FanStory.com - Miss Snider's Amazing Gift by Jay Squires

My tiny stone cottage really belonged in Ireland. It should have been cradled in the open palms of a meadow, around which bunnies frolicked and butterflies flitted, a meadow cluttered with flowers in a valley that snuggled lazily into the gentle undulations of spring-green hillocks. That’s where my stone cottage belonged.

Instead, my cottage rested in a spacious backyard of an upscale neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas.

Finding my twenty-three-year-old self in that cottage, snugged into that spacious back yard, was one of those accidental placements that has guided me throughout my life. My life seemed to follow a thread of fortunate accidents, that formed little knots or tangles in time’s thread, probably as it does in all of ours, if we look at them closely enough.

“Fortunate” in that I lived through them and one or a couple of life’s lessons flaked off each and adhered to some sticky part of my memory.

My accidental placement within that stone cottage resulted when Marty vacated our two-story rented home in order to follow his girlfriend to Austin, Texas. The hard fact was that I could not stay on, paying the entire sixty-dollar monthly rent.

The thread of that accident tugged at me from a week-old classified ad in the San Antonio Express™ newspaper, crammed between the cushion and armrest of our behemoth of a brown couch: “Lovely stone cottage for rent, $25 monthly.”

I arranged by phone for a meeting with the landlady. That the cottage was still available amazed me. Others had inquired about it, she told me, mysteriously, but they weren’t right for it. She only took her gaze from my eyes once, and that was to glance at my hands.

“Do you play?” she asked, simply.

“Play?”

“Your fingers. They’re so beautifully long. Like a pianist’s.”

“I’m a writer,” I told her. “I play the typewriter.”

The corners of her mouth twitched briefly. She went back to my eyes. Hers were blue, steady, intelligent. I wonder what she saw in mine.

“I’m unpublished. So far.” The so far held some promise, I felt, but not enough that I didn’t feel compelled to add to it.

“I have a little money set aside, you see, from my … unemployment checks.” I would have gone on to explain that, while the flow of those checks had stopped, I’d squirreled away enough money while I was receiving them to tide me over until I published or found a job — but her raised hand and fluttered fingers stopped my ramble.

“Would you like to see your cottage?” She pushed open the rose-bowered gate and led me across a freshly mowed lawn. I noted (as she walked a half-stride ahead of me), her economy of movement, her shoulders held back, the hem of her flower-brocaded silk robe gliding across her ankles with each step. Her hair, silver with just a reminder of black strands woven through it, was pulled tight across her temples and ears and secured above the nape of her neck with a pearl clip. I somehow knew it was real pearl.

We stopped a moment in front of the cottage, I suppose to take in its ambiance. Light and shadow played off the stonework in a palette ranging from smoky pinks to the cooler granite grays. The large picture window was glazed silver in the light.

It might have been at this time she asked me if her piano playing at night would likely disturb me. I dismissed it with a shake of my head.

“Sometimes,” she went on, “I have trouble sleeping and I play in the early morning hours.”

“I often write during the overnight,” I assured her. “Whether I’m writing or asleep, it won’t disturb me.”

I chuckle now, as I assemble these words, because I was quite shy at the time and what I depict as flowing so articulately from my mouth, would have been accomplished with arm jerks and stammers, and an out-of-place giggle even. But as I sit here today, with a decent online dictionary, and no rushing to respond to her concern, I can easily add 20 or 30 points to my IQ.

After a moment longer facing the exterior, I recall vividly, so vividly, the sound of her key turning in the lock and the crisp click of the latch slipping out of its metal bed, the almost soundless way the door opened. It’s so strange how the memory works.

* * *

Several days would pass before I heard her music. I had lied when I told her it wouldn’t disturb me. It was after midnight. I had been struggling at my Olympia typewriter for some time, re-ordering sentences, searching for that one elusive word that would bring all its warring parts together, when, from the Greathouse, as I called it, a most beautiful melody rose like a deep-ocean swell, a slow-release and then a swell again, an inhale and an exhale — oceanic breathing.

It wouldn’t disturb me? It would drown me! My puny words and brittle sentences were clumsy artifacts in face of this overflowing of melody, and I was its willing victim. Disturb me? Deep, pulsing chords washed over me and dragged me down to the sandy bottom where I longed to stay … until survival instinct counterbalanced my insanity and shot me to the surface where I gasped for air.

I breathed, treading water, and tinkered with words and logic, semantics and syntax until I felt the tickling, tinkling of the high notes as foam bubbles, teasing my ears and nose. Then, amidst the froth, I felt the swell at the surface, allowing me a final breath before the deep, resonating chords underlying her melody again sucked me back under.

For what my watch would tell me later had been only ten minutes, I became one with the music. It absorbed me, or I it, so completely that clumsy words will only let me describe it as a deep dreamless sleep, a deepness you can’t possibly realize until you awaken from it.

