My parents—rough, hardworking, and hopeful—stocked bookshelves with “100 Greatest Classics” in affordable paperbacks, taught my siblings and me to read Shakespearean English in family Bible studies, and gave us their time as they indulged in a cup of coffee from the time we could talk. But all of that goodness was interspersed with shocking violence and chaos. As a result, my childish thinking went something like this: if I could make it from the oak tree in our yard to the tulip poplar in the driveway in thirty-seven steps while holding my breath, then my two alcoholic uncles (who lived with us) would maintain their sobriety, along with their kindly attentions, for a while longer. Or if I awakened before the rest of my family and could walk to the end of a trail and back before others arose, my stonemason father would have work available, and our family would not be subjected that winter to his frightening rages.

My compulsion to ward off evil made me a young eccentric in ways that still affect me to this day– and are not all bad. For instance, on any given Sunday as we drove to our fundamentalist Christian church in our boat of a car, my need to fight against darkness compelled me to mouth billboard phrases such as, “Nantahala Village:  A Family Resort, Open Memorial to Labor Day,” and “See Rock City,” and “Where will you be in eternity? Read John 3:16” as fast as I could. If I could read every word before we passed a billboard, no cousin would come falling through the door after midnight with wounds from a pool hall brawl. Clearly, my psychological state wasn’t entirely healthy; however, on the positive side, I became a proficient speed reader, developed excellent lung capacity, and learned early the many benefits of taking a walk.

As an adult, I continued to see a binary world, and I continued to walk. I walked miles every weekend, backpacking with my first husband. Just out of college, I walked countless miles in Great Britain while I was there on a grant. In graduate school, I walked around Manhattan to balance Columbia’s headiness with the reality of the streets. After I had my daughter, I walked trails to lose baby weight. And when my first husband left after thirty-one years of marriage, I walked to make sense of suffering.

Kandinsky quilt detail multi, fabric piecing and appliqué quilt by Gail Entrekin

I’m a retired English teacher, sometimes a writer, and in September of 2011, I won  the first annual Norman Mailer Writing Award for Teachers for a dark tale based loosely on a family story. The award brought me a chunk of money, a month to write in Cape Cod, and a little recognition.  My friends thought literary success was just around the corner for me, and my husband was proud and supportive. By June of the following year, he was romantically involved with not one woman, but two. The dichotomous world of my childhood still existed. For a gift received, something was taken. And it was big.

So I reread Job, hoping to learn from his story. He didn’t try to control his suffering, but instead gave himself to it, smudged his face with it, threw it in the face of his friends. His story, still synonymous with suffering, is one I love because he loses everything, but still refuses to take the fall. I love it because he says to a deity, if it’s his own fault, he will deal with it; but if it isn’t, might he ask what this pain is all about? And I love that the deity throws all the mystery back in the little man’s face, talking to him from a desert wind that swirls into an emptiness—or, since it’s a deity, an otherness—churning up pelting sand, a fine terror, and an expected awe that becomes something like gratitude. Yes, I wanted to learn from Job.

When my husband left, many people helped me talk my way through a lot of pain. I also walked my way through it, and those walks, like the walks in my childhood, were a continuation—but not a culmination—of lessons in focus and attention. I walked as I talked with friends and family. I walked with my old dog. I walked with the words from the books of Marilynne Robinson, Christian Wiman, and Thich Nhat Han in my head. I walked alone on the narrow coyote trail up the quiet mountain behind the house I later sold. I walked along the roads that wound through the neighborhood next to a noisy interstate after I moved to a condominium. I walked until, one December morning—swelling with the gifts of seeing my daughter, of visiting a good friend, of falling in love again, of the Pleiades on the horizon—I decided that walking my dog that morning was not enough. So I began skipping.

I was skipping enthusiastically, gaining a little more air with each step—when I fell, hard, breaking my right kneecap in half.  The pain, as my kneecap cracked, was so astonishing, so clean, so unattached to beliefs and morals and superstitions, that it purged me for one second of everything extraneous, and I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, filled solely with fact.

