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Austin Macauley Publishers - Kay Harkins

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80 pages

English

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What saves us as children through the dark confusion of loss and abuse? What offers us light and rescue as we live past the memory of betrayal and regret? In Queen of the Leaves, Kay Harkins illuminates the gifts that lift us from despair: music, friendship, and divine love. With empathy, humor, and eyes to see the path of forgiveness through the thicket of human frailty, she offers a lost and found adventure that turns pain into hope.

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Mind

Body

Spirit

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers
Date de parution	29 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781645369349
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Queen of the Leaves
A Memoir of Lost and Found
Kay Harkins
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-05-29
Queen of the Leaves About The Author Dedication Copyright Information © Acknowledgements Chapter One Father Lost Chapter Two Queen of the Leaves Chapter Three Train Case Chapter Four Graven Images Chapter Five Model Home Chapter Six Background Music Chapter Seven High Fidelity Chapter Eight Near Fatality Chapter Nine Father Regained Chapter Ten What Remains
About The Author
A writer, educator, artist, and musician, Kay Harkins lives in San Diego, California. Retired from a career teaching writing and literature, she continues to collaborate with other writers, artists, and musicians and tends to her rose garden, her rescued greyhound Lazarus, and the home she shares with her husband, to whom she has been married for over fifty years. She holds an MFA from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.
Dedication
For Alice DeBerry Kane, Bennington’s best gift.
Copyright Information ©
Kay Harkins (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Austin Macauley is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In this spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Harkins, Kay
Queen of the Leaves
ISBN 9781645369325 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781645369318 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645369349 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020905175
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the writers who educated, challenged, and supported me in the writing of this book, beginning with Dr. Arthur Seamans, who first believed in me as a writer and who has never flagged in his encouragement. I owe tremendous gratitude to writers Richard Bausch, Sven Birkerts, Susan Cheever, Lucy Grealy (of blessed memory), George Packer, and Scott Cairns, whose teaching and philosophies of writing offered me invaluable tools in my life in the arts.
Without my writing companions, some of whom were my students, I could not have seen this project to completion. With both tough love and compassion, they never let me give up. My profound thanks to Alice DeBerry Kane, Mame Willey (of blessed memory), Danielle Cervantes Stephens, Brandyn Jennings, Katie Manning, Gaelan and Megan Gilbert, Aly Lewis, Jennifer Hartenburg, Michele Marr, George Tsoris, and John Bonadeo.
To my fellow survivors, my sisters, Janis and Susan, my grandparents, my husband’s family, and my children, Cadence and Bryan, go endless thanks for their inspiration, patience, and the blessing of their love. To my beloved husband, Jack, I owe my life itself
Chapter One

