Journals

• Some Days, 1969 - 2007

  
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  Journals, Notes, Fragments

  1960s

  To be devoted to a master –
  it isn’t the master, however, who is necessary; it’s the devotion.

  Fourth of July memory: Our front lawns is transformed into a proscenium. My father is directing, putting on the act. The small children jump up and down, having waited and anticipated. It isn’t dark yet, but they can’t wait any longer. One child is frightened. The mother’s there, protecting, warning. She holds the Kodak camera. The fiercest dog on the block cowers. Neighbors who don’t perform have come to be provided with the entertainment. Their children might be envious, but the parents are delighted to only be an audience. As for the magician, it’s showtime. He lights a fuse, he steps back: fssssstscreeeeee… And he delivers his only line, “Seventy-five cents shot to hell!”

  1972

  Christmas Day, Aunt Diana and Aunt Dotty are over. My father, in the kitchen, with the camera. My mother and her sisters are discussing how much butter to use for the stuffing. My father says, “Do you believe in God, do you believe God can do anything?
  My mother replies, “I believe God can give people the will to do anything.”

  1973

  Late in the year, Winthrop House. Michael Bernick is my roommate, though I hardly ever see him. Michael is only interested in Michael.

  Under the waterfall of the shower, I hear the phone ringing. It may be the second ring. I step out, on the tile, drying my hands, then into the living room. The call is for Michael. Wet feet on a filthy carpet, back to the shower.

  Today at the Loeb, Randy Echols tells a story. He says he once painted himself into a corner and the phone rang, and he walked barefoot through the paint. Mr. Echols is 65. His wife died a year ago, his daughter is a belly dancer in New York, his son has been out of the country for several years “for draft convenience sake.”

  His story sounds theatrical, even false. “That was in the days,” he adds, “when I still answered the phone.” Randy’s skull is like a skull. He has played Death in morality plays. I think about calling him up at a late hour, maybe tonight, and I am sure he would answer.

  1973

  Friday night at Temple Israel of Westchester, which is in an old union hall. Milt Jacobson is there, who answers how are you with the response, “I’m still moving.” Milt congratulates me on my schooling. However unhappy I was in college, it will always be “something to be proud of.”

  1973

  Traveling by car, from Berkeley to Maryland. Thousands are in the ground on either side of the highway, and under the highway as well.

  1973

  I dreamed I had written two poems, while I was at our house, on Belton Drive, but also in the car, on a family outing. Both places at once. I was also walking from the corner of the block, where the Negilison’s lived, back to our house, when the line I needed occurred to me:
  “the night was beaded with dew.” Of course it made no sense. Wouldn’t it have been the morning, “beaded with dew”? No matter. I woke up, the poems couldn’t be retrieved, only a sense of what they had looked like on the page, and the one line, which was never worth remembering.

  *

  Another fragment:

  My father bequeathed me difficulty. His father before bequeathed it to him.

  The first time you return home to your parents, the change is breathtaking.
  After that, a lifetime can pass, nothing will change.

  *

  Borges writes of the furniture in a room humbled by la actualidad, and how light from the street strangles the voices of the dead.

  *

  The fire and the flame are inseparable—like the river shore and the river.
  What would I be, if I were not a flame? And could I be a flame, without the fire?

  *

  I dropped out of Harvard for a year. Los Angeles, Berkeley, Boulder, Maryland, where I left my car in a field, and then Air Icelandic at $189 round trip to Luxembourg, and the train to Paris. In Paris, in an apartment, not far from a church where I went often to look at the interior. I remember also the paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, the murals on walls, but where I saw them, I can’t remember. On the interior walls of that church, which was St. Etienne du Mont? Most of poems I labored over I have thrown away, just a line or two left, some of them about the church. The sense of stone, what it has through time – St, Etienne du Mont – otherworldly, its arch and dark glass, its partial interiors.

  That was 1973, when I left the country to write poetry in Paris, an appealing path that led nowhere, other than to loneliness and homesickness, though where home was, exactly, I didn’t know. This is an envoi for the poems I never wrote:

  Go, little ones, go.
  You’re late, but so what.
  Go now that there’s no hurry.

  *

  1974

  After sitting through a lecture on literature at Harvard, I walked through the yard and into Cambridge, to a movie theater. In a poem, never finished, I tried to describe the difference between the teacher in a lecture hall, gesticulating, punching the air in enthusiasm, a kind of pugilist in defense of Henry James, and the street language of the grocery store or on a marquee, as if the two were competing boxers.

  And in this corner,
  words on a theatre marquee,
  and the rhythm of slogans
  in the market.

  Saved by the bell!
  Oranges, from California!
  To Have and Have Not
  starring Lauren Bacall.

  *

  3 January 76

  With Dolores.

  You live your life, I live my life, and the difference between our two souls will be that yours will be in heaven before mine. A difference, but not the only one.

  We took the highway to Fort Worth today, to the art museum.
  There’s a certain loneliness in movie theaters, of watching in the dark. Together, apart.

  5 January 76

  Ed Pfister has replaced Bob Wilson at KERA. He looks like a toad. Short, wide. His skin is waxy and red. His thin hair is slick. He’s modest though, which is good, and unambitious, which is not. Bob Wilson, our past president at the station, was Napoleon much of the time. When he was our leader, we seemed to be under pressure, though for no reason any of us understood.

  I went to SMU today to meet Toni Beck, who is a dancer. She reminds me of Sylvia, my mother’s friend; very energetic, and she has a following. She heads the dance department at SMU and uses her first name only. When I call her at SMU, a male voice answers, “Toni’s office.”

  Dolores talks to me about whether I feel something or what do I feel because of the difference between her body and the body of a younger woman. I take it as a reproach, though she asks me not to. We are different ages, after all.

  10 March

  Saturday morning, the phone rings.
  “Well,” he says. I don’t recognize the voice.
  “Well?”
  “El? Are you sick?”
  “No, not at all.”
  “You’re sounding kind of puny.”
  “You have the wrong number.”
  “Oh, sorry,” he says and hangs up.
  The phone rings again immediately.
  “Ellen?”
  “You have the…”

  *

  Dolores calls, just to say hello.

  Mark Birnbaum and I went to breakfast at Lucas B&B. Dolores is already at work at Lamplighter for the day. She’s lucky, she has things to do. Mark talks again about apprenticing himself to a photographer. When he says “and work at the foot of the Master,” there’s something ridiculous about it. He knows it’s a cliché. He’s not making fun of it and not taking it seriously either. “You would make a good slave,” I tell him. Mark has been up all night, printing photographs. He brings a strong stale odor into the car with him. Bob Shaw is also at Lucas. Bob Smith and Laura Garza are in the line waiting their turn when we leave.

  April 1976

  Allan Mondell came by my office at KERA today and asks, “How are you doing?” There’s something self-serving even In his solicitation. He’s interested, but it’s unhealthy interest. I think he wants to hear about some loss I might have had, or that I’m unhappy. Like the Dylan lyric, he says how are you, good luck, but he doesn’t mean it. There is an algebra in some relationships that makes one person rise in value as another person falls.

  I wanted to write a poem about leaving home, because I realize that what is left behind can never be recovered. Yes, you can go home again, but you cannot go back.

  I’m reading Kenneth Rexroth poems and think most of them are horrible; also, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Also, psychology, transactional analysis papers, and things related to “parenting,” and wondering what it might be like to be a psychotherapist. Dolores seems very happy with herself, which I am not.

  May 1976

  I have Tape for the Turn of the Year, a gift from Lars Engle. Cannot remember the occasion, it might have been a graduation gift. There’s a dedication on the inside:

  Let not vicissitudes
  Bend friend from friend.

  Happy Birthday. Lars

  For a birthday, then.

  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the word “vicissitudes” before, but vicissitudes and life generally will take friend away from friend. That’s inevitable. Things slip past, into the past. I don’t miss my past. I do miss the sense I had of myself in the past. The confidence I had that good things were ahead.

  Other than the vicissitude of losing my address book, which I have done, I have no excuse for not keeping in touch with the two friends I have. Losing his number has stopped me from calling Richard Levine in San Diego. I haven’t been bent from friends, exactly, but I have been stretched far away from them, first to college in Massachusetts, and now to Texas. The bond between us has thinned. It’s made of memories only.

  I can express this as A.R. Ammons might:

  What has bent me
  from my friends?
  Something
  like the undertow
  that tugged when I stood
  on Dewey Beach,
  all of California
  behind me,
  and in front of me
  just horizon.
  I could not see my feet
  through the water
  that pulled me forward.
  I thought it was nothing,
  but it was not
  nothing.
  It’s deep out here.

  *

  A story of criminal behavior in the newspaper:
  Why had he been called “the friendly rapist”? Because one woman had answered police questions, “His hands were soft, and he said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’” Or he would say, “now be nice!” Or “finished now,” and, always “thanks” or “goodbye.” The pattern became a familiar one to the police. He came into the apartment at night, held a knife to her throat, tied her hands with wire, put a pillow over her face. Then he was caught. He was an account executive with Bloom Advertising. In two years, he had raped more than 60 women.

  *

  In Chimayo:

  When I asked, “Where was the plaza,” I was told, “this is the plaza.”
  It was an orchard overrun with weeds.
  I saw a cross above a rooftop. A remnant of a church. What had I expected? Toledo steel and Spanish armor, horses, other fantasies – houses of adobe, a ristra of chilis, blue lintels, a grander plaza. Instead, in Chimayo a housewife in curlers gathered pinon for her fireplace; she carried dry boughs. It would be, I suppose, the same fire that tempered Toledo steel, or at least a distant relative. And the cross was still there, for the sake of this woman.

  *

  The parking lot at the Tecali apartments is a frying pan in July.
  My ’67 Chevrolet Biscayne is cooking there.
  International Bancshares and First National Bank are the only mountains in this landscape.
  Inside our apartment, the TV flames on its stand like a log.
  Only a few stars are visible in the city. Even so, it would be a job to count them, and not worthwhile. Worthwhile, my partner says, but not worth it.
  Our apartment in Dallas is close enough, or as close I will come, to Horace’s Sabine farm, or to the thatched hut of the poet Li Po.
  I’ll write poems at night anyway. I can see the future from here.
  I see myself with grey hair, re-reading this juvenilia.

  *

  In the summer Dallas is air-cooled and interior.
  Driving through the deserted downtown – a crop of towers, rising from the plains. The western cities are our collective cathedrals. Each could be Chartres, with travelers coming a thousand miles to pay in them. But Dallas can cast its spell from the tip of the Republic Bank Building no further than the Cotton Bowling Alley.

  *

  Summer.
  The absences hold true for a thousand miles on the plains. The unused seed crackles, and the insect air sends a note like a single steel string.
  As if the sky was plucked, and in the clarity of blue there was a hidden guitar.

  *

  Remembering the Bay Area -, the fir combed clarity of the air, the narrow bights, spray on the breakers, in bays and smaller ocean inlets, the healing of the water, and when you run into the sea, you will be stunned at the cold, and awakened.

  *

  1978

  I’m in El Paso, on my way to Mexico. Before dawn, the lights of motels on the empty hills. Having coming so far, it’s difficult to go back, to admit that I went astray. A map should correlate with somewhere. Its thin lines, the air in its spaces. The beams of my car in the dark locate a fern of dust. El Paso, Juarez, Durango. And beyond, black in the spaces between names, the highway downward.
  No sense here of the route one must go.

  *

  June 1988 – Father’s Day

  On Father’s Day disorder is the order of the day.
  “I don’t want to be the Daddy anymore,” I complain to Dolores.
  “Let’s go to sleep,” she says.
  Her advice is sound.
  I try to sleep. The spinning hum of a white fan, the tongue and groove of the wood ceiling, the shadows of the dark in the bedroom will need go on without me watching them.

  Goodnight, Eden, who’s rolled up like a doodlebug. Goodnight, brother Ben, breathing noisily. The sight of their prone shapes produces in me a kind of pity. I would call it tenderness, and it will last only until they wake up.
  And then, noise –
  Benjamin, howling to be held.
  I try to suppress the thought that I have enough troubles without this.

  Marriage, Balzac wrote, has its unknown great men. Fatherhood must have its unknown great men as well. Maybe I will wake up to discover that I have become one of the great ones, admired and famous.

  No, I’ll be neither, definitely not famous, and not admired either; maybe not even appreciated – perhaps, it could be, resented and rejected.

  *

  The day may come when I wake up to discover that something has happened to my sense of being unappreciated. It will have hardened like an epoxy, one of those unused household glues in a drawer, a squeezable tube that was once pliable, but now is dry.

  These days, it’s sometimes Eden in need, sometimes Ben, each like a little animal, a hamster or some other pet that should never have been brought home. You think it’s tame, and then it bites you.

  I say to myself, I’m smarter than this, but I’m not.

  I’m up again, at the top of the stairs, trying to wait Ben out, as he refuses to stay in his bed, much less stay asleep; I’m asking, what will it be this time.
  After a while, the house is quiet again, the four of us quiet for a while – Dolores, Ben, Eden, and “Daddy.”
  My Father’s Day gift this year? Dolores gave me a tiny screwdriver, for my eyeglasses.

  *

  Nature Trail

  In East Texas we took the train to Palestine. It was hot, there were yellow jackets all aboard. The summer had its usual languor. We stayed in a motel with a pool, to thrill our two children. The next day, we were on a trail in the pines. I have no song in my heart, but in my head I can hear, In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines. And there was a turtle. That’s what the children will remember. And, when I got ahead of everyone on the trail, I was shouting, “Hey, you, hey you turtles,” calling back to them to come on.

  *

  1988 – Cancer comes in, with knocking, without permission. Is there anything more rude in this world than illness?

  Dolores has breast cancer. Both her breasts have been removed, and she is disinclined to do reconstruction. We are both in her hospital room at Baylor before her surgery on a Monday. Dr. Barton has dropped by. He has just returned from Aspen and is wearing an expensive suede jacket. Then Dolores was on a metal trolley, wheeled off to the operating room. And that nurse from Fort Worth, who was so wonderful? I can’t remember her name, and I no longer have the bill to remind us of her.

  *

  Many of the poems I am writing are syllabics – seven syllables to a line, stanzas of six lines each, with off rhymes in different patterns – abcabc or abbacc, or, most often, just starting something and then not being able to bring the pattern off, not completely, or just not be happy with what I was writing, and giving up.

  *

  How do you describe longing?
  You tell yourself it’s nothing. You feel regret for the future.
  This Sunday, I saw a beautiful Mexican girl, a housekeeper, waiting for the bus.
  But my routines have no unscheduled stops. I am speeding through this Sunday with that feeling of wanting to be elsewhere, to take off, to head for whatever the hills are, all the while asking myself why.

  *

  The air is mysterious. Blue at the end of it all, up close it’s perfectly clear. It sounds like silence, until I hear a siren increasing in volume, from a distant street, coming closer, and suddenly there’s an air of panic, bringing with it troubles that are not mine, and soon a sense of relief, as the wailing goes away, further and further.

  *

  Last winter’s freeze was murder on the grass. Brown all summer, the green never did recover. And in the fall, red oak, magnolia and other trees in the neighborhood looked like skeletons as they usually do, their branches like bones, but real this time, not simply suggestions of death, but the fact of it. Ever tried raking leaves up when the wind loafs through them, as thoughtless as a child kicking through the piles? I might as well wait for this winter, and then for the spring sap and the blossom, if they are eventually coming.

  *

  One night, I heard Eden in her crib cry out, “come here!”
  She wasn’t there when I got there.
  She had gone into another bedroom, to another dream maybe, or to pick her nose.
  I thought, I should make a tape recording of all this, up at night, taking them to their rooms, saying in whispers as I took her back to bed, goodnight, sleepy head.

  *

  Ben, is it because you’re nobody’s fool that Miss Brame calls me at the office to complain about you?

  *

  From 1989:

  November

  Routines lead me through the days. First, dressing. Nothing seems right. My suits are wearing out, the cheap clothes are ill-fitting. Beard unkempt, hair unattractive. But no time to improve on myself, if I even knew how. Ben and Eden at breakfast. Cereal, juice. They watch Mario Bros and any available cartoons. We see Mommy in the front window waving bye and we go off to school – Eden to Temple Emanu-El, Ben to Oak Hill. The sights are routine as well. The tollroad north to Northwest Highway, passing Temple Emanu-El, then west to Abramsl. The Baptist clocktower, the painted water tower, the blue and gold Blockbuster Video, Burger King, Fisher Road, the horseshoe drive, the door of Oak Hill Academy.
  “Do good, have a good day, no time outs.”
  Then back with Eden, to Temple Emanu-El. She cries when I won’t stop to pick up something she’s seen in the street. That’s not part of the routine, but it’s routine for her.
  Olga and Ilya, the Russian kids, are already in her class. A book fair is set up in the hall.
  Then I go on to my office; there, by 9:15. To the bank, to the spa early, then to a 1 pm meeting at SnyderGeneral.

  I have a Ross MacDonald paperback. My favorite part is on the back cover, with its phrases like a slumming angel, and the sun-blinded streets. Words from an entirely different life.

  *

  What would we give our children?
  The winter days to be happy in, in the thousand ways children find to be happy, and the sky at night, with the stars to wonder at.
  The tracery of snow in the branches of trees, and the small sound of a bell, carried on the wind.
  Festivals of light, solemn celebrations, the voices of song and laughter.
  Fellowship, harmony, peace, hope.
  And toys.
  Toys that zip along. Toys that zap the enemy. Soft ones for cuddling. Monsters as fierce as a child’s heart.
  Toys change from year to year, but little changes in the giving and receiving.
  In the circle of children and their toys, we have a share in the life to come.

  *

  Feeling not quite fulfilled in the circle of children and their toys, and with my share in the life to come.
  How to describe this longing for…something else? I tell myself it’s nothing.

  *

  Could this possibly be a conversation? Might it be a harbinger of the depth of conversations to come?
  Hello, my name is Ben. What’s your name?
  Daddy.
  Hello, Daddy, how are you?
  I’m fine, Ben, how are you?
  Fine, thank you Daddy. I’m Ben. Thank you.
  Goodbye!!!
  See you later!
  Goodbye!
  See you later!

  Our conversation reminds me most of speakers learning a foreign language, something they will ever be entirely comfortable with, something that is not native to them.

  *

  It’s February. In the front yard the roots of the St. Augustine are as drab as the sky.

  *

  1980s

  Nancy, who cuts Dolores’s hair, is a fat, homely girl, with more than two chins, and short unremarkable dark hair that is no advertisement for her business.
  She also cuts Ben’s hair, and Eden’s too.
  She has a daughter, but no husband. She has recommended a plumber to Dolores, so we can call him to unstop our drain.
  Nancy says he’s “a master plumber.” He’s also a “talkative black man.” And he’s “very cheap.” All these things recommend him to us, and he came today to unstop our drain.
  While he’s here Dolores calls to ask me if she should stay home or should she take Ben to his swimming lesson.
  “Is this one you can’t handle?”
  We agree that she should stay and let Laverne take Ben swimming, after she tells me that’s already the plan.
  Tonight I ask Ben how his lesson went.
  “Oh, we never made it,” Dolores says.
  “Laverne didn’t take him?”
  “He wouldn’t go without me, so we didn’t go.”

  *

  Riis Christensen picked Ron and me up at four to show us a house for lease in the State Thomas area. He’s Willie’s friend and a broker with Terry Gwin & Associates. The house is on Routh, off Woodall Rogers. It’s zoned for offices, though families live in the houses on either side of it. Poor Mexican families, though probably not for long. Meaning, they will be poor and Mexican for long, but probably not living in the State Thomas area, which is zoned for office and is gentrifying.

  *

  October 1993

  You only have so much time. That’s life. Or, from another perspective, death.

  Death is the absolute clock that corrupts absolutely.

  I admire those watches that don’t run at all. They are the most dignified. Elegant and geometric, made of jeweled movements and semi-precious memories.

  What do we learn about time? It flies. It’s out or up. You can be on or in time. The hour is always late.

  My father’s watch was off as soon as I put it on.

  Even without a watch, I know what time it is. And what can I do with a watch?
  Watch out, mostly.

  Can it tell me how long since I was in love?

  Will there come a time when I entirely stop thinking about old girlfriends?

  We think in decades. Remember the sixties, we say. Or, this is the nineties.

  A month ago, I was forty-one. A month from now, I’ll be forty-two.

  My father’s watch is now on the shelf, in the library, behind a closed door, so he can’t see it from his home in another city and, like time, much on my mind.

  *

  December 21, 1998

  We arrive in Israel after more than 20 hours of traveling and waiting, traveling and waiting to travel.

  At the Dallas Fort Worth airport at 8 in the morning for a 9:30 morning flight to Newark. Then we wait until 7:30 at night for the ten-hour flight to Tel Aviv. We can’t sleep on the plane, which is cramped and warm. I’m not traveling with anyone who will insist on a more comfortable business class reclining seat. Only with two children.

  First night in Israel. We are at a Radisson in Eilat, after a short flight from Tel Aviv. The flight on Arkia Airlines ascended over the Dead Sea and then the Negev, which looks as dry as bedrock and as mountainous as the Old West. It’s a flashy hotel, though, with waterfall pools. From the balcony, there’s a view of the Red Sea, but also of the neon of a nearby shopping center. We aren’t far from the airport, either.

  Ben is so tired enough he falls asleep in his worn clothes. We won’t leave the hotel tonight, although it’s only six in the evening when we arrive, and we have a dinner recommendation, from Lonely Planet, to Al Hayam Lebanese Grill in the Eilat Center on the promenade. Instead, we stay in. We’ll feel less lonely if we just stay in together.

  Our guide compares Eilat to Miami, though it seems much smaller, a backwater, a place for visitors who are far from home on our lonely planet.

  *

  25 December 1998

  Christmas Day in Israel. We wake up in Jerusalem. The day here and its counterpart in America hardly seem to be the same day.

  Last night, our group went to an Israeli folk club – dinner, music, dancing for some. Ben sat beside me. He would neither eat nor say a thing. Eden went off with the younger girls, where I suppose she belongs. A year and a half after Dolores’s death, I’m just a widower. I know what Dolores would do, were she here and I had died. She enjoyed other people so much more than I do, and she could find her a place in company, no matter where. Attracted to others, she was attractive. Offering and receiving smiles. I am at the table pretending, or not even that, just fussing with the plastic tableware.
  “Daddy, did you dance?”
  Eden asked me, once we had returned to our hotel.
  “No.”
  “I didn’t think so.”
  “Why is that?”
  “You’re not the kind of person who dances.”
  Exactly so.

  Yesterday, December 24, we climbed Masada. Up at a quarter to five, so we could climb in time to see the sunrise over the Jordanian mountains to the east.
  I am the kind of person who does that, and pushes on a fourteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old to go along with it.

  *

  December 27. Sunday in Jerusalem – Sunday morning, the day after the Sabbath. In Jerusalem there are three Sabbaths. Fridays for the Muslims, Saturday for the Jews, and Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. We’re going into the Jewish Quarter today. No plans to visit the Dome of the Rock, though we can see its gold crown; and there’s no way or at least no permission for us to visit Al Aqsa, the mosque built on the Temple Mount. I would have thought that these would be sights not to be missed.

  Last night, after a Havdalah service to mark the end of our Sabbath, we walked along Ben Yehuda Street. It’s like Austin’s Sixth Street, the crowds milling, except there are plenty of Judaica shops, and the outdoor cafes. For a time Ben and Eden and I sat together. The air was cold, and it and wet, a damp, unpleasant night, but we seemed happy together. We joked, we got along, a rare good time.

  We have formed no alliance with other families, and we have no friends. Ben and I are too unsocial for that. We attract nobody. Dolores would probably have made our way for us with the Harveys, the Stolbachs, the Wassermans, or Vesta Snider. People first, places later if at all—that was her way, though that way is no longer a path Ben or I can follow. Well, we can, but we don’t. Dolores might even have connected us to the Egyptian Copt swinging his censor behind Jesus’s tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I can’t. For me he’s a sight, not a person. Or, more one than the other.

  *

  On Friday we walked in the Jewish Quarter, visited archeological sites, and saw the tunnels of the Western Wall. In the evening I left Ben and Eden in our hotel room, so I could go for a drink at the King David Hotel with Gary Stolbach and Richard Wasserman. Mark Werbner and Rabbi Stern joined us there. A discussion on Jewish education ensued, to which I had little to contribute. What I had was a Bourbon Old Fashioned.

