Never reach into foam and water through which you cannot see. Basic kitchen procedure. Familiarity begets imprudence disguised as confidence. The hands think they know what they are doing. They reach, swirling the water. Erstwhile Moses parts the sea of bubbles. Soft light over the sink limning the long blade in a nacreous glow. The left hand grabs the haft, the right a scrub brush. No offerings are made to the gods of good luck. A distracted mind is heedless. The blade turns. Swift as a viper, it lodges itself in a hapless fingertip. Kitchen air turns blue with invective in the midst of a desperate grab for a paper towel. A move to swathe the finger is put on pause by the sight of blood, bright spatters against the dull gray metal. Crimson on stainless steel is a morbid beauty, spots dotting the bowl like the bright eyes of tarantulas. The heart slows while wrapping the finger in gauze. Regret brings a newfound commitment to carefulness.
Caution is a blanket that keeps us warm. It is heavy, warm, and comforting. Such a blanket is also an imperfect armor against the knife. No amount of caution exempts us from the surprise phone call that shatters the mundanity of chores at the end of the day. A loved one has died, says the terse voice on the line. No warning, no indication, no clues this would happen. The blade finds the chink. Hot steel between the ribs and a choked shout. The pain sears. Every nerve in the body feels the edge drag as it parts the flesh. On the far side of agony, the mind boggles at the depth to which this knife can sink. The soul has not yet been quantified, but surely the blade cannot match its infinite depth. The truth is that the hilt eventually meets the torso. It is of cold comfort to survive long enough to feel it sink no further.
The razor edge evisceration of an ordinary day can be swift and savage. It is simple like nuclear fission to be shattered by trust become dust. Home from work, in a fog of fatigue, the mind cannot process unfamiliar shoes in the foyer. An open door reveals the truth. Eyes do not lie. Someone you thought you knew lies entwined with a stranger. Breathing now becomes a luxury as the blade moves up and into the heart.
The knife can make your greatest fear come true by separating you from that which you hold dearest. At the moment of cleaving this fact manifests like diamonds, clear and true. It is knowledge truly gained the hard way. It may be a slow build up to swift, blinding horror. Watching a child die is to have the knife pierce the breastbone up to the hilt, poison coursing along the blade to announce its presence with agony. To see it happen to a second child is to experience death by proxy. The body, the mind, both consumed by volcanic pain while holding the knowledge the child you love is insensible to it. Insensible to everything. Mercifully, perhaps. Machine noises fade into silence as the doctors and nurses turn off the equipment. Screens go dark. The knife remains with its point between the shoulder blades. The hilt is cold against the chest. In the coming darkness, one can contemplate kinship with butterflies pinned against cork under tired fluorescent lights.
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger” is a great sound bite but a feeble palliative with blood welling up in the cut, bright as roses. Fear grows from the soil of memory, it is broken terrain watered by blood and pain. Fear latches tight the door to life, keeping us out of the kitchen. There is no shame in wanting to keep the door shut, but survival has its own imperative. Obeisance to it makes life possible. The kitchen cannot be ignored. It is a source of critical energy even when the air is thick with fear. This is the paradox that must be overcome.
The knife will cut you. This is a fact of existence. Now, later, somewhere on the continuum, it will happen. Believing that the knife can forever be evaded is dangerous self-deception, and serves to amplify the pain when the blade finally finds purchase in the flesh. Self-deception is understandable. No one willingly wants to experience pain that threatens life. But surviving pain sometimes requires picking up the knife to increase our chances to live long enough to remain alive because we know something. This is deep knowledge, and it is useful. Embrace it. You cannot evade the knife, but with knowledge you can master it, and resume your rightful place in the kitchen.
Showing posts with label bittersweet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bittersweet. Show all posts
28 January 2020
27 May 2019
A Brief Meditation On Account of the Dead That Sacrificed
Put down the drink
Set aside the coupons
Challenge yourself
To grasp tight
Sadness and memory
Of all the souls
Wrapped tight
In that freedom rag
You worship
And exalt
Without care
At the ruination
Of another’s arc
Cost paid by them
But extracted
By the powerful
And the delusional
Who cannot stop
Fabricating reasons
To carve more names
In the stone wall
Of our violent privilege
Set aside the coupons
Challenge yourself
To grasp tight
Sadness and memory
Of all the souls
Wrapped tight
In that freedom rag
You worship
And exalt
Without care
At the ruination
Of another’s arc
Cost paid by them
But extracted
By the powerful
And the delusional
Who cannot stop
Fabricating reasons
To carve more names
In the stone wall
Of our violent privilege
04 March 2019
On the Horns of Mourning, Part 3 (End)
Mid-October at the ranges of Chimney Butte and Elkhorn. The cusp of winter on the plains and work is underway on a ranch house made of cottonwood logs. The main house would be finished by spring of 1885. Other buildings would follow, including a barn, a blacksmith shop, and a chicken coop. Theodore Roosevelt had ambitions to raise about one thousand head of cattle. One wonders how much of that ambition was driven by the relatively successful cattle raising season of the year before, and how much was driven by the need to grow something new from the ashes of grief.
If I could ask Teddy a question, it would be, from what was he running when he arrived on the ranch? He had a reputation for forthrightness which leads me to believe he would give honest answers to honest questions. He also does not appear to have talked much about losing his mother and wife. Perhaps his own version of the “man code” advised him to lock up the pain so as to not feel it. Certainly as a way to avoid displaying personal damage to the world. Displaying pain has often been taken as a sign of weakness, in personal and societal mores. History shows Theodore Roosevelt as the kind of man who placed great value on personal strength and courage. Given all that, my questions to him most likely would have been met with polite demurrals.
I have a clear idea of what he was escaping, though. Pain such as that is relatable. It is translatable. My respite from it would have to happen within. With limited exceptions there was no place to go but to the wilds of the mind. More so than usual, I began to live in my head. I ventured into the dense benighted thickets that became my emotional landscape in the months that followed. I had nowhere else to go and was at a loss to find anything better.
The soul as animal kept for study. Cranium as vivarium, the only safe place for that animal to roam. Its security I augmented by undertaking long walks in the woods and by water. Hiking provided relative solitude in what was far from frontier country. Birds and deer and the occasional fish became my herds of cattle, free ranging through the the parks and river. Boulders served as impromptu rocking chairs on riverbanks serving as porches. I took counsel from wind in the leaves and water flowing over rocks. Voices such as theirs beckoned me back from the black edge at the end of the universe. It is safe to say that nature had a direct role in preventing my dissolution.
Solitude in conjunction with the natural world allows hearts and minds seeking respite from trauma to find their respective levels. Solitude and nature are undeniably restorative, a gift that is integral to what they offer to human beings. I conjecture that Theodore Roosevelt understood this, and he was fortunate to have the resources to act on it in such direct, spectacular fashion out on the western edge of the Dakotas. My circumstances were more modest, but no less worthy and helpful. I never made it to the Territories in the physical world. I wish I could have done so. In my mind I have a different story. I would join our past President on the porch of his ranch house, with a rocking chair and a good book. Out there in the gold light of summer afternoons, Teddy and I would share our experience on the surviving of grief, with nary a word having to be spoken. We both understand being gored by the horns of mourning.
If I could ask Teddy a question, it would be, from what was he running when he arrived on the ranch? He had a reputation for forthrightness which leads me to believe he would give honest answers to honest questions. He also does not appear to have talked much about losing his mother and wife. Perhaps his own version of the “man code” advised him to lock up the pain so as to not feel it. Certainly as a way to avoid displaying personal damage to the world. Displaying pain has often been taken as a sign of weakness, in personal and societal mores. History shows Theodore Roosevelt as the kind of man who placed great value on personal strength and courage. Given all that, my questions to him most likely would have been met with polite demurrals.
I have a clear idea of what he was escaping, though. Pain such as that is relatable. It is translatable. My respite from it would have to happen within. With limited exceptions there was no place to go but to the wilds of the mind. More so than usual, I began to live in my head. I ventured into the dense benighted thickets that became my emotional landscape in the months that followed. I had nowhere else to go and was at a loss to find anything better.
The soul as animal kept for study. Cranium as vivarium, the only safe place for that animal to roam. Its security I augmented by undertaking long walks in the woods and by water. Hiking provided relative solitude in what was far from frontier country. Birds and deer and the occasional fish became my herds of cattle, free ranging through the the parks and river. Boulders served as impromptu rocking chairs on riverbanks serving as porches. I took counsel from wind in the leaves and water flowing over rocks. Voices such as theirs beckoned me back from the black edge at the end of the universe. It is safe to say that nature had a direct role in preventing my dissolution.
Solitude in conjunction with the natural world allows hearts and minds seeking respite from trauma to find their respective levels. Solitude and nature are undeniably restorative, a gift that is integral to what they offer to human beings. I conjecture that Theodore Roosevelt understood this, and he was fortunate to have the resources to act on it in such direct, spectacular fashion out on the western edge of the Dakotas. My circumstances were more modest, but no less worthy and helpful. I never made it to the Territories in the physical world. I wish I could have done so. In my mind I have a different story. I would join our past President on the porch of his ranch house, with a rocking chair and a good book. Out there in the gold light of summer afternoons, Teddy and I would share our experience on the surviving of grief, with nary a word having to be spoken. We both understand being gored by the horns of mourning.
25 February 2019
On the Horns of Mourning, Part 2
I have never possessed a ranch in the middle of solitude. There was a time in my life where my need for that ranch was desperate.
The light went out of my life in August of 2003 on the day my son died, hard on the heels of the death of my daughter not much more than two weeks earlier. What light there was flickered wanly in my heart, to be replaced by suffocating darkness, cold and infinite. The shock had me frozen and paralyzed. As it slowly abated a singular thought ice-picked its way into my mind: run from the dark, as fast and as far as my shattered heart would allow. There was no destination other than to find a place away from the world and its obscenities.
The Elkhorn Ranch was unknown to me at that time. If I had been aware of its existence, while engulfed in the miasmata of grief, I almost certainly would have mounted an expedition to visit. What I know now is how much I needed a ranch then.
