Heaven’s Gate
36 And Time Marched On
Honey Blossom Trane was born to Sugar and Lionel on March 28. They came to visit on a rare weekend that Lionel wasn’t playing. Rhiannon took that opportunity to announce that she was pregnant again. Wow! James and Céleste were only seven months old.
“Neither of us went back on birth control after the babies were born,” Liz explained to me. “This time, she took before I did. But we can keep trying, lover.” We’re trying? I didn’t know that. But Liz was a doting mother and Céleste was an angel. We had money. We had a home. Hell, yes. Let’s have another baby.
In May, Sarah told us she and Lamar were pregnant. They were also building a new home in the village. There was a mad scramble to decide what to do with the upper barn duplex. It seemed we had no end of people willing to move into it. Ultimately, though, Larry, Theresa, and Dawn moved their family upstairs to the slightly larger home and said they weren’t done having kids in their household yet.
Our second generation graduated from college the first weekend in May. It was like dropping a big rock in a puddle of water and watching where it splashed to. They all seemed to have something important to do the summer after graduation. Ross and Judy decided to continue the summer journey they’d begun after Lexi died. Pam had been invited by Heaven to see Paris and get introduced to some of her modeling contacts. TK went to visit Addison in Japan. Nancy went home to Mishawaka. Fashion Week was on hiatus for the summer and would begin again in September when we picked up our full schedule. Leonard, Bob, and Susan decided they needed to shop in New York and visit some of the major fashion houses. Mama Bear went with them.
Rich and Amber got an apartment in Indianapolis for the summer to see if now that they’d graduated they were compatible enough to live together. No one really gave it much chance. Rich was going to find out what it was like to have a real working woman to live with as Amber was taking over as summer guest host for Elaine. And Elaine was going to Hollywood to do a bit part in a movie and scope out the area. When I watched her plane go, I wondered if I’d ever see her again.
We were all pretty sad, but Jennifer was devastated when Larry came to tell us that Jingo wasn’t eating and was slow getting up. Jen and I rode with him to the Vet in Columbus where they put him down. The two of us spent the night in the master suite crying while Hannah, Courtney, and Samantha held us. It was like a part of our childhood—what brought us together—was gone.
Whitney came home for two weeks in July in the middle of her scheduled time in South Africa. I took a week off from the show during the Fourth of July holiday. I’d get more time off during the summer, but we weren’t taking two full months off this year. Lee, my guest host when I was off, was getting good reviews, though. Whitney and I went up north and got a nice cabin not far from Lake Michigan where we spent several days doing forms during the day and creating our own fireworks at night. We didn’t spar.
“You need to be teaching, Brian,” Whitney said as we lay in the afterglow.
“We still do forms in the morning. Judy works out with me on a regular basis. She’s getting extremely good,” I said.
“The children, Bri. You need to teach the children. Help them reach the peace that you’ve found through their bodies. I don’t know why, but I believe it will help them a lot. We all need to find that inner peace.”
“I don’t know how to teach,” I sighed. “I’ve always just followed what you showed me.”
“That’s all you need to do. Get them in the sacred space so they know it is different and have them follow you. They will.”
Whitney spent some time with her mother and her mother’s ‘longtime companion’, Dave, in Mishawaka and Janet Anderson finally married him. They’d been together for ten years. It was about time, I guess. Then Whitney was off to South Africa again.
I finished my thesis. A year late, but Dr. Z was pleased and after I presented the paper to my committee, they congratulated me and conferred a Master of Science degree. I was pretty proud of it, even though Courtney was working on her dissertation outline this summer. She’d developed an algorithm that would analyze a digital image and identify areas that had been tampered with. Even I had a digital camera now, though all I ever took pictures of were my kids and my horses. Apparently, though, there was photo editing software available that would let you munge all kinds of things together and make fake photos that were more realistic than the old darkroom techniques had been. She told us that we could all expect our heads to appear on naked bodies in certain unethical magazines and tabloids. The Star was no longer printing that kind of stuff with their new emphasis on positive stories, but they weren’t the only sleazy tabloid out there.
Courtney had her own company and Geoff handled all her system support as well as that for the rest of the ranch. She said a company in California was interested in acquiring rights to her video editing software. Our IP attorneys were working to put things together. It looked like this software stuff could be pretty profitable.
I took Whitney’s suggestion to heart and started gathering all the kids who could walk in the morning to go to the sacred space. I felt like I had to tell them something. I’d practiced and Hannah helped me to make sure I used signs the kids could understand. I paused outside the silo door before we went in.
