The Second Shot Heard Around the World- Part 3
Monica King
October 14, 2005
“This will be the second shot heard around the world”.
Kettle drums were playing in my own inner cinematic soundtrack, as I held my exploded chest, dripping with blood & pieces of breast tissue in my hand, carefully cupping my injured right maternal body part so it wouldn’t fly off as I gathered courage & speed to get away from the man who had just professed his passionate love to me by shooting me point blank with a shotgun in the chest as the sun was just sinking down under the horizon. I was heading up the path leading to survival & others in the chain of life.
It is true what other reporters of near death experiences say. You do see a series of rapidly appearing images, a fast forward slide show of your life. It is also true that, when your flesh is exploded like that, with hundreds of led balls of birdshot, sweater torn & stained with your life blood’s coppery smelling essence, you really do not need to be concerned about whether you ought to slip on an emergency purple rubber glove you carry with you for emergencies you might not have foreseen. It is more important to get out & get away from the person who is running after you, after reloading the weapon, to finish you off.
This will be the second shot heard around the world”.
The only clear sentence I heard from Spirit that entire afternoon to sunset siege & showdown on Angels’ Landing.
And the only sentence I heard for guidance after yelling the Our Father prayer in the air, hoping, praying some angel in white, some heavenly celestial being would appear, as they had in ancient times to block the horrible shooting from taking place. To provide divine intervention & redemption for us both.
To wake Daniel up.
To interrupt the series of actions he had taken, was taking, which I knew would lead to a miserable outcome for him, myself possibly too, & especially for our children, the ones from his previous relationships, & the two I had had in a previous wedded union with another father, another time, so long ago it seemed at that point in time, on the wooded path I was hastening up.
But Daniel was definitely awake. He was definitely aware of what he was doing. He was not tuning in to inner demonic voices that were whispering to him to do this. It was not a temporary break from reality that a newly diagnosed schizophrenic suffered from.
I knew that.
I knew from my own lived-world experience, watching, being a guardian for such troubled souls over years of nursing in various settings, in locked units, during those wee hours of the night & morning when there is an opportunity to really study the psychotic mind.
NO, I thought. He can not claim insanity. Insanity is not organized. It is not masterminded, manifesting with cold, calculating evidence that this had been planned for some time.
Daniel had freely chosen to write his own life script with this ending.
He had chosen evil. He had chosen to take matters into his own hands, & decide for me how my life should end. He would take it. If he was not happy, then neither would I be.
If he was going to bypass all human courts of justice & humanly mediated laws to go before the Lord & Savior he had so passionately worked for as a missionary, he was taking me with him.
By force. We would live “happily ever after” in his notion of heaven along with his now deceased relatives, in an Italian version of paradise. A Daniel-authored paradise.
The beginning of the month of October of 2003 was a happy time for me.
I had regained my center, my sanity, which was under assault with his neediness & demands, the imperious nature of his attempts to twist fate in his direction.
I had had the summer to get to that “baseline” again . We were calling what we did as a team of therapists in the inpatient settings of psychiatric medicine.
Costs & insurance companies were driving the whole field of psychiatry to change direction in terms of outcomes with our patients.
We no longer were seeking cures. We were seeking behavioral outcomes.
When at work during my years with Daniel I worked mainly with the elderly & the psychotic population. Prior to our association however, I loved working in labor, delivery, & pediatrics. With children & young families. As an agency nurse, I picked & chose my work environments.
During this portion of my life, children grown & launched in their own rights, I had returned to the seacoast in a sense of loyalty to intergenerational family values. My parents were getting older. They were retired, they had “bought the farm”, but they were happy & well established, amply endowed with all the first-world insurances & benefits that come from having raised children, & sharing a commitment that through good & bad times lasted.
A retired naval commander & Delta pilot, both would never have to struggle to find resources for needed care as they aged.
But they were afraid of nursing homes.
They made it clear, my father in particular, there was no way any of us was going to reduce his world to a shared room in a boarding house for the infirm.
Dad could captain an airship hurtling through space with 200 passengers, braving crosswinds & storms complicating landings into Logan without batting an eye, but his knees turned to jelly when he smelled a whiff of rubbing alcohol, or stale urine in a nursing home or hospital. Or poop smells.
