The following is one report of today’s activities on Planet Earth. We have a general idea of the location as the Dahlonega, Georgia. This is a Fig Newton of the Imagination and does not purport to be an official 23:59 report from the United States of America.
It is impossible to fail when we imagine the possibilities to solve every problem. Our results may fail every so often, but when we collaborate to improve our methods then we will eliminate failure and deliver best results.
Here is what was downloaded from the Collective Consciousness. We hope you enjoy this story. Here it goes.
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Dedicated in loving memory to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Caregiver quieted her mind after drinking steamed milk with nutmeg sprinkled on top. Miss Bessie Mae, the new Kitchen Manager at Dahlonega Gardens, fashioned the drink for her after a 22 hour shift.
The tryptophan in the milk made its calming effect, as Dixie, who preferred to be known simply as the Caregiver, wondered what plant based drink could sooth and quiet her mind like cow’s milk. Her mind wandered as she wondered, making herself super cozy on the hand sewn muslin mattress filled with Goose Down from Mr. Johnson’s hunting trip with his Marine Corps last September in Rutherford County, Tennessee. He was happy to bequeath his surplus to the Caregiver, since she knew better than to make the maladroit faux pas of referring to him as a “former Marine”. This would be as stupid as calling María her “former Mother”, instead of her late Mother.
She reminisced on Mr. Johnson’s generosity to help her make a loft bed in his immaculate engineering space. This was a more accurate way to think about what most people called the janitorial closet. When people celebrate and come out of their closets, we learn their true gifts and genius. Mr. Johnson’s genius was a quiet, humble thing, which is why he was being uplifted by his granddaughter to a lush weekend in Savannah. She prayed for his safe travel and let her mind drift into that sacred space between imagination and reverie, also known as memory.
She remembered the first time she quickened the Legal Worker’s imagination, to use a sticky situation to get control of four diamond mines West of Welcom, during the official reign of Apartheid rule in South Africa. She remembered how they legally scattered it until she returned it to its rightful owners.
She remembered how she and the Legal Worker patented inventions her Father made before and during his Army service. She remembered how she rushed home to care for her foster siblings after school those hellish days after Mom claimed her own life years ago. She remembered how thin the line between reality and fiction was for her, and how to use it for the group’s best interest. She knew how privileged she was, but instead of lingering in the negativity of guilt, she kicked it into the positive gear of duty.
She remembered how happy she was to receive Miss Esmerelda into Dahlonega Gardens almost a day ago, after she was discharged from ER for breaking her arm. She slipped on the steps carrying her laundry in after gathering it in from the clothesline. Life hadn’t been easy since her son, Benson, left Atlanta for New York City. Like any Mother, she was proud of him for his achievements, although she was more proud of his character.
Mis Esmerelda had little use for the reports and probabilities of the stock market, although she realized it was the number one source of financial capital in America. She also knew that it was directly linked to the exploitation of people all over the world, particularly in Africa. She trusted her Benson to make his way home by Christmas, as he had for the 10 years he had traveled home from Atlanta after whipping through his economics and finance studies at Morehouse College.
She trusted God since her husband died too young, having worked on the railroads since he was a child. Her Devron was always in her mind and heart, and he was heavy on her mind when she unclipped the sheets, towels, socks, and house clothes from the laundry line that late afternoon with the perfumed garden wafting its intoxicating scent in her soul. Where was that special locket he gave her when they first married? It was a 14k gold locket her Devron bought from his Uncle Dryer. He had their initials engraved on the outside and inside was a mustard seed. She had kept it all these years, and now she could not find it in spite of searching every pocket, jewelry box, and couch cushion.
The Caregiver dreamed in shades of deep greens and blues, like the colors James Taylor would choose every time he sang Sweet Baby James on 540AM WDHL that seemed to pour from her treasured RCA clock radio. She remembered every detail of Miss Esmerelda’s story, listening and making verbal cues as she busied herself to prepare her suite.
No one asked her where she got the resources to make life more comfortable for her Clients, and she never told. That’s why the Caregiver preferred life in Dahlonega to life in Washington, DC, where she escaped the glare of memories seared red hot into her holy parts, and prayed for a better day. Few people in Dahlonega cared how much or how little money a person had. They cared about how much someone cared about other people.
