Eating the Biggest Frog (Part 2 of 2)

So, I thought the world was ending.

We need to get this out of the way, straight off.

My Auntie Bea swore by “Eat the Big Frog First” and I’ve been following her sage advice for over 50 years.

The teaching, as I understand it, is this: If I have ten things to do, and all of them are as repulsive as eating a frog, I should start with the biggest and ugliest one. This makes the rest go down easier. It’s an energetic thing, not a digestive thing. I was happy about that. Because I was just 8 years old when Bea shared this with me, and my 8 year old brain was pretty literal.

 Learning to “Eat the Big Frog First”  was the first time I’d met one of Bea’s amphibious teachings, so it was marked as “important in an emergency” and pinned to the dashboard of my little brain’s desktop. And trust me, this one’s instructions were much more intelligible than future frogs would deliver. I’ve lost count of how many big frogs I’ve swallowed over the years, in the name of getting through a list of calamities my brain couldn’t sort using logic.

This story I’m digging up first, it’s my biggest frog. I’m not sure how frog magic works, exactly, but I know telling this story will release the rest from the pile. Permissions will be reset. The heap with bubble, steam and almost turn itself, and all the little frogs will be free. Instead of effort, there will be ease.

If I’d uttered this Voldemort level unspeakable thought to you two years ago, I’m sure you would have quickly offered something meant to normalize it. To normalize… me.

“Oh I know, I bet millions of years from now, our sun will likely die. We best enjoy the ride while we can!” Or maybe “The world’s a crazy place!” You would then offer a smile perfectly calibrated to your own general lack of concern.

Ok. Thank you. But no.

Not like that.

I would have smiled though, and taken your generous offramp. Instead of spilling the contents of my trailer onto the highway at full speed, I could hit the air brakes. Slow this rig down. Stop at the side of the highway, and tie down the load.

But the effort it took NOT to speak the unspeakable over time made the thought in my head even louder. The one that was coming direct from ME to ME. 

“I think next Monday might be the day.”  It was more like that.

Understanding Auntie Bea and the frog will help you understand why I was unable to free the experiences buried in this heap for sooo long.

Auntie Bea played a number of parts in my life. On the surface they seemed ordinary enough.

She was our  next door neighbour in small town Ontario, when I was five years old. Her stone house was on the corner lot, covered in ivy and surrounded by wild garden, just five feet from our house on a busy road. It might as well have been on another planet. To reach it, I parted branches of an overgrown lilac tree, and squeezed through a long- since stuck gate of a forgotten fence, at the back of our yard.

She was married to a military man who was rarely home, and had four children, and one of them was my age. We became friends and were in the same class. So, Bea  became my new friend’s mother. My first familiar adult outside of family.

Then she and her family moved away, to a farmhouse in the country. My parents were inspired to do the same thing, and soon after, bought a farm house just a short drive from them. She then became one of my mom’s dearest friends. We spent much time at their house, they spent time at ours. I watched her with a level of interest that defies a tidy explanation. She had a horse named Valkyrie, and she once called my mom in the middle of a winter’s night to bring us to the barn to see the pigs be born.

Bea carved sandstone, threw snail parties (when I was a kid, I thought  snails attended, but later it was revealed that she served escargot), swam in a bog at her farm she called God’s Water, and was a cocktail waitress who wore a kitten leotard and wedge heels to work on Friday nights. She had fairy rings growing all over her yard. She loved old books that told narrative stories about ancient history. And sometimes she spoke in limericks. Spontaneously.

When my mom died when I was 11, her daughter and I drifted apart and Bea and I lost touch. Which, of course would be normal. We had moved back to the city. Bea divorced and moved to a neighbouring city. Her daughter and I  drifted, now attending  different schools. Plus, Bea was a literal grown up and I was a literal  kid. Why would we?

What seems a little less normal was what occurred on a blistering hot summer day on a congested street in downtown Toronto when I was 18. I had moved to the city on my own at 17, and was feeling my way to adulthood. Bumbling I would say. Sort of alone-ish. Spending days avoiding unwanted attention but actively seeking something real.

On this particular day, I  crossed the road at a spot I didn’t usually, because a man in the magazine shop on my preferred side flashed me through the window as I walked home the day before. Some things you don’t need to see twice.

Anyway, I walked down the other side, the unaccustomed side, the out of the ordinary side and when I lifted my head  to see how far the streetcar stop was, I saw woman in a long flowing white dress coming toward me. 

At first I thought she was barefoot, but it was just the heat mirage rising from the sidewalk. For a moment I thought she was  gliding just about the cement…but no, now I could see she wore  leather string sandals, the kind with only a thin leather sole, and as she neared, I began to hear tinkling, caused by the many silver bangles on her ankles and wrists.

To be truthful, I had a hard time looking away from her, I was that captivated by how ethereal she seemed. As she drew closer, I began to sense something familiar. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen her.

When we met, in the middle of that crowed sidewalk on market day, she wrapped her arms around me without a word. I suddenly knew who she was. I knew the perfume. Her daughter and I had once snuck into her bedroom to put some of it on our wrists. She wore it all the time. What strikes me looking back was the lack of surprise either of us expressed.

She simply declared her knowing that it was only a matter of time until our paths crossed. Although in truth, I had rarely thought of her in the intervening years (being she was an adult and I was a kid) I accepted this as an obvious and indisputable truth. Because, well, she knew it would happen. And it did happen. And I had crossed the street. My body knew this as a form of truth I had never before encountered. A truth that rings a sort of internal bell.

Well this little story just  took an unexpected turn didn’t it?

But you needed to meet Auntie Bea. Because she is how I came to eat big frogs before little ones. And she taught me something else. Truth isn’t always something you argue with your brain using facts, research and logic. Sometimes a truth can be known, not believed. This will also be important going forward. 

She is the reason I know to dig this up first. To share it so the rest go down easier.

I really did think the world was ending.