Thanks-Giving

In our lives, we are all the keepers of stories.  These narratives tell us where we came from and who we are.  They also hint, for the young, at who we will become.

Yesterday, we gathered with family for Thanksgiving.  We told stories, some old and often repeated down through the years, and some new and tinged with sepia sadness at those no longer present, who live on only in our memories.  They are our recent losses, those of blessed memory.  Of course, we were also creating stories in present tense, right then and there:  my grand-niece’s first Thanksgiving.  Stories multiply and branch out from other stories to become trees reaching down to the past and up to the future.

As I watched people, I could read them as stories.  Or, at the very least, I could imagine them as characters in a larger fabric of our existence:  a crazy quilt of many colors, a host of fall-colored autumnal trees, strong and true.

Then, last night, I dreamed I told too many stories.  I had revealed too much, giving away secrets and the keys to the kingdom.  I awoke before the consequences of my storytelling were known.

But to reach maximum velocity, a story must put someone at risk:  the characters, the narrator, the storyteller.  Conflict and jeopardy rule the day in a good story.  They are the building blocks, the central core of any narrative, in truth or imagination.  Therefore, a storyteller must be brave.  We cannot tremble in darkness, nor should we shun the light.  Stand tall and simply tell it straight and true.  Relish the recitation; revel in its revealing detail.  The story is us.  And the keeper of stories is a trust sacred to this world.  For the storytellers and the stories, we give thanks.

A Friday Night Return

AP Photo / Bloomsburg Press Enterprise, Jimmy May

Years ago, there were Friday night football games, the marching band, cheerleaders, the smoke from hamburgers grilling out back of the snack bar, and that was the end to another busy week in the fall of the year.  Now, I hear echoes through the trees of the marching band and the roar of the crowd at my old high school just a few blocks away from my apartment.  High school football and smoke in the air:  nothing changes but everything.

“Notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind,” reads my blog tagline.  Well, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the life lessons lately, frantically scribbling away in journals and notebooks but not for publication.  What is this life?  What will happen next?  I could only ask my notebooks.  I wanted answers, and until I found them, I did not feel I had the courage to speak.  I had forgotten the prime directive of my own teaching philosophy:  the questions are more important than the answers.  The answers will always exist, but if one does not ask the right questions, the answers will never be found.

The last few years have been a crisis of faith for everyone.  Most of us were left to ponder:  where are we going?  Is the spirit of America dead?  What if we discover that the spirit has always been dead, that “all men are created equal” are just pretty words?  Maybe there is no equality and no justice, no liberty and no allowance for freedom.  Or, that we are slaves to our fears, our prejudices, our narcissism.  To the immigrant yearning for a better life we offer only the whip or the gun.  We sow the seeds of violence and celebrate the bloody harvest.  We are unwilling to reach out a hand to those in despair.  That is what we have become, a nation armed to the teeth against the Other.  A people too selfish and narcissistic to see we are all dreamers; we are all here in search of a better life.

We should be striving for a more perfect union.  Perfection may be unattainable, but like most sentences, in that one, the verb is the heart of the matter:  striving.  To paraphrase King, we may not get there in our lifetimes.  We may never get there, but we continue striving.  Always.

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” goes the lament.  Depression is the black dog that follows us home and threatens never to leave.  Anxiety wakes us in the middle of the night and disturbs our vague and restless dreams.  “I grow old…I grow old.”  We do and we are.  We are old before our time.  “Would it have been worth it after all, would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels; after the tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—and this, and so much more?”

America is a colder place:  700,000 of us are gone from this autumnal world.  Where do we go from here?  The only answer, the best answer I have, is onward, while the ghosts flow in and around each of us and fall behind.  We try to carry some essence of them with us but it is like trying to transport the ocean to the desert with only our cupped hands.  It is too much to carry.  It is a futile enterprise on the way down to our own dusty deaths.

Yet, there is hope.  There is life and there is what remains.  We are more resilient than we know.