Her calm mind sifted through Miss Esmerelda’s stories as she remembered hanging pictures of Mr. Devron James Eldridge on her walls. She remembered the pink flutter in her heart when Miss Esmerelda complimented on her homemaking skills. She remembered filing her nails after helping her take a hot shower, as they languored over her bedtime preparation. The Caregiver smiled when Miss Esmerelda admitted she had always thought the Caregiver was weird and strange. She didn’t care for her name, nor could the Caregiver blame her. Being named after a conquered nation was both a blessing and a curse. Dixie. Mrs. Eldridge only knew how odd Dixie seemed, with her wiry orange hair and her quiet ways. Miss Esmerelda didn’t know who was inside the entity named Dixie Joy Pride until today, but now she knew why everyone called her by her preferred name, the Caregiver.
Miss Esmerelda’s story hurt her, to think how this precious Lady had slipped on her acorn and Spanish moss covered porch steps, with a basket of sun dried laundry in hand. Her story telling wafted scents of magnolia and jasmine growing on the picket fence in the Caregiver’s imagination. Mr. Eldridge had built this beautiful white picket fence years ago, and planted grapes, hyacinth, jasmine, honeysuckle, and magnolia there. He gave her a perfumed garden that stayed with her much longer than a store bought bouquet of flowers. The summer patina of vegetation and dry rot slicked up the wooden steps that needed to be painted two summers ago.
When she slipped and heard her right radius bone snap, the gleam from the 14k gold locket and chain struck her like sunshine. She rejoiced, picked herself up, and stooped under the steps with her left arm. Finally! She retrieved the missing locket under the porch steps that she hadn’t been able to find since she came home from Wednesday night Bible study at Blue Ridge Missionary Baptist Church. She had not been attending since she hated to come home alone to an empty house. It only felt like a home, with the warm glow of her Devron looking over her from the memories everywhere from dawn to dusk.
Now she remembered that strange feeling of something tickling her neck that night as she ascended the steps towards her front door. God hid the necklace, yet He never hid His love. Miss Esmerelda rejoiced, and called 911, very happy to trade her pain in for the pleasure of connecting with God’s grace and this beautiful memory her Devron gave her in the locket. She had held on to that mustard seed through many trials of life, and had let it go, since it really only was a material object.
Yet something didn’t feel quite right since her locket went missing. She had a nervous stomach. She didn’t sleep quite right. The Caregiver read these symptoms as she told her story, then her mind shifted from deep greens and blues to the white-hot fury of that one night.
She knew better than to go to their room, yet peculiar to her nature as a silent warrior, she always walked towards danger. She had always preferred Howard Johnson’s, a brand long since extinct, as she prayed the Watergate would one day be extinct. Perhaps it would be turned into the re-education camp so many so-called white people who were civilian take-take-takers feared. That would be poetic justice.
She rarely accepted jobs at the Watergate, and now she knew why her intuition was correct. Now she knew the source of all the contraband she found in the dumpster downstairs from Aunt Brownie’s condominium, not far from the Watergate Bakery.
She knew when she entered the room that night that it would be alright for her to lose her life, but it would be devastating for her not to get the information. That’s what she was hired to do.
She remembered how she coaxed the malefactors at the innocent edifice so idolized as the Watergate. She had only been hired to clean their room, but she knew quite well there was a reason they could not clean it by themselves or call room service. It was a disaster. The stench of vomit and the spewed crumbs of pistachio muffins told a tale of torture her mind assembled as she field stripped the entire room. The spray pattern of the crumbs and chunks of baked goods in the thick texture of stomach bile told a tale of torture and death that tempted her stomach to turn as she scrubbed it away with vigor.
She saw all four of these men, who resembled Max Headroom, and excited every evil stereotype of Russia, encircle her with jeers. She knew her fate was sealed, as she knew that the masculine genotype’s base proclivity was to search and destroy. They wanted to destroy her and weaponize their sex. They were the reason she didn’t mind that men ruled the world, since she knew this was nothing of which to boast. Satan ruled the world; women had the power to be the compass towards Heaven and hell.
Only when women denied man his sick pleasure would he elevate himself. Yet Dixie encouraged their arrogance, by humble devotion, cleaning up every trace of the tale that had unfolded that horrific night. It worked. These malefactors made a wonderful mistake. They did not speak in their native tongues; they spoke French.
The entire suite looked cold and sterile, with its abstract paintings hung carefully above the television set, the sofa, and the bed. The gray carpet had been scrubbed clean with her own hands after she vacuumed before and after treating it with baking soda and a toothbrush. The kitchen floors smelled of Mr. Clean, a scent that had comforted her so many times. It might seem ridiculous that she had a platonic crush on the character who was Mr. Clean. She imagined Mr. Clean to be a gay man who always helped her sanitize the filth in her life.