  Earlier in the day, Eden had taken a small lip of paper with her prayer on it and pushed it into one of the seams in the Western Wall. I took a picture of her, from a distance. How distant I really am, from both of them. She leaned into the wall, but whether she was praying or playing I couldn’t say.

  What I can say about Jerusalem – it’s full of Jews. And in the hotel, American Jews.

  *

  Monday, December 28

  We left Jerusalem. We’re going to the north this morning, to Galilee, and then to the Golan. It’s a bus trip all the way, through Jericho to the Sea of Galilee, which Israelis call Kinneret. We made one unscheduled shop, beside a field, so Philip Kafka could throw up. He’s 12, and small for 12, and gets carsick easily. Beyond the field was the Jordan River, which we were told “meanders” 75 miles from the Kinneret to the Dead Sea. Meander seems like the wrong word for the Jordan’s course in such a narrow space.

  *

  1 January 1999

  We’ve been up for 30 hours. I’ve skipped reporting about the return trip to Tel Aviv from the north of Israel. What do I remember of Tel Aviv, at the very end of 1998? Seeing a tall, blond prostitute on an empty street, late at night. A Russian Jew, free from the Soviets, neither oppressed nor repressed.

  This is the end of Temple Emanu-El’s “Family Trip” to Israel, with Ben and Eden.
  We left our prayers stuck for however long they stay in the Western Wall. I wonder who comes to remove them. Somebody must, just like the attendants cleaning out the empty plane after the passengers are gone. I had discussed Jewish education at the King David Hotel bar with Stolbach, Werbner, Wasserstein, and Stern. Me, the one with the Anglophile name.

  We are almost home.

  *

  Something about the turn of the year renews my interest in “journaling.” It sprouts. And then, the passing of the year, and it withers.

  24 January

  Less than a month after we returned from Israel, I went to Northern California with Pam Caldwell.

  In San Francisco with Pam –

  From the Hotel Diva to the Wine Country – a country without a constitution, but with an aristocracy, who own vineyards. Not much further than Napa today.

  Yesterday, we walked on the Golden Gate Bridge, to the first tower; earlier, through the park.

  Odd to be here, exactly where I was a quarter century before, at twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. In Chinatown, I don’t notice what has changed, and so for me it hasn’t changed– the streets the same, the same Chinese woman, with gold bands around her teeth. She picks up frogs, crabs, the fish that are not yet dead, touching them, and untouched by them. Fish are going to die. Here I am fishing around myself, for an understanding of the years between then and now. Then, I was half promise, half dream. In the now that was then, life was wide open, and there was something shiny ahead. This time, now? No. The promise of youth is a promise I could not keep; my dreams are the kind you cannot remember in the morning.

  I have twenty-five years ahead as well, or twenty-six, or twenty-seven.

  There are many, many thens, and almost as many as nows – almost as many, but one less.

  *

  Pam and I stayed at the Huntington for our last night in the city. It’s an expensive room. Bright white sheets, a creamy blanket, and a red border on the cover of the book I was reading in bed. I could be anywhere or in any bed, though not with the same woman; with her, it needs to be in our “luxury suite” on Nob Hill, $315 at night, in a hotel named after a man who owned a railroad and left gardens and a famous library. I’m reading Leading The Mindful Life by Charles T. Tart. The drapes are drawn. I’m mindful of that, because they stop me from seeing the view of Huntington Park, the Grace Cathedral, the Transamerica Building, North Beach, or the tiny top of the Golden Gate Bridge, where a red light is flashing. It’s a light that measures time without meaning to. I’ll see this view in the morning, though the light will be gone.

  *

  At the curb in front of Rose Pistola, a Chinese girl gets out of her boyfriend’s car. Pam and I are sitting at a table on the sidewalk. Pam has her Cabernet and a cigarette. Prosciutto wrapping a piece of pear – flesh and fruit, in restaurant after restaurant.

  *

  Summer afternoon.
  For Henry James these were the most beautiful words in the English language. Maybe a confusion of word and thought, or simply the thought of someone who had never spent the summer in Texas. What about winter morning? Those words have their own perfection. We’re leaving for Dallas this morning. Watching television in our hotel room. Time is passing. Is this what happens when you follow the unchallenged guidance to live in the present? The present is a fog on a bay bridge. Objects appear out of it, sometimes sharp, with a sudden clarity. But for the most part the present has much less depth than the past. And it has less power than the future, with its hopes and terrors. Is there anything on the television worth seeing, at present, in our hotel room? The present may be a surprise, but usually isn’t. The present may be a gift, but usually it lacks both the pleasure of anticipation or the drama of the unwrapping.

  *

  Travelers in the airport. Winter coats.

  *

  Then, in the sky – taking the long view, having perspective. But from far away, from the sky looking down, every place looks the same: squares, clouds, the wing of a plane. So I return to the in-flight magazine, or my book, or plans for another trip. It’s up close that things differentiate – the paragraph in a magazine article, or Pam’s perfume – Chanel – a message from her, from the middle seat.

  Still, from time to time, I keep looking out the window, as visibility permits.

  *

  People imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. Thoreau said that, or something like it. Encouraging us to be “where we are.” To stay home.

  I don’t believe it. Although, bound for home, I would like to believe it.

  *

  1999
  30 March
  Another trip, this one to my parents in Oceanside, taking Ben and Eden.

  We left Love Field at 7 a.m. Arrival at Lindbergh, which is the airport in San Diego. Then a day at 4991 Delos, Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

  10:30 p.m., Oceanside, California.
  Ben has slept all evening, even through dinner. The visit is as it normally is, with the barest amount of conversation.
  Dad takes to his TV, preferring a rerun of last season’s game between the Padres and the Dodgers to the effort of talking.
  Mom has her book, in another room.
  If we only see each other a few times a year, and those visits are brief, you would think each one would be special, and all the moments precious.
  Eden fits right in. She goes to a bedroom where she has a TV all to herself.

  *

  There are protest signs that say silence is violence. Is it? On a family visit, silence is safety. Sleeping is avoiding. We share as few words with each other as we can. We are visiting the house more than we are each other.

  Ben, though, does seem to want company. He is inexpressive but has an underlying need, which this family cannot satisfy.

  We are all incognito here. We are uncomfortable. There isn’t room for us, there isn’t privacy enough, and we are no part of the habits of the house.

  *

  Both of my parents are hardy. They have time enough, but will never make enough time for me or their grandchildren either. Is it because my two are adopted? Not “of the blood”? I don’t think that’s it at all. They have their private conversations. They make their judgments, which I’m no part of. I think that when I am around them, I’m unwanted. Well, not unwanted, they want me here. But we are uncomfortable together. Their conversations with each other annoy me when I’m here. They have had fifty-one years to talk to each other, but they won’t spend one evening talking only to me. It doesn’t help that I’m quiet and unwilling to help. It probably doesn’t help that I’m their child. Or that they must think my life is confused and unsettled. In that I agree with them.

  *

  Am I wasting my time here? Surely I could ask that question about anywhere, but it wouldn’t be trailed by the same resentments.

  How to describe my relationship to my parents, or each of us to each other. I wonder whether we will ever be closer. I don’t enjoy being in my parents’ company, at least not yet. I haven’t learned how. There is a cold space around them. I will always be in their orbit, held by a force as invisible as gravity, and as natural. I dislike their secrets. Their stale words. They seem uninterested, but more likely don’t know how to spend an evening talking to me. It’s an effort, given my own inability to help, and they cannot make the effort. That I’m their child isn’t enough. We have everything in common, and nothing.

  *

  A recliner, an upholstered rocker, browns, forest greens. Mother sits here. My father, there. Easy chairs. They’ll be sitting in them until it’s time for bed. But nothing seems easy about these two lives. Maybe that is the secret for why I am so uncomfortable with them. They are uncomfortable with themselves.

  What is the ratio of things unsaid to things said, of silence to speech, in the conversations between parents and children?

  *

  March 31.
  Passover tonight. I’m leading our Seder for Mom, Dad, Ben, Eden, my cousin Bev and her husband Ed. It’s a thin service, Passover-light. Here in my parents’ house, Judaism has been passed over. I’m the leader here, I’m the Jew.
  “It’s a real Seder,” Mom says, thanking me.
  She says they haven’t had a real Seder at home in thirty years. In this family, my three are the remnant, the only Jews – me, Ben, Eden. We have some Jewish education. For Ben and Eden, of course, it won’t last. That reality is around the corner.

  *

  Ben’s exhausted and bad tempered. I am fussing with him over a TV program – I want to take the remote control away, to turn off the vulgar cable show he’s watching. He’s grabbing for the control. We’re fighting over TV.
  “Get off me,” he says
  It’s an ugly phrased he’s probably heard others say, at school, or on TV.
  “You want a piece of me?”
  What a stupid phrase. He sounds like a stranger, like a wrestler on World Wide Wrestling snarling at a comic opponent, wearing the flashy costume and the outsized buckle. Dolores always said, never hold him too tightly, because he can’t bear it. It must frighten him, to be constrained physically, to be remotely controlled.

  *

  Doped up on muscle relaxant and Passover wine, Bev wants to tell me our cousin Molly’s opinion of Pam, and she wants to discuss my childhood.
  “Is this a private conversation?” Mom asks.
  I don’t know what kind of conversation this is.

  *

  Sometimes, when it comes to my parents, we say to each other, too bad, we live so far away from each other. But we’re not unhappy about it. We glad of it. Do we love each other? That is harder to say, because we don’t seem to like each other much. How did we become damaged goods, our family? We feel the damage and can hardly see the good. Dad goes bowling. He plays golf. Mom and Dad together play bridge, go to movies, eat dinners out. They have what they need. It’s a good life. Maybe it’s the good life. Perhaps our family is the way it is because we children always want to get back at our parents. Maybe not every child wants that, but Patti and I seem to. And all we can do to get back at them is to withhold our love, though that isn’t nearly enough.

  I’m tired, behind a bedroom door. My parents are in the next room.
  I can hear them talking to each other again, voices together.
  Like a child, I can’t understand, and I’m certain they’re talking about me.

  *

  Visiting Mom and Dad, two years after Dolores’s death. When you bring your own unhappiness with you, it stains everything you see.

  Dolores, I’m still thinking of you. Two years later. When we were together, I forgot about you days at a time. Not these days. Your name is warmth and sorrow.

  *

  April 1, on the way to Berkeley, Ben and Eden with me.

  Berkeley. These days the name is as remote as Kathmandu or Timbuctoo. We might as well be going to Xanadu. I can hear a not-so-distant tolling of bells.

  The most persistent dream is that the life of your dreams lies somewhere else.

  *

  April 3 – Ben, Eden and I stood on the Golden Gate Bridge; it was uncomfortable, and then there was also the cold and the wind. I’m a tourist for their sake.

  Later, we drove down “the crookedest street in the world,” finding ourselves on it by accident, and then down Columbus, because I was looking for City Lights, which I couldn’t find. These places meaningful to me, meaning nothing to them. I said, “It must have moved.” And then we found it.

  (That time of my earliest twenties has a hold on me – 1973, that year more than any other. More than what has followed – wife, children, death, business, money. That was the year my life was a dream. I was drugged by delusions. It’s as if I have been tattooed by those memories.)

  At night, we watched a movie in our hotel room. I called Pam, who was out in East Texas with her girlfriend Jo Carroll, drinking Old Fashioneds and smoking weed. I heard it in her voice, which was slower, rounder, sexier.
  “Have you had a lot to drink?”
  “Tell me you love me,” she replied. She knew my children were beside me and I’m shyer around them.
  “I love you and I miss you,” I told her.
  True enough.

  *

  Berkeley has no magic left. It’s not how I remembered it. But, does a place lose its magic, or am I the one who lost it? It may be what having children has done. Ben and Eden replaced my world with theirs.
  I was planning to call Greg Kirchoff. He lives in Santa Rosa, a lifetime away from 310 Rees, that perfect home and perfect family on a hillside in Playa del Rey, all destroyed now – the house still there and doing well, but not the life – his father left, his mother died.
  I’ll call him from Muir Woods. I suspect he won’t answer.
  Tomorrow is Easter.

  *

  Visiting David, Steven and Lisa, Patti’s children, who all live in the East Bay. And Alyssa, David’s baby, and David’s wife Jacqui, who is quite beautiful, even with the cold sore under her nose, and her ragged hair. She seems fatigued. What energy she has is generated by her obvious disdain for David. They won’t last. It all seems so difficult and not only unlikely, but impossible.

  *

  When we visit Steven, he shows us his cars. A Sentra, a Camaro, a Mustang. David is enterprising as well, he has a magazine that he publishes himself. It’s called Short Wave Warfare. There are weeds everywhere in the front and back yards of their father’s house on Laurel Street. Terry’s not there. He’s left for Napa, to see his mother. Like me, visiting. I haven’t seen him in five years and won’t today either, or anytime soon.

  *

  Going back to Dallas again.
  Age spots on the backs of my hands already.
  This trip I saw that my childhood friends are aging too.
  Richard Heine is fat, balding, almost elderly.
  He’s still a nimble talker, though. Funny, playful as always.
  Still interested in high school girls, too, and not just in remembering the ones in our high school class.

  *

  April 1999 –

  I’m reading Busted Scotch, James Kelman’s short stories. They are not short enough, in my opinion. Who cares about these drunks, layabouts, these guys who involved with nothing but the pleasures of the day? Not me. Not yet, anyway.

  (Long story short is something my friend Jimmy Dunne always says, when he’s in the middle of rambling and nowhere close to the end.)

  I have my own ideas for a book of stories. I do have the characters:
  Richard Heine, Eden Perkins, Ben Perkins, Regina Reegler, Norm Perkins, Richard Levine, Mike Allen, Dolores Dyer, Mark Perkins, Pam Caldwell, Ron Sullivan, Joan Smotzer, Greg Kirchoff, Dan Kozloff, Peter Whaley.

  How long before some of these characters will be uncared about? Will the time come I’ll have to stop a moment to remember who one of them was?

  Diana Wells, Harold Reegler, Alex Shapiro, Jason Caldwell, Wayne Freeman, Bev Wells, Patti Duracz, David Adelson, Terry Adelson, Leah Beth Kolni, Brice Howard, Cyl Reed, Louis Lane.

  I’ve known some characters. There are dozens of other names. Who else? A story in each of them, a world in each of them.

  *

  May 1999

  It’s the 23rd of May, and I can’t tell the sweetness of life apart from its brevity, can’t separate good fortune from bad luck, accident, and disaster. I can see both, as close as my own backyard. There’s a lily, slender-necked, but heavy-headed.

  *

  What I love about Pam Caldwell: the softness of her skin, her small blue eyes, the smell of shampoo in her hair, the shape of her calves and ankles, her narrow wrists, the brownness of her arms, her tastiness, her willingness, her otherness.

  God bless the other, who makes everything possible.

  As it turns out, Pam and I will only have until 2007, and I won’t ever again be as infatuated with anyone. How else could I have made such a catastrophic mistake as to marry her. How else would I have had the memories that still leave me missing her.

  *

  Excitement, the sweetness of life, unable to untangle it from its sorrow and brevity. Good fortune, misfortune, luck, accident, disaster. The joining of pain and joy, life, death; no, not joined, but side by side.

  *

  June 1999

  Sunday, June 13, a Courtyard by Marriott in Danvers, Mass.

  Ben is in bed at 12:30 in the morning. Whether or not he needs medication, he is surely depressed. Eden, more mysterious than Ben is, and more disconnected as well, seems cheerful enough. And then, sometimes, she’s very sullen.

  The three of us are sharing a room. We’re in Massachusetts so I can attend the 25th Reunion of the Harvard Class of 1974. I’m not depressed. That was then, not now. In college I was lonely enough to have been suicidal at times in Cambridge; or, at least, acquainted with the night, walking out in rain and back in rain. I would have been Class of ’73, with Pat Glynn and Harry Flechner, not ’74 with Lars Engle and Michael Bernick – but I was too depressed, then, to continue, and I dropped out for a year. That led to the annus mirabilis of 1973 – meter reading, Berkeley, cross country, Paris with the Demongeots, Manhattan with Lew Porter and Jacqueline Coral. But now I’m in Danvers with my unhappy children. Soon, I’ll be back in Cambridge–in the Reunion, though not of it.

  *

  Saturday night in Cambridge with Ben and Eden. The street performers are entertaining us. A juggler tosses machetes and walks a tight rope.
  “Razor sharp,” he says.

  *
  I suppose most of what we say are cliched phrases. No wonder our computers can complete our sentences. Our thoughts, too, and much of what we feel, so much of it cliched.

  *

  A musician is singing Brown-eyed Girl on the sidewalk outside the Harvard Coop. He makes it look easy, the simple of chord progressions, GCD, GCD. Twenty-five years ago when I attended the College, I was not entertained. I would walk the streets on Saturday nights, wanting to be with someone of any color eyes, and so unhappy I thought about walking into the oncoming cars on Memorial Drive. Back then, I was as stricken as Ben is now. And now I’m happy enough, here with my two miserable children. I’m content to be drawing breath, glad to have found no permanent solution back then to a temporary problem. But as for Ben and Eden, I don’t have answers for them.

  *

  Sunday, June 13

  I know only a handful of classmates from ’74. It’s not really my class.
  There’s Lars Engle, whom I liked when we were students. In truth, I had no real friendships. I didn’t have the skill for it; I still don’t, but I’m better at it now.
  Will Silva, a doctor who works at the South Pole, is someone I never met when I was in school, but he’s here, at WHRB. I visited the station.
  Anne Fadiman, unchanged, though slimmer — Lars’s girlfriend, until he left her, and, according to Don Barkin, she was so in love with Lars she told Don that she wished she could be a lampshade in his room just to be near him. She’s pretty distinguished now, a book writer of some renown, though perhaps not as much as her father, Clifton, was.
  I talked to Paul Duffle, very unhappy then, as so many of us were; a dentist now, and happier. We sat in the dining hall at Winthrop and chatted out how miserable so many of us were.

  Norman Carlton was a classmate I saw at the reunion. His voice hadn’t changed in twenty-five years. It was still whiney. He says he doesn’t know who I am. He either doesn’t remember or pretends not to. But Norman, I say, we visited you, after college, in San Francisco. And then he remembers Dolores, because she was so much older.
  “And she had,” he puts his hand to his shoulder, “blond hair to here.”
  I have a thought:
  “Here” is not all we have. “Here” isn’t the only place we are.

  *

  At the house where the offices of the Advocate are, I thought of Jonathan Galassi, who had published a sestina in Poetry Magazine. He was a star, as was James Atlas. Jonathan’s younger brother Peter was there, when I was a nobody at the Advocate; Peter was interested in photography, which seemed strange to me. What did photography have to do with literature, or the magazine where T.S. Eliot had published his first poems And why would anyone care about photography anyway? That was something my Dad did, on a summer vacation or a family barbecue. It turned out, Peter was on to something. Of course he was. At Harvard, I was the unsophisticated one. Peter eventually curated photography at MOMA. He was distinguished, though not so much as his brother, who continued to translate Engenio Montale, the Italian poet he cared about, and who rose in the ranks of the publishing world until he led Farrar Straus Giroux. He also decided at some point in his very late adulthood that he was gay. His distinguished art historian wife, now ex-wife, spoke at the DMA once; nothing but distinction in that family.

  Among the other Harvard buildings – Widener Library, where I spent so much of my time, too much, really. Far, far too much. And Emerson Hall, named after…Emerson. I had classes there that first surprising year, when I was already a sophomore, after transferring from UCLA. I’ve read that Charles W. Eliot, the school’s president late in the nineteenth century, asked William James to choose the inscription that was engraved on the exterior of Emerson Hall. William James suggested a quote attributed to Pythagoras. Man is the measure of all things. Whether deliberately or accidentally misunderstanding, Eliot chose something else, from Psalms. What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?

  *

  June 14

  It’s a work day. I’m on a plane, though, and not working. I accepted $1500 in travel vouchers to miss yesterday’s flight, and we stayed another night in Boston. We were offered $1500 more for a 3-hour delay this morning, but I declined. I asked Ben and Eden first. Both of them wanted to go home. What if the next flight was delayed and we missed Ben’s first day of driver’s training? His course is at Sears.
  So, $1500 lost.
  Vouchers are interesting. We received them for travel; for me and the children. But they are non-transferrable. Only the three of us can go. Some gifts, it seems, cannot be given away, only used or discarded.

  *

  Something happened on this trip to Massachusetts:
  Ben bought a book as a souvenir. The Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. He picked it out in the gift shop at the Salem Wax Museum, where we had gone on a side trip. I thought witches and burning might be of interest. So far, though, he hasn’t turned a page.

  Barry Cohen, a classmate who’s now a lawyer and investment banker at Bear Stearns, told me over dinner he never read as a child, and his boys don’t, either. I am always looking for signs that what is apparent on the surface in my children is not what is underneath. Time will prove that this is a hopefulness that was not helpful.

  The night before we left Boston I was reading, in the Sunday Boston Globe, on the T, seated across from Ben, a feature story written by a woman whose 25-year-old son Charlie had just committed suicide.
  Mentally ill, a schizophrenic.
  His body, almost unidentifiable, was found in a river. Schizophrenic! The word itself is terrifying. The diagnosis had not been made until after Charlie had finished high school. Until then his symptoms were nothing much – mostly, irritability, a quickness to answer. Ben, beloved, is almost always angry, and over nothing that I can see. Schizophrenia, suffering, and death. That’s a story scarier than anything in Poe.
  I would tell him, don’t read a thing, lovely boy, to please me. My only wish is for your health and happiness.

  *

  Two children, adopted at birth. Dolores and I gave them their names. And for a lucky thirteen years, they adopted us. I can’t see Dolores, not even inside them, when I look at them now. Our blue-eyed, red-haired, rangy boy is as fussy today as he was in his crib. Our brown, quick as a mouse, daily reader, our little girl, seems to not need me much anymore, and to like me less and less. Maybe ten years from now…

  *

  We have come home again through the clouds. In preparation for landing, we’ve brought our seat backs to their full upright position. Upright, that’s the goal for each of us. The Dallas airport is flat below us, from a thousand feet up, and surrounded by the pancake of the Metroplex.

  *

  July 5

  What have I done today? I’ve proven a truth that is as much emotional as mathematical, that the interval between five and six can be divided into an infinite number of parts. It took me all day, but I did it.

  *

  I do some writing in longhand. There’s a small black notebook I take with me when I’m traveling. On the move, I can keep my hand moving. I can keep my opinions to myself. If I’m still enough, I might hear the bird that sings to the dawn while it is still dark.

  *

  Benzenger Cabernet, Stevenot Zinfandel. Beautiful, liquid, ruby anapests. Or they may be dactyls. I can’t remember which is which any longer. I don’t recall the names. The forgotten Saintsbury History of English Prosody lies on the corner of my memory, like the dead skin of bugs and the dust, like a Cabernet– dry, and a little acidic.

  *

  July

  Summer in Alaska – the five of us for part of the trip – Pam, Ben, Eden, Jason, me; then the three teenagers fly home, and it’s just us, two lovers.

  In Anchorage the most beautiful purple flowers hang in baskets from street poles. Lobelia. And the fireweed grows wild. It’s hot pink and not like any fire. A pink that’s brighter than pink. We say hot pink, but we’re not speaking about temperature. Hot, for intensity. Summer may be in short supply here, but the summer cabbages grow as big as kings in twenty hours of daylight. One of the other most beautiful things about Alaska? Its name. More handsome than mountains, or silty glacier-fed rivers, loons on lakes, caribou, or foraging grizzlies. Just the music of its name, Alaska.

  Our group of five go to see a glacier south of Seward, then we go north to Denali and Wonder Lake. We’re at the Kantishna Roadhouse. We’re sightseeing. Then back to Anchorage, so the teenagers can fly home and take their moods with them. Pam and I are like unmarried honeymooners. Off to the north again, by float plane to Chelatna Lake Lodge, where we fish for silver salmon and king salmon and sockeye salmon, Dolly Vardens, greyling, whitefish and rainbows. These are names the way Paris is a name. And, like Paris, not just names; they are also experiences. As is Pam.