Wide open spaces and time to explore them: true luxuries not within my possession. I called a truce with my job, and my employers were sympathetic to my need for time away to grapple with the fallout from grief. The tether remained. A journey to big sky was not possible. Temporary respite manifested in the form of a week-long trip split between western Massachusetts and Nantucket Island. The Berkshire Mountains embraced my soul with verdant arms of arboreal grace, while the deep aqua green waters of Nantucket Sound laved away some of the pain that patinaed my heart. I dreamt often of uprooting, of selling off possessions, and moving to where the sea and forest would insulate me from the outer dark.
The sabbatical was not to be, of course. No ancestral lands, or manor house, or second home to be found. There were no territories offering sanctuary, those places having been subsumed by statehood in the intervening years between myself and Teddy. As the days wore on I came to understand that I would have to explore the territories within in order to attain peace without. My habit of long walks in the woods and by the water would become the proxy horseback rides away from civilization. As such, I rode far and often in search of that place where I could hang my hat by the door. The Elkhorn Ranch I needed was somewhere in the recesses of my mind.
To be continued.
The light went out of my life in August of 2003 on the day my son died, hard on the heels of the death of my daughter not much more than two weeks earlier. What light there was flickered wanly in my heart, to be replaced by suffocating darkness, cold and infinite. The shock had me frozen and paralyzed. As it slowly abated a singular thought ice-picked its way into my mind: run from the dark, as fast and as far as my shattered heart would allow. There was no destination other than to find a place away from the world and its obscenities.
The Elkhorn Ranch was unknown to me at that time. If I had been aware of its existence, while engulfed in the miasmata of grief, I almost certainly would have mounted an expedition to visit. What I know now is how much I needed a ranch then.
Wide open spaces and time to explore them: true luxuries not within my possession. I called a truce with my job, and my employers were sympathetic to my need for time away to grapple with the fallout from grief. The tether remained. A journey to big sky was not possible. Temporary respite manifested in the form of a week-long trip split between western Massachusetts and Nantucket Island. The Berkshire Mountains embraced my soul with verdant arms of arboreal grace, while the deep aqua green waters of Nantucket Sound laved away some of the pain that patinaed my heart. I dreamt often of uprooting, of selling off possessions, and moving to where the sea and forest would insulate me from the outer dark.
The sabbatical was not to be, of course. No ancestral lands, or manor house, or second home to be found. There were no territories offering sanctuary, those places having been subsumed by statehood in the intervening years between myself and Teddy. As the days wore on I came to understand that I would have to explore the territories within in order to attain peace without. My habit of long walks in the woods and by the water would become the proxy horseback rides away from civilization. As such, I rode far and often in search of that place where I could hang my hat by the door. The Elkhorn Ranch I needed was somewhere in the recesses of my mind.
To be continued.
18 February 2019
On the Horns of Mourning
There is nothing like death to stoke the engines of escape. Shock is the fire, grief is the gasoline. To lose one beloved is catalyst enough. To lose two in succession is to inject pure oxygen into the roaring furnace of the soul. Experience this and watch the world turn from cherry red to arc-welder white. Survival is possible, but not guaranteed.
Consider the life tragedies of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1884 while serving as an assemblyman in the New York State legislature the future President was called home because of the severe illness of his mother Mattie. On February 14th, she died of typhoid fever not long after Theodore’s arrival. In the afternoon of that same day his wife Alice, who had given birth to their daughter Alice Lee Roosevelt two days prior, died from undiagnosed kidney failure. In his daily journal for that day, Theodore inscribed an ‘X’ above the terse entry “The light has gone out of my life.”
To say that light has gone out of life is quite an understatement. That dual tragedy appears as a cosmic gut punch with a fist to the back of the head on the way down. Anyone would be forgiven for collapsing under the force of such a terrible blow. A small mercy to be had in embracing the floor or ground or whatever one finds to grasp. Is it the hyperabundance of gravity or the lack thereof that impels us to seek an anchor, to avoid getting sucked in or drifting away? Thus is the pressure of grief.
Theodore Roosevelt undoubtedly felt the gravity that threatened to tear him apart, counteracted only by an anti-gravity that reached out from the west. It took him from New York to the far western reaches of the territory that would eventually become the state of North Dakota. On a quest for solitude, the future President ventured out to a ranch he already owned, the Maltese Cross Ranch, and ended up purchasing the land for a second one about thirty-five miles north of the town of Medora. He planned on raising more heads of cattle, and he dubbed this sanctuary the Elkhorn Ranch.
It was there that Roosevelt, it may be surmised, wrestled with his grief and how it framed his life. He kept the ranch until 1890. The fate of the Elkhorn is in itself an interesting reflection of the effects of mourning on the soul.
To be continued.
Consider the life tragedies of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1884 while serving as an assemblyman in the New York State legislature the future President was called home because of the severe illness of his mother Mattie. On February 14th, she died of typhoid fever not long after Theodore’s arrival. In the afternoon of that same day his wife Alice, who had given birth to their daughter Alice Lee Roosevelt two days prior, died from undiagnosed kidney failure. In his daily journal for that day, Theodore inscribed an ‘X’ above the terse entry “The light has gone out of my life.”
To say that light has gone out of life is quite an understatement. That dual tragedy appears as a cosmic gut punch with a fist to the back of the head on the way down. Anyone would be forgiven for collapsing under the force of such a terrible blow. A small mercy to be had in embracing the floor or ground or whatever one finds to grasp. Is it the hyperabundance of gravity or the lack thereof that impels us to seek an anchor, to avoid getting sucked in or drifting away? Thus is the pressure of grief.
Theodore Roosevelt undoubtedly felt the gravity that threatened to tear him apart, counteracted only by an anti-gravity that reached out from the west. It took him from New York to the far western reaches of the territory that would eventually become the state of North Dakota. On a quest for solitude, the future President ventured out to a ranch he already owned, the Maltese Cross Ranch, and ended up purchasing the land for a second one about thirty-five miles north of the town of Medora. He planned on raising more heads of cattle, and he dubbed this sanctuary the Elkhorn Ranch.
It was there that Roosevelt, it may be surmised, wrestled with his grief and how it framed his life. He kept the ranch until 1890. The fate of the Elkhorn is in itself an interesting reflection of the effects of mourning on the soul.
To be continued.
23 December 2018
Ceres and Poseidon: A Christmas Homily
On an afternoon of clear tranquility I sat by the windows to meditate on an ocean of jade-tinged iron. Through the panes streamed December sunlight, painting the cottage walls the color of a well-worn wedding band. A week of rain and wind had finally departed. Beach and boulders along the headland shone in ecstasy of greeting the sun. Peat smoldered on the hearth, filling the cottage with warmth and the soul with gratitude. Salt air filled the lungs on each slow breath. My empty belly growled as it dreamt of stout and oysters.
This hunger dream manifested itself in the flesh as a Christmas wish possessing an elegant simplicity. It is not greed, it is not selfishness, it is not gluttony. It is appetites to be satisfied by simple means, the result of harvest and craft. Hearing the growls, I wondered how far that simplicity could be extended into a life infused with meaning. Et comedent, ergo sum: “I eat, therefore I am”, is that valid meaning? It seems simple enough.
Hunger drives us all, almost strident in its voice when the days are on the cusp of winter. Cold twilight days combine with erstwhile Christmas spirit to amplify the pressure to desire more, want more, need more. The prevailing social matrix would have you believe that more, even excess, is the cure for hunger. Reductionism to the point where what you consume is made less important than continued consumption itself. Quantity over quality. More over enough, stupefaction over engagement.
The sea continued its stirring. Waves upon the sand brought me to stillness, their susurrus an irresistible entreaty to cease thinking, cease worrying, and be in this moment. I acquiesced.
Brothers and sisters and fellow humans, my belly dreamt of stout and oysters, avatars of the creative expression of field and sea. Each a simple want to be savored in its having, preferably in the company of love. In the quiet of the day, this moment of repose becomes the season of peace and contentment.
Laugh with a full belly. Love with full heart. May you too find your stout and oysters. Merry Christmas to all.
This hunger dream manifested itself in the flesh as a Christmas wish possessing an elegant simplicity. It is not greed, it is not selfishness, it is not gluttony. It is appetites to be satisfied by simple means, the result of harvest and craft. Hearing the growls, I wondered how far that simplicity could be extended into a life infused with meaning. Et comedent, ergo sum: “I eat, therefore I am”, is that valid meaning? It seems simple enough.
Hunger drives us all, almost strident in its voice when the days are on the cusp of winter. Cold twilight days combine with erstwhile Christmas spirit to amplify the pressure to desire more, want more, need more. The prevailing social matrix would have you believe that more, even excess, is the cure for hunger. Reductionism to the point where what you consume is made less important than continued consumption itself. Quantity over quality. More over enough, stupefaction over engagement.
The sea continued its stirring. Waves upon the sand brought me to stillness, their susurrus an irresistible entreaty to cease thinking, cease worrying, and be in this moment. I acquiesced.
Brothers and sisters and fellow humans, my belly dreamt of stout and oysters, avatars of the creative expression of field and sea. Each a simple want to be savored in its having, preferably in the company of love. In the quiet of the day, this moment of repose becomes the season of peace and contentment.
Laugh with a full belly. Love with full heart. May you too find your stout and oysters. Merry Christmas to all.
20 May 2018
Divine (or Something Akin To It) Intervention
The rain poured down as a fitting tenor for the day. I pulled my car into the parking garage just like I do most days of the week. The distinctive voice of Matthew Sweet pealed from the radio, with lyrics I already knew but could not help but feel as needles under my skin.
In the space. I hesitated before killing the engine. I had no real desire to hear the next verse, yet could not bring myself to turn off the radio. It was going to start with that line, you know the one, where Sweet sings “Does he love us? Does he love us?” Gets me every time. The question haunts me often, as it has starting in particular about fifteen years ago. That was the time when I lost my first two children. It seems cool, rainy days have a penchant for resurrecting memories.
I toughed it out through the end of the song. For what it’s worth I actually do like it. Matthew Sweet has pulled off the rare trick of writing a song about God that is neither cloyingly adoring nor furiously critical, and thereby appealing to me. The approach and the style I find interesting. I can listen to it with no eye rolling or agitation.
