One of the Names is Grizzly Mama

Pale as a ghost dissolving in the vast Home Depot parking lot, my artist friend Allison reaches into her trunk and pulls out the tasseled silk rope she plans to hang herself with.  I feel both horrified (please don’t do this thing!) and amused (not just any weapon of self-destruction, but a beautiful one).  Thankfully, Allison doesn't kill herself that day, or any other in the fifteen years since.  I move away from Atlanta, and we keep in Facebook contact, so I am aware that she has had a son named Ping Pong, and is still actively performing and making art.
 
After the Inner Beauty event at {Poem 88}, Allison and I agree to go on a snack-mission together in the epicenter of Atlanta’s foodie culture.  I sit on the porch of Star Provisions with my clear plastic box of cheeses and almonds, mini-crepes and quince paste, and watch a huge American flag sway in the rain’s gentle breath.  It comes and goes, and the rain falls evenly on everything: gleaming black cars and dumpsters, waterworks and ladies bearing the centerpieces of that night’s feast.  The rain and the flag lift my fatigue, and Allison comes to sit down next to me.
 
I feel I want to tell you about my carjacking, she says.  Maybe you read about it?  The hair stands up on my neck.  Allison tells me she was at an art opening in a perfectly ordinary area of town.  As she walked out, she noticed a man she didn’t like the looks of.  She got into her car, and when she looked up, there he was, standing at her window, pointing a gun at her head.  The man told her to get over and let him drive.  I can’t, she said, my son’s car seat is there.  He told her she could.  She did.  He told her they were going to have such a good time together. 
 
But then.  Allison drives stick.  The man can't figure out how to start her car.  Something happens where he bites her.  Something happens where Allison is convinced she is going to die, and she thinks, I can’t die.  My son needs me.  Something happens where the man puts down his gun, and Allison grabs it, and shoots him.  Not enough to kill him, but enough to get her out of the car, enough to immobilize him, enough to get him arrested, enough to keep him from ever looking for another woman to harm.  He had a cage in his car, Allison tells me, and no dog.
 
I tell Allison how moved I am to hear this story.  She’s come a long way from the silk rope to the madman’s gun, from wanting to exit life, to defending it with everything she has.  I was like a Grizzly Mama, she tells me, and now I know Grizzly Mama is one of the 108 Sacred-Ordinary Names of Now.