  *

  The Arctic grayling is an elegantly formed cousin of the trout. Its sail-like dorsal fin is dotted with large iridescent spots, red or purple. To write, and even to remember, I need to know the names of things. So I am write down the names of fish in my notebook, and trust them to have weight, like the fruit in a still life does.

  I want to learn, to deepen my perception, to see things and into their meanings. At times to have my words in a sentence also be like the fruit in a still life, part of it in shadow, and realistic, despite the ornamental frame just beyond it.

  *

  Pam Caldwell, thirty years ago, twenty years before I knew her, her eyes were just as small and cobalt, her wrists as thin and as tanned, her hips maybe a little less rounded. She shows me a picture of herself in her twenties, near a swimming pool.
  You should have known me, she says.
  I tell her that I’m always too late.

  *

  Daytrip from Lake Chelatna Lodge.
  We’re at a hippy airstrip.
  What are we doing in this wilderness? Seth, our pilot, landed our small plane on this dirt airstrip because of fog. On the ground, we meet Dan and Shelly, who are homesteading thirty-four acres near Donkey Creek. Their in-laws are visiting them. Shelly’s parents have come from England, Dan’s from Minnesota. And we meet their neighbor, Mike, who has bad teeth and dopey ideas. A Vietnam vet, he listens to talk radio all day and wants to tell us his stories. He says you have to speak Spanish to live in California now. He says the election that made Alaska a state was a fraud, it was unconstitutional, as though there were some knowledge lurking in that modifier, constitutional. Is there anything more unpleasant than a stranger with opinions? What about the Jews I wonder, but I don’t ask him. Shelly says Mike doesn’t like people, but we can’t stop him from talking if we tried, and nobody tried.

  Lance, our fishing guide on what was to have been an expedition to a river full of salmon, is stuck with us because of the fog. He’s spitting Skoal. The mosquitoes are hounding us, even inside the tent that Lance sets up. Mike is the only one who doesn’t care.

  Dan wants to show us where he and Shelly intend to live. Wearing a goofy hat, he leads us up the path to their log cabin, which is “under construction.” He carries a shot gun. Every few yards he raises his voice and shouts, “Hey, Bear!” Dan himself looks like Yogi the Bear. He says it isn’t good to surprise a bear, and the best protection you have is to let a bear know you’re coming.
  “Hey, Bear!”
  Dan’s father visiting from Minnesota comes with us, and he shouts it, too.

  The log cabin is unfinished in a clearing. Dan and Shelly tell us that it took them three years to cut the trees, strip the bark, and cut the notches. They say they’re a year away from done and in no hurry. Shelly has her garden planted. Squash, cabbages, lettuce, parsley, echinacea for tea. She’s a homely girl, with wire-rimmed glasses and a tiny stud piercing her nose, but a handy one. She met Dan for the first time in the Anchorage airport. They immediately took up with one another. They traveled together, living on a boat in Ketchican. Then Dan bought tickets to the Alaska land lottery, which the state runs “at twenty-five bucks a throw.” Dan and Shelly won. According to the rules of the lottery, they have to build a cabin of a specified size and live on their land twenty-five months within the next five years in order to secure legal ownership. Those are the government requirements. They seem happy to be here, or happy enough. They are willing to weave mosquito nets.

  For Shelly’s parents, visiting from England, this must all seem very strange. No one lets on though. Given whatever they know as parents about Shelly’s life before, maybe this homesteading seems like stability. Maybe they are relieved. Both fathers seem amused, tolerant, even proud. The mothers, cramped into the slummy garden shed Dan and Shelly have built and is, at least for now, their only home, which is fiberboard and stocked with old pans, tins of food, and not much else besides dirt — their mothers seem appalled.

  August 2000

  Blessed art though O Lord our God Ruler of the world. So the prayers say. What do the prayers intend, other than to praise reality and for each of us to wake up each day with praise on our tongues. Love reality, which is the world.
  I have heard this all my life, this recipe for happiness.

  The Talmud asks, when do we say our prayers? In the evening, and in the morning. Evening first, as it is written: There was evening, and there was morning, a first day. And how do we know when it’s evening? When the stars come out. What I know that the Tanna’im might not have known: The stars are always out. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

  *

  At night in East Texas another car is heading toward Palestine. I can hear its engine. I can see its tail lights disappear. Pam owns 22 acres off 321. Her place in the country is in Montalba, which isn’t so much a town as simply a spot. Out here, we’re in the middle of nowhere. We’re also in the middle of our lives, though not astray. And we’re in love, or so we think.

  It’s a mixed forest at Pam’s – with the live oaks and pine and other. There’s a metal swing on a scuffed painted deck. We’ll swing, under the withered leaves of a walnut tree. Tree frogs are barking. The insects whirr, as if they, too, have a metal spring inside them; they sound like the motor of a camera rewinding the cannister of film after the last picture has been taken. We hear coyotes, or maybe it’s the distant neighbor’s dogs. The moon is waxing and very bright on the leaves. Otherwise, it’s dark, and too hot even for the stars in heaven.

  *

  In the spring of 1997, when Dolores was dying, I spent hours at night online in a colon cancer caretakers group, mostly husbands and wives, but sometimes the sick. Information was shared. And encouragement, though less frequently. Most of the messages confirmed that there were no effective treatments at the later stages. The group was established by an attorney in Maryland, Marshall Kragen, who was from Fort Worth. Marshall Kragen’s wife Beverly sent me a note after his death, because I had written to her. Her note is on the back of a postcard. The front of the postcard is a photograph of a gold oak leaf and a red tomato, both of them positioned on a black cloth. It’s an odd photo. Either the leaf is very large or the tomato is very small. The tomato’s green stem pops out of a six-pointed green collar. Maybe it’s a berry of some kind, and not a tomato after all. And the photo is named and credited: Autumn Harvest, by Marshall Kragen, Latent Image Workshop, Rockville MD, 1986. So, 1986 – that was the year Dolores and I bought our house on Wenonah. That was two years before we even thought about cancer, and ten years before we thought about dying. How strange that was, in February of 1997, when we were told that Dolores had colon cancer. “It’s treatable,” Dr. Jacobson said, when he visited the hospital room after the initial surgery, “but not curable.” Colon cancer wasn’t breast cancer, which Dolores survived in 1988. After hearing from Dr. Jacobson, I went looking for help and found the colon cancer list online. Marshall Kragen ran it. He was the rule maker, arbiter, judge and jury. He kept anyone off the list who was selling wormwood and walnut shells, Dr. Brycinski in Houston, or Jesus. Kragen was a rationalist. He was a man with the patience to repeat himself to every newcomer. I knew him for four months online, and never knew that he had colon cancer, too.

  *

  Ben is downstairs watching TV, a PBS special on Jimi Hendrix. He doesn’t have enough sense to go to bed. His ambition is to play professional basketball, or to play guitar in a popular band. The band must be popular. I’m raising someone I don’t understand. Other times, I understand he is perfectly normal. He wants to play. He dislikes school, homework, hot weather, and friends who, as he sees it, betray him. He likes basketball, playing guitar, computers, electronics, and doing nothing. He tells this to the Jesuits who are trying to get to know him, so they can educate him. The Jesuits are idealists. They will do their work, but it will not work on him.

  *

  Fall 2000

  I hosted the Chavurah group for dinner on Sunday night, serving the gumbo that Bridget had made on Friday. Leah Beth Kolni ate some, as did Sari Bahl, Chuck Stein, Debby Stein, Harold Kolni, and the Lowy’s. We were supposed to talk about the Talmud, but no one wanted to. Sari told us about her vacation in Japan. Debby’s daughter is at Vassar, Len and Ursula Margolis were in San Francisco. The Bonnheim’s couldn’t make it. Their daughter Ana left for Dartmouth weeks ago.

  *

  October

  I worked with Ben tonight on his algebra. I would help with a problem, then leave the room, then he would call me back to help again, question after question. He made errors for no obvious reason other than misunderstanding. He failed to multiply each side by the same number. I was tired and didn’t want to help and lost my patience. I called him lazy and said he was wasting my time and shortening my life. “Don’t ask me another question!” I shouted. He didn’t come upstairs again. So I went down after a while to see how he was doing, and he announced that he had reading to do. “Go on, get ready for bed,” I told him. “I’ll read to you.” So I read him the tenth chapter of To Kill A Mockingbird. It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, because a mockingbird doesn’t cause us any harm, it doesn’t eat our crops, it doesn’t nest in our corn cribs. Ben sat in his chair, and I lay on his bed reading.
  There were no unknowns to solve for, and we had nothing to add or subtract.

  *

  Grandma and Grandpa are here, visiting, but I offended Dad, and he announced that he was going home.
  “I’m not comfortable here,” he said.
  My job is to make him comfortable; I suppose it is. I’m the host, he’s the guest. But what guest acts that way he does? One never invited back. Whether at his own house or at mine, all he wants to do is watch TV, to sit with Charlie Rose, or a news program, or sports. I see him twice a year? It’s dinner and we have Louisiana gumbo, but he doesn’t want to turn the baseball game off. It’s the tinny commentary in the next room that matters to him. It’s the only conversation he wants hear. Then, as we’re preparing to go out to the Neiman’s Fortnight Festa Italia, he’s fussing. He wants to tape Game Four, how can I not know how to use my VCR? But I don’t know how. I’ve never taped anything. It’s entirely possible I don’t know how. And during that interaction, I was as frustrated as he was, and I spoke harshly.

  I’m the one whose wife has died. I’m the one in over his head with two young children. And I’m the one who wonders whether it isn’t possible for my parents to be genuinely supportive, rather than burdensome houseguests concerned as always only with what they want for themselves. I tell him I’m sorry. I ask him to reconsider. He doesn’t want to. Either his dignity was deeply offended, or, truth be told, he just wants to be back in Oceanside where he’s “comfortable” in time for tomorrow afternoon’s ballgame. It’s the playoffs, after all. Yankees versus the Red Sox, Roger Clemens’ “return to Fenway” against Pedro Martinez, “who’s always tough.”

  Something I said offended my father, so he’s going, going, gone.

  *

  October

  I’ve had the day to do exactly what I wanted, but I haven’t exactly done it. Either it wasn’t what I wanted to do, or there’s another explanation.

  Thinking about Dolores; how, in 1996 she was living at home, and not at home dying. Then during the five months of 1997, the middle of February to the middle of July, she lived at the mercy of morphine. And when she died, my watch ended. I know that the same is coming for me year from a distance. My 1997 is coming for me.
  We are in relationship, me and Dolores, separated as we have been from the beginning by the fiction of years.

  All things come and go. None of the things Dolores left behind are her. Not the pockety noise of her maroon Mercedes dieseling. Or her six pairs of high heel shoes in plastic boxes that I keep on a white shelf. Or the Ann Taylor jacket wintering in my dressing room; it’s as yellow as a sun, and still bright with her memory; I might have to squint when I look at it. Dolores liked to bag and box her letters, photos, Playbill programs, meeting agendas, and her costume jewelry, sweaters, scarves, and curled belts. She wanted to preserve them. Not for always, but for as long as possible. These boxes can’t contain her much longer. Two years three months have passed. Objectively speaking, these years have come and gone.

  There were times I was angry at Dolores. And not just a two-week upset. Some of my sulks may have lasted two years. In those times, I hardly spoke to her, I wouldn’t come to bed with her. I was angry about money, when we were remodeled in 1987 and 1988. Or I was angry because she wouldn’t do what I wanted. I remember that I told her once I was angry because she didn’t love me. That was j before she got cancer the first time. Breast cancer, in 1988, when she had her double mastectomy and also what we thought at the time was her full recovery.

  After Dolores died, one of her ex-daughters-in-law wrote and asked me if I’d written the story of Dolores’s life, or if she had left a journal to write her story from. I wrote back, no, nothing had been written, and no journal had been left. It’s true. Dolores seems to have saved volumes of paper, but what do I know about “the story of her life”? I know less than a third of it, and much of that is uncertain. She was already forty-four when we met, twice my age. I have her high school yearbooks, some of her old letters, lots of clippings from newspapers, locks of hair that might be hers in baggies, minutes from f committee meetings, and her Ph.D. dissertation. When she was dying, she managed her pain with a morphine pump, ice packs, and feather pillows. She had the dignity of a dying animal. She was practical, wanting to be comfortable, uninterested in her history or in the moment after her death. She, too, told me to write something. Write it, she said. But I never knew what it was, either her story or her seeming acceptance of its ending.

  *

  My sock has a hole in it. I can feel it with my left big toe. That is, I can feel the edges of the cotton. The hole itself feels like nothing. And let me add that the big toe that sticks through it is my toe in a way that the sock will never be my sock.

  *

  Ben saw my travel books on Switzerland and said “Aha.” He must have been thinking this would be one of our trips. I tell him I am taking Pam there.
  “I always wanted to go to Switzerland,” he says
  “Since when?”
  Since he was twelve, he says.
  But Ben never tells me anything, or much of anything.
  He will yell at me to stay out of his business.

  *

  November 1999

  Montalba.

  Even here a winter Sunday morning begins with the noise of engines. Cars are passing on a farm-to-market road. It’s the end of the millennium, but so what? Time is always ending. No matter how fast your engines run, you will run out of time. This has been a century of internal combustions, of nations and peoples burning with a heat that consumed both them and their victims. Here in Montalba, the wind is rising. The rough, ridged trunk of the walnut tree is spotted with lichen, dark yellows, grey greens. The tree has no leaves, or a few, clinging. Its walnuts are falling, and they are heavy enough to hurt. This is the Sunday morning just after Thanksgiving, at the end of the second millennium. I can hear those engines of combustion, close enough on Highway 19 between Athens and Palestine, or even nearer, on Farm Market Road 321.

  *

  The dog barks at the wind and at the music of a rusty swing. Pam’s dog Charlie is a little white Westy. When the wind rises, whatever was invisible is revealed. A leaf by itself on an otherwise bare branch might be silent no matter how hard the wind blows. But on a hillside of trees, the leaves are striking each other, like chattering teeth in a cold mouth.

  *

  December 1999

  Montalba again.

  The iron swing brays. Nobody’s on it, it’s the wind. I can see it sawing back and forth, back and forth. Dolores has been dead two years four months. I’m still unmarried, but that’s just for now. My daughter, Eden, took up the violin a month before Dolores died. Dolores, who disliked violin, used to described the bow going back and forth as sawing; but not that last month, she was saying very little then. Morphine was keeping her quiet. Now Eden declares she’s putting the violin behind her. She’s giving it up, quitting her lessons, and abandoning both the strings and her school music teacher, Mr. Paraskevas, a short, wild-haired man, a looks like Chaplin playing piano accompaniments at middle school concerts. Eden wants to try percussion. That sounds right to me. I think she’s a drummer at heart. She has the self-confidence of her own rhythm.

  When Pam comes out for her cigarette and sugared coffee, she’s showered. Her blonde hair smells of oranges and shampoo. Is that the swing, I ask, hearing the braying metal. She says it isn’t, it’s the rooftop vent. Pam and Eden go off down the hill together. They’re cutting greens for clients of Pam’s business. She’s a landscaper, and, at least with plants, a decorator. Spruce, pine, possum haw berries for mantels and dining room tables and front doors, and for wreathes. I hear their voices down the path. Pam is probably giving orders, or answers. Eden is a chatterer. The wind’s up, and the rooftop vent, if that’s what it is, is as loud as a rocking rusted swing. The vent spins, it sings. I step outside to take a look at the roof. The vent looks like a chef’s hat up there, a spinning toque, an onion dome, calling me to prayers.

  *

  In think I can hear my daughter from far off.
  Help! Help!
  It seems unlikely. She and Pam, booted and in her blue jeans, are cutting pine branches with a sharp-beaked clipper. I hear it again in the distance.
  Help!
  I’m looking over bare December branches at the sky. The wind lifts the cry, separating it from any human mouth and allowing it to rise and fade in the faded denim of the afternoon. It’s nothing. I must have only been hearing my own desire to be of use.
  Hearing the two of them, distantly.

  *

  Look, there’s a snow goose in the air. We are listening to the clapping of the thin branches of the walnut tree. A brown and yellow butterfly bounces off a geranium. A fly buzzes. We’re sharing our lives. So much so, our lives scarcely seem to be our own. Still, this is our time together, for these moments.
  Every particle of air is clear, but altogether the sky’s blue.
  The thin, bare branches of the walnut tree clap, almost quaking.

  *

  December

  In Santa Fe, for year end.

  I’ve purchased a package of Japanese paper, from Zago Papers, which is in a house on Old Santa Fe Trail. The paper is a sea green rectangle that floats like a Rothko. Margeaux, the proprietor at Zago Papers, has placed a thank you note in my package of Japanese paper, to thank me for buying.

  The Old Santa Fe Trail — Coronado passed by here, as did Juan de Onate, from Estremadura, suffering as much as any flagellant from heat and from cold.

  In Santa Fe we are renting a house and building fire after fire, using the short logs of pinon wood that had been split open. We leave the master bedroom window open. It snows much of the time. The moon on December 22 seems closer to the earth than I am.

  *

  End of the millennium. What have a done, these last few days? Paid off my mortgage on Wenonah at last. Taken the days “off.” Slept late.

  *

  To write daily is an act of prayer and praise, for breath, for my children, for light, and for dark as well, for engines, sofas, paper, wheat bread, raisin bran, milk. Writing is praying to another world for the things of this world. It is both mystery and clarity, but mostly mystery.

  What do I want? To be good at it, though I have no definition of good.

  *

  There’s no such thing as a light sleep. I’m too tired for that anyway. I doze, and when my eyes open there’s a path needing clearing. It’s heavy work, being awake. My eyes are on the burl of my table, and on the vein-work of a bleached leaf from Japan. I see a stack of books, a coaster from Moschato, Greece, and a framed saying of Oscar Wilde’s, telling me that doing nothing is the most difficult thing of all — the most difficult and the most intellectual.

  *

  2000

  Dolores, didn’t we go interesting places? You at your age. I slowed down so that you could keep up. We went for the rides of our lives. Marrakesh, Gibraltar, Granada. Costa Rica, one time, where we hiked in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, agape at butterflies the color of mother of pearl and as big as a spread hand. You ate sheep’s brains in Morocco. We saw Haiti, Yucatan, Toronto, Paris, where our darling daughter left her banane in the Gare d’Orsay. You were pickpocketed twice in the Metro. They got you once, on the train. But Big Bend was the best time of all. It was lunar, spooky, prickly, unsafe and absolute. Wild javelinas had the run of it. We laughed wildly, too, the four of us, at some joke of yours about Uranus exploding. That was one blue night not far from La Kiva, as we looked up together, into those places infinitely deep, where you have now gone on ahead.

  We had our experiences staying home as well. In our first house: bois d’arc apples, which were as wrinkled as brains; the fluttering leaves of a cottonwood, the forest green spruce. We had never owned trees before. Terrazzo floors, flecked with tiny rectangles of brass. And the shoji screens that divided our white hall from our white living room. There was a sunken copper planter in that first house, and built-in drawers in our bedroom, and woven wood shutters. Two newborn children, a white cat, and handful of magic beans, tossed into a backyard near the monkey grass and pea gravel, which grew heavenward, in a sprout that became a thick stalk, sturdy enough to climb up, although not back. Going back is never an option. It doesn’t matter what you plant.

  *

  January, 2000 –

  We were walking around Pam’s place in the country, kicking through the dead leaves, the thorny vines, on paths through thickets of mixed cedar, oak, pine, enjoying the sight of a possum haw with its bright orange berries, and the sumac’s shriveled wine-red seeds, and most of all being alone, nobody, no police, no clients, no 7-11 clerks, no neighbors, no teenagers, when we heard a dog barking, then another, and we saw five more, seven in all. They’re wild, Pam said, breathless from walking. Those are feral dogs.

  *

  February, 2000 – to Zurich

  In Switzerland, we are staying with Pam’s cousin Joan. On a shelf in Joan and Mike’s apartment on Zurich’s Gloriastrasse, Joan displays her California glass. Mike’s daughter has her own room, where smoking is permitted. Also permitted, her boyfriend, a German speaker, who’s nineteen. The daughter’s name is Alexandra, Alex. Joan tells us that when Alex was fifteen her boyfriend at the time, along with her boyfriend’s friend, raped her. She suffered spells, blanked out, lost consciousness. She’s an epileptic now and can’t drive. I’m not sure why Joan wants to tell us this.

  Pam does some of the same – that is, she will say something that I don’t need to know but that, once said, can’t easily be forgotten. For example, she told me once that Joan’s older brother used to molest Joan when they were children – this brother is a bald man probably in his sixties now, I’ve seen him at family events. Was it true? Is it any of my business? Both answers may be no, but I can’t see him without wondering.

  On our last night in Switzerland, we had dinner at Mike and Joan’s house on Gloriastrasse. Joan cooks. She makes lamb chops, skewers of tomato and green pepper, a leafy salad, and chocolate cake with a light snow of sugar. Cooking seems to be one of ornaments of these women from wealthy Southern families. After dinner, we stay at the table, drinking coffee, talking or arguing. We discuss full employment, and whether it is or isn’t good to suddenly “have millions.”
  “Good, obviously,” I said.
  Mike’s daughter came in to sit with her father. She was dizzy and frightened. She had had “an episode” and had blacked out for a few seconds. Mike gave her water.
  “I blacked out once,” Joan said, “in a store, in Zurich.”
  A doctor told Joan that she had an inner ear problem, and she let us know that she was still only fifty percent better.
  Alex ignored her competitive stepmother.
  Alex’s current boyfriend was apparently staying in her bedroom.
  I thought good thing my daughter Eden wasn’t here – she almost always has her own tales of personal upset and dramatic, even traumatic misfortune, which she will share with any stranger.
  Joan’s inner ear problem must be a mysterious disability. If she’s only “fifty percent better,” when she blacks out, does she fall only halfway down?

  *

  Pam and I took the train from Zurich to St. Moritz. We stayed at Suvretta House. (I still have the ashtray, a souvenir – purchased, or “borrowed,” I can’t remember.)

  At Suvretta House, we met Mr. Fink in the dining room. He is from Montreal, sounds German, seems Jewish. He tells us that he’s been coming to St. Moritz for twenty-three years. And his sons, both doctors, live in La Jolla, California. And he’s amazed by the friendliness of people on the West Coast. Perhaps he’s meeting the Highland Park people, like Pam’s mother’s friend Mimi Lay, who take houses in La Jolla all summer to avoid the Texas heat.

  *

  From St. Moritz, we make a side trip to Poschiavo, which is empty on a Sunday in February. We have trouble finding even a restaurant open. Where’s everybody? The ghostly streets, covered with snow, have a haunting beauty. Pam takes photographs of the town. She has an eye for the inanimate, the deserted DiChirico streets, ironwork, colored shutters, handsome moldings on doors, a stony church, a single spire. Then she left her camera on the train we took back to the St. Moritz stop. I wonder where those pictures are now?

  *

  Back in Zurich – and walking those streets on our last morning in Switzerland. We pass the Florhof Hotel, which is next to the Conservatory, where students were arriving with instruments in black bags on their backs. We stood outside the building and could hear music. We had stopped after a long walk on Neumarkt, seeing stone facades, wooden doors, and our frozen breath. I asked Pam did she want to come inside to see the players, or hear more clearly, and she shook her head no. She wants to windowshop.

  *

  Luxembourgli were our last treats in Zurich. They’re small sweet sandwiches of crème between small buns of meringue. You buy them in flavors — mocha, hazelnut, vanilla, chocolate, caramel. We bought them at the Sprungli shop in the Bahnhof, then walked down the Bahnhofstrasse, just looking for things to buy. We found Cuban cigars and a gold Yves St. Laurent lighter. We had shopped In St. Moritz as well, where we bought Victorinox Swiss Army knives and Swatch watches to take back for Jason, Ben and Eden. We bought linens for gifts for Pam’s friends. I’m not much of a gift giver, but there I was, with plenty of money and an elegant blonde. Pam saw a Sud See pearl, from Tahiti, in a jewelry store window.
  “A pearl’s a living thing,” she said.
  “It’s far from home,” I said.
  It had been taken from the South Seas to the Swiss Alps, not far from Ticino and the poorer parts of Italy.
  I bought it for her. After all, I was far from home as well, and even further in some ways.
  It snowed every day in St. Moritz, storybook flakes, as beautiful as any pearl.

