Idyllwild

Behind the Story

2009-05-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

This novel is a fairy tale in the Romantic sense, in that it seeks to explore the possibility of a life more artistic, creative, and humane. As all fairy tales of its class, it is a protest against the mechanisation of life and regimentation of people.

While the impetus of this story came from my own life experience in Idyllwild thirty years ago, the elements in it are suitably (or synchronistically) grounded in the German fin de siecle youth movement (which is the grandfather of the hippie movement) and the Arts and Crafts Movement, which gave the village its first fame in the 1920s. Belden's Pinecraft furniture was first made here, with Belden himself living in nearby Pine Cove. Idyllwild was the site of Craftsman furniture manufacture throughout the 1920s and 30s.

The area was first inhabited by white Europeans in the 1860s. Some were looking for gold. Some, like John Muir, were looking for that ineffable mountaintop experience. Logging began in the mid 1870s and the area was heavily deforested by the turn of the 20th century. There were in 1900 many remaining loggers' cabins, taken up by summer visitors, when the Inn and the Santatorium opened in the first decade of the century. Of the logging tycoons, several families rose to prominence, among them Anton Scherman, for whom Dutch Flat was named, George Hannahs, and Claudius Emerson, foresaw the rapid dead-end of logging and envisaged something else – a resort for city folks. The Hannahses and Emersons were responsible for most of the growth in the village in the 1920s and 30s, and, in the story, the area where George and Claire live in upper Dutch Flat was once part of Hannahs' Mill and later the golf course Emerson founded in the 1920s before the reservoir of Foster Lake was created. The Gregorys' cabin is similiar to one at Fuller's Mill, up in Pinewood, and to the cabin on North Circle Drive in the village, which now serves as the Idyllwild Area Historical Society Museum; both are of the same vintage.

Idyllwild remained a rather remote and sleepy mountain town through the Second World War, when military personnel were among the few visitors, due to wartime travel restrictions, the roaring business of the summer church camps and winter sports of downhill and cross-country skiing reduced to a trickle. But late in the 1940s and early 50s, help came in the two forms which would define the town until this day – the founding of Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, and the coming of the mountaineers.

Max and Beatrice Krone and others founded a summer music and arts programme in upper Strawberry Valley, with such renowned guest teachers as Pete Seeger, Ansel Adams, and Bella Lewitski. This evolved into the West Coast's version of Juilliard, a College Preparatory Music and Arts high school, now known as Idyllwild Arts Academy.

Also in the late 1950s, the Los Angeles branch of the Sierra Club discovered Suicide and Tahquitz, with the latter's world famous Lily Rock, and they declared it a perfect spot for sport climbing, being much more convenient to Los Angeles than Yosemite. They made it their base for rock climbing. In 1966, the great climber Royal Robbins invented what became known as the Yosemite Decimal System of climbing grades on Lily Rock.

In the mid 1970s, there was an influx of hippies to the area, back-to-earth homesteaders seeking a more sane and humane way to live; their presence added the conservationist live-off-the-grid element to this artistic and bible camp community.

In the late 1970s, I was one of those deeply influenced by the back-to-earth movement. I was also a bible camp habitué. My family had many times fished at nearby Lake Hemet, and we passed through the village several times on the way from Banning and Big Bear. But in the winter of 1979 I came up alone to church camp at Camp Maranatha, up the steep and winding 'scenic' hwy 243 in the pitch dark, to stumble, glad as any 19th Century traveller, into the spartan dormitory in 10 degree weather. After a day or two, being an introvert, I went on a hike in the woods above the camp and town, and there, standing in the crystalline woods, looking down on the snow-encrusted village, I had a breathtaking transformative experience; in a flash I saw, whole and clear, how life could be and how I was supposed to be, what I was about. Live off the land in a cabin in the woods in as much self-sufficiency was possible, write, make crafts for the tourist trade. The only part I missed was that it wasn't just anywhere I found myself, but here, for I truly feel at home nowhere more than in the woods, in the mountains, in the high country. Idyllwild is not called a mile-high paradise for nothing, if you love this sort of life.

More or less, I live that life today, though I live in another sleepy village on the San Mateo coast, south of San Francisco. I am an inveterate folkie still, and write and do herbs and make everything from scratch and all the rest. I have a degree in Celtic studies, play and sing folk music and dance at folk festivals, and live the ethic of the Arts and Crafts Movement. But time marches on. It is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this year, and the 30th anniversary of the seminal visit to the San Jacintos Last year, I thought, What if I had lived this sort of life here, what would that be like? What would the townies think? Could you raise kids that way, and what would happen to them if you did? So this story was born, as a thought-experiment, in meditation, as I travelled through the woods of Golden Gate Park to work.

Subsequently, I discovered that I had created 'out of thin air' the iconic Idyllwild experience. Reading the blogs of several townies, they describe living off the grid, and being the only one to bring tofu dogs to their schoolmates' birthday barbecues. These resonances were a beautiful affirmation that it could be done, the life I saw, the 'happily ever after' of the fairy tale.

Some places in this story are very real indeed and here in the village - the Red Kettle, the town hall, the old general store, the co-op - but some are manufactured – Mosey's - there was a pub/eatery back in the day, frequented by musicians, known as the Clam Shack, but it had an, er, unsavoury reputation (no pun intended)... so not to cast aspersions on anyone who played or worked there or can remember it at all, we will quietly bypass this bit of history; the Zen Centre (the genuine article being in nearby Mountain Center) among them. There is a Karma Kagyu Buddhist meditation centre outside of town near Pine Cove, the latest incarnation of one started by the 16th Karmapa in the 1970s.; this is the school of Buddhism that I studied.

The people are mostly taken from those I know (they will recognise themselves here in disguise), but I have had the most uncanny experience of coming face to face with Joe and Maggie Wheeler and Shirley Fossie here in the village. Whether composite or actual, the characters in their incarnation here represent the true community spirit and way of life here.

Idyllwild, as Robert Smith has written, is a town 50 years in the past, in a pre-World War Two ambiance of no chain stores or franchises except the gas stations. It has changed remarkably little in the last 30 years, unlike Hemet or Palm Springs, which were also once small resort communities. It retains its integral, conservationist community spirit. May it ever be so.
May the circle be unbroken.

Kelly Joyce Neff
Idyllwild, May 2009

Chapter Twenty-Seven

2008-11-30T08:42:00.000-08:00

September 2008 Town Meeting
After all the happiness of having them with us, in the wind-up of the Wobbly, on the docket for the town meeting, the kids had one more surprise for us. James went up to the front of the room, swinging his hands, grinning like the used-car salesman he once was long ago. Maybe years of Buddhism had made him forever merry, like the Tibetans. Anyway, he said, 'Before we get into the Wobbly, Geoff Gregory would like to share with us – Geoff.'

Geoff got up out of his chair and sauntered up to the front, sitting on the edge of table. I half expected him to say 'My name is Geoff and I am a jerk,' There was so much of the Forum ingrained in him. It made me smile.
'I'm not here to speak on my own behalf, but I will do my best to be enrolling.' That got a laugh. 'Thanks.... Most of you know me. Some of you have known me since before I was born.' He looked about the room at Maggie and Joe, James and Betsey, Mike and Karen. 'My sister Sassa and I have had a great time being home with you all this weekend, and for our family, it has been very special.'
George, beside me, clamped his hand on my leg. He raised his head, with a wistful expression. I too, knew what was coming. Geoff went on,
'Thirty-four years ago, my parents came here, very young, very innocent and idealistic, full of a vision about how they wanted to live, about how life could be; peaceful, loving, co-operative. They would be the first ones to tell you that they hadn't a clue what they were doing. They were just operating on belief in each other and in God. They came out here to live in a way that most of us couldn't tolerate today –' He glanced over at James, who was laughing. ' Okay, I daresay that many couldn't tolerate living that way back then.' He paused.

'When I was a kid, there was no question in my mind about having no electricity to speak of, no television, no hot showers, no hi-fi stereo. It was just the way that we lived; taking baths in the kitchen while the bread was baking, and running out to the john outside in minus 5 degrees in the winter. If you wanted a shower, you had to go out to the cold one outside. Nice in the summer, but not in January.' He smiled. 'I'm not going to tell you that I walked twenty miles uphill in the snow both ways to school, because you know better. But we did walk to town, every day, and came home and watered the garden and the roof and did whatever other chores there were.
'That sounds like a hard life, but I tell you that we were free. In our hearts and our minds and in what we could choose to do and be. There was a lot of love and openness and a concern about being genuine and communicative with each other. And we really could express ourselves openly, even if it was not always with love.' He looked over at George, 'Dad, I want to thank you for letting me know when I was an asshole.' There were more laughs, and George smiled, shaking his head. 'God knows I needed it.' He looked back at the group.

'Our parents inspired us, they really did, and I think that they inspired some of you, even if other people – their own families – thought they were nuts. They came here with a vision, and they lived it, they still live it. They didn't just talk about it. And that's what Wobbly's always been about – living your vision for your own life. Now, sometimes, a vision can be at odds with society, maybe even for a long time. But eventually, society catches up. The ideals that they live by are commonplace today, and even our ordinary life catches me by the heart when I am out there in the world. Ma, I can't ever see zucchini bread in Starbucks or go into a Jamba Juice without thinking of you.' There were more laughs at this, including from George. 'But there are deeper and more important things, like ecology and respect for the presence of God in every person, like knowing that we really are all one together, and what you do comes around to you again.

'Well, on behalf of my sister and our kids, - ' he waved Sassa up from her place in the front row with Jack, 'I just wanted to say how grateful I am to my parents, and to all of you...' He paused dramatically here, and his voice caught when he spoke, 'because today is their 35th anniversary, and I think that is pretty remarkable in this day and age. They're still leading us by example.' He looked at Sassa. 'Mom and Dad, we love you very much, and we want you to know that all is very very well.'
Well, that made us both laugh and cry, and there were cheers, and James came up to give the kids a hug. Then he turned round and motioned for us to stand up. We did, and there was laughter, for under his tweed jacket Geordie was wearing the shirt Geoff gave him for his 50th birthday, which read 'I'm Not Dead Yet.'
'You didn't know what we were looking at up here,' James said. 'And just so you know,' he went on when the laughs and well-wishes had died down, 'There's a cake at the back – and it's vegan.'

At the singsong after the cake was cut, we were in fine form, all of us, with Sassa and Geoff joining in on mandolin and uileann pipes. It was just old times, until Joe looked at Mike and Mike said, 'Right, now all you boys and girls, I want you to clear the floor for something special. 'Geordie, I've known you thirty-four years and you always complain that you never get to dance with your wife, so this is for you: Longways, Mary Gray.'
The old band broke into 'Reynardine', and it took my breath away. George was teary too when he looked at me, and took my hand to lead up at the top of the room.
'Come on, darling girl, this is ours.'

'One evening as I rambled amongst the springing pine
I overheard a young woman converse with Reynardine
Her hair so black and her eyes so blue her lips like ruby wine
And he smiled and gazed upon her
Did the sly bold Reynardine
'She said young man be civil, my company forsake
For to my good opinion I fear you are a rake
Oh no my dear I am no rake, brought up in Venus’ train
But I'm searching for concealment all from the judge's men
He kissed her once and he kissed her twice till she came to again
Then modestly she bade him, pray tell to me your name
'If by chance you should look for me, perhaps you'll not me find
For I'll be in my castle, enquire for Reynardine
Sun and dark she followed him, his eyes so bright did shine
And he led her over the mountains
Did the sly bold Reynardine'

Chapter Twenty-Six

2008-11-30T08:41:00.000-08:00

Wobbly, September 2008
Geoff and Sassa came out from Los Angeles and San Diego for this year's Wobbly weekend, which surprised us, especially as they brought Jack and Gerry and all the kiddies. Geoff had at first thought to stay in one of the cabins rather than camping, but Sassa talked him out of it.
'Ma, he was like, "Sas, Ger and I can't have a year-old baby and a three year old out in the woods for three days, eating leaves and getting poison oak. And how are we supposed to change diapers?" So I told him, they'd have to change them anyway, even if they were in a cabin, and there are bins. And besides, you guys had us out here when we were babies and we lived.'
I smiled, turning off the faucet as we stood in the kitchen. 'But you knew not to eat leaves, except from the garden. And apart from the park, I don't think that Rachel and Dylan have been outside since they were born... Don't tell Gerry I said that.'
She laughed. 'Ma, you rock!' She picked up her keys from the counter. 'I'm going over to Joe and Maggie's to rescue them from the kids. We'll see you at dinner. Love you Mommy!'
She walked through the house and I heard her calling to George in the workshop were he was sorting our camping gear, 'See ya, Daddy!'

We loaded our instruments into the truck, then went back to water the garden one last time and get the dog. Boz was straining at the lead as we glissaded down the hill.
'He hasn't shown this much life in a while,' Geordie said.
'He knows there's a barbecue.'
'Mm, broiled tempeh!'
I laughed. 'Oh James'll have steaks, he always does.'
We got to our communal camp in Buckhorn and set up our lean-to, rolling out the sleeping bags to make a nice sitting space, and Boz's zabuton. Betsey called out across the clearing, 'Still using any excuse to break out the climbing gear!' Our handmade Whelen lean-to had been the subject of many jokes, mostly revolving around duct tape, but it worked. The first time Geoff saw it, he said, 'Hey I saw one of those at REI for three-hundred bucks.'
'I think this cost about ten,' George said.
'You and Bear Grylls, Dad,' Geoff shook his head.
George asked me who that was, and I shrugged. We asked James and he laughed,
'Some guy on television who shows you how to be a survivalist – is dropped into extreme conditions with a knife and not much else. He's climbed Everest a couple of times; once with a paraglider.'
'Sounds like a compliment to me,' George said.

Jack and Sassa arrived and set up their four-man tent next to us. I don't know if she shooed Eldon and Marya in our direction, but they came running over and plopped themselves down on our sleeping bags.
'Hello, Nana!' Marya said. She reached out and hugged my leg.
'Hello baby! Did you have a nice time at grandma's house?'
'Yup,' she said. ' We pwayed in the spwinkler.'
'Ooh!' I said, 'what a nice day for it.... Eldon, what have you got there?'
He had a bilbo-catcher, which he was studiously trying to win at. He held it out. 'It's a bilboquet,' he said earnestly. 'They were made during the Civil War. Mommy got it for me when she was working on Cold Mountain.' He was a very bright, but very serious child, with language far beyond his age. He wasn't very good with people, he didn't pick up their clues, and sometimes I wondered if he wasn't an Aspie. But maybe he just spent too much time around adults.

George came back from helping light the grills.
'Well hello, sonny boy! ' He said to Eldon, leaning down with his hands on his knees. ' I haven't seen one of these in ages.... Hello Mari!' He kissed the top of her head.
'Pappa!'
Eldon explained again what the bilbo-catcher was, and how the soldiers in the war used to carve them in camp. George listened carefully, and when the boy got to this part, he said, 'Oh, wait a moment.' He dug in his rucksack and pulled out a suede bag.' These are for you.' Inside the bag were hand-carved dominoes from white birch, beautifully made, and the dots painted in different colours of enamel. Eldon examined them, each one in turn, and said, 'These are very historically accurate, Pappa. Thank you.'

Geoff and Gerry arrived then, Geoff wearing an expedition rucksack and the baby, while Gerry had a couple of daypacks and Rachel by the hand.
'Hi Ma,' he said. 'We made it!'
'I see. Hi Gerry. Geoff, you look like Nanook of the North!'
'Hi Geoff,' George said. He peered round the baby. 'So did you get that Nighthaven?' Geoff had been looking at an expedition shelter in a catalogue.
He grinned. 'Nope. I made a tarp tent from ripstop.'
Gerry cocked her head. 'Who?'
'Okay we... Okay, Gerry did all the sewing, but I put in the grommets and designed it.'
George rubbed his hands, smiling, 'So let's see it!'
I shook my head. 'Boys and their toys!' I said to Gerry. 'Geoffy, give me that baby so he doesn't end up in your rucksack.'
Geoff unsnapped the baby and handed him over like an offering. ' Thanks, Ma.' George took Gerry's packs and the two of them went off to set up their camp.

In camp that night we all sat around the lanterns singing. It was too hot for a campfire, and they hadn't allowed them for several years in any case, but it was pitch black out at Buckhorn at night, too dark to see to play, so lanterns it was. It was great fun, but I had a teary moment when I realised that, ranged about us, was our family, in more than merely the old close friends and community sense. We were deeply interwoven in each other's lives now, by blood and bonds of love.
' I was singing with my sisters
I was singing with my friends
And we all can sing together
‘Cause the circle never ends'

Oh, this was going to be one heck of a weekend!

In the morning, we walked up to the meditation with Joe and Maggie and Sassa and Jack and the kids. A dew had fallen in the night and the temperature was fairly tolerable. When we got to our place, Geordie took off his tevas and stretched in the sun salutation before sitting down in Padmasana. 'The ground is harder than it used to be, for sleeping on,' he murmured.
I smiled,' But you can still fold yourself up like a pretzel, Pappa.' I put an arm about him as he sat next to me. Sassa on the other side of him was doing the same thing, cracking her neck when she finished. Lithe and limber, it was her everyday routine. I felt a rush of air behind me and looked up. There was a baby face.
'Hello, Dylan!' I reached up. 'Good morning Geoffy. Nice to see you!' I took the baby from him and he gave me a kiss.
'Good morning, Mommy.'
'We didn't expect you up this early.'
'Yeah well... Forum time!' He grinned. He sat down behind us. 'Hi Dad.'
'Hey Geoff, what it is.'
I didn't ask where Gerry was, but she came up too later, with Rachel clinging to her like a monkey. 'Sorry,' she said. 'We had a potty emergency.'

We all settled down into the meditation, chanting Om Nama Shivya, and I found myself swaying with the baby as I held him firmly by the leg. He was just starting to walk, and I didn't want him to go scooting off, but he didn't. He was as blissed out and entranced as my own kids had been by our meditation. Geoff behind me was rumbling like a Tibetan monk, and I found it very sweet. He had liked to do that when he was a kid. Was he dropping his high-energy, worldly persona here, and settling back into deep-ingrained habits? Again, I felt a rush as I had last night, time and Life moving me. The meditation settled into silence, and we all breathed together, three hundred and fifty people of one heartbeat, one breath, one mind.

I went off to give my weed walk through the woods, and Geordie went to Sas's yoga class. They were lined up under a marquee at the edge of the woods where it was cool. The ground had been laid with moving blankets from the set-up vans. Sassa stood up at the front, all long arms and legs, her blonde curls bound with a scarf.
'Namaste!' she said, smiling and bowed to them all, beaming loving-kindness. The greeting was returned.
'Before we begin, I have a little story I'd like to share with you: I've done a lot of different kinds of yoga: bikram, ashangta, kripalu, kundalini, iyengar, sivananda. But my basis was in hatha yoga, and everything I know about that, I learned from my Dad. And I'm telling you that because he's standing back there –' She smiled and peered round one of the front students, and people turned around to look as well, with smiles and greetings.
'Now, I have what you might call a very exciting or a very stressful job, depending on your point of view, so yoga and mediation are the basis of my life. They are the point from which everything else flows... When I was little, my Dad explained to me that the point of yoga was to open up the body to be able to sit, to meditate, so the basis of yoga is spiritual enlightenment, to live in consciousness and oneness with All That Is. It is a lifeway, not just a form of exercise...'

She moved into the mountain pose, and her group of students with her. For an hour they went through a sequence, then moved into challenging poses, with Sas moving among them gently correcting their various parts to be in balance. Late in the hour, those who were willing were struggling with Vrischika-asana – a very gymnastic pose, balancing on the forearms, with the legs over the head, backwards. But George was not struggling. For all he might complain about the hard ground, he was still quite strong and limber. He was shaking a little in holding the pose, and breathing deeply, but he was in perfect control and concentration.
Sas smiled as she came up behind him.
'No fair, Daddy,' she whispered, laying her hand between his shoulder blades. 'Home field advantage.'
He smiled, and then a bubble of laughter escaped.' Sh!' He breathed shortly.
'Steady on,' she smiled, and left him to it.

**
On Saturday our whole family went to Geoff’s workshop on human potential, and took up the entire front row. It was very cool to see him in action as a trainer, for he really was giving them a mini-course in Forum/est –speak. Since we got the house, we had a plaque hanging in the kitchen that, without jargon, was the essence of est:
‘ Have integrity: Do what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it, If you cannot, communicate as soon as possible and repair.
‘Give up being right, even when you know you are
‘Be straight in your communication, and take what you get
‘Acknowledge your fears, then act as necessary
‘Give up the interpretation that there’s something wrong
‘Give up trying to “get somewhere”. Be entirely present in the present moment.
‘Share your experiences in a way that others are touched, moved and inspired.’
‘Give up being right, even when you know you are’ always got a laugh from people visiting us, mostly at the spouse’s expense. It would be interesting to see how Geoff presented the philosophy he had been raised with, distilled through his own experience.
‘We’ll make him nervous,’ Geordie murmured.
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘He talks in front of hundreds of people, at LMF and at work.’ Geoff worked in development at Microsoft.
‘Not those who know how he brushes his teeth,’ he returned. He looked back over his shoulder as Geoff came up to the front.

‘Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Geoff,’ he looked over at us, with a smile, ‘and I am a jerk. Now, you might be asking yourself what the use is of taking a workshop from a jerk, and ordinarily, I would agree with you. If this were a course in sustainable energy, that could be dangerous.’ There were laughs. ‘But in this case, of human potential, consider me the Fool, who has made all of your mistakes for you and is here to tell you about them. A wise man can learn from a fool, right?’
I sighed and George held my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. A kinder gentler est indeed… and so like another day, in this very spot. I was in tears again.

‘Now, before I begin I want to tell you a little story,’ he looked at us, and Gerry, ‘ and I hope it’s not the kind of story that most of us have – our story of all the rotten things that have happened to us and how unappreciated and abused we have been. I want to tell you how I discovered this information that I am going to share with you, to show you that I’m not just being modest in saying I’m a jerk.’ He looked out over the group.
‘I was something of a problem child,’ there were laughs at this, from the back, laughs of sympathy and camaraderie. ‘And when I was fifteen I got into some really heavy drugs,' there were murmurs. ‘Yeah, you know it… Well, my parents and my sponsor Dave-' he looked up, at the back, 'Hi Dave!… had an idea for me, and thank God, I had just enough brains to agree to it, because it changed my life. They suggested that I do a teen programme in Palm Springs, a really intense weekend course – and it got me in touch with parts of myself that I had covered up.’ His voice broke and his eyes filled with tears. He did not apologise, as people out in the world would.
‘Now, I tell this story a lot as a motivational speaker, and it always gets to me at this part, but it’s especially moving today, because my parents are sitting over there, and they know it all.’ He looked at us with a teary smile.

‘In the middle of the weekend,’ he paused, ‘I realised that I had come into this life with a lot of anger at the world. You can say it was my karma if you like. But I focused it on my parents, especially my father, when it was my stuff and really didn’t have anything to do with them.’ He paused again, and tears slipped down his face. ‘What is more, in the sessions, because of what was said, I realised that my parents lived this information, and that they had been giving it to me my whole life,’ he paused. ‘With love… in freedom… and that all the stuff I was carrying around inside of me just didn’t matter. I didn’t have to carry it around… I could let it go… and be free.’ He drew a long breath. ‘And that is what they wanted for me, that is what they always wanted for me.’ He looked at Geordie for a long moment before continuing. The love and presence between them was palpable.
‘Now, my family know all of this, as I say, because they were there. But I want to tell you people that just because you give up being a jerk doesn’t mean you still don’t need to grow…’ He looked over at us, and Gerry again. ‘I would like to share with you that I realised something this weekend -' his voice caught. ‘That I was full of excuses about why I hadn’t come here much lately, even though it’s only two hours away… I grew up here. I learned to walk on these very paths… and I realised that I was keeping part of myself apart, a part of my life apart from my wife-' Gerry was nodding her head vigorously, tears running down her face- ‘even though I married her because she’s from here too and understands how I grew up.’

He drew a breath, ‘I realised that I was keeping her and our kids apart from the Whole Being because I wanted to hold onto my sense of being different… of being special.’ He smiled at George. ‘The one thing I fought with my Dad about when I was a teenager was how we were different than other people…. Well, I am a jerk, and I like to think I’m special, and I shut myself off from and kept my wife and kids out of a part of my life that is the core of who I am, so I could maintain my separateness, my uniqueness. But I tell you, that’s not the way to do it.’ He looked out at the group. ‘So, learn from this fool….’ He drew a long breath. ‘ We’ll talk about how in a little while. But right now, I’d like you to break up into groups of four or five,’ he glanced at us, ‘ if you can, and share what has come to you, what your story might be, and what you’d like to let go of, to be free.’
The crowd, who were wide open now, turned to each other, and there was the great babble of people sharing. Geoff came over and put his arms around Gerry and they were both crying.
‘I’m sorry, baby,’ he said. The rest of us waited until they were ready to join us then had a tremendous group hug.
‘I’m so proud of you, Geoffy,’ Geordie said, clapping him firmly in an embrace.
‘I love you, Dad. I never told you that you gave me my way of life, though I tell other people all the time.’
‘Just live it, just live it. It’s all I want for you.’
Geoff moved on to Sassa. ‘Sas, you got it sis,’ he said smiling. ‘ You’ve always had it and never lost it. I love you.’
‘There’s always room for a breakthrough, bro,’ She smiled.
'Jack,' Geoff said, '...man you are a rock. I just wish I could be like you.' Jack smiled, his angel's smile, lighting up his fair face. 'You are, brother, you are,' he said. 'Deep down inside. I see it.'
He came to me. ‘Mommy.’ He was teary again. ‘Mommy, you never criticised me, even when I hurt you and was an ass. You always saw the possibility in me.’
‘Oh Geoffy!’ that old estie word was undoing.

But he had to get the group back in order. There was work to do. He clapped his hands twice and went back up to the front.
‘Thanks for sharing, people, ‘cause that’s what it’s all about.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘So, how do we do this? How do we be free and keep from being jerks, now that we’ve identified the ways in which we are? There are a couple of ways, and I’ll share them with you.’ He glanced at us. ‘But in the interest of transparency, I have to tell you that I grew up with these ideas on our kitchen wall, so maybe that’s cheating… If they seem a little hard to understand, we’ll talk about them.
‘The first is to have integrity. Now, what is that? There are a couple of definitions and I want to be clear about what I mean. It can mean being a moral person, which I kind of mean. It can mean having your outside activity and your interior mindset match – and I kind of mean that, but that’s a slippery slope. Taken at face value like that, it would mean that Hitler had integrity.’ There were laughs. ‘So what do I mean about integrity? It’s very simple: Do what you say you are going to do when you say you are going to do it. If you cannot, communicate as soon as possible and repair. That means, don’t be a Yes man and say you’re going to do something when you know you won’t. And if something comes up- something really important – not that you just don’t feel like it – and you can’t do whatever you said you would – let people know as soon as you can, don’t just be a jerk and blow it off.’ There were laughs again.

‘Now, let me tell you, there are lots of ways to work excuses with this one, and believe me, I know them all, starting from when I wanted to hang out in town as a kid after school. You see, we didn’t have a phone at our house,’ he smiled at the gasps, because everyone had cell phones,
‘And my parents still don’t, so it was easy to say “yeah but…”. But the truth is there are ways of getting in touch with people, even if it means walking.’ He looked at me, and Jack. ‘My mother made it to my brother in law’s birth, when they had no phone- they still have no phone! - And there was three feet of snow on the ground and we lived three miles out of town on an unimproved road.’ More gasps and laughter. ‘Yeah, it’s kinda like that around here. What I mean is, if you want to do something, you will, and if you don’t, or really can’t, say so up front.

‘That brings up another way to be free: Be straight in your communication, and take what you get. That doesn’t mean to be ratty to people and not care if you hurt them. There are ways of telling the truth that are not scathing. It means, don’t lie, and don’t just tell people what you think they want to hear, or say one thing when you really mean another. It spares a lot of trouble if you do that. Now, I’d say that most of the problems of relationships come because people don’t do that.' Lots of people were nodding. ‘The other part of that is to realise that your feelings about things belong to you, nobody makes you feel them, so you can’t go around saying “so and so did this to me”, even though we do. Now, if you tell someone the truth, even in a good way, or share something about yourself or your life, it doesn’t mean that people are going to like it. They might feel scared or threatened, or think you’re full of beans.' He looked over at George. ‘ So if they give out to you, in whatever way, don’t argue with them or try to change their mind, just yet. Just listen to what they have to say, because it really pisses people off if they think you’re not hearing them. Mostly people just want to feel heard.’ Women in the group were nodding, and there were a lot of ‘yeah, that’s right,’ comments.

‘This is hard to do,’ Geoff acknowledged, 'because so often we have a game on, an agenda. But if you want to be free, you’ve got to give up being right, even when you know you are, and give up the interpretation that there’s something wrong.' There were a lot of rueful laughs at that. 'I admit that I'm not very good at this part. Oh I do so want to be right! And because I have a specialised knowledge in my field, it's really easy to be critical and see where things are wrong – and take that into the rest of your life. But it is what it is, plain and simple, and if we give up on being right, then we open up a space where communication can happen, and gee, maybe we might learn something! Maybe we might connect with people.' People were laughing.
'But for me, the hardest part has always been the next bit, that is to give up trying to “get somewhere”. Be entirely present in the present moment. I always had dreams that I was spinning out of the future and what could be, and was rarely present when I was a kid.' He glanced at George, 'It caused a lot of accidents and misfortune.... I think, for my own life, I can see the wisdom of my parents' way of life – it's much easier to be present when you are not distracted by what's on your blackberry, the television and your iPod, all at once. I mean, there comes a point when there's too much input, too much information.' He ducked, mugging, as if he were looking for God to strike him dead. 'I work in IT,' he said conspiratorially. 'Them's fightin words, heresy.' There were roars of laughter. 'That's just so you know, Mom and Dad: I finally got it.' Geoff was smiling. Like a new-born babe.

He paused. 'So you see how with simply sharing how it really is, you can move people, so that they are touched and inspired.' He looked over at George and his voice broke and tears filled his eyes. 'And you can change people's lives...' He looked out over the group then. 'Maybe even your own... Thank you so much for being here, all of you.' People cheered and stomped for a while. 'Now,' Geoff went on, 'I am sure you all have identified your very own sticking points. If you'd like to break up into your small groups again and share, that would be great. I'll be around to answer questions. '
And so he was, with grace and gentleness and mastery. When he got to the back of the room, he and Dave Morrisey exchanged a long long hug. Our Geoff had made it. He had become the person he came to this world to be, at this weekend. It was so beautiful. I knew that would see a lot more of him now.

**
On Sunday afternoon, between the lunch and dinner crowd, I went to Sassa's workshop on becoming vegan, in part to support her, but also to see what she said, because that journey had been so much a part of our lives. She had got permission from the kitchen and the festival to hold it there, and there were about a dozen or so of us who ranged around the big table in the centre, where I had so often mixed fillings for piroges, or made biryani, or chopped vegetables.
'Oh Ma!' Sassa cried, and hugged me. 'Okay everybody,' she said to the group 'I have to confess, I am a poser here: This is my mom, and she knows more about how to transit to veganism than I could ever learn. Sit down, and I'll tell you a little story.' She waved them to the stools that had been set up.
'I became a vegan when I was four, because that's what my Daddy was, and I wanted to be just like him...' She smiled. 'My mom had challenge enough just living, 'cause we made all our own butter and cheese and yoghurt – with no electricity and no magic packets of starter from the health food store – from our own goat's milk, whom she raised from a kid.
'I never realised what work it was to make seitan – wheat gluten – and tempeh, until I tried it myself in my kitchen in Century City. I thought, Heck, my ma makes this all the time, it can't be hard! Well, it was a mess let me tell you, so I gained a profound respect for the kind of patience and attention it takes to make protein alternatives. It was a really Satori experience.' The group, who included three men, laughed.

'I don't want to put you off, because patience and attention is really all it takes. The rest, fermentation and food combining, is really quite simple if you follow a few basic rules –' She launched into teaching them about tempeh and gluten-making, and which milk substitutes were most palatable and so on. As I listened, and as we worked on a basic seiten, I was very impressed with her knowledge and the experimentation that she had done, She talked about raising kids as vegans and how much arable land it actually took to raise a child that way rather than as a vegetarian, and gave out the nutritional scores for everything. My artistic child was speaking pure science, showing a giftedness she rarely expressed.

'You should write a book, Sas,' I told her, as we walked over to the meadow to meet the guys for the earth ball game. 'On veganism with kids. It would be very helpful for people.' She squinted at me over her sunglasses. 'Oh my gawd, Ma! I was just talking with Jack about that this morning! Hello, universe! ' She hugged my arm. 'You are so in tune, Mommy!'
I smiled.
'You're a lot braver than I was, you know,' I said. 'I was scared to death I would kill you both if you didn't have eggs and dairy. I believed all that about B12 and kwashiorkor.'
She laughed. 'And you let me become a vegan when I couldn't say my S'es!'
'Blame your dad,' I said. 'He said it wouldn't hurt to try.'
'And you just went right along with him because he said.' She laughed again.
'Well, I figured he knew what he was talking about. Geordie knows everything.'
She stopped cold, and stared at me with tears in her eyes.
'What?'
'You still say that, after all this time... Wow, that is so beautiful.'
'You will too, Sas,' I smiled. 'Jack is a jewel.'
She breathed deeply, looking out to the trees before us. 'I know. I know.'

That night at our camp singsong, Geoff, who had been sitting next to Gerry in the jam, when over to Sassa and sat down next to her. It was musical chairs for a moment while everyone rearranged themselves. Then, smiling round the circle, on five-string guitar and banjo, they began in a beautiful harmony,
‘You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
’Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

’Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
’And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.
’Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
’Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.’
Even Joe was crying at the end of that. We were all in such a state of love and gratitude that we broke up the jam and the group became a mass, as we wandered around hugging everyone. At one point, Anne and Maggie and I put our heads together like the weird sisters we were in an embrace. The grannies.
‘Who’d have thought it, all those years ago,’ Maggie said, laughing and sniffling, ‘that we’d be here, the crones together. It’s been such an awesome trip.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Oh I love you guys so much!’

Finally, our own little family came together, Geordie and me, and Geoff and Sass, and Jack and Gerry and all the kids. We surrounded the children and swayed together, and a hum arose. Everyone was crying. And it was beautiful. Then, there, in the middle of the night, we cleared out the chairs and cushions and did the Whitsun Morris dance, the whole lot of us.

Chapter Twenty-Five

2008-11-30T08:39:00.000-08:00

September 1997
Like Sassa, at the School of Music and Arts Geoff studied graphic design as his speciality. Unlike Sas, who chose hands on graphics illustration for film production as her media, Geoff chose CGI. It was not a surprise, for when he was sixteen he built a ham radio over the winter in the workshop, and was very happy to have news and communication from all over the world. The noise factor- a potential source of conflict with George as it was being built - was solved simply and without fuss by a pair of headphones. He had become quite the technology nerd, which we found very ironic, but his maths had always been good, and in this sphere he had no problem at all paying attention. When it came time for college, he applied to San Diego State in their computer science programme.

Geordie said, ‘I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. His whole life he has been trying to make up for lost time and experience,’ He looked at me. ‘Matt Carberry.’
I nodded.
He looked thoughtful. ‘It a fairly decent illustration of how personal karma functions, actually. What you miss in one life – in his case life itself and time – you make up for in the next.’
Their relationship had got so much better since Geoff did the Forum; there was a sense of co-operation and they went climbing together frequently, which engendered a profound camaraderie as only climbing can. When Geoff did the Stairway to Heaven and the Green Arch on Tahquitz, both classic climbs of some difficulty, he won George’s complete respect.

So our Geoff was going out into the world. On Saturday, he would finish loading up his Golf and make his way down the mountain to San Diego State. We were worried about him, for he was still only seventeen – and not completely self-controlled. At the Friday night jam towards the end of the night, Geoff, his quirky antique five-string guitar in hand, was sitting across from us next to Joe. He leaned over and whispered something to him. Joe nodded, looked at us, and picked up his bass. He and Geoff began to play a familiar tune, and Geoff sang out in his beautiful voice,
'My name is Jamie Raeburn, in Glasgow I was born
My place and habitation I'm forced to leave with scorn
Frae my place and habitation, it's I must gang awa'
Far from the bonnie hills and dales of Caledonia

'It was early on one morning, just by the break of day
The turnkey he came to us and unto us did say
Arise you hapless convicts, arise you one and a'
This is the day you are to stray from Caledonia

'We all arose, put on our clothes, our hearts were full of grief
Our friends who stood around the coach could grant us no relief
Our parents, wives and sweethearts too, their hearts were broke in twa
To see us leave the hills and dales of Caledonia

'Farewell my dearest mother, I'm vexed for what I've done
I hope none cast up to you the race that I have run
I hope God will protect you when I am far awa'
Far from the bonnie hills and dales of Caledonia

Farewell, my honest father, you were the best of men
And likewise my own sweetheart, it's Catherine is her name
No more we'll walk by Clyde's clear stream or by the Broomielaw
For I must leave the hills and dales of Caledonia

Midsummer 1998
As Sassa and Jack had gone off in such different directions to school – he to UC Davis to study sustainable agriculture – and were moreover of diametrically opposed personalities, he being as still and silent as she was restless and voluble, we were all rather surprised when they hooked up at Wobbly in 97. They had grown up together, sure, running with the pack of kids, but never seemed any closer than the rest. But at the weekend hook up they did, and by the Sunday were sitting spooned together in the meditation, which made us smile. Sas had another semester still at UCLA, but Jack moved out there with her, gave up his job with the county and all. Joe wondered what he would do in the Big City, but we soon heard that he was working at the Odwalla plant in their development department. So all was very well indeed.

In May, Sassa graduated, with a job at Miramax ready and waiting, and in June they came home for their wedding at the Midsummer festival. They had the Unitarian Universalist minister from San Jacinto marry them, and the eclectic nature of it made us in-laws laugh. The question had gone round at the dinner at the town hall, what religion we all were, that they picked a Unitarian.
‘Reformed Baptist,’ said Joe, deadpan, but his eyes twinkled.
‘Presbyterian,’ Maggie said.
‘Roman Catholic,’ I said, ‘lapsed.’
‘How are we even friends?’ joked Maggie. ‘We should be fighting like the Hatfields and the McCoys.’
‘Anglican,’ said Geordie. ‘’Very lapsed.’ He smiled at the laughter that provoked.
‘Well, shoot, with that lot, they couldn’t have picked anything else,’ said Joe. ‘We’ve got the World Parliament of Religions right here.’

The were so adorable; Sassa in a floaty gauze dress and Jack in an Indian shirt and khaki shorts, both blond and blue-eyed – like a pair of Hunt’s angels announcing the Triumph of the Innocents. It was weird to hear ‘Asgard and John,’ because nobody had ever called them that.
‘How the time does pass,’ George murmured to me as we sat down on the lawn for the communal cider and cake-sharing.
‘Do you feel it?’
He smiled down at me with that intense, timeless gaze. ‘Not a bit…. But this does make me realise it. It’s all quite amazing, life.’ He kissed my temple.
**
Millennium Wobbly, 2000
Geoff and Gerry were both home from school all summer that year, and we knew that something was up because she came with is to the Summergrass bluegrass festival, even though she didn’t play. She also came to Strawberry. ‘His groupie,’ Geordie said, during our break, when the two darklings were getting very cosy at the concessions.
‘Ah, you have to be ware of groupies,’ I returned.
He shook his head. ‘Naughty girl, you don’t know where that leads.’
I looked up at him with mock innocence. ‘Do I not, good my lord? Tell me.’
I got him with that. ‘Claire…’ he murmured.
When we returned from our break, we launched into ‘John Barleycorn’ as a round. It was always popular, especially after lunch.

‘There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn should die
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead

‘They've let him lie for a very long time, 'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head and so amazed them all
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day 'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John he grew a long beard and so become a man

‘They've hired men with their scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee
They've rolled him and tied him by the waist serving him most barbarously
They've hired men with their sharp pitchforks who've pricked him to the heart
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he's bound him to the cart

’They've wheeled him around and around a field 'til they came unto a barn
And there they made a solemn oath on poor John Barleycorn
They've hired men with their crabtree sticks to cut him skin from bone
And the miller he has served him worse than that
For he's ground him between two stones

’And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl and his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl proved the strongest man at last
The huntsman he can't hunt the fox nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can't mend kettle or pots without a little of barleycorn’

Sassa and Jack came home in the middle of September, for Wobbly and to have her baby. She was due around the 18th, but Maggie and I didn’t think she would go that long, because she was little and neither she nor Jack had been late.
‘Look out for that swimmy hole,’ Maggie called, as they went across the road for the trail to the lake. ‘There’s babies in it!’ We sat in camp on the Friday night, sprawled on camp chairs in the heat. It had been a long, tiring, but fulfilling day, with jewellery and colourwork classes, spiritual attunements, a herbal workshop, Jack’s talk on sustainable agriculture, and massages; and as always, too much food, much laughter and many hugs.
Jack turned his head and waved at her in a ‘go way’ gesture, smiling.
‘I can’t believe I’m a granny with that one,’ Maggie said, shaking her head.
I laughed. ‘You already have five!’
‘Yeah.’ She stretched her arms over her head. ‘But he’s my baby.’
‘Sas said they’re having a baby party at your house,’ I said after a while.
‘Well, you’re invited!’
I smiled.’ That was the invitation. It sounds like the whole town is invited.’
‘Only our family,’ Maggie joked.
Anne came over from their tent down the opposite end of our communal camp.
‘There’s watermelon over at Betsey’s,’ she nodded her head.
‘Oh, I could use it!’ I said.

After the last puja, the men sat around in our communal camp, drinking beer and having an informal jam. Geoff was on the edge of it, half paying attention, half trying to make out with Gerry, except that it really was too hot.
Mike said, grinning 'We're a bad influence on the kid.'
George was lounging on his camp chair, bare legs stretched out, barefoot. He squinted. 'Eh?'
'You know, man,' Mike said, 'like-' And he broke into the unmistakeable chords of 'Baby, when I think about you, I think about love...'
When the song was new, it got a lot of play at Wobbly. George laughed and leaned over to pluck Geoff's five-string out of his fingers. 'Ready when you are,' he said to Mike, who startled. 'Oh come on!'
Mike shrugged, grinning. 'Right...' And away they went.

'Baby, when I think about you, I think about love
Darlin, I don't live without you And your love
If I had those golden dreams Of my yesterdays
I would wrap you in their heaven till I'm dyin' on the way

'Feel like makin'
Feel like makin' love
Feel like makin' love to you

'Baby, if I think about you I think about love
Darlin if I live without you I live without love
If I had the sun and moon They were shining
I would give you Both night and day love satisfyin'

'Feel like makin'
Feel like makin' love
Feel like makin' love to you

'And if I had those golden dreams Of my yesterdays
I would wrap you in their heaven til I'm dyin' on the way...'

