Chapter 11: Hearth Stones

By the time Saturday finally rolled around, I felt like we had gotten a lot of things done. Our food and other supplies had been restocked, we had the invitations out for our Saturday get-together, and Mike and his dad would be hosting at their house. We had decided to make it a lunch invitation.

Thursday morning Dad called me and said the paperwork was completed on what he called 'the DeWitt Road property', referring to the warehouse and office facility that Dad had shown us, and that he had keys for me.

Con called me to say he had several hundred copper coin 'spy toys' manufactured.

Ginny gave me the final approval to continue with my beard 'project'. I was starting to feel better about it as it began growing in. I had never let my facial hair go more than a couple days in my life, so this was a new experience for me.

Grandpa A.J. Had decided to fly out so he could spend a little time and appear in public places without worrying about someone thinking it odd. Aaron and Ambrose were accompanying him, having decided it was high time they got a look at both California, and Meadow as well. All three of them were talking about spending at least two weeks.

One thing that still bothered me a little was just how badly I'd misjudged things with Grandma and Grandpa Carson. I stopped in to invite them to the Sunday get together, and while I was there, I tried to apologize to them for what I felt was completely ignoring them through all the recent development and excitement. To my surprise, they laughed!

"Davey," Grandpa Bill said, "Your Grandmother and I aren't dead, and we're not in a nursing home, but we are retired. We both had very long, very exciting and very challenging careers. We both went through long periods of time during those careers, longer than you've been alive, where we had to be dynamic, take-charge, balls of fire."

Grandma added. "We didn't retire because we had to sweetie, we retired because we were finally at a point in our lives where we could live at the slower pace we both always wanted."

"We are still active, energetic people, and we still have things we want to do, but excitement, mystery and drama are not things we look forward to." Grandpa said. "We will be content to experience our excitement and drama vicariously, through you and your friends, but we don't want to experience them with you. We will be there for you when you need us of course, as we were when you needed us to buy this specific house when we moved here. We will do what we can Davey, but we will be your old, retired Grandparent's when we do."

"And not to be a pest, dear" Grandma added, "but could you please get that damned gun safe out of our garage?"

I was embarrassed of course that I'd forgotten that there was a safe full of weapons in their garage. I jumped it into the storage area on Meadow right then and there.

I was surprised that I hadn't already known and understood their feelings on being involved in what I was doing. I decided I needed to socialize more with them as just their grandson, and let them be as involved as they wanted to be. Not accepting my apology was just their way of saying not to worry about it so much. They still accepted the invitation to the Sunday picnic on Meadow.

Con, once he knew the details of my adventures as a beggar, had provided me with some excellent disguise elements, even rigging me up a spray booth in the staging area that darkened my skin to that Mediterranean cast that everyone on Meadow seemed to favor. It darkened my brown hair slightly as well, which made it a closer match to the dark brown hair that was the predominate coloring all over Meadow. Not that I didn't occasionally see blond, redhead and black heads of hair. I'd even seen several people with green or blue eyes. I also had a scar appliqué for my throat that required a special solvent to remove. Con gave me a box full of them.

Friday evening, while everyone was busy getting things together for the lunch in the morning, I begged off, saying I had some research that I needed to work on, and spent 6 hours in the Meadow version of Hong Kong again. I had my beggar's bowl in hand at first, but I had parked myself this time near a restaurant with a large outdoor dining area, and even though I pretended to be a mute, I wound up washing dishes in the place for over 6 hours.

The dish washing experience was interesting. I'd never been a dish washer, and certainly the manual, backbreaking methods used in this kitchen were something I would have been hard pressed to experience on Earth. But the big, barrel-chested cook who first grabbed me off the street didn't trust me with his precious dishes at first anyway. I spent most of my time hauling water and boxes of clean dishes from the sinks and dirty dishes to them.

What I loved was the constant chatter. I don't know if its just normal restaurant kitchen behavior, but everyone in the kitchen and boiler areas jabbered at each other constantly. I worked, as much on auto-pilot as possible, and opened my mind to their thoughts as I drank in their words. I started work during a mealtime shift, obvious by the jam-packed crowd out front and the frenzy in the kitchen. The cook fed me something once the rush was over, and gave me time to sit on the ground behind the restaurant, near the big boilers that produced all the water for their cooking and washing. He sat beside me and motioning at my throat, examined my scar. He shook his head and rumbled something that sounded sympathetic. We both ate our meals, a sort of mush with bits of sausage in it. Two bites in, he'd set his bowl down and ran back into the restaurant. He came back out with a handful of tomato wedges and a couple large pats of butter, which he proceeded to divvy up into our bowls.