  *

  Texas.
  Pam’s house, on Mockingbird and Auburndale, is in Highland Park. It’s a block away from Southern Methodist University. I’m enchanted by the objects on Pam’s table – the place settings with multiple forks and knives and spoons, the plates, the gold “chargers,” the linen napkins in porcelain rings that once belonged to great grandmother, the silver candlesticks, silver pitchers, serving dishes of deep blue glass and mysterious opacity. Pam places a salad knife on the edge of her salad plate as she eats her salad. She was taught to do so, by someone who was taught to do so. She believes in it. No elbows on the table, no lowering one’s face to the plate.

  Pam believes that what she knows and what she owns are valuable. I have things, too, and I suppose I value them, but I haven’t bothered teaching anyone else to value them. I have plastic boxes from the Container Store that are packed with Dolores’s costume jewelry – earrings, stones, gold-colored bracelets. “Sentimental value only,” as it might say in a plea at the Lost & Found. I have enough flatware to cut a piece of meat and to spear it with a fork. And I tend to keep my elbows on the table.
  I have Sabbath candles and a Kiddush cup, but never use them.

  *

  My children don’t want the same good things for themselves that I want for them. They are not ambitious, as I am ambitious. They’re both asleep, comfortable enough in their beds. Or, if not asleep, they are playing. I’m at my desk, falling asleep but trying to stay awake as I play with poems or a journal entry.

  *

  Pam and I are asked how did we meet. She says, his wife who died was my best friend. It might be true. Dolores was everybody’s best friend. Mine, too.

  *

  My disturbances of the spirit are as unnecessary as the grass. They have the mystery of the weather, with its pillars of fire at night, its clouds by day. My mind tosses and turns as though I were lashed to an invisible deck in a thunderstorm.

  *

  Memories of an airplane ride back from London, after a week there with Ben and Eden. Was this 1999, a year too crowded with travel to make room for yet another trip. I’m making notes in a black notebook. Its cover can be kept shut with a snap that’s the color of a nickel. If I open it, the feminine side, the one with the hole, has Italy Fiocchi embossed on it. Did I buy it there, in Florence or in Venice, on a trip Dolores and I took, bringing Ben and Eden? That was earlier in the 90s. When I look it up, I discover that Fiocchi is the name of one of Italy’s largest and oldest manufacturers of ammunition. Its headquarters are on Via Santa Barbara in Lecco, Italy. I can also see pictures of the Fiocchi Italy Snap, which is described as a “high quality Italian fastener often used for luxury products.”

  *

  About to land, almost home. The flight is choppy all the way down. My ears seem to be filling with fluid. I look over my shoulder, back at Ben in the row behind me. Two minutes before, I was angry at him. He was bothering Eden, just as did when he was five.
  “It’s embarrassing being related to you!”
  Now I lean over to him.
  “How are your ears?”
  He doesn’t say anything. He makes the so-so gesture with his hand.

  What does it mean to “be someone,” which is what a teenage boy wants?

  My goals for my children? To deserve their love. Then they will be happy, or as happy as they might be in a sad world. And me too.

  February 2000

  Spring weather, too early. The yellow-headed daffodils don’t know the difference between the dead of winter and mid-February. My new pup’s outside in the warmer weather. He sleeps in his fur, winterized, bushy. He’s black and grey and has pointy puppy teeth and a lolling pink tongue. He’s biting at the dirt, while I’m potting geraniums and daisies in full sun, and primroses in part shade. This day, whatever it is, it’s on its way to being gone. No going back, not today, not ever.

  It’s three years to the day, today, that Dr. Jacobson gave Dolores her death sentence: inoperable, incurable. That was her he was talking about, not just her tumors and her cancer. He told us he had had a patient still living nine years later. Had had; and that was at one end of the bell curve. More typical was three months, six months. Typical of Dolores, she wanted to know what was coming.

  Cancer had eaten through her colon. He said Dolores was treatable. So I learned as best I could how to treat her. How to flush the ports in her chest, to inject ativan to relieve the agitation that both the situation and the morphine induced, and how to bottle up my own anxiety. She did as well as could be expected, and she expected the worst. She was a scientist and seemed not to be bothered by the other side of the grave. Mommy’s going to die, probably, probably, that’s what she told Ben and Eden, very directly, because she loved them and the truth as well.

  It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t helpful. In one two three four five months she had finished her dying. It didn’t take long enough, really. It was a kind of spasm, pushing out slippery, newborn memories, bawling and raging.

  Don’t let hanging back hold you back – that was one of her sayings, a favorite one.

  Dolores did tell me to “write it,” after all.

  I can hear an airplane engine, it’s screaming in its metal throat. High above my rooftop, the plane is in a bright blue sky. I thought, this plane is coming down, no matter what. There can be only one end to any flight, everyone knows that – pilot, passengers, anyone who looks up — and only speed determines the difference between a crash and a descent.

  Time goes by, the clover is flowering.

  *

  My life’s a change up, fluttering to the plate. Swing, batter, swing batter batter. Attaboy! Or it’s a curve, heading at me but then breaking suddenly to the outside, and out of my reach. Mostly though it’s been fastballs, high hard ones, whizzing by me and sometimes at me. Keep your eye on the ball, boy, or shut your eyes and swing. Either way, I am just trying to get a piece of it.

  If I only have a minute, this is the minute I have to use.
  If I only have eighty years, or ninety, this is still the minute I have to use.

  *

  Mad aunts, bigmouth uncles, born again or bag lady cousins, all of them distinguished by their dopiness, broken down, and yet always talking about being closer. They are my blood. I don’t see them much, though, or feel them. My sister’s in Pittsburgh, where she’s devoted to alcoholics, anonymous and otherwise. Both of her ex-husbands want her back. My parents in Oceanside do exactly what they want, thousands of miles away in their red-tiled retirement village, where streets are named after Greek islands. They have bowling, cards, golf, and a club house. I know my family only as far as the generation of my grandparents, and knew none of them well. Then, my bloodlines disappear into the vacuum of nineteenth century Eastern Europe. I did know my grandparents, three out of four of them. Nanny had her stroke early. She spent years in bed in a nursing home. She had the milky blue eyes of the blind. My mother’s mother, she was a helpless matriarch. Grandma Simon, my father’s mother, hardly counted. She was a figure of derision. She stayed in her apartment in Santa Monica, farting like a trumpeter and complaining about the dust in the folds of a pleated lamp shade. Ben Perkins, her former husband, smoked unfiltered Camels. Either she left him, or he finally left her. That’s as far back as I can go. Nobody cared to go back further or ever spoke of what came before. My great grandparents, and their great grandparents – all were lost in the forests of Romania, or spent their lives on the banks of the Dnieper River, never getting as far from Dubrowna as the first onion domes of Ukrainian Kiev.

  *

  Thou and thine – words that are no longer said, representing thoughts that no one can have any longer. I can hear traffic, and the heel of my hand scraping a writing tablet. I imagine that I can hear the hair growing on my arm, but surely not.
  In Montalba again today.
  I’m attending to things that are no longer heard. Two wooden candlesticks, the wood skillfully braided, a heater, an incandescent light bulb, the fan in the refrigerator. Everything in the world sounds off in the quiet of late night. When I am sitting up alone, is my world empty? Not at all. Neither is it dry, even in the heat. It overflows with sounds.

  *

  Morning in Montalba.
  What can I see this morning? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven purple irises, the last one furled and unopened. The striated bark of a tree, the braided ropes of the hammock in back of Pam’s place in the country, which her son, Jason, refers to as “the ranch.” It’s 20 acres, and most of that an unusable hillside. Sky, branches, yellow green leaves, bird feeders that are plastic cylinders hung on ropes, a metal cattle trough that Pam uses as a basin for her fountain. Pam’s outside, weeding out front. She’s tossing clumps. My powerbook is open, though the screen is dark. I’ve brought things in my orange Jacksonville Landing tote: David Lehman’s The Daily Mirror, America’s Favorite Poems, other books.
  There’s a pink plastic glass wedged into a diamond-shaped hole in the hammock. My wristwatch is on a black leather band. I’m wearing my platinum wedding ring, though it hardly seems like something worn. Wally’s here, too – my handsome dog, silver and black, with his silver dog tags.
  A bee moves over the face of an open white flower.
  My black socks are inside out, my tennis shoes are dirty, and my green pants ride up on my legs. Moles, age spots, freckles on my forearms, sharing space with the hair.
  I can see the horizon line, but I cannot see my future, that is for sure.
  I telescope in and out, squinting and changing focus.
  The lenses of my sunglasses are nearly black.
  A broken twig, or would it be more properly called a branch, since it’s about two feet long, in the shape of a Y. A divining branch.
  Pam has hung a rusted tin can on a tree branch. Not sure why; probably to keep something undesirable away. If only it were that easy, I think.
  Charlie’s here. He’s Pam’s Westy, a little dog.
  Thumbnail, thumb knuckle, pen in my hand, these things I can see until I’m tired of mentioning more, thousands of things, millions; or, more than I can count. The burned dry heads of the weeds. What I can mention is only what I can name. What I can’t name, I might as well not be seeing, and probably cannot see.

  A dog’s running. It’s Wally, Walloo!

  Hearing is much the same, but what’s heard doesn’t seem nearly as abundant as what might be seen. A bird cawing, wind chimes, the wind itself in the tree branches. The same wind, elsewhere, but with a different accent. If there were no branches and no chimes to give it a voice, the wind would be silent. In Hebrew, isn’t it ruach, the wind? And doesn’t it also mean spirit? Spirit, or perhaps breath. Who can retell the Hebrew lessons, which I had, from decades ago.

  An architecture of twigs, necessary, beautiful, in their branching, knobby joints, the small crusted-over growths. A branch flexes its strength, until a crisp snap. Some of the branches have the slenderness of the young, and the flexibility, but also the rough skin and surface of age. Soon enough, pushed just a little more, even smoothest will break.

  The things I can’t see, at least not without a mirror, and even then, only reversed: my face, my eyes. But also the world that lies behind this wonderful world, remaining out of sight even if not out of mind.

  *

  Some “illustrations” in my notebook, of street signs and mailboxes: Henderson County. Dead End. Farm to Market 4020. Rt3 Box 3083.
  Two mailboxes on a country road, like two loaves of bread. Inside them, maybe the nourishment of a water bill, or a letter from elsewhere.

  *

  A cloud has the sun just behind it. A dark, swollen cloud, but from behind it, the sun illuminates, brightening its edges where the cloud thins. And does this cloud of a world obscure some bright sun that burns at the edges?

  Might the same be on each of us, though we are unaware of it?

  If so, we are outlined in glory.

  *

  Flowers along a roadway – wild daisies, all stalk, with little beads of heads, white petals around a yellow button. So much more stalk than flower, yet, in bunches and from a distance, they seem more white petals and the bright yellow buttons. The flower outweighs the stalk, the brightness outshines the drab. Believing the evidence of our eyes, when we look from a distance, we are optimists. We are cheered by our overall impression, despite what we may know of the facts, by weight and measure.

  *

  A fly buzzing; does it sound angry, or is it only saying hello? Broom grass, wild daisies, the fuzzy caterpillar on a stalk. Like a hot dog on a stick, these caterpillars on a stalk; lots of fuzz, frizz, and seed. In East Texas, it’s posted: No Trespassing. Posted, but the signs are not on posts; they’re hung on wire fences that border the empty acreage.

  *

  To East Texas once again.

  We arrive from Dallas after ten at night. The packs of coyotes are calling in the piney woods. It must be the night of a full moon. My dog’s ears prick up. We turn off 321 on Quanah Parker Road, turn off the headlights and drive by moonlight. The asphalt ends a short way from the highway. The pale dirt ruts in the road look are like a khaki cloth. I imagine that the unkenneled tongues of the coyotes are as colorful as a red tie.

  *

  Bridget Smith is my new housekeeper. Laverne left while Dolores was still alive, moving back to East Texas to care for her father. Then Monica, who stayed until Dolores died. The Filipina, whose name I forget, was always saying “Okey dokes.” She was also, and more disciplined and never right for us. Now Bridget. In the middle of the afternoon, Bridget watches the soaps on TV. She has her responsibilities, too, but doesn’t take them as seriously. When I come home and surprise her watching TV on the job, she’s not worried. Or sorry. She does see sad, however, about something disconnected from her housekeeping. She’s frowning, furrowed, and has the weight of the world holding her down on her broad bottom, keeping her on the sofa and its colored cushions. Hey, Bridget, I greet her. I try to cheer her up, though that’s not my job.

  *

  So many stacks of books on my desk. Marvelous books, Thoreau’s journals, Robert Stone’s short stories, Heschel on the Sabbath, Fernando Pessoa translated (which I’ll never read), Online Investing (which I’ll also never read). Online Investing is a paperback with Microsoft dayglo colors on its spine. It must have been an impulse purchase.

  Where’s mine, where’s my book? I’ve spent thirty years not writing one.

  On an airplane back from London, a stopover on the way home from Switzerland, I decided I needed to read Anne Lamott’s first novel, Hard Laughter, and her book about writing, Bird by Bird. As usual I was also resolving to write on my own. Poems, journals, something. I jot down in my notebook, “The Body Surfer” – it’s a title I like.
  Sounds good. It does sound good.
  It reminds me how I would survive the biggest wave by diving under it, my arms outstretched, holding my breath. The wave is crashing, but I am calm underneath it. When I come up to the surface, I’m on the other side. And when I turn around, facing the beach now, the wave is spent; it’s nothing, a shallow rush of water running up the sand.

  Waves are…metaphorical. Under the water, the past. The past is a wave that has broken. From the shore, the horizon is the wider world.

  When I was in my teens, I used to go down to Toes Beach by the Westport Beach Club. And I went body surfing. After, I would look at the horizon from the shore. It was the wide world, and I was resolved to “become someone.” As if I wasn’t someone already. And what does it mean to be someone?

  *

  “If we cut it all out, you would not survive.” The surgeon, Jacobson, said that to Dolores when he came into the hospital room. Her skin was yellowed from a dye.

  Could I write about this? I don’t have the skill. Can I turn it into a “story”? Sitting on the plane back from London, I write the names of “characters” in my black notebook. Dolores, Pam, the circle of friends, Dr. Robert Jacobson, Ben and Eden, Saul. Saul? Apparently in my notes, which are idiotic, everyone can have his or her real name, except me.

  In the months that Dolores was dying, she had two other brief hospital stays. I used to sit behind her bed at Baylor.

  She told me to write it, and I said I would. I was resolved.

  What is one true thing I can say about living?
  Maybe that nothing’s resolved.

  *

  What is my goal? My goal, I might say to Pam, is to deserve your love. I wonder can I ever get there. What I will have to do: Earn money, be polite and hold the card door open, don’t talk back, and take responsibility. I believe I can do every one of these things, most of the time, to get what I deserve. Of course, that doesn’t mean I will get it.

  *

  I first saw Wally on the back of a pickup truck in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart in Palestine. Pam and I were in East Texas for the weekend, as we were so often. We were buying supplies. So we took two of the puppies that were being given away. Pam took the girl, I took the boy, a sister and her brother. Both dogs have a touch of the chow in them. Wally dog, Wally Walloon, Walloo – he has dog’s breath, a dog body, hairy ears, fat paws, grey and black fur, a stiff collar, and a tail that wags back and forth like windshield wipers set on high. He has so many attributes I can fall asleep naming them all. When my eyes open, it’s after one-thirty in the morning. I tell him to kennel up. People want to know what kind of dog he is, they want to know who his parents were. I tell them what I know; his mother was a bitch, his father some son of a bitch.

  *

  The market fell today. It plummeted, like a suicide diving head first from a bridge. The Dow, NASDAQ, the S&P, down, down, down. No water down there, no bottom to fall to, no dark and hard surface to break, as it breaks the back of the dying. Just falling, falling, and everyone talking about it. All that money lost. It was beautiful, wasn’t it, before it fell? The market stood like a lord looking out to the city, among the bright cables and the towers, and the strange orange paint, as brilliant as sunset on the Golden Gate.

  *

  April 2000

  What’s the point of this warm April day? For the squirrel hanging from a trembling branch of a crepe myrtle in the backyard, what could it beIts movements are twitchy, as though it was desperate, although it’s probably not at all. Today is a day with one thing leading to another, none of it connected, other than in sequence. Thinking about Peter Whaley today. We met in Berkeley in 1972 and became friends. Then we lost touch after he joined the foreign service as was posted to Haiti, and then somewhere in Africa. That was a few years after Peter had dropped out of graduate school, and the next year won a Stegner to work on his writing at Stanford. He told me used the time in Palo Alto watching Perry Mason re-runs instead, marooned in his apartment. He must be close to retirement now, since in government you can be fully vested after only twenty years.

  There’s a purple iris outside my window under the crepe myrtle. Who planted it? Not me, and not Dolores, either. Maybe Jane Vieaux, the widow who owned our Greenway Parks house before we did. I put out the red geraniums in pots, and also the drooping potted pansies that are the creamy orange of a bridesmaid’s dress. A white butterfly stutters from pot to pot. Like the squirrel, it’s on its own. These days, each day is a prayer, for one breath after another. Bed, sink, mirror, refrigerator, toilet, sink. Car, driveway, streets, houses, mailbox, lawns. I’ve situated myself here and don’t want to leave. I see the same things every day, or I don’t see them, same thing.

  *

  I am helping with the bug catching today. Ben and I have a net, jars, rubbing alcohol, and a hand spade. We found beetles, butterflies, a cricket, termites, an ant lion, and spiders, though the spiders don’t count. The assignment: to catch fifty bugs total. They are the ninth-grade biology assignment for Mrs. Messer, who also coaches the cheerleaders from Ursuline, who perform at the games for Ben’s Jesuit Prep, which is all boys. Mrs. Messer sold us 100 pins in a Morpho package, for five dollars. Ben trapped a large grasshopper in a plastic pickle container. Caught, the grasshopper jumped skyward, and bumped its head on the plastic lid, falling back into a pond of alcohol. It probably could have jumped ten or twenty times its height, if we had allowed it to.

  *

  July

  Thwap, wap, wap, wap.
  Wally is lying next to me tonight, with his big dark eye, and his tail begins to beat. I was reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which is mostly about dying, which I suppose both Wally and I are doing. You, too, Wally dog, lying there on the floor, asleep or near sleep until the moment I put down this thick book. Then somehow you know that something different is about to happen. You are aware of me, and you open an eye. I’m reaching out my hand, like the thief in the night, but only to pet the grey fuzz on your forehead.

  *

  August

  I check all my phones, my wireless, my land line. No new messages. No messages in my inbox either. So on this lonesome night I remember Billy DeVoe cutting his father’s lawn in 1964. Billy was the chubby bully on my family’s Belton Drive block. His father stood on the grass, a short man, a suburban Napoleon, dictating terms in French accented English. Maybe he was a Montrealer. Or preferred West Los Angeles to Beaune or Arles.
  Fifty percent overcut, he ordered, before retreating behind his stucco walls.

  *

  In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, it states that establishing an unafraid, heartfelt communication with others is essential, and that to attain enlightenment a sense of humor and a commonsense approach are most useful. I have little to say about this, other than there are days this wisdom seems funny and not very common.

  *

  Eden’s a magical child, curious, delighting, and full of devices. When she makes a salami sandwich for lunch, she writes a message in mustard on the secret side of the slice of wheat bread. After lunch she takes Wally outside. It’s raining. Sitting on the brick steps with our dog, she blows bubbles, using a bottle and a wand that have been stuck on the pantry shelf for years, maybe for as long as any sword stuck in a stone.

  *

  Over dinner, Alana, who is one of Pam’s friends, holds her glass of J. Lohr Paso Robles cabernet. She mentions Balboa Island. Balboa Island! I haven’t heard of it in years, or thought of it, either. Its penny arcades, its dinky motels with shuffleboard courts, the patch of beach that was ours for a week when we were taken there as children year after year for the summer holiday my mother insisted on. One year, I poked a pinwheel stick into the milky mouth of a sea anemone, under a pier. The poor blind creature. It was like a white sunflower under water. It grasped the stick, as if it were surprised. Forty years later I can still see it.
  Why do we remember what we remember?
  That Balboa is gone for good. No more exotic family vacations for me, thirty minutes from home.

  *

  September

  End of summer, and anywhere else – California, New Mexico – would be lovelier than Dallas, and also easier these days. It’s 107 here. The August summer has penetrated September. The afternoons are fat with heat. The pool fountains in my backyard are too hot to run. The water trickles down the brick, as if it were sweat.

  *

  A trip to California –
  Pam and I visited the Adamson house on a Saturday morning in LA. It’s on Pacific Coast Highway, beyond the end of Sunset. From the house we can see waterbirds on the Malibu lagoon, surfers, young men playing volleyball, and sunbathers on the beach. And, going inside, the painted tiles. The docent is a man my age, who pointed out that these tiles were from Malibu Pottery, which employed 130 men in the 1920s. Rhoda Adamson ran the business. Her daddy was a Rindge. Her name backwards was Adohr, which is the name she gave her dairy farms. I never knew that. We used to buy Adohr milk in the neighborhood Vons market in Westchester, across the street from Orville Wright Junior High. Rhoda had inherited Malibu, which has also had other owners. The Chumash, with their wood canoes, owned it first, until the King of Spain took it from them. Then he gave it to Jose Tapia for the asking. Tapia sold it, it was sold again and again until, finally, Frederick Rindge, whose father owned a mill in New England and left two million dollars to his only child, bought Malibu. I have two million dollars myself, but no hope of ever owning Malibu.

  *

  Ben, son of my right hand, is now a sixteen-year-old with a belly and a fuzzy goatee. He wants to go to CD Warehouse, to buy Alice in Chains. He plays games on the computer, where his screen name is jimi007. Jimi, cool speak for Jimmy, which is itself the informal and friendlier version of James, choked on his own vomit. Jimi died of stupor. The 007 is of course Bond, James Bond. These are Ben’s two heroes. One of them died too young, the other one can’t be killed.

  Speaking of dying, Bill Moyers is “doing a show” on it. The Moyer’s TV show on dying will take four nights. It’s an event. So is dying, although dying takes a lifetime. Yes, it can happen instantly, but not for most of us.

  *

  November

  Pam asks me to write a poem for her. She may think that would motivate me. She also she tells her son to do his homework, wanting to be helpful. Her son hates school. He isn’t good at it and hasn’t learned to enjoy what he’s no good at. Being capable matters, though not as much as enjoying things, not nearly as much as being happy. I told her no, I wouldn’t do that, I wasn’t going to write a poem for her. I probably should have said yes. I should have lied and said, “I’ll be happy to.”

  My Wenonah house needs painting. It’s flaking on the porches and under the overhangs. Bits of dull color fall to the ground. But in the backyard my Japanese maple is a rich red. I have cool November nights and warm days to thank for that. Its color has happened suddenly. The maple ignited, like a matchhead. I planted this slender Japanese maple eleven or twelve years ago, under Dolores’s direction. Likewise the fig ivy, which is mostly dead now. Its brown brittle runners climb the St. Joe brick from the living room to our green bedroom. Three years four months ago, Dolores died. I’m marrying again in another month or two, to start 2001. Where are you, Dolores? What are you thinking? Nothing? Nothing at all? Are you, then, nothing now? Are you at all confused? I know I am.

  Dolores knew how to work a room, like a politician, kissing the baby that’s inside all of us. She was ambitious for her good name, proud of her professional practice and of her position on local boards and committees, and of the awards named after her, the newspaper clippings, certificates of appreciation, diplomas, plaques and other honors that are still in one of the file cabinets in our attic. She had all the self-satisfaction of a late bloomer who proved everyone wrong. She also had the confidence of a beautiful woman, which never left her, though it went underground as she was dying, lying in bed upstairs, her ambition reduced to staying comfortable. She had a crazy mother who claimed to have married seventeen times. I was only Dolores’s third husband, but she wanted to get no further. When she died. she had children who were only eleven and thirteen, but also an adult son two years older than I am, and a grandson in his thirties. The two younger children are older now. They may still be hers, but perhaps only for a while longer. I wonder where Dolores is, which is foolish thinking, though altogether natural. Nothingness is impossible to imagine. I have some letters that she wrote when she was only a child; they show she had pretty penmanship, even then. I don’t expect her to write to me though. I have ten plastic boxes of her costume jewelry, two dozen pair of her high heels, her Ferragamo boots, and her cow coat. I’m not enough of a believer, but it’s impossible to believe that she exists only in the hearts of those who cherish her memory, in the phrase of the Union prayerbook.