So he set about building his own retirement home on his own land. With the partnership & practical help of my brother.
This fall of 2003 all had been completed. A new farmhouse stood, magnificent on the farm,
set back behind the old barn, overlooking the pond.
The occasion of my son’s marriage celebration gave us all something wonderful, special & magical to collaborate on together. A great party to be organized by the bride & groom themselves. They had transformed the barn into the gathering feasting hall, stringing it with little Christmas lights for soft lighting, decorating with a harvest theme, bales of hay, gourds & pumpkins, fall flowers & foliage.
The internet-savvy couple had done much of the planning & organizing through the web, calling together an international gathering of friends & relatives who flew in from Sweden, Colorado, California, all over America & parts of Europe for this long holiday weekend. They flew in, drove in, & some camped & set-up tents on the green grassy gentle land, brilliant green as verdant as a dream of any who long for the old- fashioned pleasures & sensual delights of a New England fall weekend.
All of nature cooperated.
But Daniel was still attempting to script his own script.
He had been introduced to our Scandinavian/Celtic ways in years past, by attending some of the significant family celebrations, Christmas being the highlight of these.
He had seen how, although no longer married to each other, the groom’s father & I always celebrated our traditional Smorgasbord together.
How my brother was still best friends with my son’s Dad.
We had gone through the divorce in an earlier time, when I had attended Harvard Divinity school for a year pursuing U.U. ministry when our boy & girl were still in preschool.
While that split was painful it was not fatal. Yes, it took years to settle into a new way of partnering which continued our roles together to honor our children with our equanimity over these important memory-building times in their lives.
The father of my children was still that. I would not have, nor will I ever disrespect my choice or his in that regard. We both became more adept & a little mellower with each passing year at navigating these larger family gatherings by coming together there over the years, as gradually others were introduced into the family circle too. He eventually remarried. As did I.
We brought new spouses to these celebrations & as there are many in our clan, it was always pleasant & an event that we all geared up for, no matter where we traveled during the year, or who was being brought into the fold. My brother too, had undergone this change of partners.
Certainly not without pain. It is always hard to divorce, most especially when it is from a parent of your child or children. But the glue, the cement that hung it all together was this unspoken liberality we were willing to indulge in about these splits when it came to the holiday season.
Christmas for us all was anticipated with a childlike sense of joy & wonder, & a love for time-honored traditions our grandparents, each from two different traditions, had given us.
As children came into my brother & sister’s lives & marriages, they too added new elements & ways to share the season of “good will to all men”, infusing them with new dishes added to the traditional Smorgasbord.
It was a good thing.
Time-worn stories of Christmases past would emerge as the Aquavit was poured & a new family member was initiated to the Swedish drinking songs & toasts. The cheeses & the fish dishes, the meatballs & the little hot dogs. And at the end, the Christmas ham. Baked delicacies & coffee after as presents were opened & oohs & ahs, joy & laughter spilled out in the old farmhouse nest.
Salads were introduced, green salads, potato salads, American dishes that my sister, who had married a vegetarian, insisted would be a good addition to the pickled beet dishes & the liver pate.
The ritual of the Christmas Eve day celebration was the training ground for every woman in the family, who was tutored in the family recipes on a rotating basis as these years went by. We all planned weeks in advance who would bring what dish to this event which always started promptly, religiously at 12 noon on December 24th.
As the years went by our men jumped into the cooking too. The ham curing was Dad's big deal.
My brother & uncle learned to make a mean meatball themselves. Baking Limpa, a Swedish rye bread was my contribution growing up in this clan. I mastered the mysteries of yeast breads. Others added, the delicious candies the children's father's new wife crafted, Scottish shortbread from an aunt with Scottish parents, every one was encouraged to bring a dish they were proud of. Or needed to learn as a core offering of the traditonal fare.
It was elegantly & most definitely presided over by my Swedish paternal grandmother, Farmor. As long she lived.
In the Swedish tradition, the authority for these celebrations was always held by the most senior member of the Swedish- blooded side of our family. So when she passed on, it naturally was handed down to my father, the first born of his generation. Those who had "the blood" were the "inlaws", those who married in were called "outlaws".