Certain days, however, with their combination of mood and weather in conjunction with a certain song can really land a punch on me. Rainwater slid with languid grace down the windshield as I waited. The parking garage had the feel of an aging mausoleum. Grimy surfaces, dim light, cold echoes of traffic and machines. The song ended, the engine sputters out, my head sags to the wheel under the peculiar weight of my five-plus decades on earth. I was having trouble breathing.
The steering wheel was cool on my forehead. I held it there for a few moments, listening to my breath while I meditated on the necessity of exiting the car and walking to the office. Rain continued to fall. The world continued to turn. Memories swirled together with weariness over a life gone akimbo, a little dizziness took hold and I wondered if maybe I should just turn around and go home, go back to bed.
But I didn’t. Work to be done and the need to eat got me out of the car and headed for the street. The song echoed in my head, lyrics messing with my heart. I did look around, and what I saw was far from destruction, yet I could not help but wonder how much longer any one of us can keep counting on divine intervention.
Lyrics from "Divine Intervention", from Matthew Sweet's album Girlfriend, released in 1991. 1991, damnit!
I cannot understand my God I don't know why it gets to meOne day my life is filled with joyAnd then we find we disagreeAll depending on hisDivine intervention*
In the space. I hesitated before killing the engine. I had no real desire to hear the next verse, yet could not bring myself to turn off the radio. It was going to start with that line, you know the one, where Sweet sings “Does he love us? Does he love us?” Gets me every time. The question haunts me often, as it has starting in particular about fifteen years ago. That was the time when I lost my first two children. It seems cool, rainy days have a penchant for resurrecting memories.
I toughed it out through the end of the song. For what it’s worth I actually do like it. Matthew Sweet has pulled off the rare trick of writing a song about God that is neither cloyingly adoring nor furiously critical, and thereby appealing to me. The approach and the style I find interesting. I can listen to it with no eye rolling or agitation.
Certain days, however, with their combination of mood and weather in conjunction with a certain song can really land a punch on me. Rainwater slid with languid grace down the windshield as I waited. The parking garage had the feel of an aging mausoleum. Grimy surfaces, dim light, cold echoes of traffic and machines. The song ended, the engine sputters out, my head sags to the wheel under the peculiar weight of my five-plus decades on earth. I was having trouble breathing.
The steering wheel was cool on my forehead. I held it there for a few moments, listening to my breath while I meditated on the necessity of exiting the car and walking to the office. Rain continued to fall. The world continued to turn. Memories swirled together with weariness over a life gone akimbo, a little dizziness took hold and I wondered if maybe I should just turn around and go home, go back to bed.
But I didn’t. Work to be done and the need to eat got me out of the car and headed for the street. The song echoed in my head, lyrics messing with my heart. I did look around, and what I saw was far from destruction, yet I could not help but wonder how much longer any one of us can keep counting on divine intervention.
Lyrics from "Divine Intervention", from Matthew Sweet's album Girlfriend, released in 1991. 1991, damnit!
06 May 2018
Short Circuit
Circlets of pale jade and verdigris white shimmer up the sand sloping out before the headland. The warmth of the day fades as the sun eases down the bell jar of the sky. Ebb and flow, the tide knows the shore like the blood knows the veins. Whispers fill the air. Barely heard, the words unclear, but meaning is known in the heart. The sea speaks of connection. The hands, the mind, the skin knows this is belied by the distance between the water and the flesh. All feel keenly an ache that growing inside at the speed of trees.
The ache is not dominant. Not yet. It can be displaced. Lungfuls of air seem therapeutic in that regard. Drawn in deep, exhaled to the beginnings of collapse, the pain is muted and pushed back. The soul gains respite in that slice of infinity. Do this again. Repeat.
Between the pulse beats the mind extends its paws yet again, reaching out to pat and pull at the thoughts and fears laying near motionless in the night. The paws retract, bearing with them the singularity that occupies a central position in this life: how to endure such an asymptotic relationship with human connection?
The program seems simple. Reach out, break out, go beyond yourself to make it back to the land of the living. Learn that it is possible to overcome the jagged-edge damages of the past. Fear exists. Anxieties sprout like thistles in the meadow. Prickle and burr are unavoidable. As with many simple things, the program is difficult in its implementation.
Therein lies the rub. Overcome the self and its hand-made chains, step into the light despite your shortness of breath! It is exquisitely hard to cast ones’ self out of the nest. The hope is for an easy victory, or at least a guaranteed one. But life will show you that is very rarely the case. The universe cares little for your particular hardships.
So it is out of the nest for a brief taste of flight, pure joy to soar, enough to engender belief that perhaps the odds, the self, will be overcome. There is a surcease of fear until the ground rises up yet again. This seems cruel if unsurprising. The breaker trips again, the clocks slow and stop. The house of the heart grows dim again at the lack of power.
The sun is kissing the horizon. Green waves begin to fade into indigo and purple-black streaked with fire. One can feel the urge to reach out. Stand up, perhaps. Walk the weary bones down to the tide line and dip both hands into the cool sea. It is by such short journeys that a path can be found back to connection. If only weariness could be overcome, with the memories of loss and disconnection expunged. If only the breakers could be reset and the circuit be short no longer.
The ache is not dominant. Not yet. It can be displaced. Lungfuls of air seem therapeutic in that regard. Drawn in deep, exhaled to the beginnings of collapse, the pain is muted and pushed back. The soul gains respite in that slice of infinity. Do this again. Repeat.
Between the pulse beats the mind extends its paws yet again, reaching out to pat and pull at the thoughts and fears laying near motionless in the night. The paws retract, bearing with them the singularity that occupies a central position in this life: how to endure such an asymptotic relationship with human connection?
The program seems simple. Reach out, break out, go beyond yourself to make it back to the land of the living. Learn that it is possible to overcome the jagged-edge damages of the past. Fear exists. Anxieties sprout like thistles in the meadow. Prickle and burr are unavoidable. As with many simple things, the program is difficult in its implementation.
Therein lies the rub. Overcome the self and its hand-made chains, step into the light despite your shortness of breath! It is exquisitely hard to cast ones’ self out of the nest. The hope is for an easy victory, or at least a guaranteed one. But life will show you that is very rarely the case. The universe cares little for your particular hardships.
So it is out of the nest for a brief taste of flight, pure joy to soar, enough to engender belief that perhaps the odds, the self, will be overcome. There is a surcease of fear until the ground rises up yet again. This seems cruel if unsurprising. The breaker trips again, the clocks slow and stop. The house of the heart grows dim again at the lack of power.
The sun is kissing the horizon. Green waves begin to fade into indigo and purple-black streaked with fire. One can feel the urge to reach out. Stand up, perhaps. Walk the weary bones down to the tide line and dip both hands into the cool sea. It is by such short journeys that a path can be found back to connection. If only weariness could be overcome, with the memories of loss and disconnection expunged. If only the breakers could be reset and the circuit be short no longer.
25 March 2018
Belly Was Young Once, And Callow
A baking sheet, mottled black and brown, lies on the counter beside the stove top. It was never destined for the theatrics of a star restaurant, the knowing hands of a celebrity chef. Its fate was that of a journeyman. This sheet had made its way from an anonymous mill of decades past to the kitchen of my maternal grandmother, herself decades gone from this world. Fate of inheritance landed the sheet in my kitchen, also decades gone.
The sheet is warped. Creases mar the bottom. Little canyons formed years ago, by thoughtlessness and a knife used to divide up some dish long forgotten. That its memory cannot be dredged up is testament to the mediocrity that must have clung to it. This is not surprising. Many years ago the belly was rapacious without commensurate sophistication. It ate with gusto and without much thought. "Fill me!" was its ceaseless demand. This greed carried with it a certain blindness to history, taste, and respect.
Respect. The word settles in the pit of this belly which hangs chastened and wiser now. The naive palate of the past has evolved into something much more discriminating. Discriminating, and rueful. It cannot eat as a youth anymore. Such actions verge on abuse, leaving mild regret at best and acid attacks on the gullet at worst. The belly is much more careful in the thick of middle age. It has to be. Respect is often as necessary to the act of cooking and eating as the addition of salt and curiosity.
Hunger is here. It is the wolf that sits in front of my spine as I prepare the pot of clam chowder that had entertained my thoughts most of the afternoon. Hunger for that chowder had indirectly led to my use of the baking sheet for my dinner. This because my imagination had been seized by the idea of cornbread as companion to the fruits of my labor at the pot. It was upon a rack resting on the sheet that I would turn out my cornbread after its retrieval from the depths of the oven.
I could not help but think of my blindness to respect as I consider the baking sheet in the white gold light of a early spring evening. The round of cornbread lay resting. In one hand was a serrated knife, on the counter a milk-white plate emblazoned with a large rectangle of Irish butter. My other hand tugged at my lip while the bread cooled. The canyons in the sheet stood out, highlighted by my regret at having marred this humble pan that carried with it the ghost of my grandmother. I struggled to recall why I thought those many years ago that it was okay to cut something out of that pan with a sharp knife, desecrating the pan and inflicting insult on the knife all the while.
The pan, and its twin ensconced in the cabinet by the stove, had been with me for years. Through marriage, divorce, two broken relationships, these humble sheet metal artifacts gave me a constant I did not know I had. And I had never apologized for the day that knife scraped its way across the metal. Warm against the flat of my hand it brought my grandmother back into my heart, her shade into the kitchen. I cut the bread, careful of the rack and pan. I bowed my head as the butter phased into liquid gold. It was then, basking in the blessing of humble nourishment, that I repented, hoping my grandmother forgave me for the thoughtless youth that had been, and his callowness in the kitchen.
The sheet is warped. Creases mar the bottom. Little canyons formed years ago, by thoughtlessness and a knife used to divide up some dish long forgotten. That its memory cannot be dredged up is testament to the mediocrity that must have clung to it. This is not surprising. Many years ago the belly was rapacious without commensurate sophistication. It ate with gusto and without much thought. "Fill me!" was its ceaseless demand. This greed carried with it a certain blindness to history, taste, and respect.
Respect. The word settles in the pit of this belly which hangs chastened and wiser now. The naive palate of the past has evolved into something much more discriminating. Discriminating, and rueful. It cannot eat as a youth anymore. Such actions verge on abuse, leaving mild regret at best and acid attacks on the gullet at worst. The belly is much more careful in the thick of middle age. It has to be. Respect is often as necessary to the act of cooking and eating as the addition of salt and curiosity.