  *

  Ben won’t do his homework or study for finals until it’s too late. He runs out of time and does poorly, and then he says, “It doesn’t matter.” He has two exams tomorrow and also a paper to turn in at 2 pm. He has started the paper at 8 pm tonight and of course cannot finish it. He struggles and asks for help, but I’m too angry with him to help him. I send him to bed and then go up to tell him I love him and to sleep well. “I’m done for,” he says. I wish I could say, “It doesn’t matter.”

  I suspect this is what he will do all his life. Fail, and then say he doesn’t care.

  *

  2001

  January
  Leonora Stephens drops by. She’s Alex’s mom; so, the mother of Ben’s best friend. She and Don live one block over in Greenway Parks, in the same position on the block as we do, and on the north side, too. They are the only neighbors I have some relationship with, in part because Leonora’s a psychiatrist and was a friend of Dolores’s. Tonight, Wally growls at her. It doesn’t matter, because Leonora is already upset. She’s looking for Alex. Her husband’s brother’s wife has died. I knew her, I had just seen her two weeks ago at the New Year’s Day party that Leonora invited me to. She was there, at Leonora and Don’s house, with her husband and their daughter Melinda. Melinda, who is nearly blind, has had brain cancer for years. She’s twenty-one, but seems much younger. She’s expected to die soon herself, though things don’t always happen as expected.

  *

  People say – I’ve heard it said – you can’t really know joy unless you’ve known unhappiness. This thought is usually shared as an explanation of sorts for why bad things happen – death and other losses, fears, hopes abandoned but not entirely, the pentimento of the past, which we see a glimpse of under the bowl of fruit, the pomegranate in a still life. But why can’t joy appear on its own, without this undercoat of miseries? Isn’t there a heaven somewhere that isn’t underwritten by suffering? It’s late at night. Almost time to go to bed. Then it will be morning, with its own intervals – the minutes before I will drive to work. And whatever happens or doesn’t in those intervals, the hands of the clock will be jumping. I will look up, and the time will be gone.

  *

  Married now, in Santa Fe.
  And then a very large party in Dallas at the Crescent Hotel.
  Then another trip, the “honeymoon,” in Paris.
  Very conventional, not at all like the first time, with its trip to a clinic on Oak Lawn to get a certificate declaring me and Dolores syphilis-free (do they still do that?) and then wed by the Justice of the Peace downtown. And a steak sandwich at Lucas B&B Coffee Shop afterwards – I still have the orange menu, as a souvenir.

  All that said, I already think that my second marriage is more problematic than my first. For one thing, there’s the undertow of the years before now. Somehow I know there is no starting over. There’s only waiting for the past to become less important than the future, and it may never.

  *

  Every February a hundred daffodils come up in the back yard. The weather’s warm, for a week or so. It’s a false Spring. Up they come, very dazzling. They nod their fat yellow heads, and their waxy green bodies seem strong enough to support them. But in another week, there will be a last frost. For a night or two the temperatures will drop into the low thirties. Most of the daffodils will die. It’s predictable, though not absolutely certain. It’s been happening for twenty years. Don’t they ever learn? Can’t the daffodils help themselves? Perennially pretty, but wasting themselves.

  *

  Tom Sime sends me a postcard announcing an exhibit of his artwork at Denise Bibro, a gallery on W. 20th in NYC. The card says “the artist will attend” the opening reception. Mark Birnbaum’s documentary Salsa is being screened at the Dallas Video Festival. After the screening, you can “talk to the filmmaker.” I drove to Verizon’s offices this afternoon and endured two hours of meetings. I am ready to discuss direct mail with the artist and to chat with the filmmaker about I-35, this flat roadway from one office to another, which is like a black speechless tongue.

  *

  Met a group of Pam’s relatives for the first time today. One of her aunts is a powdery woman, sweet tempered, with a helmet of dyed hair. She has a question.
  “Will you be joining our church?”
  “No, I won’t be.”
  “And why is that?”
  I tell her I’m not a Christian, but I practice the same religion Jesus did.

  *

  Saw something today –
  We are on our way out to Pam’s place in Montalba. It was raining in Henderson County, and it was a hard rain, with lightning like a terrible swift sword. Rainwater pooled on the right shoulder of 175 West to Athens. Near Kaufman, the police had placed cones and flares. There was an accident ahead of us. When we reached it, we could see a white pick-up flipped on its back. It was beached on the green divide. A woman was leaned against the white truck in the rain. Her face had a look of surprise. Maybe it was horror. It reminded me of the photo of the Kent State shooting, when a young woman who is crouched over a fallen body looks up at the camera. Somebody’s hurt, somebody’s exhaling a long last breath. Somebody will soon live only in the acts of goodness he performed, and in the hearts of those, if there are any, who cherish his memory.

  *

  Back from our respite in the country. All our problems were ignored while we dug weeds and fixed a weathervane to the roofline, puncturing the shingles and mounting a coppery green rooster. Now it’s the middle of the night in Dallas. I’m not sleeping; instead, I’m worrying. Unhappiness is a cockle-doodle-do.

  *

  Pam fired Bridget. Maria, her housekeeper and now “ours,” sticks her head in the room to say Adios. What can you say when you don’t speak the language? You repeat back whatever is said to you. Adios. Somebody says to you it’s a hot day, and you tell them, it’s a hot day. You’re agreeable. It’s the least you can be, and also the most.

  *

  Where does it come from, and where does it go, the wind that stirs the loquat trees in their pots. Even the stiff hollies are trembling. The last brown leaf on the red oak thrashes, tugging on its stem, at the tip of a tiny branch. What a wind. Even the birds flying into it are giving into it. They seem to coast, drafting downward on their wings, these tiny birds, speckle-headed, their eyes are on the holly berries.

  Where do they come from, and where do they go, thoughts that are the unheard sounds a soul whispers, personality, striving, fear, the breath that is life, which is so ordinary, and yet miraculous.

  *

  Wally and Venice, our two dogs, race after each other in a back yard from which there’s no escape. If given a chance, however, they would bolt. What are they wanting, what’s out front that they don’t already have? More space, more smells, other dogs, strangers to bark at or bite. They could be hit by cars, have their backs broken, and end up like the dog you see in the road. In our protected back yard, they can run each other down. Their bark is worse than their slobber. Do they know they are brother and sister? And, if they do, does it mean anything to them? What other life might they have had? The side gate is their magic door. Its only recommendation is that it opens to elsewhere. Then, just as suddenly as they ran, they stop. Game over. Collapsing into separate hemispheres of fur, they are panting, and waiting for nothing other than to do it all over again. Haunch and foreleg and paw, the thin black lines of their lips, their mouths full of pointy teeth and lolling tongues. What have they ever done to deserve their wonderful dog’s tails, which rise like plumes.

  *

  First day of Spring Break. I’m home, fussing with Ben and Eden about what they’ll do all summer. Eden wants to hike for a month, and to do nothing else. She’s a child who could do nothing joyfully. She has inner resources, which I admire, though they are frightening as well; her apparent lack of need frightens me. Ben, bored and mournful even on his days off, never knows what he wants. He can’t name a single way, not one he can think of, to pass a worthwhile summer, or even a fun one. As usual he doesn’t want to do anything unusual. I have plans for both of them, but none can be made. It’s either too late, the places are already taken, or there is something missing, a recommendation neither Ben nor Eden could get, or a qualification neither of them have. How many more childhood summers do they have? How many more for me to worry about filling? Not many, just a few.

  *

  Ben was a little boy once. He was a ten-year-old, then eleven, and then twelve. And he was happy enough, before his mother died. Left motherless, Ben has become cold, and though I’ve tried, no one can comfort him. He won’t recover what he has lost. He will need to do without. And what he will do, or how well, that remains to be seen.

  I’m having my own trouble sleeping, in ways I haven’t had before. So I stay up as late as I can, questioning everything, or avoiding the questions. Do the trees sleep, is every blade of grass as awake as I am? Drawn by the table lamp, a moth batters at the window screen. The dark is illuminated by a thousand waking dreams.

  *

  Let’s go! We say we’re going to go somewhere – let’s go to Sao Paulo – on the spur of the moment, as if moments spurred us on, rather than bargain prices or boredom.

  Ten years ago, when Ben and Eden were in Temple Emanu-El preschool, Dolores and I knew a couple from Sao Paulo. Their two children were the same ages as ours. The wife was Renata. I remember her in her orange swimsuit around our pool. I can’t recall the husband’s name, but I do remember him – boyish, a young physician, in Dallas to do cancer research at UT Southwestern. In Sao Paulo he had worked at his father-in-law’s clinic. Around our pool one day he told us about medical treatment in Sao Paulo, how villagers would come down from the mountains to the city, which was far. They needed treatment for tumors. He said you saw things there you would never see here. The trip into Sao Paulo was difficult for them. They lost their work, they were afraid – of the expense, of the city, of bad news from doctors. So they delayed. They waited a very long time in their village, hoping, denying, praying, and only came to Sao Paulo to appear without an appointment at his clinic when their fear was as enormous as a tumor “the size of a soccer ball” – a tumor that even the most ignorant or fearful could no longer ignore. Only then would they say, “Let’s go.”

  *

  The mystery of other people is impenetrable. The wonder of skin or the light in their eyes has a pale, thrilling beauty. My own opacity is something different. To my taste, it’s sour, a disappointment. Is it possible to consider oneself an astonishment? I want to be the smooth stone from a riverbed in which the fossilized remains of an ancient creature appears. And then, I will put the stone in my pocket, where it will be cool and sleek, comforting, a talisman of the ages, still here. I want to be my own lucky stone.

  *

  Notes from East Texas –

  The flowering clover on April 1st fools nobody. It’s as red and green as another holiday, but washed with sunlight on the roadside and not for sale.

  Behold is a word that can no longer be used. Hark is another. See, then: the hair in waves and tangles on my arm, the heel of my hand scraping a writing tablet, the braided wood of two brown candlesticks. Hear, then: the fan in the refrigerator.
  .
  *

  My fifteen-year-old says chill, don’t stress me.
  I answer, achieve, achieve.
  I try to fill her with a stream of piety, but she’s a sieve.
  Lifting my commandments above my head, I hurl them at her dreams.

  *

  I try keeping my mind still, but it turns back and forth, like the hanging basket of wandering jew suspended from a red oak branch, which is parsed into a thousand tiny squares by the window screen. My present thoughts are a recitation. I name off the warm down comforter, the flames and shadows under my eyelids as I try to sleep, the body beside me. This may be what meditation is for, to conjure the moment and stay with it. My passing thoughts are of the past and the future, mostly the past.

  *

  My mother disapproved of my father, who would not listen to her, but listened instead to the Dodger games on a transistor radio. He preferred sacrifice flies and the reedy voice of Vin Scully to the sacrifices of married life and my mother’s instruction. But then my mother was unhappy all her life, even until the very end of it, which was a decade after my father died.

  *

  What’s the cat looking for, jumping on the table in the middle of my travel brochures? She’s declawed, an inside cat, who hasn’t even traveled to the neighbor’s yard. I’m making plans to tour China. I want to go to Xian, to see the terra cotta army of the Emperor Qin. Did they eat cats there, or did they worship them?
  The cat is purring and has no answer.

  *

  I look out the same window every day. Big picture, nothing changes. Yes, there are the seasons and their masks. The red oak, the pecan trees, the diving board extending over the deep end of the pool, patio furniture, chairs, tables with glass tops, the loquat trees in their pots, the tips of the holly bushes rising just above the window ledge. These are my water lilies, which Monet rendered in detail, or I can dismiss what I see, abstracting it. I can try harder to see the yellow in the green tips of the hollies, and how each leaf splays and curves, and how its ends reach sharp points. I have no name for these curves that come to a point and have the elegance of a divine calculus. I’m sure someone has named them. If I sit still long enough to look at the hollies at the edge of the window, if I keep still like a birder crouching in a blind and waiting for the moment of sighting, I will see the changes, and may also notice that the older, darker leaves are ragged with holes.

  *

  I bought a new car today, drove it home, and parked it in our cracked driveway. Brand new. It isn’t even pre-owned. Have never done this before, but this is Pam’s car, this new and blue Porsche Boxter, and it’s what she wanted. The tread on its fat black tires is as deep as canyons. The paint on its blue hood has the sparkle of fool’s gold at the bottom of a stream. The owner’s manual is still in its unscuffed leather case. This car has sports car handling, but not big car comfort. Since everybody’s selling something, new cars, aluminum siding, antacid, it’s no surprise that I have questions about the purchase. When I buy anything, what do I ask, though not out loud? Is it a fair price? Is it the best price? Could I do better elsewhere? I might ask Pam now, could we do better?

  *

  My life is a wallpaper.
  My moments are a series of white squares on a black field. Sometimes red chevrons, rough edged, meant to look as though they were painted by hand, rather than calculated or machined. I was mass-produced, however individual I may claim to be. The point of the pattern is the pattern. The purpose of my life is living.

  *

  Cleaning up, cleaning out. Throwing out, and sometimes wanting to throw up. Not knowing what to keep keeps me from finishing the task. The job is to distinguish the unnecessary from the things that won’t ever be needed. I’m discarding some of Dolores’s textbooks in abnormal psychology, statistics, and experimental method, the required reading for the courses leading to her doctorate in 1969. Also, the red glossy shopping bags from Neiman’s, glass vases, silverware, a wooden block slotted to hold kitchen knives, and some plastic grapes. The books in black bags went to a dock behind Half Price Books, where a young man received them. He “took them off my hands.” He had hair down his back, a brown beard, and the attitude of the graduate student also circa 1969. All I can offer you is twelve dollars, he said. So I took the money, which isn’t enough to buy a vase at Neiman’s.

  *

  I read: Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.
  How can that possibly be true? We cannot be willing to simply wait for meanness and hate to disappear. There must be, with less civility, another way to oppose them.

  *

  It’s too warm in here. Two-thirty on the bedside clock. The sheets are as constricting as a shroud, and my bedroom is like the simple box favored for our burial. It makes little sense, this anxiety, but there’s a difference between imagined and imaginary, and that makes all the difference. There’s no reason not to fall asleep, except for the pin pricks of my thoughts, some of them as hot as sparks.

  *

  Exhaustion after not sleeping last night. I could envy the inaction of the sky at noon; the sky, which never needs any rest. It spreads, it covers, it extends, but it doesn’t shelter, not really. It does no work and has no worries. It’s a hollow thing and would let hell itself come right through it. It would let blood and fire rain down on us, without blinking its eye. And after, it would have no taint remaining on it. I need to sleep, but can’t. I want to get what the dialogue in a corny western calls “shut-eye.” A little shut-eye. And with my eyes shut, I might have better vision. Indeed, sometimes you have to close your eyes in order to see. I need to see the sky for what it is, lemony and empty.

  *

  The two orchids on the porch are gawky teenagers. They are too tall and have outgrown their green plastic pots. Their heads droop, their leaves are round-shouldered. Sooner or later, they will stop being children. Their aspirations are white, yellow, and lavenders. They are soon to bloom, and soon after to fall.

  *

  In East Texas again. Two mailboxes look like two loaves of bread and offer the nourishment of water bills. A cloud hides the sun behind it. Its puffy belly is dark and swollen, but the sun lights its edges. There are flowers are the roadside. Wild daisies, tiny, all stalk, hold up their heads of white petals in bunches around bright yellow buttons, and the broom grass is as fuzzy as a caterpillar. The fly buzzing may sound as if it were angry, though it may only be saying hello. At Pam’s place in the country, outside Montalba, the Posted Private Property signs aren’t on posts. They hang from the wire fences off 320 on a Sunday morning.

  *

  Mother is dead, but her children go on living for now. Sorrowing seems like the right thing to do. Despite one breath after another, we’re almost breathless.

  *

  At the house on Wenonah my dinner table is a stained wood rectangle. The five of us sit around it. Pam and her son Jason. Me, Ben and Eden. No wonder it just doesn’t work. The geometry of our two families is uncomplimentary, angular, and obtuse.

  *

  Lemmon Avenue isn’t an avenue. It’s a gash, a scar. It’s not a landscape, but a calculation of square footage, a ravine of loans and a torrent of signage. It’s a frenchifried avenue. I have no neon admiration for it. But it has its worshippers, whose heads are bowing to styrofoams of food, greasy with French fries, sticky with colas and special offers.

  *

  Second marriage. Our bed is covered with a beautis fabricated in Arles. The linens are from Le Rideau de Paris, the shams from 32 rue du Bac. I’ve come downstairs to enter the glow of a desktop screen, with its windows and fonts. I’m happy enough here. Words are such a mystery. They are as beautiful as beads, and iridescent, as some insects are. They tap to the beat of the cursor. Even if I have nothing to say, there’s poetry on a business card. For instance, on the one I brought back from our official honeymoon, with its Fabricant depuis 1924.

  *

  Pam and I have one of our arguments. There’s nothing more to say when we have already said too much. There’s nothing to add, nothing at least that will quickly fill the gap between us. I am looking at the gravel, stones, the chatter of the monkey grass that edges a mound of mulch and soil, where Pam has planted basil, parsley, lettuce. Also, at her back bent, where she has turned. She’s weeding. The garden speaks to us and, for the moment, likely for the rest of today, it will have to speak for us.

  *

  2001

  June 9

  No unheard messages on my phone. No calls are either waiting or saved. The children are chattering on their own phones. They have no use for my discipline. Knowing what they want, but not yet knowing they can’t have it, they idle away the summertime and would trade everything for a day of pleasure. I might do the same on my deathbed. Their conversations are as temporary as the boasts of teenagers, whose dreams haven’t yet come to an end. Enjoy it while you can, I suppose, the insecure happiness of having plans.

  I heard yesterday that Laverne Cook is dying. Or, I didn’t exactly hear that, but I wondered after her call to the house, asking how we all were. One of her neighbors talked to Pam and let her know how Laverne was, not exactly dying, but she has cancer, and the cancer has spread to her back and spleen. Laverne doesn’t look like herself anymore. That’s what I heard.

  Ben will be seventeen tomorrow. He said he wants to go see her. She lives in Elkhart, ten miles from Palestine. Ben has a card from Laverne telling him she loves him. I know we’ll go, but it may turn out to be only for a funeral.

  When we go out to Montalba, we’re only twenty miles from Athens. And Palestine is even closer. As if these historic places somehow belonged in the Texas heat among the pine trees and the bib overalls and the Walmarts. These fields in East Texas could be anywhere, with their wheels of mown hay, which is nothing but Bermuda grass. Bermuda grass or not, East Texas is definitely not the Caribbean. Nor is it ancient Greece, or what Christians call The Holy Land. When we walk through the grass on Pam’s property, the grasshoppers jump ahead of our footsteps. They’re not playing; they’re afraid, getting out of our way. But they also keep us company. They sound off, zip, zip, toasty, and crunchable. The earth in East Texas has a buzz to it. There are holes in the dirt, and hiding places, and the ant excavations are as impressive as burial mounds.

  *

  A book, a pipe, a tortoise shell pen, eyeglasses. Why eyeglasses? One glass for each eye? This morning even the cold cereal seems to belong in italics.
  To live without dying, people say it can’t be done. To die without living, that’s common enough.
  The Dalai Lama is smiling from a book jacket.
  His book is keeping me company.

  Staring into the pecan branches over my head.

  If I could see in this pecan tree the grackle that was on its branches five summers ago, or the rain on its seed in the dirt long before I was born, the sun, the wind from those days, that would be…something. Is there life after death? Certainly, just not mine. Even more certainly, there’s life before birth, a chain of events that moment by moment produced me. Are those moments part of my life, too? What if I could see this tree five centuries ago, before it was even a seed, when it was…something else.

  *

  In every possession, a shadow of loss, of outlivings. The world is full of leftovers in my refrigerated memories. The sofa that’s going off to Goodwill or The Salvation Army today in a white pickup is the sofa where Dolores and I sat reading to our children ten years ago. We read them Pierre and Are You My Mother? Later, after we had recovered it in stripes, I cared for Dolores on it during her illness, injecting her with heparin flushes through a port in her chest. Pam’s guys are taking the sofa now. Sergio, Luis – and they may decide to keep it for themselves, con permisso. They have my permission. I can open the refrigerator door and see it anytime in the small cold light. Ziplocked, this sofa will never go bad. And I’m not that interested in goodwill or in salvation today. But I would like to get over the upset of attachment. I’d like to own all my things lightly, to have sofas, books, and guitars rest on my shoulders as comfortably as one of the Italian sports coats in my closet, even as they are accelerating into the past as rapidly as a German sports car, turning off, and roaring toward destinations of their own.

  *

  Written on my headstone:
  He did his errands.

  Pewter, platinum, silver.
  In a grey hutch, twenty-one white rabbits, forty-two red eyes.

  There’s this thought, that we will understand everything after we die, as if the answers were printed on the inside of the box.

  *

  Being Jason’s stepfather is hard. It’s also unrewarding. There’s no charm in another man’s son, especially one weighing 200 pounds. I do resent his weight on me. Jason has his mother’s love, though, which my children have lost forever. What are Jason’s habits? He leaves his trash under my feet. He never locks a door or turns out a light. He says thank you like a trained bear – like one that would rather, truth be told, rip the flesh off your throat with one swipe of of his claws.

  *

  Pam and I travel to San Francisco and north of there.

  The airport lounge at SFO has a faded carpet. It’s red and brown, the unpleasant colors of blood and coagulation. Someone is paged – Michael Mancini, Michael Mancini, you are wanted by…. Is it a code, or just a simple message? I see a guy who wears a Death Valley t-shirt untucked in. His belly protrudes, the fat deplaning on his jeans. He has a goatee and stands beside me, open-mouthed, monitoring the departures. I feel like making a comment. Maybe something that an Andy Rooney might have said. Ever notice how airplanes taxi, but taxis never airplane?

  At Sea Ranch south of Gualala we check out the houses for sale and step into dreams, picture windows, bunkbeds downstairs, the silhouettes of children on walls, and books, a set of Dickens, which I might read in a worn easy chair facing a meadow. Then we walked on the headlands, beyond the lodge. The fog was thicker, bits of it fell, droplets, cold. There were signs, smokestacks, skylights. I thought of Hardy, one of the many poems I used to know by heart, something something with the weakening eye of day. I leant upon a coppice gate, the frost was spectre grey…

  We climbed down to the beach, then up a stew of stones, to sit on a sandstone ledge. The rock broke off in my hand like dirt. Starlings, brown-tailed swallows, turning in dizzying circles, brushing the meadow grasses with tipped wings, above the purple thistles and the stalks of a white flower. The starfish on the rocks were orange. Their backs had a pattern of white beady bumps. The anemones were as green as limes and soft as fruit. A flower growing on the lichen-bearded rocks. Pam said it’s called Chicken and Hen. There were ice plants, and pelicans that were called pelicans, and the birds that weren’t pelicans the we called “the ones with red beaks.”

  Look east. What do I think is out there? China. And beyond China? One just goes round and round. Might as well stop at China, for a cup of tea. And just how much tea is there in China, and why would anyone want all of it?

  We conduct an interrogation of the surf, which is itself pounding the rocks with questions. What’s the spray asking? I don’t know, but it’s the same thing, incessantly, and there are no answers.

  We hiked the path off the shoreline highway to Fisk Mill Cove. It was a hike to viewpoints, and to points of view.

  The clouds are inflamed like a final illness. The struggle of the cedar’s twisted trunk and its forking branches ends in shadows and lace. Crags and precipices. Each day is a fresh shirt here. When the sun sets, it’s settled, and the sough of the Pacific washes it of its stains.

  That evening, Pam made hors d’oeuvres: sausages, goat cheese, French bread from the Super Surf Market in Gualala.

  *

  Then there was this other guy, with Tourette’s, beating at a cash register in a shop in the San Francisco airport. He sold Ghiradelli chocolates as well as anybody, taking my money with a snatch and a jerk. He slapped at the receipt. As if he couldn’t risk opening his mouth, his fingers blurted out. Even his eyeballs were an outburst. He put all hell into making the correct change. He had the ka-pow of a comic book hero, herky jerky, as if there were moments of life that don’t occur, and the smooth sequence of our actions have frames missing. Instead, we leap forward, disconnected, and then splice ourselves together.