Swedes are a fearsome race & culture. We knew that from all the stories. From the Viking shields & helmets, the songs & the attitudes the elders handed to us in these warm gathering times. The picture books & histories my parents had collected over the years to line the family room library shelves. But they also had a great sense of humor & love of parties. We were the descendants.
We knew also that the Swedes were the first to claim neutrality in world events & conflicts. They progressed with a far more socialist government in this modern age. Providing insurance for young families to stay at home for the first year of a new baby’s life to bond & nurture a young & growing family.
They chose to sacrifice the need for the extremes of wealth & power in their society to a dedicated philosophy that all of their citizens were worthy of many benefits the government provides. So they pay many more taxes, & the housing is more uniformly decent for all. As are the schools & other public institutions.
From their vantage point in the northern hemisphere, Viking men thought smugly, as men from all cultures usually do, that theirs was the master race. So we were also handed a cultural legacy of racial superiority in the form of all kinds of politically incorrect jokes & funny songs.
They seemed funny until you got older & realized it was this sort of dark humor that fueled real & lethal resentment among the tribes of men.
At any rate, over the years these songs had been changed & edited for the benefit of OUR next generation of children. We made, mainly my sister & I, many adjustments to make the celebration more inclusive, & these changes made the party that much more enriching.
Daniel pretended to go along with all of this grudgingly at times, or stage a withdrawal at the last minute, giving some lame excuse as to why he could not be at such radically inclusive gatherings.
Behind the scenes he was playing up my Dad’s most cherished sexist biases, egging him on, & encouraging him. The Italian & Swede had come to some shared foundational truths about how to handle me. I was an unruly woman Daniel would tame.
And so it was this summer of 2003. Leading to the month of October. He had been visiting with my father, helping him out here & there. Neither would directly communicate these conversations or deep desires to put it all back together the way they saw fit to me. They just had an "understanding".
They did not acknowledge that I was a free American woman, with abilities to handle my own affairs with or without either of them.
They hated the fact I was seeing another man over that summer, that prelude to this showdown.
So as a last gasp effort to script the joyful reconciliation they both desperately hoped would happen to honor my son’s nuptials, Daniel contacted some key people in my inner circle to spread outrageous rumors & lies.
He worked on their minds, seeding doubt & discord.
He flat-out refused to come to the celebration, since I insisted I would be bringing another date. With his young son.
Dad would not allow us to stay inside. In the sacred space of the new family sanctuary as this was somehow a betrayal he felt to Daniel. The emails he deleted. The separation was not happening. It was simply a momentary whim on my part to leave him alone again. I would wake up they were both sure, & see to "reason". Which meant to see things their way.
So, in order that it not mar or detract from the reason for the gathering, we simply brought a tent too & camped out with the other guests.
This weekend was about the bride & groom. Whom all adored, we all were in agreement there.
It was a celebration as beautiful as any Bergman film.
The weather for their day was perfect. Warm, with the leaves of the trees around the pond at their peak. The calm of the pond provided a perfect reflection for this brilliant, clear, colorful tableau. A blessing of the rings ceremony was performed around the perimeter of the pond with all the guests spanning it, young & old. Cameras recorded it.
Music was played, food was served up, first at pond-side, later in the barn where a sumptuous feast of salmon & other beautifully prepared dishes were served. It was not a catered stuffy Washingtonian thing, it was a handmade, home-made celebration all pitched in their talents to manifest.
Later a speaker system was turned on, guests made toasts, guitars came out, family sang together, both Swedish & American songs. In the barn loft.
And later still a bonfire was lit down by the pond for the outdoor types, the kids & me who wanted the night to never end gathered in yet another circle to talk, tell stories & sing some more, until one by one the party revelers pealed off in smaller groups to tents & beds.
In the morning a breakfast was served like an old fashioned church or barn breakfast, with coffee urns & baked goods & fruit. My son & new daughter had pulled off the most glorious of celebrations yet; marrying the old with the new during this incredible weekend. They had orchestrated the whole beautiful event to perfection. With perfection & grace.
But the shadow of the stalking presence fell on us later that day, as the weather turned a more ominous oily grey, with a chilling mist falling gently, to signal the end of this mystical magical time.