At the dawn of the new year, my grand-niece was born.  Charlotte Ileana, named for that patron saint of English literature, Charlotte Bronte.  I have watched Charlie discover her world.  In her face, I see my niece, her husband, his family, and my lost father-in-law.  She has not dared to eat a peach, as Eliot writes in his poem, but she did try mango the other night with hilarious results.  Mango and the world are her frontiers in these early days of her life.

So it is time to pick up that thread that connects us.  The thread always seems ready to snap.  Our humanity is always in danger of fading away.  But this is life and this is us, and we are striving to bring about that most American of dreams:  a more perfect union.  That is the only struggle that matters now.

This is a time for wonder:  “Do I dare disturb the universe?”  We have no choice because we are alive and among the living.

As for the blog, look for more notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind.  If I find a few answers in the smoke and fire of daily life, I’ll post those too.  “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”  Onward!

 

Poor Banished Children of Eve

 

It is the dusky shadows of an ancient September.  My grandmother sits on the porch of her house, reciting the rosary in monotonous, sepia tones:

“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.  To thee we cry, poor banished children of Eve…”

I was often pulled into this ritual.  She would hand me one of her spare strings of beads, and I would take my seat in the autumnal twilight, sinking into the recitation, the circular rhythm.  In the span of my childhood, I went from not understanding the words I breathed, to comprehending their significance, to finding them anachronistic.  Yet, there is a comfort in prayer, a reassuring spirit in following through:

“Glory be to the father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

Except worlds do end, and begin again.

My grandmother is gone.  The house is unrecognizable, altered by another owner.  And I am middle-aged.  The ritual remains lodged in the shrouds of memory.  Yet, it is once again September.  In September, we use to go to play at my grandmother’s house after school.  That, too, is a strand of memory broken.

Our rituals have all been broken.  This only adds to our feeling that the world has turned upside down.  We do not leave our homes now.  We avoid contact and protect ourselves.  My ritual is to rise in the morning, go to my desk, bring up a student’s face on my screen, and work with her for an hour on her essay.  Later, I will pull up another face to discuss her struggles in her classes, the learning strategies and work-arounds that will help her get back on track.

Despite all our devices, our methods of communication allowing one person to see another in pixels on a screen, we are lonely still.  It feels as if the world is ending, but as my friend, William Michaelian, wrote recently:

“The end of the world is a strange and beautiful place. It keeps growing, and it keeps ending. And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

To do this, we may have to let go of cherished rituals:  family dinners, baseball games, the rhythms and milestones of the workweek, the long walk at twilight.  We must adapt and change our colors, and recognize that we see the world differently now, and there will be new rituals to embrace.  “And as it ends, it gives birth to countless new beginnings.”

I do not pray anymore.  Mumbling words without the strength of conviction is an exhausted ritual I can do without.  I love silence.  If she were still alive, I would gladly go sit on my grandmother’s porch with her.  I would tell her how the world has changed.  She would tell me the torch has been passed.  And then she would say her prayers while I take in the gloaming in silence, feeling the wind on my face.

I have been dreaming of her lately.  Or, I should say, in the dreams, she is dead as she is in real life, but I dream of her house.  I am there again.  The house is empty, but the same as when I last was there.  I am responsible for repairing and renovating it, for keeping it preserved.  There are the gardens, the fruit trees, the lawns, the two-story house itself.  I rise every morning at dawn to walk the property, a single house on three connected lots.  I water the vegetables and flowers, mow the grass, prune the trees and shrubs in season.  If there is something to repair, the materials appear, and I can put it right again.  There are no other people in this dream.  I am the sole survivor of some colossal ending.  It is strange and discomforting.  I do not leave the property, and a ten-foot wooden fence protects the place from intruders.  I can see only the sky above.  Nearby houses are shadowy and undefined.  What kind of dream is this?  Purgatory?  Heaven?  When does solitude become loneliness?

There is no one left to perform the ritual, no mumbled prayers to Mary, the Mother of God.  I am not interested in continuing the nightly prayer.  I am more interested in the Orthodox Jew, swaying back and forth in prayer.  I am more interested in the Buddhist, in the lotus position, humming, gone into another plane of existence.  I am interested in the Muslim, on his knees, facing Mecca, which may be a million miles away on the other side of the globe, yet he is tethered to it by a strong and indestructible fiber of the heart.  Finally, I am the one who spans the distance and lands somewhere between agnostic and atheist.  I know the world is a sacred place.  I know that divinity lives in all things.  And I know that we do not end.  We are transfigured at the moment of death—we become light and air.