  *

  Seeing weet peas and spikey flowers that have no name I know. Who can see the nameless things. It’s hard to count them all. They are like so many souls fluttering. Pelicans, tide pools, fog and meadow grasses, dandelions, and the wine of the fog, moving up the hillsides and wetting the tips of the pines. The fingers of the trees are signaling v at their tips, v for victory, v just for v and nothing else.

  *

  Recalling high school tennis matches, decades ago. Did my mother or father ever watch me play? I don’t think so. I can hardly remember, much less what they might have said, or the color of a button on my father’s sweater. How well does anyone recall? We have to invent our memories, or have none at all.

  Same problem, really, with experiencing the present moment. How to perceive, more or less crisply, an apple, without layering on the meaning of eating it? If I look outside the window, what do I understand of this brown bird, sitting on a coppered leaf, near the lantern that Pam hung in a Japanese maple? I notice most when it suddenly flies off, disturbed, maybe, by a noise, or a tick. I notice – that there are more leaves than birds, more birds than the one sky, but, looked at differently, more sky than anything.

  *

  September 2001

  The day we close on our house, planes fly into the World Trade Center buildings in New York, and another crashes into the Pentagon. We are seeing it on television first thing in the morning, as we sit in the title office in Preston Center.

  For me, the drama is all about leaving my home on Wenonah, and moving into another house that I never wanted.

  *

  The only thing I can say for certain about our new house is that it will provide me a place to sleep. And in my sleep it will be the same house as the one we are in now.

  Pam wants something, some amount of money, and I say that what she wants is “too much.” “Not if you loved me,” she says. “If you loved me,” I say, “you wouldn’t ask for so much, you wouldn’t even want so much.” And then, “You wouldn’t need so much,” I say, “if you loved me.” Sometimes I talk out loud to myself, thinking about divorce, angry, in conversation with myself, handling both sides of the dialogue, though even when it’s only me I don’t win the argument.

  Arguments –

  I’m reading a Dalai Lama book downstairs. Pam is upstairs, enjoying the satisfaction of falling asleep. It has never occurred to me that anger and unhappiness are the same thing. Maybe not the exact same thing, because I can be unhappy without being angry, but I cannot be angry without unhappiness. When I sneeze, at two-thirty in the morning, it accidentally sets off the house alarm. I take my time turning it off, happy to hear her waking.

  *

  We are setting off for China tomorrow. Why am I miserable? No reason. The woman is good enough. The children, acceptable enough. We are going to China for no reason as well.

  *

  In China – Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and then a side trip out of Shanghai to Suzhou, the garden city. We took the train there – the five of us. The garden we visited in Suzhou is called the Forest of Lions. Much of it is a maze of rocks, and the rest of it is wooden pavilions. It was built in 1327 for a Buddhist monk. Six hundred years passed. And then, after the end of the Qing dynasty, the wealthy industrialist Bei bought it for his family. Later, he donated it to the People’s Republic – all this according to a plaque. Donated willingly? It could be. I knew Sandy Pei at Harvard and even I had heard of his famous dad, the Chinese American architect, but not of his great uncle, or the family getaway in Suzhou, which was only an hour by train from our rooms at the Portman Ritz Carlton in Shanghai.

  In Shanghai, around the corner from the Portman Ritz Carlton, the same elderly man solicited me on two consecutive mornings. It’s possible the second time he didn’t remember me; more likely he didn’t care that I had said no the first time. He was thin, well-dressed, though casually, like a barber with his shirt out. “I’m a teacher,” he said on the second day. I could have responded, “Yes, I know, a teacher of painting.” “A teacher of painting,” he continued, following his script, just like a telemarketer. “Here….” He gave me several of his paintings on paper – birds, a moon over a lake, pine needles done with brush strokes. He wanted me to take them in my hands, as if that would lead me to take possession of them. I don’t know whether they were good or bad, but told him I had no money, even though that was a lie obvious to both of us.

  In Beijing, we went on a guided tour of the hutongs. After surviving for generations, these old neighborhoods may not last much longer. The cricket in a wooden basket singing outside the door to a room in Mr. Wu’s house was Eden favorite tourist attraction. I didn’t tell Eden that it wasn’t a basket, it was a cage, and though we might say the cricket was singing, it wasn’t singing. For her, this cricket outpolled the Forbidden City, rowboats in Behei Park, the Summer Place, and even the Great Wall, where we went on a cloudless day with our CITS guide, whose name was Ding Bin, though we were told to call him Steve.

  We made the train trip to Suzhou on our last afternoon in the People’s Republic. It rained, and my hotel umbrella open magnificently, like a blue lotus blossom. It was the best of the days. There was a bridge, a lake, and rain water pooled on a green lotus pad The water on the pad was wriggling, but not running, like a fluid surface on a green eyeball. It was one of those days when I thought that the life I have is as good as anybody’s. Later, I thought, probably not, though it doesn’t bother me. I am okay with it, and with being simply okay.

  *

  At home.
  It’s lonely here. Pam’s gone, staying the night elsewhere after one argument or another. We do have much different attitudes toward domestic conflict. I take as just part of the normal cycle. She bolts.
  When I pause for a moment tonight, it isn’t lonely; all it is, is night time. I can hear the hum of the hard drive, and the strike of a match. Smoke drifts from the bowl of my pipe. The computer monitor is as grey as dawn, and my house is as sacred as any cathedral, and I can silently mouth my prayers.

  *

  Watching television. I have to admire the reasonableness of Hanan Ashwari, who appears on Nightline with Ted Koppel and speaks for the Palestinians. She’s Ted’s friend. I like her exotic name, her dark eyes, and her articulate sorrow. She asks for an end to oppression and respect for the humanity of her people. She says, her people are under siege, and she notes that eleven Palestinians were killed today, by weapons, so she says, made in America. What would I say to her? If the man who hides behind you, Hanan, wants to kill my children, as I know he does, and if the only way to kill him is to kill you, too, then what should I do? What would you do?

  *

  I’m moving finally. I’ve lost the battle. I’ve bought another house, and now I have to sell. Goodbye, Wenonah. I won’t have to spell you for anyone much longer. Fifteen years later, I’m leaving 1986 behind. I’m leaving the upstairs bedroom where Dolores died, though I doubt leaving 1997 will ever be possible. My daughter says it isn’t things that matter, it’s what they mean. Things are brick or wood. But isn’t what these things mean just as impermanent, if we forget them? If everything passes, then how we feel is no more stable than a blue wall, St. Augustine grass, the red-tipped photinia in our front yard, the Kohler commode, and the stained hardwood floor. For however many years to come, I’ll be spelling out Guernsey Ln. to strangers, instead of Wenonah. Pam and Jason are already living there. In part, because she wants to; in part, because she is keeping her cottage in Highland Park and has already rented it out for her private income.

  The fireflies near the creek bed that borders the backyard of the new house on Guernsey have nothing to say to me, other than hello and goodbye. Turning on and off, they make their presence known by disappearance.

  I saw a blue heron in our creek. It appeared as if by magic. But there was no magic to it – only a succession of moments, connecting the dot of my eye to the dot of its beak. If I could run it all backwards to the very beginning of time, maybe we converge, my human and its heron. My skinny bird legs, my orange feet, and the splash of a prehistoric creek.

  I really don’t want to leave this home Dolores and I made. Ben doesn’t, either. As for Eden, who knows, she’s undisclosing. I should write a text now that speaks of separation, in words that drift apart as clouds do when there’s a wind. The words would break into individual letters, three here, nine there, and, hovering above them, the taps and clicks of the computer keys and, above that, my eight fingertips.

  *

  Remembering again.
  A Fourth of July, when my father would light a Roman candle on the sidewalk in front of our house on Belton Drive, delighting us, but not him, as it sparked and spurted. “That’s another five bucks shot to hell,” he would say. Joking, but also pointing out that pleasure, just like freedom, comes with a price.

  *

  Pam is in East Texas. I’ve stayed home, to keep watch over my unpleasant and unhappy children, who are here but not exactly with me. Pam calls me on the telephone to wish me goodnight before she goes to sleep. Sometimes in the evenings I want to be rescued, but I don’t know from what. From loneliness, from anger, too. But I don’t seem to be able to take hold of any life preserver, however dayglo orange and easy to see, with its strips of reflective silver that remind me of my wedding ring.

  I am thinking about making a trip to northern Mexico. I want to see ten million monarch butterflies as they open and shut their orange and black wings. It’s not far away, compared to the 2500 miles west and south these butterflies will have traveled to reach Michoacan and the Transvolcanic. The monarch is king of the butterflies. Neither Tudor nor Stuart, it belongs to the family Lycaenidae. Its larvae feed on milkweed, which makes its body bitter to blue jays –so much so that the birds won’t eat them and, if they do, will vomit them up. In the mountain village of Angangueo, in the sanctuaries of Rosario and Chincua, monarchs will cover the tall pine and fir trees. There are so many of them, I’m told, you can hear their wings beating. That’s a sound I want to hear. And not because the Aztecs believed that the souls of the dead are reborn as monarch butterflies, or because I am bored at work, or because my marriage is so imperfect, though all these things are true. I want to listen to a monarch’s fluttering wings, and then return through a cobblestone street of Valle de Bravo, and look back at the snow cap on the volcano Xinantecatl, so the deep green pine forests will appear in my dreams.

  *

  The air outside my window is as sweet as a plum. When the dog cocks his black head, I can still speak the truth, even if there is no one to hear it. What can I attribute my moodiness to? I attach it to my second marriage and, like a leech, it lives on my blood. I’m told by a therapist that I should try an anti-depressant, one a day, like a vitamin. I’m told my unhappiness may be of childhood origin, but I can hardly hold that against it – after all, I originated in my childhood, too. My unhappy mother, my silent father with his erratic temper, did that produce it? I’m as inclined to believe it’s the vacancy of the sky on this empty Sunday afternoon, which stays overhead, a cloudless cloud in my life, a nothing that nothing can fill. There are as many reasons as there are moments, and none of them are good.

  *

  The backyard on Guernsey is full of trees. They were here before us, and well before there was the house that the Linehan’s built, in 1951.

  Are the trees dangerous? The bois d’arc I am told has a tendency to fall down. Lying on my back on a stone bench near the creek and looking up at its leaves, it seems unlikely.

  *

  Pam has asked me again to write her a love poem. I could do that, though I am as likely to be swearing under my breath, depending on the day, that Pam has ruined my life. When I’m upset, it is to the mirror, or the shower wall. I’m drinking from a brackish well some days. I am less likely to talk to myself than to rant, which isn’t attractive. Then again, who else would I write to, if not to Pam? Judgment, blame, negativity, and anger. Yet, when I hear her say darling, it is a sword that slays all demons. Her Southern voice is a charm. The slenderness of her ankles, too.

  *

  Ben has to write about Beowulf for English. He hates it, this old story, with its dopey language. It makes no sense, it bores him. The text is a thicket of burrs, not a poem. I tell him, life is a difficult assignment that’s always due tomorrow. He laughs, and I’m dismissed. He just needs a topic sentence, not a life sentence.

  *

  Every evening Pam wants her glass of Cabernet, J. Lohr, from the hillsides of Napa, a place where the late afternoon light has a velvety quality. Like women seeking men in the personals columns, she enjoys sunsets, mellow jazz, popular novels, and walks in the woods. Nothing wrong with any of that. Negativity is a bad thing in her eyes, which are blue and as bright as buttons. Most people would agree with her. Even I would agree in theory, though the wolves of no have their place on my range, and sometimes seem to be necessary, if not essential, to the ecology of my happiness. But Pam has her slender wrists and forearms, freckles on both her shoulders, and sweet semicircles of teeth, even the crooked lower ones, with cigarette stains. Her black outfits have charm. Her sweaters, her pants that taper, her green plaid skirt, like a Catholic schoolgirl’s, although as a Methodist she has social propriety on her side – the plaid is more Highland Park Scot than Ursuline tradition.

  *

  In the stand near the grocery store check-out, a city magazine has an article on the best physicians in Dallas. The doctor who will be performing my colonoscopy this year is on the list. I hope fame doesn’t go to his head. The night before, I will be drinking Go Lightly, or some other oily emetic. What if one of my polyps is pre-cancerous or, beyond that, malign? Then the doctor will have a chance to exercise the skills that got him listed. Dr. Robert Jacobson was the same physician who handled Dolores’s surgery, after he discovered her colon cancer. He visited us in her post-op room at Baylor. She lay in the bed. I sat in the adjacent chair, which reclined into a bed of sorts. The TV was bracketed to a white wall. Dolores’s skin was yellowed from a dye. Dr. Jacobson came in to tell us both the bad news. “It’s inoperable, but it’s treatable.” He said he had patients at “one end of the bell curve” who had lived nine years. Dolores was dead five months later. Life goes on, so it does, but only for the living.

  *

  Reading the Elizabethan lyric poets. The love poems fall into a predictable pattern. There are verses that praise the fairness of the brow, which is a bit weird. There are comparisons to rubies, and there may be lines about burning or freezing. Some desperation is thrown into the soup. What woman would have been impressed by any of this? The poet, with ink stains on his shirt, his teeth browned by tobacco and uncorrected by orthodonture. In my experience woman are interested in two good things: physical comfort and laughter. A boyfriend’s anguish is entirely unappealing. The woman I’m with wants to stay at the Ritz Carlton and prefers the hilarity of her girlfriends to my somber company. Who could blame her? I prefer her girlfriends’ company to my own as well. She’s a beautiful landscaper who likes fly-fishing, and in her brown wading boots, in the middle of a stream, forgets all about me.

  *

  You can read plenty of wisdoms, the Dalai Lama’s, for example, about the power of patience. Or, going back in that tradition further, Shantideva’s quatrain that for a moment might talk anyone out of unhappiness. It goes something like this: Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied? And if it can’t be remedied, there’s no point being unhappy about it either. This is one of those wisdoms that strike me at first as being profoundly true but, upon further reflection, seem even more profoundly unhelpful.

  *

  Remembering Wenonah, the evenings in May and June 1997.
  The fig ivy loves to cling. It hugs the brick as if its life depended on it. It leaps the sill then, and comes right up the window. At night the lamplight reveals this ivy’s underside, which is pale green, with leaves the shapes of mouths. The moths are beating at the same hard glass that holds the ivy tight. For them, the attraction is elsewhere, and the glass nothing but a source of bewilderment or even frustration.

  *

  Ben hates school and is afraid of leaving home. He tells me he doesn’t want to go to college. I offer him the typical response that lots of young people feel that way and, besides, he’s still in high school and doesn’t have to go today. But I know he means it. He may end up working at Elliot’s True Value Hardware, one of those stores that has a hundred helpful employees, grown men who spend their days finding a homeowner the right molly bolt, measuring lengths of rope, or standing in the plumbing aisle. He’ll have his dreams of working with computers, but instead, at night, he’ll play Nintendo or watch TV. He might go into retail sales, though he’s shy. He could work at Micro Center selling keyboards and modems. He’ll take his paycheck out of its white envelope, tear it at the perforations, and wonder about all the deductions. He’ll keep beers in the refrigerator of his apartment. When his car needs a repair, it will be a crisis. He’ll make the minimum payment on his credit card and pay the usurious rates. He won’t go to the doctor once a year, or to a dentist ever. He’ll have his friends. Someone may love him. One day, it will be over, just as it will be for the editor of his prep school newspaper, the valedictorian, the point guard scouted by Indiana, the one who gives the speech on the promise of the future awaiting everyone in the graduating class.

  *

  Buying flowers today. The yellow gladiolas at All Occasions Florists stand at tight attention, waiting. Refrigerated, they keep their cool in a bucket. The white stargazers are waiting as well, near the counter, which has a portrait of Miss Gay America on it. It’s fine to wait, to cultivate patience, to wait after bringing the glads and the stargazers home for the yellow to droop and the white to open fragrantly and, a few days later, to fall. Everything waits for something, in the same way that, sooner or later, later always turns into sooner.

  The moon drifts at the end of our street. It seems completely out of place here, lighting our home’s brick veneer, its metal roof, the front yard grass. The clouds are stratus or cirrus – I could never keep that straight – whichever they are, they are wispy, and dissipating. The moon must be unimaginably cold. It can only shine with a light not its own, which is what the grass does, too. Don’t we all.

  *

  Laverne Cook died after what her obituary calls “a long struggle with cancer.” She was fifty-one. She was the special one who raised Ben and Eden, and the three of us attended the funeral. I worried that this might be the wrong thing for them to do, because now they were losing their second mother, if not their third. But there was no right choice, and we went. Laverne was eulogized “as a Christian” in the small white chapel in Elkhart. One of the men who sang her praises wore a lavender suit. He used a hand mike and sang. Heavy, probably with high blood pressure and too much salt in his diet, he offered a resolution for “Sister Cook.” Her coffin was white and as smooth as enamel. It was half-opened at the end, and we were invited to walk past to see her in repose, which we declined to do. And at end of that, we followed her casket in our car to Pilgrim’s Rest cemetery, where she was buried, before a lunch that was scheduled for the mourners at the Community Center, though by then, like her, we were gone.

  *

  When I consider the amount of time I’ve spent on my son’s homework, it amazes me that I don’t have a deeper expertise in world civilizations, and a minor specialty in the use of the topic sentence. I plead with him to do his work, while he strums on one of his guitars or declares that it doesn’t matter, like Pierre in the Maurice Sendak story that Dolores used to read to him, who also didn’t care – Pierre, I mean. Dolores always cared, and I do, too.

  *

  The view from midlife turns out to be unexpansive. The terrain is mostly ravine, occasionally canyon with a strip of sky overhead. No vistas, no horizons. It’s dry country – scrub, creosote, burrs, where everything sticks or stings. My prospects are as good as ever, or as bad, depending on how I look at it. Widowed once, and now practically expecting to sooner or later be divorced from Pam, which was a disappointment most of the people who knew me expected. I’m finishing out these years with my children. Then they’ll go off to college, or to wherever.

  I’ll go somewhere, too, even if it’s here, in this dry place, interesting only to the specialist who claims it for his own.

  Who was it singing that happiness is just an illusion? The Four Tops, a distant summer ago, on the airwaves of Los Angeles. But then the obstacles to happiness are illusions as well. Happiness is as pretty as the distant horizon and as airy as the sound of transistorized voices on the radio.

  I did go into a midlife marriage with both eyes open. Out of one eye, a mortgage, car payments, and tuitions. Best to put a patch over that eye. Then, out of the other eye, goat cheese, roasted garlic, wines, fine china and napkin rings, and sex while it lasts.

  *

  Still on Wenonah; not moving yet, not while this house is unsold. Perhaps I can refuse all the offers?

  The clock in my library has stopped. I’ve set the hands to the eleventh hour and left them there. The table in the library is a copy of a table from France in the nineteen thirties. That was also a bad time, for some, though the furniture is still stylish, even in this veneered version. The clock belonged to my mother-in-law, Dolores’s nutty mother, who claimed to have married seventeen times. The table came from the Roxy on Greenville Avenue. Everything comes from somewhere, and everything has its time.

  *

  At fifty, I may not be at peace but I’m falling into place. I’m not going to be President, or ever pitch an inning of major league ball. Of course I never wanted that. I can hear my coda and declare comfortably all the things I will never do. I might be an acrobat of sorts, but I’m never going to run away to join the circus, or sail around the world, or seek a fortune that I don’t already have. My intentions now are to grow old. I’ve buried Dolores, unhappily remarried, taught myself to stay satisfied for the most part, and I’ve carried on, like a good soldier. Years of writing at night, all of it for just one reader. There are nearly two thousand places to publish poetry, according to this year’s Poet’s Market. Imagine the thousands of poets writing, the hundreds of editors willing to read their work, in upstate New York or Yuma, Arizona. Nonetheless, I’m writing too, putting down a dry, discursive vision, not so different than William Blake did, with his worlds of burning tigers and his forests in the night.

  *

  If I intend to give up my grievances, I will need to act more like my dog, who leaps at the atrium door, eager to get back in, even though I’m the one who put him out, his head slinking, as though he could hide from me. Either he’s forgotten the injustice of my actions, or he’s just forgiven it, or doesn’t care, which is the probable explanation. Wally’s happy enough in his grey coat and leather collar. A barker, he has no ability to lower his voice; even if he had secrets he wouldn’t be able to whisper them. He seems to want nothing at the moment other than to come back inside; then, to be scratched behind his head. This is his home. He has his tags in case he gets lost, but if he’s lost, it’s only because he’s gone, running out a gate that I forgot to close. He doesn’t run to escape me, or because he’s a bad dog, but to pursue something exotic on the neighbor’s grass. I can understand his attitude, though I can’t share it. I’ve never had hairy paws, or a wet black nose to follow.

  *

  I’m reading books on restoring relationships and “things to try before you say goodbye.” Of course, this isn’t what I had in mind when I remarried. What I do have in mind now is peaceful coexistence, the way sovereign states, their borders more or less secure, learn to put their weapons away. Perhaps I can mediate my differences with Pam, agree on the shape of the table, begin peace talks, and, after years of shuttling to and from one ornate room after another, arrive at a broad green lawn to celebrate a signing ceremony. We will still be wary, and each of us will recognize the other’s foreign customs, but we will agree to an end of outward hostilities, as we kiss each other first on one cheek and then on the other, diplomatically.

  *

  Thinking back, but not too far back. Just to the months before the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed by two airplanes, the same day we “closed” on the house, which was new to us although it was built in the 1950s. Pam’s mother has asked me if I plan to tear it down. Unfortunately, my only plan, which I don’t want to implement, is put my Wenonah house up for sale. Ben and Eden don’t want it sold, either.

  *

  November 2021

  I’m asked what I want for my fiftieth birthday, as if there were anything that could be bought that I really want. I try to take the request seriously and promise to spent a noon hour looking for the answer at the mall. I’ll go looking in the windows of Neiman Marcus at NorthPark. It’s mostly women’s fashion there, which suggests that Pam should instead buy something for herself. Maybe spikey black heels, I would like that. Or some Chanel fragrance, so when we’re closer I can smell the fields of lavender, insouciance, the voluptuous skies of the south of France, or whatever that fragrance is meant to evoke. Browsing at Oshman’s, I think, maybe a personal trainer might be in order. At the tobacconist, they recommend a meerschaum pipe. I could clean it with a brush dipped in brandy. The tobacco is in bins, with names like Lord Peacock’s Blend and Royal Pleasure. The names of pipe tobaccos are not all that dissimilar from the names of condoms – not that I’m a purchaser of those. There are wristwatches, v-neck sweaters, large-as-life televisions, a compact disc of Chet Baker’s Paris sessions. Pam can pick out an Armani tie or an alligator wallet. Better yet, a magic wand to wave away the rift between us. What if I try saying what I think in lieu of confessing wrongdoing. Her gift to me could be accepting it.

  Are the eyes the windows of the soul, as was said long ago? Pam’s are blue, but they are more icy than sunny, more glacier than sky, a moraine, with traces of both gravel and star, two equations with their x and y that made sense once but have become, most of the time now, unsolvable.

  *

  According to the news, someone is sending anthrax through the mail. It arrives, simple organisms, as innocent as the vegetables in the cans my mother used to open for dinner in our kitchen in a suburb of Los Angeles, green beans at so many removes from a garden that even their green was theoretical. As for the anthrax, it turns out, upon testing, not be anthrax at all, but just a powder.

  *

  At the house on Wenonah, because the walls and even the ceilings are adobe red and, in some rooms, a blue no sky has ever been, a vase of yellow flowers can make a striking impression. They are a display of cheerfulness, of sunniness, of a domesticity that is comforting and, in a way, female. Yellow gladiolas do the trick. Sunflowers work, too, though they have dark centers. Mostly I stick with gladiolas, in bunches.

  There are late nights, after one in the morning but before two, when my thoughts flicker like the moths bouncing off the yellow light on the porch. My ideas are neither true nor false, but energetic and apt to disappear suddenly. Sometimes I will think that I am the victim of a persecution. Or, that it will rain for forty days and forty nights, so I had better build an ark, or at least purchase a better umbrella. Still, it’s easy enough to make these thoughts go away. Turn off the porch light. Walk upstairs to bed. Pull the covers up to my neck. I can then wonder, did all the moths flutter down for the night, settling their sticky feet on the lantana? Or did they take off for the streetlamps, or for the moonlight reflected on the bumper of a parked truck, or for the lighted houses of sleepless neighbors.

