Gifts and Creatures

Not understanding the story was the most important part

When I was in college in the early seventies I visited a psychic who told me he saw "an old country fella" in my aura, a man with a mustache who was my guardian spirit.

"Great-granddaddy?"  I asked.

The psychic nodded, fingering the keys he'd borrowed to pick up my vibrations, staring into the auric depths behind my head.

But my great-grandfather was clean shaven, insisted my family.  Embarrassed, I chalked the twenty-five dollars I'd spent on the reading up to experience, then tried to put the whole episode out of my mind.

Shortly thereafter, my aunt found a long-lost picture in her attic: my great-grandfather, Alexander Norman, in his early twenties.  With a mustache.

Not long after this I was Sunday driving with a girlfriend and wound up near the cemetery where my great-grandfather was buried.  I hadn't seen his grave for years but thought I remembered where it was.

We searched for awhile among the mostly modern, fairly indistinguishable tombstones, then lost interest and just walked until we came to a place where lawn-like grass led over to some woods.

Kissing and dancing childlike in a circle.  We swung each other, leaning back laughing, until we fell down dizzy on the ground.

When I stood up there was a breeze.  It was full of the mingled scents of spring--honeysuckle and freshly dug earth--and reminded me of walking the fields looking for arrowheads when I was a child.  It was a memory I often went back to.  I'd even written a poem about it for a creative writing class.  When the breeze came up, lines from that poem started running through my head.

                          And those times in spring when a smell brings back

                           the slow walking of the new turned rows

looking for the gleam of the quartz arrowhead…

  I looked down.  There, on top of the grass, was the lower half of an arrowhead.  I picked it up and stood amazed.

  In the years since, I've often tried to write about finding that arrowhead.  None of my attempts satisfied, and now, two decades later, I've started to think that my inability to finish the story is one of its most important features.  The incompleteness kept it off the shelf, compelling me to revisit it again and again.

Hopefully, the accumulation of drafts are like the flintknapper's pile of flakes from working the stone down to a point that's useful and sharp.

When I found the arrowhead I was positive that it was a communication from my great-grandfather.  My occult explanation was that the sexual arc between my girlfriend and myself charged our magic circling dance with power.  With the spontaneous spell intensified by incantatory memory/verse, a crack opened between worlds and a sign slipped through.

While today I don't discount ceremonies and spirits, I find that I'm more interested in other aspects of the story.  I still surface hunt for relics.  The visitation seems like a blessing on that quiet, outdoor time as well as on my interest in history which has been constant over the years.

In one of the Episcopal prayers preceding communion the priest asks God's blessing on "gifts and creatures of bread and wine." The phrase is apt.  Events like these are gifts because they come unsought for--or, if you were looking, they aren't what you expected to find; creatures because they are alive, growing and changing in the spiritual part of our being.