* * *

Late morning, I watched my landlady on one knee in the far corner of the yard, beside a bed of carnations. The stem of a pink blossom between her fingers, she bent her face toward it and I could almost hear her inhaling its fragrance. She rose and half-turned and our eyes met.

I left my typewriter and went out to greet her.

“I hope my playing last night didn’t disturb you.”

“No,” I said. “I enjoyed it.”

“Then it did disturb you.”

“No, no, really, it was lovely.”

She brushed some imaginary dust from her fingers. “We’d like to have you join us for afternoon tea. I’ve a few books you should read.”

I was unprepared for the invitation and stammered my less-than-effusive acceptance.

I thought about her invitation after she’d gone. Who were the we she spoke of? On the other hand, why shouldn’t there be a we? Was there something in her original demeanor that set her apart, in my mind, as a widow, or an older single person? I ran back over what I remembered of the ad. Nothing suggested she wasn’t married. There was something about her assertiveness, though, when she spoke of the other candidates for renting as not being right for it. She was, I figured, some twenty years my senior. Whether she was married, single, or divorced, she could have a child or children living with her. It wasn’t inconceivable that an older child and she — no, not for tea! Or a sister, or a brother, even.

Then there were the books. Books I should read. Yet it wasn’t delivered with a tone of superiority. You should read. No. You should read. No. It was definitely a you should read. The should carried just a shade of emphasis. It was as obvious and matter-of-fact as you should breathe, and you should respect the laws of motion and not step in front of a speeding car.

I tend to overthink. That day, I decided to follow Henry Miller’s laws of psychic motion and step, not in front of, but into the flow of experience without thought of consequence.

That afternoon, I was led down a hallway, past an open kitchen, fragrant with the unmistakable smell of baking cookies, and into an adjoining music room. There, next to her grand piano (to which I felt a magical kinship), my landlady directed me to a chair, opposite hers, at a mid-sized round table. On it was a silver tray containing three cups, a stack of saucers, three services of silverware, each wrapped in a white, linen napkin and held together by a silver ring. An empty chair sat between us.

“Is that your piano?” I asked her and was immediately astounded into silence by my ignorance.

She responded in the manner I’d experienced earlier, after I had rambled on about my ability to pay the rent, and I would experience again as her response to my other irrelevant questions. She politely waved it off with a flutter of her fingers or a change of subject. She chose the latter, now.

“How is your writing going, Mr. Squires?”

“It’s progressing well, but please call me Jay, Mmmmm,” which I converted into a clearing of my throat, but was intended to cover my realization that I didn’t have a name to plug in after Miz, and so I never got past the Mmmmm.

“My name is Gladys, Jay. Miss Snider, if you feel uncomfortable using my given name.”

“Of course. Mine is Jay … or Mr. Squires, too … if you … you know.” I wanted to run, to retreat to the security of my stone cottage. “You — you are a beautiful piano player. Um … That is, you play beautifully ... Miss Snider.”

“Then you prefer the more formal.”

“No — I — ”

She smiled. She had lovely teeth. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, Jay.”

A woman entered with the teapot and placed it on the tray. She was petite. She reminded me of a sparrow that had just lit on a branch.

“This is Jay Squires, Anna — no, don’t stand, Jay.”

I repeated her name and smiled but settled back in my seat. I supposed she was the hired help, and I would have been committing a social gaffe by standing. Anna left the room, then returned with four leather-bound books, a little worn at their binding. She stacked them at the table’s edge, then sat in the remaining chair, crossing her legs. “Here are the Steiners you wanted.”

Miss Snider plucked the top one, opened it and turned a few pages with her long, thin fingers and short rounded nails, glistening red under the chandeliered light. “Yes, you must read Steiner. You’ll find your creativity will begin to come from a deeper place. And your intuition will flower. Don’t you agree, Anna?”

Anna responded. “You play beautifully, Gladys, and you’ve read them many times, so it must have helped yours. I’m sure it won’t hurt his creativity, at least. As for me, I haven’t read them.”

“Anna comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, Jay. She’s nothing if not practical.” She smiled at this woman whose relationship to her I couldn’t pin down. Sister, perhaps? She put her hand on Anna’s, gave it a little squeeze, then patted it, lovingly. When the patting settled into a gentle massage, Anna placed her other hand on Miss Snider’s. They shared a moment.

“Would you like to pour the tea, dear?” Miss Snider asked at last.

“Why don’t you pour the tea, Gladys, while I go get the cookies?”

* * *

That was my first of many afternoon teas with Miss Snider and Anna — whose last name wasn’t disclosed that afternoon, and was never mentioned later. I’d observed them over time to be rather mismatched life partners. There was no denying their love and affection for each other.