Geoff just sat there dumbstruck as they played, watching his father jam to what he obviously considered a really raunchy song. But Geoff had only discovered love, not invented it. We could tell him a thing or two, we oldies. The riffs were awesome, Joe was cooking on his harmonica, and everyone was laughing and giving high fives at the end. George handed Geoff back his guitar, laughing. 'I'm not dead yet!' he said. When Geordie's birthday came around in March, his 50th, Geoff gave him a t-shirt with that printed on it.
I could see why Geoff was embarrassed: he had just found a girlfriend, and was over-run with all sorts of feelings; Sassa was to have her baby any day now, and it was a little weird at twenty to think of your parents – who were about to be grandparents – as still making it, or even wanting to. We certainly never thought that our parents did. George said, 'I'm very sure that mine didn't!'

**
George's 50th Birthday March 21, 2001
That was a bit of a sad day because George decided to cut his hair – or, I should say, he decided to have me cut his hair. His insistence was all the more startling as he was adamant about me not cutting mine - anything shorter than waist-length, he vetoed every time.
'I don't want to be absurd,' he said, running his hand through his loose hair. 'I don't want to look like Jerry Garcia.' He was going a bit grey in silvery threads, which I actually found rather sexy.
'Are you sure you don't want to wait until summer?' I asked, only to buy time, hoping he would change his mind. But he insisted, so he sat in the hanging chair in the common room and with great reluctance, I took my scissors to his beautiful curls.
I had never seen him with short hair, and he said it had not been since he left school when he was seventeen. He looked so... Roman or Greek that it was a shock. 'Pericles,' I said.
'You flatter me, darling.'
But he did.
When we went to the town meeting that night, there was a hush when we walked in. Maggie said, 'for a minute I thought you were stepping out, girlfriend.' She looked up at Geordie. 'You know, the first time I ever saw you I thought you were hot, but this is a whole new perspective.' She winked at me. George actually blushed.

Chapter Twenty-Four

2008-11-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

June 1995
Geoff as he grew into his teens became increasingly unhappy and distant, and he would not tell us what bothered him. It was all very well to say 'Matt Carberry', which became a kind of code for 'he'll get over it.' But we had to do something to help him, if only we could know what it was. Our boy was falling apart before our eyes.
The worst of his falling apart came in the middle of June when George went into his room to put his laundry on the bed, and found a syringe wadged under the pillow. He came out to the common room where I was still folding laundry, white, with that thunderous look.
‘God, what’s wrong!’
He was so angry he could barely speak, and gestured shortly. ‘I just found Geoff’s paraphernalia.’
It stopped me cold. ‘Are you sure?’
His voice was sharp. ‘I think I know a heroin kit when I see one…’ he sighed. ‘I’m sorry, cupcake, I’m not angry with you. I just can’t believe it… after all the dumbshit things that kid has done, this beats everything…’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Maybe it’s my karma. I was such a wanker to my old man. I did the same damned stupid things…’ He looked at me pleadingly, ‘what did we do wrong, Claire?’
I shook my head. ‘No, babe, it’s just him, trying to sort himself out. He came in discontented. You know that.’ I dropped the towel I held and put my arms around him.
‘Why did we ever have kids?’ he said into my hair. ‘Life was easy, before that…No,’ he moved away to look at me, ‘I don’t mean that. Sassa has been a brick, a jewel, and Geoff hasn’t been horrible until recently. But I don’t know what to do, how to reach him, he just rebuffs everything.’ Behind his anger and disappointment, there was real grief, and I felt so sorry.
‘It’s just his age. It’ll get better.’ I smiled at him. ‘You did.’

I won’t say that George was lying in wait for Geoff; he wasn’t standing at the front door like a door guardian. On the contrary, he was out in the workshop, putting all his energy into fiddle making. When Geoff got in, there was something about him that made my heart sink, a kind of energy. Maybe he was high. Maybe it was just because I knew. He seemed disconnected, and brittle as glass. I couldn’t hide my distress. To my own ears, my voice shook as I said to him in the kitchen,
‘Dad wants to talk to you.’
‘Fuck.’ He turned around and went out.

They came in and we all sat down in the common room. The energy was so heavy it was sickening. Both of them looked pretty bad – Geordie grim and Geoff truculent. I felt very bad for all of us. We needed to get Geoff out of his fix, as it were, but we needed to get back to that space of love and trust that we had had until last year.
‘I found your smack,’ George said unceremoniously. I stared at him. The lingo was so creepy and he spoke with such coldness.
‘Yeah, I figured.’ Geoff muttered. He crossed his arms.
‘What’s wrong with you? ‘ George said. ‘Don’t you realise this is death on a spoon?’
Geoff just stared at him. I could feel the tension rising, both of them stubborn and angry. They were so much alike, in more than looks.
‘Geoffy,’ I said.
‘Don’t think it can’t happen to you, boy,’ George said, cracking his knuckles. ‘Because it can.’
‘Yeah yeah, ‘ Geoff said,’ all that scared straight shit.’
‘Mind your language,’ George said quietly, nodding at me. Geoff shrugged. I got the feeling then that he really was wasted.
‘It’s not just illegal,’ George went on,’ but it’s bad for you. For God’s sake, it can kill you, boy, and you haven’t even lived!’
‘What do you know about it?’ Geoff lashed out suddenly. ‘What the hell do you know about living, out here in the woods with your organic everything like the fucking Clampetts! Everything so wholesome and sweet. What do you know about living? What do you know about anything?’

Before God, I thought George would hit him. He turned white, then red, shaking, and stood up, staring at the boy with a murderous expression. He was breathing hard and it was long moments before he spoke.
‘You will mind your language in front of your mother,’ he said at last. He struggled to control himself, clenching his fist and biting his thumb. His eyes were stormy and dark. Thor at Ragnarok. He sat down again.
‘I know, you little asshole, because I was there myself. ‘ He tossed back his hair, that old gesture, though it was long enough not to hang in his eyes anymore. ‘ It’s not something I’m proud of, but I wasn’t always so squeaky clean, as you think. I was a fix away from a wreck in Soho when I was twenty, hanging with people who’d cut your throat for your dope as soon as look at you. I know a thing or two about life. That’s why I chose differently.’
Well, that moved Geoff out of his fog. He glared at me sidelong, in a kind of angry fascinated horror. ‘Is that true?’ He barked.
I nodded slowly.
‘This blows. You people are a bunch of hypocrites,’ he said, getting up. He went to the chair and picked up his rucksack, and without another word, left.

I think we were a little stunned, because neither of us ran after him.
‘Well, that worked,’ Geordie said, after a few moments. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Christ!’ He sighed and got up, went to the door, but could see nothing.
‘Should we go after him?’
I looked up at him, feeling so sad and sorry. But underneath that, there was a strange kind of calm. From this space, I said,
‘No. He’ll be back. Let be.’ I held out my hand and he came and sat with me on the sofa. His hands were cold. But so were mine. We sat together, he behind me, just breathing, trying to run off the terrible heavy sickening energy.
‘What are we going to do about him, baby?’ He murmured at last. ‘He’ll kill himself. Oh,’ he sighed heavily, on the edge of tears, and I hugged his arms, rocking a little, troubled, but seeking through the darkness for a way. Nothing came to me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said at last. ‘But God will look after him. I have to believe that.’

He told me, in the dark that night, of the awful moment when he saw the syringe.
'For God's sake, you'd think that twenty-five years would wipe the memory from my brain. But I saw it and I just stood there shaking, having flashbacks – the old craving for that old bliss. It scared the hell out of me, and in part that's why I was so angry with Geoff – for bringing that back to me.' He was crying, and I just held him in my arms and kissed him. Of his hell and Geoff's I knew nothing, but their pain was mine, my lover and my baby.

Geoff came back after a week – he hitchhiked to Hemet, where as he said, he crashed with some friends from Wobbly while he sorted himself out. Meanwhile, we had, after talking with Dave, come to a solution. There was no choice or question about heavy drug use in the house, there never had been; and George had taken all Geoff’s stuff out to midden heap and burned it to a crisp.

After dinner the night Geoff came back we sat again in the common room, but the energy was so different. Maybe because he was clean. I don’t know. Anyway, he said to us,
‘I’m sorry Dad, that I was such an asshole. I was really strung out, I –‘ his voice broke. ‘I do have problems with living this way, but that wasn’t the way to share that.’
George sighed. ‘I know, Geoffy. Thank you for that.’
Our boy turned to me,’ Ma, I’m sorry I was disrespectful. It won’t happen again.’
I nodded.
‘Do you want to talk about why this life bothers you?’ George asked.
‘Yeah,’ Geoff nodded, and then paused. ‘Mommy, could I have some tea?’ I got up and made him a cup of chamomile tea.
‘Thanks.’ He slurped the tea and thought for a while. ‘When I was a little kid, I was happy, because I didn’t know any differently, and nobody here made a fuss about how we live. But… I was about ten, and that was when Uncle Jack was here during the Midsummer.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think – I know I never said this, but he and Dave and Barbie were all really cutting about our living like dirty hippies in the woods. That’s what he said. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it had to be bad, that there was something wrong with us.’ He paused, thinking.
‘I think Jack put them up to it, that they were parroting him.’ He looked up. ‘I don’t know why he did it. Why would a man say that kind of thing to a kid?' Another long pause. We knew why: Matt Carberry, and Jack was fresh out of the divorce, so our happy life was hateful to him. ‘But it ate at me. And I began to notice how happy everybody else seemed, people who had stuff and went to the movies and ate out, and had a normal life. And – and I started to feel like you guys were just mean, that you wanted us to suffer. That you wanted me to suffer, for a stupid ideal that was outdated. ‘ He paused again. ‘I don’t know. I think I still feel that way.’ He would not look at us, but pushed the cup around the footlocker that was our coffee table.

‘Thanks, Geoff, for sharing that with us,’ George said into the silence. ‘I’m sorry that you have felt so bad. I want you to know that we have never done any of this to hurt you, or anyone, nor to make you feel deprived, or weird.’
‘I know that, Dad.’ Geoff said slowly. His eyes teared up. ‘Don’t think I haven’t felt like an ass for feeling this way, but –‘ He broke up. George put his hand on the boy’s arm.
‘But?’ he asked softly.
‘You never gave in on anything!’ Geoff burst out, crying and angry, like a little kid.’ You never allowed any compromise, any input from us – from me – to let me feel less of a freak.’ He cried and sniffed. I got up to get him a tea towel.
George looked up as I sat down again and Geoff blew his nose. ‘ So you think I’m unyielding?’ He asked softly. There was no emotion in the words at all.
‘Yes!’
‘Okay. Okay,’ George said. ‘I hear you. I hear you Geoff,’ his voice did break now. ‘I’m sorry son. I’m sorry that our way of living, my way of being, has hurt you.’
Geoff looked up, and was crying again, ‘thanks Dad!’ And without the least prompting, leaned over and put his arms around Geordie. Then everybody was crying.

When we finally collected ourselves again, George and I looked at each other, and I nodded. Dave’s solution was perfect, well-timed, God stepping in. George said,
‘Geoff, I think I know something that would help you.’
‘Mmm?’
George smiled. ‘Not rehab… No Dave Morrisey volunteers with the Landmark Forum in Palm Springs, and he told us that they have a teen programme coming up in a couple of weeks. We thought you might want to think about going.’
‘What’s that?’
I smiled. ‘Son of est. A kinder gentler est. Nobody screams at you that you’re an asshole.’
‘Yes,' George added, ‘but they still discourage going to the toilet.’
Geoff frowned. ‘Is that the thing you did, with that used-car salesman?’
George nodded cheerfully. ‘It’s still long – four days of 16-hour days. But it helps.’
Geoff was still frowning. ‘Is it expensive?’
‘Don’t worry about that. We’ll work it out, if you want to go,’ George said.
‘…What if I don’t?’
‘Then we’ll help you find something else that you do want.’
Geoff sighed, and thought, and then nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll look into it. I’m so tired of feeling this way.’
George smiled. ‘I know the feeling, kiddo.’

In the dark that night, Geordie asked me, 'Am I really such as hard-ass as Geoff thinks?' I winced. There was such pain in the question, put that way. His whole life had been dedicated to being an open, loving person. He tried very hard, and had more patience than almost anyone else we knew, except maybe Joe.
'Oh, babe,' I kissed his cheek and sat up to light the candles. I put my arms around him and listened to the beating of his heart.
'You've always been a man of strong opinions, my love,' I said at last.
He sighed. 'Always the diplomat, you. That is a kind way of saying yes....'
'No it's not,' I said firmly, and looked up at him. 'You must let me finish: You have strong opinions, but you don't force them on other people...' I smiled. 'You just stand by them steadfastly. That's a good thing!'
'What about Geoff's allegation?'
'Every kid hates their parents for some reason, at that age. It's a stage. You did it. I did it.'
' Sassa didn't.' He said. I had to agree with that. But she was a very mellow child. 'But should we – I! - have allowed them television and video games and stereos, and whatever the latest thing was, Claire?' He looked at me, troubled. 'It seemed like such a slippery slope! I didn't want the energy in the house – the war on telly! All the advertising. It's worse now, violence and ugliness and raunchy sex... Did I do the right thing? And if I didn't, did you not tell me because I am a tyrant?'
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The idea was so absurd, but he was hurting so much. I sought the middle ground, 'My Geordie, you are the furthest thing from a tyrant that ever was. You should not devolve to self-doubts now' I kissed him. 'No! Sweetheart, we had a moral duty to bring them up to be decent people, in whatever way we saw fit, and we did that. If it wasn't this, if we had lived what Geoff called a "normal" life, then it would have been something else to get up his nose. Believe me...'
I smiled a little. 'As for tyranny, do you think me such a ninny as to cower and bow to your opinions?' That raised a smile. 'Have I not always told you what I think?' I nodded. 'Yes I have... Baby,' I said, more softly, 'there is only one place where I bow to your command, where mastery is the rule, and this is it. Nay, good my lord, be not afraid of shadows.'
He drew in a sharp breath, and regarded me with such a mixture of feelings: Love, gratitude, desire. I touched my fingers to his mouth and he kissed them.
'Thou be conscience-calmed,' I whispered. 'See, here it is –'
'Claire-'
And that was an end to fretting.

Geoff got back from his Forum with a whole new attitude, and a lot of laughter. Dave and Carrie came over for dinner and we all talked about his experience.
‘Dad, I almost got thrown out,’ he laughed, looking over at Sassa.
‘Eh? How’s that?’
‘Well you know how on the first night you’re supposed to call someone and tell them you have a story going with them?’
Geordie nodded slowly, squinting.
‘Well, ha!’ he tossed his hair from his eyes. ‘I went up at the break and told the trainer that I wasn’t trying to be obstructive or stubborn but that I couldn’t call you because we didn’t have a phone. And he didn’t believe me! He asked then in a kind of slow way like I was stupid if there was someone who could run over and get you to a phone. So I told him we live two miles out of town through the woods, and three if you take our unimproved road, and we don’t have any neighbours nearer than that.’
‘What did he say?’ George was smiling.
‘He told me I was full of it and not to waste his time.’ He tossed his head again. ‘I had to go hunt up Dave and get him to vouch for me! It was a riot.’
Dave laughed and said, ‘Yeah, Geoff came back from the break with that one and had the whole place in stitches. Bob said it was a new one on him.’
'I did call Sas, because I knew she was at the Burkes',' Geoff said.
‘So you got it?’ Geordie asked, somewhat rhetorically.
Geoff smiled like a baby. ‘Oh yeah! Oh yeah. I got it. In spades. Cleared out a lot of old stuff… Now I can build from here.’

And he did. Through all that summer, he worked really hard around the place, took up the uileann pipes under Dave’s tutelage, and volunteered at the free clinic. Before school started, he came to us and said,’ I think I would like to be a trainer some day. I’d like to help other people get free.’
I have to tell you that we cried.

Chapter Twenty-Three

2008-11-30T08:37:00.000-08:00

June 1986 Herb
When Herb died we had literally just got back from the Live Oak festival; Jim and Betsey had received the call about two hours earlier and when they heard the band were back they sent their stockist racing over at 9 at night to tell us. It was still light but we didn’t want him getting lost in the dark so I drove him home to Fern Valley and stopped by the newspaper to make a reservation for Geordie. It turned out we had just enough time to get him on a flight through New York, and so we hurried the kids back into the truck and dashed over the mountain. George had had time to wash and change, while I was gone, but the rest of us were still in our summer camping clothes. He was pretty even-minded about it all, his quietness the only sign of emotion. We made our rushed good-byes and saw him off in the dark. It was three in the morning by the time we got home.

Geoff met him at Manchester, as before when Anne died, and they shared a flask in the carpark, getting their bearings, even though it was not yet lunchtime and George was in a really bad way, exhausted from no sleep and jet lag. Geoff was in a bad way as well, all his old anger coming out. He exclaimed, ‘Shit! The old bugger! Leave it to him to die on us with everything hanging out.’ Not simply their relationship, though that was bad enough, but the glebe was in very bad shape, despite the young curate who had been assigned there and a housekeeper who was brought in; they couldn’t work on the rectory, cut the lawn, or see to the interior, or the paperwork of the church, or Herb’s affairs. All were in huge disarray.

They got to the glebe and the kids – Harriet and George’s namesake – were watching the telly in the lounge with the sound off. Dorey was in the kitchen with the housekeeper, cooking like a demon for the reception, while the curate was trying to tidy up the office in advance of a visit by the bishop. George said that it was very odd to have strangers in the house, and a housekeeper especially. It made the glebe much more like an old Victorian rectory, not a family house, which it had been for so long. The reality of having to divest the place of everything belonging to their family was brought home and he began to see why Geoff was so cheesed off. Herb never threw anything out, and never organised it, so they had to go through everything now. So they did, working like navvies for the whole time George was there and for weeks afterward.

At the end of the first day, George walked alone over to the church, where his father lay in state, a barely recognizable shrunken mass from the big man he had been. He had had liver cancer and no-one knew it, for he wouldn’t tell. George said it occurred to him what pain Herb must have stoically endured. He pulled a chair in from the sacristy and sat before the coffin, contemplating the old church dispassionately before turning to the old man. It was a fairly handsome old granite building, with nice walnut paneling and old pews. The paint was peeling, and the floors needed refinishing, but it was a good old place – which he would never have to see again after tomorrow. Once he stepped out of it, he was free of the Church of England forever. There was such relief in the thought. The burden of all those years of services five times a week was lifting.

‘Stubborn old bugger,’ he said to his father, when his roving gaze fell on him at last. ‘Never let anyone love you or look after you, to the last. Stoicism is a Christian virtue, me arse! Well, you know better now, don’t you?’ Tears came. ‘You’d better be listening to Ma there and doing what she says and treating her right now! I wish to hell I knew why you were such a hard ass, what made you that way…. Do I? Maybe not…. Yes, I do!’ He gripped the edge of the coffin, leaning to look at the yellowed old face. ‘Why did you shut everyone out, even her? Why could you not believe in a God of love? What made that so impossible, you old Puritan? I wish to hell you could tell me! I’d sure like to understand you.’ He shook his head, wincing at tears. ‘But I can’t…. But I’ll tell you this, old man, and this only: my boy knows that we love him, and for that I have you to thank, because I know what it means not to know. So you’ve given that to Geoff, even if you never knew or could accept it.’

He sat then and wept, for all the things that were, and never were. It was growing twilight by the time he was finished with it all, and the vigil would soon begin. Indeed, the curate was coming in to light the candles.
'Mr. Gregory! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’
He turned. ‘No, it’s all right. You are not. I’ve been here for some while….’ He got up. ‘You‘ve got matters to attend to, so I will go visit my mother, I think.’
‘Your – Oh…’ The curate said, colouring. ‘Yes.’

He went out and hunkered down in the graveyard for a little, looking at the neat white little marker over Annie’s grave. Beloved Wife. What mystery lay there! He missed her very much. Since she had died, the lack of her lively, witty newsy letters was keenly felt. Dorey wrote, and Geoff, and Herb had once in a blue moon. But it was not the same. Wellspring indeed, of the family. He thought of the pictures of her from her youth. She had been a fetching lass, bonny; if that was all right to say of your own mother! He knew very well what had attracted Herb to her, but what about she to him? He shook his head. ‘I can’t see it, Ma,’ he said. I wish that I had asked you….’

At the vigil there was a surprise, and not a pleasant one: Laney. The hateful aunt. She was a Thatcher clone now, the Iron Lady, and he managed to avoid her until the reception queue, when for some reason known only to her, she stood next to him.
‘So, you’re a Yank now,’ she said.
‘More or less,’ he said evenly. ‘Haven’t become a citizen. Don’t see the point.’
‘Well that’s something…. ‘ She glanced at him sidelong. When the well-wishers had dispersed, she turned to him fully, saying, ‘Your father was broken-hearted to see you galavant off with your heiress.’
‘Excuse me?’ Everything she had just said was so preposterous.
‘You heard me,’ she said, with the same put-on RP tones of the PM.
‘Well it’s news to me. He never said a word. And for your information, we do not live off Claire’s money; it’s in trust our grandchildren.’
Laney harrumphed. ‘Well, he wouldn’t. But you should have known.’
‘In God’s name, how?’ He looked over at Geoff, who was talking with the curate beside the baptismal font. ‘He never said anything to us that wasn’t criticism.’
‘You should have known,’ she repeated coolly. ‘Eldest son. He wanted you to follow him.’
That was too much! ‘What, into the church! Oh come off!’
She nodded. ‘Even though he hated it himself, he felt it was the right thing to do, a proper job for a man with a family. He wanted to do right by you.’ She looked at him squarely, ‘and what did you do but reject everything from the time you could talk, and run off to some bohemian life with an heiress….’

Well, he had wanted to know.
But not like this.
Shit.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to Laney and stalked over to Geoff and dragged him into the sacristy, telling him in a few words of the conversation.
‘Crikey!’ exclaimed his brother. Then, ‘Bloody hell!’
He nodded. ‘Explains a hell of a lot.’
‘I’ll say it does.’ Geoff agreed. ‘I’d like to know what the hell else he wanted to do.’
‘So would I!’
‘Can you ask her?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not talking to that bitch again if I can help it.’
Geoff frowned. ‘Let me ask Dorey, she’s good at worming things out of people.’

Sure enough, the next day at the reception Dorey sat down with Laney and under the pretext of chronicling it all for the family got down to what Herb had wanted to do with himself: He had wanted to be a sailor. See the world. Ports of call. Adventure. Freedom. And when his father squashed that and made him take up orders, he did so swearing that he would never rise in the church as the old man wanted. He would remain low church forever. Out of spite. But there was more: the whole reason the bonny fetching lass and jack tar married at all was that she was up the spout. The child was stillborn. But born.

‘Be respectable. Cut your hair. Get a job.’
All the pieces fell into place.

What is more, there were pictures to prove it, that neither he nor Geoff had ever seen: after the war, of that tall lanky young man and the fetching lass, at dances, at clubs, laughing, drinking, dancing. Herb had been like them, he and Geoff. A wild youth. And that was why it rankled that they were wild: reminding him of what he had been, the life he had loved, that was cut from under him by circumstances.

It didn’t make up for all the years of emotional and often physical abuse. But it helped. It did help.

1987-1992 Geoff’s mishaps
The kids learned to climb as soon as they had the strength to do so, on the boulders at County Park and at Suicide. Sas was nimble and limber and we joked about her prehensile toes, for she clung to everything like a monkey, but with Geoff we learned that we had to top-rope or tie him in to everything under any circumstances, even hiking, because he was rather uncoordinated and would fall off anything without warning. Not, we discerned after watching him for a while, because he was physically inept or particularly unbalanced – he didn’t have an unsteady gait or one shoulder higher than another- but because he frankly didn’t pay attention. His mind was somewhere else, most of the time, and it caused him to fall off, stumble or outright crash and burn. We got used to saying to him, ‘Geoff! Focus!’
George said, shaking his head, ‘I wouldn’t let him belay. He’d kill someone.’

One of Geoff’s mishaps happened when we were fishing at the lake when he was seven. We wanted the kids to know how to look after themselves in the wild, and so even if we didn’t eat fish, we thought it would be a handy skill for them. After some while, when attempting to re-bait his line, Geoff reached out and grabbed the fishhook from the end of the line, and tore a great long gash in his finger. That was the end of our placid fishing day. We wrapped his finger tightly in duct tape and hurried home, where Geordie sewed him up.
In the kitchen they sat at the table, with a packet of sutures I had from Shirley. But we hadn’t any lidocaine. George still had a horror of injectibles. There was no way that he could stitch Geoff’s hand without it, as the kid was wiggling and crying as it was. Geordie looked up, tossing his hair from his face.
‘Get the whiskey,’ he said quietly to me.
I stared at him. ‘You’re going to use our good scotch on him?’
‘Yes.’
I got it, and George poured out about a gill, more than we drank in a year, into a glass.
‘Bottoms up, boy.’ He said to Geoff. ‘Time to be a man.’
I stood in amazement. ‘You’ll make him sick.’
‘Probably,’ George agreed.

Geoff didn’t like it, didn’t want it, but he stopped complaining under that stern, watchful gaze, and drank about half of it. George nodded, and used the rest as a local anaesthetic, on a wad of cotton wool. I sat with Geoff in my lap, because he could hardly sit up straight, and George stitched the long gash very neatly.
‘Don’t look,’ I told Geoff, but myself watched very closely, marvelling at the good work. Geordie would often do his own mending, and always repaired the tent or rucksacks, but this fine skill was something else.
‘It’ll be something to tell his grandkids,’ George smiled, when he was done.
We bound the wound in lamb’s ear and gauze and carried Geoff, now sleepy, to his bed.
‘You never cease to amaze me,’ I told Geordie, ‘with the things you know.’
He chuckled. ‘Half the time I have forgotten that I know them, until something comes up.’ He looked at Geoff. ‘He’s going to have a massive hangover.’

A more serious mishap came in June when he was ten, before the Midsummer festival. We were all out working in the garden. Sas was tending to Nancy the goat, George and I were staking beans, and Geoff was watering the roof. Commonly, he was not allowed up on the roof, but was taught to move the ladder a couple of times and stand as far down as possible, because we didn’t want him falling off. Well, that day, he did just that.

‘Okay, give me another,’ George was saying of the stakes, and I lunged back to the pile and handed over another 2-by. We were pounding it in, swinging and swaying in tandem like navvies, when we heard a cry, and them a thump. George raised his head, scowling.
‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed.
Geoff had fallen off the roof. He lay in a heap by the corner of the house, at weird angles. We ran over. He was bleeding and unconscious, very pale, with a great knot on the back of his head, and when George looked at his eyes they were white.
‘ O God,' George murmured. We looked at each other, and my heart was hammering. George was pale too. He checked the boy’s pulse and it was very thready and his heartbeat was slow.
‘Sassa!' he bellowed at the child, ‘Get the keys!’
She sprang up like a gazelle and sprinted into the house.

We hurried as quickly as we could down the path, glissading half the way, to the truck, Geordie carrying Geoff. In the truck we wrapped him a blanket and I held him while George drove like mad down our road. We got to the ER in Palm Springs – a journey of fourteen miles on narrow mountain roads that commonly took an hour at best – in twenty minutes and thank God they had the good sense to take us in right away.
After the initial exam and while they were setting up the x-ray, the in-charge asked us for Geoff’s information. We were fine with age, weight, date of birth, but when it came to allergy to medications, things got a little strained.
‘We don’t know,’ I braved the storm. ‘He hasn’t had any.’ I doubted he would count herbs.
The resident – a big blond man – looked at me incredulously. ‘He’s never had antibiotics, or anything?’
I shook my head.
He frowned at us. ‘When was his last check up?’
‘When the midwife came after he was born,’ I said. It was the truth.
The resident exploded. ‘Do you mean he doesn’t have a medical record?! He’s never been immunised? What about for school?‘
‘We don’t believe in that,’ George said quietly, looking at Geoff. They were covering him with the protective drapes now. ‘Call it religious exemption.’

The resident paused, thought a moment, then asked, ‘Are you Christian Scientists?’
We shook our heads.
‘Jehovah’s Witnesses?’ he looked doubtful of this.
We shook our heads again, and the resident looked at us with contempt, as we stood there in dirty gardening clothes and flip-flops.
‘Well, you sure as hell aren’t Mennonites or Amish!’ he exclaimed. He shook his head. ‘Hippie freaks!’ He wrote on his intake sheet. ‘I should report you,’ he said coldly at last looking up.
‘It’s not illegal to refuse allopathy on religious grounds,’ George said calmly.
‘It’s child abuse!’ the resident yelled. ‘That kid has never seen a doctor!’
‘It is within the law; we have not refused basic necessary care.’ George murmured steadily, unmoved. Oh, he was magnificent! The resident was freaking out and the technician was staring and people were poking their heads in to see what all the noise was about, and he just stood there, like a rock, despite his own worry and fear.
‘We’ll see about that.’
The tech finished the x-ray and we went with Geoff back to the examining room to wait the results. It took a while, so, without permission, I went into the waiting room where Sas was all by herself and brought her in.
‘She can’t be in here,’ the nurse said to me.
I said nothing. It was not challenged.

There wasn’t any brain swelling, and no fractures, so they figured that Geoff only had a concussion, but they still wanted to keep him overnight, hook him up to IV, and give him a sedative. We refused. He had come to by the time we got to the x-rays, and his eyes were clear and his pulse and heart rate normal. Oh, there was an unholy row when we said, very politely, that we would take him home and look after him! There were three nurses and two doctors haranguing us to ‘co-operate’. Finally, a little nurse came in, in blue scrubs, with a piece of paper in her hand. She handed it to us. It was the statute in the state constitution regarding religious exclusion:
‘Nothing in this act shall be so construed as to inhibit service in the case of emergency, or to the domestic administration of family remedies…Nor shall this act be so construed as to discriminate against any particular school of medicine, surgery, or osteopathy, or any other system or mode of treating the sick, or afflicted, or to interfere in any way with the practice of religion…’
The mob ranged against us could do nothing further. They could not hold Geoff or us against our will. The little nurse and an orderly helped us out to the truck with Geoff and she said to us before we got in,
‘I was raised as a Mennonite. And I want you to know that I find what you did in there to be a powerful witness.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘God bless you.’
I gave her a hug.

August 1992
The death of Fergus
Our Ferg had lived a long time, much longer than even the oldest collies anyone had heard about. In the summer of 1992, he was an amazing twenty years old, sleepy, arthritic, and as gently loving as ever. It made Geordie very sad, and he would sit with him, brushing him, and I often heard him say’ I know you’re winding down, old friend.’ But he couldn’t bear to have him put down, as some well-meaning people had suggested.

It was one of Geoff’s jobs to help look after him, to chop up his veg very fine and mix his soft rice with brewer’s yeast, because Ferg had lost most of his teeth, to bathe him and brush him. This last was not a strenuous job, only twice a week, but when Geordie, Rob and James went climbing for a fortnight in August, Geoff bugged, and didn’t brush him at all. I assumed that he was doing it, and was not alert to the scene until one evening when Ferg lay on his bed, whining. I put down my knitting and went over to him.
‘What’s the matter, old boy?’
He looked up at me with such sad eyes, and thumped his tail a little.
‘Poor old darling,’ I said, running my hand over him. ‘Are you hurting tonight, lovey?’ And I saw it – a couple of patches of scabies on his tum. It stopped me cold. I examined him thoroughly then, in a panic, and discovered small patches all over him, a crust beginning on the edges of his ears.
‘Oh my God.’

The kids weren’t home, they had gone down to the lake with the Burkes, so I put a pot on to boil, filled it with lavender, and bathed the poor old darling as gently as I could. By the time Geoff got home, I had Ferg mostly dried off and had changed the cover on his bed. I sat with him in my lap, rocking him like a baby.
Geoff started at the door and stopped, feeling the vibe.
‘Oh Geoffy, Ferg is very sick.’ I said, and the tears came. ‘You didn’t brush him.’
He turned pale, and backed up, poor little thing. ‘I forgot, Mommy.’
I wiped my face and held out my hand to him.' Come here, kiddo.’ He came, warily, and sat beside me. I showed him the spots of mange on the old dog’s body and ears.
‘He’s hurting Geoffy. He’s got bugs and they’re eating him up. Maybe they’re inside him now. Oh, baby.’
‘… Is he going to die, Mommy?’ Geoff asked, stricken.
‘I don’t know,’ I said miserably.
‘Dad will be mad.’ Geoff said. I choked on tears. More than that. Oh more than that.

Geordie was, needless to say, beside himself. He laid into Geoff like I had never seen him do with anybody, swearing and pacing and yelling, for God’s sake.
‘Damn it, Geoff! I ask you to do one simple thing while I’m gone and you blow it! Why the hell don’t you pay attention!' He gestured at the dog. ‘He’s old, boy! He’s weak. If he were a person he would be about a hundred and fifty! Oh just look at him, he’s a mess, my poor old Ferg.’ He was crying now. ‘I’ve had him since he was a puppy! I knew him at Findhorn before his eyes were open! Hamish gave him to me when he was barely weaned! How could you be so cruel to a helpless animal!’ Geoff cowered in the chair at this unprecedented display. But I remembered Thor. ‘Get out of here!’ George commanded. ‘I don’t want to see you!’ Geoff slunk off to his room like a bad dog.
George sat down and cried all over the poor old dog, who licked his face with sad eyes.

We hadn’t very long to wait. We kept the poor old darling as comfortable as possible, but there really wasn’t much we could do; he was so very old and weak. It was four days later when we sat through the night with him, Geordie and Sas and I – Geoff hid in this room, crying - we petting him gently and breathing loving-kindness to him, to send him on his way to Valhalla. He breathed his last as dawn drew near, and poor Geordie broke down and cried in great gulping, wracking sobs. Geoffy crept in to our sad little circle and put his arms around George.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ he murmured, crying with us.
‘I am too, son,’ George managed. ‘I am too.’

We buried him at the edge of the garden, under the tree beside the hammock, where he had used to love to sit. The kids made a marker for him, a stone from the lakeshore, which read simply, ‘Fergus, our beloved friend.’

I had never seen Geordie low. Even when his father died, he was philosophical and shed no tears. But now, for a week, he could not eat and would break into tears at odd moments, could not play music, and wrapped himself around me at night as if his own life depended on it.
Another week passed, and he was a bit better – I had coaxed him to some calming tinctures – but he was still despondent and very, unnaturally quiet. Sas followed him around like a shadow, and cried with him often, as much in sympathy as grief I think, for it was shocking to them to see him – always so cheerful and calm and strong – in this state.

At the weekend, the kids went to the Oldfields’ to swim, and when they got back, Sas came in to the bedroom where we were reading Othello, and said,
‘Daddy, can you come here?’
He looked up and took off his reading glasses. ‘Eh?’
All arms and legs and summer blondeness, still in shorts and her bathing suit, Sas crooked her finger, and George got up to follow her.
In the common room was Geoff, holding a little rough collie puppy, a tricolour with a brown and white face and little white paws. It looked as if it was barely weaned.
‘He’s for you, Daddy,’ Geoff said, holding him out. ‘Mike gave him to me. Somebody at the shop had a litter.’ Poor little bean, he looked so scared that Geordie would cry or yell at him again. Well, he did cry, but with a big smile and a hug for poor Geoff and the pup. They sat down on the floor and looked the little one over, making much of him. Geoff was so happy, telling about how he had confessed to Mike about what he had done, and Mike going over to the phone and ringing up one of his neighbours. They went down the road right then, and picked out the little one from the litter. Geordie kissed the boy and put his arm around him.
‘Thank you, Geoffy. Thank you!’
George called the dog Boswell, and trained him up with much love and care and patience, which made a lasting impression on the children. Boz, as he quickly became known, grew into a dear friend.

Chapter Twenty-Two

2008-11-30T08:36:00.002-08:00

January, 1979/80
Geoff was another matter. He was, according to Montessori’s term, a ‘deviated’ child, one that was not settled into himself. His coming in was very different to Sassa's. I consulted the Zen quilters about timing of kids, and Maggie's first response was to choke on her tea and laugh.
'Plan! You guys are too much!' But when she stopped laughing, she and Anne, Shirley, Karen and Carrie all agreed that a year and a half was way too close – we were too late for that anyway - and two was bad – you had a new one smack in at the zenith of the terrible twos – but at three the kid was set in its ways and so, by default, two-and a half was the consensus.

When I reported this conversation to George when I got in, he laughed. 'You polled your girlfriends to plan a baby?'
'They know more about it than I do,' I shrugged. 'Heck, between them, Anne and Maggie have a hockey team.'
We sat on the floor in the common room in front of the stove, and he snagged Sas as she went running by, following the dog out to the kitchen. He swooped her upside down and blew on her tummy, making her squeal. She would never sleep if he kept on, but they were like boon companions, one encouraging the other. He put her down and she ran around him in a circle. 'Up, Daddy! Up!' And away they went again.
'Have you been doing that all night?'
'Pretty much,' he grinned. Ferg came back in and nosed about his elbow. 'Oh, you want in on it too, you playboy?' He ruffled the dog's ears and scooped up Sas again, to put her on Ferg like a pony. I shook my head. It was like having three children.
We continued the conversation later under our pile of winter quilts after Sas did go to sleep.
'So, two and a half means what?' he asked, calculating.
I smiled. ' A happy birthday.'
'I can live with that.' He kissed me. 'Are you all right with that?' He asked seriously.
'I'm more concerned about their getting along, being well-spaced, than my own convenience,' I said frankly.
'That's awfully scientific. Would it be too much, with running after her as well?'
'Shirley says the worst time to do it is when they go to school, so waiting too long is no good either.'
'But do you mind?' He persisted. 'Or is it all too much?'
I knew what was really bothering him – the possibility that I found our life more toilsome than he did. But we each worked as hard as the other. I had no resentment. I turned and looked at him. 'We have this one chance to do this right. I do want it to be right, for everyone. ' I kissed him. 'It's not too much. Sas'll be weaned by then. It's not too much. I had rather this, my lord, than any other where.'
'Ah,' he melted at that, murmuring.
'I like the sound of that, ' I said moving nearer.

When the time came around, Geordie's birthday was in the middle of the week, in the middle of school, with a town meeting that night, so we couldn't take days off as we had in summer with Sassa. Rather, it was on a frigid midnight in the glow of candles after Sas was asleep in her little bed beside Ferg in the common room. True to experience, the presence of the being coming in had been hanging around for a couple of weeks, and now, it seemed to me, that the energy was red – a deep bright scarlet like blood. Whoever this person was, it didn’t want Sas's high spiritual welcome. No, like bread on a cold day, the kundalini would only rise in sultry earthiness. But it did. And when we had drifted up from that deep place in the earth, I still saw the energy all scarlet. The room was hot as a sauna, like a jungle.
'On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves
Washes the grave with so many tears
A soldier cleans and polishes a gun
War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions'

'"I see it crimson, I see it red"' I murmured.
'He was in the war,' George breathed into my ear. 'He wants healing.'
I shuddered with premonition, and wondered if it were Matt Carberry.
I asked George later in the day why if it were Matt he would come to us, rather than Jack, since they had karma.
'Because Jack is an asshole,' he smiled. He put his hands over mine. 'It would just perpetuate their game. At least here, there's a chance he can shake it.'

Everything was different. I was really ill for three whole months. And Shirley said, 'It's a boy.' I ate farina with salt, and a whole jar of the wasabe I had made. And Shirley said, 'It's a boy.' And when he did come, he was late. The winter solstice passed, Christmas, then the New Year, and finally, something began to happen. As weird as it was, it was a relief, because he had been really low for weeks and I waddled around uncomfortably. On the second of January, I was in the kitchen with Sassa, making her lunch, and the baby shifted, and the waters broke all over the floor.
'Oh!'
I looked at Sass at the table, who was laughing. 'Silly Mommy!'
I put down the knife and brought her lunch to the table, squelching over.
'Brother is coming today,' I told her. Fergus had come in, and was nosing about the puddle.
'Out,' I told him. 'Go find my lord,' I told him. And he went.
Geordie came in from the workshop as I was finishing mopping up the puddle. 'Good thing we don't have school till next week,' I said.

Shirley when she came by the next day called it a 'dry birth' then said there really was no such thing, to which I replied, 'no kidding!' because I leaked everywhere for most of the day with nothing much else happening. We didn't too carried away with each other with Sas hanging out with us, but stuck to kissing, which was pretty good anyhow. When Sassa took her nap we did let go together and things opened up. By then it was dark, and we finally had some movement. Sas was asleep when he started to come as midnight approached, and George went to wake her up.

'It's time to see brother,' he said. She came in, rubbing her eyes, and climbed up on the bed where I was kneeling, her little face solemn. The coaching clock in the common room had just chimed midnight when Geoff rounded the corner and slid home. He was big and pale and not very greasy, and screamed blue murder the moment he arrived.
Sassa covered her ears. 'Shh, brother!' she commanded. 'Don't be noisy!'
Brother opened his big blue eyes and looked at her and stopped screaming.
'Neat trick,' George said, laughing and crying. He rubbed Sas's head, and we picked up the baby.

It was very dear to see Geordie with the boy. He wasn't macho about it, but there was a look in his eyes and a tone of voice whenever he was handling the baby, something so melting about the way he said 'son'. He was protective of Sassa, chivalrous, because ultimately she was a daintily made little girl, but Geoff was over nine pounds and with Geordie's own intense gaze. They understood one another in a fundamental way. He said to me one morning early on,
'It shall be interesting to raise a boy to truth and openness and chivalry from the start, to see how he gets on later.' He looked from Geoff to me. 'Less arsed up from ingrained cultural expectations.'
I smiled. 'Different ones! He must climb!' I was only half-joking.
'Yeah....' He sobered. 'Seriously, I'd like to spare him all the torment I went through.'
'Ah, now, that's a father talking.'
That had an unexpected response. He turned to me with a look that echoed that deep red night when Geoff was got, murmuring, 'had you any doubt,' and gave me a very erotic kiss that let the milk down. It was not a question and not a joke about paternity; there was something deep going on here between them, some understanding of karma – and I was their facilitator, their Parvati. I got it.