So I am thinking of past Septembers.  We just observed Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a moment we should all reflect upon, not just our friends in Judaism.  The world needs to recognize the pain and suffering we cause each other, the way we are hell-bent on destroying who we are and what we have built with our own hands as well as the pulsating Earth beneath us.

My grandmother, in an afterlife of her own construction, is probably sitting on her porch in some other unreachable dimension, mumbling her prayers and letting the beads slip over her fingers, keeping count of decades and prayers.  That is her path now.

I stay up late into the warm fall night, remembering all of it, the way we live, the poor banished children of Eve.

 

Keeper of the Flame

“In plain truth, I exist more among the dead than the living, and think more about them, and, perhaps, feel more about them.”

Robert Southey, letter to S.T. Coleridge

In the dead of a summer night, I sit in my chair reading.  Far away, across the city, I hear the booms, hisses and sizzle of fireworks.  Shortly after, a fire engine or police vehicle screams through the night.  From a distance, the fireworks sound like a battle.  It would not be a surprise in this time and place of pandemic and civil unrest to read in tomorrow’s paper that the war has begun.

Later, I awake from a deep sleep and walk through the apartment.  In the rooms, I see shadowed figures sitting in the corner of a couch, standing in the middle of the room, lingering in the hall.  Who are these people?  I should be scared, but I am not.  I am strangely comforted, and if I turn to stare directly at them, they dissolve into cushions and furniture and corners.

“Our lives change but do not end.”  I repeat it to myself, a Catholic prayer for the dead.  A promise:  “Our lives change but do not end.”

She handed me the envelope—my father-in-law’s death certificate.  “Keep it for now.  I cannot look at it.”

The County of Los Angeles

Department of Public Health

Cause of death:  respiratory failure

Time interval between onset and death:  minutes

Cause of death:  lung cancer

Time interval between onset and death:  years.

Signed, sealed, delivered, done.  But we know it is never done.  In fact, it cannot be done, because we carry him with us.  I hear his voice in my brother-in-law’s greeting.  I see his expressions in my wife’s face as she cooks dinner.  During our late nights up reading, she will launch into a story, some bit remembered from childhood, a narrative remembrance but in the time frame of the story, the events of recent months are like a comet at the edge of the horizon, faint, ominous.  Parents never die.  Children never die.  Everyone lives forever, and no one ever grows old. Right? Right.

But then they do—they do grow old, suffer, encounter failure, cling to loving memory, and eventually die.  “Our lives change but do not end.”  We hold fast to it like a life raft.

I remember being a child and looking at my aunts and uncles and thinking they will never die.  I remember the death of grandparents—they are old and old people will die.  I can make it.  I can keep going.  Sadness, but still far and away, a distant fire.  Then?

We grow into the generation of funeral mourners.  Those we thought would never die, guess what?  They die.  We bury them.  We visit multiple graves in the cemetery on holidays now, buy flowers in bulk, remember moments.

Our lives are lived in denial of death until we can deny it no longer and we enter our mourning phase.  Then, the hardest to accept, we will be mourned.  “How do we live in a world where we are destined to die?”

“Our lives change but do not end.”  That is my final answer, I whisper to myself, imitating a tagline from a game show.  Yeah, the game of life show.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the dead.  I grapple with the idea of not being, so much so that I miss the time being now.  I gotta change my behavior, but here I am, right back where I was.

It’s a summer’s night and I should be thinking about childhood or possibilities or the distant flash of a bottle rocket.  Picnics and potential.  Joy and running and skin turning brown in the sun, tanned and healthy.  The taste on the tongue of chlorinated water.  Breathe deep the barbecue on a hot night, the gentle sound of ice cubes in a glass and low voices and laughter.  Tumbling and tumbling down.

“Someday, I’ll fly away.”

Yeah, wake me when you go.  I’ll be right here.