Daniel had called over to my sister-in-law at the old farmhouse. Demanding to speak to me.
I could tell by the pained look on her face. He was working her over with guilt.
He was pulling her gentle heart strings with his misery & need.
I mouthed silently I would not speak with him, but I would go by the house to see him.
She passed this message on & got off the phone with some relief.
The party was over.
I & my date with his son, packed up, said our goodbyes, & headed north, by way of Milton.
To give Daniel a chance to see & make an adjustment to the new reality.
The farmhouse I had left him had a small barn attached to it where he had a fire going in a woodstove.
I brought him some delicacies from the party as a peace offering.
I left my new friend in the car with his son, parked on the main road of the village center.
As gently but firmly as I could, I gave him an opportunity to meet & greet this new person & his son in my life. He refused. I didn’t push it. We conversed for about 20 minutes & headed up the road again, this time visiting our land, Angels’ Landing, on the way to the upper valley where we were returning to.
I wanted my new friend, who is a talented woodworker, to see the lot, to see what he thought of it. I was going to have to decide what to do with my part. I wanted his input.
I wanted to see it again for myself too. It was land I had found, land I had bought with a gift of cash from my father. I had put the title of the deed in both of our names. It was the next step I needed to address in my separation. I also wanted to see how Daniel was doing.
He put up a good front. He had things in order he said. His business was thriving on the main street of town. He was holding the fort.
But he was not reconciled to a divorce or the separation. He had taken no steps on his own to help himself.
He stalked us. That chilling last day of the holiday, he suddenly appeared, like a panther on the property, claiming a neighbor had called to report that intruders were on the property.
He knew it was us.
But with the little boy in the car, both men restrained themselves circling each other like big wildcats, eyeing each other & me.
They feigned civility. They behaved.
Daniel just happened to have some gifts in his truck to give me, so the "report" story was another in a long string of tall tales. But I could see why he was doing it. He wanted to woo me back with gifts. Small mementoes to remind me of him back in Vermont where I now lived.
I determined to, after this milestone of a celebration was over, get on with the final details of a divorce. It had been six months. I knew nothing had changed. He was not going to. We were at a stalemate with this whole equality thing.
check in again soon for part 4...
Kettle drums were playing in my own inner cinematic soundtrack, as I held my exploded chest, dripping with blood & pieces of breast tissue in my hand, carefully cupping my injured right maternal body part so it wouldn’t fly off as I gathered courage & speed to get away from the man who had just professed his passionate love to me by shooting me point blank with a shotgun in the chest as the sun was just sinking down under the horizon. I was heading up the path leading to survival & others in the chain of life.
It is true what other reporters of near death experiences say. You do see a series of rapidly appearing images, a fast forward slide show of your life. It is also true that, when your flesh is exploded like that, with hundreds of led balls of birdshot, sweater torn & stained with your life blood’s coppery smelling essence, you really do not need to be concerned about whether you ought to slip on an emergency purple rubber glove you carry with you for emergencies you might not have foreseen. It is more important to get out & get away from the person who is running after you, after reloading the weapon, to finish you off.
This will be the second shot heard around the world”.
The only clear sentence I heard from Spirit that entire afternoon to sunset siege & showdown on Angels’ Landing.
And the only sentence I heard for guidance after yelling the Our Father prayer in the air, hoping, praying some angel in white, some heavenly celestial being would appear, as they had in ancient times to block the horrible shooting from taking place. To provide divine intervention & redemption for us both.
To wake Daniel up.
To interrupt the series of actions he had taken, was taking, which I knew would lead to a miserable outcome for him, myself possibly too, & especially for our children, the ones from his previous relationships, & the two I had had in a previous wedded union with another father, another time, so long ago it seemed at that point in time, on the wooded path I was hastening up.
But Daniel was definitely awake. He was definitely aware of what he was doing. He was not tuning in to inner demonic voices that were whispering to him to do this. It was not a temporary break from reality that a newly diagnosed schizophrenic suffered from.
I knew that.
I knew from my own lived-world experience, watching, being a guardian for such troubled souls over years of nursing in various settings, in locked units, during those wee hours of the night & morning when there is an opportunity to really study the psychotic mind.
