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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Thurs. Sept. 8 [1]
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Date: 2022-09-08
I am back on Pat Angel’s acupuncture table. The windy season has returned to the Bolinas Mesa and, as always, it brings along with it the feeling that I am coming down with a horrendous cold. It is fierce this year, worse than ever, I’d told my husband who’d just shrugged as he headed out to the beach with the dogs, calling back over his shoulder “You say that every year. Tell Pat I said hello.”
Pat is Native American, tall and lanky with a piercing gaze and waist-length blue black hair. She never wears shoes. Right now, she is rolling joints with her long thin fingers and her hair fans behind her on the wall as we wait for the needles to do their magic. A small wood stove cozies the room. The only source of light filters in through a large hexagonal window. The wind trolls around us, a series of shrieks outside our sanctuary.
Pat’s family lives off the grid just past Purple Gate in a barn-like house down a short dirt road. About a mile from downtown. Her long white vintage Mercedes sits in the grass, alongside her husband’s chunky red truck and a rusty tractor. The blades of a greyed farm windmill whisk through the air.
The Angels live across the way from Neiman Schell ranch, where Lily, Pat’s beloved St. Bernard, was shot for attacking cattle just last week. She is inconsolable and I can tell by how she is holding her body, by her hooded gaze, that she has dipped into her heroin supply today.
“Yeah, I use a little bit of heroin,” she’d told me at one of our earlier sessions. “Just enough to take the edge off.”
I remember feeling a sense of danger, this person I was entrusting my health to, being so open about illegal drug use. But also a sense of intimacy. We developed a close, albeit distant relationship during our sessions. Her heroin use explained a lot about her: how she so infrequently left her property, how unconnected she was with our tiny school community. In all the visits I had made to her over the years, I never noticed another client coming or departing.
But the wind. It is what brings us together each year. One of the six excesses which bring on disease, it is the Qi, which unites us in this tiny room where we share secrets and truths. Where I know I can count on her to tap one of her acupuncture needles into the middle of my forehead to calm the churning of my mind. For there is wind in there as well, more fierce than last year. Then the year before. Than ever.
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