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I am conscious that the only things known about me after my departure are those things I speak aloud, and so, on most
I am grateful to be silent. But there is one in particular which has shaped my life even when I was rebelling against it!
I was six years old, my parents were already separated, having lived separate lives for as long as I could remember,
but coming together twice a week, as I was allowed to do, in an upstairs apartment in a four-plex just outside of Watts,
California that I still cherished as 'The House on West 38th Street'. We stopped our horses in the shade of a rough-hewn 'bridle
path'. I was at the stage of saying 'You know what?' five or six times because I was nervous at having an adult's
full attention, and I have no idea how he was ever so patient with me! I'd never seen him so nervous or concerned. As a 'half-breed'
Ed Simpson had been schooled by life to keep his feelings locked inside. But this one I remember so vividly, despite my stokes,
that I can feel the wind on my cheek, I can smell the dirt and horsy smells, the tang of his 'natural pine' aftershave with
the slightest permission to allow it to draw near! Then the image shifts and I am older, wondering why he has 'abandoned' me even though I know that's
unfair to both of us. I'm sitting on the edge of the fountain at Saint Francis Cabrini Academy in Los Angeles, watching the
gold fish swim in shadows as he is reminding me of 'that day' and my promise to him that I would write down the book from
that child's dream. And I fear to probe how the two images overlap, but I remember looking at his face that day in the open,
near our rental horses, as he told me, watching his hands in an oddly quiet manner even for him, who was a Quaker by the time
I knew him, and he, a man never given to 'omens' or 'signs' or ‘visions’ of the ecstatic sort, told me in
a tremulous voice that he believed God had spoken to him. That he believed he had been told that 'one day' after going down
too many empty roads, I would 'come home', that the recurring dream I had of being a young Jewish girl growing up in Nazareth
wasn't a delusion I was the Virgin Mary reincarnated, the way my mother, a non-Jew's Jew, chose to interpret it, but rather
a 'sign' that one day I would find the adult capacity to look back on this time of my life and be able to relate with another
young Jewish girl who grew up in an observant, loving house with an elder half brother who claimed to be the long awaited
Jewish messiah, who would be killed for His beliefs, but whom God would rise up on the third day. He was worried that I wouldn't
remember. I do. He was worried I be concerned it meant a man would die. I came to know and understand that in a way my tender
soul would have rebelled at that young age, and indeed did, well into middle age. I never felt worthy of it. But as he looked
in my face he relaxed. We talked about how the story would be "shared around the world" in the 1950's; long before
we knew of this thing called the Internet which would be privatized and 'personalized' with computers in nearly every home
or school library. That I would get to see a portion of that. I have. But that "Majesty" wouldn't become a world
wide phenomenon until after I'd rejoined the Master in Heaven. I've always been strangely content with that. As sure of it
coming true as I was of my Daddy's love. Then one day, it happened. "Majesty" was written as I lay dying, and in
believing, I was healed and restored. Because I remained housebound I was able to explore worlds I would never have dared
if I had physical mobility, and now...now, my Dear Ones...I am about to have my first book of prose published in Spring,
2011 and I am again a little six year old girl sitting next to her daddy, who stood six foot tall in her eyes, and I can smile
back, and it's my turn to relax. It came true, Daddy. Just like you said! It only took some sixty years for me to allow to
prove you right, as you were all along. Go figure, eh Pops?
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