No, you won’t.  I may see you in my rooms, ghostly reminders of those lost, but you are gone, gone, gone.  I shout to you, “Don’t go, don’t.”

“When the shadows of this life have gone,

I’ll fly away;

Like a bird from prison bars has flown,

I’ll fly away.”

I wrote about grief once, for 147 pages.  All those pages like falling leaves in late autumn, falling without a sound, just a cascade of gentle, swaying breezes down to the dusty earth.  Winter coming soon.  I offered the best defense I know against the stabbing pain of grief:  storytelling.  In stories the dead come alive again.  We walk them back into existence.  We remember lost summers and quiet autumns, heavy rain on a January night, warm earth in spring.  I can see you again, not some shadow in an empty room, but real and alive, standing over the barbecue, laughing, with death so far away we cannot hear the distant roar.

What did I learn from all of this?

“When I die, Hallelujah, by and by,

I’ll fly away.”

This Changing World

That’s where the stress falls

That’s where the bough breaks

The sense of a missing limb

The sense that part of you exists, elsewhere

We are on a search

To bring home the children we once were

If we could find them once again

Out among the living

Sometimes we must make do with a memory

A flickering candle on a warm summer’s evening

A light of love

In this changing world.

My father-in-law’s ashes have come to stay with us for a while.  He rests in the den among our books and treasured possessions.  Still, I cannot bear to think of it.  There is a picture of him with my wife on a shelf across the room.  He is smiling.  Someone snapped the picture at my niece’s wedding rehearsal dinner, in a much happier summer just a few years ago.  Yesterday, really.  That is what it seems like.  Yesterday.

Where is his consciousness now?  Is he beyond this world, this changing world?  Or, too terrible to contemplate, does he still possess some awareness of what is happening, the grief, the horrific sense of loss?  Does he see us struggling to go on?  Whatever he knows or doesn’t, we go on.  There is no choice.  Coming, though, is our own separation, our own departure to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”  This will happen.  After more than three decades together, my wife and I will be separated by death, and for the survivor, the loss will be immense, unfathomable.  No way around it, this is the Great Divide.

I believe in the spiritual life force that encompasses everything.  There is an interconnectedness, some thin fiber holding all life in concert, the symphony of us, past, present and future.  We are never alone in our struggles but it is not like the dead are physically here with us.  The dead have crossed over but we must remember the Catholic Prayer For the Dead:

“Lord, those who die still live in Your presence,

Their lives change but do not end…”

Or, a more secular view from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried:  being dead is “like being inside a book nobody is reading…An old one.  It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time.  All you can do is wait.  Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”

Maybe the dreams I have had for some time now, the dreams about living in isolation and solitude are really all about trying to block myself off from the pain and separation of death.  My idyll:  the proverbial cabin in the woods, Henry David Thoreau’s cabin.  Is that cabin really a coffin?  To cut off oneself from humanity is to be truly dead, the very thing I fear.

Maybe I have not written my way out of grief, or even to an understanding of grief.  Maybe I have not learned enough about the mysterious connective tissue between each and every human heart.  Ours is a story etched in our DNA.  O’Brien, again:

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.  There is an illusion of aliveness.”

The dead, the living, we are all connected.  “[Our] lives change but do not end.”

I can go on with this, knowing we are never separated, that human life is one long quilt to keep us warm in the cold of eternity.  I can live with that analogy.  It will be a struggle, but with this knowledge, we can go on, we can cross the chasm of loss and go on.

Fernando Gonzalo Garcia (1940-2020)

He knew the city as if he had imagined it into existence.  This always amazed me since it was not the place of his birth.  He came here as a boy from Santiago de Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immediately began to explore his new metropolis.  He and his cousin would ride their bikes through the streets:  downtown, Pico-Union, MacArthur Park, Hancock Park, Griffith Park—every neighborhood, street by street, he knew it all, a map indelibly pressed into his memory.

Often, when I needed to go to a particular neighborhood, I would call him to ask the best way to go.  He knew.  Always.  These were his streets where he had driven city buses for his professional life, first as a Rapid Transit District (RTD) operator and later, driving Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) buses including those big articulated behemoths.  He moved into accident investigation after he had to chase some teenagers off the bus for bothering other passengers.  Out on the sidewalk, one picked up a large stone and hit him between the shoulder blades.  No serious damage, but his driving days were done.