NO, I thought. He can not claim insanity. Insanity is not organized. It is not masterminded, manifesting with cold, calculating evidence that this had been planned for some time.
Daniel had freely chosen to write his own life script with this ending.
He had chosen evil. He had chosen to take matters into his own hands, & decide for me how my life should end. He would take it. If he was not happy, then neither would I be.
If he was going to bypass all human courts of justice & humanly mediated laws to go before the Lord & Savior he had so passionately worked for as a missionary, he was taking me with him.
By force. We would live “happily ever after” in his notion of heaven along with his now deceased relatives, in an Italian version of paradise. A Daniel-authored paradise.
The beginning of the month of October of 2003 was a happy time for me.
I had regained my center, my sanity, which was under assault with his neediness & demands, the imperious nature of his attempts to twist fate in his direction.
I had had the summer to get to that “baseline” again . We were calling what we did as a team of therapists in the inpatient settings of psychiatric medicine.
Costs & insurance companies were driving the whole field of psychiatry to change direction in terms of outcomes with our patients.
We no longer were seeking cures. We were seeking behavioral outcomes.
When at work during my years with Daniel I worked mainly with the elderly & the psychotic population. Prior to our association however, I loved working in labor, delivery, & pediatrics. With children & young families. As an agency nurse, I picked & chose my work environments.
During this portion of my life, children grown & launched in their own rights, I had returned to the seacoast in a sense of loyalty to intergenerational family values. My parents were getting older. They were retired, they had “bought the farm”, but they were happy & well established, amply endowed with all the first-world insurances & benefits that come from having raised children, & sharing a commitment that through good & bad times lasted.
A retired naval commander & Delta pilot, both would never have to struggle to find resources for needed care as they aged.
But they were afraid of nursing homes.
They made it clear, my father in particular, there was no way any of us was going to reduce his world to a shared room in a boarding house for the infirm.
Dad could captain an airship hurtling through space with 200 passengers, braving crosswinds & storms complicating landings into Logan without batting an eye, but his knees turned to jelly when he smelled a whiff of rubbing alcohol, or stale urine in a nursing home or hospital. Or poop smells.
So he set about building his own retirement home on his own land. With the partnership & practical help of my brother.
This fall of 2003 all had been completed. A new farmhouse stood, magnificent on the farm,
set back behind the old barn, overlooking the pond.
The occasion of my son’s marriage celebration gave us all something wonderful, special & magical to collaborate on together. A great party to be organized by the bride & groom themselves. They had transformed the barn into the gathering feasting hall, stringing it with little Christmas lights for soft lighting, decorating with a harvest theme, bales of hay, gourds & pumpkins, fall flowers & foliage.
The internet-savvy couple had done much of the planning & organizing through the web, calling together an international gathering of friends & relatives who flew in from Sweden, Colorado, California, all over America & parts of Europe for this long holiday weekend. They flew in, drove in, & some camped & set-up tents on the green grassy gentle land, brilliant green as verdant as a dream of any who long for the old- fashioned pleasures & sensual delights of a New England fall weekend.
All of nature cooperated.
But Daniel was still attempting to script his own script.
He had been introduced to our Scandinavian/Celtic ways in years past, by attending some of the significant family celebrations, Christmas being the highlight of these.
He had seen how, although no longer married to each other, the groom’s father & I always celebrated our traditional Smorgasbord together.
How my brother was still best friends with my son’s Dad.
We had gone through the divorce in an earlier time, when I had attended Harvard Divinity school for a year pursuing U.U. ministry when our boy & girl were still in preschool.
While that split was painful it was not fatal. Yes, it took years to settle into a new way of partnering which continued our roles together to honor our children with our equanimity over these important memory-building times in their lives.
The father of my children was still that. I would not have, nor will I ever disrespect my choice or his in that regard. We both became more adept & a little mellower with each passing year at navigating these larger family gatherings by coming together there over the years, as gradually others were introduced into the family circle too. He eventually remarried. As did I.
We brought new spouses to these celebrations & as there are many in our clan, it was always pleasant & an event that we all geared up for, no matter where we traveled during the year, or who was being brought into the fold. My brother too, had undergone this change of partners.