Hunger is here. It is the wolf that sits in front of my spine as I prepare the pot of clam chowder that had entertained my thoughts most of the afternoon. Hunger for that chowder had indirectly led to my use of the baking sheet for my dinner. This because my imagination had been seized by the idea of cornbread as companion to the fruits of my labor at the pot. It was upon a rack resting on the sheet that I would turn out my cornbread after its retrieval from the depths of the oven.
I could not help but think of my blindness to respect as I consider the baking sheet in the white gold light of a early spring evening. The round of cornbread lay resting. In one hand was a serrated knife, on the counter a milk-white plate emblazoned with a large rectangle of Irish butter. My other hand tugged at my lip while the bread cooled. The canyons in the sheet stood out, highlighted by my regret at having marred this humble pan that carried with it the ghost of my grandmother. I struggled to recall why I thought those many years ago that it was okay to cut something out of that pan with a sharp knife, desecrating the pan and inflicting insult on the knife all the while.
The pan, and its twin ensconced in the cabinet by the stove, had been with me for years. Through marriage, divorce, two broken relationships, these humble sheet metal artifacts gave me a constant I did not know I had. And I had never apologized for the day that knife scraped its way across the metal. Warm against the flat of my hand it brought my grandmother back into my heart, her shade into the kitchen. I cut the bread, careful of the rack and pan. I bowed my head as the butter phased into liquid gold. It was then, basking in the blessing of humble nourishment, that I repented, hoping my grandmother forgave me for the thoughtless youth that had been, and his callowness in the kitchen.
18 March 2018
Glass Heart Waltz
PROLOGUE: 8:57 pm. Saturday. A quiet St. Patrick's Day for this writer. Sidelined by a sore back and achy head, the revelry is in the mind. Also, fragments of the past drift to the top of the pond.
A song thought over, cruel as a frozen stiletto slipping between the ribs. The strains of it drift in on a caustic electron breeze to scour the heart. Something so intangible yet so hurtful. Where is the off switch? There is no plug to pull, no breaker to trip, but that has not stopped the attempt to do both. Fighting the inevitable invisibilities in a frantic ten rounds of shadow boxing, man , is a recipe for bleak exhaustion. There seems to be no stepping out of the ring.
To dance or to box? What is this choice that is no choice? The body a leaden meatsuit, the mind a black night cradling a box of wet matches. Sunrise over the ocean brings light to a sky colored as a fading bruise. Knowing how to feel about this is a difficult exercise. Confusion, angst, and fatigue conspire against clarity of thought. Perhaps the best that can be done is to swallow as much breakfast as would stay down, then push the body into the day in hopes of getting something done.
The heart is another matter. It is glass, crystalline and brittle. It wants to beat but cannot escape the chains of an amorphous, supercooled liquid bearing the appearance of solidity.
To dance or to box? What is this choice that is no choice? The body a leaden meatsuit, the mind a black night cradling a box of wet matches. Sunrise over the ocean brings light to a sky colored as a fading bruise. Knowing how to feel about this is a difficult exercise. Confusion, angst, and fatigue conspire against clarity of thought. Perhaps the best that can be done is to swallow as much breakfast as would stay down, then push the body into the day in hopes of getting something done.
The heart is another matter. It is glass, crystalline and brittle. It wants to beat but cannot escape the chains of an amorphous, supercooled liquid bearing the appearance of solidity.
EPILOGUE: The waltz was scored almost exactly one month ago, in a different weather, in a different mind space. There is distance now. The space-time coordinates have changed, and hence the perspective. The ghostly breezes of those words still shift at the edges, but the mind space is clearer, brighter, it may be said. This is good. It is comforting. Progress has been made on remaining in the now. For this, the heart is grateful and becoming flesh.
11 February 2018
Bonfire of the Memories
The water swirls down the drain in inky spirals. Soot drips from my fingers in fat ebony drops. The amount of wood and paper they had slung into the flames exceeded my original estimate. Drying my hands on the scratchy scrap of cloth at the sink gives me pause to survey the cottage. Pale spots on the walls give a mottled appearance, the hide of a great beast paneling the interior. The spots are rectangular and a spectrum of sizes.
So many holes in my heart, in my memory, beginning to close up slowly in a creeping scrim of scars. The copious fuel of the frames and printed paper kept the fire going for the time it took to steam some clams scavenged from the tide line along with a small loaf of cornbread. The soul may be hungry but the belly has no complaint.
Fire. I see the embers glowing orange and red down on the beach. Ripples in the glass of the cottage windows diffract and distort the colors, creating a ghost fire alongside the corporeal one. Sundown is almost complete here on the headland. Out on the horizon the lights of a freighter bobble and yaw on the moderate swell. The ship moves at the speed of glaciers from this vantage, but I enjoy its company. Later, I will return to the fire along with the ritual drams of scotch. A toast is in order this chilly but tolerable winter night.
I am swathed in a faint tang of woodsmoke and ashes. The walls of the cottage in contrast are now nearly bare. Frames gone, except for three irreducible memories, ones that remain embedded in the core of my heart. The rest, truth be known, had to go. The ghosts and the memories so thick in the air of the cottage one could barely move, much less breathe. In this thickness life could not propagate. Something had to be done. Emotional gravity dictated that this was not to be executed by the mere mundane act of tossing everything into the rubbish bin. This act of exorcism, this purification, called out for the power of ritual sacrifice.
Fire it would be for the wood and paper. The glass was destined to be broken later, like plates smashed on New Years to cast off the past with its griefs and disappointments. Frames and pictures were pruned from the walls in the watered gold light of the afternoon. The stacks I carried down to the fire ring I had set up from a collection of stones culled from the pile outside the cottage. Scavenging on the strand garnered enough driftwood to set up a fine base. I wanted it to burn hot, burn bright, color the sky if possible.
There would be no gasoline or starter fluid in this temple of my creation. Too industrial and bereft of ritual weight. From the depths of my grandfather's heavy metal toolbox, I retrieved the worn steel lighter my father had carried with him in the service days of his youth. With a satisfying snick, a yellow flame tinged with blue shimmied before my eyes. It was right. It would do.
Stacks of frames. Stacks of paper. Lighter at the ready, I applied the flame to wads of cotton waste and driftwood twigs. The mass swiftly sprang to life in a tarantella of fire. The frames and photos were fed into the maw of the salamander, piece by piece, for what felt like hours. The making of the cornbread and steaming of the clams accomplished themselves in a daze. I recall eating, slowly, bread into broth, sustenance into belly, as years worth of memories combusted into sparks and smoke. The fire died down. So did my ardor. My shoulders sagged and eyelids closed while I sagged into the sand and wept.
I came to standing at the sink, washing my hands of soot, sand, and melancholy. Through the windows I could see the smoke spiraling upward in a thin stream. The wind was nearly gone. Looking around again at the cottage walls I felt lighter. More at ease now that the knot that had usurped my stomach was gone. In the corridors of my mind doors creak shut, doors creak open. In the real world I opened the casement over the sink to let in the cool air of a winter sea. The last light of the setting sun caressed the walls like Belgian lace. The walls, too, seemed relieved of burden. They beckon and whisper, the paneling and washed lime gently coaxing me to till the soil in a new garden of memories.
So many holes in my heart, in my memory, beginning to close up slowly in a creeping scrim of scars. The copious fuel of the frames and printed paper kept the fire going for the time it took to steam some clams scavenged from the tide line along with a small loaf of cornbread. The soul may be hungry but the belly has no complaint.
Fire. I see the embers glowing orange and red down on the beach. Ripples in the glass of the cottage windows diffract and distort the colors, creating a ghost fire alongside the corporeal one. Sundown is almost complete here on the headland. Out on the horizon the lights of a freighter bobble and yaw on the moderate swell. The ship moves at the speed of glaciers from this vantage, but I enjoy its company. Later, I will return to the fire along with the ritual drams of scotch. A toast is in order this chilly but tolerable winter night.
I am swathed in a faint tang of woodsmoke and ashes. The walls of the cottage in contrast are now nearly bare. Frames gone, except for three irreducible memories, ones that remain embedded in the core of my heart. The rest, truth be known, had to go. The ghosts and the memories so thick in the air of the cottage one could barely move, much less breathe. In this thickness life could not propagate. Something had to be done. Emotional gravity dictated that this was not to be executed by the mere mundane act of tossing everything into the rubbish bin. This act of exorcism, this purification, called out for the power of ritual sacrifice.
Fire it would be for the wood and paper. The glass was destined to be broken later, like plates smashed on New Years to cast off the past with its griefs and disappointments. Frames and pictures were pruned from the walls in the watered gold light of the afternoon. The stacks I carried down to the fire ring I had set up from a collection of stones culled from the pile outside the cottage. Scavenging on the strand garnered enough driftwood to set up a fine base. I wanted it to burn hot, burn bright, color the sky if possible.
There would be no gasoline or starter fluid in this temple of my creation. Too industrial and bereft of ritual weight. From the depths of my grandfather's heavy metal toolbox, I retrieved the worn steel lighter my father had carried with him in the service days of his youth. With a satisfying snick, a yellow flame tinged with blue shimmied before my eyes. It was right. It would do.
Stacks of frames. Stacks of paper. Lighter at the ready, I applied the flame to wads of cotton waste and driftwood twigs. The mass swiftly sprang to life in a tarantella of fire. The frames and photos were fed into the maw of the salamander, piece by piece, for what felt like hours. The making of the cornbread and steaming of the clams accomplished themselves in a daze. I recall eating, slowly, bread into broth, sustenance into belly, as years worth of memories combusted into sparks and smoke. The fire died down. So did my ardor. My shoulders sagged and eyelids closed while I sagged into the sand and wept.
I came to standing at the sink, washing my hands of soot, sand, and melancholy. Through the windows I could see the smoke spiraling upward in a thin stream. The wind was nearly gone. Looking around again at the cottage walls I felt lighter. More at ease now that the knot that had usurped my stomach was gone. In the corridors of my mind doors creak shut, doors creak open. In the real world I opened the casement over the sink to let in the cool air of a winter sea. The last light of the setting sun caressed the walls like Belgian lace. The walls, too, seemed relieved of burden. They beckon and whisper, the paneling and washed lime gently coaxing me to till the soil in a new garden of memories.