Father Lost
Somewhere between the incantations of Latin, Sister Miriam’s story time, and the black and white Life of Christ films at St. Theresa’s School, I began to expect an immediate return of Jesus Christ.
During the months before Easter, the year I turned six, I would roll all the way over against the wall at night before I went to sleep, in case He came in the middle of the night, and finding Himself tired, would have a welcome place to sleep. I fluffed up the pillow and put my head on just one half of it. Lying there next to the cool wall, I flipped the sheet up into the air and let it float down to create a barely perceptible breeze. That must be the way it is in heaven, I thought, everything cozy and soft and just a whisper of sweet wind keeping everything fresh.
Sometimes I’d plan what we’d do when I found Him there in the morning, usually deciding to let Him sleep in a little, then waking Him up in time for breakfast. I imagined taking His hand and leading Him out into our living room, how surprised my mother and father would be. His robes would be white and worn out from a thousand washings, like my sheets, and would smell like incense on Easter morning.
I perplexed my mother, those few months or so, saving a portion of everything on my plate, just in case Jesus came during a meal. It did not occur to me that if Jesus Christ arrived at 6000 College Street, Des Moines, Iowa, in the Year of Our Lord, 1952, my mother would have set a place for Him, so private was my fantasy. I put off eating what I saved for him on my plate as long as I could.
“You will sit there till you eat it,” she or my father would say, as I sat swinging my legs under the chair, waiting it out for as long as I could.
Sometimes, a hand would be put to my forehead or questions about tummy-troubles would arise, but my good cheer and enthusiasm-for-play did not diminish, so they assumed willful fickleness of appetite. After a while, I decided that Jesus would not want to eat the cold food, so I had to gag it down.
Although the Lord’s return had probably broken into my imagination from some Lenten discipline at St. Theresa’s, my mother didn’t link my behavior at the table to theology. Not understanding the Second Coming enough myself to explain it to my mother, I was afraid she might laugh at me.
She had converted to Catholicism in order to marry my father, but she took little delight in the rituals of Catholicism, having come from a family of non-practicing Episcopalians. I do not ever recall seeing her pray the rosary, and neither she nor my father seemed to have much interest in going to church, saying prayers or helping me study my catechism.
My father’s mother, Helen, ensured my weekly attendance at church, and who had observed my fascination with icons and statuary, had been the one to nurture my affinity for religious life.
“Paul, come in here,” I overheard my mother call to my father one Saturday morning. In my room, she’d discovered my toy box covered with a sheet and set with a prayer book, my blue child’s rosary, and a plastic ‘glow in the dark’ cross that I’d won as some prize at school. I started to step from behind the bathroom door when she winked at him and smiled, wiggling a crooked finger, but something stopped me.
“She’s got her own altar in here.”
My father shook his head and smiled, “She’s her grandma’s little girl.”
“Don’t you think this is a little too much?”
“Oh, she’s a kid. She’ll grow out of it. Don’t forget that she wants to be a Broadway dancer.”
“Yes, but she thinks she wants to be a nun too!”
“A singing, dancing nun!” I said, stepping out from the bathroom behind them. Long before the days of The Flying Nun or the Singing Nun, I believed all things were possible. I wanted to defend my shrine, but found no words.
“You have a good imagination, honey,” my father said. “Let her play, Ruth. It’s not hurting anything.”
My good imagination felt quite valuable to me at that moment.
It was during those weeks of religious fervor that my mother was expecting her third baby, and my two-year-old sister, Janis, and I would take turns in spending weekends with our grandparents; staying first one week with our mother’s parents, and the next with our father’s.
Our mother needed her rest, and we welcomed the spoiling always waiting for us at our grandparents’ homes.
The richest weekends came when just one of us went to each place and I would find myself riding the bus with Grandma Helen on a Sunday morning, to her large downtown church with its consequential, stained glass windows, every interior crevice imbued with incense.
My grandmother let me use her missal and prayer book with its thin, crispy pages printed in red and black, most of the gold worn off their edges. The priest always sang or spoke in Latin, but she told me her book had the words he was singing or saying in English. I could barely read at all, but that made no difference. I held the missal and pretended I was reading the things I learned at school, about the Ten Commandments, and Moses and Mary. I especially liked the part about how God never stopped loving anybody, no matter how bad they were.
In those same months of obsession, I devised my own system of penance. When I felt really bad about something I had done, I went outside and pulled my fingernails over an aluminum trash can lid. I hated the way the little prickly sounds bumped under my nails and went right up my arm into my ear. I came up with that penance one afternoon, after my mother had put me in the hall closet for doing something bad. I cannot quite remember the infraction because what I did in the closet seemed much worse to me.
My mother would always send me to the coat closet until the ‘bad little Mary Kay was sorry and the good little Mary Kay would come out.’ I was so indignant at being in the closet that particular occasion that I stood in there for a long time. I could not make myself feel sorry for what I’d done. The closet door was never locked, and I never felt frightened to be in there.
Often, it served as a good place to think things over and ponder the mystery of slowly being able to see things in the dark. Once my eyes had become adjusted to the darkness, I noticed a pair of Mother’s shoes on the closet floor. Unable to make myself be sorry for anything, I spat into her shoes. Then, there was something to be sorry for.