  *

  Friday night. The plan is to go over to the house of Pam’s best friend and her husband, neither of whom I want to see. Too bad, because we also have tickets to the opera, Simon Bocanegra, a Verdi I have never heard, except on the two-disc CD set I bought to prep for the performance. I also have the libretto, which reads like one of the soap operas on the Spanish language station, where characters display their fury and the women show as much of their chests as permissible. It’s an improbably story, as they all are. A daughter lost and then regained, politics, misunderstandings, death, and big bass voices. But then maybe this is no more mysterious than the leaves on the red oak outside my window this fall evening, or having a light German beer after work in the courtyard of Gingerman, guys at other tables talking about high school ball, college ball hockey, unreasonable girlfriends, one fellow shrugging and offering by way of explanation, “She’s cute, and she swallows.” I wonder what the Italian for that is. The wind in the Gingerman courtyard was over our heads. It was on our shoulders. It sent the slender curls of dry leaves down on the outdoor tables, like pieces of ordinance falling on some faraway place — over, as they are now describing on the news, Afghanistan.

  *

  The noise in Dolores’s throat at the end of her life was described, predictively, as a death rattle. Despite that description by a hospice nurse, her push of exhalation and her sharp inhaled gasps of air over mucus didn’t sound like a rattle. It was nothing as loose as grains inside a gourd. It didn’t sound anything like beads sealed in a sterling silver dumbbell keepsake that might be inscribed in cursive script with a newborn’s first, middle and last names. And it wasn’t like the interlocking horny rings at the end of a snake’s tail, tilted upward and shaking, as it warns a stranger off from its bit of shade in the desert; though, as a signal, it turned out to be just as deadly.

  *

  The millstone of the milestone of my fiftieth birthday is around my neck, dragging me down to earth. I’d like to believe that I’m only at the halfway point. It’s the bend in the road, at which I turn gently in a different direction, maybe toward a horizon where the setting sun is picturesque, if I don’t think about it too much. I could also be a u-turn, a doubling back to the beginning of the same road. And because return trips so often seem quicker, I’ll be back before I know it at the place I was, before I was born.

  Soon enough fifty will be yesterday. And a year or two after that, fifty will be young. It will be remembered, forgotten, or confused with forty-nine or fifty-one, the way I try to remember a birthday dinner with Ben and Eden at Panda’s, where we had Firecracker Beef and two desserts. First, the fried ice cream was served with dishes of strawberry topping. That was always Eden’s favorite. And then, with the bill for the table, those brittle fortune cookies arrived. The three of us cracked them open, so their tongues of white paper could have their say. The messages would always be cheerful enough, but our tradition was to not share them with each other, not out loud, for fear they would never come true.

  *

  A bas la loi Debre!
  A slogan, painted graffiti, which I saw on a wall in Paris in 1973 and never forgot. In part because of the charm of the rhyme in it, but mostly because it spoke to me of defiance and unhappiness and youth.

  It referred to a law reforming military service, promoted by Michel Debre, Minister of National Defense and a former Prime Minister (the first of the French Fifth Republic, who served under President de Gaulle from 1959 to 1962). Debre’s father was Jewish, it turns out. He was a professor of medicine described in Wikipedia as the founder of modern pediatrics. And Debre’s grandfather was a rabbi. Debre, the one behind la loi, was Roman Catholic.

  What was la loi Debre? It reduced the length of military service to one year, but also repealed student deferments beyond the age of 21. It was intended to rejuvenate the spirit of service in the military, but it led to strikes at high schools and public demonstrations, protests against the military, students fearing that their studies would be stopped by military service, with no reprieve by prolonging their stays in graduate programs. In March, 1973, 200,000 demonstrated in Paris. Far-left activists, led by the Communist League, went into the streets as well. In April, more than 500,000, mostly young, marched in cities across France. I landed in Paris that May, or was it April, after driving east from Berkeley with Laura and taking a $189 flight on Air Icelandic, with a stopover in Reykjavic, destination Luxembourg, and then a train into Paris.

  A bas la loi Debre! It was spraypainted on walls next to the patisserie where I bought my flan. Down with the rabbi’s grandson!

  *

  One of the benefits of Pam’s house in the country is the opportunity it gives me to observe spiders, wasps, hornets, and scorpions. They are all innocent. Still, I will prod them with sticks, stomp them beneath my cowboy boot, use a sneaker to smash them on the tile in one of her bathrooms, or the living room carpet. It doesn’t scare the rest away.

  Lying in a hammock outside, I can hear a high-pitched cry. It sounds like distress. Looking up through the grid of branches and leaves, with blue sky in the spaces in between, I can see a hawk. And then the hawk vanishes, without a cloud to hide behind. There’s nowhere for it to go, and so it seems to have gone into nowhere. It has gone into that blue place where everything lost goes. That must be the most crowded place in the universe. That must be where the dead are, along with misplaced keys, forgotten phone numbers, torn-up grocery lists, and the discarded cheap vase that comes from the florist when a gift of flowers is delivered after a funeral. All the years I’ve left behind are there, too, impossible to change. The future, which as the lyric of a Jackson Browne song suggests may be no easier to change, is headed there, too.

  *

  What I’ve learned as I try to train Wally to walk on my left, or to respond to any directive — sit, down, stay — is that commands cannot be questions. And I’ve learned that the desire to please, so fundamental to obedience, cannot compete with the pleasure of strange grass.

  *

  A phrase I read today: “to be in happy dialog with the music of the world.” But does one have dialog with a form that doesn’t use words?
  Dialog with the lyrics, maybe, but never with the melody.

  *

  Looking around the yard at Guernsey, and focusing on:
  The serrated edges of leaves.
  Rosemary, with its forest scent, which is woody and spikey.
  I am challenged by seeing and observing, by the ordeal of not just passing through, but actually noticing.
  I want to be more than I am. Better at seeing. But why?

  *

  There are seven guitars in our house on Wenonah, one piano, and three beds. At night it’s the beds that are making music. I can hear the soughing sounds of breathers, of Ben and Eden, the chord progressions of mattress and box springs, the cadence of sheets and pillowcases. The guitars hold their peace. They’ll hang over my son’s neck in the daylight. The piano has its toothy grin. It probably knows more than it’s saying. It tries to keep its dignity, although it’s completely neglected by my daughter, who has refused to practice and has abandoned her lessons.

  *

  The day after Thanksgiving.
  I heard my name in a crowd on the way out of the shopping mall. This, on one of those bright blue fall days, unseasonably warm, although the National Weather Service is predicting snow by mid-week. I turned my head, anticipating recognition. It’s my name, after all. So what if others share it? I only need a first name to know who I am.
  The front will be coming through soon enough. I’ll see the breath that I also need, and not just one, but one after another.

  *

  Ben delays doing homework and sometimes leaves it undone. He says it doesn’t matter, the topic sentence for English, the Latin vocabulary words, his junior year physics, the drawings of tessellation for geometry. He doesn’t seem to want even a sip of the offered cocktail of Beowulf and quadratic equations, Latin declensions, the War of the Austrian Succession, and basic computer, or an olive of theology. Ben was doing nothing out of the ordinary this morning. He drove himself to Jesuit, the “preparatory school,” where he receives the education that he tolerates but neither enjoys nor understands. This morning, though, he may have learned something. Sleepy-eyed, though awake enough, he tried to turn left on a yellow light at the busy intersection of Inwood and Mockingbird, just a few blocks from our house on Wenonah. He might not have seen the car accelerating northbound, which was also trying to beat the light. The crash must have terrified him. The air bag burst out of the steering wheel in his black Volvo, blistering his hand. Was he cursing, the way he does at even a small frustration? He called me in a panic. By the time I reached him, he was clutching his inhaler, and the EMT team had him in a neck brace. When he was placed in the ambulance, I noticed that he had failed to take schoolbooks with him. He had left the reading for theology on the floorboard of his totaled car. That was probably no accident.

  I brought the reading to Parkland emergency for him, in case he wanted to study one or more of the seven sacraments.

  *

  Sleeping later these days. Half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes, because I have no children to drive to school. It’s winter break. Two pieces of rye toast and a cup of coffee. With every year, these children are less mine, if they ever were.

  *

  Pam is staying in another house, our new one on Guernsey.
  Before we married, she was divorced and unattached for nine years. I admire the independence of her pleasures. She knows how to make a fire with newspaper, kindling and logs from under a tarp outside the back door. She’s certain that tomorrow’s glass of Cabernet will be just as good as yesterday’s. I do wish there were fewer ways to offend her. For example, failing to offer her the right gift is an offence. It may be the thought that counts, but it doesn’t count for very much.

  *

  Remembering Dolores. Memory is like a pool of light in the orchestra pit, at the opera, when the hall darkens, and the singers are on their marks behind the curtain. What is buried is treasured, even if it will never be unearthed. Nothing is lost, it belongs where it is, anticipatory, waiting for me.

  What’s the news today? A friend’s father has died in another city. Waking at five on a winter morning, it’s hours early, but once awake is awake for good. This is a day that begins in darkness.

  *

  Christmas Eve – temperatures are falling.
  So much of what I’m reading makes no sense to me. The Dalai Lama, for example, who is revered without being understood. And Jesus, what about him? Talk about a misunderstanding!

  Things are often half true, but it’s impossible for me to know which is the true half. Like the glass half full, though the empty half is there to see. I’m drinking from it. But from a cup of sweet honey as well, into which I can dip a slice of apple, so crisp, although on its edge, if I look for it, I can see it’s beginning to turn brown.

  *

  What exactly do I bring to the table? And to which table, exactly? The table in Pam’s dining room on Auburndale was so heavy it took four men to move it. It was a beast, with its fat wooden legs carved into paws, and a thick glass top as its jawbone. I can offer a compound of stubbornness and memory, and my occasional sense of persecution. And there are certain truths that no one needs to tell me; for example, that even if sorrow is as shallow as a puddle, you can still drown in it.

  *

  Petty crime? Crime is petty in the same way that daylight is broad or facts are plain.

  If I have a thought but cannot put it into words, what form, then, is it in? Wordsworth wrote that some thoughts are too deep for words. Many things are too deep for words, but a thought is not one of them.

  *

  After I bought my first pipe in Harvard Square, I memorized Baudelaire’s poem Le Pipe. I also owned a second-hand Harris Tweed coat. It was salt and pepper, with leather patches on the elbows. Its tag said it came from the Outer Hebrides, but it was at home in my closet in Cambridge, a student’s costume, like the skeleton suits children wear for Halloween, all black, with the bones in white. I also had a pea coat from the Army Navy store, and a blue work shirt, though never one with the raised clenched fist stenciled on it. When I was a junior, I borrowed a bicycle so I could pedal all the way to Waltham, to hear J.V. Cunningham, the poet that Yvor Winters admired. J.V. Cunningham taught English at Brandeis. These days, Waltham seems further away than the Outer Hebrides, a place that I see in my mind’s eye, with its North Sea and winds whipping cusps of sea foam below outcroppings of grass. Baudelaire used to smoke a pipe. In his poem, he compared the tar in its bowl to the dark face of an Abyssinian. I’ve been smoking now for thirty years. Not continuously, of course, but after dinner, and later at night, keeping company with a New York Review of Books, a collection of Joan Didion’s political essays, or John Cheever’s stories, the smoke from my pipe as grey as wool.

  *

  It’s one of those days. It’s the kind of day when how’s it going? – a question I answer pro forma with Fine or deflect with Hi, how are you – would be better answered it’s one of those days. Dissatisfaction is the order of the day. Even the cat knows it. She has regurgitated the brown pebbles she’s been eating every morning for years. Maybe the sameness of cat cuisine has finally, today, made her want to throw up. The blue of the sky this morning pools around the stone of the sun. The yellow stripe in the middle of the road on my way to work has a touch of jaundice. When I have a cup of coffee at Starbucks, the tall is a small, and I wonder what would my father think of these prices. Half-a-century ago at Les Deux Magots, Sartre, after a sour wine, thought up a philosophy of nausea. He declared himself to be as blue as the sky, and his soul, not that he believed that he had one, to be the color of swooning.

  *

  2002

  Sometimes, there’s nothing better to do than doing nothing. Weekends can be like that. Nothing necessary, no chores, bills, supervision of the children’s homework, no work or what might be taken for work on Saturdays. So today, Saturday, I took Highway 890 all the way to Canton. There’s a country market in Canton, where you can buy English bulldogs and rat terriers from country people, who enjoy dominion over the animals. The market is called Dogtown. Of course, we city people enjoy being masters, too. Hence, leashes. We look down on dogs, however affectionately. We think we are better than dogs. As for the dogs, they don’t know any better. For them, as long as there’s no hunger or suffering, there may be no such thing as better or worse. There might not even be no better than, or no comparing. Do does make no such judgment because they have no judgment? Do dogs ever notice, for example, how ugly most of the country people are? Thick- featured and heavy-bellied, bad teeth and poor clothes, the locals walk around, talking and gawking. The dogs forgive all. Hemingway defined nobility as “grace under pressure.” But then, he was human. There’s also the nobility of the rat terrier. It consists of not passing judgment.

  *

  What to do when someone you dislike has misfortune? Ron Sullivan has cancer, and it needs to be cut from the wall of his colon. How did he hear the news? Not in a routine physical, because whatever burrows in the intestines does so secretively. He must have had symptoms, maybe some blood in the stool, or fatigue, or something else that led him to bring his worries to a specialist. Ron’s frightened now. However malevolent he is, he is the same as an innocent child. In illness each of us is equally innocent, the victim of being human.

  *

  Meeting Pam for lunch at Antone’s today. Or taking her for a cup of coffee. Or holding hands and walking along Turtle Creek. Just for today, wherever we do, we probably should not talk too much. There are days we can be great talkers, fast talkers, chatterboxes, but today, let’s not, because conversation is a puzzle, and it can be a trap. Lately, the words tumbling out of our months have not been landing on their feet. They have stumbled. Even our thoughts have put us at risk. Thoughts that are in a fog all day go untucked in at night.

  We haven’t talked seriously to each other in a long time. So why stop now?

  *

  One in the morning. It’s too late and also too early. Far to the east, the sun is already burning a sacred bush. Here, on Guernsey, a bird trills in the dark, a mix of drowsiness and alarm. There are so many ways for my life to proceed in the dead of night. Tomorrow, or the next life, you never know which will come first.
  At one in the morning, tomorrow and today are the same day.

  *

  My father, who is eighty-six, had a stroke a month ago. A mild stroke. Now he’s received a call that his cousin’s wife has died in Los Angeles. He wants to go the funeral; or, he wanted to go, but it’s a three-hour drive north, which my mother thought was ridiculous for a man in his condition. Risky, at best, for a man his age. Frightened either for her husband or for herself, she has refused to go with him.

  *

  A trip to Maine –

  The Wyeths are the local deities on Monhegan Island, which is off the coast of Maine, east of Camden. It’s said that they own the big house, the one that turns its back to visitors and its face to the Atlantic. Pam and I are visiting the island, with her friend, Lisa, who grew up in New Hampshire. Lisa’s a former dancer, a bit of hustler now. She used to be Michael Bolton’s girlfriend and likes to mention it.

  For us tourists, the nicest place on the island is a rented room with a bathroom down the hall.

  *

  Three matchbooks, two of them matchboxes.
  One is from The Crow’s Nest, a bar at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage. I chatted with two guys from Houston there. We noted that Houston is also a frontier on the edge of water.
  The brown Chaya Venice matchbox has a gold border. Its type, also gold, reverses out of the brown. It’s a clever little box. It says product of Japan, but also claims to come from Newton, Massachusetts. Its matches are sturdy little things, fat splinters, with white heads as fragile as eggshells; the glint in them seems ready to burst into flame.
  The third is another box. It’s a somber, brown rectangle from a place where sunlight is precious. It advertises Sonnenberg, a restaurant at 15 Hitzigweg, Zurich.
  All of them souvenirs, from Alaska, California, Switzerland.
  All three are in bed together. They’ve snuggled up to my pipe, on the white ceramic ashtray from Suvretta House, St. Moritz.

  *

  A Buddhist thought – to think well of others is the source of happiness. When our minds are full of ill will, more often than not it leads us to our own unhappiness. This is natural.

  A wisdom from the West – if pain is a principal obstacle to happiness, are Darvocet or Vicodin a path out? A tablet can be taken “every four hours as needed for pain.” Somewhere, there’s a factory manufacturing happiness, or at least removing an obstacle to it.

  *

  Many tasks fall under the heading “If I don’t do this when I’m tired, I’ll never do it.” For example, polishing the silver, practicing piano, grounding a rule-breaking teenager (after a parent makes one of those if then pronouncements).
  So many things are like this.

  *

  Lying in bed, and looking at shadows and flashes on the back of my eyelids.

  *

  Ben, Eden and I are very close to moving from Wenonah Drive to Guernsey Lane. We’re about to move into the “new home” I’ve owned since the closing, September 11, 2001, at a title company in Preston Center. We call it moving, but it feels like leaving. Why is this so difficult? After all, I do it in miniature every day. I leave my bed, sooner or later. There’s never been a day I didn’t leave home. I’m moving all the time. No wonder I’ll be exhausted when the time finally comes to leave this house behind.

  What am I giving up? The neighborhood of Greenway Parks? After sixteen years on Wenonah, I can’t name the neighbors three doors down.

  And when the day finally comes to truly eave everything behind? Someone will pack me up like dishes. Two men and a truck are all it will take, to take me away. There won’t be a fragile or this side up on the mortuary bag or, two days later, on my coffin.

  *

  Pencils should be orange for the same reason road signs are, as a warning of hazard and of curves ahead. The loud color signals that this wooden hexagon should be handled cautiously. Even the pencil’s point is dangerous. It’s dark and slippery as a dog’s nose at the end of a tapering snout, and it can bite. I suppose there’s fecundity in the pencil’s orange, too — sunshine, and roadside groves of trees. Think of the schoolchild picking up a pencil and filling in rows of empty lozenges on a standardized test. He longs to release from the thin orange cocoon a butterfly of doodles.

  *

  What am I keeping on my desk, which is so crowded? Much of it provides me the evidence of my inability to say goodbye. I have a coaster handmade in Greece, which Louis Lane, the former Dallas Symphony Orchestra conductor, gave Dolores. There’s an ashtray from Suvretta House in St. Moritz, and matchbooks that are mementos as much as advertisements. One from Chaya Venice, on Navy Street, another from the Shilla, which is the grandest hotel in Seoul. Sometimes the most difficult question about objects is also the simplest: What are they doing here? The matchbooks on my desk, the white ceramic ashtray from the Suvretta House, a pipe planted in a soil of ash, the six or seven charred matches. I have a short answer: they’re reminding me. Sometimes the memory is as thin as smoke; other times it glows, like a fire.
  One of the matchbooks is from Winrock Farms, Morrilton Arkansas. It was a souvenir Dolores never threw away, from her life before me. So, not my memory, other than of her telling me that she and her friend Sandy had gone there, where Winthrop Rockefeller, or more likely his employees, were raising Santa Gertrudis cattle. One of them – let’s say Sandy — knew Winthrop Rockefeller, and maybe was sleeping with him.

  *

  Lines written in the first hours of the day, unaffected by dawn. It’s pitch dark still. Lines having nothing to do with musicians, or a smoky night life, that life that is described as chatter and loneliness at the same time; whatever smoke rises above them comes from the blackened bowl of a pipe, not from a cigarette between the lips of a bass player. Lines at the end of the work day, after the woman and the children have gone to bed. Lines written by a widower, in the first hours of a new marriage. And if they were written quickly, it’s because they were written by a husband.

  *

  Common enough, a commonplace, even, to compare our hidden internal life to an object in the observable world. Joy soars like a bird, if we can believe what we sometimes read. Grief is a shadow. Sometimes the comparison is muscular. It does some heavy lifting. But most of the time, not; it’s mostly flab.

  There is an illusion that we can make the unseen visible, although we can’t. So, on a summer evening, when a white egret, its yellow feet pointed backward, rises through the channel of the creek at the boundary of my new house, I have a glimpse, for a moment, of my own feelings disappearing. As if in a magic trick, right before my eyes; the bird is gone. A panel of unbiased judges might award all eights and nines to this performance.

  I’m in a hammock fastened between two hickory trees at the edge of the creek. Where in the thickening light did the egret go? When I turn in the hammock, hoping to catch a last look, the hammock sags under my weight. I’m unbalanced, in the ungrieving shadows of the trees, and swaying in the hammock’s net. And my thoughts? They are like fish too small to be caught in the netting, slippery and silver-sided and swimming only in my imagination. It’s better so. Better that they escape in the watery air, imagined and unseen. Better that they are not visible in my hand, with a hook in their mouths, gasping and unintelligent. I don’t want to see them that way, at the moment of their deaths.

  *

  When the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, the dog, lying on St. Augustine grass, opened its glassy eyes. Its plume of a tail began to beat cheerfully. This was something different, the lazy dog thought, something remarkable. The belly of a fox, which the dog saw out of its one good eye. Eight pink teats and a fringe of reddish fur, passing like a dream. Who says there is nothing new under the sun. But then the miracle of the moment was over, and, for the lazy dog there was as much purpose and even more pleasure in the softness of the mowed grass, in the warmth of noon, and in the twitch of eyelids closing down again, as there might have been in any chase.

  *

  Thoughts after reading a few pages of Isak Dinesen –
  To the catalog of unlikely adventures that will not occur anytime in my lifetime, add the steep, huffing climb up Mt. Kilimanjaro. I am unlikely to breathe in the dust from the musty carpets at the historic Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. The coffee plantation and home of Baroness Karen von Blixen will be left to my imagination, as I’m at home, with a cup of instant Folgers. Soon enough, backing out of my driveway on my way to work, then turning left on Inwood Road, I will not be driving past the beehive-shaped thatched houses and terraced fields of the Kikuyu farmers on my way to remote Meru Park on the eastern side of the Nyambene Hills. There’s a green arrow at the intersection of Inwood and Mockingbird, but no three hundred species of birds, and no riverine forest or savannah woodlands. If I made my private camp in an idyllic clearing on the median of Armstrong Parkway, I would be arrested by the Highland Park police and placed into a clean squad car. There is no riverbank anyway, and no camp staff providing hot water, or baking fresh bread daily and serving meals from the camp kitchen. So I won’t take the scenic drive up the forested slopes of the Aberdare Mountain Range to the lodge overlooking a waterhole, where game comes to drink. That, too, is out. No superb game viewing will be possible today. And tonight, returning home from my office, I’ll forgo both alpine landscapes and the dense forests broken by giant heath and scrub, where I won’t spot a colobus monkey or a bushbuck, or decide to camp for the night on the banks of a hippo pond at ol Maisor, which is the ranch of Jasper Evans, a third-generation cattle and camel rancher, and a fascinating character. I’ll also skip in this lifetime my drive to Lake Baringo and the refreshing swim at the Lake Baringo Club. As for the drive to Lake Bogoria National Reserve, where there are tens of thousands of flamingos as well as several elusive kudu, I might as well not try to recall it, or to say anything of the views of the surrounding Rift Valley and, at one end of the valley, the Maasai Mara, that vast expanse of undulating grass and woodlands in the southwest corner of Kenya, on the border with Tanzania. No wildebeest viewing for me, no zebra, buffalo, elephant, cheetah, lion, leopard, impala, or gazelle. No hike with the local Maasai or, in the evening, around the campfire, an iced drink in my privileged hand, no cocking my ear for the night sounds of grunting hippos. I’ll be skipping all of it, including the return to Nairobi, the final farewell dinner at the Carnivore restaurant, the flight back to London, then on to New York and finally home. That’s where I may actually join the journey, beginning at its very end, like a tenth grader assigned Out of Africa flipping to the last chapter rather than plowing through the dreary text. I’ll skim this once-in-a-lifetime experience that won’t occur for me even once. I can however savor being back, the familiarity of impossible teenagers, two dogs, the expanses of St. Augustine grass, begonias in the summer, caladiums in the fall, and the pansies when the weather turns colder, as it will begin to do any day now.