19 November 2017
Addendum to the Road Not Taken (Ghosts)
The road was embraced with melancholy and longing, getting back to another version of home. Freshly scrubbed sky of Virginia blue tinging everything in sight under the watery sun. A split between heart and head throbbed heavily under a breastbone shielding lungs that struggled to draw enough air. Leaving, arriving, restless.
Craving company to fight off the loneliness but lacking energy to be a good companion: this will be my doom.
Saltwater flows in my veins alongside the blood. Riverine tides with estuary ebb and flow pull on my heart wherever I go. Yet that in part prompted me to avoid the scenic route. It ran too close to the water. Earlier that morning, I had shivered awake from unsettling dreams of the ocean and the night. Whimpering turning into a sharp intake of breath.
I had fallen or was pushed from a ship, the bulk of which I spied receding in the distance. The blood-tinged orange sun was nearly down. Stars were coming out and cool wind ruffled the water. I trod water while contemplating a death by drowning.
I knew for certain, under that deep indigo sky, that the ship was not coming back. My unsettled mind swore it heard laughter floating over the water. It saddened me to no end that this laughter might be the last human sound I ever heard. A hard scrubbing in a hot shower eradicated the uneasiness.
I knew for certain, under that deep indigo sky, that the ship was not coming back. My unsettled mind swore it heard laughter floating over the water. It saddened me to no end that this laughter might be the last human sound I ever heard. A hard scrubbing in a hot shower eradicated the uneasiness.
I pushed some breakfast down on a jittery stomach. It refused to hold still. Sheer willpower kept it in place, which braced me for the drive. Lunch would be somewhere on the road for sure.
So it was that the car brought me to the decision point. Highway or byway? My heart already knew the answer. My head had abdicated responsibility a long time ago. It was to be the highway, and not only for the reasons set forth earlier in this ramble.
A bigger, more poignant reason was I just could not bear the thought that the quieter scenic road would bring to my eyes a lone boat on a river, or a solitary duck winging through a November sky filled with the whispers of all the losses I endured in the past year. Those avatars of loneliness would have broken me down in tears, and I did not want to besmirch with such emissions a landscape so beholden to my heart.
Fall and winter in the tidewater holds a bittersweet beauty of its own. One best contemplated without a heavy heart and weary psyche. That Sunday drive would be on the fast road, the anonymous road, where I could eat surrounded by cacophonous isolation and be grateful for a crowd that would help me pull the curtains on the road not taken.
I did not take that road on the return. The usual route back to Maryland, small towns and browning leaves by the rivers crossed in the light of a sun in repose. Ghosts were whispering to me to visit them. I confess that on this trip, I was a coward. There would be no conclave with the undead.
It was no fault of the season. Nor fault of the rivers. I adore fall upon the estuaries. Water has its own magnetism. The pull is strong upon my heart, no matter what time of year. The promise of sunlight on rippled wavelets, geese creating flying V's in the November air, or even the culinary tug of fried oysters in a small town family restaurant, these are all grand things.
But when pewter skies and soul weariness grip the eye and the heart, the barrier between sighs and tears thins too much.
I did not take that road on the return. The usual route back to Maryland, small towns and browning leaves by the rivers crossed in the light of a sun in repose. Ghosts were whispering to me to visit them. I confess that on this trip, I was a coward. There would be no conclave with the undead.
It was no fault of the season. Nor fault of the rivers. I adore fall upon the estuaries. Water has its own magnetism. The pull is strong upon my heart, no matter what time of year. The promise of sunlight on rippled wavelets, geese creating flying V's in the November air, or even the culinary tug of fried oysters in a small town family restaurant, these are all grand things.
But when pewter skies and soul weariness grip the eye and the heart, the barrier between sighs and tears thins too much.
31 July 2017
Cipher Lock on the Gates of Heaven and Hell
07162003
07222003
08082003
10302004
05??2009
08092009
02112010
03??2010
04??2011
05012012
06242016
07302016
04292017
The wheels crank and turn in the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, that is my heart. Numbers scroll past the inside of my eyelids, grown weary of holding them open to witness the majesty and tragedy of the last fifteen years of life. Love, death, and heartbreak neatly condensed to digits as if that would provide some anesthesia or euphoria.
They do not. Not entirely in either direction of pleasure or pain. The numbers are signposts. Delineators of anniversaries never to be forgotten, some cherished, some dreaded.
Summer is the season of heat. The cipher transforms it into a hell broken only by the memories of love that somehow have survived amongst the ruins. Those memories, as water cupped in my hands brought to a trembling mouth that gulps to soothe the burning in my heart.
The wheels crank and turn. The code will be scrambled. With luck, the vault will stay shut long enough for healing to take hold. Healing perhaps will make the numbers add up to something.
07222003
08082003
10302004
05??2009
08092009
02112010
03??2010
04??2011
05012012
06242016
07302016
04292017
The wheels crank and turn in the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, that is my heart. Numbers scroll past the inside of my eyelids, grown weary of holding them open to witness the majesty and tragedy of the last fifteen years of life. Love, death, and heartbreak neatly condensed to digits as if that would provide some anesthesia or euphoria.
They do not. Not entirely in either direction of pleasure or pain. The numbers are signposts. Delineators of anniversaries never to be forgotten, some cherished, some dreaded.
Summer is the season of heat. The cipher transforms it into a hell broken only by the memories of love that somehow have survived amongst the ruins. Those memories, as water cupped in my hands brought to a trembling mouth that gulps to soothe the burning in my heart.
The wheels crank and turn. The code will be scrambled. With luck, the vault will stay shut long enough for healing to take hold. Healing perhaps will make the numbers add up to something.
12 June 2017
Water-silver, Flow For Me
Blood and muscle seem aggressively prosaic in consideration of matters of the heart. It seems impossible such a lump of flesh could carry, could withstand the currents that flow between one heart to another. Protein seems an inadequate medium for the task of withstanding binding and intertwining the precious elements of souls in concert. Certainly it gives no impression of suitability when those souls get sucked in to the dark that is distance, drift, and dissolution.
Metal, now there is a different story. Ah, what would one gain with a heart of metal? Endurance at the cost of romance? Resilience in the face of soul pain, a refined ability to withstand hammer blows to the psyche? Metal becomes attractive when the grasping at straws in vain hope of keeping the thing together. Even as one watches the rust creep over the surface. Seeing the stress cracks form as the "hellishness of life" grips a flimsy heart in its merciless hands and bends it back and forth. Inevitable, the breaks that form with their sawtooth edges and searing heat.
Metal versus flesh. Perhaps the best course is a combination of the two. The only element that come to mind is mercury. Heavy, liquid, toxic under the wrong conditions even as its fluidity allows it to adapt and flow over the rocks in a river of life. Do you not see the miracle of love as a pool of shimmering silver collected under the sun and moon, flowing from the invisible truth and into the invisible truth? We all have dipped our hands in that pool, once or twice or many times while ignoring the impossibility of controlling what we gather. Our hands our poorly suited to the task.
What of magnetic fields, or cosmic forces of strange action at a distance? This emotion we call love is one way, if somewhat incomplete, of exerting control. Our mercury hearts can only be shaped by its funneling through the channels of love. Plasma fields, magnets, gravity, our hearts subjected to them all. Hope provides fuel, elation the energy, and belief that the forge of love will achieve the successful enjoining of another mercury with ours.
It happens, sometimes. The universe may be insensate to the messiness of the heart's business, but its laws do not forbid the possibility. That crystal clear day where the mind and the body and the soul wake up with that second sine wave pulsing through them. The light from within shows the form of the heart. Picture this form of water-silver in resplendent argentine glory against the absence of light, the fuliginous wilderness of life without shared love. Shimmering beauty held in place by forces we sense but do not truly understand. For what would true understanding bring us in that case?
The universe is full of forces inimical to the propagation of love, this we know. The gravity of emotions, the drifts, the rifts that develops over time as our attention gets diverted by the mundanities and tragedies of existence. Sometimes these forces bend the heart or even torment it to the point where the mind's eye watches it flow into every nook and cranny where pain and loneliness have not taken up residence. For the fortunate the heart of water-silver gradually reorganizes itself. The shape is reattained, equilibrium reached. A benefit of like finding like and remaining close enough that integration is always possible.
Emotional physics often works to the negative, often to our sorrow. Pain, loss, even simple carelessness can in concert create forces too great for anything to withstand. A heart orbiting the sun of love, a planet of rock and dirt, neither is better able to resist a supernova even if they see it coming from a long way off in space and time.
It happens. The explosion, slow or fast. The superheated plasma of emotion, the gravity of pain and disintegration reach out across the vacuum of non-love to explode the heart. And we watch it happen as the force pushes us out of ourselves. We float and spin helplessly into a black speckled with millions of pieces of what used to give us life. In those moments we no longer trust gravity, or love, to bring them all back together. In the interstellar black of loss we lunge and grasp, frantic to cup our hands around the water-silver talisman of belonging we once knew. We gather it, one small drop at a time.
21 September 2016
Super Heavy
Hurtling down the highway on my morning rounds and I see another one up ahead. The shape is familiar, a small yellow triangle emblazoned on the corrugated side of a shipping container. The words are well-known to me now. "SUPER HEAVY", it says, right there on the side of what the warning label declares to be a high-cube model. About 8,600 pounds of weathering steel clamped to the back of a semi and loaded with who knows what. This day, clouds and all, I feel it. Super heavy.
This sort of thing makes you think while spending so much time on the roads in the middle of the country. Shipping containers are all over the place out here, on trains and trucks. Danish, German, Korean, Chinese concerns pushing their charges overseas and through the woods and to Grandma's house we go. Curiosity got the better of me, because I had to know how the super heavy vibes got here, and landed on my head and filling my heart with ghosts.
Container ships. It is how it gets done. Insanely large vessels carrying thousands of twenty- and forty-foot long steel boxes full of stuff. Boxes that get loaded, offloaded, put on trucks and trains and sent forth into the world to scatter their contents hither and yon. Things that you didn't know you needed, perhaps, or things you didn't want but found you anyway. It hit me this morning that this is my grief, too. A load of super heavy, coming from a strange place far away.
