Katy Mangan

I had texted Katy Mangan, one of the two hosts for the monthly Do Tell Story Swap, to tell her I was going out of town for the June virtual story swap. Over the past eight months Katy and Vicky Ness had taken over my responsibilities as the Zoom Host while I was dealing with my career change from high school to college teaching. Nothing could have prepared me for the text I received a day later. 

It wasn’t from Katy. It was from her beautiful daughter, Lucy, who, I believe, lives in England (if not England then Sweden). Lucy told me the terrible news that her mother was unconscious in Intensive Care. She had had a stroke. 

Ugh. 

Just two and a half weeks earlier, I had spent an afternoon with Katy. I was preparing for my performance of Jack London stories at the museum in Glen Ellen. We hiked up to the grave. We met the program coordinator for the museum. Then we went back to her house for a cup of tea. We sat on the porch of her “crow’s nest,” and we did what we always did. We each practiced a story. I ran through my twenty minute version of “Tales of the Fish Patrol,” and she told a Shirley Anne story, which is a story told in her persona of Shirley Anne, who brings updates from her little village in rural England. This time, Shirley Anne spoke about Beltane, which is the celebration of early summer. Her story featured a recollection Shirley Anne had as a young girl wearing a dress her mother had made for her dancing with the Green Man, a folk legend associated with the changing seasons and vegetation. As usual, Katy’s story traced the boundary between dream and reality leaving me refreshed like I had just been in a deep slumber. Her stories were always unique… always very unpredictable but always satisfyingly human. The lessons Katy taught were mysterious and didn’t reveal themselves immediately. I have found myself thinking about her stories in fields of flowers, standing before lakes, or deep in the woods. Recently with Katy, while we walked around the ruins of Jack London’s Wolf House, I felt like I was in the setting of one of her Eduardo stories. 

Eduardo is the main character of many, if not most, of Katy’s stories. He is a shaman, and he carries the knowledge passed on to him from his grandmother, a wise woman versed in the old ways… in magic. Eduardo lives in ancient times, but, as Katy would tell you with a twinkle in her eye, he is here among us now. He speaks to the animals. He transcends all boundaries. He is an eternal traveler. 

Katy’s stories of Eduardo featured his moments of insight, suddenly knowing something that lay beneath the surface. If there were a terrifying wolf standing in the middle of the trail, Eduardo would be the one to see that the wolf was actually there to protect… to guide… to teach. 

Within two hours of receiving Lucy’s text, I was in room 266 of Memorial Hospital, beside Katy. Lucy had told me to go there quickly, and I sensed the urgency in her message. There was nobody in the room, but tubes and machines were crowded around her bed. 

I pulled a chair near the foot of the bed. Katy’s bare feet were sticking out from beneath the blankets. She had just done her toenails in a maroon color. I was sure her fingernails matched, but her hands were curled, nestled in tubing and gauze, and I couldn’t see her fingers. So… I held her right foot in my hand, and I began to speak to Katy. 

I thought immediately of Eduardo, and I knew that he was with Katy now. This was his realm… the liminal space between myth and reality, dream and consciousness. Katy’s stories always ended our Do Tell Swaps, and at 9 pm most of us were ready to step across the threshold Katy led us to into sleep and dream. I imagined Eduardo was showing her things. Imparting further knowledge. I began to retell every Eduardo story I could remember. There were so, so many… and they always ended, “Blessings and abundance.” That was Katy’s wish for everyone. She was simultaneously granting it with the completion of each of her stories. 

For me, Katy has always been easy to talk to. I liked her immediately when I first met her eleven years ago in the annex of the church on Humboldt Street, where the Do Tell Swap had been located for several years (after it moved from Kenneth’s garage). She was so inviting, even on Zoom, greeting everyone as they came and asking if they had a story to tell that night. From seeing her every month, I began meeting her outside of the swap to practice stories. We often traded, listening to one another before we were ready to tell to an audience. It became a very special relationship to me… I think it was because we were making ourselves very vulnerable to one another. I loved taking notes while she narrated her latest about Eduardo. Beneath Katy’s narrative, there was always a more hidden pattern… a progression of sounds, for example, or a pattern of colors running through the story from scene to scene. She was always so delighted when I pointed something like this out. Her eyes would sparkle and shine with the magic of her creative mind. 

There she was in the hospital bed… vulnerable in a way I hadn’t seen her. With her stories, as I was privileged witness to how she develops them, I always felt like she was teaching me, and I learned that there was more to this world than meets the eye. I learned that there was a magical, liminal world just past every tree line… at the far corner of every beach… deep within the grape vines of every vineyard… in the kitchen of every wisewoman. We weren’t near any of those regular places at this moment. The machines beeped and Katy labored to breath. But after a half an hour… after I had made it through several Eduardo episodes (mixing up details and stumbling as I went)... after I had repeated “blessings and abundance” at least three times… I realized she had once again summoned Eduardo and they were teaching me again. 

I have not been good when people have been near their deaths. I have always been awkward around them… a coworker with cancer… a beloved neighbor also with cancer… my own father and mother in law.  Now I was speaking quietly to my beloved confidante, holding her foot, as she lingered at the edge of life. Lucy’s instruction to be sure to see Katy within twenty-four hours made each of these moments precious. As usual Katy was inviting, calm, and strong as, from her hospital bed, she began to teach me about death… and how not to be awkward around it… or try to ignore it. As with everything for Katy, I could see it was a door… a passage. She was standing at the edge of the woods, and Eduardo was just inside the tree line. They would walk a path together and meet Mr. Wolf, who was waiting for them by a quiet river that ran through the large trees toward the misty beach. I couldn’t see Eduardo or Mr. Wolf. I could just see Katy standing there, her eyes shining like Lake Tahoe, her steel hair the color of the Sierras with a bit of snow. “Brandon, do you have a story?” she asked. And I racked my brains for yet another one of her stories – another Eduardo story – so that our time together would continue just that much longer. And I probably got two or three more in before I finally left (there were so many!), each of them ending with “Blessings and abundance.”

Blessings and abundance, Katy.