Mark and I hiked up toward Big Rock. The sage and manzanita tickled my legs. We followed a single-track trail that took us higher and deeper into more sage, more manzanita.
“Chocolate is my favorite sweet,” I told him. “Sometimes I just go on what I call my Chocolate Diet, and eat nothing but chocolate.”
“But how do you keep that trim figure?”
“Oh, I pay for the use of the chocolate. I get plenty of exercise. My two favorites are bicycling and sex. You can burn a few calories with a good hot session of either.”
My mother used to embarrass me by the outrageous things she did and said. What I now realize is that she was set up by society in her youth to believe she had to get married and have six children. Being Catholic, she had no choice. When the Catholic “drug,” or nerve gas, began wearing off well after her sixth child was of school age, she had a nervous breakdown. Instead of controlling her life, life had spun her out of control into a direction she never intended nor desired.
She unhinged herself in an effort to find who she was, buried deeply within herself. She became caustic for many years.
Chocolate is a drug my mother felt safe to take. I knew where she kept her stash, up inside her clothes closet in a paper bag. It gave me a certain smug satisfaction to see that she was not perfect, that she had secrets to hide, like me.
Chocolate is perhaps the closest to sex a food can come. Was chocolate her way of reaching orgasm? I never heard Mom and Dad “do it,” even when I made an effort, ear to the heating duct leading down to their bedroom.
I knew of six times they had “done it” for sure. But it was not a topic they discussed with us, their six children.
“Hurry, Patty, we have to hurry to reach Big Rock before sunset.” By now the manzanita and scrub oak were battling us, leaving scratches on naked skin.
“Almost there!” Mark announced. We clambered up a mossy boulder, trekked around it, and Voila, there was Big Rock.
No wonder he called it “Big Rock.” It was.
“Let’s go!” He bounded up it like a monkey boy, and sat atop the rock, smiling down at me.
My eyes were not used to spotting the subtle footholds, so I took my time, paused, considered and waited, held my breath.
“Breathe, Patty. It helps to breathe. You don’t want to fall, do you?”
“No way.”
“So you won’t. Believe you can do it, and you will. But hurry. The sun’s almost at the horizon.”
I hugged the rock wall and stutter-stepped up, baby steps. My weight held. I did not slide down the face of Big Rock into the impervious manzanita below. I made it up to the top, next to Mark, on the rock throne facing west as the sun touched the mountain range.
“I have something for you,” Mark grinned. He handed me a magic wand, a rainbow star mounted on a stick tied with silk ribbons. “For you to remember love.”
High on love and the day Mark and I had shared, my magic wand mysteriously vanished by the time we had returned to the car.
By the time I realized the wand was gone, our car was hurtling halfway down the mountain back to San Diego.
We didn’t return to Pine Canyon for a month, during which time a fire raged across the slope leading to Big Rock. Most of the sage and scrub oak were gone and the once glossy red manzanita dotted the area like fat black skeletons. The magic wand was gone, perhaps the catalyst that had incinerated this power spot.
I was disappointed and did not yet realize the magnitude of offerings one needs to make to our Mother Earth, even involuntary ones like the wand.
When you take from Mother Earth it is right to give to Mother Earth. That way, the circle of a happy life continues.
The wand was one of several offerings I have made, involuntarily each time, with a protracted struggle to retrieve the beloved item, then a sigh releasing each one to the universe.
There was the beaded cashmere sweater stolen from the cloakroom when I was a seven-year-old Catholic school girl; a heart-shaped opal from Mark which slipped off my gold chain at the foot of Tres Cascades, a powerful Tahitian waterfall; an amethyst stone, the gift of a medicine man, that fell out of my pocket at Machu Picchu; and the Crazy Horse pin which popped off my jacket at Pine Canyon after I steered off a cliff on my mountain bike and came to a soft landing at the base of the only tree--an oak--in the vicinity.
Mother Earth has my tastes in ornamentation. I have found that she also savors M&M’s, cabernet sauvignon and scraps of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat. I am conscious of Mother’s place in my life. Without her I could easily become a mental and physical wreck, lost, stressed out, depressed. I need to feel her presence around me for my happiness to shine out from within me, like sunlight. I hope it touches others, too.
What would any of us do without her? Where would we be without plants and trees and the sounds of birds and running streams?
Just before Mark and I departed for our first travel adventure together, to New Zealand, Fiji and Tahiti, what would turn out to be our first grand “honeymoon,” he presented me with a magic wand like the first. It stands in a special vase in the altar of my bedroom where I can see it and remember our cache of shared memories. It reminds me of fire’s cleansing nature, the adventures Mark and I have enjoyed, the presence--and presents--of Mother Nature, her exceeding patience with humanity as she teaches by being.
No matter what we humans do to her--create negative and painful situations, abuse ourselves, each other and her--she springs back. I have no worries about her. Fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and tidal waves are her nature. She has been around a lot longer than we have, an entity of slow metabolism and vast intelligence. Her true nature is love. Can ours be anything less?
And one thing you may not know about me is that I, too, love to sing Karaoke. Unfortunately, we did not get any photos of Jerry and me singing together, but it happened. So the day we can download data from our memory, that will be among the first photos I'll print out!
Because Aiyana had never been to Las Vegas before, Joe and I took her to the Stratosphere where my thrill-seeking niece convinced us to go on the Bigshot which shoots up into the sky from the top of the Stratosphere, and the XScream which juts out over the side of the Stratosphere, looking down at the Strip 900 feet below.
Sorry, no shots of any of the rides. You are not allowed to take cameras aboard, as anything loose will go flying and get smashed 900 feet below (in all probability).
More on this extraordinary weekend later.
