Who is Cotta McCotta?

McCotta is not my given name. Cotta McCotta is the name I gave to the person in me who regularly loses car keys, misplaces my glasses, gets into the wrong car in the parking lot because it looks a lot like mine. “Oh,” I tell my annoyed spouse, child, or friend. “That Cotta McCotta, she’s up to her tricks again.” She is like a retarded sister personality that lives in my body. But lately I’m learning that Cotta McCotta is a kind of divine being. All that dreaminess, all that sense of being unable to cope with the details of the real world – it’s like a protean soup where everything beautiful, everything creative in my life incubates; formless, nameless, like plankton floating in the sea. Cotta McCotta is that entity, that singing-in-the-blood feeling. She might be that important thing people call a “soul.”

My first memory of being is when I was very small, maybe two or three years old. I was out in the back yard of my family’s first house in Cranston, RI, on a hill, on a street called Woodstock Lane. My mother was hanging freshly washed sheets on the line. The sheets billowed and roared, smelled of soap and sunshine. I was lying on my back in the grass, feeling the warmth of the earth below me. I inhaled the smells of spring loam and freshly cut grass, heard the subtle shifting of the blades as ants and beetles passed through. There was no judgment, no analysis; only feeling. The sky was clear blue. I was watching the silver, winking progress of an airplane across the heavens when I noticed things floating in my vision. They were strange shapes: some like translucent tiny straws; others were things I learned to call Paisleys when I got older and learned about fabrics and design.

So, okay, the shapes were debris in the outer layer of my eyeball, in the gelatinous fluid there. I’m educated now, so I know. But on that day back in 1950, those floating shapes, needed no scientific explanation. They were just part of life. Part of the strangeness of living in a human body on this beautiful, sensual planet.

Cotta McCotta lives this way – floating in mystery, while I, on the other hand, try to function in society, deal with ideas, opinions, desires, obligations, emotions. I’ll be 60 in November, and I’m tired of the struggle between who I’m supposed to be, as opposed to who I really truly am.

I want to dedicate my blog to Cotta McCotta, this primal entity that is me. She cannot lie, because she has no one to convince. She simply is, and I’m beginning to see that she is the wisest, as well as the most exasperating part of me.