Thursday, November 11, 2004
Mango Chicken
I’m sitting here at my keyboard wondering how to get started. It’s not I don’t have anything to write about, It’s I have so much I want to say. Anyway my son Thunder calls from college. He says, “I have the answer. It’s Mango chicken.” I immediately feel jealous. He has an answer. I’m not sure to what but wow, what confidence!“OK,” I say and wait for him to continue. It’s not a long wait. Thunder’s a lot like me. He doesn’t need prompts, he needs cut-off warnings. “I gave a colloquium presentation today and afterward one of the professors got me all psyched about my majors. It’s all Liberal Arts. I really can do the Social Anthropology/Archeology and the Music Major thing work together at a Liberal Arts school. So if I start worrying about making my life work just tell me ‘Mango Chicken.’ That’s what I had to eat tonight,” Thunder says. He hasn’t stopped to take one single breath. It’s amazing. But he’s a tuba player. He sings in the college choir too. Last spring they toured Spain. Twenty-one years old and he’s already world-renowned. I murmur something non-committal waiting to see if he’s really finished. He isn’t. He talks non-stop for five minutes drawing two breaths. I utter two more monosyllabic comments. “I gotta go. So tell everyone I love them and I’ll see ya soon.”
“OK, love you too.”
The silence is deafening after we hang up.Life for Thunder is either all up or all down. I’m really glad it’s up right now.When I answered the phone I’d been expecting the call to be from Eyvonne’s Sarah. She left a message on our machine hours ago that she was having car trouble and would call back. She commutes to her school.
It’s hard parenting an adult size kid. Sorry, young adult. I wonder if it’s harder parenting them while they live at home or parenting long distance and fielding weird calls. I know it’s been difficult for Eyvonne to get used to the full-time responsibility of parenting Sarah, who moved in with us less than a month ago. Eyvonne was always there for my boys as they endured high school and took their first steps into the real world. But the parenting decisions were made by the continuum of Q, usually el, Lillie and I. Being supportive is one thing, it’s quite terrifying when the full responsibility falls on your shoulders.
Suddenly Eyvonne is not so sure about how to handle things. She’s the one staying up half the night playing solitaire on the computer because Sarah hasn’t called home. We Qs stay on the sidelines and try our best to play a supporting role. All I can say personally is girls are high maintenance. But then I think of Thunder in one of his downswings. The only reason he isn’t high maintenance then is because he doesn’t have 24/7 access anymore. Instead he calls, spills a torrent of despair and hangs up. Next time instead of worrying I’ll know what to do. The answer is mango chicken.
The phone rings again. I pick it up. This caller is a young man who calls an average of a dozen times a day trying to reach Sarah. She is perpetually not home. It’s a doomed relationship not even salvageable by the magic of mango chicken. The poor guy called three times the other night right up to midnight. Sarah was out on a date with another guy. We were up late watching the Northern Lights.
I knew about the possibility of seeing the lights because of an email alert from this fringe element guy who keeps an eye on things like solar flares and the resulting geo-magnetic storms. If you read my profile you’re forewarned, here it comes: pure unadulterated love of science slightly tainted by fringe element wacko world-watch concerns. You can skip the science paragraph below if your eyes start to glaze over.
During bigtime sunspot activity mega explosions result in solar flares. Lots of solar particles are spewed into space in plasma clouds. Whipped by solar winds these reach spaceship two or three days later. The earth's magnetic field captures them swirling particles towards one of the two planet’s magnetic poles, south or north. Light shows result when the particles collide with earth’s atmosphere.
I started hopefully scanning the night sky as early as nine p.m. but it was cloudy. By ten the wind was up and clouds were lifting and but there was still no sign of Northern Lights. Eyvonne and I gave up to watch a movie. We were snuggled up on the couch with double buttered popcorn to sustain us when Merlot started making dog-rolking sounds. Eyvonne grabbed his collar and dragged him outside.
