Now There Was an Old Woman Who Said She Knew How Many Times Barack Obama Had Been to the Sea – Stephan Crown-Weber

October 30, 2024

1. Now there was an old woman who said on the street and in stores she knew how many times Barack Obama had been to the sea. Rose felt even in her chair and bed that it would be powerful to talk on how she dared and would keep daring Barack Obama himself in her dreams and one day for true whereas someone like her sister never called from down her way because she was oh so steady. Now was in the past because she had located Obama in his rhythm with the Virgin Mary’s Son begotten of God and not found in the tomb, who was in the past and also in the now through the pulse and pool of blood outside time up to here and into eternity beyond the end of folk. The originary Obama time was of the dream that kept repeating from the moment they had met as though shifting in high secret and replicating from the moment of core international power. Hail Mary, full of grace.

Closer to the original Obamerican moment, her neighbor approached the blue and white and red and white (!) morning glories on the chain link fence and said that that Baraka Emboa of their own Chicagoland was running for President. The neighbor looked at her funny and said he did not really want to talk politics even though it just went to show and then retreated as she tapped the sunlight and a view of passing cars into the temple of her skull.

Obama would come up the walk to her stoop out in Cicero whether she got a boy to clean the dandelions from between the concrete slabs or not. She looked at him for true eventually, eyed his lanky frame and his grin and said she felt the Eagle didn’t speak to the Dove like it used to. Rose remembered vaguely all the Black people she had ever been friends with, and went: “How many times have you been to the sea?” She insisted on asking him again when he just laughed. He grinned and clasped her shoulder like she was really something and maybe a little fragile after all these years and exclaimed he had looked upon the oceans for decades. She asked that Barack Obama: “You think that Lake Michigan is the sea?” She held her side and hooted.

He must have told her she was younger than she thought. She must have said she knew how many times Barack Obama had been to the sea that was the baby blue ocean and also a name for the Christ Son’s Blood: every motion of his body that led to and from the tiki volcano beach or of any other kind was in a picture of the knotted dynamo of jetsetting and tropical life. Blessed art thou among women.

The timeline, she would explain, was simply for her to sing on as a Dove of the Dove because all times were resolved in the Obama chorus. “And I do know he ain’t Jesus Christ.”

Rose used her penny change to take an express bus into the Loop looking for news. Didn’t trust all the neighbors, crafty and were beholden to a hundred mean-time secrets about her that struck as though an expression of the little folk who lived from age to age like a front porch that maybe needed a scraping, a staining, and white paint for sisters they could trick into liking them through an alignment of meanness that did not land upon the mountained heights of men who rose above the arrow of century seen from the street to deal with the war of the evil ones. They failed to understand like the Doves of the Dove the Obama verse that there was just one United State of America if you stored up great treasures or not or if you grew up a poor girl of the hillbilly race like her or not and so many of them had failed to place country over family. They did not see the doubles had collided. They laughed and laughed at their roast beef and first communion dresses from flagship department stores but they never put themselves in a position to visit her because they were getting more parallel and maybe she had had it up to here with what a person did when he didn’t know the smiling faces of billions of people who are threaded into a man’s face each time he beholds the waters dotted by seabirds and shorebirds and knows this is the language of the world and even of the Great Lakes when they are still.

She was upset about her secrecy, about the fact that the future president’s visits to the sea were unknown to the great American people beyond the sour and the busy and the secretive. She told the police in their short sleeves and folded arms the missionaries kept it from her with the poison of the false Gospel. And they tricked her to keep witnessing until they asked her where she was meant to be in the yellow dark of the night, as she understood it, and she disguised the truth of her home address to send a signal about America! And she wasn’t gonna be about at night with a thievable pocket book neither.

She looked at the fake sea at one end of the CROSS-SHAPED ward of the hospital where she was told she’d be safe and she exclaimed they needed the tale that they needed that President in the war for peace and they told her against beige walls Obama was already the President since the week before and she said nobody had told her and her work was done becept no one was aware how many times he had been to the sea. No one.

She sat in the chair with crumbs from the handicapped man in the blotchy pink day room at the crux of the CROSS-SHAPED ward of the hospital until the TV broke in the middle of a small-claims preacher judge show because they got tricky and wondered if she knew she had to leave and go to a senior center eventually to see what TV was doing.

That map on tape was blue and red across the nation and did the people notice something about the color blue?

They handed out brownies and sugar-free pink lemonade in the day room. They learned nothing new in the little class but she could feel how someone younger would go gaga at her spinning of the new-old-time tales. Obama was from Chicago. He was half Black but African. None of the Gospel levels about him could hide when she revealed what others left unknown. They asked if anyone had anything to say at the end to a silent room. “Baracka Obama won the oceans,” she said without raising her hand “Nobody but the littlest children need or needed a legend about how to use space heaters in blue states or the red states. Some need or needed to study in school by the seas and lakes like the big-time Obama. Now what do you think they were trying to say with royal blue? I think I would claim to know and the legend would be crystals like the frozen icebergs,” she tried.