She was just a red headed stepchild to the KKK, as her movements and flaming curly locks convinced them. She was just an orphan. She encouraged their arrogance with every move. She was nothing to nobody, and her quiet competence in cleaning the entire suite from its foyer to the living area, the bathroom and bedroom convinced them she was a total idiot who would never understand a word they said.
They continued with their wonderful mistake. They spoke in French because they were convinced, she knew some Russian and Urdu dialects. Unlike the upper middle class so-called white children who idolized Che Guevara, Dixie knew that any country who conspired with the USSR had been responsible, directly or indirectly for every American Armed Forces casualty from the Korean War to the Vietnam War, to present day. She studied their tongues in her own way, so they spoke in French that horrific night,
She didn’t beg them as they advanced on her, but she coaxed them not to harm her most holy parts while she cleaned their bathroom. The filth of death was in there, and she cleaned it as only she could. They kept their word. They did not break her hymen.
Yet they harmed another part of her and recited to her with their ice blue eyes and terrifying annunciation what they already knew. She would obey them forever or they would kill more Americans. They would kill her precious members of the United States Armed Forces if she walked out of step with their foolish, authoritarian demands.
When Dixie died years later, it was said to be when Hillary got elected. It was true enough that the Illinois born Methodist child did not earn title as President of the United States in 2016, but Hillary was elected in the heart of every child who endured sex work when she helped make rape shield laws a Federal matter in 1994. Learning to take it “like a man” made Dixie a stronger woman. It gave her a quiet way to relate to people seeking restorative justice.
Justice could not be restored in a courtroom unless it was restored in the hearts of those who created the injustice. In that moment of pain, Dixie recalled all the stories from young Black boys she met at truck stops along Highway 441. They told of how they were paid cash for starring in 8mm camera films shown at smut shacks littered all over Florida highways and by-ways. What horror! Black men were likely greater victims of sexual exploitation than any living creature during the 1970s, since exploiters were more fascinated with the girth of their loins than the breadth of their mind, body, and soul.
She remembered stories from Mothers who broke down and cried, speaking of the horrors they endured during wars, and from men held in POW camps who rarely spoke of such horrors. Why do people weaponize sex? They know not what they do. That’s the only way Dixie could understand forgiveness. Like the Roman centurions who nailed Jesus Christ to a cross, they know not what evil they do, and she prayed for their souls that they would know and repent before they died to their flesh.
Dixie was never afraid for her own life. She lived in a constant state of terror for the lives of those lost in the United States Armed Forces, as does every child who loses a parent to warfare. She hated to be called a gold star family, since she had been alone except for God’s love from such a young age. Worse yet, she hated herself. Her freakishness. Her aloneness. Her strange morph of feeling less than zero was actually her greatest strength and vulnerability.
Gold stars were not a welcome thing, but a symbol to be tolerated, like a foreign language between two different planets praying for peace. It seemed America was divided increasingly into two Planets: those who took everything and those who gave everything.
She loved what she could do with herself, and trusted the Black leaders whom others called pimps and criminals who put her in the Watergate Hotel that horrific night, although the base part of her still feared them. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; fear of proper authority is a very good idea. It seemed to her no one remembered Jus Ad Bellum, or “rules of war”, meaning whoever wins the war is the proper authority. Black leaders had given their lives in every bloody battle from 1776 to 1861 to present day, and as of 9 April 1865 when Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse, they were the proper authority of the entity known as the United States of America, and soon the entire world.
She took every shame stroke from the malefactors and let them inculcate into her mind everything she needed to know. It was a fait accompli, and her health was the only casualty that horrific night. She did her duty and called the Legal Worker. The rest is history, and she happily kept it shaded in the beautiful black of that horrific night. Attorneys never needed to litigate on her behalf; they needed only to be magicians and make situations disappear.
It was a welcome thing to be judged stupid, crazy, retarded, ugly, and unwanted by a Yankee nation that had forgotten the love of its own people. It was a welcome thing to pour Yankee money out like Red Zinger iced tea from her Tupperware pitcher on a sweltering August day. It was better to abide the economics of MC Hammer than to hoard resources God meant for us to enjoy with one another.