“This is a special place,” I said softly. “It is a place of peace. Outside the sacred space, I am Papa. Inside, I am Teacher. Inside, I will teach you a new way of speaking with your hands and your feet. Inside you will follow what I do and practice what I show you. Do you want to go inside?” There were nods from kids ages two to almost five. “Then follow,” I said.
Once inside I removed my gi and folded it carefully. The kids were used to nudity, so they all quickly got out of their clothes. Folding them wasn’t exactly neat, but they got everything into a pile. We’d work on that. From that point on, I didn’t speak out loud. I did everything in sign language. C-Rae was the youngest in the group. Then Xan at two and a half. Leslie was just two weeks older than Xan. Ellie was nearly five and Matthew was four and a half. Leon and Leann, of course, were in Charlotte. I thought I’d discuss having them come for the summer next year. The first morning we just worked on standing in a line and doing children’s games. The littlest ones were still a little wobbly when it came to footwork and at one point, Leslie stepped forward and fell back on her bum. It shocked her and she started to speak but I held a finger to my lips. She got big eyes and for a minute I thought she might cry. I held out my hand to help her stand and we repeated the move. I smiled at her and she beamed.
That first morning, we only worked for fifteen minutes. I didn’t want them to get tired or bored and I wanted them to know that this was a special and exciting place. As soon as I got them all dressed, I led them to the door and outside.
“Papa, you aren’t dressed,” Matthew said when he was outside.
“I’m not finished yet,” I said. “You may watch if you want to, or go back to Aunt Dawn. She’s waiting for you. But while I continue my dances, you may not come back inside the sacred space. Okay?”
“Yes, Papa,” Matt said. The other kids nodded, but I expected them to wander away to play in a few minutes at most. I moved back into the space and began my own forms. As soon as I was into them, the world went away. At one time, this was how I channeled my anger and frustration and worry. It was stress relief to the max. Now I found myself with more emotions that I let out through the forms. My care and concern for the children, my everyday worries about performing on the show, and my sadness at what I saw happening within my casa. Just this weekend we’d agreed to partition the big room upstairs into two master suites so people could have just a little more privacy. We were dedicating one of the guest rooms as a children’s room and one as another suite that the mothers would share. That meant expanding into the third room so there was a sitting area as well. Casa del Arco Iris was moving to the lower level of the barn duplex that Larry, Theresa, and Dawn would vacate once Lamar and Sarah’s new home was finished. Jennifer and Courtney were talking about having the girls’ apartment they’d always imagined in the emptied Bunkhouse one. No one was breaking up with anyone, but we needed more room. More privacy.
I felt like I was losing my family. Everything I’d worked so hard to put together was going to slowly come apart. And what would be left? There were simply too many of us to hold together the tightly knit relationship that we’d had.
I’d finished my forms and let all my worry and sadness dissipate. I turned and saw the children sitting on the ground outside the door watching me. Ellie sat with her sister Leslie in her lap. Matthew had both C-Rae and Xan cuddled next to him. My son had always had a way of seeing things. He’d heard me talk early in the morning enough times.
“Why are you sad, Papa?” he asked. I pulled on my gi as I laughed a little.
“Do you ever get sad for no reason?” I asked. He nodded. I nodded back. I didn’t tell him that I was afraid my family was all breaking up. “Now I am at peace. That is why we have a sacred space,” I said.
“Can we walk in the River, Papa?” he asked. “That always makes me happy.”
“Me, too. But we need a couple mamas. I don’t think the little ones can walk all that way.”
“I’ll get Aunt Dawn,” Ellie said. Leslie looked after her and then reached out to take Xan’s hand. Matt got up and C-Rae reached to Xan’s other hand.
“I’ll find Mama Liz and Mommy Dan,” he said. He took off at a run. I sat with the three little girls in front of me and we sang silly little songs until we were joined by Liz toting Céleste on her hip. Dani reached in and scooped up Xan just as Hannah reached for C-Rae. Ellie and Dawn were there in a second and Dawn took Leslie. I took Ellie’s and Matthew’s hands and we walked barefoot out to the stream that would take us to the River of Life.
I talked about life being a cycle and that we experienced all kinds of things between when we came from our mothers until we returned to Mother Earth. We come to the River of Life to renew that energy inside us. “We make gentle patterns in the River to soothe our souls, just like we do forms in the Sacred Space,” I said as I handed rakes to Matt and Ellie. They began raking the stones and then handed the rakes off to Dawn, Hannah, and Liz.
“The River is sacred space, too,” Ellie posited.
Yes. Yes, it is.
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