Flash

020214

The Lord Giveth and the Lord Giveth Again

    Fresh snow frosted the small windowpane of her bedroom. She awoke late, at 7:30, the morning that began her eighty-fifth year. Last night, she’d given herself permission to sleep in, risking missing morning prayers, Mass and even breakfast with the rest of the community.  Her intention was sincere in honest ambivalence–“if the Lord wants me at morning prayer, the Lord will see to it I awake in time.”

    As always, the Lord had other plans.

    Before rising from beneath warm, cozy blankets, enjoying blessed solitude, anticipating a first cup of coffee in rare silence, she realized the sisters would be on their way to Mass.      Suddenly she was taken by a vision. Eighty-five years ago this minute she would just be approaching five hours old, hairless in wrinkled pinky flesh, writhing with hunger for her mother’s milk, elixir of life.  Her first communion in the intimacy of the first family bonding as God so ordained.  What awesome wonder!  

     January could chill through to the bone in Oklahoma’s panhandle. Transporting back to that moment collapsed time and space, to the sights, smells and sensations of her first hours on earth.  The sticky warmth of her mother’s body against her flesh, the warmth of milk coursing down her throat, the low sounds of her father’s voice in comment of adoration.  What wondrous love is this?  The gift of sight extended as she imagined her beloved brothers, then two and four, rubbing their eyes, hair the color of dry corn husks askew with fresh waking. Silently they came alongside their mother to peek at their new sister; gently touching the quilt over their mother’s leg, her arm, astonished at the magical sight of this baby appearing out of the darkness, out of their dreams.  What glorious delight to see them so young, flanked by the older three siblings.

     The moment passed briefly as moments do in life and memory, but the joy and gratitude sustained her in giggles and renewed energy.  “Happy new year, Miriam!” she said aloud to herself—grabbed her robe to venture down the hall for coffee, her morning prayers fulfilled.

The Wife Who Saved England

They hated her. She had flirted with him. She was married, after all. Wicked, exotic, American divorcee. She had no shame. She put her designs on him and trapped him. Everyone said it.  Even though they knew better. It was important to control public opinion.  To protect the royals.  Didn’t the pictures even reveal a great love between the two? For years they carried on.  Forbidden love seemed sweeter—how utterly romantic that he would give up the kingdom for the woman he loved. To be exiled from his homeland. It was better than anything Hollywood could have invented.

You know the history. He was king fewer than 12 months in 1936. His brother reined successfully through the second world war. His niece became queen in 1953.

He died, still exiled, in 1972. By the time she died in 1986 she had stayed loyal to her third husband and had never spoken out about any strangeness, disease or malady that might have inflicted the abdicated king.  Conjectures looking far back into their past are the tools of the future to help defend or right the cruel luxury of harsh judgement.  He had anorexia nervosa, a disease that caused him to be trapped in a demanding juvenile obsession with the woman he loved; there are letters he’d written to other lovers before his marriage and escape from kingly responsibility where he referred to them as “mummie”; his threats of suicide; and her secret letters to the husband she had never fully intended to leave bore her loneliness and regret; he showed signs of having Asperger’s—even his own staff had claimed he was mad, as mad as king George the III.  But she had never said anything.  Never complained.  Never asked for help. For forty years. How much pain could she have endured in all the years that followed what she had thought was harmless flirtation?  What wondrous love is this?

While all around were accusations and bitterness between the men and women that made up the royal family and governing body of the land, a young lady growing up alongside all the politics must have felt mercy and love for her uncle.  Secure in her rein, she made a forgiving gesture by inviting the exiled prince to join the family in celebrating his mother’s 100th birthday.  He died not long after that.  When she died in 1986 the Queen granted her uncle’s wish that his wife be buried alongside him at Windsor.

090312