Pathways to Ancient Shelters by Mary Locke Crofts

In the early Seventies, back when we were young, and mothers, and seekers, I met my friend Mary Locke Crofts.  I liked her so much when we met at the Baptist church we were members of back then, but I was shy.  When she called to ask me if I knew where she might find a Karistan rug,  I didn't have a clue, but I knew I wanted her to be my friend.

We ate avocado and sprout sandwiches on thick homemade bread.  We ate crackers and cheese on her porch.  Our children, then 3, 5, and 7, played together.  We talked about books and "Life's Rich Pageant"--as she calls it.  She made the best chocolate pie I'd ever tasted. My years as a vegetarian skidded to an sudden halt when she made me a baloney sandwich on white bread.

At the end of my marriage--an end which dragged on and on and on--I was so depressed one day that I told her, "Don't come."  She came anyway.  We got into her car and drove (me silent, her talking) to the Guadalupe River.  "Jump in!" she said.  "No!" I said.

Mary Locke jumped in and I eased in slowly.  Soon both our heads were under water, and my depression vanished in the cold river water.  You could have heard our laughter way upriver, had you been there and listening.   I will never forget that day--the day when she introduced me to Cold Water on the Head Therapy!

When I left my marriage of 28 years, I stayed at her house until she and I found me a house--the very one I'm living in now.  I wept at her kitchen table.  I slept in her daughter's bed.  She and Tom fed me and loaned me furniture from the basement.  She made me laugh--in spite of my intentions not to.

Over the years, we--and two other friends--started going on retreats together.  We went to Colorado, we went to each other's homelands, we went to beaches and rivers and lakes.  We have countless photographs of the four (sometimes three) of us laughing and standing in a row looking sassy.

When I started my master's degree (there being no female equivalent--mistress degree?) Mary Locke decided to join me. In our thirties, we studied literature together and wrote papers and sat in her car or mine after night classes and smoked and talked and figured things out.

When we were young, and mothers, and seekers, we used to talk on the phone almost every day.  Or I'd stop by her house on my way home from my then-job, teaching English at Horace Mann Middle School. I thought then--and now--that nobody was/is funnier than she is.  Smart funny.

Today I am turning off the phone so that I can spend the day reading a book she wrote--an outgrowth of her Ph.D. dissertation on rock art in the Pecos Valley: Pathways to Ancient Shelter: A Sojourn in Langtry, Texas.

I am loving this book already!  Here are two stunning paragraphs from page 5:

      Yet in the course of things, of course, the truest thing is change and change courses through both endings and beginnings, though beginnings, to me, do not seem as solid as endings.  The joy of a good beginning does not hold a candle to the bone-piercing pain of an unwanted ending.

     I was talking recently about the archaic people of the lower Pecos and their art with a man who said, "I can't stand the thought that it will end."  I said, "Do you mean the world as we know it, or the environment, or you yourself?"  He said, "I am pretty self-turned."  So I assume he was thinking about his life in this place, all the beauty and mystery, and the fact that he must leave it, sooner or later.  His wife told me he was going in for a heart test next week.  Maybe he was thinking of his heart in a way he had not thought of it before--his very real heart in his very real body that will shockingly, incredibly stop and the rhythm it has maintained all these years end.

       We are not young anymore, I guess--she past-70, me close enough--and we are now grandmothers.   We were practically newlyweds when we found each other, and today is hers and Tom's 49th anniversary!

       But we are seekers always.  Reading this book on a Thursday in June, I'm feeling like she and I are sitting together by a river somewhere, talking.  Her voice on the page is exactly like her voice in real life, and I am now following it into canyons where I've never been, looking at rock art, and wondering about the people who put it there.