Amongst my vehicular ruminations in the soggy heat of a tenacious summer I could not also help but wonder just what it is that powers these huge ships that bring us stuff from all points on earth. A little research turned up that most of these vessels burn something called "bunker fuel", which turns out to be sort of the lowest of the low amongst refined petroleum products. It is thick, black-brown sludge leftover after all the other easier to use and more valuable fractions have been extracted from the crude.
Bunker fuel is so thick you can walk on on it when it is cold. Cheap and easy to get, it burns like the outer rim of hell and creates a lot of pollution generating all sorts of nasty things when it goes up in flames. But it is what drives the fleet. It makes it possible to move tonnage, even if we don't want or need the weight.
Another day, another road trip, and when I spied another yellow triangle the pieces of all this began falling into place. I know why the clouds seem so low, the air too hot, the weight too much to carry. All that semi-useless knowledge and the thick, black well of my grief congealing into a metaphor so bitter I had to laugh as I wiped my eyes.
I've seen this ship before, this behemoth of sadness and grief barreling out of the mist to run me over. Not once, not twice, but three times has the darkness punched me in the heart. A person can't watch three babies dies in his life and feel like he is a typical passenger on the cruise we hope to call life. No one can.
But I know what this is. Having sailed my ship right into a storm only to be fished out of the sea and carried away by a hulking black steel mass known as the MV Grief, I am a container lashed to the deck. The engines thrum and moan, burning the bunker fuel of sadness at a rate that threatens to drain the core of the world. The joke is on us, that this ship burns the same stuff packed into the container that I am. A person-shaped container full of the black-brown sticky spew of hell that wrapped itself around my heart faster than I could scrape it off.
I had to laugh, I said. The images burning in my head were too terrible for any other reaction. I have a secret that the captain of the Grief does not know: I can carry more than his ship can ever dream of. There is no vessel that can carry what I have had to carry. I have proof. I am alive. I burn the bunker fuel in my heart and know that memories of the children and grandchild that I held are cargo that far outweighs the grief of their loss. I am super heavy, but I am not lost at sea.
This sort of thing makes you think while spending so much time on the roads in the middle of the country. Shipping containers are all over the place out here, on trains and trucks. Danish, German, Korean, Chinese concerns pushing their charges overseas and through the woods and to Grandma's house we go. Curiosity got the better of me, because I had to know how the super heavy vibes got here, and landed on my head and filling my heart with ghosts.
Container ships. It is how it gets done. Insanely large vessels carrying thousands of twenty- and forty-foot long steel boxes full of stuff. Boxes that get loaded, offloaded, put on trucks and trains and sent forth into the world to scatter their contents hither and yon. Things that you didn't know you needed, perhaps, or things you didn't want but found you anyway. It hit me this morning that this is my grief, too. A load of super heavy, coming from a strange place far away.
Amongst my vehicular ruminations in the soggy heat of a tenacious summer I could not also help but wonder just what it is that powers these huge ships that bring us stuff from all points on earth. A little research turned up that most of these vessels burn something called "bunker fuel", which turns out to be sort of the lowest of the low amongst refined petroleum products. It is thick, black-brown sludge leftover after all the other easier to use and more valuable fractions have been extracted from the crude.
Bunker fuel is so thick you can walk on on it when it is cold. Cheap and easy to get, it burns like the outer rim of hell and creates a lot of pollution generating all sorts of nasty things when it goes up in flames. But it is what drives the fleet. It makes it possible to move tonnage, even if we don't want or need the weight.
Another day, another road trip, and when I spied another yellow triangle the pieces of all this began falling into place. I know why the clouds seem so low, the air too hot, the weight too much to carry. All that semi-useless knowledge and the thick, black well of my grief congealing into a metaphor so bitter I had to laugh as I wiped my eyes.
I've seen this ship before, this behemoth of sadness and grief barreling out of the mist to run me over. Not once, not twice, but three times has the darkness punched me in the heart. A person can't watch three babies dies in his life and feel like he is a typical passenger on the cruise we hope to call life. No one can.
But I know what this is. Having sailed my ship right into a storm only to be fished out of the sea and carried away by a hulking black steel mass known as the MV Grief, I am a container lashed to the deck. The engines thrum and moan, burning the bunker fuel of sadness at a rate that threatens to drain the core of the world. The joke is on us, that this ship burns the same stuff packed into the container that I am. A person-shaped container full of the black-brown sticky spew of hell that wrapped itself around my heart faster than I could scrape it off.
I had to laugh, I said. The images burning in my head were too terrible for any other reaction. I have a secret that the captain of the Grief does not know: I can carry more than his ship can ever dream of. There is no vessel that can carry what I have had to carry. I have proof. I am alive. I burn the bunker fuel in my heart and know that memories of the children and grandchild that I held are cargo that far outweighs the grief of their loss. I am super heavy, but I am not lost at sea.
31 August 2016
36 Days in Dreamtime
36 days in dreamtime and the awakening occurs here. Cold, dim, familiar. The cry of seabirds and the trumpeting of seals greets the rising of the sun and myself, such as it is. I know this place. The stones of it dig through the fabric of my coat, into my back. I never wanted to see it again.
Memory fades a little as I sit upright. I was dreaming, I thought. But maybe not. No, I wasn't dreaming it all. She was here, she was with us for 36 days in dreamtime. Now she is gone, and I am up here on the ridgeline overlooking a lonely island out in far south of the Atlantic where it is cold and gray but the birds and the seals are curious.
At least, that is what it feels like. Soul on ice. Numbness of the heart and a weariness that reaches deep into the bones. Hard not to feel like that when you granddaughter dies before she got to make a full orbit around the sun. I have company, though, which means the long journey back to the mainland and the sun will not be as hard as it could be.
Not that difficulty matters. I have a thicker skin now. Tougher hide around the beaten stone that is my heart. Hard work is the order of the day, hope I am up to it. This is one of the hardest things I have ever written because I stared at the blank page for three weeks, because the words would not come.
Maybe they still have not shown their faces. I do not know yet. But I had to start somewhere, and the familiar territory of my past experience with loss beckoned. The journey back starts now. It starts with a deep breath and memories. My soul pulls its coat tighter, and starts back down the mountain to the sea. I have 36 days in dreamtime to keep me going.
Memory fades a little as I sit upright. I was dreaming, I thought. But maybe not. No, I wasn't dreaming it all. She was here, she was with us for 36 days in dreamtime. Now she is gone, and I am up here on the ridgeline overlooking a lonely island out in far south of the Atlantic where it is cold and gray but the birds and the seals are curious.
At least, that is what it feels like. Soul on ice. Numbness of the heart and a weariness that reaches deep into the bones. Hard not to feel like that when you granddaughter dies before she got to make a full orbit around the sun. I have company, though, which means the long journey back to the mainland and the sun will not be as hard as it could be.
Not that difficulty matters. I have a thicker skin now. Tougher hide around the beaten stone that is my heart. Hard work is the order of the day, hope I am up to it. This is one of the hardest things I have ever written because I stared at the blank page for three weeks, because the words would not come.
Maybe they still have not shown their faces. I do not know yet. But I had to start somewhere, and the familiar territory of my past experience with loss beckoned. The journey back starts now. It starts with a deep breath and memories. My soul pulls its coat tighter, and starts back down the mountain to the sea. I have 36 days in dreamtime to keep me going.
31 January 2016
Sunday Meditation #45: Eating the Home of Boyhood
Truth as revealed in a sandwich, found in a place unexpected. Roadside sub shop franchised, branded, and with all the chips from your boyhood. Stickball special they call it but you know it as the sandwich that meant you were home.
Home. Cheese, ham and capocollo with the usual suspects. And funny how it warms you up, maybe even brings a slight tear to the eye, because of that feeling of home. Nostalgia wasn't on the menu, not a condiment, not a cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookie next to the register. No, it was none of those things, and everything.
To find the past you left behind, the days of idle wonder in the summer and stultifying boredom (sometimes) in the school year, the laying on your back in the grass while falling asleep to the drone of airplanes...to find these things and more in between the bites of lettuce and onion, tomato and hot pepper relish, is a minor miracle.
Watching the wine vinegar and the olive oil drip off the bun, running down the heel of your hand you can give thanks that you aren't truly weeping in the fluorescent glare of the sandwich shop. Seeing yourself in the window glass under that dead-making light is a bit of a shock. So much older now. Unknown if you are much wiser.
What you do know as you wash down the last bite of the sandwich with gulps of unsweetened tea is that you were a young lad once. A young lad who only needed a favorite sandwich and a book to know he was home. He is there, you see. In the glass looking back at you and wondering who that fellow is, so near and so far from home.
Home. Cheese, ham and capocollo with the usual suspects. And funny how it warms you up, maybe even brings a slight tear to the eye, because of that feeling of home. Nostalgia wasn't on the menu, not a condiment, not a cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookie next to the register. No, it was none of those things, and everything.
To find the past you left behind, the days of idle wonder in the summer and stultifying boredom (sometimes) in the school year, the laying on your back in the grass while falling asleep to the drone of airplanes...to find these things and more in between the bites of lettuce and onion, tomato and hot pepper relish, is a minor miracle.
Watching the wine vinegar and the olive oil drip off the bun, running down the heel of your hand you can give thanks that you aren't truly weeping in the fluorescent glare of the sandwich shop. Seeing yourself in the window glass under that dead-making light is a bit of a shock. So much older now. Unknown if you are much wiser.
What you do know as you wash down the last bite of the sandwich with gulps of unsweetened tea is that you were a young lad once. A young lad who only needed a favorite sandwich and a book to know he was home. He is there, you see. In the glass looking back at you and wondering who that fellow is, so near and so far from home.
22 October 2015
Monkey Bring Tea
"Brigid?" Colm's voice rasped over chords dry as dust.
"Yes, my love?" Brigid leaned over and took Colm's hand. His eyes fluttered.
"Be a dear, would you, and open the shutters. Sunshine." He blinked slow.
