In the end, there is always a beginning.
There were banners of blue, red and yellow, screaming, "Sale," "Everything Must Go," and "Going Out of Business." These signs heralded the departure of a downtown St. Thomas landmark.
The institution was Irmela's, last identified with the majestic Grand Hotel.
Once upon a time, the store was located in Drake's Passage; and, long before that, it was housed upstairs of H. Sterns on Main Street.
Over many years, I have watched Irmela Neumann, for whom this landmark is named, sitting pensively and purposefully at her workstation with her implements and her tools forging from the rocks, minerals and metals of the Earth beautiful items designed to elicit joy. I didn't know all along that Irmela wants to be a pelican in the next life.
I, too, wish a bird for the next incarnation, though I have not decided which from among the varied beauty of this wondrous species I aspire.
So it is, that in these the last days of the Empire that in simple honest conversation and in a totally unexpected way, I find a kindred spirit. I, who hail from Sandy Point, St. Kitts, a sleeping village in the shadow of Mount Misery, and Irmela from a place in Germany called Pforzheim near the mysterious Black Forest with the promise of the snow-capped Alps which tower somewhere in the distance.
I imagine that there is as much space between these places as seemingly to fit another world. Yes, so diverse seem the people of this world who walk the earth set apart more by their simple differences of place and name and color than unified by their major similarities as creatures of a Universe created by a magnificent and awesome God.
"Why do you want to be a Pelican Irmela," I ask.
With eyes which speak of joy and sadness and longing and beauty and peace, that torrent of conflicting emotions which characterize the human condition, Irmela answers, speaking of the gift of instinct and intuition and wistfully of that defining talent of birds, that gift of flight which brings them so much closer to the heavens When Irmela speaks of this magic of flight, it is as if she already has transcended the mundane and ordinary realities of the human condition and is already floating with the flocks on the winds.
She speaks of how the pelican reads the wind, how he finds the currents and updrafts and uses them to float so effortlessly that he can with deft movement even scratch himself in midflight.
I say to Irmela, imagine that we build jets and install sophisticated flight equipment to perform these feats of magic that the birds know so well, with only skin, and sinew, flesh and bone and God. Irmela is convinced that we know what they know. We know the winds and when the rains will come and even when the earth will shake. We know. But in so much of our living, we learn to forget or to ignore these instincts.
In Irmela the instinct is far from lost. Instead, it expresses itself in an aesthetic that fashions a pendant of peridot and Rhodolite garnet, a necklace of red coral, black onyx and gold, a bracelet of turquoise and lapis lazuli linked together with strands of gold, a ring which juxtaposes a flawless diamond and a lustrous sapphire, like a deep blue sky speaking to clear water.
These pairings which seem so naturally and eternally beautiful in their simplicity are the mark of a woman preparing to be a pelican in the next life. But her actions and her manner and her special way of being in this world speak also of this life, this time where she has listened to that inner voice to find and develop her gifts and her talents.
So many of us plod on from day to day, in the words of the old proverb, from the cradle to the grave, never realizing that we, too, have been endowed with gifts and talents. This is the time to look inside, way past the loud and vexatious noises, and to allow the revelation.
In the end there is always a beginning.
