Blue Roses: Short Stories

By Kathleen Keating

For eons of time, blue roses have conjured up the quest for mysterythe hope for a miraclethe cherishing of new possibilities. In 1995 I bought a bouquet of blue roses, not figuring how difficult it was to produce them; thus, azure blue roses had been made by placing a blue dye into the bark of the roots, according to Ibn Al-Awan in the 12th century.

Blue Roses is a panoply of Short Stories taken from my dreams, my memories, my ancestry, and the world wide web. The stories are things that I wrote a long time ago, or a short time ago...the remarkable experiences of growing up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483645001

Kathleen Keating

I came to Belfast for four years in 1996 as a peace and reconciliation worker from the United States and I fell in love with the west of Ireland and Donegal. Since then, I just went back to the States for visits. I live with an assortment of ‘over 55’s’ in an apartment building in Dungloe, County Donegal. I am 70, and, at long last have an Irish passport. I have three daughters, one in Illinois, one in Alabama, and one in Saudi Arabia.

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Copyright © 2013 by Kathleen Keating.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 05/22/2013

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Contents

Dreams and Stories

Memories

Madame Cocotte

A Melancholy Tale

Subbekáshe

A Cree Medicine Woman

Beyond the Pale

The Story of Pádraigín Haicéad

‘Spectacles’

When I Was Young

‘O Holy Night’ and Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’

Grandpa and Grandma Keating

Arthur Keating and Inger Olsen, the Norwegian

Grandma Inger’s Story

The Nisse

A Rebel Without a Cause

The High School Years

Shards of a Broken Window

Our Life Together

Potato Pancakes

A Fondness for Chicago

The Long and Winding Road

How I Went to Abbot’s Langley Rather Than Have a Nervous Breakdown

The Danish Prince

Jorgen Mikkelsen

Those Were the Days, My Friend… I Thought They’d Never End

Good-bye to Bicentennial Park

To my daughters: Kristin, Trina, and Erika

Bright Blue Rose

A Song by Jimmy McCartney

. . . One bright blue rose outlives all those

Two thousand years and still it goes

To ponder his and his life eternally…

Dreams and Stories

.  .  .

Memories

The year and a half I was at I was at St. Joseph Hospital (St. Joe’s to me) in 1975, I was a psychiatric assistant. It was part of the Nurses Aide duties on other floors. It was a life-changing experience. We had ordinary clothes, as did the nurses in psychiatry. Patients were all in there together, in those days… anything from schizophrenia, addiction to drugs, bipolar disorders, geriatric dementia, and depressive disorders were taken on board.

We were given 4 or 5 patients, and had to talk to them, if possible, and to check on them. We had to ‘chart’ them, which meant writing down anything that happened on our 8-hour shift. We had an elderly man who heard the television talking to him, and he didn’t want anyone to know that he was being talked to while the World Series of baseball was on! There was a tall, carrot-topped young man, with long hair… he and I had just had talked about ‘life,’ and then he proceeded to take acid while he was on another person’s shift; there was a Lebanese woman from Coal City who knew my Dad, and would stop and talk to Jesus. On and on… it was a small hospital. The people who were in there were our neighbors and our friends. I went back to school part-time at the College, (and now University) of St. Francis, and started out in Psychology. I thought that’s what I wanted to be.

My friend had a doctor, a gynecologist, who was giving talks on hypnosis through the College of St. Francis (now University of St. Francis). Through a hypnosis course, I not only learned to hypnotize, but to remember dreams that I had of a ‘former’ life. In my post-hypnotic state, I had on a soft gold dress, and I was alone, because my father had to be a part of George Washington’s army. Another ‘remembrance’ I had was of sitting on a fence in the ‘old west,’ teaming with horses; another of a nun in the 17th century… like looking through a telescope; and another that I was a Jewish seamstress in the 1890’s in a block of apartments, in what I know now, was Chicago.

Recently, I was woken by a dream of an 18th century carriage, and a man’s voice saying, ‘Madame Cocotte?’ I had to look up ‘cocotte’ in the dictionary because my 3 years of French in college, where we’d read ‘Madame Bovary’ were a very long time ago. It said, ‘promiscuous woman!’

A memory, or a dream, still comes to me… I was at ‘the show’ (that’s what we called movies at the ‘Times’ cinema) and I was little… I thought it was ‘The March of Time’ newsreel… little children in boxcars on a train, some of them sitting on top of the boxcars. I think they were Jews… I was standing there watching them… maybe I was watching because I was really there… I thought about the years 1942 to 1945… I must have been 3 when the Nuremburg Trials went on… November 20th 1945. Where were my older brothers? Where was my sister? I began delving on the internet. Those dreams, or whatever they were, came tumbling back…

My birthday is on the 21st of February. I was born in February of 1942… and conceived in June of 1941. Perhaps, ‘feeling life’ was exactly that. My mother would have ‘felt life’ at the beginning of four months of pregnancy.

. . . I was named Celia. I was the youngest of three daughters, born November 28, 1923 to Jewish parents living in Stanislav, Poland. My father was an ardent Zionist, and dreamed of moving his family to Palestine to help build a Jewish homeland. My sisters and I went to private Hebrew primary and secondary schools to help us for our eventual emigration to Palestine.

My oldest sister left for Palestine a week after the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Her departure was timely because Stanislav was occupied in mid-September. I grew closer to my other sister who was starting college. She helped me with my homework, and helped me understand the events taking place. I hoped that someday soon, all the family would be in Palestine.

The Germans occupied Poland on July 26th, 1941. Jews over the age 12 were forced to warm white armbands with a blue Jewish Star. The Jews were told to report to the Jewish community center for work assignments. My sister and I were given pails and scrub brushes, and assigned to clean at the Gestapo headquarters. From the widow of the building I could see Jews being held in the courtyard, crying for help. One day, unable to bear the suffering, I tossed them my lunch of bread and cheese. A German soldier spotted me as I threw the food to the imprisoned Jews. I was detained, beaten, and put to death. I was 17.

After I was in Ireland, I was studying a course called Reiki II, and my teacher was Margaret Byrne. Margaret had her sister regarding me ‘psychically,’ and described an Indian woman with white buckskin clothes, looking on me. I knew that one of my ancestors had been part Indian, but that