Excerpt from "Riding the Dragon's Breath"
By Judy Grahn
From Volume 4 (2013)
1949 Awakening
A child’s head can turn and in a moment of consciousness feel an awakening into life from a long, an eight year long, sleep of suppressed memory. So it was when she first walked down the grey painted steps of her parents’ apartment, steps leading out a nondescript door into the new place that even had the word new in its name, “New Mexico.” The sunlight bowled her mind over and over, like being in a camera flash without end. Everything alive in that flash was outstanding, the century plant’s sage-colored thick sharp leaves throbbed in light, and the high-powered springs of grasshoppers thrashed through consciousness like sudden insights. Light sparked off the pebbles and faces of sand, bending close you could detect little jewel flashes, mirror-glints of sand embedded in white plaster splashed on the adobe walls of the house next door. She felt as though she had just been born, had newly opened her eyes, was being introduced to the previously unknown element: light.
The sunlight was a staggering wave rolling over and through her. And the rebirth moment went on and on, as her eyes explored the building, the textured walls, the wooden doors and window frames painted blue, not just any blue, “New Mexico blue”—water caught in noon summer light blue, matte lapis blue, paint sunk between the dark cracks of dried wood blue. She had never seen blue; you cannot see blue until light so dazzles your poor befuddled eyes that blue, no matter how dry, is water to the mind. The mind rests on this blue, floats in it, sucks it up, and is able to go through the remainder of the sun struck day without getting dizzy or catching fire.
She was not done with the new seeing, as the tall two-story wall of the house next to her parents’ nondescript apartment, their “garage apartment,” the one in the back, this tall house wall descended into a well with steps going to a blue frame screen door behind which was an enormous cat she had not seen yet. She had not seen this longhaired cat because the well caught her eyes first. Three cement steps led down into the well, which was lined with bricks, and in the eastern corner at the bottom she saw another new element: cool. Cool came right up into her eyes. Cool had shadows and textures.
She had known cold, Chicago invented that word. You walked on the sharp edge of the wind in Chicago and the cold came in through all your clothes and flesh and through your warm liquids to explore your bones with its nosy ice breath, eager to convert you instantly to metal if you didn’t turn just so, into the edge of it. She had known hot, her mother had frequently said, “when you were born, it was so hot, so hot. I thought I would die of the heat.” That was Chicago heat too, leaden, “muggy,” a big hot dead body lying on your chest, sucking vitality. Likely to kill the mother before anything could even get started.
Cool is what she had not known. Cool had been unknowable in that terrain yet now here it was lying alertly on the pretty reddish bricks in the well leading to an apartment with a giant cat behind the screen door. Cool was lying on the shadowy bricks looking up at her, with a strange thorny body and slanted yellow eyes. “What is THAT!” she yelled, and the neighbor girl came into view, a self-contained child with black hair cut in bangs straight across her white forehead, so she looked like an architectural drawing. The neighbor girl was named Kay and was leaning over the rail looking into the well right along with her. Before she could say, “I don’t know,” the screen door opened. Out came a tall, distracted, kind-looking woman with gruff arms.
“Hello, girls,” we mumbled. “Do you want to know what this is?” More mumble.
“This is a horny toad.” And now the magical moment exploded, as Miss W.—I would always call Edith Welsheimer this, and I would know her for thirty more years—leaned over and picked up the thorny cool being, cuddling it to the breast of her midnight blue and white polka dot dress, and placed it in my unbelieving hands. Cool had a stomach that beat like a heart, and the eyes of an owl, and a calm nature. My thumb rested between the brown thorns on the brown head, my palm felt the leathery sweetness of a cool tan stomach. My round hazel eyes gazed into the kaleidoscopic yellow triangles of Cool’s eyes. I was alive.