I took my biggest chance then, with the two of us absorbed in our meals, and the cook jabbering at me between spoonfuls. I gathered my mental energies, and entered the cooks mind. As I remembered Eru doing it, I followed his thoughts and words into the verbal centers of his consciousness.

We finished our food, I tried to make gestures of appreciation and thanks, and made a few throat sounds, pretending at the application of great effort to do so.

He clapped me on the shoulder and we went back to work. We got the kitchen cleaned, and the dishes done, which I actually got to help wash this time, in time for the next meal rush. Most of their dishes were wooden, but they did have some fired clay pottery. The wooden stuff was actually better, as the pottery was pretty crude.

Right in the middle of the second rush, I realized I was starting to understand bits and pieces of the chatter around me. The cook's name was Borthun, and he was yelling at one of the waitresses, an attractive older woman whose name I hadn't caught to that point. What he was yelling just suddenly started making sense, as my brain begin to finally integrate things. Somewhere some bits of my awareness lined up finally, and it began coming through.

"... care if he wants a rare cut of the lamb shank! If he wants rare lamb, he comes for the midday meal!" I caught.

I spent the remainder of that meal rush listening and hauling water and dishes with a big grin on my face. Halfway through, I felt Ginny thinking at me.

<Davey? Are you busy?>

<Kinda sweetie. I"m working on something I can't stop in the middle of.>

<Okay, just checking in, I haven't seen you all day, and its getting late!">

<Probably another hour or two, sorry. Gotta get back to it, bye Blossom!>

<Bye Sweetie!> She said.

Borthun caught my pause as I was having my mental conversation, and had also seen my recent grin.

"Scarecrow, you are smiling like a boy during his first trip to the brothel. I wonder what is going on in that head of yours?" He said laughingly to me.

And I understood the entire sentence!

I pointed at my ears, and then pantomimed his words reaching from his mouth to them, and nodded my head and smiled. Then I touched the scar, and pantomimed words from my mouth to his ears and frowned and shook my head.

"You can understand me then?" He said. I nodded my head a bit, then shook it a bit, pantomiming a back and forth gesture.

"Ah! You understand some?" I nodded vigorously!

"Yela! He hollered at the attractive older waitress he'd been yelling at earlier. "The scarecrow can understand what we say a little it seems!

I took another chance as Yela came over to 'meet' me, now that they knew they could be understood to some degree. I took both their hands, put them on my chest for a second, and then in the best hoarse whisper I could muster said "Dave".

Yela, mimicking my gesture put her hand on her own chest and Said "Yela". Borthun repeated this with his own name. I smiled widely.

Just then one of the other waitresses yelled at us, reminding us that we were in the middle of a rush, and we all scrambled back to work.

When the meal rush was over, and things had been cleaned up for the night, I looked at the sun lowering itself in the sky. I pointed at it to Borthun and pantomimed walking away, and sleeping.

"I understand. You need to go. Probably got a family somewhere who will worry?"

I nodded yes at that. He reached into a pocket and pulled out several copper coins, both larger than the ones I'd seen in my previous begging trips.

"Come back tomorrow and I'll put you to work. You are a hard worker!"

Yela handed me a cloth wrapped bundle as I left, and I waved goodbye, and I took off down the street. My 'safe' arrival area had been a narrow alley between two buildings with high windowless walls. When I returned there it was still deserted, so I quickly jumped back to Meadow.

Despite the length of my day, as it was now past midnight our time, I woke Ginny, bubbling with excitement. She took one look at me, still in my beggar's disguise and said "Davey McKesson, have you been keeping secrets from me?"

I grinned sheepishly. She got over her upset when I showed her the coins and better yet the cloth bundle, and the small half-loaf of heavy, brown bread and chunk of pork shoulder. The meat was still warm from the spit, and we both ate a little of it while I recounted my day.

Ginny made me go change out of my beggar's outfit, and I washed the disguise out of my hair and off my skin, using Con's spray booth. When I returned to our room and slid in beside her, she pulled me to her and kissed me heatedly.

"I missed you today. I missed you more tonight. Make love to me!"

That night, I received a new 'special' nickname from Ginny that served her well for all our years ahead. When she got excited, as she urged me on, she called me 'beggar boy'.

With the late hour of my return home, and the events that followed, we were both a little bleary-eyed in the morning, especially since we had all agreed to meet early so we could still get in a full hour of meditation and a normal two hour session in the Garden, but by the time we were showered and dressed, aided by a reinvigorating wave of Light that I washed us in briefly, we were ready to go.