Exploring Cassy

EXPLORING CASSY

  by

  Margaret Guthrie

  ******

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Exploring Cassy

  copyright 2012 by Margaret Guthrie

  *****

  I wanted to be tough. But the body I lived in was only of medium build, like 5' 6" at adult height, 130 lbs. It was a body I tried to keep in good shape, exercising with the recommended strengthening routines for arms and legs, and  from an early age I hiked and camped with my parents and their friends.  Dad loved the outdoors, and he didn’t hold me back from anything. Maybe he wanted me to be a boy, which would have been ok with me. Instead, I was the older of two girls. Little Louise hung about watching everything I did, as if she wanted to either imitate, or find something wrong that she could tell on. It was hard keeping secrets from her. It was hard just being myself with her.

  There was a boy cousin, a couple years older, that was the closest to a brother I ever got. He was an only child, and we sometimes competed, and dared each other to do the most outlandish thing, extreme thing, we could think of. On hikes Gene tried to keep ahead of everybody, but I made it hard for him. I was pretty good at choosing good rocks or tree roots to land on, and balancing from step to step on really torn up trails. You had to watch your feet and the ground and make quick judgments if  you were to be a good hiker. We didn’t have much to say to each other, but it was implied that we would compete for strength and agility and never cheat and threaten the other. It was  a matter of pride. If he got into trouble, I’d help in a minute, and he’d do the same for me.

  Uncle Ron was a college professor and got summers off. He and Aunt Amy owned a cabin in Colorado near Rocky Mountain National Park. Since Amy was a nurse she didn’t get as much time off as Uncle Ron, and sometimes he and Gene would go out to the cabin by themselves.

  My Dad worked in an REI store in Ohio and he got three weeks vacation a year, which wasn’t much. Mom was into gardening and didn’t like to leave things in the summers. But sometimes Dad got a job leading a troop of Scouts—which I couldn’t be a part of, of course, being a girl, but he taught me the stuff they were learning.

  Sometimes at the cabin, Uncle Ron went off with Louise to fish and Gene and I hunted for rocks and anything that looked interesting to collect. Gene later became a geologist, and became a professor like his father, and lived an honorable life. Mine didn’t compare.

  I suppose you could say that my first criminal act was in third grade when I traded with a boy his comic book for doing a math assignment for him. Or was that another lifetime? The memory comes in so clearly that I can picture the room with its wall of windows on the left side, its blackboard at the front behind the teacher’s desk, the right wall empty at the beginning of the year, but then filled with student drawings after certain assignments. The strange thing is, each desk had an inkwell on the right hand side, and we learned to use pens for cursive writing. I don’t know what left-handed children did. Anyway, this boy, I think his name was Cecil, had a comic book in his desk and since I sat in the next row, down one seat from him, I could easily see it. How interesting it looked! Katz and Jammer kids—oh that had to be another lifetime! In any case, he was not a good student and he made a deal with me. I easily did the few math problems and he loaned me the comic. What kind of girl did that make me?

  Maybe a better question is what kind of a person does that make me now? In this existence, I’m not sure I am a “person.” Maybe “entity” would be more descriptive. But you see, I do have consciousness, and I have form.  It’s light and easily moved around. Actually it is light rays of different colors and every entity here is like that.

  Back to that Cassy life. It was short, actually. Didn’t even make it to 30 years. 26, to be exact. But they were very active, if that’s anything to note. I made it through high school and a few years college before I discovered that education wasn’t really taking me where I wanted to go.

  “And did you know where you wanted to go?”

    The entity asking this is supposed to be some kind of counselor for new entrants. There’s a bunch of us here, making a circle around her presence. Sitting, I guess you could say. We’re supposed to introduce ourselves and tell a little about how we got here. If we know. I’m doing my best.

  “Probably not,” I answer. That got me to thinking about freedom, just doing whatever you wanted to do whenever you wanted. But if everyone is free in that way I guess there’d be a lot of chaos. Miss Independence my mother liked to call me. And chastising me for not being responsible. “I guess I wanted to go where I wanted to go and to hell with anything, anyone else.”

  “And how did that work out?” 

  “Geez. What a question. I’m here, right? Not on Earth anymore.” I tried rolling my eyes, but it didn’t seem very effective. Beings here seem to know what  you’re thinking without you ever saying it out loud. At least those that seem to be in charge.

  I looked around at all these ovoid balls of light watching me and waiting for me to come up with some explanation. I could almost see inside these elongated balls a more intense light that gave form to something like legs, arms and head like I had so recently been used to. One of them seemed particularly excited; his light was virtually giving off sparks. The more I looked, the more familiar the form came to be. And then I had a sinking feeling that it was a familiarity I really wasn’t interested in encountering.  

  “I know where she wanted to go,” the guy said, and the others turned toward him all expectant of some great enlightenment. And then it dawned on me. Sally, from the motorcycle club. He thought of  himself as a singer, and played guitar,  wore bright shiny shirts and tried to blackmail me. He started coming around to a couple cafes and bars where our club  often hung out. He got a crush on me, started following me around like a little kid. He said he’d stop if I gave him some money. Well, it got to be real stalking, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it stop. He threatened to write a song about me. Cassy the hypocrite, Cassy the tease, things that weren’t me at all. He told  me I could buy the copyright and he’d hand it over. It just went on and on.  He was driving me nuts. Then, some of the club guys took pity on me, I guess, seeing what he was doing. And one day he had a motorcycle accident and was killed. I didn’t rejoice, but it sure was a relief at the time.

  But now, I couldn’t believe it. I had to confront him again? Death doesn’t end things? It didn’t seem at all fair.

  “She wanted to go all starry-eyed, is where she wanted to go. I mean, slippery Cassy wanted to live in fairyland. She wanted her own castle in the forest with her man slaves to wait on her. The queen of the woods. That’s what she wanted.” The words were flung out in a shower of bright sparks, much like  the  sparklers set off to celebrate 4th of July. Freedom. Oh, to have the freedom from such offensiveness. It was just spoiling my day!

  Fortunately, the entity running this counseling session, if that’s what it is, pointed out that there would be many chances for the two of us to work out this tension between us. But right now, she told Sally  he’d have to rein in his hostility. It wasn’t helpful to what we had to do. She said she had in mind some assignments for each of us new entrants, and she was going to hand them out right now, and wouldn’t tolerate any back-talk. She had a handy way of restraining unproductive outbursts. She simply sent laser-like rays of light that surrounded and bound the person she wanted to be quiet. Which was Sally just now and I was deeply grateful.

  As far as I could tell there were five of us in the group. I was becoming curious who the three I had not met were. I couldn’t think of any relatives or friends that had passed on from Earth recently. I was sure I would be finding out in good time. Which, of course, is a useless term since I gather there is no time here. No
time. No space. How do I know? Osmosis? It’s like knowledge sinks in when needed, like skin lotion used to sink in when we rubbed it on.

  After the entity had disbursed the rest of the group, she turned to me and faced me straight on. She left a distance between us, which I felt was a protection meant for me. She could probably melt my light rays, if that’s possible, make me a mist perhaps. Anyway, her countenance turned quite kindly and she made it clear that I would need to talk about my last few days on Earth. That meant my hiking trip that I had supposed would be a simple one in which I had expected to do some contemplation along the way. I had paper and pencil and intended to find a place to sit and write. Writing was a way of working out some thoughts about who I was, what I needed to do, where I was going in life. Yeah. That again.