Certainly not without pain. It is always hard to divorce, most especially when it is from a parent of your child or children. But the glue, the cement that hung it all together was this unspoken liberality we were willing to indulge in about these splits when it came to the holiday season.
Christmas for us all was anticipated with a childlike sense of joy & wonder, & a love for time-honored traditions our grandparents, each from two different traditions, had given us.
As children came into my brother & sister’s lives & marriages, they too added new elements & ways to share the season of “good will to all men”, infusing them with new dishes added to the traditional Smorgasbord.
It was a good thing.
Time-worn stories of Christmases past would emerge as the Aquavit was poured & a new family member was initiated to the Swedish drinking songs & toasts. The cheeses & the fish dishes, the meatballs & the little hot dogs. And at the end, the Christmas ham. Baked delicacies & coffee after as presents were opened & oohs & ahs, joy & laughter spilled out in the old farmhouse nest.
Salads were introduced, green salads, potato salads, American dishes that my sister, who had married a vegetarian, insisted would be a good addition to the pickled beet dishes & the liver pate.
The ritual of the Christmas Eve day celebration was the training ground for every woman in the family, who was tutored in the family recipes on a rotating basis as these years went by. We all planned weeks in advance who would bring what dish to this event which always started promptly, religiously at 12 noon on December 24th.
As the years went by our men jumped into the cooking too. The ham curing was Dad's big deal.
My brother & uncle learned to make a mean meatball themselves. Baking Limpa, a Swedish rye bread was my contribution growing up in this clan. I mastered the mysteries of yeast breads. Others added, the delicious candies the children's father's new wife crafted, Scottish shortbread from an aunt with Scottish parents, every one was encouraged to bring a dish they were proud of. Or needed to learn as a core offering of the traditonal fare.
It was elegantly & most definitely presided over by my Swedish paternal grandmother, Farmor. As long she lived.
In the Swedish tradition, the authority for these celebrations was always held by the most senior member of the Swedish- blooded side of our family. So when she passed on, it naturally was handed down to my father, the first born of his generation. Those who had "the blood" were the "inlaws", those who married in were called "outlaws".
Swedes are a fearsome race & culture. We knew that from all the stories. From the Viking shields & helmets, the songs & the attitudes the elders handed to us in these warm gathering times. The picture books & histories my parents had collected over the years to line the family room library shelves. But they also had a great sense of humor & love of parties. We were the descendants.
We knew also that the Swedes were the first to claim neutrality in world events & conflicts. They progressed with a far more socialist government in this modern age. Providing insurance for young families to stay at home for the first year of a new baby’s life to bond & nurture a young & growing family.
They chose to sacrifice the need for the extremes of wealth & power in their society to a dedicated philosophy that all of their citizens were worthy of many benefits the government provides. So they pay many more taxes, & the housing is more uniformly decent for all. As are the schools & other public institutions.
From their vantage point in the northern hemisphere, Viking men thought smugly, as men from all cultures usually do, that theirs was the master race. So we were also handed a cultural legacy of racial superiority in the form of all kinds of politically incorrect jokes & funny songs.
They seemed funny until you got older & realized it was this sort of dark humor that fueled real & lethal resentment among the tribes of men.
At any rate, over the years these songs had been changed & edited for the benefit of OUR next generation of children. We made, mainly my sister & I, many adjustments to make the celebration more inclusive, & these changes made the party that much more enriching.
Daniel pretended to go along with all of this grudgingly at times, or stage a withdrawal at the last minute, giving some lame excuse as to why he could not be at such radically inclusive gatherings.
Behind the scenes he was playing up my Dad’s most cherished sexist biases, egging him on, & encouraging him. The Italian & Swede had come to some shared foundational truths about how to handle me. I was an unruly woman Daniel would tame.
And so it was this summer of 2003. Leading to the month of October. He had been visiting with my father, helping him out here & there. Neither would directly communicate these conversations or deep desires to put it all back together the way they saw fit to me. They just had an "understanding".
They did not acknowledge that I was a free American woman, with abilities to handle my own affairs with or without either of them.
They hated the fact I was seeing another man over that summer, that prelude to this showdown.
So as a last gasp effort to script the joyful reconciliation they both desperately hoped would happen to honor my son’s nuptials, Daniel contacted some key people in my inner circle to spread outrageous rumors & lies.
