There is no end to the blame
Or the depths of pain.
We all bear not only our own history
But our ancestry.
There’s no way to even the score.
We must, like children, cry,
Olly olly all come free!
Just After Twilight
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Tag Archives: love
I saw a coyote
We were walking up the dirt road that cuts midpoint in the short loop around the farm, and I had just reminded myself of what I wanted to remember from earlier in our walk:
Why would you ever want to be any place but here and now?
Where you have a choice.
…Just coming up the hill toward our turn for home. Lucy is interested in something ahead, away from where we are going. Not tugging-me interested like it is a deer, but definitely interested. I’m noticing but not thinking much of it when I glance up and see, about 50 feet away in the misty light, a male wolf. It nods once and brings its head up looking to its left. A mild shock runs through me and I whistle–three short and one long that curves upward–then turn right for home.
Of course it couldn’t be a wolf. Must be one of those coyotes that have been howling in the distance come near. It would be easy to succumb to fear, but aside from the prompts of my programmed experience I am not afraid. I feel a masculine presence and see that nod.
I sent my thanks and the blessings I had then to give, and came home and wrote this.
This world, every day, all around, is for us to witness and love.
Rocks
In Memoriam.
“Rocks” is a reference to the Jewish custom of leaving rocks on someone’s grave, in remembrance. “Rocks” is a place to re-member those whom I have loved or admired, or who have done good service in Thee Old Cause. (I am not Jewish, although I feel an affinity with Jews and if I had to choose a religion I would be a Jewish atheist.) I first learned of this custom from the movie, Schindler’s List, in which the survivors and their families lined up to place rocks on Schindler’s grave. It has always stuck with me.
Today, on the hunter’s moon, October 2018, I’d like to remember my professor, Arthur Clements. I took a course with him in fall 1993 that wrapped together Medicine, the New Physics, Mysticism, Poetry, and damn–D.H. Lawrence! I’d never read Lawrence before, and we didn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover either. We read The Man Who Died. It was a great class. He was both fierce and compassionate–if you didn’t read the material, he might kick you out of class, but if you did he would listen to you, even if you said strange things, and take you seriously. I contacted Art in 2003 because I was writing again, and we talked a few times on the phone. He was dying of cancer then. In the spring of 2004 I got an email from his companion–that is what he called her, which seemed to me both cozy and maybe a little distancing for a lover–asking me if I would be willing to speak at his memorial, that he had wondered if I would in his last days. So I wrote the following piece and drove to Binghamton, where I stood, and shook, and read. One last lesson.
Art and Life
I took one of Arthur Clements’ classes in the fall of 1993, my second semester at Binghamton University. It was not an easy class, and I regard it as formative. I am still learning the lessons he laid out for us then, for, as so often happens with a good teacher, I understood what he was talking about while there, in his class and steeped in the material, but it has taken me years to apply it. I am still weaving it in, and I suppose I always will be—because the subject Art concerned himself with was far more than academic; it was Life.
Allow me to give you an example. Our final paper was to be 16 to 20 pages, discussing the works of Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Galway Kinnell. We were to “find a theme tying them together—what is common, what is distinctive, and how they distinctively express what they have in common.” A difficult task indeed—one which I worked very hard to fulfill. On the last day of class, before we handed our papers in, Art told us we had a choice: we could tell him not to count our paper, in which case he would automatically give it an A, or we could tell him to make it count, in which case we took our chances on the grade it received. I still remember the mingled fear and hope of that moment when I gave up a guaranteed A in favor of an honest appraisal of my work.
This is what I am grateful for—he took pains to elicit the very experience of being awake and alive that we were studying in these authors. He tried to show us that every moment we have a choice to either make ourselves comfortable or take the opportunity to push our boundaries, defy convention, give up the standard measures of success. “The object,” he once told us, “is to live intensely, feel intensely, love intensely—happiness is not a state of constant comfort and ease of soul.”
It is therefore with conviction that I can say to those who are feeling pain in the wake of Art’s passing: he would want you to embrace that pain and see it for the gift it is—another opportunity to experience the fullness of life, here and now.
April 2004
“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.” ~Rumi
A Taste of Wild Raspberries
August 2010.
For a long time I have largely avoided writing because I had done it so much I began to feel it got between me and experience, the way cameras and video recorders can get between you and watching your child grow up. The recorder, the reporter was always there, translating experience into simile and metaphor before I’d had a chance to taste, let alone digest, what was happening. But writing has been my main mode of digestion for most of my life—to make sense of the exchange between my inner world and the outer world, to extract nourishment from the meanest and the most expansive movements of these worlds.
Today I walked in the fields and woods of Thacher Park, the first time in many weeks because I have been so busy—busy-ness, busy-ness, busy-ness and I no longer have my sweet joyful dog expecting and needing me to take her for her weekend excursions. And myself, though I need these walks as much as she did, myself I can put off and deny in the face of work that must be done during the precious little time I am not at work, at The Job.
Every time I go to Thacher Park now, since Heidi died in May, I weep a little. Sometimes quiet, tears rolling down my face for brief moments before the wind in the trees or birdsong or the peace of the place soothes me and I walk on. Sometimes I stop and gasp with sobs, seeing her smiling face looking up at me with joy and adoration. Never for long, though. I think the disinterested benevolence of those woods has much to do with this, but I also know that it is because I am slowly digesting the enormity of her absence. Like a snake who has swallowed an elephant.
