parties, with our dolls
pretend-drinking out of tiny China cups with
pink roses on the sides. Mom would bake little
cookies for the occasion and fill our teacups
with sweet lemonade. My mom was a little girl at
heart and always had a box of fancy clothes
ready for our spontaneous "dress up" times. When
we pretended to have a wedding that shady nook
became our church. We would take turns for the
enviable position of the bride of the day. Mom
dressed us in Salvation Army clothes she altered
to fit us. It was mostly about wearing a crown
and veil and gathering wild flowers for our
bouquets. I never especially wanted to play the
bride though I took my turn to be polite. I
preferred when we played school under the
zucchini canopy, and willingly traded my bride
turn if the girls would let me be the teacher.
Life was simple and safe and childhood's
end was nowhere in sight yet. Later,
I wrote a poem about the yellow squash flowers
that Grandma dipped in an egg batter and fried
on her cast iron stove. I plan to collect all my
poetry and give it a chapter of its own in this
book of memories. That is, if I can find it all.
It's part of my process of getting all my
writings into one place for once in my life. Can
you tell I'm having fun yet? This is what bliss
feels like for me. Writing and genealogy
research float my boat and my muse loves to show
up to inspire me in the dark, quiet hours after
midnight.
Fast forward for a minute to 1972.The
winds of change turned the page and blew me into
the next chapter of my life as a single woman
after a sixteen-year marriage. I lived in many
different apartments and houses in Gainesville,
usually with roommates. Some worked out better
than others for me. One day while sitting out on
the balcony, I tried to figure out what made the
difference and had an aha moment. The places I
was happiest in had only one thing in common - a
fruit-bearing fig tree on the property. It
fostered my illogical belief that when deciding
between places to live, I *should* see if a fig
tree was growing there! (The asterisks around
*should* remind me not to use that word because
I don't appreciate it when people *should* on
me.) Fig trees became my touchstone, filed next
to the necessity of having a library within
walking distance.
I spent my childhood in the Leonard
Library, one of Brooklyn Public Library's
original Carnegie branches that opened in 1908
when my mother was six years old. It's still
located at 81 Devoe Street at Leonard Street. I
stopped there every day on the walk home from
Jr. High School 196 and lost myself in a book,
carefully watching the clock so Mom wouldn't say
she almost called in a missing person report for
me. I met my first boyfriend, Johnny Martin, at
that library. He lived a couple of houses away
from it and I thought he must be the luckiest
kid in the world to live that close to a
library. At fourteen, I loudly declared that
when I grew up, I would never live far from a
library. I still feel that attachment to
libraries, and although I now have an Amazon
Fire tablet to house new books, it's just
not the same feeling as holding a book in my two
hands. I finally bought a purple cover for my
tablet that opens like a book and that seems to
be a good compromise. It has one big plus. It
can read books out loud to me with or without
headphones.
In 1993, Gordon found us a house that was
a manifestation of all my little girl dreams,
including a creek we share with the Milhopper
Branch of the Alachua County Library District -
but in 1993, there was no fig tree in sight! Oh,
no, what to do? We immediately had three Brown
Turkey fig trees planted over twenty years ago
because the property had everything else that
made its home on my treasure map - a house with
a huge screened-in porch looking out over virgin
woods that led to a creek, and is close to a
library. Oddly, the inside of the house was
never part of my fantasy, though I do love ours.
When my daughter, Kimberli, was moving to
Minnesota with her husband, Greg, and sons
Richard and Sabbastian, they transplanted their
fig tree in a corner of our fenced garden area,
and then there were four. I was babysitting it
in case they ever moved back, but so far they
haven't. Last year I had a conversation
with their now huge tree. I informed it
that it was too tall and healthy to ever be
transplanted again even if my family moved back
and therefore I was adopting it. I told it, "I
am happy to say you are mine and I am yours now.
No one will ever dig you up again!" The biggest
fig trees are taller than our forty-three year
old house now and, in good seasons, they bear
more fruit than we could ever eat. We finally
stopped picking figs from the tree outside my
office window. We gave up years ago and gave it
back to the birds and squirrels who think it's
theirs anyway and named it "Squirrels' Delight."
However, I'm not Pollyanna anymore. I
must admit the most important part of my happy
life is missing from the beautiful life we
created together, since my dear Gordon left his
body in 2013. I couldn't believe the jagged
edges of my grief could ever smooth out, but the
very fact that I am able to sit at this computer
and write again tells me healing is possible and
a very individual experience. It takes as long
as it takes. It helps me to remember that we
both believed this life was really an illusion
and just one focus of our eternal life in
All-That-Is.
Back to fairies: When I was an adult, a
psychic told me that fairies were incarnated
elementals, the angels of Nature with magical
powers. She added that when I was not confined
in a physical body, I lived in the Devic Kingdom
as a fairy. I have no way of knowing if this is
true or any empirical proof that fairies are
real, but this I do know - I am definitely drawn
to paintings and posters and statues of fairies,
especially the Gothic ones. I finally
redecorated our bedroom and have christened it
my Fairy Room.
This week, my daughter, Kimberli, sent me
one of those free tests making the rounds of the
internet. You answer questions and it tells you
things about yourself. This one promised to
determine which fairy spirit I was. Kimberli
(Kiki) turned out to be a Fairy Enchantress. I
thought, what the heck, I'll do it for fun. If
it's on the Internet, it has to be true, right?
Right! I turned out to be a Fairy Queen. I was
not impressed. I'm pretty sure being an
Enchantress would be way more fun than being a
Queen who has so many responsibilities! C'est la
vie.
I've been sitting here for days
Thinking of different ways
To change my life so I can start anew
And one thing is not clear
What is this sound I hear?
Is it me or maybe it is you?
I see colors everywhere
People who just don't care
Those who think that they can change the world
Looking back on all the years
Of happiness and tears
I've found there's only thing that's for sure
You only get what you give
The way you die is the way you live
And what you want is not always what you need
‘cause you might want it today
but tomorrow you'll throw it away
and the only thing that's permanent is change