2. There once was an old woman who said she claimed she knew how many times Barack Obama had seen the mouthwash or ash-black topsy-turvy sea, not been to the sea. It was all the awareness that Obama mayhaps tried to vision with the naked eye of the sort whose daughters were the apple. Rose was activated in the night. Stared at the taupe popcorn ceiling in her house with a half hope she was ordinary and not charged with a little mission until her eyes focused in in the dark on the fans of a little wave up there on the ceiling pouring out on a shore over and over again from another fanning of water.

No one credited her as the teller of legends to change the way we talked. She saw every seaside Obama eye clap. Every blink on a plane. All the hours he looked at the mirror of the sky that was blue because it remembered the water beyond. She told the neighbors through a whisper at the fence and the other fence. He was President after all. It mattered what a man who strode the world knew about land beneath his feet! He had seen it as a boy in Hawaii under the aquamangerine blue water that he must have told her about with a hula of his dancing hands like tropical people in his other countries. The squiggly whatsits and nobody knows!

She would close her eyes in the “unsafe street” down far from her block and say Barack Obama had seen the sea forty million times and counting!

She later sat in another(?) CROSS-SHAPED ward of the hospital another time (and they must have been all the same) and watched the good old TV and looked at the picture and said it was all wrong—and not just that her sister’s people aimed to sway the little government below the sight of a historic Obama to put her in a retirement home; it was sin to watch these talk shows about getting over it and she watched anyway. They had a whole new crop of shows on and she would go: “This one is so stupid!” And it would run its course. Sometimes you just watch to figure out why they went and did it like that! Her sister would be the fool if she tried to explain and she would have.

3. In the forever now and in the past there once was an old woman who was flooded by a craving for the line that she was aware how many times Barack Obama had been and continued to be the sea; he perhaps became it in times of universe and system! Heh. When an Obama refuses to accept that there are two Americas, she never forgot dishing out a school lunch. That Rhonda as a kind of sea got back in there and knew a thing or two about television. They said in the hospital that next time, oh-oh, does anyone have any thoughts on this? All she had to singsong for her Obama art was: Barack Obama having been the sea, would be the sea and nobody would say a thing and it was time for TV.

Barack Obama had been the sea that knew no terror but its own conquest of the days of the Cross. He was the size of the sky contained in an eye kiss and winked down through the undark of night as though bequeathed by the wink of the orange kitty cat of the moon—and had she ever met him? She had and maybe he was coming back to roll her shoulder and she knew a thing or two about that creamed corn, that ham, that pizza. She would get a wheelchair this time and roll. Those ministers and missionaries stayed away because they got tricky. And she had no family to call except a cab and the social worker showed signs of the suspicious.

Except she had to go through the process in there first. She had devised the temple of Obama in the pyramid that is the mind and nobody gave her trouble. Nobody would explain why she was a problem to the seers who said not a word. She had to rebecome a little scrape-kneed hillbilly girl at times who was the version of her who had every reason never to have children and they said to take the medicine and she was taking the medicine and they said she needed to take it another day and another day and she sat in her room and said she was tired. And the screen that last day was black dead after their lunch of ham sandwich, gelatin, and potato that she knew had come from powder.

He wasn’t on TV.

4. There was an old woman who was the idea beyond Rhonda. She had once claimed her name was Rose but that wasn’t as round as time or Rhonda. It was spring and they were saying there wouldn’t be more snow but you never know when pigs fly. The younger couple next door were saying he was gone from their lives. And Rhonda gestured at the dead screen of the sky. Maybe it was true she hadn’t ever needed to talk about him; it was the game of her time, she kept thinking, but she was crying about it anymore when the Witness told her Obama was gone and asked why she didn’t have a radio and Rhonda didn’t like doing it all over again outside the hospital until she ran out of medicine and the courier wouldn’t take getting it for free, she was too tired for the prettiness of high sound. Then she remembered how the prey of the woods finds the dag-center of the highway, they would have said in Pike County, Kentucky when her féet was pínk but fílth enóugh for wárshin’. Did they know Obama was nothing like that? She saw those old Jehovah’s Witnesses in dresses, the next crop of them who hadn’t lied to her about Obama and said she had a case of the non-radio businessman. A different woman, the same dress as though they had done an oceanic swap—and she wasn’t afraid yet of an old timer who knows they have tricky ways about celebrations, the Witnesses. And the old woman Rhonda told her there were reasons to be wary. Even her own husband had been wicked as a cheater and beater once in his salad days—not that her sister wrote letters anymore and her sister’s people didn’t know what to say to shift her into a nursing home. The ocean may have no beginning or end.

She made a point of lamenting the failures of the cops with an eye to their destiny on the blocks: and went in search of them and later asked did they know about Mrs. Michelle Barack Obama of Chicago being the woman she wanted to make known as the mortal princess of Christian truth and history who could stop the real terror next with the secrets of this same Chicagoland?

She was gonna talk on Michelle Barack Obama and how Michelle Barack Obama knew just enough secrets about the first Obama preisdent. Nobody said how boring it was without her on the CROSS-SHAPED ward. How they pumped her hillbilly blood so no thoughts would come and she got the medicine shakes of the endless victims short of eternity but ever in the sight of the eye who always… It was tricky. What else is there to do in this world except try to go a-ways in the direction of being an uppity hill woman? The doctors would file in and ask her the questions and what was there for one to say except: “I know about Michelle Obama, uh-huh. Does she know about you?”

Rhonda gave the most beautiful answer: “Well, she oughta!”