He worked on their minds, seeding doubt & discord.
He flat-out refused to come to the celebration, since I insisted I would be bringing another date. With his young son.
Dad would not allow us to stay inside. In the sacred space of the new family sanctuary as this was somehow a betrayal he felt to Daniel. The emails he deleted. The separation was not happening. It was simply a momentary whim on my part to leave him alone again. I would wake up they were both sure, & see to "reason". Which meant to see things their way.
So, in order that it not mar or detract from the reason for the gathering, we simply brought a tent too & camped out with the other guests.
This weekend was about the bride & groom. Whom all adored, we all were in agreement there.
It was a celebration as beautiful as any Bergman film.
The weather for their day was perfect. Warm, with the leaves of the trees around the pond at their peak. The calm of the pond provided a perfect reflection for this brilliant, clear, colorful tableau. A blessing of the rings ceremony was performed around the perimeter of the pond with all the guests spanning it, young & old. Cameras recorded it.
Music was played, food was served up, first at pond-side, later in the barn where a sumptuous feast of salmon & other beautifully prepared dishes were served. It was not a catered stuffy Washingtonian thing, it was a handmade, home-made celebration all pitched in their talents to manifest.
Later a speaker system was turned on, guests made toasts, guitars came out, family sang together, both Swedish & American songs. In the barn loft.
And later still a bonfire was lit down by the pond for the outdoor types, the kids & me who wanted the night to never end gathered in yet another circle to talk, tell stories & sing some more, until one by one the party revelers pealed off in smaller groups to tents & beds.
In the morning a breakfast was served like an old fashioned church or barn breakfast, with coffee urns & baked goods & fruit. My son & new daughter had pulled off the most glorious of celebrations yet; marrying the old with the new during this incredible weekend. They had orchestrated the whole beautiful event to perfection. With perfection & grace.
But the shadow of the stalking presence fell on us later that day, as the weather turned a more ominous oily grey, with a chilling mist falling gently, to signal the end of this mystical magical time.
Daniel had called over to my sister-in-law at the old farmhouse. Demanding to speak to me.
I could tell by the pained look on her face. He was working her over with guilt.
He was pulling her gentle heart strings with his misery & need.
I mouthed silently I would not speak with him, but I would go by the house to see him.
She passed this message on & got off the phone with some relief.
The party was over.
I & my date with his son, packed up, said our goodbyes, & headed north, by way of Milton.
To give Daniel a chance to see & make an adjustment to the new reality.
The farmhouse I had left him had a small barn attached to it where he had a fire going in a woodstove.
I brought him some delicacies from the party as a peace offering.
I left my new friend in the car with his son, parked on the main road of the village center.
As gently but firmly as I could, I gave him an opportunity to meet & greet this new person & his son in my life. He refused. I didn’t push it. We conversed for about 20 minutes & headed up the road again, this time visiting our land, Angels’ Landing, on the way to the upper valley where we were returning to.
I wanted my new friend, who is a talented woodworker, to see the lot, to see what he thought of it. I was going to have to decide what to do with my part. I wanted his input.
I wanted to see it again for myself too. It was land I had found, land I had bought with a gift of cash from my father. I had put the title of the deed in both of our names. It was the next step I needed to address in my separation. I also wanted to see how Daniel was doing.
He put up a good front. He had things in order he said. His business was thriving on the main street of town. He was holding the fort.
But he was not reconciled to a divorce or the separation. He had taken no steps on his own to help himself.
He stalked us. That chilling last day of the holiday, he suddenly appeared, like a panther on the property, claiming a neighbor had called to report that intruders were on the property.
He knew it was us.
But with the little boy in the car, both men restrained themselves circling each other like big wildcats, eyeing each other & me.
They feigned civility. They behaved.
Daniel just happened to have some gifts in his truck to give me, so the "report" story was another in a long string of tall tales. But I could see why he was doing it. He wanted to woo me back with gifts. Small mementoes to remind me of him back in Vermont where I now lived.
I determined to, after this milestone of a celebration was over, get on with the final details of a divorce. It had been six months. I knew nothing had changed. He was not going to. We were at a stalemate with this whole equality thing.
check in again soon for part 4...
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