"Of course, love." Her heart lurched at the sight of his bluest blues, flecked with gold and storm. She stood, letting his hand slip slowly from hers, the cool dryness electric against her fingers. She crossed a room full of tone and shade, a room that seemed to her in perpetual autumn twilight since the rude awakening of his diagnosis. Fitting, she thought, that Colm ever loved the fall. She opened the stained wood shutters. Worn, nacreous walnut under decades of varnish and beeswax. Built by Colm's own hands when he wore a younger man's coat.
Pure ingots of white gold light poured themselves over the floor and Colm's bed. He managed a smile at the sight, running a hand slowly through his stubbly salt-and-pepper hair. He insisted it be short, his patience had run out with maintaining the long locks from months ago. Too much work, not enough energy. The low embers that smoldered in his head and heart were just enough to get himself out of bed, some days. But not much else.
Brigid smoothed out her skirt, the wool scratchy and reassuring under her hands. She turned to look at Colm. She thought perhaps he might be up for some time on the patio listening to his favorite birds. She smiled back. "Window open too, my sweet?" She could see finches flitting amongst the trees along the back hedgerow. Yes, he would enjoy a sit-down on the terrace.
"Yes. I'm wanting to hear the songs."
She opened the window. The scent of lilacs zephyred into the room. Colm breathed deep, a gravelly sigh that loosened his chest. "Ah, lovely" he murmured. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, resting back against a walnut headboard carved in an array of stylized Irish elk and triskelions. The headboard was one of Colm's favorite pieces, and one of his earliest. His head sagged. A few dizzy seconds passed. Brigid thought he might be on the verge of fainting, but he raised his gaze to hers. She let out a breath she had not known she was holding. He smiled again.
"You okay, love? You look worried," he said.
"I'm tired, but okay. Worried about you," that worry tightening her voice.
"Ah, don't trouble yourself in such a way. Not much to be done at the moment."
The sun streamed through the window. A cozy heat rose from the stones of the floor. Colm struggled to the edge of the bed, Brigid quickly steadying him when he threatened to overbalance. His feet he placed on the stones, luxuriating in the warmth radiating up through his soles. Brigid wrapped her arms around his head and shoulders, drawing him to her. He breathed deep of her, a mixture of the sea and dewy roses that thrilled his heart with a burst of vigor. He looked up into her eyes, the emeralds that brought him home.
"To the terrace, love? With me?"
"Of course. No resistance from me, pulse of my heart. Here, take my hands and I'll help you up."
He did as she bade him, the journey a slow one as if he were struggling out of sand. Resting his head on her shoulder, he let her guide him to the glassy door that led out to the terrace. His usual scent of peat laced with wood shavings had changed since he had fallen ill. It was now tinged with wet clay and other things she could not name. She found the combination to be simultaneously reassuring and unsettling.
They shuffled together, slow in the lowering sunlight, and sat down in oak chairs facing the slope down to the hedgerow. Colm huffed and sputtered a bit, catching his breath. Brigid moved her chair closer to Colm's, sat down, and took his hand. Silently they listened to the birds chorusing amongst themselves. Songs such as they sang made Colm feel that perhaps this storm would not end badly, that he and Brigid would sail through and get back to life.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" he asked Brigid.
"Yes, my love. It is. I like watching your face when you hear the birds. It makes you happy, I can tell."
"Aye, it does, it does."
He held her hand and breathed in the lilacs and the grass, the sea and the roses. The world spun a few times more while they soaked up the waning sun.
"Brigid? Starting tomorrow, I should like a cup of tea every afternoon at this time." Brigid jumped a tiny bit.
"Certainly, dear. I'll have to get some, though, there's none in the cupboard."
"I'd like the one we used to drink when we first moved here. The one with golden in it's name. What was that, golden, golden..." his voice trailing off into a wheeze. He seemed genuinely upset that he could not recall the name.
"Golden monkey?" She laughed, and he could not help but chuckle.
"Yes, that's it. That's the one. Get some tomorrow?"
She leaned over and kissed his forehead. "That I will."
They both leaned back. He did not let go of her hand. She looked over, watching him watch the birds and clouds. Two rabbits frisked amongst the grass halfway up the hill.
"I'm thirsty, my love. And I'm scared." Colm did not look at her.
"Scared of what?" she asked.
"The treatment will be nasty, I think. All sorts of bad things could happen. I want to remember the taste of tea in case the drugs take away my tongue. I want to remember the taste of you." He turned his head, lit up yellow gold in the late afternoon light. She squeezed his hand and managed a small smile.
"I want you to remember that, too, my love. And you will." She kissed his hand. The rabbits scampered off to home. The light fell on the couple. Tomorrow they would have tea, storms be damned.
"Yes, my love?" Brigid leaned over and took Colm's hand. His eyes fluttered.
"Be a dear, would you, and open the shutters. Sunshine." He blinked slow.
"Of course, love." Her heart lurched at the sight of his bluest blues, flecked with gold and storm. She stood, letting his hand slip slowly from hers, the cool dryness electric against her fingers. She crossed a room full of tone and shade, a room that seemed to her in perpetual autumn twilight since the rude awakening of his diagnosis. Fitting, she thought, that Colm ever loved the fall. She opened the stained wood shutters. Worn, nacreous walnut under decades of varnish and beeswax. Built by Colm's own hands when he wore a younger man's coat.
Pure ingots of white gold light poured themselves over the floor and Colm's bed. He managed a smile at the sight, running a hand slowly through his stubbly salt-and-pepper hair. He insisted it be short, his patience had run out with maintaining the long locks from months ago. Too much work, not enough energy. The low embers that smoldered in his head and heart were just enough to get himself out of bed, some days. But not much else.
Brigid smoothed out her skirt, the wool scratchy and reassuring under her hands. She turned to look at Colm. She thought perhaps he might be up for some time on the patio listening to his favorite birds. She smiled back. "Window open too, my sweet?" She could see finches flitting amongst the trees along the back hedgerow. Yes, he would enjoy a sit-down on the terrace.
"Yes. I'm wanting to hear the songs."
She opened the window. The scent of lilacs zephyred into the room. Colm breathed deep, a gravelly sigh that loosened his chest. "Ah, lovely" he murmured. He pulled himself up into a sitting position, resting back against a walnut headboard carved in an array of stylized Irish elk and triskelions. The headboard was one of Colm's favorite pieces, and one of his earliest. His head sagged. A few dizzy seconds passed. Brigid thought he might be on the verge of fainting, but he raised his gaze to hers. She let out a breath she had not known she was holding. He smiled again.
"You okay, love? You look worried," he said.
"I'm tired, but okay. Worried about you," that worry tightening her voice.
"Ah, don't trouble yourself in such a way. Not much to be done at the moment."
The sun streamed through the window. A cozy heat rose from the stones of the floor. Colm struggled to the edge of the bed, Brigid quickly steadying him when he threatened to overbalance. His feet he placed on the stones, luxuriating in the warmth radiating up through his soles. Brigid wrapped her arms around his head and shoulders, drawing him to her. He breathed deep of her, a mixture of the sea and dewy roses that thrilled his heart with a burst of vigor. He looked up into her eyes, the emeralds that brought him home.
"To the terrace, love? With me?"
"Of course. No resistance from me, pulse of my heart. Here, take my hands and I'll help you up."
He did as she bade him, the journey a slow one as if he were struggling out of sand. Resting his head on her shoulder, he let her guide him to the glassy door that led out to the terrace. His usual scent of peat laced with wood shavings had changed since he had fallen ill. It was now tinged with wet clay and other things she could not name. She found the combination to be simultaneously reassuring and unsettling.
They shuffled together, slow in the lowering sunlight, and sat down in oak chairs facing the slope down to the hedgerow. Colm huffed and sputtered a bit, catching his breath. Brigid moved her chair closer to Colm's, sat down, and took his hand. Silently they listened to the birds chorusing amongst themselves. Songs such as they sang made Colm feel that perhaps this storm would not end badly, that he and Brigid would sail through and get back to life.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" he asked Brigid.
"Yes, my love. It is. I like watching your face when you hear the birds. It makes you happy, I can tell."
"Aye, it does, it does."
He held her hand and breathed in the lilacs and the grass, the sea and the roses. The world spun a few times more while they soaked up the waning sun.
"Brigid? Starting tomorrow, I should like a cup of tea every afternoon at this time." Brigid jumped a tiny bit.
"Certainly, dear. I'll have to get some, though, there's none in the cupboard."
"I'd like the one we used to drink when we first moved here. The one with golden in it's name. What was that, golden, golden..." his voice trailing off into a wheeze. He seemed genuinely upset that he could not recall the name.
"Golden monkey?" She laughed, and he could not help but chuckle.
"Yes, that's it. That's the one. Get some tomorrow?"
She leaned over and kissed his forehead. "That I will."
They both leaned back. He did not let go of her hand. She looked over, watching him watch the birds and clouds. Two rabbits frisked amongst the grass halfway up the hill.
"I'm thirsty, my love. And I'm scared." Colm did not look at her.
"Scared of what?" she asked.
"The treatment will be nasty, I think. All sorts of bad things could happen. I want to remember the taste of tea in case the drugs take away my tongue. I want to remember the taste of you." He turned his head, lit up yellow gold in the late afternoon light. She squeezed his hand and managed a small smile.
"I want you to remember that, too, my love. And you will." She kissed his hand. The rabbits scampered off to home. The light fell on the couple. Tomorrow they would have tea, storms be damned.
27 February 2015
Ruins of the Temple
February is the honest month. The ego laid bare like the trees, all leaves finally gone through the insensate malevolence of icy wind and sheer cold. Winter is not through with us, not yet. February brings us to our knees where we implore it for mercy.
Even the sun meddles in the affairs of the heart, its white-gold rays teasing this troubled organ with warmth that never quite reaches the bones. We persist in our fantasies of life. The groundhog becomes Delphic. We do not believe in its prognostications, yet groan when the shadow lays upon the frozen earth.
On a Sunday of no particular note, it is my freezing shoes that trouble the snow and dirt. I stand alone with my thoughts before the stones of memory. The wind skirls amongst branches scratching at the sky. A sky so blue as to break the heart, empty, cold. It is the blue I imagine would have been the color of my children's eyes, had I been so lucky as to seen them open.