This break inspired a major change: I began to realize that there was no dichotomy at all, no division as I had thought as a child. Because I’m a very slow learner, it took more to teach me about gifts given and taken away than a childhood rich in literature and in human experience. It took more than the loving people who lifted me up when my husband defected to another life, when I had to sell my home, or when my daughter struggled to face her own sadness. My lessons should have taken, should have sunk in, long before. Instead, it took this shattered kneecap to trigger within me a total reversal of the upside-down way I’d been navigating the world.

Family were visiting me at the time, and after I commando-crawled twenty yards or so to my front door, my brother-in-law helped me in, and he and my sister somehow wedged me into their Mini Cooper without causing me further pain. My sister stayed with me until the orthopedic surgeon told me my knee had snapped cleanly in half, horizontally, exactly like a communion wafer, and he would use a saw to cut it in half vertically, then wire it all back together. And he did.

Kandinsky quilt 2 detail pink, fabric piecing and appliqué quilt by Gail Entrekin

No one told me that, after the bandages were removed, the quadricep muscle would be atrophied to the point of nonexistence, and in its place would be loose skin, hanging cellulite, and an old woman’s thigh-bone. Nor did they tell me that my knee would buckle embarrassingly and unpredictably on stairs. Or that even after months of hard workouts to strengthen the muscle, walking would remain difficult and slow. But all the hard workouts, and the patience of those around me, helped me develop a dancer’s hamstring that compensated when I went back to long hikes. Moreover, strangers in airports offered help when they saw me struggling with luggage and a cane. And I began to understand what it truly means to nurture and be nurtured from the man I was coming to love, the man I would marry.

  The learning curve that began with a violent but loving family, the curve that had been so steep for fifty years, that made me superstitious and sad, suddenly leveled when my knee struck the pavement. As my family and friends picked me up and took care of me, the man I was seeing cooked my meals, changed my bandages, and lined up my pain pills each night until I could walk with crutches; as my co-workers and students helped me through hard days of teaching from a motorized wheelchair, the fickle world I had distrusted since childhood disappeared. In its place was a new world that was born in the starlight when I looked up at my old dog standing in front of me as I crawled towards her on the pavement. Indulging my joy that morning and skipping like a child had not simply resulted in a broken patella: that broken patella had resulted in changed perception.

My lifetime of compulsive walking, the momentary absurd and joyful skipping, and the extraordinary pain that resulted when I fell were indeed symbolic. But I recognize them now as sign posts that pointed me, albeit slowly, to what is real. The stars in Orion that shone above my dog and me in the dawn darkness were neither apathetic nor empathic, but they shone just the same. The early morning of my fall was beautiful, and that beauty did not end with my pain. I realized then that it wasn’t that for every good there is an evil, nor that for every evil there is a good. Good, in my lucky life, in the face of everything, has existed everywhere, at all times. I just had to learn to see it.
 

Encounter with the Future

by Anika Pavel

  Encounter with the Future is a political and social drama running parallel with a rapid coming of age. It is a true story of an 18-year-old girl who arrived in London from behind the iron curtain alone. She became an emigrant when her country was invaded by Soviet Union in August of 1968. She went from sleeping in the telephone booth at London’s Victoria railway station, to waitressing, then becoming a model, actress, even a James Bond girl. This engrossing memoir is told in series of essays, some previously published, some wholly new. Encounter with the Future is a mirror of an unforgettable journey filled with fear, pain, veracity, and laughter. “Pavel is a natural storyteller and shrewd observer with a deep understanding of people. She keeps readers engaged across decades, continents, and pages.” — Publishers Weekly “Pavel manages, from her present and sophisticated vantage, to evoke the innocence of youth.” — Nicolas Delbanco, author of Why Writing Matters “A touching tale of a woman who makes it through the tornadoes of life and still comes out centered.” — Goodreads “Beautifully written and captivating…it will make you look differently at your own life.” — Cindy Myers, author of Mile High Mystery Available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

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