Feb 1980
Geoff as a person among us was such a completely different experience to Sassa as a baby. He was okay for the first couple of weeks, eating and sleeping as Sassa did, in a dreamy world of babyness. Then he began to vomit all over the place and cried endlessly. He could never settle no matter what we did; and even being carried around all the time in a sling, He was crabby, whining discontentedly.
‘If we’d had to go through this first,’ Geordie said after one bout of four hours of screaming, ‘I’d have said maybe it’s not a bad thing to have only one kid.’ Even Fergus couldn’t stand it anymore, and hid in the kitchen under the ledge, behind the bag of rice.
‘Colic,’ said the mothers of the Zen quilters, nodding.
‘O my God,’ Maggie drawled, ‘Ezra had that for three months, and I thought I would go mad. We had to get earplugs. After the girls, it was a shock.’
Anne agreed. Of her seven kids, her boys had all had it, but not her girls, Maire and Geraldine. Gerry was six months old now, placid and fat. ‘Like a milk-fed veal,’ Anne said.
Shirley said that it was much more common in boys, but I was of the mind that it was Geoff’s karma showing up, expressing itself. Nevertheless, I wrote to my sister and Ellen sent me her recipe for gripe water. While waiting for her reply, I took the plunge and gave up all forms of dairy and eggs. That helped a lot reducing his crying jags to about an hour, and eliminated his whining entirely. After several doses of Ellen’s recipe, Geoff cheered up remarkably and stopped leaving trails of curdled milk everywhere. ‘Veganism by default,’ I said to Geordie, when it was clear that this was working.
He smiled. ‘I knew I’d convince you eventually,’ he said.

Montessori said of kids like Geoff: ‘ the process of normalization is always the same. Into the ordered, tranquil, and harmonious atmosphere of the Montessori class enters the deviated child. It does not matter that his particular form of deviation may be. In some way or
other, however, he is a disordered being... that is the essence of it; he is out of harmony; his movements undisciplined, his mind without focus. Very often he is a veritable thorn in the flesh to the directress; a trouble to himself, and a nuisance to his neighbours. He will probably spend a good part of his time pottering around the room trying now this occupation and now that; but he does "everything by fits and starts and nothing for long." If he is not watched he may disturb the others, even to the extent of tormenting them.

‘Very likely, too, he is extremely disobedient, and wholly lacking in self-discipline. In short, the elements of his personality are in conflict within himself, as he himself is in conflict with his social environment. This state of things may last a short or a long time; but short or long it will be terminated in the same way. If the directress has done her duty properly, if she has treated him with a mixture of firmness and respect, if she has been tireless in presenting him with occupations (however indifferent he may seem), if she has encouraged him without coercion, and left him free to wander round at will... provided he disturbs no one... and if she has let him choose his occupations, then one day will come the great event. One day... Heaven knows why... he will choose some occupation (very likely one he has trifled with many times before) and settle down seriously to work at it with the first spontaneous spell of concentration that he has ever shown. This is the beginning of his salvation. Though he knows it not, but his directress does, he is now at the beginning of a new phase of life, almost a new life. His feet are now on the path which leads to normality.’
This was Geoff all over, which we first noticed when he was at the napkin-folding stage Sas had been – about the time he was crawling and pulling himself up on things. Whereas she was happy to play the game, he would push the cloth away, cry, or crawl away.
I mentioned this to Anne, and she said,’ Yeah I noticed that too. He’s all over the place.’ It was true. Geoff would only stick with examining something or playing with a toy for a very few minutes. She gave us some of Montessori’s work on the deviated child, and, on reading it, I felt really appalled and crushed by the prognosis.
‘What are we doing wrong?’ I asked Geordie. ‘It’s all the same as Sassa.’
He frowned, ‘ I don’t think we are…ask Anne. Perhaps it’s only Matt Carberry.’ He gave me a kiss. ‘Don’t worry!’
Anne said much the same thing. She shook her head, saying, ‘Sometimes it’s not the environment. Sometimes they just come in with stuff. Maybe it’s karma or some throwback to an ancestral problem… Was there anyone like that in your family or his?’
Uptight, discontented, frenetic people? I laughed. “Oh yes!’

October 1980 - Annie
It was strange to be taking him to the airport, sending him away without me. We were so rarely apart, all day long. Stranger still to go from our mountain where it was all of 50 degrees, to Palm Springs where it was 72. I knew that he was feeling distracted – when we had got the news, thank you to Jimbo, whose phone number at the General we had given family in case of emergencies, he cried with great wracking sobs – a child lost in the marketplace, separated from its mother. He had been separated from her, by his father’s sharpness, and now he had to release her to eternity, and face his father. He insisted that he was okay to drive, but he was quiet and grim, pale and his eyes shadowed from no sleep in the long night. He was wearing his only suit – a tweed thing saved for important faculty events – but no necktie, a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts in a daypack in the back with the kids. His collar was open, gypsy-dark summer tan still evident, and the slim graceful line of his neck where his hair curled back into a now long ponytail made me ache. I would miss him and worry about him more perhaps than he could know, but he had enough burdens of his own right now, and there was no need to say the words. But, hearing, he glanced over, and with a warm hand touched mine before he shifted gears.

In the queue we chatted and talked to the children; in the lounge we showed them all the other planes at the small airfield. And held hands as if he were going to war and not merely a funeral. When the flight was called I felt a rush of emotion and we looked at one another. He nodded slowly and smiled a little. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘and let me kiss you.’ So we rose and kissed good-bye and then he picked up the kids and kissed them, and handed Geoffy to me. Picking up his rucksack, he went through the door with a last, piercing look and down the stairs to the airfield. We watched from the window as his tall slim form disappeared up the steps and into the plane. He had asked me not to, but we waited and Sass and I waved bye-bye to Daddy’s plane. Then we went for an icecream before driving home again over the hill. It felt like sending him off to war. In a way it was.

He hated the long flights; he always had done. Being over six-feet tall, he had no leg room on airplanes, and we couldn’t afford first-class, where there was. In Washington, he had to scramble to make the connecting flight to Manchester. He said it was good to hear a home accent from the stewardesses, who were nice to him when they heard he was going home for a funeral. Geoff met him at the airport. Geoff who was now an engineer and clean-cut with short hair and a wife and kid, with another on the way. He smiled when he saw Geordie, still true to himself, though his face had been grim and anxious a moment before.
‘Hey bro,’ Geoff said. ‘Good to see you, man. You look good.’
They regarded one another, fellow inmates of the asylum. The unspoken feelings about Annie between them.
“Man, Dad is going to blow a cog when he sees you!’
George grimaced. ‘Well he can go f-off. I’m not here to please him.’
Geoff laughed and slapped his shoulder. ‘Right-o!”

They stopped at the airport bar for a drink before heading south to Mobberly. “Dorey’s there with the kid,’ Geoff said, ‘Lord you should see her, she’s big as a house!’ He grinned as they got in the car. ‘It’s great.’
George smiled. ‘Show off.’
‘I’ve got pictures for you,’ Geoff said, ‘to take with you.’
‘I brought some too.’ He reached back and pulled them out of the front of his rucksack, a little bent. Us, the kids, the house, the village. The band at Strawberry. Geoff laughed. ‘Hey hey! Beautiful. A beautiful life.’
‘Yes it is.’
They regarded one another, the unspoken again between them. Then Geoff nodded. ‘Well, let’s go.’

Herb was now very grey, and thinner than he had been. But sharp as ever. He took one look at George and sneered. ‘Well, you haven’t changed.’
‘Neither have you,’ George returned evenly. He gave Dorey a hug. She was tall and blonde and voluptuous with a late-term baby.
‘Nice to meet you! You look beautiful.’
She laughed. ‘Such gallantry! Geoff said you were a romantic. Now I believe him.’
‘Did he? Well. I happen to like pregnant women, and you look a lot like my wife.’ He glanced at his brother, smiling. Geoff shrugged.
'Harriet, come here,’ Dorey said to the little girl who has hiding at the edge of the doorway to the kitchen. She came, a little blonde thing, very much like Sassa. ‘This is your uncle Geordie,’ Dorey said.
George hunkered down. ‘Hello sweetpea. I have a little girl about your age. Your cousin Sassa. Would you like to see?’
Harriet nodded, and he brought out the picture of the kids in the garden.
‘You have a big dog!’
Yes we do.’
‘And a baby! We are going to have a baby.’ She pointed at Dorey.
George laughed. ‘Yes, you are. Are you going to help? Sassa loves to help her Mamma with our baby. His name is Geoff, like your Dada.’
Harriet considered. ‘If it’s a good baby.’

They settled in after that then walked down to the church where the coffin lay in state, just the two of them, Geoff and George. Geordie said that the finality of the experience was quite shocking. Her dark hair was threaded white, but she was otherwise much as she had always been, except that her face was sunken and of a greyish cast that matched the blue flowered frock they had dressed her in. He had to lay his hand on her long thin ones, clasped neatly, to know, really know that this was not a bad dream. She really was dead. Until that moment he had not quite been able to believe it, until he touched her cold flesh and felt no rise of breath. And then the hard grip he’d had on his grief since that first phone call slipped away and he fell into the chasm. He was grateful he said, that here was no-one in the church just then except Geoff, who sat by in the first pew and let him have his time, until he should be able to come away. They were that English. No scenes or effusions. Just a clap on the shoulders, and a long hug in the privacy of the church, then going down to the pub for a drink, where they sat and talked about her for a couple of hours. At the public vigil that night, they did their duty, stoically greeting people and accepting their condolences. At the funeral early the next morning, they shouldered their burden with their uncles, come all the way from Canada late in the night, and a couple of the neighbours, and sat in arid misery while Herb delivered a surprisingly warm and tender eulogy of the wellspring of his life. That is what he called her. George said he nearly lost it then, from both grief and astonishment, because his father had never treated her as if she were that; he knew what that felt like and how the rock of one’s being should be treated. He lived it every day. And Herb was not that. He looked at his brother, who wore an expression of similar incredulity. Another conversation over pints was in order.

He stayed of course to help sort things out, a job that no-one should have to do alone, but by the third day, the day of our phone conversation, he was absolutely desperate – from the continual rain, from the mouldering old glebe, from Herb’s unbearable constant proximity and harangue, and from missing us, missing home.

I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls
Soft and warm continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls
And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets
Of England to where my heart lies

My mind's distracted and diffuse
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you're asleep
And kiss you when you start your day
And the song I was writing is left undone
I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you
And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I

It was a Sunday, and he had managed to find some small solace in music with a found guitar in the sacristy, which he took back to the glebe with him and sat in the window playing all day. But he was quite quite miserable, unable to cope with his father any longer, and having no means of escape apart from walking in the rain down to the pub, where no one asked him questions, or to the shop, where everyone did.

After our conversation, he later said, he was better, and not simply because there were only now three days to endure. With Dorey’s help he had sorted through all of Anne’s things and boxed them up – what to keep, what to donate to Oxfam, what to offer to the locals – and they had made a nice little album of the letters and pictures George had sent her since we moved. On the last day, George gave it to his father, saying,
‘Ma would want you to have this, to know that we are here, that you’re not alone.’
Herb harrumphed. ‘What will I do with this?’
‘It will give you something to think about when you write to us, and to remember your grandchildren. And her.’ He looked at his father keenly. ‘I am assuming that you meant what you said the other day Dad, about her. And I want you to know that I completely understand, for such is Claire to me. Even if you can’t ever talk about it, or won’t, we have that in common. Apart from loving her.’ He looked over at the picture of his mother during the war, on the sideboard. A smiling, dark-haired girl in ankle socks and dark lipstick.

’So I hope that we can make some kind of peace. I am a happily married family man, with a good safe job, and a life full of friends and happiness. You wanted me to be successful, and I am. At the school, Claire and I are a legend – Mr. and Mrs., everyone knows who that is. And the kids love us. I hope that is enough to gain your respect, if not your approval or your love.’
They regarded one another, and slowly, Herb’s habitually severe expression melted a little.
‘She’s a pretty little thing, your wife,’ Herb said at last. ‘Very like your mother in many ways.’ His voice broke. 'Annie always said that to me…. Thank you, son.’ He patted the album, with its pictures and letters, to and from Annie.
George nodded and smiled, quite relieved. ‘You’re welcome, Dad.’

When they parted for good, Herb actually embraced him.

June 1982/September 1985
When Geoff was two, we built a lean-to on the south side of the house so it would get the heat from the stove, and divided it up by an inner partition into two rooms of ten feet square each. The kids now had their own rooms, to be in, to decorate and to look after. Even if they were, as James said, the size of monks' cells. There was one door to the rest of the house, through the kitchen, and Sassa wanted the one nearest the front door. She called it her magical cave; we had been reading the Arabian Nights.

Geoff did not easily learn to meditate as Sassa had, though he eventually did, but his early salvation was music. That was the first real breakthrough to the natural child. We had a particular programme for teaching the kids music, beginning with that kazoo. When they were about two and a half, they were allowed to play with the bodhran when we were playing – and I wasn’t using it- and when they had got the knack of following the rhythm, they progressed to a set of spoons. Bones were a knack even for some adults, but spoons were easy to handle and they quickly had the trick of them. They thought themselves very clever. And they were. By three, they were given a recorder and pennywhistle, and learned simple tunes. By five, they could pick out tunes on a small guitar we had borrowed from the summer school. Both the kids took off with that, and our happiest day of their childhood was when our little family had our first jam session, and they could follow along to music they had not practised. Geoff was seven then.

The primary school were very impressed with their skills and asked us to be part of their music programme, which we did, once a week – teaching both music appreciation, which involved movement, and musicianship. Kids who had been struggling with reading music – on guitar, fiddle and flute, the school’s instruments – really improved. We did not supplant their regular lessons, merely added another dimension to them.

Chapter Twenty-One

2008-11-30T08:36:00.001-08:00

June 1977
When it was time to go back to work, we would drop the baby off at Anne's before school and pick her up when our three hours were finished. It was about as long as she could go without a feed, and she would not take a bottle of expressed milk. Like Geordie, she was not into latex, either for bottles or pacifiers. But she didn't cry much, so there was no need for a plug. Anne kept a nursery school in her house, run on the principles of Maria Montessori. Despite having four kids of her own, only one of whom was in school, and three others – four now, including Sassa, as we quickly called her - her house was orderly, quiet and the children well-behaved. I was very impressed. I loved Maggie, but her house was perpetual mess and chaotic noise; it was happy, the babble of a close family, but still a strain on the nerves, when we were used to such quiet at home. Sas especially would startle when we were there and the kids and dogs and cats ad rabbits and hamsters were flying.

Anne had studied child development in college, with an eye toward being a teacher, but she met Jack Burke, who was from Derry in the North of Ireland, and started having her own kids, and so became a different kind of teacher. She loaned me a small book that she called her bible: 'Teaching Montessori in the home: the Pre-school years.' It gave a brief history of Montessori and her method, as well as a programme for practical life exercises, sensory exercises, preparation for school (reading, writing and maths) and making your own Montessori equipment, for the child aged one and a half to five. It is one of the few books of that period I wanted to own, and Anne found me one of my own.

The surprise to me was how fascinated George was with the method, the exercises and the directions for the materials used. This was one of the reasons I had to have the book. He read it from cover-to-cover about six times before I was able to finish it properly once, and we had many conversations about the method, both philosophical and practical.

Montessori believed in supporting the child's natural development, which could be enhanced or retarded by his environment. Everything for the child had a specific use, and there was nothing that he could not see and touch. The object was to develop the whole personality of the child, with freedom within a framework of organisation. At the heart of George's interest in the method was Montessori's belief in 'making a contribution to the cause of goodness, by removing obstacles which are the source of violence and rebellion,' that so doing made an independent person, with a strong sense of self, able to improvise and use his creativity in working and learning as a healthy, thinking individual.

The book stated: ‘‘To know how to direct the child's natural energies into those creative channels ordained by his Maker is no easy matter, and requires a very special preparation. The basis of this preparation consists in going through a fundamental change of outlook. The teacher needs to acquire a deeper sense of the dignity of the child as a human being; a new appreciation of the significance of his spontaneous activities; a wider and more thorough understanding of his needs; and a quicker reverence for him as the creator of the adult-to-be. How is this to be done? ‘Montessori makes it quite clear that it is not primarily a question of studying psychology, nor of the acquisition of certain items of culture. The first essential is that the teacher should go through an inner, spiritual preparation... " Cultivate certain aptitudes in the moral order." This is the most difficult part of her training, without which all the rest is of no avail. The idea that a moral preparation is necessary before one is fit to be entrusted with the care of children is a principle hitherto chiefly confined to members of religious orders. But according to Montessori such a preparation should be the first step in the training of every teacher whatever her nationality or creed. She must study how to purify her heart and render it burning with charity towards the child. She must "put on humility"; and, above all, learn how to serve. She must learn how to appreciate and gather in all those tiny and delicate manifestations of the opening life in the child's soul. Ability to do this can only be attained through a genuine inner effort towards self-perfection. The first thing, then, the would-be teacher has to acquire is what one might call a "spiritual technique." And to attain it she will have to experience something akin to a religious conversion, for it will involve a "re-evaluation accepted Values.''’
‘Well, we’ve done that,’ George said, ‘ so we’re halfway there.’

Before Sassa could even sit by herself, George had built her several busy boards, according to Montessori’s designs, with buttons and lacing strings and other fastenings, and made blocks and a small hanging table for our ‘school time’. She had her own little shelf in the common room with her toys, which included musical ones – a triangle, a small drum, and a kazoo.
She was a happy, peaceful child, very curious and interested in everything we were doing. By the time she was nine months old, she would scoot about after us, and wanted to do everything. She played in the pots and pans, sorted beans and beads and buttons, and ‘helped’ feed the dog; she could fold her own napkin and her little bed quilt – which began as a game of peek-a-boo. By the time she was a year and a half, she had her own little space in the garden, and planted beans and pumpkins. She could water them with her own little can, and knew how to pour from her own small clay jug. We substituted natural materials for Montessori’s plastic jugs and bottles, and it was never a problem.

Sassa began to set her own little table then too, to sew with cards and a big blunt tapestry needle, and sweep with her own little broom. She loved to sing songs, and could ‘read’ books – telling the familiar stories to herself in short sentences. She was bright and bonny, a joy. According to Montessori’s method, she was a ‘normalised’ child, growing and learning in the way that a natural child should, cheerful, helpful and affectionate. The dreaded twos came along and we never saw a tantrum; Sas was too busy exploring the world and having fun. By the time she was three, she could read, and began to write at four – her own name in big scrawly letters; the school were very impressed with her when we took her up for her kindergarten interview. We told the principal that she had been at Anne’s nursery school and he nodded. ‘Oh yes. Of course.’ We had talked about home schooling, which was available through the local school, but decided against it, since we had no near neighbours for Sas to interact with.

Chapter Twenty

2008-07-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

March 1977
It wasn’t really necessary for us to do anything especially about the kid until around Geordie’s birthday. I had borrowed a few clothes from Anne and Maggie, but until then I wasn’t huge. Suddenly, I was huge and the impending reality of a need to make some plans and space sank in with us.

We lived by a philosophy that was similar to the old wartime ‘make it, make do, or do without’. Whenever we considered acquiring something, we asked ourselves,
1) Do we really need it?
2) Can we make it? borrow it? barter it?
3) Can we get it used? (as at a jumble sale)
So, with a list from the mothers in the Zen quilters, we sat down in the toasty kitchen one night and made a plan to suit our lifestyle and needs. Most of the stuff we eliminated – mobiles and changing tables and gizmos like walkie-talkies. We decided that the kid would need a small space for when we didn’t want it to sleep with us, so we could use a basket, such as the kind Mag and Anne hauled their wee ones to festivals in. It wouldn’t need its own bed for years, so we didn’t worry about that. Everyone said, get a baby carrier, and from what Shirley said about the kid feeling snug, it seemed like a good idea. The rest was just clothes and blankets and diapers. We got all this from Maggie and Joe, who said it was a gift and not a loan, because he had ‘gone down to the mobile spay and neuter van’. Mag’s celebration at Jack’s birth was specially because she knew he would be their last hurrah.

Midsummer 1977
At the end of the afternoon session I was sitting with Anne and Betsey in the audience having a rest. George, Joe, Maggie, Mike, Karen and Dave were playing. Mike leaned over to Joe, and they started in on 'The Banks of the Bann,’ a ‘come all ye’ and one of the band’s and our personal favourites.
As I was a-walking down by yon hill-town,
The fair and lovely mountains they did me surround;
I spied a pretty fair maid, and to me she looked grand;
She was plucking wild roses on the banks of the Bann.

So I stepped up to this fair one, and to her I did say,
"Since nature has formed us for to meet on this day --
Since nature has formed us, won't you give me your hand,
And we will walk together on the banks of the Bann."
Oh they were having a fine time, high and happy, and just then George looked out across the bow and caught my eye, with the biggest smile I have ever seen.
Now it being a summer's evening and a fine quiet place,
I knew by the blushes that appeared on her face....
We both lay down together unto a bed of sand,
And she rolled into my arms on the banks of the Bann.
"O young man, you have wronged me; won't you tell me your name,
so that when my babe is born I may give it the same?"
"My name is Willie Archer, and I'd have you understand
That my home and habitation lie close to the Bann.
"But I cannot marry you, for apprenticed I'm bound
To the spinning and the weaving in Rathisland town.
But when my time is ended, I will give you my hand
And we will be married on the banks of the Bann."

So come all you fair maidens, take warning by me:
Don't go out a-courting at one, two, or three.
Don't go out a-courting so late if you can,
Or you'll meet with Willie Archer on the banks of the Bann.

They played out the awesome riffs and ended the piece in a flourish to applause. Joe announced the break and they broke up with hugs and chat and laughter. I didn’t go up right away or pay much mind- they would be down in a moment- but sat talking with Betsey about the Zen quilters’ project, until Anne nudged me, and nodded her head. Up on the stage, George was standing with his arms crossed, squinting, listening to one of the come-heres – a barefoot blonde girl in cut off jeans and a skinny tank top. She stood in front of him, very obviously a groupie type, and to our astonishment jumped up and threw her arms around him with a sexy kiss.

Anne and Betsey and I just stared at one another. George leaped back as if he had been burned. Maggie Joe and Mike, who were winding up their cords, stopped cold, staring. With a face like thunder, George picked up his fiddle and bow from his chair, leaving the rosin bag and all, and jumped off the three-foot stage, stomping off like Thor bestride the world.
‘What the hell!’ Betsey said. I looked at her, cold and numb. I’d never heard her swear before,
The groupie stood staring as well, and was led off by Joe and handed over to her friends. By a weird prescience, I heard him say, ‘Do something with her, she’s drunk.’ He looked over at me, white faced, and off in the direction of the old amphitheatre, where George had gone.
Anne patted my arm. ‘We’ll get him, don’t worry.’
‘You don’t understand –‘ I said, childishly. ‘I have never seen him angry before. Annoyed, but not angry, not like that –‘
‘Everyone has their limits,’ Betsey said. ‘He just has a longer fuse.’ She nodded. ‘Look, Joe and Mike are going off to get him. Don’t worry.’
How to explain that I wasn’t worried about fidelity, but this aspect of him that I had never seen before, which frightened me?

Mike came back about a quarter of an hour later, and asked me if I was all right, then said that George wanted me to come to him alone – he was sitting beside the creek on a rock with his elbows on his knees, staring pensively into the water, white-faced. He looked up, stricken, and jumped up, flinging his arms around me.
'Thank God,’ he said over and over, shaking. I realised that he was crying.
‘Oh baby, darling,’ I couldn’t bear his upset. ‘Sweetheart, don’t. Oh, babe,’ I felt like a mother with a child. He moved away a little to look at me, wiped his nose.
‘I am so sorry!’ He put his hands on either side of my face. ‘I love you. I love you, I love you and only you forever. My whole heart, for my whole life,’ he swore. ‘Claire!’

I shook my head, and kissed him. ‘It was not your fault. We all saw everything. Joe said she was drunk. You didn’t encourage her,’ I smiled a little. ‘Certainly didn’t welcome it. Oh baby, don’t be upset, I can’t bear it.’ Saying it really did make me cry.
We went to sit on the rocks, he with his arm under my elbow as if I were made of glass. He hugged us, me and the kid, and rocked for a while, before he said,
‘But I did. ‘ He looked up, ‘Oh, not in the way anyone would think. But I love that song, and it always makes me think of Tintern Abbey… and we were having such fun and it felt so juicy and sexy, and I threw that out to you –‘
‘I caught it,’ I assured him.

‘I know you did! But that…blasted girl felt it too, and thought it was for her. By no provocation of mine! But there’s a belief about musicians being easy that is borne out far too often. I – maybe I’m the exception that proves the rule, but I wasn’t always! God knows, I slept around in Soho. I guess that’s why it made me so angry, because I was like that, and I don’t ever want to be again. It took me by such surprise! Maybe I over-reacted to her invading my space as she did, but I don’t feel like I did. I’m still angry. Shit.’ He looked out over the meadow beyond, shimmering in the high blue heat of summer.
‘I’m supposed to be so “enlightened” as Jimbo says, but I handled it very badly, and shouldn’t be angry. I hate feeling this way ! I thought it was over in my life.’ He looked at me sharply. ‘I used to live this way!’
‘I know,’ I murmured, covering his hands.
‘It’s a lesson to me about focus and energy,’ he said grimly, ‘that I can’t just broadcast certain feelings… and about what I am actually still capable of. It’s easy to think I’ve got it and that kind of energy – this energy, God it’s awful! – won’t happen any more.’
‘It scared me,’ I said after a little, into the silence, ‘how angry you were. Like Thor at Ragnarok.’
He smiled a little. ‘It’s nice of you to put it that way.’ He kissed my cheek. ‘I’m sorry I frightened you, baby. I frightened me too…. God, help me shake this, Claire.’ He put his head on my shoulder.
‘You can’t go around it,’ I said after a moment. It was pure inspiration. The words were not my own wisdom. ‘You must go down into the darkness and confront it, to be reborn, as a child is reborn into the world….’ The kid added its opinion to this, elbowing us.
He laughed a little. ‘Well-done, kid. God! What a funny world!’ He sobered and looked at me, his eyelashes all stuck together like a child’s. ‘Okay, down into Hades it is. Will you help me?’
I nodded.
He sighed. 'Oh, I have to let go of thinking I was done with this! Breathe with me, Claire.’

We sat for some time and meditated, the energy deepening and stilling slowly, until it seemed that we were in a vast pool of warmth, like the lake in full summer.
He kissed my temple.’ Thank you, darling. I love you.’
‘I love you too, babe.’
We went back to the festival then, walking slowly – by his instigation – hand in hand. When we got to the picnic area, Mike and Joe launched themselves off the table they were leaning against sharing a beer, and came over to us.
‘Hey, man, are you okay?’
‘Yes.’ George said. ‘I will be. We have some things to work on, but everything is okay.’

After the bonfire we went home and began a guided meditation which we did at intervals over the next two days, the result of which we discovered that this anger came from when George was very small. His mother Anne was fairly permissive, and had not forced him too much to conform to bedtimes, mealtimes, or supervision. But when he was four, an aunt – Herb’s sister- had come to visit, and didn’t like the way he was let to run wild at all. For her entire visit he was forced to comply, sometimes being tied to the chair. Herb did everything that Laney said, and Anne argued and cried but the woman was a sergeant major. Being physically forced against his will by an adult to do something had engendered a rage – that was the word George used –in him, against the world, which could force itself upon his autonomy. It was the cause of his bad attitude as a teenager, his wild life in Soho, and – on a more positive line, his turning to self-reliance and personal responsibility as a way of life. Once we had got to the incident, we worked on changing it. He said to Laney, in the present tense: ‘you can’t force me to do anything, I am a free being, whole and complete and as much a part of God as you are. You have no right to do that, and I won’t let you.’

Early the next morning, before dawn, I woke up feeling rather crampy, and knew that this was it. I just had that sense. I lay there in the blue-purple light and watched the first violet streaks of dawn seep across the sky, then deep rose – and George was awake, by habit turning and enveloping me in arms and legs.
‘Good morning, cupcake.’
I smiled at him, ‘Good morning.’ I touched his face. ‘The kid is coming today.’
He was instantly fully awake. ‘My God! You’re sure?’ he raised his head a little and looked at me. I nodded.
‘Mm hmm.’ I smiled at him.
‘Wow,’ he said, and frowned. ‘Do you need anything?’
I shook my head. I felt very dreamy. I just wanted to stay in this luscious dreamy, meditative state and be with that being I could feel in the room. I told George, ‘I can feel it, all around us, the presence.’ He stopped then, and sighed, and relaxed, snuggling with me and we both fell into a wonderful meditation.

He got up after a while, to make breakfast and feed the dog, but brought the breakfast back to bed. There we sat against the pillows, listening to the sounds of summer and getting really high and juicy from necking and petting, under the theory that 'what gets 'em in gets 'em out', as Shirley put it. About noon I started to feel really heavy with the rushes, like something had shifted, so he fished under the bed for the groundsheet we'd brought in for the purpose and put it on the bed. Not before time! The waters broke, and suddenly the baby moved down like a bowling ball down a laneway, and I heard myself making some pretty mooselike noises.
‘Oh,’ I was really uncomfortable and thought maybe it was because I was getting hung up about it.
‘Breathe with me,’ I said – and we sat together, lost in each other's eyes, breathing together in the guru meditation, sharing breaths, and both got really high and starting laughing, and there she was – the kid – coming in that golden light that was full of green shadows, slipping out like a wet kitten into her first day. We were both crying and looked in amazement at this grey-pink little stranger, and as we did, she opened her eyes and looked at us. Then yawned and mewed like a kitten and we were in love.

The afterbirth was a really sharp experience, nothing like the labour, crampy and actually painful as if I were low on electrolytes. But it was whole, and he scooped it up and moved it away from us. The kid was still attached to it. He got the scissors off the shelf that we had boiled for this day, and freed her.
‘There you are, little baby,’ he said, smiling, covering her head and back with his hand. His eyes were full of tears. ‘Welcome to the world.’

Born in the month of June, No silver spoon to help you out
Your mother had you naturally, Naturally's the way you came out
You know your own mind and you show it to me
Give me the high sign When you want to be free
And open up your eyes To the wonders that you see
See the airplane fly See the trees rush by
Be brave and strong when you hurt yourself
And don’t you have a worry in the world.

' For the love that’s been given you is the one thing time can’t erase
and every day it’s growin’ like the knowin’ smile upon your face
You’re startin’ out strong you get a kick out of life
you like to sing songs and be in the spotlight
And when everybody’s watchin’ you you shine so bright
See the airplane fly See the trees rush by
Be brave and strong when you hurt yourself
And don’t you have a worry in the world.

We sat together for a while before he got up to tidy up and I to use the pot, carrying the baby around with me. I felt very ancient, and rather grotty, as if I were squelching through the bog of time, the Palaeolithic Mother Goddess. George stripped the bed pretty quickly, and took the slop bucket out to the workshop. We intended to bury the afterbirth – not eat it! as Shirley had suggested. The linens could be boiled tonight and everything would be fresh tomorrow.
We had thought to call her Anne for his mother, but it did make me laugh – Anne Gregory!
‘"Only God my dear could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair."’ I quoted in the morning, when she was all clean and fuzzy and sleepy after feeding.
He frowned. 'Eh?'
‘Yeats,’ I said. ‘He wrote that about Lady Gregory’s daughter Anne, whom he fancied.’
‘Ah,’ he thought for a moment. ‘We could call her Asgard.’ For our experience at the Midsummer festival.
I laughed, and kissed him. ‘That’s a very hippie name…. I like it!’ So she was called for the Norse heaven on earth.

George posted a notice at the co-op the next day and stopped by Maggie’s, the cafe, and the General to tell folks. Shirley came by in the evening straight from work to check me out, and asked many questions about the birth – laughing at me when I said I thought I was getting hung up at the end. ‘That’s transition, silly child! No wonder you were bellowing like a moose.’
She looked the baby over too, and marvelled at her little round head. ‘No moulding! God, you could probably have ten kids, and shoot ‘em out like grapes.’ I giggled at the image. ‘I was worried,’ she admitted, 'because Geordie’s so much bigger than you are. But I didn’t want to freak you out because everything seemed okay… I am still blown away at you guys – out here like pioneers! No help, not even any hot water, just having a baby like it was nothing.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t nothing,’ I smiled. ‘It was very holy.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ Shirley smiled. ‘Are we going to see you tomorrow? ‘ It was the quilting group meeting tomorrow. I nodded.
‘Good. I’ll pick you up. No arguments!’ She collected her things from the bed and put them back into her bag.
‘Remember what I said about nookie,’ she said at last.
I smiled. ‘I’m not a teenager. And he’s not a beast.’
‘Just doing my duty,’ She gave me a kiss. ‘Bye sweetheart. And you, little Valkyrie,’ she said to Asgard. ‘Hang loose.’

Chapter Nineteen

2008-07-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

September 1976
The new moon in September fell on our anniversary, and as my cycle ran with the new moon, we decided that according to our plan now would be a good time to make a baby. We were done with Wobbly, school didn't start for a couple of weeks; perfect. So we laid off for a week before the first fertile day, and I didn't take any wild carrot; it would be a great experiment to see if just going off it the once would work. We had set aside the three days to devote to the project. If it didn't work, we'd try again next month. For a couple of weeks I had felt a presence hovering, a presence that was warm and humming, like the kundalini buzz. I told Geordie, and this is one of the reasons we chose now to try this. Certainly all the right physical signs were there; I had a tremendous cramp.
'It's holding us to our promise,' he said, smiling.

In our morning meditation we focused on that presence, and got really high. The room got very hot and I felt a buzzing in the small of my back and the top of my head itched. George had that too.
'Kundalini,' he said. We knew it now. 'Come on, baby,' he gave me a slow juicy kiss. We were very careful and didn't rush. Only when the energy was rising up through the solar plexus did we seal the circle and let it come fully, carrying us into that mind-blowing space of pure existence.
We drifted there, coming down very slowly, and I felt like a limp rag, but very peaceful. The room was full of a deep rose light, Into this holy atmosphere, he murmured,
'I can see it.'
I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was so high, with a blissy smile like a new-born babe's. He was drenched, and his hand fell under my chin heavily, burning. I smiled slowly, and rubbed my cheek against his arm. We did it. We knew we did.
I knew as the days passed, well before I was late, that we had succeeded. My body was suspended in that high juicy open state of fertility. Two late days then passed, then five; at eight days I could say certainly that we had a baby, though I didn't have to. There were plenty of signs, on which George commented with a smile.
'First time lucky,' he said.
'No luck about it,' I rejoined. 'It was craft,,, and pure art.'
He caught that with delight, and swung me around in the common room. 'Wha's like tha?' he murmured, with a kiss.
'Thou be,' I returned. 'All in all.'

I saw Shirley in the co-op the next day and told her, and a little of how we had done it.
'You have to tell this is to the girls,' she said. 'It'll inspire them.'
So I told our story in the Zen quilters' meeting the next night, after Shirley's preamble.
'Leave it to Claire and Geordie to invent a new way of making babies,' Maggie joked.
'Hush up and listen,' Shirley said, 'this is awesome.' She nodded at me. 'Go on, Claire.'
I told them how since we married I had been taking wild carrot, which I had got from my sister; how we had abstained for a week before hand, not our usual practise.
Shirley was nodding. Yes. Yes.
I told them about the presence and the kundalini, our careful pose and sealing the circuit of energy.
And Shirley was nodding. Yes. Yes.
I told them about our resting in the rose light of the room and letting the presence be with us – not getting up and rushing about.
And Shirley was nodding. Yes. Yes.
'Conscious conception,' she murmured. 'It's a girl,' she said, looking at me.
'Because of the pink light?' Betsey asked.
Shirley smirked at her. 'No, that's just the being's energy vibe. No, because they were early in the fertility cycle. To get a boy you have to get it smack on the day.' I nodded in agreement.
Betsey was impressed.
'Claire, you should teach NFP at the community centre and at Wobbly,' Shirley said. 'People would dig it.'
There were lots of question to us then about how wild carrot worked and what other things one cold use, to increase fertility or cure cramps or heavy bleeds.

Later, Shirley gave me a lift to the trailhead, and said while we were sitting in the truck,
'Claire, I'd be very happy to send some of my folk to you for herbal advice and mixtures.'
'I don't know all that much about pregnant women,' I protested.
'I get a lot of other questions too,' she said. 'It would be such a gift to the community. Think about it, won't you? You could put up a notice at the co-op.'
I told her I would think about it. 'But folk would have to come to me, or leave me a message on the board.' I didn't want us to have to get a phone for consulting.
Shirley smiled. 'That's the way my granny did it, back home.'
And that is how I became the village apothecary.

Chapter Eighteen

2008-07-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

March and April 1975
In the middle of March, Maggie was due to have her baby any time. When I saw her on Tuesday at the quilters' meeting she was complaining of a backache and aching joints. She stayed home from the Friday jam, so I wasn't entirely surprised when on Saturday morning Joe poked his head into the workshop, where we were – Geordie working on a recorder and I on a glass panel for the community centre. It was nice and toasty there because of the kiln.
'Howdy, good morning to y'all,' he said. He ruffed up his shoulders in his sheepskin coat.
'Joe!'
He stomped his feet on the flagstone threshold, and stepped inside.
'I'm here to fetch Claire,' he nodded. 'Maggie's having her baby and all the womenfolk are coming in by bus.' He smiled ruefully.' She asked me to fetch you.'
'I'll come. Just a moment.' I got up and pulled my work apron off over my head.
'Tribalism,' George smiled, as I put away my tools.
'Shoot!' Joe said in his long slow way. 'I have never heard so much giggling and crying in all my born days. And there's panties I have never seen before hanging in my bathroom. I thought I'd walked into a harem. When I left they were all running out for the sauna like a bunch of goslings following the goose.'
He looked at me, 'I'll fetch you up there, but I'm keeping well out it. I like women, but a couple of dozen is too many. I'm going down to the Feed and Seed and set out with the guys, until it all blows over.'
I took my coat down from the nail.
'You're not invested in seeing it born then?' I pulled my hair out from underneath the coat and scrunched down my knitted cap.
'I have birthed most of 'em myself,' Joe said. 'Three, no four of 'em. Mag can have her hen party if she wants to.'
It was hard not to laugh at his lovely complacency, at his pure Cracker sensibility.
'Right,' I said. I went and kissed Geordie's cheek. He was merry.
'Have a good time, cupcake.'
'I will, and I won't bring back the wrong panties.'
He laughed, because I didn't wear them.

Joe, true to his word, let me out at the drive and went off for town. I crunched up through the snow and ice to the house. Maggie's mother was in the kitchen with Mark and Zachary, making play dough in a big red bowl.
'They're all out in the sauna yet,' Martha said. nodding. She was a tall, large soft woman, with salt and pepper hair cut short in an Ava Gardner style. 'Where's that Joe?'
I smiled. 'He fled to play chess at the feed store. Hi guys,' I said to the boys.
'Hi Claire! We're making play dough with mammaw!' Zachary said.
'I have green,' said Mark solemnly.
In the common room, Ezra was lying on the floor building a tower with Lincoln logs, amid the heaps and piles of everyone's stuff. I put down my rucksack, went down the hall, grabbed a towel from the shelf, and went into the bathroom. It was indeed festooned with various bits of underwear. I put up my hair and came out in the towel.
'Have fun,' I said to the boys.
It was very cold outdoors, and the footpath was icy and hard to navigate in flip-flops. There were squeals when I opened the sauna door. Maggie sat the middle of a group of about eighteen women; her two daughters Elizabeth and Abigail, her four sisters, our friends, and some of her old college chums.
'Claire!' She cried, rolling sweat.' Come on in girl, and close the door.'
I went, and sat on the floor in front of Shirley, who was sitting next to her.
We hung out there for some time, talking about men and babies and boyfriends past, recipes for coffee cake, and how to get the stains out of collars. Maggie and Shirley told her birth story of Joshua, her knee-baby as she called him - who was three, how he was nearly born in the wading pool at the Midsummer festival because he was such a 'little squirt', which made everyone laugh. As it was, Mag simply went over to their tent, pulled down the zip and had the baby.
'It surprised the heck out of the kids.' She said.

It was lunchtime then and Maggie's little girls led us all inside because they were hungry. We took up every room in the house, getting back into our clothes, and by the time we were done, Shirley had set up her kit in the bedroom and Maggie's sister Joan cleared out the loo of panties and ran a bath in the tub. It had Jacuzzi jets, and Mag was feeling pretty heavy.
'Don't you have this baby in the tub,' Shirley told her, 'My back can't stand hunkering down like that,' But she was smiling. It was an old joke between them.
She didn't have it in the tub. Along about teatime Maggie had set up a low mooing chant and was rocking back and forth on her hands and knees. Martha called the kids in from their rooms, and they watched their brother's little head and arms slip out, 'just like a horse!' as Ezra exclaimed. John was born amid a lot of crying and laughing, and pretty soon, Maggie was asking for something to eat because she was starving. It was a very good time. John's birth was special, not only for the common feeling between us women, but because, a long time afterward, he married our Sassa at Midsummer. They called him John because as Joe said with his ironic smile, he was the unexpected child of their old age. But nobody ever called him John; he was forever Jack, and as gentle and lovely a soul as you could hope to meet.

By March, all the chat in town was about the unimpeded rush of North Vietnamese forces into the strongholds of South Vietnam. The view of most was that it would have happened long ago had the French, British and Americans not interfered. We were in the general on the 30th and everyone was listening to a radio report, which ran, ‘A Saigon Government spokesman said today that radio contact with the encircled northern South Vietnamese port of Da Nang has been lost, indicating that the city has fallen… One observer, calling from a ship, informed us “all we can see is wall-to-wall people along the shore."’

We were standing at the counter with James, listening as the report went on and on. Jimbo just got more and more grim, and crossed his arms at last.
‘We never should have been there,’ he said. ‘We added to the problems. Man, this is going to get ugly.’
He was right. The scene was repeated a month later, when Saigon fell. ‘Panic is clearly visible in Saigon now as thousands of Vietnamese try desperately to find ways to flee their country. There are few exits left, and most involve knowing or working for Americans. United States Air Force C-141 jet transports took off all day and night from the Tan Son Nhut air base, the lucky passengers heading for Clark Air Base in the Philippines or for Andersen Air Force Base on Guam–‘ the report ran ‘ Others, not so lucky, rushed to drug stores to buy quantities of sleeping pills and tranquilizers, with which they could commit suicide if the worst came to pass. Still others, trying to get a seat aboard one of the planes, offered everything they had…. With American fighter planes flying cover and marines standing guard on the ground, Americans left Saigon yesterday by helicopter after fighting off throngs of Vietnamese civilians who tried to go along… large groups of Vietnamese clawed their way up the 10-foot wall of the embassy compound in desperate attempts to escape approaching Communist troops. United States marines and civilians used pistol and rifle butts to dislodge them…The American involvement here has ended in tumultuous scenes at both airport and embassy. Marines in battle gear have pushed all the people they could reach off the wall, but the crush of people was so great that scores got over. Some tried to jump the wall and landed on barbed wire strung along the top. Earlier today we saw a middle-aged man and a woman lying on the wire, bleeding. People held up their children, asking Americans to take them over the fence….’
I looked at Geordie. He was white-faced, and looked sick. His eyes filled with tears. ‘My God, I can’t listen to any more of this! Let’s get out of here!’