He was a graduate of Los Angeles High School, class of 1958, and told the story often that the actor Dustin Hoffman was only a year or two or three ahead of him.  His first paying job was at Bullocks Wilshire, one of the many landmarks of his life that is no longer there.

In 1962 he enlisted in the United States Air Force and was stationed in Duluth, Minnesota.  A boy from the Republic of the Equator serving his adopted country from frigid Duluth, Minnesota—the irony was not lost on him.  He served honorably, surviving on leftovers provided by his friend who was a cook, mainly spaghetti and veal cutlets, a meal once he left the service, he never ate again.

After his time in the Air Force, he moved back to Los Angeles to raise his family.  He became a painter specializing in landscapes and painted wood carvings.  He owned a gallery in downtown Los Angeles, and traveled the western United States for art shows at malls and public parks.  My wife remembers the night when he called from Colorado upset because he had hit a deer on a lonely highway and totaled his van.  The fortunes of an artist could not support a young family, so he segued into driving a city bus.

He loved classical music, foreign films, literature, and current events.  He enjoyed cooking and sharing special meals with loved ones, and brought joy to the community of elderly neighbors and friends in his last apartment building.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, we kept telling him not to leave his apartment door unlocked to neighbors and visitors.  By then, he was suffering from lung cancer, COPD, emphysema and aortic stenosis and was at high risk of dying should he contract the virus.  He would tell us on the phone or over Hangouts not to worry, that he was playing it safe.  Then, in the same breath, he would say, “Just a minute,” and we would hear him greet someone.  “I’ll call you back,” he would say, coming back on the line.  “It’s my neighbor and she needs me to look at her laundry cart.  The wheel is broken.”  We would get angry and tell him that was hardly playing it safe.  “It’s okay, I know her,” he would reply, as if friendship prevented infection.

As his multiple health problems worsened, we were not sure if his low blood oxygen level might be affecting his mental faculties.  My wife would call him and ask what he had for dinner, since we had all taken turns dropping off food for him.  “Yes, yes, I had tomato soup and grilled cheese,” he would say.  She would be upset with him, warning him that he had to watch his salt intake.  My brother-in-law would call an hour later and ask the same question and get a totally different answer.  What we learned later is that he was not eating much of anything except chocolate ice cream, his favorite.

He was a lifetime smoker, and would tell us he began when he was a teenager, yet when the doctor would ask, he would say he had only smoked for twenty years.  Outside the office, someone would remind him he did not start smoking at 60.  He would give us a sheepish grin and change the subject.  He had quit a number of times, but always went back.

Family was everything to him.  His happiest moments were spent with his son who followed in his footsteps in his professional life, and he was so proud of his daughter and granddaughter, both graduates of Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles.  He loved visiting the Chalon and Doheny campuses, learning about their histories and enjoying the scenery, libraries, and most of all, spending time at Mary Chapel.  He knew every spot where his favorite television show, Monk, was filmed on campus.  “This is where Monk figured it all out,” he would exclaim in a grassy area of the Circle, the center of campus.  We took him to see our offices on campus, and he looked at my wife’s door plate with great pleasure and pride.  “You went to school here, and now you work here,” he said quietly.  Outside, we made our way back to the car, and he stopped for a moment and stared out over Santa Monica to the ocean.  “You get to see this view every day,” he said to me.  “You’re very lucky.”

I will miss his kindness, his patience, his hearty, raspy laugh that made me smile.  That was his gift to everyone: his warm and embracing smile.  He was the light of our lives.  I will be forever in his debt for bringing my beautiful wife into the world.

Last week, when his health issues had taken a decidedly downward turn, he told us that he could not go on like this.  He needed to find peace, the kind of peace his cousin found when he passed recently.  This was the same cousin who rode bikes with him across the city all those years ago.  The desperate fight to fill his occluded lungs, his dizziness, his chronic anemia, the endless tests, poking and prodding, he was so tired of it all.

In that spirit, I hope that now he has found that peace, and a new city of dreams to explore.