Seconds later she was shrieking, “Q come here, ya gotta see this! Garbled garbled LIGHTS! But watch it don’t step in the dog puke.”
I bailed out the door worried it would be over before I got there what with having to leap puke and all. I needn’t have worried. When I arrived fingers of white light were reaching from the horizon upward like the hand of god, or perhaps mango chicken. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Oprah.
My excitement woke every Q so it was a shared experience. Therapists call it being ‘co-conscious’. They like it. It’s supposed to be a major step toward integration. If so we’re progressing a bit slowly as Lillie, el, Baby and I have always been able to do it. Emotions surged through the system as we all watched.
“What is it?” one of our youngest alters asked as the sky lit up. “Wind from the sun kissing the stars,” I said. He snuggled into my arms content to watch.
Forty-five bone-chilling minutes later those light fingers morphed up from every compass point to the center of the sky where they met in a spiral. They flashed and pulsed with light as bright as summer lightning. A red corona appeared in the northeast, another toward the west. I flopped down on the picnic table and wept as I watched.
Feathers of light overlaid the Milky Way, the spiral path to the spirit world suddenly visible. A lot of people we knew had started that journey recently. At journey’s end they were star people. I wanted science gone from my brain. I was flooded with awe by this visible evidence of the power of the universe. But I wanted to experience and interpret this in the manner of the old ones. Did this beauty herald the world’s end? Prophecies flooded my mind, Quetzequatl, feathered serpents, flying monsters, dragons. I saw them all wheel above.I could hear Eyvonne calling her mom, brother and Thunder, telling them to go outside.
Sarah drives in momentarily blinding us. She leaps from her car.“Did you see the lights?” she yelps.
Eyvonne hugs her. They do a wild little dance.
“Look up, breathe, live,” eliot said. As we did a slow fireball tracked across the sky from east to west. Now el was crying too. He loves meteors. The dude absolutely hates to be cold, but he’ll stand outside in the dead of winter wrapped in a blanket to watch a meteor shower.
He interprets things with no science overlay. Sometimes it’s eerie. Definitely fringe element. But what do you expect from a guy who’s walked that spiral path and returned since we were both three?
“What’s it mean el?” I whispered.
“The worlds are coming closer together,” he said.
I knew there wasn’t any use pressing him for details. It made as much sense as photons being released from excited atoms of nitrogen.
“We would have missed this if the dog hadn’t puked,” I said to Eyvonne.
“Shel you’re always so romantic.”
I grinned and pulled her closer. I had proof. Mango chicken is the answer to all things in the universe.
“If not the answer at the very least a minor deity,” el says.
“Good night el.”
“Nighters Shel.”
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
“OK, love you too.”
The silence is deafening after we hang up.Life for Thunder is either all up or all down. I’m really glad it’s up right now.When I answered the phone I’d been expecting the call to be from Eyvonne’s Sarah. She left a message on our machine hours ago that she was having car trouble and would call back. She commutes to her school.
It’s hard parenting an adult size kid. Sorry, young adult. I wonder if it’s harder parenting them while they live at home or parenting long distance and fielding weird calls. I know it’s been difficult for Eyvonne to get used to the full-time responsibility of parenting Sarah, who moved in with us less than a month ago. Eyvonne was always there for my boys as they endured high school and took their first steps into the real world. But the parenting decisions were made by the continuum of Q, usually el, Lillie and I. Being supportive is one thing, it’s quite terrifying when the full responsibility falls on your shoulders.
Suddenly Eyvonne is not so sure about how to handle things. She’s the one staying up half the night playing solitaire on the computer because Sarah hasn’t called home. We Qs stay on the sidelines and try our best to play a supporting role. All I can say personally is girls are high maintenance. But then I think of Thunder in one of his downswings. The only reason he isn’t high maintenance then is because he doesn’t have 24/7 access anymore. Instead he calls, spills a torrent of despair and hangs up. Next time instead of worrying I’ll know what to do. The answer is mango chicken.