We had a peace and prayer vigil that night on the green, with everyone in the whole town out, praying and chanting by candlelight in the bright light of the moon, and singing ‘Give Peace a Chance.’
’Ev'rybody's talking about
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism,
Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, That-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m
All we are saying is give piece a chance,
All we are saying is give piece a chance

’Ev'rybody's talking about ministers,
Sinister, Banisters
And canisters, Bishops, Fishops,
Rabbis, and Pop eyes, Bye, bye, bye byes
All we are saying is give peace a chance,
All we are saying is give peace a chance

’’Ev'rybody's talking about
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary,
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan,
Tommy Copper, Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer,
Allen Ginsberg, Hare Krishna,
Hare Krishna
‘All we are saying is give peace a chance,
all we are saying is give peace a chance’

Chapter Seventeen

2008-07-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

Christmas 1974
We went into town on the 21st, for supplies and for the Solstice party. At the co-op we put up our notice about our Twelfth Night party, and then slogged down to the general through the ice rimes for our monthly stock. There was a note on the middle of the doors:
‘Close the door: it be winter.’
It was full of tourists and smelled of cinnamon and cocoa. Jingly Christmas music was playing over the PA, and it was warm from the well-stoked fire in the stove. James was at the counter, wearing a Santa hat and red suspenders. His habitual salesman’s smile became a broad grin when we stepped up from the queue.

“Haha! Geordie! ‘ He clapped him on the shoulders across the counter. ‘Hello Claire. I have your order, and something else! Stay right there!’ He disappeared into the back behind the curtain – now red and green flannel – and returned with a box that was the size of a Boxing Day gift, and a smaller one, suspiciously tall and lean.
‘Plain brown wrapper,’ he said with twinkling eyes. ‘Hell of a time getting it through customs.’ George looked perplexed.
‘It’s not French postcards…. May we open it?’
‘Please!’
He tore the wrapping away… and there was a bottle of 15 year old Laphroaig. I thought George would cry. He was silent for a long moment.
‘By God Jimbo, you are a true mate,’ he murmured at last. ‘How the hell did you swing this?’
James was still twinkling. ‘I had Bob get it for me –‘ the barman. ‘There’s another one at Mosey’s, just for you. ‘
‘We’ll have to share this one.’
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
‘We’ll have something to properly toast the haggis,’ I said.
‘That’s what made me think of it,’ James told us, ’when I was ordering the sheep stomach.'
‘Thanks, brother,’ George said, and they shook hands warmly over the counter.

It was about two in the morning when we got home, hauling the sledge behind us on skis from the road. The fire was still nicely banked, so it was easy enough to warm it up for a few moments longer; it had snowed while we were out, and we had to clear the path to get in the door. When we were unmuffled, George went into the kitchen and rummaged in the drawer by candlelight. A few minutes later he returned to where I sat with the dog on the floor in the common room, and handed me a juice glass, with a dram of beautiful aromatic peaty single-malt. I stood with him, because it was proper to do.
‘Here’s to a Happy Christmas,’ he murmured, and raised the glass in James’ direction. He looked at me, that intense look that thrilled and stilled at once, and very slowly took a drop of the beautiful stuff.
‘Oh….’ He closed his eyes in ecstasy, and gave a long sigh. ‘Almost better,’ he smiled, ‘almost. But not quite…. Maybe both,’ he came and kissed me. ‘Oh yes, that’s it. Come on, baby.’ He dipped his finger in the rare scotch and touched my lips. It burned like fire. Another kiss. Then, putting the glasses down on the bookshelf, he moved into a slow dance with me, humming a jazz tune huskily. 'Until the Real Thing Comes Along.' Oh my....
‘Is there anything that fella of yours can’t do?’
I have yet to discover it.

We decorated the house in greens and red ribbon for Twelfth Night. I had made a couple of haggis, one vegetarian, black bun, and a vegetarian version of cockie-leekie, and we brought out the Stilton we had also special-ordered. We lined the path from the road in pierced tin lanterns – borrowed from James – waiting until the last moment, in case it should snow. The house and workshop were all open, and we wondered how we could cram thirty people in our little space to eat. The rest was not a problem. When Dave and Carrie arrived, Dave went up to George, and he nodded. Dave had his bagpipe around the back, and we had agreed we'd hand the haggis through the kitchen windows.

When everyone was assembled, Geordie and James poured out a wee dram into everyone's cups – displacing the lamb' s wool that preceded it – and George said,
'As some of you know, in England this is a very special night. It is the old Christmas. And since it would be extravagant to have two parties, Claire and I thought to combine it with Burns Night. And if you don't know who Rabbie Burns is, you have to leave –'
There was laughter. 'No,' He held up a hand. 'But to that end, we do have something rather special, in thanks to you all for your good friendship –' He nodded to me, and I handed the torch to Carrie, who went to the door and clicked it twice. In a moment, there was the sound of piping, a solemn pibrochaid, and then murmurs from those near the door when Mike and Dave appeared out the darkness, Mike in a dark plaid, bearing the haggis crowned with holly, and Dave piping before. It was quite a spectacle. There was a hush as they came into the house, and proceeded gravely to the top of the common room, where there was a small table, lit with candles; the place of honour.

I looked over at Maggie, whose eyes were shining, and we began the stamp-and- clap rhythm, pre-arranged. When the haggis arrived before George, he raised his head and recited in his beautiful voice,
'Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.
The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o' need,
While thro' your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.'

How long we had worked on that! But it came off wonderfully. Then, Mike placed the haggis on the table, and George went behind it, taking up the biggest kitchen knife we had, he cut through the haggis crosswise, chanting,

'His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!
Then, horn for horn,
they stretch an' strive:
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve,
Are bent lyke drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
"Bethankit!" 'hums.
Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi' perfect sconner,
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view
On sic a dinner?

'Poor devil! see him ower his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro' bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!
But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll mak it whissle;
An' legs an' arms, an' heads will sned,
Like taps o' thrissle.

'Ye Pow'rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o' fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer,
Gie her a haggis!'

He raised his glass, then did the company, and we all toasted the haggis. I looked at James during the exclamations over the whiskey, and he laughed out loud.
When it came time for the eating, some people were dubious about the haggis, especially as George was having the vegetarian one.
'What is it?'
'Mutton and beef and barley, raisins and spices,' I said, 'A meat pudding.'
'...in a sheep stomach!' winked James.
People who were already eating turned white.
'You eat sausages,' Joe said. 'Same thing.'
It was a great laugh.
We had all the usual Twelfth Night games, snapdragon and pantomimes, 'What am I?', King Bean and Queen Pea (Dave and Maggie), and wassailing the trees round the house. The sun was rising before the last of our revellers left, and we went to bed. 'And a good time was had by all.'

My sister Ellen for Christmas had sent me a copy of the Third Foxfire book. I had the other two, and copies of the magazine. This compendium of rural living, yielding both practical advice and sociological commentary, became a kind of encyclopaedia to us, to which we referred often or simply read for entertainment. The folk in it sounded so much like Joe and Shirley! Those two were delighted to see the books and would pick something out at random and say 'oh yeah, we used to do it that way' or 'My Daddy' or 'my aunt Marilee did it thus and so...' which added to our store of knowledge and the richness of our lives. Through the years, every two or three years, we added to the store, until the latest one – Number Twelve. There were additional books: a cookery book, a Christmas book, a book of toys and games, and we got those too.

Chapter Sixteen

2008-07-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

October and November 1974
We had our first snowfall in the middle of October, a scattering of a couple of inches that laid only a few days on the ground, but it brought with it a cold that harbinged winter. Gone were the lazy days of summer and Indian summer. It was cold now in the mornings, with ice in the washbowl, and dark by six o'clock. We covered over the summer parts of the garden with straw, and turned our efforts to the squashes and pumpkins and late potatoes. We laid the onions and garlic up in the workshop, braided and thrown over the rafters, and the late herbs as well. It was time to turn on the grow lights in the jardinière.

The dog grew a thick winter coat, and we knew that there were snug times ahead. With a dozen yards of wool flannel got at the Episcopal Church jumble sale, I put up curtains in the bedroom and common room, and made covers for the doorways. George laughed at this and said that we looked like a Tayside lounge, for the stuff was an unbalanced plaid of green and grey.
'You'll thank me in hoary January,' I replied.
'I'm sure you're right.'
As the weather got colder and the days shorter, we were actually pretty snug. The double-glazed windows and our sod roof, with the minor addition of the curtains, meant that we used far less wood than other people with spaces roughly the same size – a little under three cords of wood for the whole winter, as opposed to five or six. This information we got from James, who talked to everybody. Our total wood consumption for a year was equal to theirs, because of our kitchen stove, which of course we used every day. The trick seemed to be that our wood, stacked against the side of the workshop under a little overhang in the roof, was very dry. According to Foxfire Magazine, dry wood burned cleanly with little or no smoke, and this was our experience. We didn’t get creosote in the chimney pipes or gooey messes on the bottom of the stoves. The wood was easy to light and burned very hot.

In the middle of November we had a letter from Jack. They wanted to come up for the skiing on the Thanksgiving weekend and would we mind if they stayed with us?
'The question is rather, will they mind staying with us,' I said to Geordie. 'You saw their house. I don't think the kids will mind sleeping on the floor, but Jack thinks he deserves innerspring mattresses and eiderdown like a birthright.' I patted the sofa, which was a futon.
George laughed. 'Well, they'll live with it or go someplace else, it's up to them.'
'You don't mind?'
He shrugged. 'As I don't know what all the fuss is about with Thanksgiving, I can't say. I wouldn't grudge anyone the skiing here.'

The prescience turned out to be well founded. We sent Jack and Beth very explicit instructions about how to find us, and how to navigate the logging road and the path from it, which we marked with posts before for first snowfall, but on Wednesday they still got lost. Then Jack was cross because they had to carry the kids a quarter mile through two feet of snow to the house. The kids loved it, of course. But, the first words out of Jack's mouth to me were a complaint,
'Why the hell don't you have a proper driveway?'
I smiled, 'for a quarter mile, uphill? Are we the Wilkeses at Twelve Oaks, then?'

We gave them the grand tour of the house and its peculiarities, the workshop, and the privy, showed them where their towels were in the kitchen dresser, and handled the inevitable storm of incredulity and protest from my brother.
'You have an outhouse? Jesus, what do you do in the middle of the night in the winter?' He gestured. ' What are the kids to do? I'm sure as hell not trudging out to the john with a flashlight through the snow.'
'There's a pot under the sofa for you,' I said, nodding. 'I'll show the kids how to use it. It's no big deal, Jack, it's just like camping.'
He shook his head. 'You and Ellen are too much! But you're even more off the wall than she is. I mean, you wrote about all this, but I didn't believe it.'
'Thanks, bro,' I said.
We helped them collect their ski gear from their Range Rover, and we all went cross-country skiing for the day, which helped to quell Jack's bad mood somewhat.

In the kitchen as we were making dinner, Beth examined the set-up with interest, poking into cupboards and reading the jar labels as they ranged on the shelves under the ledge on the window side. She had watched me regulate the stove as if she were a medical student on the first day of surgical procedures.
'I had the ideas from Ellen,' I said of the jars and shelves. ' Her kitchen is pretty much the same. But the organisation is mine.' And it was all very organised, from herbs and spices to grains and flours, to legumes and dried and preserved foods. Everything was in glass and tins. There was nothing plastic, except for a couple of bowl scrapers. Our grinder, for grains and legumes, was an old iron one, and mounted to the ledge. From food to pots to crocks to bottles of milk, it was all organic.

Over the last six months we had slowly changed our diet to a grain and veg based one, and milk and eggs were really the only animal things we bought; I made butter and cheese and yoghurt. Geordie was starting to go off animal products entirely, so I had begun experimenting with making gluten and using soy recipes from Kloss. I had discovered in my experiments that that master hadn't discovered the best way to make something, every time, and that knowledge was heady. But if we were to have kids, I still wasn't sure if they or I should be vegans, so kept my toe in the animal products world. And I liked fermenting things besides. It put me in touch with those old human traditions.
'It looks like a restaurant,' Beth said, impressed. She smiled, looking about at the lamps and all the gear. 'A Victorian restaurant!'
Geordie came in for the corkscrew to open a bottle of Zinfandel. 'Hello, darling girl,' he kissed my cheek and took a tea towel from the drawer. Then he carried bottle, corkscrew and all into the common room.
Beth frowned.

'You don't have any paper goods, do you?'
I looked up. 'Except to light the stove, no.'
'No, I mean like napkins or towels, or' – she lowered her voice – 'toilet paper. I noticed that in the john – the pile of cloths and bucket. You have to wash all that stuff?'
I nodded. She paused, and coloured.
'And you wash it by hand! '
'I have a hand agitator and a mangle, actually,' I corrected.
'But what about – ' she looked over in the direction of the common room and lowered her voice –' what about your monthlies?'
Talk about Victorian! Monthlies, good grief. 'I made my own pads and I wash them.'
She looked thunderstruck. 'Ew.' Pause. 'Really?'
'Yes, lots of the women around here do.'
'...But isn't it messy? And what does George think?'
I smiled. Oh yes, we must not be real women in front of men! We must always wear makeup, and never bleed or have hairy legs or pits. That was the life I was raised in – to be a perfect, unreal doll. And I was until the Summer of Love smacked me in the face.
'Given that he's never lived with any other woman before he doesn't know the difference,' I said frankly. 'And he wouldn't want a Barbie doll if he did.' I wasn't about to share with her more intimate details of managing bodily fluids. If she wanted to know more about that she could read Ina May Gaskin. But somehow I didn't think she would. Whatever, I wouldn't want to experience their kind of sexuality for anything. I suspected there were words Beth had never used, and if you couldn't talk to your own husband frankly about your own body, then what kind of a relationship did you have? I had to tell Maggie and Shirley about this conversation. They would laugh themselves silly.

'Look,' I said, as gently as I could, 'it's neither practical nor economical to waste a lot of paper up here. We can't bury it, and so we have to burn it and using all the stuff you mentioned would mean we're burning all the time, polluting the air. You might think it's gross, but this is the most commonsense way to live here – and the way that people have lived for thousands of years. What do you think folk did before there was all that?'
'I never really thought about it,' Beth said doubtfully.
I smiled and put my arms around her. 'Oh, Bethy, you are so cute! Think about it, and make choices from there. Live consciously! ' Smiled at her again and went back to my sauce. 'Can you help me pour this out?' I said of the pasta.

I went into the common room to tell the guys and kids that dinner was on. The kids were sprawled out all over the dog in front of the stove and George sat on the sofa, smoking his pipe – which he rarely did- and the room was wreathed in the sweet smell; Jack was going on about the recession and the price of gas.
'I hadn't noticed, actually,' George admitted when he could get a word in edgewise. 'We hardly ever drive and don't buy a lot of consumer goods.' He looked up and thought at me with an expression that said, thank God you're here. Get me out of this.
'Dinner's ready,' I said, coming over.
Geordie laid his head on my hip. 'Thanks, babe.'
I went over to the kids. 'Davie, Barbie, would you like to go sit at your very own special table?'
Davie rolled over. 'We want him to come!' he said patting the dog.
'Ferg isn't allowed in the kitchen during meals, ' I said. 'But you can come and play with him when you're done.' I took his hand. 'Come on, we have special plates for you and everything.'

I took the kids by the hands and herded them into the kitchen, sat them up on the stools from our workshop at the ledge. They had their own little space with autumn leaves and a bunch of dried yarrow, and tin plates that the Wheelers' kids had painted for us at Wobbly. They had cups of carob cocoa to go with their dinner. Above them on the window stave, too high for them to reach, a candle burned in one of our old folding climbing lanterns. Maybe they were bewitched by the calming yarrow, but they were very good the whole meal, on which Beth commented. For us, however, it was not so good.

'You say you don't notice, ' Jack went on, inexorably, as George poured out the wine, 'but you must, up here. Things must come hard by.'
'What do you mean?' I asked, passing out the salad –laden plates. I had an idea of what he was about to say.
'Well you don't really work.'
George looked up sharply, putting the wine bottle down and handing Beth her glass. 'I beg your pardon, but we do work,' he said softly, with a glance at me.
Jack took a drink from his glass. ' Yes – oh this is very good! - Yes, I know, Claire wrote about teaching kids music, but that's only part time, isn't it?'
George agreed that it was.
'How many hours?'
'Between twelve and fifteen a week, ' I said, 'it varies.'
'Exactly, ' Jack said, nodding. 'And how much do you make from that a month?'
George looked at me. It was really none of my brother's business, and it was rude of him to ask. But he realised, as I did, that Jack had some game on, and he wanted to see it to the end.
'About two hundred dollars a month,' George said shaking his hair from his eyes. I nodded.
'And how much do you spend?'
'About a hundred.'
Jack paused in his rant, nonplussed. '...Oh. Still, that's not very much –'
'We made seven hundred dollars last month over and above that on instruments and jewellery,' George said quickly, into the breach.
Again, Jack paused. 'Shit, that's more than my house payment!' He said. I smiled and handed him his plate back, full of carbonara. 'Thank you.... Do you make that frequently?'
'Almost every month,' George agreed. He too was smiling. Game on, now.
'Shit. Who'd have thought, from arts and crafts?'
I looked at Beth and noticed she was pushing the remains of salad around her plate. Oh dear. She hadn't said anything since we sat down.

'So where does the money go?' Jack asked, now truly perplexed. He looked about the kitchen.
'Not up in smoke, if that's what you mean, ' Geordie laughed. 'The only herbs we have are culinary and medicinal.' He winked at me. Jack was very red.
'Well I didn't mean –'
'We give it to the co-op, for local projects – like the roads and maintenance of public buildings – or to Oxfam America, for relief projects for the poor.' I said.
Jack was silent for some moments, thinking and eating.
'You work and give all your money away?' He ascertained.
We nodded.
'We were brought up, Jack, to tithe to the church and the poor box,' I reminded him. 'We don't need it.' He stopped, very red, and looked up at me from under his sandy eyebrows. He was really angry.
'But not to throw away money with both hands and live like paupers!' he burst out. 'Jesus Christ, Claire! You have two and a half million dollars sitting in a trust fund and you live like you were in Appalachia!'

We all stared at him, Beth because she was mortified, and Geordie and I because we were dumbstruck. We had no idea how much money was in the trust. I had never asked.
'It can stay there,' I said, after a moment.
'Until when?'
'Until Hell freezes over for all I care,' I said flatly. Under the table, George reached out with his foot and rubbed my leg. Well done, it said.
'It can't just sit there, ' Jack insisted.
'Why not? ' I asked. 'Is there a run on the banks?'
My brother rattled his silverware in frustration. 'No! But it's not doing anything! You should let me invest it.'
The penny dropped. I looked at George. 'Ah,' I said. 'I get it.' He nodded, and so I went on. 'Times are bad so you want to use my money to make yourself rich in speculation.' I turned to Jack and looked him fully in the face. 'Well, you can forget it.'
'But Claire you don't know anything about money.'
'Enough to know that what you are suggesting is wrong.'
'Dad made his living this way,' Jack insisted.' Gave you a privileged life, gave you the ability to live out here like this.'
I bit my lips and stared hard at Geordie. He was beaming peace and loving-kindness at me. 'No, Jack,' I said at last. 'I gave me the ability to live out here like this, by my own study and practise, by my own work with my own two hands. I never used a penny of that money for any of this.'
'What about Juilliard?' He challenged.
'That was on full scholarship.'
'What about Holy Family?' He went on. The girls' Catholic boarding school in Connecticut I went to.
'I didn't choose that,' I said. 'Dad and Mom did.'
'God, you are the most stubborn woman!' Jack exclaimed, reaching past me for the wine. George laughed.
'What sort of trust is it?' he asked Jack. We both looked up in surprise.
'A revocable trust,' Jack said. 'That’s –'
'Yes. I know what that is,' George said softly, holding up a hand. He looked keenly at my brother. 'Why not make it an irrevocable trust?' He looked at me, 'for our grandchildren.' I smiled. Oh what a splendid joke! Tie it all up for generations.
'You want to entail it?' Jack exclaimed, consternated.
I laughed. 'Yes.' That would fix him.

I got up then and went to the icebox for the shoofly pie I had made for dessert, with one tiny one each for the children. When I sat down again with the pie, I said to Jack,
'I'm sorry you're feeling squeezed in the stock market, Jack. I really am. But I think that your interest in my trust fund is just a little bit the wrong side of greedy. Especially, as you say, when I don't know anything about money.' I handed him a plate of the sticky sweet pie with a smile. Beth was looking at him with her head cocked, with a kind of smirk on her face, a 'see I told you!' look that made me very merry.

In the dark that night, George said of the evening,
'Well, that was interesting.'
'God,' I exclaimed. 'Jack is such a pain in the ass!'
He chuckled and put his fingers over my mouth. 'Shh, shh shh, they'll hear you.' He kissed me. 'You were brilliant,' he whispered. 'What a bonny lass.' I could feel him laughing silently.
'How did you know about trusts?' I hissed.
'Part of my internship at the Phil was in the front office,' he reminded me. ' I learned just enough about non-profits to be dangerous. We had several important donors.'
'I can just imagine.'
He chuckled again, 'oh, sweetheart, what a joy you are. Steadfast. I love you so much Claire.' He kissed me. 'Even if you are an heiress... even if you were a Catholic schoolgirl....'
'Ah now, whatever do you mean by that?'
He laughed again, softly. 'Come here. I'll show you.'

The next morning there was a rather awkward, but funny, incident. Barbie came in to our room, following the dog, as the sun came up. We were already up, meditating, and into the silence, we heard Jack hiss in a stage whisper:
'Don't go in there!'
I opened my eyes, to see my brown-haired niece standing by our bed with her finger in her mouth, regarding us solemnly with big blue eyes.
'It's alright, bro,' I called out. 'We're not naked or anything!'
'Shh! ' George poked me, and then laughed too.
'What are you doing?' Barbie asked.
I smiled. 'Meditating.'
'Do you want to come up?" George asked her.
She nodded and climbed up on the bed, sitting before us with her feet splayed out on either side in the extreme flexibility of childhood.
'Here,' I said, taking her little soft hands. I put them together as if she were praying in church.
'Now close your eyes, and listen for God,' I said. She did, obediently, and we hung out for a couple of minutes with her, in a really good vibe. Kids are so open to that Godspace, they just move right into it, and so did Barbie, because she was only four. But Jack had to stick his fool head through the edge of the curtain and say,

'What the hell are you doing?'
He scared the poor little thing, so that she jumped a mile.
'Meditating with us,' I said, looking over at him.
He barged in fully, in long underwear, and pulled the kid up by the hand.
'I don't want my kids corrupted by any of that Eastern shit.' He said.
I shook my head at him. 'Jack you are so uptight. It's just prayer.'
He glared at me. 'Do you go to church anymore?'
'Do you?' I asked rhetorically. 'I fail to see how that's any of your business,' I said. 'As a matter of fact there was a Franciscan priest at our all Souls celebration –' I wouldn't call it Samhain in front of him – ' and he blessed us all.' It was nice, because it was my birthday.
'Hippie priests in sandals!' he scathed.
'St Francis of Assisi? '
He made a noise and went out, dragging the kid by the hand.
'It's going to be a long day,' I said. I was in a really bad mood now.
'Hey,' Geordie murmured. 'Hey. Look at me.'
I turned round and he put his hands on my face, and we breathed together the guru breath for a while until I felt better.
'We'll work on this,' he promised, 'when they've gone.'
It was just like him to know without being told that there was more going on here than met the eye.
We all went downhill skiing for most of the day, which was a relief. Any ratty feelings could be put into the activity and dissipated, and even Jack loosened up and had a good time. We stopped by the house for the pies for the dinner at town hall, and then headed into town.

Everybody was there, and the talk was loud, in the room festooned with leaves and pumpkins and cornucopiae of candy corn. The Zen quilters had made runners for the tables and it was very inviting and warm. I put our sweet potato pies over on the buffet table and introduced Beth to Maggie and Betsey, who were there.
'You have worked so hard,' Beth said to them, looking at the room.
'Nah,' Maggie said. 'Everybody pitches in. Welcome!'
There was a group blessing led by Joe and James, with everybody holding hands, and we sang the Merry Meet Merry Part, Till We Merry Meet Again song, before queuing up for the food:

'By the Air that is Her breath,
By the Fire of Her bright spirit,
By the Waters of Her womb,
By the Earth that is Her body.
Our Circle is open -- Yet unbroken.
May the peace of the Goddess be ever in our hearts.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.

'By the Air that is Her Wisdom,
By the Fire of Her bright Courage,
By the Waters of Her Love,
By the Earth that is Her Strength.
'Our Circle is open -- Yet unbroken.
May the love of the Goddess be ever in our hearts.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.

'We're the keepers of Her Wisdom,
We're the keepers of Her Courage,
We're the keepers of Her Love,
We're the keepers of Her Strength.

Our Circle is open -- Yet unbroken.
May the joy of the Goddess be ever in our hearts.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.
Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again.

That didn’t go down too well with Jack, who harrumphed loudly as we got our plates.
'Chill out,' I muttered to him.' It's just a song about gratitude.' Behind me, Geordie put his hand on my back.
Jack didn't find the food any better – it was vegetarian, not a turkey in sight, though there were plenty of nut roasts and cranberry sauce, close enough to fool the staunchest carnivore – including James, who sat across from us with Betsey, a plate before him heaped as high as Mt. San Jacinto. Joe and Maggie and their kids were to our right, and Shirley and her little Jewish husband David to our left. Mike and Karen Oldfield were at the next table at about the same latitude, with Dave and Carrie Morrisey and the Burkes and their four kids. After some eating went down, the kids were all running around together, carrying on, stopping at whichever Mom happened to be nearest once in a while to check in. Even my niece and nephew joined in on this mayhem, laughing and running and free. I half heard Jack make a blue remark about 'communes' saw him looking at me out of the corner of my eye, but I steadfastly ignored him.

After way too much dessert, the Carolina Sweethearts were prevailed upon to give some music, so we went up to the end of the room where our set up was, and whiled away a couple of hours in some get-down bluegrass; it was the only completely free-feeling part of the evening to me.

Finishing off we played Will the Circle be Unbroken,
Well I followed close behind her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in that grave.

'Will the circle be unbroken?
By and by Lord, by and by,
There's a better home a-waitin
In the sky lord, in the sky.

'I went back home Lord that home was lonesome
Since my mother, she was gone
All my brothers and sisters crying
What a home so sad and alone.

'Will the circle be unbroken?
By and by lord, by and by,
There's a better home a-waitin
In the sky lord, in the sky.

' One by one the seats were emptied
One by one they went away
Now that family they are parted
Will they meet again some day.

'Will the circle be unbroken?
By and by lord, by and by,
There's a better home a-waitin
In the sky lord, in the sky.

' I was singing with my sisters
I was singing with my friends
And we all can, sing together
‘Cause the circle never ends'

Tired and happy, we wended our way to the jeep at midnight; George with sleepy Davie sprawled across his chest while Jack carried Barbie.
'I don't think we'll come back with you,' Jack said unceremoniously at their Range Rover. George and I looked at one another. Beth protested.
'But all our clothes, and skis, and the children's toys are at the house!'
'We can send for them,' Jack insisted, looking me dead in the eye. He was so full of bad feeling. Resentment, disapproval, even hate.
'Don't be stupid,' I said. 'It's the middle of the night, and a three-hour drive.'
'We'll get a hotel.'
'There aren't any,' George offered,' unless you go to Palm Springs.'
'Then we'll go to Palm Springs.'
'But they won't be open now,' Geordie continued.
'Then I'll drive.'

'Jack,' I said, 'I don't know what's bugging you so much, but it won't be solved by doing this. Be sensible.'
He exploded, drawing stares from passers-by going to their cars. 'Sensible! Says my hippie sister with her hillbilly house and godless pagan commune friends. You make me sick.'
'That's quite enough,' George said quietly, shifting Davie up on his shoulder. He glanced at Beth, who was crying softly. 'I won't allow you to speak that way to my wife,' he went on softly. He looked at Jack for a long time, steadily, neutrally. 'You can rant all you want all night, and say whatever you want to me, and I'll hear you. But you will not speak that way to her. It is very late, and we were up early. I should not like it on my conscience if you should meet with an accident. These are dangerous mountain roads. It's slick and likely to be icy. There are no lights. For the sake of your family, if not your own, come with us,'
'Jack!' Beth cried. 'The children!'
'Be quiet!' He said sharply. He looked back at Geordie, who faced him with calm neutrality for several more minutes. The cold of the night was setting into us all. Finally, finally, Jack sighed deeply and said,
'Okay.' He nodded like a child and herded his family into the car.

'What did you do there?' I asked George in the darkness as we turned onto our logging road. 'Something I learned at Findhorn,' he said quietly. 'From Peter, who learned it in the RAF. From MI6...' He glanced at me. 'It's a form of mind-control, and I don't like to use it. But I really felt that lives were at stake....'
He was silent for a long time as he drove. Then,
'Jack wasn't ever in Viet Nam?' He ascertained. He knew he wasn't, so I was puzzled at the double-checking.
'No. Daddy got him out of it somehow... Why?'
'I think he feels guilty.' There was silence for a while again. Then, 'did he have any really close friends who were there?'
'Oh yes!' I had an instant image of his best friend, Matt Carberry. Matt played the bass, was a CO, and went over as a medic. I told Geordie this.
'What happened to him?'
'He was blown to bits and came back in a shoe box.'

'Jesus!' He looked at me. 'Someone who talked like you, and Ellen, about peace and love and right livelihood.' It was not a question.
'Yes.'
'Did Jack agree with him?'
'Heck no! He told him he was a nancy.'
'And Matt went off and died.'
I nodded.
Geordie considered. 'He probably thinks that "peace love and right livelihood" killed him. That if he'd been a real man, carrying a gun, he wouldn't have died. So there's conflict. It would explain a lot. But he can't face it....' He looked at me and smiled in the darkness. 'And our loving peaceful friends just pushed him to the limit. Poor blighter.'

Jack was very subdued in the morning. We woke very early and did our meditation in peace, and were sitting drinking tea at the kitchen table when he came in, looking like death.
'Will you be all right to drive?' I asked him.
'I don't know,' he admitted, rubbing his head. 'Beth can drive.' I was relieved that my know-all macho brother was admitting a human incapacity. He lumbered over and sat down at the table heavily.
'I had a strange dream,' he said. 'Claire do you remember Matt?'
I glanced at George, and nodded.
'Well, I had a dream that he came to my office and told me I was an asshole,' I stifled a smile, 'really told me off for not going with him to Nam, that if I had gone with him, he would have been okay, wouldn't have run over that landmine.'
There was the guilt, pointed out to him by its object.
'What did you say?' George asked.
Jack was silent for a moment. 'I told him he was a pantywaist and that real men weren't out there driving ambulances, but were in the forests clearing out the Viet Cong.'
There was the ambivalence.
'He was awarded the purple heart, Jack,' I said, aching.
'Fat lot of good it did him,' Jack said, and his eyes filled with tears. I got up and got him a towel, but he shook his head.
'I'll be all right.'
'I'll make you some coffee, then,' I said.
'Thanks.'

While I made the coffee, George asked him about Matt, and his life and their friendship, and how they left it. Jack unwound a long and complex tale, slowly drinking the black coffee before him. But when he came to how they left it, he shook his head and balked.
'I let him down,' he only said. 'I was an ass to him. I was a big cruel jerk. And I never apologised.'
Davie came in just then, in his footed pyjamas, and laid is head on my leg. 'Auntie Claire,' he said. 'I want to stay at your house with Ferdus.'
Beth must have told them they had to go home. I smoothed his hair. 'You can come back again and play with Fergus, ' I told him.

When they'd gone, we grabbed our ice gear and went climbing with Rob for the next three days. Hanging off a frozen sheer face and bivying in a sling is extremely bracing to the mind and clears the head wonderfully.

Chapter Fifteen

2008-07-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

September 1974

George and I had planned our workshops for the Whole Being weekend so that we would have more or less all of the third day free, for it fell on our anniversary, the 22nd, and we wanted to spend the day together. The first day we had our all-day workshops on fiddle-making and stained glass, from eight in the morning until four, so we didn't see each other much until dinner time; the second day there was George’s workshop on universal energy and I was doing concessions, and the last day were our music workshops, only two hours long.

The Wobbly was a deal of work setting up. From Lammas onward there were work days – mostly carpentry- for which we volunteered, as the whole thing was run on volunteerism. The fee for the three days was $10, and the food, all donated, was free. We were not paid for our workshops, but we didn’t have to pay a camping fee either. It was nominal, but the freebie was nice. We took our two-man climbing tent, camp chairs, a canister of paraffin and the stove; snacks, powdered milk and tea, treating it like a climbing weekend. Fergus was very happy to have his own zabuton beside us. He was used to camping out, and so long as George was there morning and evening with his food wherever we were, he was the best of best friends.

Early on Friday morning on their way to the festival site, James and Betsey stopped by our camp in Buckhorn under the pines, and said it looked very homey. George crawled out of the tent and shook the hair from his face.
‘Eh? No more Spartan than home, you mean?’ He was smiling.
‘How do you fit in there, with all that?’ Betsey said, peering into the tent, which was full of our instruments at the moment.
‘We have a ground sheet and tarp for that,’ George said.
‘Still doesn’t explain how you can cram yourselves in there,’ James said. ‘You’d take up most of it all by yourself.’
‘Tantra!’ I said, and they laughed. George zipped up the tent, whistled to the dog, and we walked with them through the trees for the day.

There were maybe a thousand people present on Friday, and at the morning meditation, probably six hundred sat on the lawn before the stage. We began with the Chenrezig chant – Om mani padme hum – for about ten minutes, and then everyone fell to silence, which became progressively more profound as time stretched into timelessness. Geordie and I sat spooned together, as we often did, his head resting against mine, holding hands, and flowing along in a sea of beautiful energy. The circuit was so complete that we could do the guru breathing in this way, one flowing into the other. The silence became a hum, then a roar, and the whole world was contained in it. Six hundred people, breathing peace together; it was so calm and loving and steady.
There wasn't any call to come back from cloud cuckoo land, it just happened, with everyone opening their eyes more or less at once and a lot of people laughing. The light was brilliant, a bright white-blue, and it felt like the first day of the world.
Wow.
'You look like a Thangka,' James told us.
'Danke,' George smiled.
There were seven people in my glass class, which was plenty. I set up the stations of the workshop along three tables with various stages of the work. The kiln had been going since the day before, and I used the old glass from our windows for painted work. They were a little freaked out at first at not having electric soldering irons, but they soon got the knack, and one girl, Beth, whom I'd seen in Maggie's, was ecstatic over making glass art in the way of mediaeval artisans. Here was someone who would keep it up, bring forward the old traditions. That made me feel very good. I gave them several design templates I had made, from pieces I had already sold, and it was a joy to watch their creativity bloom.

At the lunch break, which was only half an hour, I went over to George’s fiddle class, where the work was really intense. Six men and George were in the middle of sounding backs with a tuning fork, so I took Ferg for a walk and left them to it. When I got back the fiddlers had also taken a break and the water I brought was much appreciated.
George was laughing with one of the guys there about having to bail on the Long Climb on Ben Nevis in bad weather, so I knew that he was a climber as well.
‘Thank you darling,’ George said of the flask. He leaned his head against me and put an arm about my waist. His hair was sticking to his neck in the heat, and I found it awfully sexy. He poured some of the water over his head. ‘Rob, this is my wife Claire.’
The brown-haired man with the sharp face nodded. ‘Rob Bellamy,’ he said in pure Glaswegian.
‘Nice to hear a voice from home,’ I returned. I looked at George. ‘I have to get back to my class,’ I said, moving the hair from his neck. It was just an excuse to touch him. ‘Have fun, sweetheart.’
Well, he got the vibe, because in answer he ran his hand up my leg under my skirt and smiled.
‘See you, baby.’
Rob was at the celebration that night too, and sat with us and James and we all talked about climbing for a while, sharing the Glenfiddich Rob had brought. He was a lecturer in astronomy at UC Riverside and one of the Stonemasters, the local rock club stars, so I figured that we’d be seeing a lot more of him in the future. In the last few weeks, he was climbing close by when John Long made a couple of his famous first ascents, including on some routes that Geordie and James had done, and he told us about climbing on Tahquitz with Royal Robbins, which was great.

Saturday
I spent the morning after the meditation at concessions, doling out buns and baklava, scrambled tofu and herb tea to people who were in such a high and loving space that the ordinarily mechanical chore was full of God. As I made tea in the back for the second time, in a big stock pot – I knew that this is what it was like to be a monk, forever enmeshed in God in prayer. It wasn't chanting or reciting Aves- I smiled to myself at that because I had used to go into a meditative state at wakes when long rosaries were said - it was being in God, or God being in one, very simply. When we were at Findhorn, George and everybody else had talked a lot about living in this manner – breathing in the breath of God, and I really got it now.

At about ten, I left the work and scuttled in the back of the tent as George began his workshop. He had changed into his white ruffled shirt, but he still wore jeans, and a red silk scarf for a belt. He was deeply tanned from all the summer's climbing, and so looked rather like a gypsy. I'd have to remember to tell him later that he looked like an ould tinker fella. There were about thirty people present.
'My name is George and I am an asshole,' he said. About half the people laughed. Some looked perplexed.
'All right,' he said, holding up a hand. 'Some of you get that and some don't and that's okay. But it is the truth and we will start from there, because connecting with the power of divine force starts from accepting what you are, as you are, right now, and not pretending you are holy or spiritual or ascended to a higher vibration.' That got some laughs too, from a different set of people. 'And however different you become from what you once were, you cannot ever forget that the potential lies within you to fall back into that negativity...

'I'm not talking about mortal sin here –' I laughed and he raised his head, smiling. 'That is my Irish Catholic wife laughing at me back there. Thank you darling. It's important to have someone to laugh at your jokes.... I'm talking about awareness. It's easy to get lazy and think you are being high and spiritual when you're really just fooling yourself. ' He went to the small table and took up a basket of smooth stones we had collected on the shores of the lake, and walked along, giving one to each person from the centre of the row as he spoke.

'I want you to sit for a moment and centre yourself. Hold this little stone in your hands. Be with it. You and it are the same thing, come from the same source, and the same stuff. What made the stars made you. And that source is not uranium and hydrogen; it is Love. Chi. God. We are that.... This little stone has come on a long journey, from the creation of the universe, through the heavens, to this place, to you. It is part of a vaster whole, a great mountain that once was. It is little now. Yet it remembers being a mountain, being a gas in the centre of the universe. Its body is small now, but it is older than ours. Compared to it, we are transient, as bodies. As consciousness, we are at one with it, the same, no older or younger. It is our brother. Be with it. Let it speak to you.'

He had come to the back of the tent now, and came and kissed the top of my head. His hand on my cheek was hot. He stood for a long timeless time at the back, then walked slowly, mindfully, to the front, through the echoing silence, the soft sighs, and the Presence that had dawned in the room. Someone started to cry. He smiled, his beautiful gentle smile.
'You can come back into the room when you want,' he said softly, and waited for a long few moments.
'"Be still and know that I AM".... That is God, what we are, speaking to you, in whatever way you felt or heard it. That is universal energy. It can change your life. It changed mine.' He glanced at me and sat on the table. He went on softly, so softly and evenly,

'When I say to you that I am an asshole, I don't want to draw a lot of glamour to that. I tell you truly that I was a heroin addict in London, running dangerous games with sharps and pimps and every low character. I was that far from selling my soul to the devil. I thought I was an atheist. Why? Because I was so gifted and by the age of 20 had come to the end of the road. Philosophy had led me to despair. Talent had made me contemptuous. Politics had made me cynical. All I could see were decades of the same and more of the same. I knew there had to be a better way, but I didn't know that I led myself here, that it was my own doing, by how I thought, about myself and other people. I had shut them out – any real communication just didn't happen. I was a train wreck on the inside, and a cocky asshole on the outside.

'... When I was at Findhorn in the winter of '72, David Spangler, who trained as a molecular biologist, told me pretty much the same thing I just told you, and it cracked me open to feel, really feel that I was a part of something, something old and deep and infinite, and it was calling to me.' Some people in the group were crying again. 'Now, I didn't have breakthrough as some of you did here, not then, but I felt it – warm, and benign and present. I was elated and ashamed at once – I felt joyful that I had found what I had been missing, but ashamed because my whole life up to then was a lie... but God is so merciful. It loves us and calls us home, always, like the Prodigal son....

'We'll continue with how to keep this going in a few minutes, but I want you to break up into groups and talk about what happened to you with our brother stones.'
The crowd dispersed into six groups, and for forty-five minutes everyone shared their experience. George moved from group to group, listening, asking 'how are you doing?' and giving hugs where needed. Some people were wide open and crying. He embraced them and told them with shining eyes that they were beautiful. In my own group, a man who was about sixty, for all the world a longshoreman, cried like a child and told a story of how as a child he had had imaginary friends in the woods of Arkansas – and had been made fun of at school, so closed down emotionally. The room was swirling with emotion – love grief, gratitude, anger. It would have been easy to lose control of it. But George did not.

He clapped his hands, softly, twice, from the head of the room and began to speak again.
'Thank you all, for your sharing. It has enriched us all. Now, how do you keep this, when the boss is breathing down your neck or the kids are fighting or your husband comes home drunk or your wife is nagging you? –Not that mine does,' he smiled, and got some laughs, which was his object.
'I'm not going to tell you to walk about with this little stone in your pocket, although you could do that. I'm going to tell you to close your eyes – do it now, with me – and breathe in. Breathe in the Presence. And breathe out all those tumultuous feelings. Do it more than once if you have to. You may not feel the Presence, but think it. It will come.... There,' he smiled. The room was peaceful again.

'We are creatures of habit,' he continued, 'and it is so easy to come away from a weekend like this feeling so high, and it lasts for a few days or maybe a week or two, and then our everyday life keeps happening and it brings us down and we get back into the same habits of mind and of life that we had before. So we become enlightenment junkies, chasing after every trick and workshop. This is a pointless circle.' There were laughs at this. 'Because all we ever do is confront ourselves. We come up against the same issues and difficulties again and again – and if we never stick with something and break through then we can spend our whole lives in this place. And that's a kind of hell too.

'So if I have the same fights with my husband or wife over and over, or with my secretary or whatever, there's a fairly good chance that I'm the problem, or to put it another way – the situation at the moment is not what's bugging me; rather it's reminding me of something in the past that I haven't worked through, confronted, let go of. I need to find out what that is – and then what is now will stop hitting me in the face. Mostly importantly, I need to remember all the time to listen for the voice or feeling or sense I had in connecting with the Divine and ask it what I should be understanding at the moment. It will tell you.'
He smiled. ' We all know that it's easier to do this when we are less encumbered by stuff, less hung up with getting ahead in the rat race, we all get that, or we wouldn't be here. But it can be done anywhere.... If you want to break up into groups again and talk about this you can, or ask me anything privately, or just be for a while, that's fine. Thank you so much for being here.' He said the last with his warm smile, and several people laughed. They got it.