Heidi had been sick for a year and a half at least. She started throwing up after meals months before emergency surgery to remove her spleen and a tumor the size of a navel orange. We didn’t know whether it would be worth putting her through the pain at the time— the vet gave her two months tops post-surgery—but we could not bring ourselves to euthanize her then, when the last time she had seen us was in the examination room and I could not stop crying and holding her. So damn the expense, and the pain of recovery, and the dismal prospects. We gave the go ahead, and brought our doped-up girl home a day later, wincing at her slow movements and the twenty-seven shining staples along her shaved belly.
Two and a half weeks later, on a mild March Saturday morning, I coaxed her into the back of my old Ford Escort wagon and we went to get those staples taken out, picked up my friend Eileen, and went to Thacher Park to walk through sloppy mud and melting snow. It was a bit too much for her, those two miles or so of trails, and she lay down on the drive home instead of holding her pretty head up for me to see in the rearview mirror. Heidi spent the day sleeping and I felt guilty for having pushed her, but Sunday saw us back up there in the woods, for a shorter walk this time, and she was a little better. A little stronger.
Every weekend after that we walked in the woods, as we had been doing since autumn 2002, when I sought solace after an ill-conceived foray into law school. Every weekend I said good-bye, letting Heidi lead me wherever she wanted to go. We walked every trail we had ever walked, and even found new ones. Every step was precious, every time perhaps the last time we would walk this way together.
Spring bloomed, summer ripened, and August offered me wild raspberries for first breakfast three yards from Beaver Dam Road—the small ritual I had observed for years made sweeter now by the question of her presence, the ever-present last-ness of each ramble. But Heidi lasted. Longer than the vet’s prediction, longer than my most hopeful hopes. We walked through autumn, then winter, until I fractured my hip in January and was forced to stop for weeks, each one passing interminably as I let Heidi out to throw up in the backyard after every meal, wondering how much longer she would last, each weekend passing irretrievable.
We walked again, and again, and spring came again, and we passed the anniversary of Heidi’s surgery. She remained joyful and always willing, eager to go on our rambles though slowly starving to death, throwing up more and more often, until one Thursday night in early May she couldn’t stop. Every twenty minutes all night long we ran a slow race to the back door, and by dawn I knew the time had come. Even though I knew she could continue this way for weeks, or maybe months, longer, I didn’t want her final days to be lingering, didn’t want her to die when she could no longer go up to her Place, the woods.
Friday morning I called in sick, then called the vets and made the appointment for Monday evening. Dr. Jarvis would come to our home to spare Heidi from having to spend her last moments in fear. I allowed myself a few tears, a moment of tears, then vowed not to cry, not to mourn—not this weekend, not our last weekend—and then we went to Thacher.
Twice a day that weekend we went to Thacher, except Sunday, when I could not coax Heidi from her spot on our bedroom floor in the morning. I went alone, thinking I must get used to it. I walked fast along the trails, escaping the fact of her absence, which sat inside my heart like a great, heavy stone, and then I saw, sitting on top of a boulder, a large rock. It called to me. I lifted it and felt its weight as I walked back to the car. Heidi’s headstone.
Later that day my younger son accompanied us to Thacher, then Heidi and I went again on our own Monday morning, and Monday afternoon my older son, Heidi, and I climbed the Long Trail up the steep hillside across Beaver Dam Road. We stood and looked down at the valley as the wind gusted around us. And walking slowly down, down to the car it really was the last time.
Heidi died on her soft, red flannel sheet, in the grass under the old cedar tree back of our house, with birds singing and the westering sun shining in her golden red hair, all of us around her, petting her and telling her what a good girl she is.
And I did not dissolve into tears as I thought I would. All the holding back I had done that weekend really had turned my grief into a heavy stone that filled the whole of my trunk, both solid and cavernous at once.
Today it is August 28, and I have missed many weekends at Thacher Park. So much can get between you and life. I stopped writing because I wanted to experience without the reporter constantly interpreting. And this is really valid, except I think about how often I have been filled with gratitude to my former selves for setting down in words their experiences, so I could read them and taste those moments in their immediacy once again.
Today I passed by the wild raspberries, hoping to find a few lingering berries at the end of their season, but the clusters had been picked clean by birds and other hikers. I found a few broken berries on one cluster and picked them, held them in my hand for a moment then popped them into my mouth—more crunch than sweetness. Faint regret for allowing busy-ness to come between myself and this small, yearly ritual, but I swallowed and walked on. I started thinking about writing, about the taste of wild raspberries in August, and saw with reluctance that the reporter was back and the trees were passing by unnoticed as words strung themselves into sentences in my head.
Midstep in my thoughts I was arrested by the sight of a perfect cluster of raspberries just off the path, a long way from the bushes I usually visit. Red and fully formed they hung there before I reached out and gently pried the caps from their heads. I held them in the palm of my hand, wondering at their perfect forms as the reporter in my head said, “how like the faintly ridiculous bathing caps those lovely water-ballet ladies wear.” Then I ate them, one at a time, savoring their perfect sweetness as I walked slowly on.
Miss Heidi, the Fluffernutter