I meditate upon the idea that in deep winter we become the trees outside our walls. Frozen, sluggish, bereft of the leaves that allow the sun to nourish our starved and hollow bodies. Hard funeral ground grants me no succor. The cold of it seeps through the soles of my shoes while the granular snow crackles and squeaks as I shift my footing. My roots are paralyzed, asleep. There will be no growth until spring.
Even the sun meddles in the affairs of the heart, its white-gold rays teasing this troubled organ with warmth that never quite reaches the bones. We persist in our fantasies of life. The groundhog becomes Delphic. We do not believe in its prognostications, yet groan when the shadow lays upon the frozen earth.
On a Sunday of no particular note, it is my freezing shoes that trouble the snow and dirt. I stand alone with my thoughts before the stones of memory. The wind skirls amongst branches scratching at the sky. A sky so blue as to break the heart, empty, cold. It is the blue I imagine would have been the color of my children's eyes, had I been so lucky as to seen them open.
I meditate upon the idea that in deep winter we become the trees outside our walls. Frozen, sluggish, bereft of the leaves that allow the sun to nourish our starved and hollow bodies. Hard funeral ground grants me no succor. The cold of it seeps through the soles of my shoes while the granular snow crackles and squeaks as I shift my footing. My roots are paralyzed, asleep. There will be no growth until spring.
Crows caw out raucously from the trees scattered around the cemetery. Their metallic rasps and croaks is not laughter, I think, but perhaps conversation regarding the stranger in their midst. I find strange comfort in their company, the chatter reminds me it is the children I came to visit. Snow was dimpled softly over the memorials. Twelve years of memory overlaying scant inches of white blurring what I used to know, used to see. A brief debate ensued in my head as to the necessity of brushing their graves free of snow. I say debate, but it was foregone that I would do such a thing.
My heart needed to see. These children of mine deserve the sunlight. I reached down to begin, snow shockingly cold sending a brief lancet of pain arcing into stiffening knuckles. The metal beneath the snow was colder than lost love. Their names became exposed in a winter light, shiny like the melancholy of an arctic midnight. It is a stark beauty that I cherish. My fingers trace the letters and through the numbness I feel a warmth, an electricity cutting through and lighting up the pathways to my heart. I marvel at the strength of the foundations as I kneel in the ruins of the temple.
My heart needed to see. These children of mine deserve the sunlight. I reached down to begin, snow shockingly cold sending a brief lancet of pain arcing into stiffening knuckles. The metal beneath the snow was colder than lost love. Their names became exposed in a winter light, shiny like the melancholy of an arctic midnight. It is a stark beauty that I cherish. My fingers trace the letters and through the numbness I feel a warmth, an electricity cutting through and lighting up the pathways to my heart. I marvel at the strength of the foundations as I kneel in the ruins of the temple.
17 July 2014
A Game of Pooh Sticks on the Bridge of Sorrows
"Daddy, will the Sun ever burn out?"
Her voice quavering, my daughter questioned the very life of stars. The Sun is not the certainty to her that it is to me. It was there by creek side, under a luminous smear of galactic dust, she spoke to me of Death.
I inhaled crisp air lashed with the tang of woodsmoke from the fire at our feet. A little creek, crossed by a tiny footbridge, bisected the yard in front of our cabin. It burbled and whispered as I craned my head back to contemplate the stars overhead in the clear South Dakota sky. Her questions were unexpected. The truth seized hold of my tongue before I could shush it.
"Yes, it will, sweet pea."
Her eyes as those of a wounded doe, she asked "When?"
"A long time from now, so far away we won't know about it when it does," I said.
She paused. Her face a sphinx before the flicker of the flames.
"Could it happen tomorrow?"
"No, dear."
"But when will it happen?"
"Billions of years from now."
That stopped her cold. I swallowed the tightness in my throat, a metallic tinge of regret burning my gullet. The truth as I knew it was maybe not the best of revelations for a thoughtful kid who wants to see around corners. Just like her Da. I could tell. It was there in the shining eyes beyond the firelight. We held our breath, teetering on the fulcrum of a hard question, she wanting to know the truth and me wrestling with shielding her from it.
The dam broke. Questions spilled from her lips. Tell me about stars, she said. How long does it take for them to burn out? What happens if I get sick and die? she asked. What happens if you get sick? Is that what happened to my brother and sister? I don't want that to happen to us, she said. Will it? Will it, Daddy?
My mind reeled. The sediment of memory was stirred up, and thick. I did my best to describe and explain, without going to deep into details. Assurances were made, platitudes delivered, at best it was a redacted version of wisdom and history. There was no hiding from the direct questions. She is too smart for me to pull the wool over her emotional eyes for too long, so there was no trying.
The sutures on my heart throbbed and ached when tears welled up in her eyes. How to explain these things without breaking someone's heart? Compassion and regret were duking it out in my head.
But she asked. I wanted her to know. We drifted off into a conversation about the stars, again, their colors and what they mean. She impressed me with what she already seems to know about those things. I asked her if she knew of an easy way to remember the colors and the sequence. She did not. From some memory vault last accessed long ago, I dredged up the mnemonic I had learned as a kid.
"O-B-A-F-G-K-M, sweet pea. 'Oh be a fine girl kiss me." I laughed. She blushed, I think, hiding her grin behind her hand.
"That's funny, daddy."
"I know, but you remember it, right?"
She asked me for the third time if I was certain the Sun wasn't going to burn out when we would know about it. I responded again that I was certain.
"Are you sure?" she asked, her arching upward in that 'I-do-not-quite-believe-you-yet' sort of way.
"Yes, I'm sure."
We lapsed into silence. A slight breeze stirred the trees. For some ticks of the clock, I watched the stars wheeling over the ridge line to the north. It was beautiful in the night. My eyelids drifted downward, the murmurs of the creek and the dying of the light exerting the gravity of sleepiness. She surprised me with another question.
"Daddy, do you remember the bridge? The one back in Maryland close to the apartment?"
I snapped my eyes open. "Yes, I do."
"I liked the bridge. Remember when we used to play pooh-sticks from it?"
The tightness in my throat returned. Boy, did I ever remember. "Yes," I squeezed out.
"That was a fun game. I liked watching the sticks in the water. We could play it here!" she said while pointing to the footbridge. The shine in her eyes was pure joy. Much better than the existential sadness I had glimpsed earlier. I chuckled.
"I reckon we could, sweet pea, but it is a bit dark for it."
"I know," she sighed, "but we could when it is light."
With that, she announced that she wanted to go inside the cabin, because she was tired and it was getting cool. She fetched water and I doused the embers of the fire. Watching them fade away, I felt untethered from the earth, but comfortable with floating. My daughter hugged me, briefly, in that skittish animal way that kids have sometimes. The realness of the affection convinced me that sometimes, the best way to handle the infinite is to play games on the bridge of sorrows.
"Yes, it will, sweet pea."
Her eyes as those of a wounded doe, she asked "When?"
"A long time from now, so far away we won't know about it when it does," I said.
She paused. Her face a sphinx before the flicker of the flames.
"Could it happen tomorrow?"
"No, dear."
"But when will it happen?"
"Billions of years from now."
That stopped her cold. I swallowed the tightness in my throat, a metallic tinge of regret burning my gullet. The truth as I knew it was maybe not the best of revelations for a thoughtful kid who wants to see around corners. Just like her Da. I could tell. It was there in the shining eyes beyond the firelight. We held our breath, teetering on the fulcrum of a hard question, she wanting to know the truth and me wrestling with shielding her from it.
The dam broke. Questions spilled from her lips. Tell me about stars, she said. How long does it take for them to burn out? What happens if I get sick and die? she asked. What happens if you get sick? Is that what happened to my brother and sister? I don't want that to happen to us, she said. Will it? Will it, Daddy?
My mind reeled. The sediment of memory was stirred up, and thick. I did my best to describe and explain, without going to deep into details. Assurances were made, platitudes delivered, at best it was a redacted version of wisdom and history. There was no hiding from the direct questions. She is too smart for me to pull the wool over her emotional eyes for too long, so there was no trying.
The sutures on my heart throbbed and ached when tears welled up in her eyes. How to explain these things without breaking someone's heart? Compassion and regret were duking it out in my head.
But she asked. I wanted her to know. We drifted off into a conversation about the stars, again, their colors and what they mean. She impressed me with what she already seems to know about those things. I asked her if she knew of an easy way to remember the colors and the sequence. She did not. From some memory vault last accessed long ago, I dredged up the mnemonic I had learned as a kid.
"O-B-A-F-G-K-M, sweet pea. 'Oh be a fine girl kiss me." I laughed. She blushed, I think, hiding her grin behind her hand.
"That's funny, daddy."
"I know, but you remember it, right?"
She asked me for the third time if I was certain the Sun wasn't going to burn out when we would know about it. I responded again that I was certain.
"Are you sure?" she asked, her arching upward in that 'I-do-not-quite-believe-you-yet' sort of way.
"Yes, I'm sure."
We lapsed into silence. A slight breeze stirred the trees. For some ticks of the clock, I watched the stars wheeling over the ridge line to the north. It was beautiful in the night. My eyelids drifted downward, the murmurs of the creek and the dying of the light exerting the gravity of sleepiness. She surprised me with another question.
"Daddy, do you remember the bridge? The one back in Maryland close to the apartment?"
I snapped my eyes open. "Yes, I do."
"I liked the bridge. Remember when we used to play pooh-sticks from it?"
The tightness in my throat returned. Boy, did I ever remember. "Yes," I squeezed out.
"That was a fun game. I liked watching the sticks in the water. We could play it here!" she said while pointing to the footbridge. The shine in her eyes was pure joy. Much better than the existential sadness I had glimpsed earlier. I chuckled.
"I reckon we could, sweet pea, but it is a bit dark for it."
"I know," she sighed, "but we could when it is light."
With that, she announced that she wanted to go inside the cabin, because she was tired and it was getting cool. She fetched water and I doused the embers of the fire. Watching them fade away, I felt untethered from the earth, but comfortable with floating. My daughter hugged me, briefly, in that skittish animal way that kids have sometimes. The realness of the affection convinced me that sometimes, the best way to handle the infinite is to play games on the bridge of sorrows.
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