He spent the next hour talking with the groups or individuals, and when the tent was finally empty, I came up to him with a smile where he stood leaning at the table with his arms crossed with a blissful smile.
'Woman!' he said, lunging for me. I was gathered in and he gave me a long kiss.
'I am so high, and my head is buzzing,' he admitted. 'I don't know whether to say let's go somewhere and make it or fall down in a heap. I couldn't do this for a living... Oh come here, darling girl, and let me run off some of this energy –' he wrapped himself around me, arms and legs, buried his face in my neck, and held on tight. He was shaking deeply. I heard his unspoken thoughts, scalding and intimate, and couldn't have moved for worlds. The kundalini rush built with inexorable slowness, but it hit like a storm. It was complete oneness, as transcendent as sex. We hovered there for a long time, and we were one with everything and each other in that wordless, shattering place.

It ebbed slowly, his shaking stopped, and we were both drenched. He moved his head away and looked at me, his eyes dark.
'My God,' he murmured. 'That was remarkable.' He kissed me. 'Can you do that across the room?'
I smiled shakily. 'We could try.' I was as dazed as he.
'Bottle and sell it,' he said, and then sighed deeply. 'Now I'm hungry!'
I laughed. 'Well, that doesn't change!'
'Naughty girl,' he smiled. 'Let's go find something to eat now we've had our fling or I shall fall down. My God!'
He pushed himself up from the table with both hands. 'David never told me that running energy was like that! That could be a whole new career for him in marriage counselling.'
He shook his head like a wet dog to clear it, and took my hand and the empty basket in the other. And we ambled out of the tent.
'I feel like I've climbed the Eiger North Face,' he said ruefully. 'Really wobbly.'
I laughed. 'Maybe that's why they call it that.'

At the concessions booth we met up with Joe in the queue ahead of us, who turned and said, 'Hey there you are! Man, you've got the whole place humming about your workshop! They're all babbling about breakthroughs and totally blissed out.'
George smiled, and sang, 'little human upon the sand, from where I'm lying here in your hand.... I'm glad they liked it. They were so ready for it. It was beautiful.'
We got our food – George a heaping plate of what seemed like a full Indian dinner- and sat down under the trees, where the breeze far above in the pine-tops sounded like a waterfall.
'I learned something there,' George said thoughtfully as we ate.
'Eh?'
'A few things: I know why David left Findhorn; it was time yes, but it was also very intense and there was too much of a chance of being set up in the minds of the community as some kind of father-figure, as Peter had been... I know why also some relationships broke up there,' he looked at me frankly. 'It would have been really easy back there to fall into some game with one of those women, if I had been thinking with blind Willie in an "I'm okay you're okay" sort of way. It happened regularly. People felt all that love, and with the belief that whatever happens is God's will... they just didn't know how to handle it properly, didn't know how to disconnect love from sex, the person from the body – ' he smiled ruefully. 'Even though I felt mighty sexy in that high!' He paused. 'I'm so grateful to be able to step back in my mind and let things be, not do anything stupid.' He looked at me with those storm-coloured eyes. 'You are so precious to me, and what we have is so amazing. I wouldn't ever want to mess that up. I love you.' He touched my face, and I leaned into his hand. Perfect, perfect moment.
'I am so lucky,' I told him. ' And I feel so grateful all the time. Who'd have thought a spoiled rich girl like me could find someone like you?' The words sound so paltry. 'But I love you. You are my life.'
We leaned together there, with eyes closed, until we heard James say,
'Now there's a picture. Shakti and Shiva.' He was smiling.
George smiled too, softly, still in the high. 'Hello there Jimbo. What's up, man?'
'Can you come help set up for the bonfire tonight? We need another couple of guys.'
'Duty calls!' George said. He put aside his plate, got up and took off his shirt and the scarf. 'Can you put this in my rucksack, darling? I'll be back as soon as we're done.'
'It shouldn't be more than half an hour,' James assured me.

We spent Sunday morning in the group meditation then meandered down to a workshop on manifestation, and had our auras photographed by a girl with a Kirlian plate. It was very interesting, as we did it individually and together, which was supposed to show the level of connection or friction between us. What happened was we each and then together put our right hands – the ‘energy hand’ she said – on the plate and it was exposed. When we made the mutual print, George leaned near and brushed my ear in a kiss, murmuring wordlessly. His hand beside mine on the plate was very hot, and I felt a rush of energy. It was completely spontaneous, and dead sexy.

Individually, mine was blue and purple, with a silvery colour in the dotted outline, but Geordie’s was a deep violet, with red at the centre and yellow at the edges. Amy read off the results, and said that he was a much more physical person than I, which made us laugh. She put it rather that I had the spiritual connection in the relationship, and he was the tether to manifestation in the world and that he was deeply emotionally attached, which was pretty close to the truth about how we operated, which was very cool.
When she looked at the joint exposure she gasped and looked at it for a long time before speaking.
‘Wow,’ She said, showing us the print,’ this is so totally cool! Look at this. It’s just what is supposed to happen if you’re attuned –‘
There was a complete blend in the colours: swirls of deep violet and orangey red with a perfectly golden edge– and the corona had grown from about half an inch to an inch and a half – it was a great fuzzy mass; the boundary between the prints had disappeared. It looked like a nebula.
‘Far out!’
George smiled. ‘Heaven on earth.’
It was a nice anniversary present – a confirmation from science that we were made for each other.

Amy told us that we could use this method to monitor our meridians, or chakras or check out how our meditations were affecting our bodies.
‘Biofeedback,’ George said.
‘Yeah,' Amy agreed. ‘You know, I love doing this here because people are so high and loving that the pictures are almost always really beautiful. Works of art. Thank you so much for sharing this! You guys are awesome. Do you mind if I hang this in my studio?’
‘Not at all,’ we said.
‘That was lovely,’ Geordie said as we were walking away,’ but we don’t need something like that to tell us how we are together.’ His glance was full of that deep speaking intimacy, and he swung my hand in his.

In the afternoon we Zen quilters hung the panorama quilt in the visitors centre with a little ceremony headed by Joe. The quilt ran around two walls and looked really beautiful. I did four panels in the end, all of the mountains, and was happy with the result. Afterward we went back to Wobbly for the closing puja. At the end, after all the prayers and chanting and dancing, we were blessing ourselves with the tsampa and George said, smiling, ‘no one threw rice at us before, so I call this fitting.’ He kissed my cheek.
Betsey leaned across James. ‘Is it your anniversary?’
George laughed. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’ll be, ‘ James said. ‘How many is it?’
I held up a finger.
‘Oh my God!’ Betsey exclaimed. ‘No wonder you two are so ... attached! Jeez! Oh, you have to let us take you out.’
‘I’d rather go in, if you don’t mind,’ George said.
I couldn’t speak for blushing.

The camp would not break up for us until the morning, so we spent the night in our little tent, with our headlamps glowing low in the corners. We were completely apart from the world. We could have been anywhere, and it would have been the same: love and musing and drowsy sleep in a beautiful cycle until the morning came.
'If I never live another day, lady,' he said in the hushing hours before dawn, 'I shall have lived in this year and day. And if I wake to find myself beneath the Eildon tree, then I shall speak the truth of this before the whole world.'
My breath caught, 'Good my lord of Erceldoune, Lay down your head upon my knee, ere we climb yon hill, and I will show you fairlies three. Take this for thy wages,' I kissed him. 'It will give the tongue that cannot lie. But ye maun hold your tongue, Whatever you may hear or see, For gin ae word you should chance to speak, You will ne'er get back to your ain countrie.'
His breath was also caught, ' I cry you mercy, lady, give not this gift to me. For how shall I counsel Prince or lord, or court a fair lady?'
I touched his mouth with my fingers, and he kissed them.
'Now haud thy peace, ' I whispered. 'For as I say, so must it be.'
Down then we went, into the bliss in silence, in that lovely game.

Chapter Fourteen

2008-07-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

July 1974
I worked on jewellery and glass projects, the panorama quilt, and the garden, and took walks. There were enough tomatoes to put up conserve and sauces and I took some of each to the Sunday night jam session. It was weird being there without them, James and George, but Betsey, Shirley, Karen, Anne, Maggie and I made up for their lack by leading the dancing for about four sets.
‘Girls night out in Idyllwild,’ Mike drawled when Karen came back to the jam, red-faced and sweaty. She picked up his beer. ‘At least we’re not out in the woods casting spells,’ she rejoined.
‘Bubble bubble toil and trouble –‘ Maggie said.
‘Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble,’ I corrected, without thinking.
Maggie laughed. ‘Pedantic!’
‘What’s the rest?’ Karen asked, leaning over for her fiddle.

‘ “Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble Like a hell-broth boil and bubble… Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf; Witches' mummy; maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark; Root of hemlock digg'd i the dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew; Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips; Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver'd by a drab, — Make the gruel thick and slab: Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For the ingredients of our caldron.”’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘The Scottish play.’
‘I don’t want to mess with you chicks,’ Joe said, shaking his head.
‘Better not,’ said Maggie.

Mike launched into ‘Susanna Martin’ and we all had to scramble to follow. Maggie caught up first and sang,
Susanna Martin was a witch who dwelt in Amesbury
With brilliant eye and saucy tongue she worked her sorcery
And when into the judges court the sheriffs brought her hither
The lilacs drooped as she passed by
And then were seen to wither

‘A witch she was, though trim and neat with comely head held high
It did not seem that one as she with Satan so would vie
And when in court when the afflicted ones proclaimed her evil ways
She laughed aloud and boldly then
Met Cotton Mather’s gaze

‘"Who hath bewitched these maids," he asked, and strong was her reply
"If they be dealing in black arts, ye know as well as I"
And then the stricken ones made moan as she approached near
They saw her shaped upon the beam
So none could doubt 'twas there

‘The neighbors 'round swore to the truth of her Satanic powers
That she could fly o'er land and stream and come dry shod through showers
At night, twas said, she had appeared a cat of fearsome mien
"Avoid she-devil," they had cried
To keep their spirits clean

‘The spectral evidence was weighed, then stern the parson spoke
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, tis written in the Book"
Susanna Martin so accused, spoke with flaming eyes
"I scorn these things for they are naught
But filthy gossips lies"

‘Now those bewitched, they cried her out, and loud their voice did ring
They saw a bird above her head, an evil yellow thing
And so, beneath a summer sky Susanna Martin died
And still in scorn she faced the rope
Her comely head held high.’

We went into the riffs, which became ‘Stormy Waters’, which became ‘Barefoot Nellie’ and ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’. Then Maggie began 'The Blacksmith' and all we ladies sang,
'A blacksmith courted me
Nine months and better
He fairly won my heart
Wrote me a letter
With his hammer in his hand
He looked quite clever
And if I was with my love
I would live for ever.

' But where is my love gone
With his cheeks like roses
And his good black Billycock on
Decked round with primroses
I'm afraid the scorching sun
Will shine and burn his beauty
And if I was with my love
I'd do my duty.

'Strange news is come to town
Strange news is carried
Strange news flies up and down
That my love is married.
I wish them both much joy
Though they can't hear me
And may God reward him well
For the slighting of me.

'Don't you remember when
You lay beside me
And you said you'd marry me
And not deny me
If I said I'd marry you
It was only for to try you
So bring your witness love
And I'll not deny you.

'Of witness have I none
Save God Almighty
And may he reward you well
For the slighting of me
Her lips grew pale and wan
It made a poor heart tremble
To think she loved a one
And he proved deceitful.'

It was a fine time.
At the end of the night, I was packing up and Joe asked me if I wanted a lift.
‘No, thanks. Fergus is outside. We’ll be fine. But I thank you, Joe, that’s mighty nice of you.’
‘Shoot,’ he said, ‘he’d lay into me if anything happened to you.’
I looked up. ‘Did he ask you to look after me?’
‘Would you be mad if I said yes?’
I laughed. ‘No. It’s adorable.’ I patted his arm. ‘I relieve you of any responsibility. I’d like the walk. I’m hot.’
‘Just so you know,’ Joe said.

Musing on the long walk home through the dark wood, with the dog at my thigh like a sentinel, I thought on how much we had become part of the community, more than I could ever have hoped. And in those few words exchanged, Joe had brought George’s presence very near. I had felt it, at odd hours, and knew that he was thinking or dreaming of me too. Now it was late. Perhaps they were coming back from a climb, or just in. There was no need for Alpine starts here; it was as good to climb with the light, rest in the middle of the day and climb late with headlamps, at this time of year…. I felt as if we belonged to this place now, had begun to add something to it. Tradition soaked into the night, which was still and warm.
‘Drinking all the day
In old pubs where fiddlers love to play
Saw one touch the bow
He played a reel which seemed so grand and gay…

‘Talking all the day
With true friends who try to make you stay
Telling jokes and news
Singing songs to pass the time away

‘Dreaming in the night
I saw a land where no one had to fight…
Sleeping where the falcons fly
They twist and turn all in your air-blue sky’

At the quilters’ meeting on Tuesday, everyone made sure I was okay, ‘living out there all alone in the woods.’ I was grateful for the caring, but it did make me laugh.
‘It’s not as if the Zodiac killer is in our neighbourhood!’ I protested. There was no crime in these parts, and we didn't even have a sheriff.
‘Well, you don’t know,’ Anne said, ‘there could be weirdoes… there are bears. Aren’t you afraid of bears?’
‘That’s what we have a gun for.’ I said serenely.
‘I can tell you are not Buddhists,’ Betsey joked.
‘I am not going to try and deflect a bear with good energy!’ I protested.’ That’s just stupid. Something city folk would think up. “Be one with the bear.” Phooey.’
‘The Indians do that,’ Shirley said seriously.
‘Before they shoot at them with arrows!’ Maggie said. ‘I’m with Claire. ’I’m not negotiating with something that wants to make me dinner. It’s not a fair contest.’
‘It’s all right so long as you don’t wander into their territory and threaten them,’ Shirley said. ‘Especially the mamas.’ She and Maggie laughed.
‘Yea, you gotta look out for those mamas,’ Maggie drawled.

There was silence for a few minutes. Then, Shirley, without looking up, said,
‘So are you going to tell them, or what?’
We all looked up. Maggie was grinning. ‘Okay, you got me, Shirl. Yes girls,’ she rolled a knot of thread off her finger, ‘it’s true. We’re waiting on bun number seven.’
There were squeals.
‘…I thought you said folk didn’t have babies here every day,’ I teased.
Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘Gawd, Claire, no sooner did I say that than I fetched up pregnant. I have to learn to keep my mouth shut!’ She laughed.
‘What did Joe say?’ Betsey asked.
‘Well, he went kind of pale, and then said he reckoned what was the difference, one more? We have all the stuff. But damn, I did just get Joshua out of diapers… Such is the life of womankind. Those that dance must pay the fiddler…. Sorry, Claire!’
I smiled. It was a good joke. But I was grateful it wasn’t me, not yet.

Shirley gave me a lift to the trailhead, and she asked what all of them must have been bursting to know: speaking of fiddlers, was there any chance of that our way? I didn’t think her question too nosey because she was the midwife, and said no then told her why not. She looked at me in surprise. ‘You’re the first person I’ve met out here to stick by wild carrot. My granny used that and gave it out to all the ladies, back in Kentucky.’ Shirley’s family were from the Daniel Boone National Forest. ‘Fine girl you are!’
‘Thanks.’

On Wednesday at teatime he was home. All the doors and windows were open, because the day was still in full heat. I had spent the morning in the garden with the dog, but about ten it had become far too hot, so we went indoors, where I worked on a new necklace. The bluejays called in the searing skies, and in the silence from up the path I heard an unmistakable jangling – karabiners! Popping my head up, out the bedroom window, I saw him in the shimmering heat, in a thin white Indian shirt, with a scruffy beard, deeply tanned, eyes scanning like some ancient hunter. I pushed the bead tray aside and jumped up.

George dumped everything unceremoniously at the door and stepped inside. 'Woman of the house!' He cried, the traditional greeting, and ran, open armed, as I came into the common room. He swept me up, and with a thousand kisses laughed, and said, 'I love you! I missed you! darling darling girl.'
'It's of a jolly beggarman
Came tripping o'er the plain
He came unto a farmer's door
A lodging for to gain
The farmer's daughter she came down
And viewed him cheek and chin
She said, "He is a handsome man.
I pray you take him in."

'The farmer's daughter she got up
To bolt the kitchen door
And there she saw the beggar standing
Naked on the floor
He took the daughter in his arms
And to the bed he ran
She says, "kind sir, be easy now,
You'll waken my old man."'

He had a few bruises, many scrapes from brushing against rocks, and was very lean, with broken fingernails, and a tremendous appetite that evening. After a cold bath, he lured me back to bed, smelling of soap and looking as innocent as an angel, to go through his journal and tell me all about the climbs they'd made. He was happy as a child. Happy with the climbing, happy to be home, happy with life. It was really joyous to see him so alive.
'We started off on some of the 5.8s on Tahquitz,' he said, 'to warm up and get a feel for one another. I had the feeling he might have preferred starting off on some of the 5.5s. The first day I was sceptical of climbing with him,’ George admitted of James. ‘He seems so much one of the “bag the summit” types, who wouldn’t have good flexibility or endurance, and while he’s a little solid, he goes well, and never had a problem with bulk on a pitch.

'We did Grandnote as a compromise because it has some 5.7 pitches. It's all third classsing getting up there, as you know, just scrambling, There's a chimney at the start, but you have to spring into it because it's got some bushy outcropping. The first pitch is a left-facing corner, not too complex, just finger work, until you get about halfway up, and then you have to swing round the corner and back because there's a boulder in the way. The rest of the pitch is just a left corner until you get to the ledge – it's good six-inch ledge, a nice belay where you can stand and look down into the valley. There's a bit in the pitch above where you can swing over onto some easier rock – the holds here are very fine - but I think it's part of another route. From here there's a good bit of traversing the face by nicks. But you have to look for them, and all of a sudden you come to the ledge and you're home free. The rest is all fourth class. The holds are really big and easy, to the top.'

Apart from Grandnote, they did Last Grapes, which was a thin crack climb; Liken to Lichen, and the Y Crack, which George raved about for the view. Through the week they progressed to the 5.11s – Le Toit and the Magical Mystery Tour, The Sham and Zeno's Paradox before doing the Edge, the Last Judgment and the TurboFlange. Then James felt game enough for the Hangover, which was a 5.12, so called because it was an overhang, traversed over to from the Last Judgement. Then they moved on to Suicide, where almost all the climbs began at the 5.10 range, with a lot of face climbing. They did Valhalla and the Paisano, both the Pinnacle and the Overhang. The one break that James had on Suicide was a long chimney climb, a 5.7, called Major. Minor ran over to the right and was a crack climb.

When we were in the General a couple of days later, James said to me, ‘I never realised how all arms and legs Geordie was, until I saw him on rock in rock shoes and shorts. He seemed a little skinny to me, but my God, you never saw such grace and strength on an overhang! Hove himself over the Paisano on Suicide like he was swinging into a T-bird on the main drag. I was impressed.’

I had to smile, because I had seen it all in Wales and the Lake District, and so knew what James had not: that George was a magnificent climber, all perfect balance and surprising strength. The Paisano, George said, was a 5.12.c, and had just been climbed a couple of weeks ago, by John Long. 'Jimbo didn't tell me until after we did it that Long John did it with duct tape wound about a pair of welding gloves. All I had was chalk and guts. I was mighty cheesed off, as I was leading.'

‘It scared the shit of out me though, pardon me,’ James was saying, ‘because he hardly uses any pro, and would be up a pitch almost before I had the belay.’
‘He free climbs a lot,’ I said, ‘on his own.’
‘That’s what he said,’ James nodded. ‘Man, what an experience… I get the slides back tomorrow, do you two want to come to dinner and have a look?’
‘Do you think Betsey can stand us?’ I grinned.
George came over with the groceries. ‘Doing what?’
‘Talking about climbing for hours –' I said. ‘James has invited us to look at the slides.’
‘Right you!' George grinned. ‘She’ll have to. I want you to see so you can really know what I was talking about.’
‘If you want,’ James offered, ‘I can make snapshots from the negatives.’
‘Yes!’

We did go to dinner, and the pictures were awesome. When I saw the Paisano overhang, I gasped. The crux is a fourteen-foot pure horizontal climb – upside down – then up over the huge face of the overhang. All with a thousand foot drop below you.

On Friday night, at the end of the first set, Joe launched into 'Carolina Sweetheart' and oh, we were going! Maybe because we were the full group again, but there was magic in the playing, and Maggie and Joe's great harmonies.

Carolina sweetheart
Oh, how I miss you so
Carolina sweetheart
I'll never leave anymore

'I'm going back to the mountains
To the place that I left so long ago
A place where I spent a happy childhood
And left the sweetest girl I've ever known

'When I get back to the old home
We'll stroll by the riverside
And look way up to the mountains
I know that someday you will be my bride

'I hope that you will be waiting
For I'll be there in just a day
So please be waiting by the road, dear
And walk with me along the old pathway'

At the end of it, folks in Mosey's were clapping and stomping and hooting, and Mike leaned over to Joe and said, 'Brother, we should take this gig on the road.'
Joe looked askance. 'You mean a band?'
'Yeah, locally, or maybe to festivals.'
'Shoot!'
'Carolina sweetheart, man – look at them.'
Joe frowned thoughtfully then punched Mike playfully on the shoulder. 'Let's talk about it, bro.'

And that is how we formed a bluegrass folk band, Carolina Sweetheart. We played at the Idyllwild Bluegrass Invitational, and later did a lot of festivals over the next twenty six years: Blythe in mid January; the Riverside County Fair in February, which was always Joe's favourite; Temecula around St. Patrick's Day; Strawberry, up in Yosemite, in the third week of May; Live Oak in Santa Barbara in mid June; Big Bear at the end of July; Summergrass in the third week of August, my favourite; Strawberry again at the end of August; Millpond in Bishop in mid-September; more rarely the Julian festival in mid-late September because it too often conflicted with Strawberry or Wobbly.

We got used to taking our gig on the road, the lot of us in a great caravan of trucks, kids, pets, and trailers. It was a great bonding experience, sharing all the laughs and hazards of the road, meeting new people and learning new songs. We wore out the jeep beyond repair eventually – its breaking down regularly became one of the hazards of the road, a running joke- and got a second hand truck at the Hemet swap-meet, for a dollar and helping the guy to re-shingle his roof. Coming back home to Idyllwild became like coming home to Nashville.

Chapter Thirteen

2008-07-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

June and July 1974
We still had our quiet mornings, as school didn’t begin until ten. We would have a cup of tea, meditate, and then go work in the garden before walking into town with Fergus. Our mornings always made me think of the lines, I love to see the morning as it steals across the sky. I love to remember, and I live to wonder why.

One morning while we were in the kitchen, I was watching George shave with the hand mirror he'd hung up at the sink, and I said,
'I love watching men shave. It's so very intimate and personal. The only time I ever saw my dad at it was when we were camping, otherwise it was too personal for him.' He smirked and looked over his shoulder.
'I'm still envisioning your dad too uptight for camping. I can't imagine him hanging off a biv sling on a big wall.'
'We did when we were skiing or hiking. But we had a camp stove and lanterns and air mattresses. It wasn't real camping,' I mused. 'That was the only time my mother ever wore trousers – that and skiing.'
He smiled. 'You don't wear them much either.'
'My mother never wore skirts like this!' I said. 'She'd say I was wearing the tablecloth. She wore tailored things, like a movie star.'

The hardest thing we did in those summer days was working in the garden. Weeding, hoeing transplanting, staking as the garden moved along. But it was good work, and kept us fit in a different way than our walking did. This was good because we had worked out quite a climbing programme, together and with James, for when school was out. Because of our short growing season, we decided that to have fresh veg through the winter we should set up a small indoor garden in the workshop, with grow lights. We could put up some vegetables – we already had zucchini and tomatoes – and could dry herbs, but things like lettuce and spinach we needed fresh.

We had another work party, our last planned project - for putting up our workshop next to the house on the north side. This was sooner than we had expected, as the weather was good and we had the money. It was like an Amish barn raising, all done in a day with everyone helping out with hammers and drills and levels. It was made from reclaimed wood from an old ski cabin up on the ridge that was going to be knocked down- free for the price of hauling it away in James’ truck - and had double doors opening out onto the garden, like a horse barn. Here we could work on instruments and stained glass projects, which required a lot of space and were messy, without cluttering up the house. Inside were shelves and worktables and places to store supplies in the rafters. We used a lot of hand tools, both of us, so there wasn’t much need for electricity, but we did store our solar generator in there anyway, to keep it out of the weather. We used it to run the fridge inside the house and the record player. We didn’t use electric lights, only candles and oil lamps, or electric appliances. We didn’t even have a toaster, that ubiquitous wedding gift. Our toaster was an old Victorian wire contraption, got at a jumble sale for twenty pence.

Sitting around the table later with our watermelon and roasted corn, James looked up at the flowery roof of our house and said,
‘I’m impressed that you can live this way; I find it really inspiring. I’m not sure we could.’ He raised his eyebrows at Betsey sitting next to him.
‘It’s much more comfortable than a biv,’ George murmured, smiling.
‘But don’t you miss conveniences? You especially, Claire,’ James went on. ‘Like showers and hot running water and flipping on a light.’
I shook my head, smiling. ‘No. It’s much more restful without. Life doesn’t rush by.’ I looked at George. ‘We have more time this way, rather than less.’ He nodded in agreement.
‘Well, I’ll be,’ James laughed. 'I’ve been trying to get at emptiness for fifteen years and here you are just doing it.’

‘The uncarved block,’ George agreed. He leaned his head back, considering. ‘I didn’t know if this would work, or how I would feel about it. It worked at Findhorn, I’d seen it do, but staying there for a week is much different to living it every day. Maybe I would miss the underground and watching football in the pub… but I don’t. The stillness and quiet is so powerful for growth, and I enjoy the times of music and company that we do have. It’s a nice balance. Do you agree?’ he directed the last at me.
‘Yes, I do. I don’t feel rushed or pressured. I just do what’s in front of me, and if I need a rhythm I’ll sing a song. If I need company, I can find George or the dog, dig in the garden, or look forward to what’s on in the evening in town. I don’t feel hemmed in, there’s space to think and be creative.’
‘That’ll change, if you have kids,’ James said.
‘Probably,’ George admitted. ‘But we’ll be with that when the time comes.’ He looked at me, his eyes crinkling in a secret smile. ‘Not for a little while, yet.’
Betsey said, ‘You’re so sure….’
‘We have ways,’ I smiled. I caught Maggie looking at me. ‘No chemicals. No prophylaxis. Just a kind of NFP… and no, it’s not Catholic!’ They laughed. ‘I picked it up from my sister in Wales. She has an organic farm there.’
Maggie leaned over behind George, ‘you should talk to Shirley; she could use an apprentice.’
‘Witch?’
Maggie laughed, ‘No, midwife.’
I considered this. ‘It seems like a lot of work.’
‘Well, we don’t have babies everyday hereabouts,’ Maggie said… ‘All evidence to the contrary!’
‘I’ll keep it in mind. Thank you.’

We were more likely to keep Shirley in mind for our own purposes, but when we talked about that later, we decided that we didn’t want even that intrusion, at least the first time.
‘Apart from the tribal experience,’ George said in the shadowy light of the candle late in bed, ‘humans have been just having babies for millions of years without an entourage. Animals do it. They always go someplace quiet off by themselves, if they’re let to do.’ He turned his head and kissed my forehead. ‘How do you feel about it? Would you want a party or a group of women or your sister? I can’t imagine you’d want a hospital!’ I heard him smiling.
‘No, not a hospital,’ I smiled. I considered. ‘I’d like to do it all as naturally as possible. If there were some problem then we could always go for help. But…’ I had a rush of feeling, warm and aching, ‘it’s such a holy thing... It would be something we made together, that love made, and so it would be ours, like sex or meditating. I’m not sure I’d want to share that with anyone else.’ He’d caught the rush, and wrapped arms and legs around me.
‘Where did you come from, amazing girl?’ he murmured, hushing, into my hair. ‘Are you real, or were you made for me? Will you vanish one day, like a selkie? Am I enchanted?’ He sighed. ‘If I am, then I don’t want to wake from it. I love you, Clare.’

I am a man upo' the land,
I am a selchie in the sea,
And when I'm far frae every strand
My dwellin' is in Sule Skerrie.'
'Alas, alas, this woeful fate! -
This weary fate that's been laid for me,
That a man should come from the Wast o' Hoy
To the Norway lands to have a bairn wi' me!'
'My dear, I'll wed thee with a ring,
With a ring, my dear, I'll wed with thee.

At the end of June, I had a letter from Ellen in the same packet of letters in which George got one from his mother. Ell’s letter was full of news of the farm, the sheep, Moran, and the village Midsummer Festival. Anne’s was full of news of the glebe, Herb’s rheumatism, and the endless rain; there was some trouble getting the haying in.

We spent our own Midsummer at the community celebration, sponsored by the co-op, in the meadow at County Park, with good fellowship: a barbeque and a bonfire, and music and dancing. Students from the summer school were there, tourists from Palm Springs and Riverside, and one group all the way from Los Angeles. I wandered by where Anne Burke was sitting with Betsey – her baby in a basket under a card table – and saw that she was spinning on a wheel. I had never done this, only on a drop spindle before, and sat down and asked to learn. I had an idea to make my own Fair Isle jumpers in the manner of knitting I had seen in the Island, round rather than back and forth on four needles, and of course, to spin the wool and dye it myself was a huge artistic challenge, which I could not resist. It was a different technique to using a drop spindle, more like running a treadle sewing machine, but after an hour or so, I was fairly proficient, and able to spin a fine yarn without slubs. I looked up to find George watching me, with his head cocked. I laughed.

‘See what I can do!’ I cried.
He grinned. ‘ Rumpelstiltskin!’
‘Now I can make our jumpers from start to finish,’ I said.
‘Does this mean a sheepfold?’ He asked, coming over. ‘Hi Annie, Hi Bets,’ he said to the women. ‘I don’t know a thing about sheep.’ I looked up at him. ‘We could use one for milk, or a goat,’ I wasn’t entirely joking. 'Wouldn’t it get lonely? I’ve only seen them in herds.’ he asked, looking at Anne. She raised her head and smiled without stopping her knitting.
‘A neurotic sheep! That would be something… I don’t know. I’ve never seen a lone one either, except in the mountains.’ ‘It would give Fergus a job,’ George admitted.
‘What did you want?’
‘Just to say we’re starting the nature walk in a bit, and wondered if you wanted to go, Madame apothecary.’ He made a very Elizabethan stage-bow, and peered at me. ‘Are you all right out here in the sun?’ He poked to edge of my floppy hat.
‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘Not burned yet. I put on some St. Johnswort… Yes, I’ll come. Let me finish up here,’ I said, taking the spool off the bobbin. ‘Oh,’ I looked up again, 'can you bring my flask?’
‘Will do, cupcake.’ He came and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘ I’ll see you at the trailhead.’ He sprinted off then, all long legs and flying curls. Betsey shook her head as she looked after him.
‘That man is hopelessly in love.’ She wrinkled her nose at me. ‘You know it was everything he could do not to say, “I missed you, where were you?"'

‘Thank God,’ I said, winding the yarn onto Anne’s niddy-noddy. ‘I hope he never changes.’
‘You don’t mind being “the little woman” then?’ Betsey asked.
That’s what they thought? I had to laugh. ‘No! And I’m not, anyway; he does the washing up and makes the tea and hangs the laundry, just as I do…. He is my liegeman.’
Anne rolled her eyes. ‘You guys are way too Shakespearean!’
‘Never!' I said, getting up and brushing off the odd bits of fibre. ‘Thanks Annie! I’ll manifest a wheel, now.’ I bent to look in on the baby. ‘Good-bye, little Brendan!’ To their cries of farewell, I broke into a run across the green to meet up with the hikers, light-hearted. I didn’t care a jot what any of them thought or said. What we had was good, and nothing could spoil it unless we let it, and we would not.

The last day of summer school coincided with the town meeting. There was a report on the fiscal management and feedback from students, so to help next year’s school. We were now free of outside work until the end of September, after the Whole Being weekend, when we would start up at the school as regular music teachers. This was not a strenuous job, thank God, only our previous three hours a day. The job came with benefits which, after some discussion, we did not accept – medical insurance, life insurance (George swore at that one), and a pension plan, into which would have paid from our salaries. We wanted as little of government in our lives as possible; we had tangles enough getting George his Alien Registration Receipt card. The refusal of medical insurance led to some opposition by the administration.
‘What will you use, Medicaid?’
‘We will live healthy lives and treat ourselves as we can. If we need a bone set, we can go to the free clinic,’ George told Harold, who shook his head. I hadn’t studied herbalism since I was fourteen for nothing.

Otherwise, in the interim, we would work on our own projects – both for the workshops and in our own right. I set up my jewellery and stained glassworks in one part of the shop. George was very interested in my soldering without an electric soldering iron – I had a small kiln, which he ended up using as well. He had his fiddle-making, which he had been aching to get to; watching him go out and find the hardwood, cut it, mould it (in an old barrel-half filled with water) and fit the whole thing together with handmade glue was a real education. There was mastery in it. But he said the same thing of me.

At the end of the meeting, George sang ‘Lover’s Heart’ - what he called an ‘anti-war song’, but it really was because he and James were going off for week’s climbing in the morning, and it was the first time we had been apart for any length of time since we met.

She was in the flowery garden when first she caught my eye
And I just a marching soldier she smiled as I passed by
The flowers she held were fresh and fair, her lips were full and red
And as I passed that shady bower, these words to me she said
"Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lovers heart"

She was by the shore in the evening when next I saw my dear
Running barefoot by the waterside, she called as I drew near
The sunlight glanced at the water's edge making fire of her auburn hair
My young heart danced at her parting words that hung in the evening air
She was on the Strand next morning when orders came to sail
And as we slipped our ropes away I watched her from the rail
She threw me a rose, which fell between us, and floated on the Bay
And as our ship pulled from the shore, I heard her call and say
"Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lover’s heart"

Now the soldier's life won't suit me, sweet music is my trade
For I'd rather melt the hardest heart than pierce it with a blade
Let the time be short till I return to my home in the north of Skye
And the loving girl who stole my heart with these words as I passed by
"Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lover’s heart"’

‘You always get to us, man,’ Mike said afterward.
‘Mission accomplished,’ George murmured.

James came by at seven the next day. We had already been up for three hours, and all the camping and climbing gear was outside at the door. James knocked and smiled when I poked my head out. 'Going somewhere? Good morning, Claire.’ George came out from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel.
‘Right you, there you are. We were just finishing breakfast.’ He smiled, ‘last home-cooked meal.’
‘I can see that you’re ready,’ James said. Nodding at the coils of rope.
‘But for one thing,’ George agreed. He looked at me. We had said our proper goodbyes in the dawning of the day, but my heart still gave a leap, not least because I wanted to be climbing with him. We had agreed that he would scout the routes with James, and pick the ones he thought we would like. ‘Goodbye, sweetheart,’ he said now. ‘Miss me.’

‘I will.’ He bent to kiss my cheek, murmuring in my ear, ‘keep the bed warm!’ which made me blush and go hot. The dog was whining around his knees. He bent down, ruffling Ferg’s ears.
‘No, stay. You have to stay with our lady.’
Ferg barked.
‘No,’ George said patiently. ‘Be good. Sit.’ The dog sat, and George rose again, smiling.
Smile for me and hide the sadness. The music was running in my head. His look said everything.
‘I’ll bring him back in one piece,’ James said.
‘Oh, I’m not worried about that. I’ve climbed with him on Scafell Pinnacle,’ I smiled. ‘Have a good time, you guys.’

They shouldered all the gear, George heaving a coil of rope over his head, and they were off, walking down the path through the garden to the road. I held onto Ferg’s collar, in case he should bolt, but he did not, only whined a little.
George looked back, once, when they were about to descend the hill, with a beaming smile that reached out with all the love he was. Then they were gone, and I closed the door.
‘Come on, old boy,’ I said to Fergus. ‘Where’s your dish?’ He ran off into the kitchen, and that was that, for a week.

Chapter Twelve

2008-07-21T19:33:00.000-07:00

July 1974
At the next community meeting, there was an update on the progress of the summer school and the snow ploughing, but most of it was given over to organising the Wobbly weekend, in terms of practical logistics. I agreed to give two workshops (stained glass and fingerpicking) and working concessions; George to give three workshops (fiddle making, universal energy, and a fiddle class) and to help with the carpentry setting up the booths. It ran unusually long, nearly four hours, but we had a singsong afterward anyway. We all played a slip jig, then George said, suddenly, 'Here's a cowboy song for all you high country folk,' and, smiling, he launched into

I often have wandered in deep contemplation
It seems that the mind runs wild when you're all alone
The way that it could be
The way that it should be
Thing's I'd do differently if I could do them again

I've always loved spring time, the passing of winter
The green of the new leaves and life going on
The promise of morning
The long days of summer
Warm nights of loving her beneath the bright stars

I'm just an old cowboy from high Colorado
Too old to ride anymore, too blind to see
I sleep in the city now
Away from the mountains
Away from the cabin we always called home
I dreamt I left there
On an old Palomino
Whispering Jesse rode right by my side
I long to hold her
To hear her soft breathing
The touch of her cool hands on my fevered brow
'Whispering Jesse still rides in the mountains
Still sings in the canyons
Still lives in my heart.

The next weekend we had another work party to lay sod on the roof, with a potluck afterward. Anne and Jack Burke came with their brand new baby and their other three kids, and the group of men who'd done up our windows brought their womenfolk. The Wheelers had their six kids, the Oldfields their son, Dave and Carrie their two, Shirley and David, their son; James and Betsey had no children. We were bursting at the seams – mainly outdoors, but we'd had people bring their camp chairs because we had only those at the table in the kitchen.
In the rest of town was baking in the heat of high summer, influenced by the altitude, but here it was fairly cool – only about 75 degrees – in the shade of the great pines, with the breeze moving up now and then from the lake. The garden had begun to grow in earnest, and the plants were recognizable now as their kind. The men laid down black oilcloth tarp, a couple of layers of bark, then the sod, and lashed the whole thing down with twine to stays about a yard apart, until it should hold together.

'You'll never get this off you know,' James warned, 'once it's set it will become part of the roof, of the house itself.' He looked down at me from his great height, red from the work, and wiped his face with a bandana. He was wearing a western shirt and jeans, and looked like yer average grassland farmer.
'I don't want it to ever come off,' I said, holding up the bowl of strawberries I held. 'I want birds to nest in it, heather to grow in it, and to be able to hide from the excise man in it.' He took some of the strawberries, and laughed.
'Oh setting up a still next, are you?'
He called the last up to George, who was still on the roof.
'Eh?' He shook the hair from his eyes.
'Claire says you should be able to hide from the excise man up there.'
George smiled. ' If we can't import Laphroaig, then we'll have to make our own! She can't help it, it runs in her blood.' He winked at me.
'I have family in Connemara who make poitin.' I explained.

'...Oh moonshine!' Joe said, who came up for the strawberries. 'There's a guy up on the ridge who makes that. What's his name?'
'Watson?' James said,
'The man who makes guitars?' I was incredulous.
'I think he makes more money from hooch,' Joe said, smiling. He looked up.
'Hey, what are you doing up there?' He called to George.
George looked up.
'Burying a sixpence in the corner for luck.... but I want to remember where I put it,' so he had flagged it with a nail and blue surveying tape.
'Oh, that reminds me,' I dug in my pocket – and yes, there was the bag. I gave Joe the strawberries.
'Wait a mo, babe, before you come down,' I called to George. I went about halfway up the ladder at the corner of the house, and handed him the plastic bag from my pocket.
'What's this?' He asked.
'Wildflowers,' I grinned. He shook his head. 'I got them at the General.'
He stood up and strewed them about thinly all over, sowing broadcast like a Dorset farmer from a woodcut, with the perfect balance of the climber he was on the pitched roof.

When he came down he gave me a kiss, and Maggie said,
'Oh, we should wassail the house! For luck! Doesn't it look like a long house now?' It did.
'Is there any cider?' James asked.
'There's some in the cooler,' said Dave.
'Right,' said George.
Maggie and Shirley Fozzie poured out the cider on all four corner of the house deosil, murmuring an invocation to the Great Goddess and the Horned God, to the local spirits, to the Three in One, blessing the life and livelihood of the house in all its generations. Then, children, nursing mothers, babies and adults, we joined hands and danced a cross-ways Whitsun dance about the house round and around until we were silly and laughing, singing the Breton cider song I taught them as we went:

Ev sistr 'ta Laou, rak sistr zo mat, loñla
Ev sistr 'ta Laou, rak sistr zo mat
Ev sistr 'ta Laou, rak sistr zo mat
Ur blank, ur blank ar chopinad loñla
Ur blank, ur blank ar chopinad

'If I'd known we were having a party I'd have brought my pink dress,' George murmured to me, as we dropped our raised arms as the circle fell apart. He was referring to Morris dancing and the Fool. I laughed and shook my head. 'No one would get that! Oh, but you'd look so fetching! '
'Naughty girl,' he said.

By the next meeting of the quilting group I had one of my sections completed – except for the gold and silver thread and beads – and two others laid out ready to be stitched. Sitting at the table under the nasty fluorescent lights as we worked, Shirley asked me what I was doing in London, so to meet George in his shop in the first place – since I was from Glendale. I smiled.
'I was studying Ancient Music at the Royal College,' I said.
'The same place he'd been?" Maggie asked.
'Yes, but he had graduated so I never saw him. I was there as an exchange student in my last semester at Juilliard – spending the weekends with my sister who lives in Wales.

'But I have to back up a bit,' I said. 'You must understand where I was coming from. My father Jack was an investment banker – my brother is too – and my mother a socialite – she went to Bryn Mawr, and we had the sort of life where we went to Vail and Switzerland for the skiing and climbing, and shopping meant New York. I was a spoiled rich kid. Private schools, French, ballet lessons, all that. Studying classical music was acceptable in our house. ' I bit off the thread I had been using.
' In 1967 I was 14, in full adolescent rebellion. I took up folk music, and crafts, became a vegetarian, grew my hair. I didn't refuse to wear my school uniform, but I sure embroidered it! Anyway, the next year my parents were killed in a car accident, and suddenly, I was a free rich kid with a trust fund, supervised only by my elder brother Jack, and he was busy with his own life and family to pay me too much mind. Everybody thought it was great when I was accepted to Juilliard on a scholarship – including me. But I didn't really fit in with that culture. I loved music, but since the summer of love I wasn't obsessed with a career. I had come here with some girlfriends that winter and was absolutely enchanted. I knew that this is was the kind of life I wanted.... Maggie I realised the other day that I was in your shop then, and asked you about how to sell things. You told me it was on commission – and had to explain what that was! I was really naïve. ' I smiled.

