REMEMBERING ANGELA
I have always loved poems about poets loved by other poets. When I was asked if I could write something in memory of Angela Lloyd, I decided to put it off until morning. But at 4 am images tossed me out of sleep.
ANGELA’S INEXHAUSTIBLE BRILLIANCE
Laura Simms
In the San Cristo Mountains, north of Taos, New Mexico, at a retreat center years ago, Angela and I taught a weeklong storytelling residency. We worked on the beginnings of stories for days. During the nights, we dreamed up “story mail.” These were odd events that people would receive under their plates at lunch ,giving them partnered ways to tell stories. We developed this exceptional activity for 10 years in California where she assisted me. I can hear her deep sudden giggle as I write this. “I forgot the singular mails,” I said to her recently. To my delight, Angela remembered every single one. In the afternoons, we took walks, talked about our lives, about stories, and reminisced, when it was too hot to teach. One afternoon, we gave everyone time off. Angela heard about a second hand clothing store an hour away. We all shopped for storytelling clothes.
That evening. Angela offered to tell a story. She disappeared to change her outfit, and returned in a long dress, with a long shirt over the dress, and a garland of flowers in her hair. Standing up, she towered above us. Her washboard beside her, she remained silent for a few minutes. The air was palpable with expectation. We were in the presence of a compassionate and unconventional guide. Then, moving her arms in front of her as if she was stirring a great cauldron, she incanted “Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga.” Starting in the middle of the story, she drew us irresistibly into a fairytale. In the middle she told us the beginning - “a little girl was born who was so beautiful she was named Wasalisa, The Beautiful”. Then, she wove an incident about her mother in South America, shifting from English to Spanish. And, when we least expected it, Angela sang a song she invented - on the spot - accompanying herself on the washboard as she related the wicked trick of an evil step mother. It was riveting, disarming, astonishingly woven with uncanny skill.
Angela was Angela: completely unique. She was a genius of generosity and composition, a harsh critic of herself, and an irreplaceable friend. On her way to a festival, she phoned to ask if I knew a story about a beaver. a piano, or a folktale from Ukraine or Africa. We went over the outline of the story. By the time she arrived on stage, the story was plush with meaning and alive. She would phone me in the middle of the night from a hotel to tell me about it and praise all the other tellers. She complained that she was never prepared. Yet, she was always prepared. She summoned spontaneous poetry from a lifetime of trust in spontaneity and an ability to be present for her audiences; not to mention each friend. It was unequalled.
We met over forty years ago in Oklahoma City. I watched her perform a one woman show twirling her Sunbrella on a small stage, plastic wings on her sneakers. It was enchanting. She was child and priestess. I brought her into the storytelling world that afternoon when we bumped into each other. That summer in July she took a class with me, and showed up in Jonesboro for a festival in October. She found her community! We were gifted with her presence and love.
A month before she died, Angela refurbished the sunbrella with new ribbons. “I found the ribbons in a box in the barn.” Her collections of buttons, colored pencils, musical instruments, patches of cloth, books, cassettes, and files filled the barn. Of course.
Conversations. Hours of conversations. Crying about our lives and our mothers, or telling each other things ‘”we will never tell anyone,” laughing, and then urging each other to include it in a story on stage. Whacky laughter and gossip prevailed. She tried to set me up with her cowboy chiropractor who wore pointed snakeskin boots. When I had cancer, she called me every day. When she had a problem teaching we went over every detail. When she was sadly coerced to leave the Red House - where she lived for twenty five years, married, taught, did art, was always rearranging furniture, organizing shelves, planting flowers,memorizing poems, recording, sitting in the garden and repainting the table different shades of green, secretly smoking outside, feeding donkeys with her beloved husband Larry, and walking at dawn with her dog Maddy - I called her every day. “Are you all right?” I inquired. “No.” she would answer and talk about something else. We understood each other’s sadnesses. We cared for the insides of each other’s lives.
“And what are you doing the rest of the day?” I asked a few weeks before she passed. She said, “I am doing nothing! Just crocheting squares.” She would send me a photo. They were astonishing. Each one was a painting. Like her photographs and drawings they were colorful, elegant and alive. She worked tirelessly for the storytelling world – writing letters, organizing awards, emceeing, performing, and always listening to support events and others. I was not the only one she spoke to for hours. Her nothing was a tapestry of activity and relationships.
I taught her meditation. But she became an organizer of dharma art activities for eleven years. She was a devoted member of a Los Angelos meditation center, and attended retreats as a ‘kasung’, a protector. She taught her neighbors in Victorville to meditate and remained best friends with everyone. Her nothing was a commitment to whatever she said she would do. And there was no one more impossible to teach with - seemingly distracted and wild – while, on the other hand, brilliant, thorough, insightful and endlessly inspired. She taught by being.
Everyone who met Angela remembers her. We were befriended, appreciated and seen. She always had boyfriends, or as she said “suitors”, and there were those she secretly adored. She went out of her way to visit driving half a day to say hello. When she met her husband Larry, artist and sculpture, a private and soft spoken man, she fell in love. She devoted herself to their relationship. She was determined it would work. And it did.
It is hard to describe all of Angela’s life and accomplishments. Many tributes will do this squeezing an ocean into a teacup. I want to offer an intimate sense of Angela - to share the warmth she exuded and the capacity to hold us each in her vast heart. A heart that could contain us all. I went to her “school” once and watched her gather gaggles of students into a project or a story with vivacity and creativity.
The sorrows, the early addictions, the trauma of incidents in her past were fertile soil she transformed with her magic. She always said I was her mentor (she had many). We were actually each other’s guardian angel.
At the end of the story of Wasalisa, in New Mexico, when the little girl, grown, won over the witch Baba Yaga, “because she carried the love of her mother,” she whispered as if revealing the secret of her own power, Then added, “ Baba Yaga gave her a skull with a fire for eyes that led her back home through the dark forest.” Angela paused.
We waited breathless. She incanted baba yaga’s name again, and again.Then, e held up one hand: “She had a skull on a torch with flames that lit up every house in the world whose fire had gone out.” She had us sing with her.
When Larry told me that he was by her side and there was no hope of recovery, I had the image of Angela going home, lighting up the way I would follow one day. The fire that she stirred awake in each of us will never go out. As my grandmother said, “Her blessing will be with us always.” I miss Angela. Like everyone, I cannot believe she is gone. I say to myself everyday, she is not completely gone! She was three hours earlier and when I get into bed, I forget and pick up the phone to call her. Then put it down. Her voice is in my ears. Her ebullience and seriousness, her artistry, and love, remain inextinguishable. I dreamed the other night that she pushed a small baby goat through a window into my house. “How will I keep a wild goat in the city?” I thought as I awoke. Then smiled, thanking my wild goat sister Angela for reminding me to be brave and trust in the heart of the moment as she did bringing joy to the world.
January 29, 2025
cLSimms202
New York City