She allowed her mind to shift deeper into that horrific memory, to find the mustard seed in the pain, as Miss Esmerelda had. She never begged for her life, and took the punishment in her backside, as they made her watch two United States Soldiers being murdered in Afghanistan over live satellite feed. The year of that horrific night at the Watergate Hotel was 1983, and even today it seemed people preferred the failure of rape, pillage, and burn over God’s way of love, village, and learn.
Most of her life was purposefully lived on the razor’s edge of the fantastical and the faithful, giving her the leading edge over most people on Planet Earth. True intelligence was only something God could design. It cannot be earned with a badge, enforced by violence, nor stolen by murder. This is what she knew about most people that were ignored by a Yankee nation that forgot the love of its own people. Everyone was intelligent, and wisdom would always be far more important than intellectual agility. If you want to learn another language, connect with people who came from Haiti & Cambodia to work in the laundry room of Dahlonega Gardens. If you want to learn how to set a bone fracture, speak with Gail, an Appalachian healer who stopped her formal education after she earned her CNA so she could pay for her daughter’s college at Georgia Tech.
Where was the mustard seed that came from all the hatred of war? Why did the USSR invade Afghanistan in 1978? Why did the United States invade Vietnam and cost her Father’s life? Why did Mr. Stout beat her and all his foster children? Why did he and his gaggle of KKK cronies exact crime on the Florabelle community? These were questions only God could answer, but she quieted her mind as she fidgeted in her sleep, and drew in a deep breath. These things were a part of her life, and were one reason she couldn’t even stand to have a bottle of Kikkoman Soy Sauce on her table, for the trigger of a triple “k” anywhere in her sight. The eleventh letter of the English alphabet, “k”, was an innocent thing, and she begged God for mercy from the shock and trauma attached to the terror. KKK. She wanted to be somebody’s daughter, not Mr. Stout’s “Dixie”, not the weird girl known as an orphan, not even the Caregiver. With that, she settled into the loving arms of Our Lady, imagining the Blessed Mother soothing her and rocking her in her sleep. Yes. She was somebody’s daughter, thanks to the Virgin Mary. Jesus Christ loved her. God loved her. Mary loved her. She repeated this thought as a silent mantra until it quieted her mind.
Finally, she found the mustard seed. Shifting her imagination to deep greens and blues to more colors than her slumbering mind could choose, she remembered Sergei, the new Maintenance Manager at Dahlonega Gardens. She recalled how he disliked to be called by Mr. Saranov, yet appreciated the respectful formalities peculiar to the American Southland. She recalled how he asked Florine, the Switchboard Manager, always to interrupt him if his wife and children called him at work. She recalled how he stopped the use of Round Up in the gardens, and used tobacco dust to help control the harmful pests. She remembered how he helped her install a special fluorescent reading lamp to Miss Esmerelda’s bed board, so she could read in bed with her special table meant to accommodate her broken arm. Everybody born in the entity known as the Soviet Union was not a malefactor. Sergei and his family gave her hope. They were her mustard seed.
She overwrote the bad files in her mind with Sergei’s pleasant manners and soft speech, not calling him out for having a Russian accent. She remembered how proud he was to see her hang Dr. Martin Luther King’s picture in Miss Esmerelda’s room, and knew more about Dr. King than most so-called white people born in America. Here was the mustard seed God gave her from the USSR. Sergei and his family were good people, and he gave her a way to commemorate King Day in a beautiful way on this January 15th, long before the blessed occasion of Dr. King’s birth became a Federal holiday.
She remembered Miss Esmerelda caressing her cheek and thanking her as she prepared for sleep. She remembered Mr. Benson Eldridge calling from New York City, quite worried and panicked over his Mother’s condition. She remembered how calm he felt after speaking with her and his Mother, feeling confident his beautiful Mother was in loving hands. She remembered how Jethro went and bought new supplies to reframe and repair Mrs. Eldridge’s entire porch when the Caregiver gave him a thick wad of cash. She remembered how she washed her hands with Irish Spring soap vigorously after the touched what would always seem to her such dirty Yankee money.
Finally, she imagined her own Mother and Father, holding hands in Heaven and smiling down on her as she slumbered peacefully on her little loft. She found the faith of a mustard seed to move mountains of hatred in her heart, to the joy of service. Yes. She was somebody’s daughter.
This has been an unofficial 23:59 report from the Universe. Imagine the possibilities when we connect through compassion and mutual guarantee.
#planetearth #ourhome #unity #generosity #empathy