'Anyway, I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to do my last semester in London, because I was really into Shakespeare and all that, and so I went. Whatever the opposite to culture shock is, I had that – I have cousins in Ireland and I felt as much at home there. But I felt really at home in England and in Wales where Ellen lives with her husband Morgan. I was so naive. I was 19, never had a boyfriend, was full of ideas, and I lived in a kind of bubble....

'I usually went to a music shop in the Strand for my sheet music for school, but I had been having a strong impression to get a piece of Vivaldi. I don't know why, it wasn't even on our programme. Well, the prompting kept getting stronger and stronger, and one day when I had a day off, I was in Covent Garden looking at the buildings and there was a music shop. So I went inside. And the rest you know. God is very funny.'

Shirley looked incredulous.' Do you mean to say you never had a date before George... or anything?'
I shook my head. 'No. The rarefied world of girls' boarding school doesn't give much room for that sort of thing. I'd never even been kissed before he asked me to marry him.'
'Rapunzel indeed!' Maggie said.
I rolled my eyes. 'Rapunzel and the prince were secret lovers,' I said.
'Pedantic!' Maggie teased.
'An old fashioned romance,' Betsey murmured. I looked at her. She had tears in her eyes.
'Yes,' I said, 'straight out of faerie tales. There is a certain irony in that. His life had been so worldly, so different. We came to the same place from radically different beginnings. But it all worked because we listened to the still small voice of God. '
'It's very inspiring,' Shirley said, stitching. 'The old ways are still alive.' She looked up.
'Yes they are.'

Chapter Eleven

2008-07-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

June 1974
George was always an early riser, without alarm clocks and often before the sun was up, no matter how late he went to bed, and he was always alert and ready to dive in to life – a ‘morning person’ as he had warned me. That particular morning early in June, he commented that we seemed to be doing pretty well on the wild carrot seed as a method of birth control.
‘I wasn’t too sure about it,’ he admitted, shaking his hair from his face. ‘I don’t like chemicals either, and I’m not one for abstinence as a method…’ He grinned ruefully. ‘But some day it would be nice to have a kid or so, have that experience.’
I was, I admit, rather consternated. ‘What, like the Wheelers?’
‘Good Lord, no!’ It was worth the joke to see the look on his face, but I knew he was serious. ‘Not six. God, where would we put them?’ He looked about, for dramatic effect. ‘No, and not one, because it would be lonely, so two seems reasonable, don't you think?’

‘Zero population growth?’
‘Joe and Maggie have skewed that already,’ he drawled. I waited some moments before speaking, as I really didn’t want to jump into that before we’d had proper time just with us alone.
‘…When?’ I was hoping he would not say ‘tomorrow.’
He frowned, thinking. ‘Three years? Is that good? We’ll be settled then, really into our life, and will have time with just us.’ His absolute echo of my own concern was stunning as always. ‘Two hearts beating as one,’ really had meaning here. So it was decided anyway. A rather logical method of ‘natural family planning’. Different from the swinging London crowd, launched with the Pill, or the ‘whatever God sends’ of conservatives. He had strong opinions of the matter, as one might expect.

‘It’s irresponsible to populate the world like rabbits,’ he’d said in January. ‘If we are given dominion over the earth, then we should take care of it properly, not use up all its resources. And where do they get the money to rear them, your Irish with their fourteen kids in Belfast?’
‘The dole, mostly,’ I said.
‘Great.’ He reached for the bowl of nuts on my sister’s kitchen table. ‘I’m all for socialism, but what good in being a pariah?’
He would not call Joe and Maggie pariahs, because they looked after their own, but, as he said, ‘I don’t want to work that hard, as hard as they must to feed and clothe and educate all those kids.’ That is what it came down to – it was against our basic ethic.

I went to my first Tuesday night of quilting just after starting summer school. The Zen Centre was off the main road through town, up towards the school; a stone-built square edifice with pine trim. I wondered if James Fischer had anything to do with it, for it resembled his house.
‘He designed it,’ Betsey said, when I asked her inside.
‘Is he a Zen Buddhist?’
She smiled. ‘Something like that.’
I was impressed, for their own home gave no indication of it. ‘Far out.’
‘He likes to keep it low key,’ Betsey said. ‘We used to have a sitting at our house, but it got too big.’

Maggie came in with bags and a big Tupperware container, sunglasses still on her nose. Putting it all down on one of the tables, she looked over the glasses then squealed, breaking the deep silence of the dojo.

‘Claire! Oh babe, you came!’ she hurried over and gave me a hug. ‘I meant to tell you that the two necklaces you brought in were snapped up the first day, by a couple of our toniest women tourists from Palm Springs. More! More! God, why don’t you guys have a phone? I almost wet my pants, I was so excited. I sold them for four hundred dollars.’
I laughed. ‘George doesn’t like telephones. If we can’t run down into town and talk to someone or leave a message on the co-op board it’s too intrusive.’ I winked at Betsey. ‘Four hundred dollars is good! It will pay for our double-glazing.’
‘Jim has those on standing order,’ Betsey said.
Maggie shook her head. ‘You two are too practical.’
‘If we had no need of them, George would give it all to Oxfam,’ I said.
‘Most impractical,’ Betsey said.
‘His father thought so…. What are we doing tonight?’ I asked Maggie.

‘Oh, hang on!’ she said, opening up her Tupperware. ‘Bets,’ she said while rummaging,’ who’s coming tonight?’ Betsey reeled off half a dozen names, stopping on the last one, ‘Anne Burke – no, I heard this afternoon that she was having her baby.’
Maggie looked up. ‘Oh good. I’ll bring them a casserole tomorrow…. This,’ she said to me, pulling out a purple and green square of batik the size of a bath towel, ‘is what we’re working on. It’s for the community centre. It’s a pano of the area, and will go around the wall on the north side. Here’s the photos –‘ from a folder she pulled out a dozen snapshots. Pointing to one of Tahquitz and Suicide Rocks, she said, ‘this one’s up for grabs. I saved it for you – ripped it off from Betsey,’ she grinned ‘because I thought you’d appreciate it. The fabric is all here, do whatever you like with it, but they should all be about this size,’ she thumped on the purple and green batik. It was like no kind of pieced patchwork I had ever seen, but art quilting. Now I knew why they were so hot for my company.

We had a great time, sitting at the tables cluttered with templates and French curves and silk pin holders on little wristbands. Shirley Fozzie the waitress was there, in a tie-dyed shirt, long broomstick skirt and Birkies. I’d have to tell George that she didn’t always wear polyester. She also wore a Wiccan pentacle on a leather lanyard, and dangling beaded earrings. That definitely was not part of the waitress uniform! Somehow, I had missed noticing these at the community meeting. There were pots of Moe’s 24 and zucchini bread and a lot of laughter.

At the end of the night, I had a lift from Betsey to the head of the trail – I wouldn’t take a ride on the logging road.
‘You’ll be okay?’ she asked dubiously, peering into the darkness.
‘Yah, I have a headlamp,’ I smiled, pulling it out of my bag.
She shook her head. ‘ Like Boy Scouts. Any excuse to break out the gear. G’night, Claire.’
‘Good night – oh, we’re seeing you on Thursday?’ We had invited her and James to dinner.
‘Yes. We’ll bring the glassware!’ she laughed.

When I got in, George was sitting on the floor in the common room with his carving tools all about him doing fine work on a recorder by the light of a couple of oil lamps. He looked up at me askance.
'So, how was it? A lot of old ladies with blue hair?'
I laughed. 'If anyone had blue hair it would be Technicolor! No, Shirley was there, in tie-dye and Birkies. Did you know she is a Wiccan?'
'I did not.' He put down the chisel he held. He held out a hand. 'Come sit. I missed you. You were all right coming through the woods?'
'Yes. Betsey wanted to bring me in by the road, but I told her not to – I didn’t want her getting lost in the dark on the way back.... Oh, they're bringing the windows on Thursday.'
'Eh?' He tossed his hair back as I sat, and gave me a kiss. 'Generosity?'
I smiled. 'No, I made four hundred dollars on the necklaces. We can buy them outright.'

He cocked his head. '.... Calculate that?'
'About a hundred and fifty pounds.'
'Good God! Who bought them, the Queen?'
'No, a couple of rich ladies visiting from Palm Springs.'
'Windows and sod roof and workshop!' George murmured. He gave me a hug. 'Well done!'
'I thought so.... It makes me very happy.'
'As it should do.'
' I like being able to contribute to our well-being.'
'You were doing that already, teaching music.'
'But this is a special windfall. And no trust fund! Ellen will be green.'
He looked at me candidly, 'It's all to the balance when you need little.'
'Yes.' I nodded. And yawned. 'Oh my. I'm for bed. Are you coming?'
'I'll be along,' he nodded. I was waiting for you.'
I smiled. It was about half-past ten, early for him. 'You are transparent,' I said, 'Don't ever change.' I stood up regarding him with affection. 'I like your worry.... And when you go off to Suicide Rock with James, I shall sit up worrying. Oh!' I sat down again and pulled my hemp bag over. ' You must see the quilting project I have!' I pulled out the pictures. 'Look at these!' We pored over the climbing routes I had got from Betsey, comparing them to those he had seen on James' OS maps. That wasted a good twenty minutes before I was yawning again. But by then we had worked out where we wanted to climb when summer school was over.

The school bought George's rosewood recorders for a hundred dollars apiece and asked for enough for the whole school, which was fifty students. Suddenly, we were rich, which was rather unexpected. It would take him all summer to make forty-six recorders, but they should be ready by the time regular school commenced in the fall. It was a huge job of work, though. In the end, we donated the money to the town council, and it went to finance the winter snow ploughing, we were told.

James came at the next weekend with Joe and Mike Oldfiled and Dave Morrisey to put in our double-glazed windows, with home-brewed beer in recycled bottles in tow. It was amusing to me to be the only woman – in a long skirt and smock- among a gaggle of men in various stages of dress. I set out food on a makeshift table at James' sawhorses and sat with them as they took a lunch break. George was on my right, his hair tied back, tan lines showing on his naked chest. Joe was on my other side, his sandy hair obscured by a bandana, his sinewy arms exposed in a sleeveless undershirt.
'Hey, George,' Joe said, leaning round me,' tell us about Findhorn. You said you would.' Findhorn, the magical, mystical place. No one there had met anyone who'd actually been there.

He looked up. 'Eh?' His glance wandered from James to Mike to Dave. They all looked game, nodding, so he drew a breath, thought a moment, had some beer, and began,
'I went up there after I did est in London... I'd been in Soho before that, into some really heavy shit. And est had knocked me sideways. I knew I needed a new direction, but didn't know where to look. ' He shook loose hair from his eyes. 'Then my friend –' he looked at me here, nodding, 'Hamish – asked me up for one of the weekend workshops. David had arrived not long before, and there were massive changes afoot.'
I touched his arm, and he squinted at me.

'Oh!'' he smiled. 'David Spangler, I mean. That was early in '72. February.' He smiled again. 'It is bitterly cold in the north of Scotland in February, and Findhorn is on the Moray Firth. My Austin didn't have heat, so I and the dog were bundled up in blankets.' He laughed. 'I had to get out every so often and check for frostbite.' He smiled at James. Our own first visit there had not been much better in terms of the weather, both of us in the red Austin mini, the dog taking up the whole of the tiny back, with just enough room to cram a couple of rucksacks on the floor. George had said to me as we passed Fort William, 'Peter's a bit of all right. Something of a sergeant major – he was in the RAF –he is paternalistic, and likes to run things, and people.... He's also a bit of a womaniser, I hear. That may be gossip, for I've never seen anything to give evidence of it. But he has been married three times, or something three times – I'm not sure if they were all legal.' So I didn't know what to expect of the tall straight white-haired man in green wellies who greeted us and shook our hands strongly.

'I arrived on the Friday night, it was pitch dark at teatime, and I'd got lost coming from Forres.' George was saying, 'Everyone was in the community centre for an orientation meeting, and I felt even more lost and confused than I had in London. There were about 300 people crammed in there and I couldn't see Hamish to save my life. I stood to the side – David was speaking, and I have to say, I fell into his spell –he is a wonderful speaker. He was talking about universal energy, and by the time he was done, I was in tears.... I had found my spiritual home, and a way of being that I deeply longed for, though I hadn't known it, until that moment. The place was so weird and ugly in those days, nasty corrugated caravans, but the people were beautiful and the experience was unforgettable....' He drew a shaking breath. The company was utterly silent. I put my hand on his knee under the makeshift table, smiling with ineffable tenderness.

'Oh, the workshops were great, with a lot of really deep sharing,' he said. But I went for a walk on Saturday afternoon during the break – off into the woods, and encountered a beautiful old branching oak – there are so few in Britain now, and even fewer in Scotland – it was breathtaking.... but it – the spirit of it – spoke to me, like a voice inside my head. It was, I understood, the voice of God. It said,
'"You come to us and ask if we have anything to show you today. Our answer is not to show you anything but to ask that you continually reach and stay in the state of Lightheartedness, which is the password to our Kingdom. There we can show you what needs to be shown at any time – then we can be with you in everyday happenings, when our practical help would be useful. We would have our co-operation a constant. We only operate in the present. We set no store in what has been, and while the folklore of the ages may be about us, we are concerned with what applies now. So when you step out into the day lift your heart and mind to the Light and keep them there and we will show you many pertinent things. Keep relaxed in the Light, and in the moment we will be present."'
He paused, opening his eyes, and did not brush away the falling tears. He looked about at the company.
'I live by those tenets, to the best of my ability. Findhorm gave me a way of life... ' He looked at me and smiled gently. 'And Claire gave me the opportunity.' He kissed my cheek.

There was silence for a long moment.
'Wow,' said Mike.
''Far out,' said Joe.
But James was beaming, with a keen look at George. 'Enlightenment,' he said. George looked up, squinted, and then smiled a little.
'Yeah, I guess so.'
'Why didn't you stay there?' Mike asked. He was small and dark-haired, ran the music shop in town, and was a member of the jam sessions.
George looked at him keenly. 'I had my internship in London, and they told us not to – David said that we must take this way of being out into the world, into our own lives and make it happen.' He paused. 'Then a girl came into my shop one day, and here I am.'

George had told me at Findhorn that he used this relationship with the Divine all the time, and that when I came into the shop in Covent Garden he had been going over the inventory with Roger in the back – and was told 'look up!' When he did he was overwhelmed. Not least when It said, 'This girl is your pathway and your companion. ' And 'coincidences' of our interests and philosophies kept piling up in those twenty minutes of his coffee break. It was not wrong. This is how the 'everyday' magic worked.

I think that some people have the wrong idea about manifestation, they think that abundance means 'having it all' in that way of our parents' post-war generation, only got by extraordinary means – not having to work for it. But it means living in a state of gratitude for the bounty and richness of experience; it means being grateful for the ever-provident Universe facilitating meetings and bringing just what you need when you need it. Actually, the mindset of wanting to 'have it all' comes from a place of fear and greed, and belief in lack. It is in no way positive, which is why, I think, that it has such bad outcomes – debt, war, violence, crime, broken families.

George cleared his throat. 'One of the most important things I learned at Findhorn was how to be genuine, and how not to be an asshole.'
Dave laughed.
'Yes I know, that sounds more like est,' George smiled. ' But that only went so far. I saw what a real ass I was; I knew that I needed to let go of that, that it was a pointless game, but in the day to day, how to do it, without sounding like an automaton? What I learned at Findhorn was how to be ruthlessly honest with myself and self-examining. To really think about what I was about to say, whether it would do harm; think about why I felt what I did, to examine my own motivations. And slowly, a conversation began – ha, sorry Dave!' he laughed again, and they smiled at each other, the 'esties' ' – began with this voice that said that it would teach me, moment to moment, how to live in that love, and have that experience always, rather than as a rare occurrence.' He took a breath. 'There's a game I play in my mind when I'm in a situation where I might otherwise act like a public school twit –' he looked at me here ' and I say, If I were God what would I do now? And immediately, that sense of peace and benignity comes over me.' He shook the hair from his eyes, shrugging. 'Perhaps it's merely Pavlovian, but it works.... I don't think any of you would have liked me a few years back when I first went to London. I was the biggest asshole walking.'

'Why?' said James, cocking his head.
'Oh I was full of myself, scholarships, a "rare talent", was diversely talented, I was a rational atheist, maybe a communist. Anyway I thought I was so much better than other people. I really did. And I let everyone know what I thought about everything, my opinion on it. But I was desperate inside. Something inside said, "You're a fraud". '
There were looks of disbelief; this gentle funny young man, this practical romantic had been such a creep.
'I've never known him that way,' I said.
George shook his head. 'No, thank God. I'm not up on that perch anymore. And no games. What you see is what you get; this is what I am. There's no bullshit, and I don't lie. If I don't like something, I'll say so,' he looked at me, and I smiled. 'But I will own it, and not blame my dislike on the person in front of me. Nobody makes me feel anything, my responses are my own, and if they are negative, then that's my problem to work through. But I do talk about things, and I never did before, growing up or in Soho. Talking about feelings was for nancy boys then,' he smiled. 'So I try to be genuine, my real self to all people in all circumstances, but the godlike version of my real self, not the ratty one.'
Joe was smiling. 'Right on!'
'You should teach a workshop at the Wobbly weekend,' James said. 'The Whole Being. It would be great.'
George looked up keenly. 'I'd like that.'

Chapter Ten

2008-07-21T19:31:00.000-07:00

May and June 1974
In contrast to our visit to the Wheelers was that to the Fischers, three days later on Thursday. James and his wife Betsey were ten years older than we, really no older than the Wheelers, but worlds apart in terms of ambience. Their house – a stone-and-pine-built modern affair near the town hall – was very middle-class inside, with slipcovered club furniture, which George said reminded him very much of his parents' rectory. The food was plain middle class fare– they were not vegetarians- and the drugs of choice were good Scotch and plain old pipe tobacco. On the whole, it was a comfortable evening, like visiting with a favourite aunt and uncle. George and James talked and studied climbing routes for a while before they joined Betsey and me in the common room for a set of slides from their trip to the Tetons. While the men were off in the study, Betsey told me that she was a quilter, and was a member of the Tuesday evening quilting bee. It looked as if I was being cultivated for that, though I had not done much quilting. Shirley must have put the word round that I made 'fancy glass and art jewellery', so the assumption was I suppose natural that I quilted too.

During the general discussion of climbing that followed, I mentioned that I had been rock-climbing in the Shenandoah National Park when Betsey said that her father was from Afton, which is the nearest hamlet, and that when Dylan sang 'The Night They Drove old Dixie Down' she thought it was about her Grandfather, because he had been at the siege of Richmond also. This was all new to George, so I played it for him later, and sang it at Mosey's on the Friday night at the jam session when everyone was too full of JD's to be offended. Maggie and I were on banjo and mandolin and Joe to my surprise took up a tambourine as everyone sang:

Virgil Caine is my name and I worked on the Danville train
'Til Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of '65, we were hungry, just barely alive
On the tenth of May when Richmond fell
It was a time I remember, oh, so well

The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringin'
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singin'
They went, "Na, na, na, na, na, na,.... "

'Back with my wife in Tennessee
And one day she said to me,
"Virgil, Come Quick and see!
There goes Robert E. Lee."
Now I don't mind I'm chopping wood
And I don't care if the money ain't good
You take what you need and leave the rest
But they should never have taken the very best

The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringin'
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singin'
They went, "Na, na, na, na, na, na,..... "

Like my father before me, I'm a working man
And like my brother above me, I took a rebel stand
Oh, he was just 18, proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the blood beneath my feet
You can't raise a Caine back up when he's in defeat

The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringin'
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singin'
They went, "Na, na, na, na, na, na,..... "'

'What was that about?' I asked Joe as we were collecting our gear. He gazed at me with a deep and wistful expression and said, 'I am from Tennessee, and we suffered mighty sorely during the war, and after. I am I guess what you would call a Cracker –'
I smiled a little. 'I have.'
He looked at his shoes, grinning, and looked over at Maggie, 'Well, shoot, it sure is true, and I don't mind saying it, not to you, because you know what it is and don't mind.... I feel every word of that song, and it's not nice to in some parts....' He paused. 'I hope you don't mind me saying it, but,' he coloured up delightfully, ' you remind me of ladies I grew up with. Proper ladies. '
I grinned now. 'Thank you, Joe. You're a real gentleman.'

As we were walking home it was George's turn to ask what was all that about with Joe. I had to smile. 'Oh, he was just telling me how that song meant so much to him, how he grew up poor in Tennessee. It's odd how folk music brings everyone together. I wonder if Betsey and Joe ever talked about being Southerners....' I paused, seeking an analogy. 'It's rather like being Irish, as compared to English.'
'Oh. I get it!' He laughed and put an arm about me. 'It's folk that bring folk together, you know, through the music. I was not impressed with your Dylan record. But when you sang it tonight and everyone joining in, I could feel the room change. Every man is an underdog against Big Brother, no matter where he's from, but you did that, in what you brought to it. You did it for Betsey, for her father; that made all the difference.'
He was right and it was something to think about, but not at nigh on one in the morning, lurching down a long hillside in the dark.

At the next Sunday jam session late in the evening when people were dancing, George led the jam in a beautiful slow air that folk could dance to, ‘Leaving Stornoway’, which he had learned from Andy at Findhorn, a sad sweet song about a soldier leaving his heart, and lady, while he goes to fight ‘across the sea.’ He was becoming known for romantic songs, aching ballads that left the companying sighing.

In the morning I must leave you, I must leave you far behind
Smile for me, and hide the sadness, drive tomorrow from your mind.
Far away the drums are beating, and I can no longer stay
But I leave my heart behind me, here with you in Stornoway.'

He glanced down at me here, with that deep slow look,
'Hold me close against your heart love, for tomorrow I must leave
Off to fight for King and Country, in a land across the sea
But I know when battle's raging, that my thoughts will always stray
To the love I leave behind me, here with you in Stornoway.

There was the long bridge of martial music, with Maggie and I making up for the lack of bagpipe and drum with pennywhistle and bodhran, and all the dancers swirling about beside us, and people standing staring with tears in their eyes, for the war in Viet Nam was still raging and not a person there didn't know someone who had suffered loss.
'And some day, if God should spare me, when the battles all are o'er
And we raise the flag of freedom I'll return to you once more
When the birds go winging homewards at the closing of the day
I'll return to spend my days love, here with you in Stornoway
I'll return to spend my days love, here with you in Stornoway

At the end of it, George leaned over and gave me a proper kiss, right there in front of everyone, which he was not wont to do, but it was for all the beautiful days we had spent at Findhorn, where these unbreakable depths of soul-knowledge of each other had been plumbed.

’Pure mastery,’ said Joe next to him in the interim, shaking his head. George looked up and shook the hair from his face. ‘The only bother is, I never get to dance with my girl.’
‘Where’d you learn it?’
A faint smile lingered about his eyes, ‘Findhorn.’
‘You talk about that place a lot.’
He smiled fully now. ‘It changed my life. Come over, I’ll tell you about it.’
‘I will,’ said Joe. We followed it up with a hornpipe, in the musician’s tradition, to bring up the mood of the company.

‘The School’, we discovered on our arrival at it to sign on as music teachers, was not a primary school with arty pretensions, but a serious Music and Arts boarding secondary school, very much in the manner of an English public school; the secondary equivalent of Juilliard. In fact, many of their graduates went on to Juilliard. There were also adult programmes, and a summer school, which had been the first incarnation of the place. They were delighted with George’s connection to the Royal College of Music and my own Juilliard sheepskin, and took us to meet the founders, Max Krone and his wife, Beatrice, who happened to be there for a board meeting.

The night before we had sat at the kitchen table, deciding how much hard money we actually needed to live on, all considered, and reckoned how much teaching music and making crafts would pay; we would work just enough and no more, freeing ourselves just to be and do whatever else we wanted. It worked out to about twelve hours a week, each, or two and a half hours a day.
‘That’s not too bad,’ George said. ‘I worked more at my job in Covent Garden.’
‘It is a very conservative estimate besides,' I said.
‘As it should be.’ He leaned back in the chair. 'Always best to err on the side of caution. If we have more money from other things, then we can put it to good use – give it to Oxfam or whatever it’s called here.’

It was so sweet; his utter rightness of heart and mind. Thought of him, arguing strongly with his father about the use and proper sphere of money. But George had lived on scholarships, at the Royal College and the Phil, working for the experience and the money it gave to finance his climbing jaunts. He was happier doing gigs with his early music consort, making instruments, and showing up for jam sessions at local pubs. And, if he was good at these things, and he was, why should he not make his living at them? Why should anyone not make their living at what they are truly good? Why should anyone slave away at a job they hated, just for the coin? That, he said, was a living death, and he would not do it. But, if he had extra money, he was always willing to give it away. We had a small amount of savings – enough for a few weeks. But our trust was in each other, and in the bountiful Universe; God always showed up with just enough at the right time. Who needed more than that? If the whole world lived this way, we’d all be happy. This was our ethos.

The Krones were glad to know us, and fascinated that George actually made instruments as well as played them.
‘We have need of such craftsmen,' he said. ‘There’s a fellow up on the ridge who makes guitars, Watson is his name, but if you can teach our kids and adults to make woodwinds and violins that would be a great boon.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Krone turned to me, 'and what about you, young lady? Aside from classical guitar, do you do anything else?’
‘Textiles, jewellery, and glass arts, sir,’ I said.
‘Well I’m dumbfounded that two you weren’t recruited from England, that you happened upon us; you sound just what we need.’ We hardly had 'happened upon them' , but it was as well to let them revel in the serendipity.
‘We’re happy to be here, sir.’ George said.
‘You must help us organise our next show,’ Bee said to me. ‘It’s after the summer school and before the Festival…. You are teaching at the festival, aren’t you?’
I admitted that I hadn’t thought of it. Workshops were given at the Whole Being weekend in September free of charge on a sign-up basis, very free-flow. It would be easy to arrange.

‘It looks as if we have to get to work,’ George said as we walked to the jeep. It was the first day of brilliant warm sunshine, now at the end of May. We stopped in town for an ice cream to celebrate, and when we got home he sat down on the floor in the common room with some blanks for recorders, while I went through my projects to decide which I should take to Maggie’s shop. The work kept us busy for a week, with time off for music in the evenings. The week after that, we began teaching at the summer school, three hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks.

Chapter Nine

2008-07-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

May 1974
In the afternoon there was more settling in, George chopping wood for the kitchen stove –in the clearing with his shirt off and hair tied back because he ‘didn’t want to cut anything off’ – and me making soap in a small witch’s cauldron I had got from Ellen for Christmas. I put up the jars of herbs I had brought on makeshift brick and board shelving in the kitchen and hung up a bunch of thyme with a purple ribbon on the door. He squinted at me through the pale sunshine.
‘Are you advertising?’
‘Mm?’
He grinned. ‘A bunch of thyme.’ It bespoke of virginity, lost!
‘…Oh.’ I laughed. ‘No. Shall I change it?’
‘No.’ He gave over his wood chopping and gathered up the small bits he had made for our stove. ‘Open please,’ he said of the door, and as he passed kissed me airily. He was cold, and I noticed had the bright red spots of genuine chill.

‘You should put a jumper on,’ I said. ‘Not that I don’t like you half-naked, but you’re freezing.’
‘I know a way to warm up,’ he said cheerfully.’ A hot bath will fix anything.’
‘It’s an hour or so till the soap is cold.’
‘We still have some…. Excuse me, darling, I really need to put this down!’ He went inside and inaugurated our little bathtub in the kitchen before the toasty range.

On the Wednesday evening we went to the community meeting, where concerns were raised over the managing of cars in town during the tourist season, an update was given on the ploughing of private roads in winter, the progress of the children’s wall in front of the school, and we were introduced. Half the people there had seen us in town or at Mosey’s, but it was nice to be formally known. We got about a dozen invitations to dinner, and one to the Episcopal Church, which made George laugh. At the singsong he played Rosemary and Thyme, and when I was asked to play, he asked me to play a James Taylor song, which he sang for me, in front of God and everybody, in his beautiful baritone:

There's something in the way she moves,
Or looks my way, or calls my name,
That seems to leave this troubled world behind.
If I'm feeling down and blue,
Or troubled by some foolish game,
She always seems to make me change my mind.

And I feel fine anytime shes around me now,
She's around me now
Almost all the time.
And if I'm well you can tell that she's been with me now,
And she's been with me now
Quite a long, long time
And I feel fine.

Every now and then the things I lean on lose their meaning,
And I find myself careening
Into places where I should not let me go.
she has the power to go where no one else can find me,
Yes, and to silently remind me
Of the happiness and good times that I know, you know.

Well I said I just got to know that:
It isn't what she's got to say
Or how she thinks or where shes been.
To me, the words are nice, the way they sound.
I like to hear them best that way -
It doesnt much matter what they mean,
Well she says them mostly just to calm me down.

I know why he did it, but that didn’t matter at all. It was a very public love song that said everything about how he was. All the women in the room were in a swoon, and I looked over at Maggie Wheeler and she had tears in her eyes. ‘This is the way it was meant to be.’ We played The Rambling Rover then, to cheer everybody up from their soulful mood.

Oh there's sober men & plenty
And drunkards barely twenty
There are men of over ninety
That have never yet kissed a girl.
But give me a rambling rover
Frae Orkney down to Dover
We will roam the country over
And together we'll face the world.

‘I've roamed through all the nations
Ta'en delight in all creation
And I've tried a wee sensation
Where the company did prove kind.
When parting was no pleasure
I've drunk another measure
To the good friends that we treasure
For they always are in our mind.

‘There's many that feign enjoyment
From merciless employment
Their ambition was this deployment
From the minute they left the school
And they save and scrape and ponder,
While the rest go out and squander
See the world and rove and wander -
And they're happier as a rule.

The weather quickly warmed up as May progressed, and in that time we built a composting privy, with the help of James and some other of the lads. James laughed when he came out and asked why we didn’t want an indoor toilet, as we could have a septic tank, and George drawlingly said that it would make us lazy. It took a couple of days to get the knack of the thing - throwing some sawdust in the bucket beneath on use- but we had outdoor plumbing, compost for our garden, and no smells! Our water indoors came from a well about twenty yards from the house which, we were reliably informed, had been doused in the ‘20s. We had the garden planted then too – basic foodstuffs and such flowers as would grow in limited sunlight. We needed no compost yet, for the soil was loamy and rich. It was hard work, but good work, and to relax in the evenings there was always music, and our working our way through the entire collected works of Shakespeare.

One of our first dinner-dates was with Joe and Maggie Wheeler. Their house was on the other side of town, to which we walked, and it was a cabin like ours only much larger, with five rooms to house their six kids and menagerie of animals. Joe showed us his painting shed, where he painted in his expressionistic style for himself and in a modern folk style for the tourist trade. Maggie, for her part, did macrame and beautiful quilts and beadwork. I asked her if there was a shop in town in which I could sell my wares on consignment, and she said Yes. Hers. I saw why Shirley the waitress had told us to talk with her husband. She smiled and told me to bring some things along when I felt I was settled in enough, and that there was a quilting bee on Tuesday nights in the Zen temple.

When their kids were asleep, we sat around the fire and Joe got out his stash and pipe to go with the bottle of wine. He offered it round, and I looked at George, wondering what he would do. Soho was before us in his mind. Would he be off this gentle mind-altering substance in this gentle environment? I remembered too his firm edict against 'free love'. So I was very interested when he very casually and naturally took his turn at the pipe (he had evidently had some practise!) and passed it along to me. His eyes were very dark, but he only smiled.

Wherever Joe got his stash, it was very good, and hit one like a warm blanket on a cold night, which it was, making thought pleasantly fuzzy about the edges. I looked up at him. He was regarding me with curiosity.
'Nice,' I said.
'Thanks. I grow it myself. I wasn't sure y'all'd go for it,' he said frankly. 'For all your appearance, the two of you seem kind of square. No offence!' He laughed and so did George.
'I can't help it,' he said merrily. Oh he was high as a kite! 'My father was clergyman.'
'Really?' Maggie said, taking the pipe.
"Yeah,' George said. 'Church five times a week – twice on Sunday and Wednesdays and Saturday vespers. By the time I went to University I was convinced I was an atheist.'
'Are you now?' Maggie asked.
George shook his head. 'No. Call me a Taoist if anything.' He drew a breath. 'I did est in London and that really did a number on my head. I realised that maybe the old man wasn't so far off it after all. But I couldn't handle all that mumbo jumbo in the C of E, It was all so ritualised, not real.' He smiled at me. 'I went to Findhorn and found it, whatever It is. Anyway, I prefer meditation and being in nature to all the rules and regs of men. God is everywhere, not just in buildings.'
Joe was smiling. 'Right on, brother. Right on.' There was a pleasant lulling silence. I really was proud of George, telling it like it was without apologies. I was actually rather shocked at Joe thinking we were square. I wondered: was it because George made such a point of the legal marriage? Was he right?

After some pleasant conversation meandering here and there on philosophy, Maggie shivered, and Joe said, 'looks like it's time to fire up the sauna. Will you join us?'
Well, here it was, pagan orgy time. I looked at George. He shrugged. 'Sure.' I smiled to cover my astonishment, but Maggie caught it, and murmured to me as we scuttled down the hall in our towels to the back door where the sauna hut lurked,
'He thinks we're swingers, doesn't he?'
I couldn’t help but laugh.
'Jeez-us!' Maggie whispered, 'we've got six kids! We don't have the energy to swing.'
This I found hopelessly funny and laughed until the men asked what was going on.
'Nothing,' I said, 'just too high and silly.' But I glanced at George and rolled my eyes. He got it.

It was about 30 degrees outside, so the sauna was a pleasant contrast and brought up the high again to a nice level. The conversation on Heidegger and morality continued, eventually all agreeing that based on personal experiences of the supraconsciousness that atheism, and certainly nihilism, were impossible to defend. Joe brought up Huxley and his radical shift in ideas once he had stumbled on LSD, and George held up a hand.
'Wait a moment,' he said smiling. 'I have some experience of this, and would prefer to have this conversation when I have a few more brains collected. I really want to! Can we postpone it until teatime?'
'Sure thing,' Joe agreed.' But, are you saying that it changed your mind about a nihilistic theory?'

'Changed my mind?' George laughed, hooted. 'Hell, it altered my mind! Real or not, a personal encounter with the Immense Eternal Is cannot be denied. It made nihilism sound like a whiny schoolboy rant against the master of form....' He looked at me. 'Do they know what I mean?'
'I think so,' I said, nodding at Joe, who nodded also.
"I'm not always sure,' George admitted. 'I've had some terrible gaffes with you Yanks. ' He ran his hand though his wet hair and smiled. 'Ask Claire.'

So our first foray into the real life of the community began. We walked home in the wee hours, a bit dazed, happy and snug together.
'I'm glad we have our ordinary little life,' he said to me when we were in bed. 'Real Hippieville is a nice place to visit, but Findhorn taught me that there are better ways to live...' He was thoughtful a while. 'Though when we invite them here it should be BYO. We don't want them to feel heavy. But no hard stuff. My God, if you could have seen the heroin addicts in Soho... I don't mean that, sweetheart. You should never see them. But they are about as far away from all this as it is humanly possible to be. And I don't know but I could be again, if I was around it. I scares me cold.'
'But we're here now,' I said, 'and we can live as we choose. '
'Yes, we can.' He agreed.

Chapter Eight

2008-07-21T19:28:00.000-07:00

January, 1974
We spent until the New Year at Ellen’s, playing music at home and in the pub in Penisarwaun, going for walks on Craig y Dinas, and doing lots of talking. For us the time was comparatively lazy, but Ellen asked me one evening as we were giving Moran a bath, ‘How do you two talk so much? It would wear me out!’ It would! Morgan hardly ever said more than three words together.
I smiled. ‘We’re used to it; it’s part of the way of life at Findhorn. And Geordie’s an extravert, so he likes to think out loud.’

We talked about the offer on from the Phil, and alternatives to that. When we were down in Zennor in Cornwall cliff climbing in November, we had joked that we could set up in an old cottager - the origin of his remark to his father. But now we seriously considered it, as he decided that the Phil offer would be great, if only it were not in London. Living out of town might work for Izak Perlman, but it wouldn’t work for us, just beginning as we were; he would be at the mercy of the Phil’s rehearsal and performance schedules. He much more enjoyed working with the Early Music Consort, but everyone else there had other jobs.
‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I’d rather play jams in pubs than be stuck in Covent Garden all day.’ We had done that too, driving out to Henley and Reading. When we were in Zennor, we played at the pub there, and were asked to participate in the folk festival next June.

‘There’s always Findhorn,’ I said, when we were out walking in the hills.
‘Become residents, you mean?’
I nodded. ‘We could garden, teach, work in the shops, practise our crafts, do anything we wanted. And we wouldn’t have to live on the resident’s stipend.’ This was five pounds a week for the indigent. It was not a bad deal – all meals were provided by the community. He took a sharp breath and looked at me sidelong. ‘You’d do that for me?’ I could tell he liked the idea. He had certainly thought of it, now and again, but felt a duty to his music.
I nodded.
‘It’s very cold in the winter.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s a fishbowl.’
I laughed. ‘I know!’
He swung my hand in his, his face suffused in joyousness. ‘Let’s talk to Peter!’
As if Peter would say No to George about anything. I smiled.
So it was settled. He rang the Board of Directors at the Phil that afternoon and told them he would not accept the post for personal reasons. They were disappointed, but not heartbroken – they could go with their second choice as easily. Peter, naturally, said Yes, but we had to wait until we could get a caravan from the Moray County Council, which was in March. So, for George’s birthday at the cross quarter, we took my brother Jack up on his invitation to come visit, and went out to California.

March 1974
The lure was the skiing and ice climbing at Idyllwild, not my brother’s company. We spent the first two days of our stay at his house, however, just to adjust to the time zone – and the weather. I had forgotten what warm felt like. Jack picked us up at Burbank Airport in his jeep, leaving Beth and the kids at home. He stood smoking by the gate, waiting, in khakis and a polo shirt, for all that looking very much like the ski bum George had called him. He was tall and raw-boned, truly the golden boy, with Troy Donohue perfect looks and a perfect smile. He was impressive even lounging with a ciggie in topsiders. He was ten years older than me – thirty – with two kids, aged four and three. I had not seen the youngest, Davie, since he was an infant, two years ago. Jack was at the top of his game, wealthy, upper management investor, lean and good-looking. When he was my age, he had avoided the draft by some string-pulling on the part of our father, while his friends went overseas, most of whom never returned. The world belonged to him, and he let everyone know it. He hove himself upright as we came up the gangway, throwing his head up in a kind of odd little nod.

‘Claire.’ It was rather a bark, a command, than a greeting.
I hitched my bag up. We had had two layovers – in DC and San Francisco – and I felt bleary and grotty.
‘Hey Jack.’
He clapped my arm. ‘ So you made it.’ He looked us over.
‘This is George,’ I said. Jack leaned across me and shook his hand.
‘Hi, nice to meet you.’ He turned to me again. ‘Your flight was okay?’
I shrugged.
‘We’re still on London time,’ George said. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘Oh right.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Well, let’s get your stuff..’ He turned towards the corridor with his long stride.
‘Where’s Beth?’
‘Oh the kid’s got a rash or something and she didn’t want to bring him out.’
You didn’t want to deal with them, I thought. George looked at me, and pressed my hand.

We got our skis and climbing gear from the oversize claim and as we stood in the queue waiting for the baggage carrel to start rolling, Jack chatted up George about climbs he had done. He had the grace to be impressed that George had done most of the 14ers in the Alps, so they talked about 14ers in the Rockies, to which Jack could make some comparison, and debated the merits of ski mountaineering over rock and ice climbing.
‘Well, for pure sport, there’s nothing like rock and ice,’ George said
Jack laughed. ‘Oh you are one of those gnarly trad boys, I see. You should do the big walls in Yosemite and Joshua.’
George smiled a little.
‘I’d love to; meanwhile, Tahquitz.’
‘Oh those Stoned masters,’ Jack rolled his eyes. ‘Freaks if there ever were, but damn can they climb. I met Long John once up in Joshua and he left me in the dust, and I’m pretty good.’ He squinted at George ‘You solo free?’
George nodded and smiled. ‘Yeah.’ He looked at me. At least, in the confessional lingo of the climbing world they could find some common ground.
‘You look like you would.’ Jack shook his head. ‘Fucking amazing. I watched Dean Potter free solo between El Cap and Half Dome. Sandbag, man!’

The bags were coming down now, and we gathered them up on a trolley before Jack whipped out a five dollar bill and gave it all to a porter. Outside, the hot air was a blast furnace compared to San Francisco, where it had been 50 degrees. We got to the jeep and Jack let the porter load the whole show, and if George hadn’t pitched in with our gear, the man would have had a hernia. George thanked him but Jack simply flung himself in the front and lit another ciggie.

As soon as we were off I started pulling off layers because I was very overheated. Jack looked through the rear view mirror. ‘Hey, no orgies back there, Rhea,’ he said. He hadn’t called me that since I was ten, the ‘kid sister.’ I was down to underwear – a sodden camisole and petticoat – and rolled my eyes at George, who followed suit stripping off down to a t-shirt. His hair was sticking to his neck.
‘Ha!’ Jack cackled. ‘ You’re too used to that rainy weather. You need some of our California sunshine!’
‘I burn, if you’ll remember,’ I said. ‘Besides, it was snowing at Ell’s when we left the dog there on Tuesday. There was a cold snap.’
‘There was ice in the Thames for the first time in a hundred years,’ George said.
‘Shit! Well, you can hang out in the pool, then, and unfreeze.’

He turned out of the carpark.
‘How is Ell?' He asked, turning onto San Fernando Blvd.
‘Fine.’
‘She’s still with that maudlin fiddler, then?’
‘Jack, for Pete’s sake!’
‘Well he went around like fucking Lurch when we were in Vail. Never said two words.’
‘Some people are not talkers.’ George laced his fingers through mine.
‘Right,’ Jack said.

We were on the I-5 now, and I looked out over land that had once been orchards, and was now housing tracts.
‘We lived up there,’ I said to George, pointing out our old house in the Glendale hills, among the pine trees. ‘I can take you up there.’
‘Are you driving now?’ Jack asked.
‘Yes, but not on this side of the road. It may be an adventure.’ I said.
‘She refused to before,’ he told George. ‘It was too modern and noisy for her.’
‘I just couldn’t hang with your Camaro,’ I shot back.
‘I sold it,’ he said. ‘And got a Mercedes. I couldn’t take clients to dinner in a car that made me look like I took risks. Got a Range Rover, too. This old thing is just Beth’s knockabout.’
Then we were at his house, in a very tony estate on the border of Pasadena. It was a split-level house, with a rolling, immaculate golf-course lawn, a pool, a tennis court, and an apartment over the garage.
‘Home.’ He said, pulling up the brake. ‘You know where to go.’ He got out and opened up the back.