Rudolf Steiner turned out to be a significant part of my creative journey over the next few months. His schools, which had started to spring up in the nineteenth century were grounded in the belief that the student’s conscious connectivity with nature’s processes, and the deep-level clairvoyance that the connection produces, can be taught. His books were a collection of mental exercises and others designed to refine each of the five senses to a pitch of the highest vibration — most nearly akin to clairvoyance.

I devoured each of the four books, discussed them on a bench in the garden with Miss Snider, and was given a handful of others. “You must do the exercises, Jay. You must learn to align each of your senses, individually with nature. Trees feel. Flowers feel. Rocks — not so much … but you must reach out your senses toward the trees and flowers and strive to understand their message. And not give up. And not manufacture your feelings.”

One of the several exercises I practiced daily was “reverse memory”. Before sleep each night, I lay on my back, relaxed my entire body, and with my eyes closed I retraced every activity of the day, starting with the present moment on the bed … like a mental movie but in reverse. So I visualized myself rising from my back, sitting up on the bed's edge, putting on my socks and shoes, my pants, my shirt, walking backwards to the bathroom, having the door open, then close as I reverse-walk across the bathroom floor to the toilet, flush it, idly watch the silvery stream I produce, tuck my member back, do the thing with the zipper, et cetera.

I rarely got past my review of dinner, some four hours earlier. Nor could I be expected to. Otherwise, I would be still reviewing reverse activities as my room began to fill with morning light. And I would go quite mad, I’m sure.

So certain was I that my clairvoyance was on the verge of opening like a lotus blossom in my mind, that I did that exercise and others for weeks before abandoning them. I didn’t have the heart to tell Miss Snider, though.

One night — actually, in an early morning hour — I sat in darkness at my desk when I noticed Miss Snider, in a gauzy white gown, drifting across the far end of the lawn, much as a specter would. The moon was three-quarter’s full and she looked rather luminous. I held my breath, then released it. It was a breezy night, and she stood beside the young aspen tree, looking up into its bare branches, and they both swayed backward and forth with the same nocturnal rhythm. And I kept holding my breath and letting it go.

* * *

The last month of my living in the stone cottage was marked by my not being invited for afternoon tea. I hadn’t seen Miss Snider puttering with the plants during the coolness of the mornings. Nor were there the late-night melodies floating from the Greathouse through the darkness to my cottage.

For each of the previous two months, I had settled the rent over a cup of coffee and a plate of cookies in their immaculate kitchen. With the rent again due, I removed a twenty and five ones from my wallet and took a moment to rehearse the appropriate words in case it was Anna who answered my knock on the Greathouse door.

I ran my fingers through my hair, checked to make sure my shirt was tucked in, and opened the door.

On the doorstep, Anna stood, her hand poised to knock. We both stared without a word. Something was wrong. I saw it in her eyes, heavy-lidded and red. Absent, too, was the bird-like lightness in the way she carried herself. The world’s weight seemed to bear down on her.

“Gladys is gone,” she said, abruptly.

“Gone?” I wanted to interpret her meaning as “Gladys is gone to visit a friend and she wanted me to pick up the rent.” I glanced at my hand clutching the cash.

“She passed. A week ago. In her sleep. She had been ill for some time.”

My chin fell to my chest. I raised it and met her eyes again. I knew — damn it! I knew — what Anna needed more than anything now was the shared contact with another human being. I knew that if I opened my arms that she would collapse in them. All the study I had done — all I’d hoped to have gained from my perusal of those dusty books and trees and flowers was nothing if it didn’t lead to this moment of compassionate embrace.

“I — I …” Tears welled, but I knew they were more not allowing myself to feel her pain — to respond to it. She swam out of focus.

Anna produced a wad of tissue from her robe, and sniffing, pressed it to her nose. “Gladys was very fond of you, you know?”

“Oh, God! The music … the music,” was all I could say.

“She wanted you to stay. Until the house is sold.”

I reached back and pulled a tissue from the box on my desk. “But you …”

“My mother lives alone. I’ll move in with her.”

But something was out of sync with the rest of it. “The services?” I asked, seemingly from nowhere.

“Her body has been shipped to Connecticut. She’s to be buried beside her husband.”

“Her husband? But — ”

“Dead for fifteen years.” She squeezed her nostrils with the tissue and slipped it in her pocket. “I’ve said my goodbyes. She said hers to me.”

I sucked in a breath and I opened my arms. “Oh, Anna …”

She took a tentative step toward me, and then she released her frail body into mine. Two trellised structures, each supporting the other. And I think that morning I caught a glimpse of the lessons Miss Snider was trying to open my soul to.

* * * * * *

I left my stone cottage two weeks later. Anna had already gone to be with her mother.

I would see Miss Snider one more time. But I must leave that for another telling.