Guru is thinking
back on early childhood, his early adolescence. In the springtime halls of Keep
Abbryggdd, the springtime was always celebrated with rituals- blessing of the
Springs. Water fairies, his mother said, lived in the Spring. The Blessing of
the Springs were a family tradition, just like the Toddy Festivals in
Pondicherry. The legendary Abbryggdd Springs had been a destination for
pilgrims up and down the Marches and even into Scotland for centuries. But now,
commercialism, the need to weaning the National Trust from everyone’s mind
about these days and the need to keep at least the local minister busy every year
were a reason the family kept up indulgences, and appearances.
The springs were in a sheltered dell
around which some ancestral Abbryggdd or other had taken great care to
constrain inside well fitted natural stonework, and then small niches were used
for altars- candles, flowers, photographs, relics. These kind of things were immortalized there. For the sake of the water fairies, Guru would come there as
a child and swimming in the spring-tub, the green leaves of the yew tree beside
the stone well laughing down on him.
Guru was remembering a day spent with
Stokely after one of his spring-spring soaks.
Stokely had driven him some ways off
into the deepest gloom and wood of the Abbryggdd estate, where the forest
sprites and elves lived for certain. If water elves could live on the edges of
the Spring, then surely elves lived in the cast forested
parklands.
Stokely stopped the car and got out.
Standing with his hat in hand clasped to his chest, and his necktie blowing off
to southeast, he
looked at Guru with darkened lowered eyes.
“Here.”
Guru just sat and looked at him.
Seated as he was in the passenger seat of the car, looking west, past Stokely,
out toward the Atlantic.
“Here is the spot where I want you to
bury me. When the time comes.”
Guru hardly had a mind about where
Stokely should be buried- he hardly even knew what death was, at that time in
his life. But not many more years away would come the big lesson. Stokely was
meaning to break the news, in his own stiff-necked way, however.
But Stokely had also granted Guru a
wisdom both far beyond his years or his doings, by virtue of his being the
number one son, and only child to the lion of the clan, here coming to the end
of his line, the end of his road. Certainly Genevieve knew what she meant when
she had named him Guru. How long would he before Stokely saw his was just
another person with feet of clay? All his life?
Stokely never even knew of his own
feet of clay let alone no child of his own. It was just up here at the top of
the hill, only just so far enough as to lay open to every wind. Not the most
comfortable place among the holdings, thought Guru, and now, years later,
remembering Stokely- who now lay in rest at just that spot, inside a tall round
marble columbarium surrounded by a number of irregular, highly suspect standing
stones (the effect was as though a wealthy Roman patron had been placed right
down in the center of a magic Celtic henge, all the more to beguile the tourists
who would begin arriving in late March.
Guru did not think much of the place
then, back when Stokely had shown it to him, and now even with the grotesque
monument erected around his mother and father;s bones, he barely contained a
slight chuckle. It would be just his due, he thought. The columbarium had been
built and dedicated to both his parents now some 25 years ago.
Now it sat on the forsaken hilltop of the winds, where the mind of
Stokely Abbryggdd will ever remain, neither blown by the breezes nor solid like
the stolid-state-citizen that he had been. Disgruntled, of course, There had
never been the due, the turning of the family’s tide, not during Stokely’s
time, at least.
Stokely and Percy Junior had been left
with the larger office of keeping their lands free from “interlopers, varmints,
and scalawags”- once the job of their antecedent the Thegn of Fishguard, the
only dues the family owed Her Majesty were in general, the same lot as had been
handed down year after year as the Barons Abbryggdd over the centuries defended their realm – for themselves first and others
later.
While Guru didn’t think much of the
place, and still didn’t, the place which Stokely had chosen to erect his
“Temple to Bo’Canon” even yet dominated the hill, where once here had been only
the sound of the wind and far away to the southwest was the ocean, blue, white,
and shining in the distance.
Guru thought back
to time again in his young past. The memory of his mother playing records in
the living room, and the record spinning on the wooden console stereo which sat
uplifted from the floor by four and a half wooden stem legs. His mother’s
favorite record was the Welsh singer Mary Hopkin’s Post Card. His favorite song
was “Young Love.” It might not have been a very typical thing for his mother to
get into , but his mother had had some times herself, and had battened onto
Mary Hopkin just at that time she came along to the public, through the
Beatles, their Apple Records, and her hit song “Those Were The Days.” That was
one Guru liked, but not as much as “Young Love” or his second favorite, “Love
Is The Sweetest Thing.” Even “Voyage of the Moon” meant more to him than “Lord
of the Reedy River.” Guru liked Mary Hopkin but loathed most of Donovan
Leitch’s work. “Too fay, twee, and ponce, so far’s I care” he once said to
friends, and not in jest.
At that time in
her life, Genevieve Abbryggdd (nee Sante) took her own place among the Carnaby
Street set. That, of course, was how she met Stokely, one night after a Kinks
concert when all either of them could think about was “all day, and all of the
night” running through their minds like two trains headed into a collision.
When fire meets water, steam dissipates into the air. The last time she had had
that time of passion with Stokely was probably about that long ago, also, once
the bloom came off the rose, their marriage had turned into a business
proposition.
Guru didn’t think
about all that. He thought about the record only in terms of the sentimentality
and old fashioned arrangements on most of the song- they seemed (to him) so
evocative, lie, Britain before the Second World War, relaxing and enjoying her
come sunny living, before (once again) another new generation of young men
would be set before the grinder.
He got Mary Hopkin
off his mind soon, however, walked over to the wall full of Roget and Desiree’s
collected vinyl albums, and pulled down a record titled Steppenwolf’s Greatest Hits. He danced about their living room,
luckily, neither of his hosts were home to see him making a fool of himself. But
after another glass of scotch, he could get used to this.
John Kay’s buzzsaw
lead guitar from “Magic Carpet Ride” drove an aural nail right across the room,
as he danced, balancing the liquid in his glass carefully, so as not to spill
any on the fine Persian carpet of his hosts.
“Why don’t you come with me, little
girl?” was the musical question. It remained to be seen who might show up to
answer it. It could not be Desiree. That much was easy to see, and he need not
concern himself, for Desiree had been playing Roget (again) as she often felt a
need she might, partly out of listening to all Claudine’s advice, and partly
for her own amusement.
(From Bus of Fools, a work in progress.)