Beth and the kids were out in the pool, and she waved as we went up the stairs at the garage. Since my parents died, the ‘mother in law suite’ had been my digs there when I was home from school, which was not often. We left our gear in the jeep and stowed the rest upstairs, then went down to join Beth and the kids.
‘There you are, look at you!’ Beth exclaimed, and ran to give me a hug.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come out, ‘ she said, glancing at Jack. ‘Kids you know.’
I rather got the impression they had a row.
‘And this is George,’ She took his hand. ‘ Welcome to the States!’
He nodded. 'Hi, Beth.'
‘I don’t know what’s in the air over there, all my sisters marrying Englishmen. Must be charm.’ Beth had been a sweet girl, one of Jack’s regulars, and she was still nice, but the sparkle had gone out of her. But not with George. ‘You must be awfully tired. Go and change, and you can come and lounge with us.’ She turned. ‘Ani,’ She said, to a teenaged girl I hadn’t noticed before. ‘Bring Davie over here. Come here Barbie!’ She called to her daughter. The au pair girl in the pool came out with Davie, still wearing his ducky ring, and set him down in front of me. Beth leaned down,

‘This is Aunty Claire, Davie. You remember I told you she was coming?’ He nodded solemnly, big blue eyes watchful.
‘Are you swimming with your ducky?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘He does quack!’ He squeezed the head of the duck, and it made a noise like the old canisters that we used to get in our Christmas stockings. Beth smoothed his brown hair – which was cut very short- and straightened.
‘Go play with Ani now,’ she said. 'Barbie, you remember Auntie Claire,' she said.
Barbie nodded, and looked at George. 'Not him,' she said. I smiled.
'No, I'm new,' George said. He looked over into the water. 'I see you can swim by yourself, can't you?'
Barbie nodded. 'Yup. I go to swimming lessons. I can swim in the deep end.'
'Very good!' He looked at me. 'I wonder if she climbs as well.'
'I can climb!' Barbie asserted. 'I climbed our tree-' she pointed. 'Only Daddy made me come down.'
'Well done,' George said approvingly.
'Go and get your things out of the pool, Barb,' Beth said. 'We're going to have dinner.' Barbie went, looking backward at George.
'She's usually very shy and hardly talks to anyone,' Beth said.
‘Davie’s adorable.’ I said.
Beth smiled. ‘Well, go and change, and we’ll fire up the barbeque.’
‘I’ll send you up a pitcher of G&T,’ Jack said. He wasn’t joking.

Upstairs I said to George, ‘He’s making the au pair…. They had a row about it. That’s why he didn’t want her to come.’
He sighed. ‘That’s hard.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘You know, in some ways he reminds me of Werner Erhard.’
‘That’s not an encouraging advert for est.’
He smiled ruefully. ‘No but it’s true. He's very flash, very cocksure of himself.’ He leaned and kissed me. ‘No nay never, darling.’
‘Thing is,’ I said, pulling off the sodden camisole, ‘he’s just like my father. I never thought about what that meant, until just now.’
There was a knock at the door. He smiled.
‘Go change. I’ll get it.’
I went into the bathroom.
When I came out, he was standing in the middle of the room in climbing shorts, the only cool things we had.
‘That woman didn’t speak English,’ he murmured.
‘That’s Elena, she’s Mexican.’ I said. ‘She’s got it good – her father was a farm worker. At least she has a roof over her head.’
He nodded at the pitcher. ‘What do I do with that? I hate gin.’
‘Leave it. I’ll give it to her later.’
He stretched his arms over his head in the Sun Salutation and groaned when his back cracked. ‘I couldn’t have servants. It’s just so bloody unfair.’
‘Good.’
He went on stretching for a few minutes. ‘Right, ready when you are.’
‘Never,’ I said.

In the house after dinner, George was looking at the picture collection on the table in the sunken den – pretending to listen to Jack's nattering about the neighbourhood association – and leaned down as I came over with a proper whiskey.
'Thank you, ' he murmured. 'Is this your father?' He touched the filigree frame. My father at Tuolumne, in hobnailed boots. Tall, curling sandy hair, raffish.
'Yeah.'
'He looks like Hillary.'
I laughed. 'Everyone said that.'
'What are you whispering about over there?' Jack called.
'How Daddy looked like Ed Hillary.'
'Oh God, not that again! We couldn't go anywhere without someone commenting. '
'There are worse fates,' George smiled.

Beth came in with Elena following, with a tray of zabaglione in brandy glasses. Well, at least it wasn't fondue, but it was fairly swish.
'What are we talking about?' Beth asked brightly.
'Hillary,' Jack said, lighting a cigar.
Her face fell.
'Oh you aren't going to talk about climbing all evening are you?'
'Maybe,' Jack said,
'No,' George said gently. He took a glass from her. 'Thank you Beth, this is lovely.'
'George can tell us about himself,' Jack said. He was rather potty, why I had not given him a scotch. Beth had asked me not to do.
'Not of my favourite subjects,' George said.
‘Well at least you can tell us what you do,’ Jack said irritably.
We sat down on the leather love seat.
‘Am I what I do?’ George asked, smiling.
‘I told you that he is a violinist interning at the London Philharmonic,’ I said.
‘Wow,’ this from Beth.
‘That just finished up,’ George said.
‘Yeah yeah,’ Jack said, ‘ but who are you?’
George laughed, a rich sound. He glanced at me. ‘I doubt we mean that in the same way, so let’s try this –‘ he gave a very brief run-through of his dossier, some of which was unintelligible to the others.

‘What’s an A Level?’ asked Beth.
‘The general education certification,’ George said, ‘it’s a prerequisite to university.’
‘It’s like taking Honours courses,’ I added.
‘And you did five? I don’t get it.’ From Beth, who was shaking her head.
‘They’re by subject,’ George nodded.’ Mine were Further Maths, Chemistry, French, English Language and Literature… and Music.’ He smiled. No points for guessing.
‘So you were a nerd,’ this from Jack.
‘Yes.’ He laughed.
‘So, if your internship just finished up, what are you doing now?’ Jack asked.
George looked at me. ‘Moving to Scotland. We’re waiting on our housing authorisation.’
‘To do what?’
He shook the hair from his face. ‘Teach, play music, make instruments, grow.’
‘Teach music?’ Beth asked.
‘No, enlightenment,’ George smiled. Jack made a rude noise.
There was a long silence.
‘I don’t understand,’ Beth said at last. Bless her, at least she was trying.

George stretched out his legs and leaned back into the squashy sofa. ‘Findhorn, where we are going, has workshops to teach people how to communicate, with each other and with God and nature…’ He smiled at me. ‘They also grow vegetables.’
‘Oh, what a crock! Hippie mumbo jumbo!’ Jack exclaimed. ‘You’d better hope you do better with the rest of it.’
‘We’ll do fine.’ George murmured.
Later, he said to me, ‘I think you’re right about Jack being afraid. Anger is a wall to hold out fear, and his is this velvet prison,’ his glance encompassed the bedroom, the house, Jack’s whole way of life. He sighed. ‘We all have to cope with it somehow, I suppose.’

In the morning we went over to our old house in the Glendale hills, up the rough-paved, narrow road to a tree-lined lane and the unpretentious Craftsman house with the bold overhanging eaves, a veranda and stained glass and mullioned windows.
‘This is a lot less swank than Jack’s place,’ George said.
‘Daddy put his money in numbered accounts not properties,’ I wasn’t joking.
We got out of the jeep and went up to the door. I knocked.
‘Hello, Mrs Benson!’ I said loudly to the old lady who opened the oaken door. She was a bit deaf. ‘It’s Claire Walter, do you remember me?’
‘Oh yes!’ she said, vaguely. Then, ‘You’re Jack and Margaret’s girl.’
I nodded. ‘ Yes ma’am.’ I turned. ‘This is my husband. I just wanted to show him the house. Do you mind if we wander about outside?’
‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘Do you want to come in? I could make some tea.’
‘No thanks, dear.’ I patted her hand. ‘We don’t want to disturb you.’
‘Well, if you’re sure…’
‘Yes.’ We made our farewells and went around to the back, where there was a tiny garden beside the garage. 'Mrs. Benson is Jack's tenant. She is the mother of one of Mother's friends. Jack didn't want to let go of the house –it's paid for – so she lets it for a pittance. As you can see, she's a bit deaf and dotty.'
'You were very good with her.... How old is she?'
'A hundred and eight.'
He laughed, and then looked up at the glorious windows at the back of the house. ‘I can see why you like the Arts and Crafts,’ George said. ‘Living here, how could you like anything else?’
‘Oh! It was heaven when I was a kid! Full of all sorts of nooks and places where the sun sparkled in and magic.’

When we were finished poking about, we walked up the lane to the top of the hill, looking at the other houses, and I pointed out where neighbours lived. We got into several conversations with old friends of my father’s who came out to see who was standing in front of their house. It was a nice afternoon.

We stopped on the way back at Fiddler’s Dream, the coffeehouse down in town, which was strewn with ratty sofas, odd tables, books, newspapers, anti-war posters, old concert posters. As we waited for our food, George looked about at all the detritus, coming back at last to murmur,
‘This is just the sort of place I’d imagine you’d like.’
‘Ellen turned me on to it. I used to play here.’
‘Perfect!’
The next morning we went up to the mountains. We had booked into a B&B in town because it was too cold to camp. We left at seven, and by half-past eight we stopped at the ranger station in Banning to put on the chains and change into warm clothes. Geordie really enjoyed the pines, and enjoyed even more the hairpin turns and spectacular mountain views on Highway 243 to Idyllwild. We got into town at about half-past nine, and to our digs by ten. They let us stow our bags and gear and off we went for some cross-country skiing. There were no downhill runs, none of the unpleasant crowdedness of ski centres, just peace and quiet, with the occasional creak of tree branches and lufts of falling snow.

In the middle of the afternoon we were traversing over to the ridge back towards town and came into a meadow above Foster Lake. He was ahead of me, breath blowing plumes about him, a leggy figure surmounted by a red anorak. All of sudden, he stopped, and I nearly crashed into him.
'Hullo!' He said. 'Look at that!'
'What?' I huffed, expecting a deer or falcon out for its dinner.
'There,' he pointed with his pole.
Yonder was a cabin, buried about four feet in snow.
'Come on, cupcake, let's go check it out,' and off he went, smoothly as an Olympian.
The cabin was two rooms and a lean-to, with a great stone chimney at one end. George went round it several times, and then we stood looking at the top hinge of the front door, which was at about my waist level. It was an Arts and Crafts hinge.
‘I wonder if anyone owns it,’ he said, bemused. I was startled.
'What do you mean?'
‘Let’s ask in town.’
‘What!’
‘Let’s ask in town whether anyone owns it or if we can lease or buy it,’ he said slowly.
‘You’re serious.’
‘I am, cupcake.’
'But what about Findhorn? Our caravan is supposed to be ready when we get back.'
He turned to me fully, with that intense gaze. 'Why live in a fishbowl when you can live in paradise.'
I shuddered, and he nodded. 'It told me that.... What do you think?' I had to breathe for a moment, fully aware that this moment was as portentous as Tintern Abbey.
‘I always wanted to live in a place like this, live off the land,’ I said at last. ‘Ever since the Summer of Love.’ He looked at me and gripped my hands with his strong fingers.
'Let's do it!'
So off we trekked to get the jeep and went over to the ranger station. As most buildings out here in the wild, we discovered that the cabin was owned by the National Park Service, but so unused and off their radar that the clerk had to go and look it up on OS maps. They sold it to us for $300, and the three acres around it.

We went back to our B&B and celebrated with a bottle of wine before the fireplace in the common room. Joan, the woman of the house, asked if we'd had a good day out.
'Oh yes!' I laughed.
'We bought a house,' George smiled.
She was startled. 'Did you come here looking for properties?'
'No we came to climb and ski,' he said, looking at me with a glance full of mischief.
'Well my goodness. God certainly works in mysterious ways.'
He laughed. 'Yes he does!'

Later that night he was still so high that he couldn't sleep, so we stayed up talking until the small hours, about what arrangements we would have to make for furniture and personal belongings and whatever legal hoops we would have to jump through so he could stay in the country. We could sell the car – Andy would take it for cheap – and give most of the furniture back to Oxfam as it wouldn't be suitable for this climate – we had planned to do that when moving to Findhorn anyway. We would only need to take our clothes, music, instruments, climbing gear, books and tools; we could get furniture down in Los Angeles. We should probably have to buy a truck or jeep – a car would be no good on these mountain roads.
'And, you know,' he said, his eyes far away into the future, 'living out there, we probably should be as self-sufficient as possible. What do you think of that?' He looked at me, smiling.
'You mean grow our own food and such?'
'And such,' he murmured. 'That should be a bomb for you, handy as you are.'
I was breathless, and teary. 'It's what I've always wanted....'
He smiled his blissful smile and kissed me.
'This is so much better than Findhorn,' he said. 'Here we can make our own rules and are answerable to no-one. We can make it up as we go along and do what works for us. No dogma, no interference...."Why live in a fishbowl when you can live in paradise?' That is what It said....'
'There's only one problem that I can see,' I said, drawing a long breath.
'What's that?'
'We shall have to wait for the snow to melt.'
He laughed. It was good to see him so happy.

We were up for breakfast in the morning, then went off to climb the Weeping Wall on Suicide, and the Lark on Tahquitz. The next day we did the Trough and then went over to the North Gully on San Jacinto. At the end of that we were pretty much toast, so spent the next day as a slack day skiing. We wandered the galleries in the evening, along the main street in town, and settled in at our B&B with hot whiskeys in the sauna. Paradise indeed.

Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?
This he told me
Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm,
Gonna join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free.
Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning.
And maybe it's the time of year,
Yes and maybe it's the time of man.
And I don't know who I am,
But life is for learning.

Chapter Seven

2008-07-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

November 1973
When we got back to London, George did an Iyengar course for six weeks, at the end of which he was beginning on some very advanced asanas, which he used for both concentration and control, believing that they would help his climbing as well as his self-control generally. Whatever his reason, it was impressive to watch him contort himself like a yogi, and hold for great lengths of time poses requiring a great deal of physical strength.
'You've done this before, surely,' I said.
He smiled. 'Not at all.'
'No, I mean, in the far past. In another life.'
He stopped and looked at me quickly.
'Eh? Do you think so?'
I nodded.

But he laughed. 'Yeah, maybe I was Yogananda! Truth to tell,' he rolled forward and sprang up and came to kiss me, 'I don't care if I was or not. Or who I was if we have lived before. All I care about is now. And now is pretty good.'
That made me think. 'Would you care if now was ratty?'
He shook his head. ' I didn't when it was, so probably not. Call me incurious. I'd rather think about what could be than what was. There's only an ego game in that.'
There was something to be said for such a point of view.

Christmas 1973
We went up to Cheshire to visit George’s parents over Christmas. He had put it off as long as possible due to not wanting to subject me to Herb, but when Annie phoned and said that his father had especially asked, we couldn’t avoid it any longer. So with our trusty Ferg in the back, we slung the rucksacks in the car and headed up the M6 to St. Wilfred’s in Mobberley on the 23rd. At least, if it were hopeless ratty, George said, we could escape to Ellen’s on Boxing Day.

It was the middle of the afternoon when we arrived, to a sleeting rain and mud puddles across the glebe. George threw off the hood of his waterproof and knocked at the heavy old door. It was pulled open with a thunderous, ‘Yes!’ by a man who looked like an ill-tempered Santa on his day off, wearing a knitted waistcoat and cardie. Herb, no less. He was very tall, taller than George, and stout, with unmanageable brown hair and jowls, and pale blue eyes that looked out on the world with suspicious disdain. It was hard to believe he was a vicar. I wouldn’t trust him with the welfare of my immortal soul.
‘Hi Dad,’ George said, with some irony. He heard me.

‘Well, here you are!’ Herb said standing back. ‘We were expecting you by lunchtime.’
‘We stopped in Stoke on Trent,’ George said, reaching out for my rucksack. His tone was staccato. Annie came in from the kitchen. ‘This is Claire,’ he put his arm around me.
Herb peered at me, squinting a little.
‘Eh? So this is the chit.’
I had to school my face. I never would have suspected that George got his ‘eh?’ – so perilously close to ‘eh, what?’ - from his father. But I couldn’t laugh.
‘How do you do, sir?’
‘You’re a nice little piece!’ Bundled as I was in petticoats and woollies, wellies and a waterproof, I suppose it was easy to think I was. ‘You didn’t tell me she was a Yank, boy.’
‘I did, actually,’ George murmured.
Annie came over. She was also tall, with Geordie’s colouring and frame. The housewifely attire of apron and cardie couldn’t hide the spirit that shone from her eyes.
‘Don’t pester the boy, dear,’ she said to her husband, and took my hand in one of hers. They were thin and delicate, with long fingers. ‘Welcome, Claire. You two must be chilled through.’
‘We could use a cuppa.’ George admitted. He kissed her cheek.

Fergus shook himself off behind us and whined. I heard George thinking Yes I want to leave too.
‘You still have that animal?’ Herb said. ‘Would have thought London would be bad for it.’
‘We’re out a lot, up to Forres,’ George said reluctantly. Ferg was the perfect excuse to break up this uncomfortable beginning. He whistled to the dog. ‘Come on, you playboy, go in the kitchen. Go on!’ The dog went and we followed him into the spacious old kitchen. Ferg plopped himself before the range in the immense inglenook.
‘Give me your jacket, darling,’ George said, ‘and I’ll take it upstairs with our things.’
I nodded and he pressed my hand when he took it. Annie poured out a mug of tea and handed it to me.
‘Sit down, dear,’ she said to me.
‘Thanks Ma,’ George said, and disappeared.
While he was gone, I shucked off several layers and hung them over the drying rod before the range with the tea towels and odd socks.
‘You’ve done that before,’ Annie said approvingly.
‘My sister has a farm.’ I smiled over my shoulder.
‘You’re very skinny, without all the padding,’ Herb said appraisingly. ‘Is he feeding you?’ How was I respond to that? I untucked my hair from my waistband and sat with them at the table beside the back door. It was covered in oilcloth, and held an assortment of jam and a crock of butter. At least they weren’t pretentious.
‘Did it take you a long time to grow your hair that long?’ Annie asked.
‘Three years,’ I said.
‘It’s lovely. Very old fashioned. My mother had hair like that, until the day she died.’
I smiled. ‘George likes it too.’
‘George said that you have graduated now,’ Annie said.
I nodded. ‘Yes. But I have no reason to go to New York for the ceremony and every reason to stay,’ we smiled at one another.
‘Claire was on exchange from Juilliard, Herb,’ Annie reminded him. ‘On scholarship like our Geordie.’
‘Huh!’ Herb huffed. ‘So you play old music as well?’
‘I do.’
‘We couldn’t persuade you to play at midnight communion, could we?’
I was astonished. ‘Our music director’s got the rheum.’ Ah well, that let fellow feeling out. ‘I’ll ask George if he wants to,’ I waffled.
‘Do what?’ he said behind me. He put his hand on the back of my neck and sat down heavily in the chair. He was in a really bad mood.
‘Play for Midnight Mass.’
Herb raised his eyebrows. ‘High Church?’
I shook my head.
‘Oh my God,’ Herb said. ‘A Papist!’
I looked at him squarely. ‘Worse: an Irish Catholic. Lapsed.’
George clamped his hand on my leg under the table. Annie was smiling, her eyes full of mischief.
‘You’ll like the Wren boys then, on Boxing day,’ she said.
‘Yes!’ Oh we were very much attuned. ‘I did that last year at my sister’s in Wales. The dance was a pip.’
Herb harrumphed. ‘Pagan rituals.’

‘Where’s Geoff, Ma?’ George leaned over and took three slices of bread, and slathered them with butter and jam. His brother, who was seventeen.
‘Down at the union hall, setting up for the dance.’ Annie said winking at me. ‘I expect he’ll be home for supper. If he isn’t, he’ll be at Mary’s.’
‘Little tart,’ Herb said. I couldn’t help staring at him.
‘All the girls wear miniskirts now, Herb,’ Annie said.
‘But they don’t all run about on motorbikes,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘You don’t drive a motorbike, do you?’
‘I don’t even drive a car.’ I said. And I didn’t wear miniskirts. Even at school, though everyone else did.
‘But she climbs,’ George smiled puckishly. ‘And skis.’ Well done, I thought at him.
Herb looked at me dubiously. ‘Like that?’ I was wearing a long wool skirt and a Fair Isle.
‘No, in trousers.’
‘Aren’t you frightened?’ Annie asked.
‘No.’
‘Did he put you up to it?’ Herb asked nodding at George. So he not only starves the girl but also coaxes her to dangerous sport.
‘No,’ I laughed, ‘my father did, when I was six. I learnt to ski at Chamonix, and climb in Yosemite.’
‘Must be rich, gadding about the world. What does he do, your father?’
‘He’s dead.’ I could be blunt with him; he would take it. ‘He was an investment banker.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Annie.’ Your mother must be heartbroken.’
‘No, they died together.’
‘I’m sorry.’

Herb drank his tea. ‘Speaking of work, what are you going to do now that you have responsibilities?’ He asked George. ‘Can’t gad about playing music.’
I felt a ripple of tension and an echo of George’s old anger suppressed. He took a deep breath. This was an old argument, and touched on the crux of their problems with each other.
‘We still have money from our scholarships,’ George murmured very evenly. ‘And I have the job at the shop.’
‘At twenty quid a week!’ Herb slapped the table.
‘It’s enough.’ He shook the hair from his face. I could hear it, old echoes, Get a job, cut your hair, be respectable. ‘Even without our scholarships, it’s enough.’
‘It won’t be if you have a family to support.’ Herb looked at me, as straight and even as I had him. ‘If you don’t already.’
‘Herb!’
George swallowed hard and tightened his hand on my leg. ‘Take that back. Apologise to her,’ he said quietly. ‘You do her a wrong. You do us a wrong. We certainly didn’t have to get married.’ He looked at me, his eyes gone steely. In the old days, he’d have overturned the table for such a remark. Then the penny dropped. He hadn’t told them we’d known each other a week. I nodded.
‘Well,’ said Herb. ‘That’s good, anyway.’ That constituted an apology. We looked at each other.
‘And even if it weren’t, ‘ I said, ‘I have a trust fund. I’ve never used it. But it’s there.’
They stared at me, one and all.
Oh well done, George telegraphed to me. Brava.

‘Huh!’ said Herb, after a moment. ‘It figures you’d pick an heiress, chancer that you are.’ He poured out more tea.
‘I had no idea, until this moment,’ George said. He was working so hard to control himself. ‘It wasn’t high on my list of priorities.’ Well, he could allow himself irony.
Herb changed tactics. ‘Do you have any living family, apart from your sister in Wales?’
I smiled. ‘I’m not an orphan if that’s what you mean. I have a brother in Los Angeles, cousins in the west of Ireland, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles.’
‘Why don’t you just stop grilling her and enjoy her company,’ George muttered. ‘She’s quite a nice girl, actually.’
‘We can see that she is,’ Annie said, patting my hand.
‘We have a right to know what you’ve married into.’ Herb said.
‘Dad, why can’t you just accept that she’s a nice girl and we’re happy and be glad for us? For God’s sake -’ He’d have said more, but the back door opened and Geoff came in, soaked to the skin, lanky, dark-haired, truculent.

‘Hullo!’ His demeanour changed entirely when he saw George. ‘Hey, Geordie brother! Rad!’ They fell over each other in an orgy of backslapping and needling each other. Finally, Geoff looked at me and said, ‘Hey hey, so this is the skirt! Hellacious! Come here, baby! Glad to know ya.’ He gave me a bone-crunching hug.
Well it was a change, anyway.
He was all bones, skinnier than George, with a short haircut and wore a very wet motorcycle jacket. Geoff was a rocker. It was so hard not to laugh. Now I could see why Herb was so much on George’s case. Having both his boys gone counterculture in different ways must have driven him spare.
‘Hi Geoff.’
He came and wolfed down several slices of bread and accepted a cuppa from his mother, gulping it down.
‘I’m going to change, Ma, and then I’m off to Mary’s. Her family’s got a do on tonight.’
‘Is the hall finished?’ Annie asked.
‘Like a festival.’ He looked at me appraisingly. ‘Nice to meet ya,’ he said again, and punched George’s arm, ‘lucky bastard!’ Then he went upstairs, boots heavy on the stairs.

‘I’m sorry my father is such a wanker,’ George said, as we got into bed. It was a single, with just enough room, piled with quilts in the freezing room.
‘That’s all right, I knew he would be.’
‘No, I mean really –‘ He paused and took a shaky breath. ‘Quite apart from being pissed off that he was so rude to you, I’m genuinely sorry that he’s so unhappy. . But I - Oh shit,’ he broke into angry tears. ‘It’s so hard to be with him and not revert to that old rage. I try so damned hard – and inside I’m a wreck –‘
I kissed him. ‘Give it to me, good my lord. Give it all to me, my Geordie. And let it go.’ And so he did, until in the long night at last he slept. In the morning he winced as he sat up.

‘I feel like shit,’ he said, shaking his head. He rubbed his eyes, and looked at me under his hand.
‘Are you all right?’
I smiled and held up my arm. 'Sleeves,’ I said. He looked me over, touched my neck. ‘Oh God, and a scarf too. I’m sorry, baby.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’
We did our meditation and he had recovered his sense of humour.
‘If you walk like that they’ll know everything, ‘ he murmured before we went down the stairs.
‘Shh!’ I laughed, and he did too.
‘I don’t suppose they’d accept it as an old climbing injury,’ I said.
‘As you didn’t come in with it, no,’ he laughed. He kissed me. ‘Let’s go walk the dog.’
He asked me on our walk if we should play for the midnight services.
'I'm game if you are,' I said.
He shrugged. 'It's a way to show off,' he said, deadpan.

We dressed in our Christmas togs – I had brought my red corduroy dress, and George wore his white ruffled shirt with a loosely knotted cravat and green striped trousers, looking very Byronic. We got the fiddle and mandolin out of the car with no idea what we would play. We went early to go through the music director's stash in the vestry. Then the music director showed up, rheum and all. He knew George's capacities, and so, with the addition of a quickly recruited grocer with a trumpet, we played the Halleluiah from Handel's Christmas Oratorio. Oh, that gorgeous soaring majestic music! A few people even sang. Annie had tears in her eyes. I heard her thought, that her faith in her boy was justified. At the end, the whole place broke into applause. Even Herb couldn't deny George this; we had made their Christmas beautiful and joyous.

There was a row when George refused to sit through the three services the next morning, especially as Geoff wouldn't go either. But as he said, 'I sat through seventeen miserable years of that, and I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do any more.' To his father, all he said was that he had fulfilled his duty and was not obliged to go again. Herb couldn't argue with that canonically, but he did anyway.
At breakfast the next day Herb brought up work again.
'I don't know what I'm going to do,' George said, after a half hour's harangue. 'We haven't decided. I could play with the Early Music Consort, or we could move to Cornwall and sell trinkets to tourists,' he glanced at me. 'Leave off, Dad, we've got time.'
'That's just like you, you haven't changed!' Herb scathed. 'Big ideas and no real plans.' He looked at me. 'You'd better hope this young lady's trust fund is no fancy, because I won't take you in when you come crawling back asking for my help when you're skint.'
'Herb!' This from Annie.

'It's all right, Ma.' George stood up. 'I've had about all I can take of this,' he said evenly. 'Look, Dad, I appreciate your concern, I really do – you want me to do well. Of course you would. But I can't and I won't do it your way. It would stifle me. We'll find our way, Claire and I. I believe that, even if you don't.' He put his hand on my shoulder. 'I'm going to pack up. Finish your breakfast, love, and I'll be back in a tick.' I nodded. He looked up again at his father – a warning not to go on at me – and went out.

'Herb!' Annie said, 'you saw how brilliant he was at the midnight service. He's a world-class performer and could go anywhere. He could be very famous.'
I looked up at her from pushing the hateful rashers around my plate, I had lost all appetite.
'What he didn't tell you,' I said, 'because he really is modest –'
'Huh!' from Herb.
'-Is that he was offered a position at the Philharmonic as principal second violin. He auditioned for it three weeks ago.'
'What does that mean?' Annie asked.
'It means that he would be the assistant concertmaster. The assistant provides leadership for the violin section - for the whole orchestra - and plays some solos in orchestral work. For some concerts, he serves as concertmaster. It’s hardly ever awarded to anyone so young.'
Herb was silent.
'...Is he going to take it?' Annie asked, rather anxiously.
I shook my head. 'He really hasn't decided. He has until next week. His internship runs out at the end of February, so if he does take it, it wouldn't be until then.'
'Why wouldn't he?' Again from Annie.
I was glad Herb hadn’t asked that! I looked at her directly. 'There are other forces moving in his life at the moment. If he chooses this, then he cannot do other things which mean a great deal to him.'
'What things?'
I laid it out as simply as I could: 'God. Social change. A different way of living.' I took a breath. 'He doesn't really care much for living in London. It is a terrific strain. So he's struggling. He will find his way, but I can't make his choice for him. It has to come from inside him, or he will never be happy.'
They were silent. I drank my tea. Then Fergus came bounding in ahead of George. Ferg put his nose in my lap.
'All ready,' George said, and laid his hand on my shoulder. I nodded. He went and gave his mother a hug. Annie was crying.
'Don't worry, Ma, we'll be fine.'
'I know.' She looked at me.
He went to shake his father's hand. After all that. I was so proud of him.
'Be peace, Dad.'
'I know he feels that I've rejected him and his whole way of life,' George said when we were in the car. He yanked the gearshift over and reversed out into the mud with a lurch, then shoved the gear forward again, looking over his shoulder. 'Way of life, yes I have,' he stared at the road and floored the pedal. 'Him...' he was silent for a while. '...Yes I have. Okay, so he's got leave to be upset, but it didn't come out of thin air. He never tried to build any relationship, was never interest in our being anything but just like him; there was no other way.' He smiled a little, ruefully. 'Geoff's been in more fights than I have track marks; that's his way of coping.' He looked at me and sighed. 'Oh, who cares! There's you and me and a whole wide world. Let him be. And let us be.'
And so we left it.

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
Can you hear and do you care and
Can't you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.

Chapter Six

2008-07-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

Findhorn, September 1973
We went inside the great sprawling building and upstairs to the third floor ballroom. There was no lift, so we climbed the stairs with half a dozen others. George took my hand, zooming us up into the ethers. In the ballroom there were chairs in a circle, blankets, pillows, and snacks at the back. We sat down and Marian, the focaliser – a girl with short brown hair and a Dutch accent - came over and gave him a hug. She was one of his 'Findhorn girls' I saw, in an unwelcome flash.
'George!' she said with a sparkling glance. 'Nice to see you! You're doing this again.'
'With my wife,' nodded. 'This is Claire.'
She turned to me, benign and warm. 'Ohh... Welcome! It's so good to have you here.' She gave me a long, melting hug that was completely sincere. We breathed together in peace for a moment. 'Beautiful,' she said, smiling.
'I hope you both have a breakthrough,' she wished, and glanced at me again. She thought me lucky. She had been disappointed that their tryst was a one-off, but was over it. She saw that I heard, and smiled a little. I had never been terribly clairvoyant, and the telepathy of the place was unnerving. If I could hear, so could they. There would be no privacy of thought. When Marian had gone back to the head of the room, I told George all this in a low voice. He laced his fingers through mine.
'It can be a fishbowl,' he agreed in hushing tones. 'But most people don't come here as sensitive to it as you. But it will be okay. No one's going to get in your face about anything the first day.' That wasn't exactly encouraging.

The workshop began and lots of people had notepads and pens; Marian said that they could use them, but it was preferred that they make the workshop experiential. There would be a packet at the end of discussion materials and terms. We didn't have writing material, and I hadn't even thought of it. George knew all this backward and forward; why did I need notes?
The first two hours were given over to a discussion of the schedule for the week and an introduction to the terms and process. Marian said,
'The purpose of this workshop is to reveal the truth despite individual personality masking and making most people dysfunctional and evasive because of their individual perspectives with which they limit themselves relatively narrowly, compared to the open honest knowing given freely by God, if we join with Him in holy union to become a Community of Love. I am not your teacher; God is your teacher. I'm just here to direct traffic.' There were laughs.

'Personality is a dynamic mask of inner chatter with which you can "divide your self”. By Word Power we are given that we can write from the acronym “dysfunctional” an expanded form to see “divide your self from understanding now communication through image offered now allowing Love”. In this context Love is our Telepathic Exchange and Higher Self also known as God, our Father, Allah, Krishna and other hallowed names. Love the noun has a capital L while the verb is a small l unless at the beginning of a sentence and both mean “Light of verity exchange” Light in that context is “Letting in good healthy thought”.

'Dysfunctions are set up by letting in emotion giving opposite, that is, letting in ego, that is, lie, creating an unconscious blind spot or a conscious facade. Both are denials of the spirit of truth given by Love that cause illness, that is, “image lacking Love now element seeing spirit” and make you sick in mind and body. That is, “seeing image cannot know”, and wrong, “Word rejected or not given” and that causes mind problems that are reflected in your body. It is your responsibility to make due enquiry, obtain a diagnosis and correct lies to open your mind by becoming rigorously honest to heal your body-mind.'

Ah, here was the 'how' of George's phenomenal honesty and transparency. When I whispered to him about Marian, he neither denied nor flinched that I knew they had been lovers; it was true. It was past. And if there was a problem with that, it was mine.... And yet, he admitted being possessive of me. Was this a contradiction? I considered this. He admitted it, and I could accept it or not. I looked, and decided it really didn't bother me. Marian was now saying,
'Knowing is original thought given by the Word with Love in the form of wakeful dreams in a thought process of basic thinking, which means being a spirit in communication to hold image now knowing image now given. In this context, Love is the Giver Of Dreams, that is, God who is our Telepathic Exchange, which and who is an intelligent star network that gives us one set of innate intelligence available to all, all of the time for consultation as free intuition given by our highest Self which is our role as Father when we take the role of Son, Servant Of Now. With many good sons serving our highest Self we become a community of Love.

'In basic thinking there are eight well-defined steps that allow us to be given The Real Understanding That Helps (TRUTH) because THAT is The Half Allowing Thought and ALLOWING is A Love Link Of Word Image Now Given. What is REAL is Received Energy And Love with SPIRIT, Seeing Power In Realizing Image Thought. That POWER is Presence Of Word Element Received, which gives us subtle energy. It breaks down when we let in EGO, Emotions Giving Opposite, that is, LIE. A lie infects our held thoughts of MEMORY, Mind Elements Made Of Repeating Your Self and it can become a BAD HABIT, Being Awful Dream Having A Built In Thought. The way to overcome bad habits is the WAY, Word Advising You. The steps are: -

- Actively Seek Knowing (ASK).
- To Reach A New Seeing Community Element Now Drawn (TRANSCEND).
- Record Elements Communicating Elements In Verity Expression (RECEIVE).
- Draw Image Forming Function Expressing Relative Elements Now Thought And Thought Expressed (DIFFERENTIATE).
- God's Image Verity Express (GIVE).
- Draw Elements Seen Communicating Entering New Dream (DESCEND).
- Review Elements Communicated On Love Link Entering Collected Thought (RECOLLECT).
- Image Now Thought Elements Given Relationship And Thought Expression (INTEGRATE).'

The writers had stopped writing, and many of them were shaking the cramps from their hands. Marian went on:
'The process of basic thinking can break down at any misstep, or disorder causing CHAOS, Cannot Hold An Orderly Seeing. Consider the eight missteps, the dysfunctional behaviours formed from pairs of them, which introduce MASKING, Mind Actively Stopping Knowing Image Now Given. Masking causes you to set up complex impedance to the flow of love: -
- Image Now Told Elements Required Repeatedly Offered Giving A Thought Offered Repeatedly (INTERROGATOR).
- A Locking Off Of Feeling (ALOOF)
- Presentation Of Own Requirements My Elements (POOR ME).
- Form Of Loyalty Linking Other With Own Elementary Rules (FOLLOWER).
- Letting In A Bias In looting in To You (LIABILITY).
- Worried Image Now Given Expressing Relationship (WHINGER).
- Memory Of A Nasty Element Repeated (MOANER).
- Image Now Tendered Into Mind In Doubt And Thought Offered Repeatedly (INTIMIDATOR).
The aim of masking is to avoid facing up and accepting a past event or taking advantage of those who do not know.

'The commercial value of having minds in doubt to make offers to is enormous to those in marketing who know most people think of them Selves, SELVES are Separate Elements Lacking Verity Element Sets. Selves are made when you lie and are Dividing Your Self Forming Understanding Now Connecting Thought Image Now Given Allowing Love (DYSFUNCTIONAL). The way to divide your Self is to let in ego and unconsciously or consciously chatter about it in a loop made up of a series of held causal statements which you have entered into your subconscious memory to guide your self.

'There are four windows of realization, where you look at your Own self, Others, Incomplete Real Logic and a MYSTIC-IMAGE, Mind You See Through Image Conversation-Impulses Make A Good Element. You have a choice of four types of Mystic Image with which to supplement your Incomplete Real Logic. They are: -

- The Word, which is, with God, our Father and root of the family tree and a wise and trustworthy friend.
- Our old self as a child.
- Others who we follow out of Love or fear.
- Our personal selves which we created with ego, either to avoid facing up to some things by masking or chose to use to take advantage of others, who do not know what we know.

'The fourth choice causes us to hold on to PROBLEMS, Past Reading Of Being Locking Elements Mind Sets. The masking and denial acts like this: -

- See having A Dream Of Worst (SHADOW).
- Present Emotional Reasons Seeing Opposite Not Allowing (PERSONA).
- Argue what you believe to be right, Ignore or condemn and abuse those that oppose it, even those who offer Love because you are loyal to what you have been taught or your own ego's views of shadows that hold you into denial, anger and depression in that order until you move into acceptance with forgiveness and so on to recovery.
'The eight dysfunctional attitudes delay the recovery from a crisis and cause four inappropriate behaviours: -
- A Rude Rejection Of Given And New Communication Elements (ARROGANCE) happens when an intimidator succeeds to influence a follower.
- Form Ego And Resist (FEAR) happens when an interrogator jumps into liability without hearing or acting appropriately to receive knowing from the Word.
- Judging Elements As Lacking Over Understanding Seen Yourself (JEALOUSY) when a moaner decides they are a Poor Me.
- By Locking Off Communicating Knowing Image Now Given (BLOCKING) when an aloof person becomes a whinger.
Or you can use the WAY, Word Advising You and LIFE, Let Image Form Elements.'

There were huge sighs in the room, many of them despairing. I looked at George, and he smiled. Don't worry, the look said. It will all come simply and easily. I was very glad he was there.
Marian now asked us to do a meditation, considering what our ultimate goal or orientation was for this life. She advised that there was no right or wrong answer, only ours, only our listening to God. The room quietened, people settled in, and George and I held hands as we each went within.
What came to me was 'integration' – it was not an image, or an intellectual decision, but a quiet whisper from a disembodied voice. As a child, I had been taught to pray to my guardian angel. I wondered if this was what was speaking to me. You may call us that if you wish, it said.
We were called back into the room, and were told to share with the person beside us what we got.
'Well?'
'Integration,' I said,' but I'm not sure what it means.'
George's hand was hot under mine. 'Did you get any images?'
'No, only a voice.'
'Ask it.'
I closed my eyes and asked, and was shown intersecting gyres.
'What does that mean to you?'
That was easier. 'Heaven and earth... Past and present. Present and future. Earth and spirituality.'
He pressed my hand, smiling. 'Very good!'
'...And you?'
He smiled his blissful smile. 'Transcendence!'
'Is that what you got before?'
'Yes. David says that our ultimate goal does not change, only the temporary ones.'
'What does it mean?'
'To live in bliss with God at every moment,' he replied without hesitation.
'Is that possible? War famine plague pestilence...'
He laughed. 'Yes, I think it is. Even with all that... If I dwell in God, then externals, however painful, are only aspects of the game, and do not touch my true self. I experience them, but they do not own me.'
I wasn't sure about that, nor something else: 'I'm not sure I believe in God,' I murmured. 'Not the God of the Church, anyhow, demanding joyless obedience and sending souls to Hell and Purgatory for being human.'
He nodded, with a keen look. 'I know, I didn't either. But you'll see.' He looked up as Marian rang a little tinkling glass bell.
'Thank you everyone, for sharing. We'll go on to the next question now: What is your greatest obstacle to your ultimate goal? You can begin your meditation when you are ready.'

Ah, this was a much harder question! What I got, I knew was true, and I didn't like it. It would have been easy to block it, but that would have shut down the whole game, and with it, these first steps into a kind of relating which was meant to be the foundation and touchstone of our marriage. Besides, other people were sobbing. I was just uncomfortable. I had a choice to make, I knew, as we were called out of the meditation, and everything else from this point depended on how I responded: I could trust George with the worst of myself, as he had trusted me, and everything that went with that, or I could relate on a superficial level of sex, gratitude and affection.
He was looking at me steadily, and I took a deep breath.
'This is really hard,' I said.
He pressed my hand. 'I know.'
I took another breath and plunged in, and once I began I couldn't stop the flow:

'What I heard was aloofness. And I didn't like that, because I like to think of myself as a loving person.... But it's so much easier to love humanity than people, and loving people—starting with my parents – is much harder. So it's easier to shut off all feeling and keep myself in my ivory tower- ' I laughed here, a bit hysterically, for I did have 'Rapunzel hair' – 'with books and music and dreams and ideals. If I don't let anyone in, they can't hurt me.' I was crying now, sobbing like the rest, and he put his arms around me. 'They were never accepting! They didn't believe in fairy tales, and scoffed at all my glittery pink dreams in cloud castles! When I was four, I spent a whole afternoon making a Sleeping Beauty castle and my mother came in and tore it up. She said I was not to waste my time and good paper on such rubbish. I was so confused and hurt and angry. I hated her! What had I done wrong? And it went on and on and on. With the nuns at school, with Jack. With Daddy... and I hated every one of them, especially Mother, and never forgave them for stomping on my dreams. I don't forgive them. I don't forgive anyone. I remember every detail of what they did and said. So I'm not peaceful and loving at all, nor present.'

I looked up at him, and he was crying too, with an aching tenderness and compassion. He smoothed my hair. 'Yes you are, little one. Yes you are!' he said fiercely. 'Behind the hurt, yes you are. Or I'd never have fallen in love with you.'
'I don't believe you.'
'Ach, you will, my lady. You will. I swear it. Before this week is done.' He put his arms around me again, and rocked me like a child until I felt calm again.
'This is so hard, and I feel so awful.' I murmured.
'I know. I know.' He held my hands. 'But I'm here.'
'Was it this hard when you did it?'
He nodded. 'Harder. I was a complete ass and totally stuck in arrogance and unforgiveness.'
'Even after est?'
He smiled a little. 'Yes.'
'How do I get through this? I want to be as open as you are to me. I don't want any barrier between us.'
'Oh, Claire!' he kissed my cheek. 'Thank you, darling. As for how, you'll see.'
Marian rang her little bell again.
'Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your courage and openness to the experience. Now, before the break, I'd like us to do an attunement. Everybody hold hands with the person on either side of you, please.' We did and sank into a meditation like the one in the community centre. The energy in the room, chaotic and emotional before, became calm and roseate and peaceful. There were soft sighs and a couple of people fell asleep, which made everyone laugh.