The phone rings again. I pick it up. This caller is a young man who calls an average of a dozen times a day trying to reach Sarah. She is perpetually not home. It’s a doomed relationship not even salvageable by the magic of mango chicken. The poor guy called three times the other night right up to midnight. Sarah was out on a date with another guy. We were up late watching the Northern Lights.
I knew about the possibility of seeing the lights because of an email alert from this fringe element guy who keeps an eye on things like solar flares and the resulting geo-magnetic storms. If you read my profile you’re forewarned, here it comes: pure unadulterated love of science slightly tainted by fringe element wacko world-watch concerns. You can skip the science paragraph below if your eyes start to glaze over.
During bigtime sunspot activity mega explosions result in solar flares. Lots of solar particles are spewed into space in plasma clouds. Whipped by solar winds these reach spaceship two or three days later. The earth's magnetic field captures them swirling particles towards one of the two planet’s magnetic poles, south or north. Light shows result when the particles collide with earth’s atmosphere.
I started hopefully scanning the night sky as early as nine p.m. but it was cloudy. By ten the wind was up and clouds were lifting and but there was still no sign of Northern Lights. Eyvonne and I gave up to watch a movie. We were snuggled up on the couch with double buttered popcorn to sustain us when Merlot started making dog-rolking sounds. Eyvonne grabbed his collar and dragged him outside.
Seconds later she was shrieking, “Q come here, ya gotta see this! Garbled garbled LIGHTS! But watch it don’t step in the dog puke.”
I bailed out the door worried it would be over before I got there what with having to leap puke and all. I needn’t have worried. When I arrived fingers of white light were reaching from the horizon upward like the hand of god, or perhaps mango chicken. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Oprah.
My excitement woke every Q so it was a shared experience. Therapists call it being ‘co-conscious’. They like it. It’s supposed to be a major step toward integration. If so we’re progressing a bit slowly as Lillie, el, Baby and I have always been able to do it. Emotions surged through the system as we all watched.
“What is it?” one of our youngest alters asked as the sky lit up. “Wind from the sun kissing the stars,” I said. He snuggled into my arms content to watch.
Forty-five bone-chilling minutes later those light fingers morphed up from every compass point to the center of the sky where they met in a spiral. They flashed and pulsed with light as bright as summer lightning. A red corona appeared in the northeast, another toward the west. I flopped down on the picnic table and wept as I watched.
Feathers of light overlaid the Milky Way, the spiral path to the spirit world suddenly visible. A lot of people we knew had started that journey recently. At journey’s end they were star people. I wanted science gone from my brain. I was flooded with awe by this visible evidence of the power of the universe. But I wanted to experience and interpret this in the manner of the old ones. Did this beauty herald the world’s end? Prophecies flooded my mind, Quetzequatl, feathered serpents, flying monsters, dragons. I saw them all wheel above.I could hear Eyvonne calling her mom, brother and Thunder, telling them to go outside.
Sarah drives in momentarily blinding us. She leaps from her car.“Did you see the lights?” she yelps.
Eyvonne hugs her. They do a wild little dance.
“Look up, breathe, live,” eliot said. As we did a slow fireball tracked across the sky from east to west. Now el was crying too. He loves meteors. The dude absolutely hates to be cold, but he’ll stand outside in the dead of winter wrapped in a blanket to watch a meteor shower.
He interprets things with no science overlay. Sometimes it’s eerie. Definitely fringe element. But what do you expect from a guy who’s walked that spiral path and returned since we were both three?
“What’s it mean el?” I whispered.
“The worlds are coming closer together,” he said.
I knew there wasn’t any use pressing him for details. It made as much sense as photons being released from excited atoms of nitrogen.
“We would have missed this if the dog hadn’t puked,” I said to Eyvonne.
“Shel you’re always so romantic.”
I grinned and pulled her closer. I had proof. Mango chicken is the answer to all things in the universe.
“If not the answer at the very least a minor deity,” el says.
“Good night el.”
“Nighters Shel.”
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