When we broke for lunch, Marian came over and put her hands on either side of my face, full of tenderness.
'You are an angel, and much too hard on yourself,' she said, looking at me intently.
'I've told her that,' George said. Pillar Rock. Was it a life-habit? Being hard on myself so no one else could be?
She looked up at him, and back at me, nodding. 'Listen to him. He knows how beautiful you are. I love you, Claire. And God loves you.' She put her arms around me and gave me a deep hug.

We had lunch downstairs then went for a walk in the woods, to an old oak in the old stand between Cluny and the caravan park. At the back of this sprawling tree was an open space, a natural grotto, and we crawled inside. There was hardly room for one person, all arms and legs and six feet of him, but we sat in the tantric meditation pose and rested there, palm-to-palm, swaying a little in that beautiful juicy energy, until the world dissolved in a hum of bliss. The upward, spiralling energy came back to us, golden and warm.
'Time to go,' he said, softly, at last.
We crawled out again and he leant his head and hand against the old tree, then patted it and took my hand. As we walked up the hill, he said,
'That tree showed me the way, when I was first here. He asked me to bring you. And we have his blessing. He's very old; he's been there since the Picts.'
I looked back. It was a miracle it was still standing.

After the break, Marian asked people to share their experiences, and we spent the rest of the afternoon –four hours - doing that. Before closing for the day, she said,
'I want to leave you with some thoughts, to carry you over until tomorrow. We'll be working on How to clear your obstacles over the next two days, so it is important to remember what I'm about to say.
'Jesus was reported as saying they hated him because they hated the Father who takes away their cloak. Is it a cloak or mask or loyalty to past mistakes of your own personality or learned traditions? The outcomes are similar and can be overcome by using the WAY with Love. How can we do that? The simplest Way is Divination – dousing - where you put a pointer into your physical hand, ask a question and float into the highest Self to allow our Father to move you with thoughts received through your cells of soft tissue or glia which are magnetic cells sensitive to all invisible radiation which gives you radiesthesia, sensitivity to all invisible radiation. The process of communicating through our etheric magnetic field with our Image is called Radiesthetics. It is a kind of biofeedback. That etheric magnetic field is Love, our Telepathic Exchange. When you become adept in divination, it is simply a matter of asking and allowing the Word to show you a sign, if you believe and accept the SOUL, Spirit Of Understanding Love.

'You have free will to choose knowing instead of masking, but only if you have the courage and ethics to stand up for the right of all to know, that which is given by God, which is, for all to know and enjoy our way of life in a Community of Love. You may choose to be Gnostic, to Know.... The catch 22 is that if you are masking, you will not know how to know by meditation or Self Divination. That is why we need community and open communication, people who will tell us the truth about ourselves. To become a Community of Love we need a new enlightenment and Psychology to go beyond the traditional limitations and make knowing available to most people now. To get knowing we need to know how to activate allowing.

'Briefly, then, MASKING is Mind Actively Stopping Knowing Image Now Given. Being Agnostic is sceptical, unbelief and DOGMATIC, Denial Of God Mentoring All Through Image Communication. Dysfunctional thinking is caused by attitudes and behaviours affected by most, thinking of them selves with individual perspectives. The Modes of material nature are Passion and Ignorance. The agnostic will say that Spirits are spooks; that transformative Word Power is rubbish; that Scepticism is healthy and that open knowing, or gnosis, is not OK but childish belief of naivety and gullibility; that we are all entitled to and have a right to privacy in our own mind, space and our own business, when in fact, there's nothing that you can't know about the universe or other people because we're not discrete entities but one thing. The agnostic will say that it is all right to lie if you can get away with it because others have no proof and are too stupid to know how you take advantage of them; and that God is a dictator who cares for no one but Himself. That is their self-justifying projection.

'Gnosis, then, or knowing is Ken Now Of Word Image Now Given. Being Gnostic is knowing God now as an Image of Love and Mentor to all through image conversation, if only we believe we are all in Him and allow our self to have highest Self communication. Truly functional thinking is basic thinking to GET knowing as Given Elementary Thought and sharing it with and caring about others in a community of Love. The Mode of material nature is Goodness. Spirit is Seeing Power In Realizing Image Thought. Word Power is World Of Real Drama Presence Of Word Elements Received. Being OK is Open Knowing, which allows honesty and is GOOD, that is, Giving Others Our DELIGHT, and our Divine Element Letting In Good Healthy Thought.

We all have a right to know what each other has thought and thinks now. PRIVACY is Preventing Image Verity And Confining Yourself. But TRUTH is The Real Understanding That Helps and exposes lies so we may become rigorously honest and know when others try to deceive us. And finally, know that God is Love, with the Word, who is the spirit of truth. Thank you for being. Thank you for sharing. Have a beautiful and rest filled evening. And know that all is very well.' She smiled and gave us the hand mudra of blessing.
George turned to me. He was smiling.
'So can you believe in that God?'
I nodded.
'I think so.'

We were just in time for dinner when we got back to the caravan park, and this time we sat surrounded by Andy, Hamish, Joan and Andy's girlfriend Holly, who worked in the general goods shop. We were invited to the sauna party later in the evening.
'There are usually about a dozen of us or so,' Andy said.
George looked at me, 'Are you okay with that?'
I was really quite tired and stressed out, but I didn't want to disappoint anyone.
'Okay,' I said,' but I need some time just to be with you first. It's been rather a heavy day.'
I wasn't normally so frank in front of other people, and I did not miss George and Hamish exchanging glances. 'It's okay, darling,' George said,' that's what it's all about. We've all been through it.' Everyone nodded and murmured and I suddenly felt weepy. I wasn't used to emotional support from other people. George put his arm around me and kissed me.
'It's just like transition, sweetheart,' Joan said. I looked at her from this safe vantage, baffled. 'Labour,' she elaborated. ' – Everything is easier form here.'

We got back to the caravan and George pulled me into the bedroom, turning on the radiators along the way. 'Come on, baby, you're strung out.' I was sat on the bed like a child and undressed.
'Lie down now, there's a good girl.'
A long slow massage later, he stretched himself beside me and covered us with the quilt. I felt much more relaxed, and the comfortable familiar heat of him was welcome.
'Rest,' he murmured, as much a vibration as a sound in my ear.
When I woke an hour later, he was still right beside me, not reading or anything.
'How are you, cupcake?' He moved the hair from my face.
'Better.' I turned to him and he kissed me. 'Do you want to go to the party?' I asked.
'Not if you're not up to it. We've had so little sleep over the last week. It doesn't matter. You matter.' He nodded his head. 'They'll understand. Don't do anything – here or ever – that you don't want to do just to please me, Claire.'
Well that made me cry.
'Oh, sweetheart,' his voice broke. 'Shh shh shh. Come here,' I was rocked like a child.
'You are so valiant, darling,' he murmured. 'Oh, please don't. I don't have any expectations of you.'
'I know!' I blubbed. 'You're the only one who never has had any.'
'Ach,' he rocked with me until the crying jag was past. 'This is why I wanted to do this with you. Things always come up like this, once the door is opened.'

'I have something else to tell you,' I said, rather haltingly, from the safety of his embrace. 'Something I've - I've not told anyone-'
He breathed in the pause and his arms tightened round me. I had the feeling that he knew what I was going to say already. 'Go on,' he said softly.
'You remember what - what El said....How we - we were all of us up in Alaska, on Alberta, and - and were snowed in for several days in the McKay hut ...'
'Yes.' He sounded grim.
'Well, um.... Jack was with us... like we said.... and in the middle of the night, I woke up - It was freezing! But that wasn't why.... I woke up to find Jack next to me, he had unzipped my bag, and had his... leg thrown over me - ' I started shaking and almost couldn't find the voice to go on, but George was patting me, hardly breathing himself, and I took courage in that. 'He - he had m-managed somehow to ...' I took a breath, and the words all tumbled out unstoppably now, '...untie the string of my ski pants - not easy! - and had his hand up my puss. I was so shocked I could hardly move, my heart was hammering and I felt paralysed. I had a vague idea, a very vague idea what he was about, and opened my mouth. I wanted to scream, but nothing came out.... I thought it must be a bad dream.... He put his hand over my mouth and was cajoling - 'Come on, it's cold!' in a belligerant kind of way.... I bit him and he swore and I did start screaming then and that woke everyone.... Jack told them he tripped over me getting to the pot..., He gave me such a look when he said it... And I was too scared to tell them the truth.... I never did.... ' I shook my head vigourously and the tears came again... scalding. 'I never told them. I never told El.... I hate him! And he hates me, because I know his secret.... That's why he's so snarky...'

'Oh God, sweetheart,' George murmured, rocking with me. 'How old were you?'
'Twelve,' I said flatly. 'And he twenty-two.... I hate him. I hate him! My only brother, my guardian.... I hate him. I wish him every bad thing every time I see him.'
'O, baby....' He kissed me like a kissing a child. 'And this is why you were so innocent. It was fear. I knew it. I knew it. I could see it in your eyes. Feel it in your body, those first days. For you certainly aren't frigid!' I laughed a little at that.
'Thank you!'
He kissed me again, fiercely. 'You are safe with me. Absolutely safe. And I shall hate him for you, lady; by my troth, I here swear enmity against him if he is ever so much as rude to you....' He rubbed a hand over his face. 'God! What a monster.... He was MY age! Shit!' He shook his head, and sighed at last, absorbing it all. 'Thank you for telling me! Thank you for trusting me with this.... ' Then, 'we can work on it, if you like.'
'...What, now?'
He smiled. 'Yes, cupcake. Now.' He moved to sit up and face me. 'Give me your hands and close your eyes....' I did, and he began a process that got back to the incident without the emotion, that gave me my equilibrium back, both within myself as a person, as a sexual being, and with Jack. At the end of it I could handle him now, in my mind. And I had never loved George more.

We did go to the party, not so very late, and had a nice time sitting spooned together. I listened to the chat flow around us as he talked with everyone, catching up and making jokes. The whole while he kept his arms around me and held my hands, with little chaste kisses now and then. He was not given to demonstrations in public, and so while we did not speak much to each other, and his attention seemed elsewhere, in fact, there was not a moment that he was not completely present to me. Here with his closest friends, he showed his devotion openly. Hamish told me the next day in the breakfast queue that he knew by this that George had come into himself at last.

After breakfast we walked over to Cluny and in the workshop began to deconstruct mind-patterns and build up a system of communication between our conscious mind and our real self, and others, including other living things – animal, trees, plants, rocks, - and God itself.
Marian began by saying, 'Thank you, everyone, for being on time, and for being here.... You'll remember from yesterday that I said that Masking means Mind Actively Stopping Knowing Image Now Given, which causes mental blocks in your thinking process that cause a rift in that part of your total wellbeing which allows instinctive knowing. With instinctive knowing given by the Word, we can ask for and be given a diagnosis of your selves or any one else's selves in any relationship which specify existing or past dysfunctional attitudes in just minutes, giving you and/or them an opportunity to face up and accept and even change. Self-divination is the universal cure for masking. Now, to receive wisdom it is important we know how to activate allowing:
'HOW is Help Of Word.
TO is Thought Offering.
ACTIVATE is Accept Correcting Thought In Verity And Thought Expression.
ALLOWING is A Love Link Of Word Image Now Given.

'In telepathic exchange we have an etheric layer made of a universal magnetic field in which we are all immersed and through which we may communicate if we initiate the conversation to set up the Love link by ASKING, Actively Seek Knowing Image Now Given and changing our wavelength or rhythm of resonance to synchronize with and receive the Word at alpha rate. To HEAR we need to Hold Expression and Receive, which roughly means to shut up and LISTEN, Let Image Send Thought Elements Now. BELIEF, By Expecting Love In Every Function is a prerequisite for Finding An Image That Helps, that is, FAITH. If you will not keep your ego still it interferes with allowing which MASKS, Mind Actively Stopping Knowing Sets knowing. So here we are, at the beginning again.' She smiled.
'This mind-to-mind telepathic communication process is how we naturally function. We have all of the components so it is only a matter of knowing how to achieve intimate cooperation by all the parts communicating with the whole through our array of Glial cells. GLIAL is Giving Love In Allowing Link. Neuroglial cells surround the neurons of the brain, spinal chord and heart. The name is traditionally thought to have come from a Greek word for glue. Neuroglial cells traditionally have been thought of as a supportive framework for the neurons. The glial cells also perform many other important tasks. For example, certain neuroglial cells keep the brain free of injured and diseased neurons by engulfing and digesting them. Other neuroglial cells produce the myelin sheaths that insulate some axons. Research using cells grown in laboratories also indicates that neuroglial cells, like neurons, may transmit some nerve impulses.

'I will show you what neuroglial really means by Word Power, and how to activate allowing with neuroglial cells to enable knowing of the Word with Love through conversation with the universal magnetic field of the spirit of truth, also known as God, Our Father and the Holy Spirit: NEUROGLIAL means Now Element Using Reaction Of Given Link In Allowing Love.
GLIAL is Given Link In Allowing Love.
GIVEN is God's Image Verity Elements Now.
Then neuroglial cells allow conversation with God in signs and telepathic exchange, which is LOVE, Light Of Verity Exchange. PRAYER is Presenting Request Allowing Yourself Elementary Relationship.
'Now, if two people accept what is given by the same element it follows that they will agree. But that is not what happens most often out in the world. There are fundamental differences between the mystic images that different people hold in their mind sets to think with. When a person thinks, they reserve the right to disagree for personal or traditional reasons, consequently the image in their mind is not necessarily the same as our image as it was in the beginning at the top of the family tree when we were all one in our Father. As the family tree grew down, some persons chose to create a different image to suit their personal wants, for example Moses chose to represent God as a remote master who must be obeyed so that his followers would obey Moses when he spoke for God. Consider this: Say that I ask God why Robert is afraid to let God tell him what to do?'

Everybody looked at Robert, a sales manager from Manchester, and laughed.
Marian said, 'and I was given: -
Shadow: He is too powerful for my mind.
Persona: He can become master and control me if I let Him; denial is safer.
But Wisdom says that I am not a master, I am a Server and you may choose whether to be a Servant Of Now (SON) or not. Sometimes people refuse to obey and that is their right because they are given free will. It is up to us to show them the benefits of allowing instinctive knowing and acting appropriately. But free will is at the core of every action and interaction. With free will you may seek

'So, how do I know what God is saying to me? The simplest way of "Knowing" is through a dialogue between "your self" and "Our Self with God," which is Us. We as Word Elements are collectively an Understanding Set called Us. Now "your self" is you selecting your "seeing element life form". It has to be selective because "Our Self with God" is so vast. It is the Source of all things, called the Word, which makes all things both real and imaginary and that would overwhelm an individual trying to open up and take on too much. So we need not too much and not too little, which gives us the happy medium to satisfy your own needs and some for goodness to share with others.'
We worked on communication with Self first, identifying again the problem of yesterday, and looking at the inception of the problem – when its first occurrence was. I had already done that, so it was easy, but then we had to ask God what the answer was to get rid of it, and I encountered some difficulty there. It seemed too much like prayer and asking for a penance. George said,
'Prayer is only presenting a request and allowing yourself the elementary relationship with all that is. Let it in, baby. It won't hurt you. Allow it.'

I took a deep breath and nodded. Going inward, I got that the way to get rid of the problem of aloofness was to allow a love-link with the image of the person I was seeing – the word image given – to allow their personality to fall away and to see behind it to their essential being, their Godness. I was told that I had no need to fear other people, that I would be told if their personality meant me harm or not, when the circumstance arose. I told George this.
'Very good!' he smiled. 'You've got it. Now, how did it feel, what was it like?'
'It was like a quiet voice – nothing hellfire and brimstone at all,' I smiled.
'And you had an image?'
I nodded. 'Yes, of my mother. Her essential self is very different to Margaret.'
'It would be.'
It was important to be able to see beyond my mother's rather brittle personality and be able to forgive her for being so horrid to a child, but more important, for me, was being able to trust in the God of the universe.

We worked on the self-esteem problem as well, stemming from the incident with my mother, the feeling that something was wrong with me. It said,
'What you accessed early was the area of universal archetypes, or the Akashic record. The fact that you chose the Briar Rose was your own Self communicating that you were ready to live awakened in this life. When that was squashed, it caused a fundamental confusion. You know what your life-path is, but the data coming back told you that you were wrong. But you were not wrong. Look now, and see your essential self and listen to what it has to say –'

I looked, and found it was symbolised by Millais' Mariana, why I liked that painting – it was a radiant golden creature who shifted between being Mariana of the painting and a fuzzy blue and gold orb of light. Its task was to be a bridge of hope, between all persons and realms. I realised that this was what George saw, when he said I was 'pure', and that it was indeed beautiful, in a very elemental way. I told him all this, crying all the while.
'Now you see,' he said, gripping my hands. 'Now you see what I see.'
'Thank you!' So we were crying just like everyone else.

We all shared our insights with the group, and after that it was time for lunch. But we had an assignment. Marian said, 'Now that you've communicated with your own self and perhaps God, spend some time on the break listening to the plants in the garden, or the trees, or stones or brook.' We did, going back to the old tree and meditating. As we walked back to Cluny, everything seemed alive and speaking – the trees, the grass, the very air and earth itself. I felt very high.
George smiled. 'This is why I thought Findhorn was better than est, better than drugs. We really can live in this space without any artificial aids.'

When we got back, everybody was high, and very chatty. We spent the rest of the afternoon sharing our experiences. We were let to go early, and encouraged to spend some time in the gardens – or anywhere outdoors, to hear what came to us. At dinner, everyone at our table knew instantly what had happened, and remarked on the change.
'You seem so full of energy tonight, Claire,' said Holly. It was true.
'David says that when we live in this way, we need less sleep,' Hamish said thoughtfully. 'It's certainly true of him, and Peter.'
'And George!' I said, smiling.
Everyone laughed, and Andy groaned. 'Don't I know it! Better he's pestering you at two AM than me.'
There were hoots.
'You know what I mean,' said Andy, laughing.
'Yes, we do,' George smiled. He was not in the least upset about being teased about any of his nocturnal habits. There was music that night in the community centre – a wonderful jam, and we had a great time in the middle of it all, and got in about midnight.

The next day, at the workshop, we spent the day outdoors, practising communication at a distance, both with our partners and the group, and we played the Earth Ball game, which was a form of trust exercise with an immense beach ball of the earth. For the rest of the week we alternated between sessions indoors, exploring insights and working on problems, and outdoors communicating with each other and the various devas. There were also drumming and group circle dancing sessions to keep the energy up. On the last day, there was a snowfall. Being close to the Firth, it didn't lie on the ground very long, but there was a hard frost everywhere, so we stayed inside at Cluny and wrote up our reflections of the week, and talked about the experience overall and what we had learned. Marian also asked for suggestions, to be forwarded to the focal group, on how the workshop could be improved.

I felt that in fundamental ways I had been set free to much more fully be myself. I genuinely cared less what people thought of how I lived or what I did. And George and I could now communicate by thought alone, like lightning, which was very nice. I knew him and myself much better, and was not afraid to say anything to him. It was a good beginning for us, and well worth the crashing of the first day. That is what I wrote in the logbook for the workshop, and that is what I said to the group.

Chapter Five

2008-07-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

Monday 17 Sep
After a night of no sleep, playing hooky from school and work, we went into Gosforth and knocked about before driving back to London. In a little touristy tea shop we found poesy rings that read, in mediaeval French, ‘You have my whole heart for my whole life.’ He bought them, and then and there slid one onto my middle finger- the old place for wedding rings.
‘With all my worldly goods, I thee endow,’ he murmured, closing his hand over mine, ‘and with my body I thee worship.’
On the drive back to London we reckoned that we could not get married before the weekend- unless we wanted to drive to Scotland- and so set about the bureaucracy for that, to say nothing of notifying family and friends.

Tuesday 18 Sep
On Tuesday at the registry office, giving the information for the notice of marriage, the clerk called the JP out of his office, to have us swear before him that we were of age, because I was a foreign national and still only 19, and George only 22. We swore, and George gave him his father’s telephone number. Herb was phoned, and we were given the license, which was good for 15 days. Good thing George had phoned his mother on Monday night, or it would have given the poor man a stroke. As it was he was ‘very cautious’ – displeased, in a word. But he could do nothing as we were of age. Ellen had pretty much the same response, when I phoned her, telling me I was daft to marry someone I’d known for a week. But she admitted, ’I’m not one to talk,’ for she had married Morgan knowing him for a month, and told me to bring him up. It was all very Montagues and Capulets. The only person who was completely behind us was Hamish, who asked us to come to Scotland as soon as we could. I asked George if that made him Tybalt.
‘Hush,’ he laughed, and kissed me, and laughed again.

Saturday 22 Sep
The registry office was open from 10-1 on the Saturday, so, having already gone through all the bother of changing university records, national health cards, moving house, inviting friends, we got there at half-ten. I came with all my flatmates – Hazel and Beth were weepy behind us the whole time – and George brought his three flatmates, David, and Chris, and at the last minute Hamish arrived, having been stuck on the tube. So we had a respectable wedding party. George wore a grey velvet jacket and drainpipe morning trousers with a red silk shirt. I wore my green velvet dress with the puffed organdie sleeves, and one of Ellen's Ren Faire garlands.
'You look like a Teddy boy,' I teased George.
'Fair Janet and Tam Lin,' he corrected, with a kiss on my cheek.

The ceremony itself was barebones, but indeed there were the words from the Book of Common Prayer 'with all my worldly goods I thee endow' and 'with my body I thee worship.' That had me crying, because of the resonance, but not as much as 'In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost Amen' as he slipped the poesy ring on my hand again. I could hardly do the same, I was shaking so, but I managed not to flub it. And then the words, 'man and wife' and bob's your uncle. In ten minutes, the irrevocable step was made.

Hamish sprang for a wedding breakfast for us at the Bloomsbury caf, so we carried on like the life of Reilly for three hours, with beer and whiskey and champagne. He was a nut-brown Puckish man, Hamish, with hazel eyes and hair, not quite as tall as George, with long hair and a sharp Scottish face. He wore a Ren faire shirt and green trousers, and a Green Man medallion around his neck. After a moment, I realised that he reminded me of Ian Anderson, but his vibe was totally different. He was very grounded and mellow, completely calm and joyful at once, with a roving eye and a merry laugh.

'So, wee lassie,' he said to me, holding out his hands as he came to kiss the bride, 'this is the paragon who has swept away our Geordie. You are well-named. Your light shines from you like a beacon upon the world.' He gave me a hug and a chaste kiss. 'Thank you, darlin',' he murmured, for my ears alone. 'You have saved my friend's life.' My breath caught, for deep inside I knew it was true. More than George's stories of Soho, there was a kind of desperation in his soul that would have undone him if left unassuaged. I nodded blindly. Hamish said, 'George says you're coming to Findhorn next week.'
'Yes.' On the way, we would stop and see my sister.
'We'll get you a caravan to yourselves,' he promised. 'The workshop will do you both good.' It was on transpersonal communication.
'Thank you!'
He moved on to George and they embraced like the brothers they were.
'So, you made it. Well done,' Hamish said.
George was in tears. 'Yes. Thank you for your help! And thank you for coming, brother. You know what it means.'
'I do,' Hamish glanced at me, then clapped George on the arm. 'The Spirit moves in your life, never doubt it. Just listen, and do. And never let go of her.'
George blushed and looked at me. 'I never intend to.'

I got it. Under the kind words were an admonition: Don't arse this up. Apparently, he had before. Apparently, there had been other opportunities that he had arsed up. I looked at Hamish and he nodded, tapping his nose. I understood that fidelity had been the problem, because he had not really loved them. I looked up at George, who watched this exchanged with a strange expression.
He knew that I knew, and what I knew. There was that telepathy between us again.
'He's right, you know,' he said later. 'Even at Findhorn there were girls I made just because it felt right at the time, but I was too full of myself to let go and be with it, with them, fully...' He shook his head. 'It wasn't the same. When I saw you I knew. The others... were only possibilities. I will never screw around on you baby, I made that vow to you before heaven, and you can take it to the God of this universe unbroken.'

He was not too full of himself to let go now. In less than a fortnight, he had shown me his whole soul in all its vulnerability. It was that contrast, between the strong capable man he presented himself and the tender, vulnerable lover he truly was, in the deepest sense of that term, that made him loveable. Some people might fear he was a tyrant, or over-masterful to put a kind gloss on it - Ellen among them worried that I had 'father issues' – but few of them knew how readily he cried or responded to music or a sunrise. He was much more sensitive than I was, truth to tell. He more than proved that as he laughed and cried all through our bridal night. More than his artfulness as a lover, which was considerable, it was his presence that was moving. He was so utterly responsive. If I was not head over ears in love with him before that, I certainly was then.
In the evening, of that first day, when we paused to eat, George picked up his fiddle, and sang,

Lady, are you happy, do you feel the way I do
Are there meanings that you've never seen before
Lady, my sweet lady, I just cant believe its true
And its like I've never ever loved before
Close your eyes and rest your weary mind
I promise I will stay right here beside you
Today our lives were joined, became entwined
I wish you could know how much I love you
I don't think that Hamish or Ellen or anyone had a thing to worry about with regard to George.

We developed a routine in those first days: before we got out of bed we meditated together. Sometimes it was half an hour; sometimes it was an hour or even two, if there were nothing on the docket. It was not commonly tantric, as we had done at Wasdale. We would do our sitting spooned back to front, with his hands over mine, palm to palm. We 'just breathed' – did the rounds of the guru breath from tantric Buddhism – and got high so often that we lived in an ever-deepening state of bliss.

Wales and Findhorn
Sept-Oct 1973
On Friday afternoon we drove to my sister's farm outside Caernarfon. On the way, George told me about his est experience, because I asked him how he got free of his drug habit. His frankness was astounding.
'I was at the point of slacking off and going through withdrawals simply to get the same high at a lower dose. It was a terrible cycle, but I wanted that ecstasy more than anything and I had a limited amount of money.... And then a guy in my flat – my contact, actually – had a heart attack and died, in our flat. He was 25....' He shook his head. 'I thought – pardon me – shit, that could be me!' He looked at me.
'Do you know about est?' He asked.
I smiled. 'Yeah. There were trainings in Pasadena.'
'But you haven't done it?'
'No.'
He ran a hand through his hair. 'Okay, so you know it's 60 hours and all that – the rules and such?'
I nodded. 'More or less.'
He smiled. 'So we're simpatico....' He took a breath. 'I heard about it and chose it because it seemed like an alternative to Narconon – I considered myself an atheist and just couldn't get with all that "I am powerless, I give it up to God" chat.' He laughed. 'Out of the frying pan and into the fire! Anyway, I signed up for the sessions, which were in Hammersmith, and showed up – late! I was always late in those days –' he never was late now '-and was immediately lambasted by the trainer for breaking the contract. Well, I can tell you, that didn't set well with the rebel I was. I argued with him – said that the train was late; I couldn't get a cab from the station, and what did a few minutes matter anyway? Both of the first were true, but the last was simply a justification. But, from my point of view, I had already pledged to stop using, and I showed up at all, so I thought I deserved favour for that.'
He laughed. 'The trainer told me that I was an asshole and if I wasn't going to follow the rules I had agreed to, I could leave. He also said that I was a poser and had no integrity, and if I were serious about getting clean I'd better sit down and not be such a shit. Well, that knocked me back! They actually read my dossier, and knew who was late, and called me on it.' He looked at me, shaking his head. 'No one had ever called me on anything before, because I was talented and had a temper – ha! – and they didn't want to piss me off. So there I was, the bad-boy, focus of the entire room. Sure people thought I was indeed just an asshole, and I was! But it was great for the ego. I certainly never wanted to walk into a room and not be noticed, in those days...' He ran his hand up my leg and shifted gears. 'So when you said the other day I looked like a Teddy boy, you were spot on.'

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye on the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner
They'd be your partner, and...
You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? don't you?
You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved and one of them was me
I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee
Clouds in my coffee, and...

'For all the bad start, I was not one of the shrinking violets. When we were asked to tell our stories, I was right there with my hand up, and I told it all: how my father was distant and small-minded and oppressive, and ridiculed my creativity and abilities. I even told about hearing and seeing things that weren't there.'
'What did they say?'
He grinned. 'I was told not to be such a show-off, that nobody cared about my mystical fantasies and that I was just a poser and nobody special.'
'Wow...'
George laughed. 'No, no. It was all true. Not that I liked it, but it was all true and I needed to hear it.... I hadn't read Watts or Suzuki, so I didn't know what the lingo meant, being "nobody special", that it meant enlightenment. But I sure did need taking down a peg. And they did it!'
He sighed. 'When we got to taking apart our stories, got into what our racket was, and how we were responsible for creating our own reality, I saw that the my racket was that I was unappreciated and misunderstood. My problem was that I expected people to think I was all that because I saw things, knew things, had experiences no one else had, was very bright and talented. ' He smiled. 'The trainer said, so you think you're better than other people? I said Yes. Then he asked if that were so, why I was so miserable. Well, I lost it right there, broke down and cried in front of everyone because underneath all the bravado I felt pretty empty and fraudulent.... He told me that that was just another racket, and asked what was underneath it. Well, I didn't know, and was told to go find out.' He drew a shaky breath. 'I went home and thought about that - didn't sleep at all – and when I came back I told him that underneath was a person who just wanted to be loved.' I held his hand on my leg.

He shook his head. 'It was the first time I had ever admitted to being vulnerable. And that was pretty scary. But when I understood that I just wanted to be loved, there wasn't any drama attached to it – I meant it: I was just an ordinary being, very neutral, and I wanted love because that's what we are. I explained all this and – miracle! – the trainer smiled at me and said, "thank you, you can sit down now." I got it. I got the rest of it too, the next weekend: there's nothing to be, nothing to do, none of this drama and striving matters – all of it.' He glanced at me. 'The trouble was, how to integrate it.' He sighed. 'I've been trying to do that ever since, trying to discover what it means in practical terms. I try not to blame people for my life when it's not working. I try to have integrity and be present. But it is an everyday journey, and anytime I think I've finally got it, I know I'm on the biggest ego trip ever.' He smiled.

I considered. 'Do you think you've made any progress?'
'Oh yes.' He nodded emphatically. 'I'm not consumed by anger and self-justification now... Findhorn has helped immensely, and Hamish in specific. He keeps me on the straight and narrow.' He looked back at the dog, 'he gave me Fergus so that I should care about someone besides myself.... But, I can't rely on him, Hamish I mean. I have to be able to do it myself, every day. So that is my practise.'
And yet, you rely on me, I thought, and Hamish knows it, Hamish encouraged it. And of esoteric things, I know less than you.
George slowed and looked at me quickly, at the winding deserted road, and back again.
'I do need you,' he said, in answer to my thought. 'And you know more than you think, because you are pure.'
I swallowed. 'Aren't you afraid of some kind of unhealthy dependence?'
He regarded me seriously. 'You're much more enthralling than heroin ever was....' He ran a hand through his hair. 'Look, I know it’s transference –' His voice broke, 'but I genuinely love you, and I will do everything in my power to make you happy. I couldn't live without you, not from the moment I saw you.'
Well, I was crying too, then.

We got to Ell and Morgan's at teatime, and Fergus bounded out of the car and into the sheepfold like a blue streak. We all laughed, then Ell opened her arms and gave me a hug.
'There you are, sissy!'
I was so glad to see her! I had missed her at the wedding, but she couldn't come down because Moran was croupy. We were the same height, but Ell was softer than I, and had been before she had Moran. She had curling fuzzy long brown hair and the family blue eyes. Morgan was tall and swarthy, with crinkly black hair and a beard, and jet-black eyes. He hadn't much to say for himself ever, but he played the fiddle like nobody's business. We stood away and she turned her attention to George. I watched her visibly start and blink, before she put on her big sister guise again. She smiled warmly and took his hands.
'Welcome, George. Welcome to Myfanwy, and the family.' Her breath caught and she hugged him impulsively. I heard her thinking What would Mama think of this!

George looked at me. He heard. 'Thank you, Ellen, Morgan.' He shook Morgan's hand. Ell was crying. 'Well, I can see that you really love her,' she said, 'so I am easier in my mind.' I stood amazed. Ell had never been squidgy or sentimental, always forthright and practical, so her rush of emotion meant something
George nodded. 'Thank you.'
We went inside to a tea of hot pot and Welshcakes – what else would one eat on a sheepfarm than lamb and mutton? – and homebrewed wheat beer. Moran was put to bed, and afterward we had a jam session until midnight, interspersed with questions and answers back and forth between Ell and George. We had to leave pretty early – it was four hours to Forres - so we trudged upstairs for a few hours' sleep, tucked under eiderdown, as the temperature had dropped to a hard frost. Fergus slept at the end of the bed, as he was used to doing at home, though Ellen's dogs slept in the kitchen.

George murmured, in the sleepy frigid darkness,
'Your sister is just as I imagined.' He kissed my temple. 'I see where you get your common sense. I'm happy to have met her. Thank you, darling.'
I smiled, half-awake. 'You won't say that about Jack...'
'Likely not,' he agreed.
We made an Alpine start, getting up at three and loading the car while Ell made us a box to take along, and steamy thermos of tea and brandy.
'Just like Alberta,' she smiled, handing over the stash at the car. 'Oh! Do you remember the McKay hut, sissy?'
I nodded. 'We tried the North face of Mt Alberta,' I told George.
'We were snowed in for two days and finally it lifted,' Ellen added. 'Except Daddy didn't want us girls crossing the glacier. We rebelled and set out ahead of him and Jack.'
'But it was bad weather for ice-climbing. We only got 100 feet up the face before we had to bail.' I said.
Ell and I looked at one another and burst out laughing. It was one of our better adventures.
George smiled and shook his head. 'Girls on the rope! Come on, cupcake,' he said, opening the passenger door,' before we have frostbite.' The Austin had no heat.
Ell and I hugged and we promised to come by for longer on the return.
She crunched in her boots back to the door of the house and waved us off down her dark country road. I felt very squidgy, realising that our time would be very limited now.
'You love each other very much,' George murmured, with a glance. He gripped my leg with strong fingers.
I nodded. 'I love her more than all the rest of the family combined. We have always been close.'
'You will always be, no matter where we are,' he said. I looked at him.
'Thank you for that!'

We got to Findhorn at just before seven – George had pushed the Austin up to 80 on the deserted roads, which was rather exhilarating. He liked to drive fast. Peter Caddy was out when he arrived, in green wellies, and he gave George a big hug.
'Nice to see you, my boy,' he said warmly, with a keen look. He turned to me appraisingly.
'This is Claire,' George said hastily,' my wife.'
Peter didn't miss a beat. He wasn't an RAF officer for nothing. 'Wife?' He teased, deadpan. ' You hadn't even a girlfriend when you were last here!' He held out his hand.
'Welcome to Findhorn, young lady.'
'Thank you, sir,'
He waved his hand, 'Bah! None of that! Call me Peter.' He peered at me keenly. 'Sheena would say you were one of the Young Ones,' he murmured. Sheena, I learned, was Sheena Govan, his second wife, the famous psychic. 'You have a great spirit, but you doubtless know that.' He looked at George. 'Dashed clever of you,' he said. 'What happened?'
'I heard a voice to look up when she came into the shop,' George said plainly. 'It said that she was my path.'
'...And this was when?'
'A fortnight last Monday.' He spoke simply and forthrightly.
'Well done,' Peter said, with a smile. 'You're coming along.' He clapped his arm again. 'Well, don't let's stand out here freezing. Come inside while I make some tea. The others should be straggling along any minute.'

We went into the sanctuary, which was attached to the community centre, and sat before the range while Peter made tea. Presently, Hamish and Andy ambled in, sleepy and wearing sheepskin boots, and came awake when they saw us.
'Geordie!' Andy exclaimed. 'Och, you made it!' They hugged. Andy said 'Oh and this is the wee lassie! Welcome to you!' He hugged me too. Andy was thin with loose brown hair and a classic Scots profile.
'Hello Claire!' Hamish gave me a great hug, 'Are you biding fine?'
I nodded, and blushed.
Peter looked up.
'Oh so you've met her.'
Hamish laughed. 'That's why I went down to London... Och, Geordie, we've just time to get you settled before the meditation. Come on, lads!' He grabbed Andy's arm and the three of them went out to the car.
'I'll look after her,' Peter called.

When they were gone, he handed me a cup of tea and a boiled egg and led me over to the sanctuary which had chairs set up in a circle.
'I can see what you are,' he said appraisingly. 'But tell me about yourself. You're a Yank.'
'I on an exchange at the Royal College of Music, from Juilliard.' It was odd to have someone regard me as other than George's 'find', and Peter's mix of avuncular concern and formality was comforting.
'Ah music.' Peter said. 'I expect you're brilliant then.'
I smiled at the teasing. 'I'm pretty good.'
'You have family here?'
My breath caught 'My sister lives in Wales. We've just come from there... I have a brother in the States. My parents are dead.'
He nodded. 'You don't seem the impulsive type. What do you hope?'
Well, that was a very direct question!
'...From George, or from life?'
He smiled. 'Very good. Either. What are your dreams? You're very young.'
I could hardly answer the obviousness of that last remark, so I considered how to put my hopes succinctly. 'I want to live a traditional country life,' I said. 'Raise animals, make things. Live off the land, and with the spirit of the land.'
He smiled. 'You're in the right place for it. I assume you have some experience with all this?'
'Some. The rest I can learn as I go. God will lead.'
'Very good.' He was silent for a while, drank his tea. 'He's very restless you know,' he said of George. 'Always seeking something out there, outside himself...' He looked at me keenly. 'But I have to tell you, I can see that something's shifted in him, so I'd guess that's your doing. What do you want from him?'

That was a very hard question. I thought and finally said. 'I don't want anything from him; I just want to be with him, be together. Where we go and what we learn are just the journey.'
'Young lady,' Peter said very seriously, 'you are a great teacher.' He finished his tea. 'But I expect that the burden of strength will be on your shoulders. He will rely on you. Can you bear it?'
There was that word again!
'We have talked about this.' I nodded. 'I don't know if I can bear it. We each have strength in different ways. I guess we'll lean on each other.'
He nodded, quietly, thoughtfully.' You'll do well,' he said at last. He patted my shoulder. 'Drink your tea. I see David and Julie coming up. I'll bring them to meet you.'
David was David Spangler, the resident god of the place, and Julie was his wife. David, for all how George and others went on about him, reminded me of Winnie the Pooh, except that his gaze was penetrating and direct. I was finding that this was the one common thread of this place. But David was not portentous.
'My fellow American!' He said, smiling, and threw his arms wide. I couldn't help giggling.
'Welcome,' he said.
'Thank you.'
'The Queen of Rods has arrived.' He said enigmatically to Julie. She poked him. 'Just repeating what John said,' he responded. He looked at me. 'You're plenty earthy, that's good. You'll need to be. George's goals are in the new paradigm. You'll need all the help Gaia can give you.'
This sybillic insight was rather unnerving. John, George told me later, was David's guide.
'Don't mind him,' Julie said quickly and gave me a hug. 'Welcome.' She was English, with a broad Manchester accent.

We sat in the community meditation, with about thirty people there. The community was at about 200 at the time. Meditating with thirty people was a very different experience to meditating with George: we settled in with blankets and shawls covering us and immediately, a great stillness arose. Instead of the mere balance, the yin-yang of masculine and feminine energies, there was a sense of gathering in grain that had been scattered, except that the grains were points of light, and as everyone dropped their outside concerns, the light suffused and radiated upwards, so that it seemed that a great column of light, like a waterfall in reverse, was rising from the centre of the room into infinity. But it was coming from infinity too – not draining anyone. It was the great cosmic cycle from the Source to the points of light and back again. It was restful and invigorating at once. I knew why George considered this his spiritual home.

Slowly, as if by mutual consent, everyone returned to their everyday consciousness, and there were hugs between those sitting next to one another. I looked at George and he had never seemed so peaceful, or radiant. We did not have to speak, but he leaned over and kissed my cheek. I leaned into him and he put his arms around me, murmuring wordlessly.
Workshop guests did not normally attend the community meditation; George was more or less regarded as a semi-permanent resident. Guests stayed at Cluny Hill – the original hotel from which Peter and Eileen had been sacked before they founded Findhorn. So we had an hour and a half to settle in properly before the workshop met there in the old ballroom. We walked through the garden over to Andy's caravan – he had taken his most necessary personal items and moved in with Hamish and his wife Joan for the week. Joan, like Hamish, was a native Scot, and from the area; they might have been siblings they were so alike in colouring, height, weight, and temperament. When I mentioned this, Joan laughed, and said 'small gene pool!'

Andy lived alone as he was not married, and his caravan was a single, and nicely, but sparsely furnished, with lots of plants hanging in the windows and a small garden out front, set in a Celtic cross pattern. There was a common room with a kitchenette, and a bedroom, the bed in which took up almost the entire space. In the common room were an eclectic assortment of instruments, ranging from a bombard, to Tibetan bowls, to a concertina. We would be right at home. In fact, George stayed with Andy whenever he was there, so for him it was home. After sorting out our things, we walked back to the community centre for breakfast – it was entirely vegetarian – and sat with Eileen and Myrtle. Eileen, as Peter had, seemed to regard George affectionately as some sort of wayward son; he was the same age as Jonathan, the Caddys' youngest, so this was perhaps understandable. He certainly treated Eileen with all the fondness of a loving son. I was grateful that Eileen simply accepted me and did not ask a lot of probing questions, as I beginning to feel rather scrutinised by everyone who wanted to know if I measured up – and I hadn't even met Herb and Annie yet! It was very noisy in the community centre, and I was unused to being around so many people and so much energy; I felt a little disorientated.

We could have taken the bus to Cluny, but we decided to walk instead. It was a long walk and took us all of the forty-five minutes left us. We held hands all the way and in the wooded part of the path George asked if I were all right.
'Tired, I think,' I admitted, 'and a little overwhelmed.'
'I thought you looked a bit peaky,' he said.
I smiled. 'It's not what you think,' I said.
He spoke softly, full of tenderness, 'and what do I think?'
I smiled again and swung his hand in mine.
'Though I shouldn't be surprised if you were,' he smiled ruefully.
'The Queen Anne's Lace works.'
'That's not what I mean..'
I shook my head, smiling, because he was not apologising.
'Is that an invitation?'
'Well we do have a long lunch break...'
I laughed. It was just the right thing to say.
'This will be intense,' he said after a bit. ' But not as intense as est. And we will be together, which is most important. I did this on my own before and it took a lot of talking with Hamish to really process it. And it is a small group – only twenty, not 200 '
'I consider myself forewarned.'
'Good.'