  *

  Virgil Suarez, poet of the little magazines, your name recurs more often than your lines. You were as prolific as opuntia in the desert and hardier than creosote. You were both the plant and the ploughman. You worked the ground that was mostly sand, home to salamanders, and where nettles were flowers. One year, when there was less than an inch of rain, you set about becoming other things: husband, father, widower, husband again, wage earner, business owner. And all that time you were saying to yourself, I am poet, and sometimes even shouting it.

  *

  People come and go. The qwerty keyboard is a constant. What am I doing here? Expressing myself. I always wanted to be good at something. It turns out that one of the things I’m best at is typing.

  No bills in the mail today. When they do come, they only have PO boxes for their return addresses. They are uniform in intent and format, with their account summary details, their explanations of terms, and their instructions to please mail payments to, colon. I’m waiting for mail without dotted lines or any instruction to save this portion for my records. I want mail with no request to please detach here and return with payment. Mail without the stale formality of a demand to make it payable to or the insincerity of please and thank you. The politeness of my bills is rude. If I have a question, I can call (Toll Free), because they value my business. Do I have any questions? As if there were answers to the question I have, which is when will this end, working like a slave for MasterCard and living under the i of Citi. I want to transport the authors of the fine print in a timbrel over cobblestoned streets and hear the rabble scream for their heads.

  *

  Patti phones me today from Baden, where she has her small house on Spang Road. It’s outside Pittsburgh. She says she’s frightened and having a bad time. The Celexa isn’t for her, no one can help her, and her mornings are a panic. Using Ativan, she alleviates some of the fear, but not nearly enough. What does she think I can do? My phone is on a national plan; all cell phones seem to be now. So, so I can chat with her long distance for an hour, and there’s no charge. In the childhood Patti and I shared, our parents never wanted to incur a “toll charge.” And this call from Patti, however desperate, is one of my mother’s wishes come true. A brother and sister are talking.

  I’ll go to see her. Even if I cannot help, going will help.

  *

  Another weekend in East Texas. What am I doing out here? I usually ask myself that question at some point, when I’m invited “out to the country” for a weekend. Then again, what am I doing anywhere? I’m observing the walls at Pam’s place, which are painted Ralph Lauren colors. The brown has shades of grey and purple. I call back to the city to check on three teenagers, who are happy to have been left behind. My stepson answers. He asks, “How is the ranch?” and I answer, “How is the ranch?” He says, “How are things out there?” Pam likes to refer to her 20 acres in Montalba as “the ranch,” and Jason has picked up on it. He’s seeking status, I suppose, as best he can. I tell him there are fields, a full moon, a night sky, and everything is pretty much as he remembers. He laughs, but whether he’s laughing at the silliness of his question or the mockery in my response, I don’t know. More likely his laughter is politeness, as perfunctory as an echo and as devoid of intention as the moonlight.

  *

  A different weekend. Grilling steaks, which have five or seven minutes on a side at most, before they will be torn to pieces. They don’t last long. Neither do the insects around the grill, which have little to do other than reproduce, and not much time to do it. Their lives are a quickie. And then there’s the fate of the twilight, which is briefer than the interval between the appearance and the disappearance of smoke from the grill. Smoke billows when I lift the lid, then disperses into shapelessness. The sky’s dark already. In the darkness, the fiery edges of the coals, a burial mound of briquettes that will burn for hours and give off heat long past their use.

  *

  I had a moving sale a month ago, before leaving Wenonah Drive for our home on Guernsey Lane. I gave away the flat metal casting of a French corsair that I had bought at the estate sale of a folk artist the Dallas Morning News called the Texas Kid. I saw it again, today. It was docked in the stall of an antique shop on Industrial Boulevard, where Pam and I shopped for salvaged doors and a garden gate. The dealer is asking ninety dollars for it. Of all the gin joints, I had to walk in here. The green hull of the corsair, the masts with brown threads for rigging, even the tiny tricolor flag – they’ve all been buffed; they look valuable now. Will anyone wonder about the home it sailed away from? Its port had been my two-story house in Greenway Parks, sold after my wife’s death and emptied of some of its keepsakes, the boxes of Ninja Turtles, used clothing, a few plates, a disassembled crib, a favorite chair, and a metal corsair that some would consider folk art. There was no place for it in the smaller house on Guernsey, or in my new marriage. This new house is why I am here on Industrial. Pam says we need a gate 52 inches wide to span a stone path leading to a crescent island of azalea bushes, which floats on an open sea of grass. We also need white carved doors for a bedroom that is now the port that will shelter us, for a while, from various storms.

  *

  Ben is a senior at Jesuit Preparatory School this year. He answers his counselor’s question “where will you attend college” with a declaration that he has no idea. He is guileless, and has given a response notable for a lack of subtlety not usually associated with Jesuits. Not for him debates about triune mysteries, transubstantiation, or making the unseen visible. On the other hand, he might have had plenty to say if he had been asked instead about the visible stars of professional basketball. He knows that twenty-three is the number of playoff games that Michael Jordan has won in the last second with a miraculous game-winning shot (and that number is the same as Jordan’s jersey number). Or that Jordan ranks in the top ten of every single career total category, except for blocks. He could have said so, though he just as likely wouldn’t have. He’s a quiet, very insecure child. He’s uncertain of speech. He withdraws. He retreats to his room, falls back into silence, monastic in his simplicity and like an angel in devotion to his gods.

  *

  Ben uses the phrase “I have no idea” so easily, as though it were one of the few phrases he has memorized in a difficult foreign language. What is also disconcerting about Ben is not that he uses that phrase, but that he seems to have no interest in finding the answer to whatever question prompted it. And those questions are typically of the sort that most of us worry about most. What do you want to do with your life? I have no idea. Where do you want to live? I have no idea. Do you want to marry and have children? I have no idea. And I also don’t care, one way or another. That seems to be under the surface of his responses. He is a poster child for the directionless.

  *

  The time arrives, night after night, when I can no longer delay going to bed. My teeth have been brushed. The statin that manages my cholesterol has been taken. I’ve outlasted midnight. I’ve stayed at my desk past midnight. I can’t think of another sentence, much less type one. I can’t read another page. When the same thought occurs twice, or I read the same sentence twice, that’s my signal that it’s time to give in. Surrendering, with an uninhibited yawn, to the silence of the armchairs and rugs, I close my eyes and switch off the desk light. I close them first, so, when I open them again, the dark can be more easily navigated, with no bumps all the way to bed. Bed is like a swimming pool, only cold at first. Pam is in bed by nine thirty, and I can trace her warm curves there. She has the habits of a landscaper, with a crew that starts early, especially in summer, when the Texas heat rises almost as early. Some nights, I wonder what I’m avoiding, coming to her so late. Other times, I regret what I am missing, because she’s sleeping. And then there are the nights when my anxiety about my failing children, or rather my failure to help them, or my sleeplessness for other reasons, or for no reason, will lead me to get out of bed again. I might wander out, into our backyard. There I am, barefoot, wearing only a t-shirt, and pacing. Or I am standing on the prickly grass and looking up at the bald head of the moon.

  *

  July 7, 2002

  I went for a drive by myself to Archer City, to check out Booked Up, which is Larry McMurtry’s blocks’ long used bookstore. I’m going to visit McMurtry’s house, too – or, not visit it, but just take a look at it.

  A week later, notes from that trip, most of which make no sense to me.
  I had written down the name Mike Evans in the black notebook I keep in my car.
  “Just tell her I was the young guy living in McMurtry’s house 30 years ago. We played pool.”
  Reading this from the black notebook, I have no idea who “her” refers to, or who Mike Evans is, or was.

  So much of experience is exactly like this. Noted at the time, but making little sense later.

  *

  At the end of middle age, I can see what stays with me. The roundness of my belly no longer disappears after a day of fasting. The Fig Newtons eaten yesterday no longer pass through tomorrow. On the other hand, so much more is fleeting, far more than before. Thoughts, for example, cannot necessarily be recalled after the moment of their conception. Memories that once seemed as stable as redwoods turn out to be flightier than insects. Hopes are hard to grasp as dragonflies, and as jumpy as the water bugs skimming the surface of a pond. The days pass, with their compound of Nabisco and absentmindedness.

  I think about telling the story of my life, but as a project it has problems. First, who would want to hear it? My children would not. They would be bored, or even hostile, and neither of them had the attention span of a Pomeranian. They couldn’t make it even through the end of Chapter One. They would be the wrong audience anyway for the salacious parts that a stranger might underline with a marker in order to find them easily for rereading. Pam? Her tastes in books run to what is called “a good read.” Meaning, something tightly plotted, which my story isn’t. Second, what sort of book would it be, what genre? Russian novel, in tribute to my ancestors? A series of essays, with gassy, rambling passages? The best I might do would be a catalogue, one of those fat books appearing in my mailbox, selling gardeners’ gloves, pillows with stitched mottos, and homey things described in a sentence or two—with sizes, and always with prices that don’t include shipping and handling. In short, my book would be tedious. I could try a form truer to my life: short stories, limited to the preoccupations that I have. Or shorter still, a slim volume of poems, each capturing a moment of insight, epiphanies that are like lightning in a bottle, but avoiding rhymes or formal structure. If none of these options work, I can opt for a smaller frame. I can doodle a picture of my life, forgetting all about what came before, just a sketch. It could fit it on a post-it note, not much larger than a postage stamp. It would give only my name, address, and phone number, and maybe a slogan if I come up with one. My autobiography on a matchbook cover; inside, with the coating of white on their heads, nothing but the two or three stiff matches remaining to be burned.

  *

  September 2002

  It’s tiresome for me and apparently horrible for Eden to be driven from one restaurant to another so she can look for work after school and on weekends. Still, we are spending time together. We are listening to James Taylor on a CD, music from thirty years ago. You’ve got a friend, he sings, which at the moment seems like one of those lies artists want to tell you. I doubt my daughter considers me her friend, as I encourage her to look for work at the California Pizza Kitchen on Preston Road. James Taylor signs that soon he’ll be knocking upon my door, and I’m struck by his use of upon. It’s antiquated, but maybe he needs the two syllables. My values must seem antiquated to Eden, but I’m still convinced she needs them. And “upon” was the natural thing to say, once upon a time. Odd, isn’t it, how Paul Simon has two first names, and Jackson Browne has two last ones, but bland James Taylor has the classic first and last name. Eden is in the passenger seat crying, and I don’t really know why. Her face has the raw texture of an elbow or a knee that she might have scraped in a playground fall, though I haven’t seen her on a playground for many years. Not since years ago, a time when I might still have had the ability to comfort her.

  *

  “The only thing I know about life is that it goes on.”
  That’s what Robert Frost wrote, or some variation of that.
  Life is the answer, then, when someone asks, “Hey, what’s going on?” The more usual given answer is “Nothing” or “Nothing much.”

  Today, plenty is going on. Droplets of sunlight are falling on a wooden deck, and there are puddles of sun on the oval table. I’m having breakfast on the deck — rye toast, butter and jam, and dark coffee that comes from a plantation south of the equator. Ben and Eden and Jason are in their rooms not doing homework. They have better things to do, in the sense that anything is better than reading about The Atlantic Experience or solving numbers three through seventeen in Chapter 2 of Forms and Functions. I have my sections of the newspaper in folds, and I have more time than there is news. Time enough to read an obituary, whose column of story supports a black and white photo of the deceased. He died at seventy-nine, but has a picture that was taken at his high school graduation, as though his heart had stopped at the prom rather than at the hospital. He doesn’t look like the type who enjoyed doing his homework either. Maybe he spent his Saturdays skipping stones or stealing cigarettes from his mother’s purse, in those months before he enlisted in the service. He is survived by picas of relatives, sons and daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and the complexity of seemingly unrelated last names. Life in fact doesn’t go on. Not for the dead, who may go on to life everlasting, which isn’t the same thing. It isn’t much, this simple thing I know, that contrary to what Robert Frost wrote, life only goes on for the living.
  Some may think it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing.

  *

  The joy my dog Wally takes in an open door is disproportionate. It’s so out of measure, you would think life inside must be unbearable for him. What is he running from? The tedium of sleeping on the upholstered cushion of a living room chair? His horror of the carpet, or hatred of the neutral colors of the walls? Is he disgusted by the geometry of the bathroom tiles? This is my home, so I might take it personally. Wally seems desperate to leave. He jumps at the knob of the door as I’m walking toward him. What is he thinking? He doesn’t have a prayer of opening the door with his snout. Gripping and turning are beyond him. It makes me wonder, do the cats feel the same way? How about the finches, who never let on about anything, or show the least unhappiness, behind their bright orange masks. They are caged, of course. Are there bright songs they sing actually sorrowful spirituals? The fish in the aquarium offer no insight or leads either, though the fact that we are all hundreds of miles inland might dampen their enthusiasm for the nearby out of doors. About the dog however, there can be no question. He loses his footing on hardwood floors in his scramble to get out. And then, like the kiddo with poor impulse control, he will run for daylight. It’s as if he were explicating the phrase when the fur flies. Suddenly, though, alert to the possibility that he might be left outside, or otherwise left out, he stops. He turns around. And he dogs my heels, as though he’s just as happy after his escape to follow me back inside. As if it were all nothing but an escapade.

  *

  When I call Pam at her house in East Texas, she tells me about the beauties of the place. Those will be a sunset over the piney woods, or, later, a canopy of stars, some of them shooting. She is observing from her deck, rocking on the metal swing, her head back, and a mobile phone at her ear. She has glass of J. Lohr Cabernet in one hand, and a Winston Light 100 between index and forefinger of the other. I may be calling to tell her news from the city, or just to say good night, and to ask what time to expect her back on Sunday. I call just for the pleasure of imagining her there and anticipating her here. She will usually include in her report one episode that hints at danger. Sometimes I take this to Imply a rebuke that she went to her weekend place alone only because I didn’t come with her. She tellsl me how she saw the bright beams of two flashlights “in the pasture,” and in response she went inside for her shotgun, which she fired into the air to let whoever was on the property know.

  *

  I felt the sudden sharpness of a pain in my side. What exactly was that pain? Was it a twitch? A contraction? That’s a word I associate more often with birth than with death. Then the pain began disappearing. Its sharp edges were becoming smooth. Pain is a funny thing, but not entirely, and not in the way, for example, the sound of a fart may be funny, though not the smell. Pain is funny. Meaning, it can be peculiar. And funny, in the way that I would have felt very different if the pain I had in my side had been located in my chest. Pain in the midst of the most ordinary experiences also reminds me that there are no such things as ordinary experiences.

  *

  A postcard from the hotel room where Pam and I stayed in New York advises anyone who happens to pick it up to meet interesting people at glamorous parties in trendy hotels and exclusive clubs, as a member of a cosmopolitan association of young professionals who choose to live a privileged lifestyle. I picked it up, but back home now, and I’m choosing to stick close to my three-bedroom, two-bath house, raking leaves on Saturdays, and meeting no one more interesting than moody teenagers. And now I’m running to Home Depot, so I can enjoy the privilege of repairing a faucet.

  *

  Dolores and I took a trip to Paris in 1992 with Ben and Eden. Our children might have been seven and eight at the time. I wanted to go back and to see, at least from outside, the apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine where I had lived for two months in 1973. I wanted to walk around Paris again, but this time without the weight of loneliness that I had carried in 1973. So we went. When we rode the Metro, Dolores was robbed by a Gypsy boy, who took her wallet right out of the purse she was carrying over her shoulder. As it was happening, we both knew and didn’t know that it was happening. I had noticed as the boy stood near us, his breathing was hurried. He was anxious, as if something were wrong. It didn’t occur to me at immediately that he was a thief. Or that it was our money he was about to pickpocket, lifting Dolores’s red wallet from the wide-open mouth of her purse. But moments after it happened, practically immediately, we knew. We got off the next metro stop, for the Louvre, then backtracked to catch the thief. We didn’t. But we found the red wallet in a metal trash bin, and that was bonne chance, as a policeman told us later; even though the money was gone, it was merveilleuse, finding that red wallet with its black band among the cigarette butts, discarded metro tickets, and the wads of Kleenex. That wallet in the trash may have been the most memorable of all the sights we saw. It was more thrilling than the Invalides or the onyx tomb of Napoleon. It was more surprising than the Pei pyramid at the Louvre, or the Burghers of Calais at the Rodin Museum. The credit cards were gone, though. That was tant pis.

  *

  It’s in the nature of everything written to have a subject. Sentences must be about something, even if that thing is nothing more than a roadside flower.

  The sentences can also be about the one who notices the flower. Or the one who asks a question, “Is it an aster?” And if it isn’t an aster, it doesn’t matter.

  In the end, none of this has as much impact on the writing as other incidentals. For example, conditions, such as the lateness of the hour, , the syncopated splatter of raindrops on the skylight, the brightness of the screen, the angle of the keyboard, and the bitterness of the pipe tobacco or the strength of the alcohol in a glass on a coaster. And each of these factors is as mysterious as the star pattern of a single aster, which might have been glimpsed in passing from a two-laned, back-topped East Texas road, but wasn’t, as the unnoticed flower nodded on its stem.

  *

  Here I am, making this all up. Pretending this is a journal, when it is simply an exercise. If not of writing, then of rewriting. It’s late, it’s raining. No matter how many times I listen to the individual notes of the raindrops, all I can hear is the collective sound of rain. What I call rain, not discriminating one raindrop from another, could I think of it otherwise? For example, the way I think of the boys waiting in a group for their rides home at the Jesuit prep school that Ben attends. Each waits in his blue blazer, wearing the same color of melancholy. But each boy has his own aspirations and his singular fate. Does each raindrop have its own soul? Instead, in my reductive fashion, I think of the rain the same way I think of grass, or the Chinese, always as a group. But each raindrop, dispatched from a cloud, has its own falling. Each one falls from a great height through a grey air, silent as far as I know, never emitting a single scream, except, at the very end, and then percussive on my rooftop, like a last breath.

  *

  November and December 2002

  Dentist appointment today. I’m looking forward to sitting in the peculiar chair I will be invited into, as much like a celebrant at a ceremony than as a customer or a patient. I can’t remember all the chairs of my life — easy chairs, dining room chairs, Eames chairs, a woven wood and impractical Gehry chair, the barber’s chair, which has its flopping footrest shaped like a lozenge with a metal grill. But the one at the dentist’s, where my head will be bent back, my mouth agape, is memorable; it’s entirely practical, positioned within spitting distance of a white porcelain bowl.

  *

  The math problems in Ben’s senior year pre-calculus textbook baffle both of us. He’s in danger of failing his final, as he has failed chapter tests and interim quizzes earlier in the semester. The logarithms of parenthood are equally perplexing to me. They are threatening to the relationship between father and son, as we plot our x’s and y’s, with many of the specified points falling into the quadrant of negative numbers. It’s a foolish exercise, but then so are these textbook exercises foolish. No graph can plot the various turns of our love, which form as twisted a spiral as any corkscrew.

  *

  I don’t want to sit and stare at the walls. But what else does the room I’m in have to offer? A rug, a tabletop. A book will open its stubby arms to me if I want that. Usually I will take some comfort in that, but not today. My sister calls. She tells me she is recovering from a blues deep enough to be cobalt. My own troubles are friendlier, no bluer than a cloudless winter sky around two in the afternoon.

  *

  In Santa Fe.
  Talking things out with Pam? It can’t be done, at least not today. I might as well talk to the snow, or to the jack rabbit that runs away from me at the first sound. I could hold a discussion with the pine trees, the stunted junipers that live at high altitudes, or with the stacked pinon that is split in logs beside the brown adobe wall of the rented home where we are staying. I could try arguing with the fire inside, but then I would have to go back inside. Better to just talk to myself, under a cold blue sky. I will talk things in, as it were, rather than out. That will have the virtue of being harmless, the unsounded words like the fragrance of burning pinon, no longer fuming, as they disappear into the big ears of the clouds.

  *

  My breath is visible in the cold air of the mountains. With each exhalation it rises closer to the place in the sky that I’m staring at. These short, high-altitude breaths seem remarkably hot in the winter air. A Hebrew prayerbook describes God as being as near as breathing, though no closer than the farthermost star. It is as if God were the house light I see on a hillside, very familiar, but not really, for all I know of the household or its inhabitants. I can hear a dog barking, and my breathing as well. Each of my breaths is a cousin of that miraculous wind that God breathed into me at birth. Plenty has happened to it since then, so many exhalations, and at the same time nothing has happened other disappearance. Some of my breaths have been gasps, some have been sighs. Some have been deep, easy, thoughtless; some, quick and anxious. So few of the breaths in this world are mine. And one of them will be my last. How many do I have left? There is a finite number that can be counted, and not one that can be counted on.

  *

  We’re waiting for college acceptance letters for Ben. I’m waiting, at least. Ben shows no sign of concern one way or another. The mailbox at the end of the driveway has nothing in it. It’s after midnight, and the day’s mail was brought in this afternoon. No chance Ben will receive either a letter of acceptance from Kansas or a rejection from Puget Sound at this time of night. Quinnipiac will have nothing to say to him today. As for the University of San Diego, where the average grade point of accepted students is so much higher than his, its silence is even more understandable.

  *

  One thirty in the morning, then one thirty-five, then a minute before two. Given that it was once a snug fit, my wedding band twists surprisingly easy on my finger. Can it be that my ring finger has narrowed during these two years of my married life? In the gap between the platinum and my skin, there’s a motto – it’s engraved on the inside of the ring: Always my love, Pam, it says, as I turn it in circles.

  *

  Sunday – the football games are over, the dogs are sleeping on the sofa, and the evening has been spent at the task of waiting for bedtime. I’m busying myself. I have a second bowl of ice cream and read whatever sections of the Sunday paper are unread. I might have an editorial opinion about my idleness, with a picture of my head the size of a postage stamp floating above the column. I could express the sour thought that I have wasted the day. I could take the frowning position that there was something important to do, an accomplishment or, at least, some chore, which I haven’t done. But self-criticism for not having walked on a treadmill or cleaned a gutter or pushed a grocery cart, with its cattywampus wheel, down the aisles of the Tom Thumb —that criticism would need to be balanced on the other side of the page by a different opinion. And what could that different opinion be? It would express the idea that even if I had done all these things, it would still be bedtime. I would still be just where I am, regardless. Besides, whatever I would have done, it wouldn’t have been that one thing that would have given this day meaning. Which is just as well, because that one thing has yet to be identified. It’s like the distant planet or mass exerting a light-bending gravity, but remaining undiscovered by whatever instruments are currently available.

  *

  I have a Texas summer memory of a distant California summer memory. I dove head first into the swimming pool in my backyard, then recalled how I had plunged into the curl of a wave in the Pacific. I was below the bluffs of Playa del Rey, at a hem of beach on the skirt of Los Angeles. The intake of breath, the shock of the cold, the resistance of the water and how it gave way – those were the similarities. The head smacking in my pool and in the Pacific was also the same. But the experiences are separated by their differences: the narrow space of the pool and the clarity of its water, the darkness and vastness of the ocean. The sharp smell of chlorine, instead of salt, the clouds overhead, instead of the cloudless sky. The Texas heat, and the ease of August in Los Angeles. My eyes were squeezed shut on both dives. I didn’t see either the jay in the red oak in my yard or the gull in the sky over the beach. I might have heard the bird cries, both times, before my ears filled with water. And there is the barbell of time, one event belonging to late middle age, the other, forty years earlier, on the outer ring of childhood. Only that earlier plunge has a patina on it, a coppery color, a verdigris it would not be wrong to describe as sea green.

  I want to write about my boyhood and bodysurfing and the power of the ocean and the impression it made on me. I could describe the “s” of smoke from the stack of a freighter barely visible on the horizon. That horizon was a line, more a distance than an actual place. That “s,” a curving chalky letterform, remains on the blackboard of my memory of an afternoon at the beach. A cloud is rising now from my pipe this evening in Texas, as I wrestle with the freight of unwritten phrases in my mind, stubbornly offshore.

  *

  In the dark, there are things I know by touch. I can recognize a matchbook, which is bigger than a postage stamp. And I know the match by its rough head, as I fumble to light one. Matches come in books. Books, perhaps because they have covers, though beds have covers as well, as do manholes. Matchbooks are easy reads. They tell the shortest story about restaurants, nightclubs, and other places. When you open the cover, it’s the same old story: twenty or so layered matches, with cardboard bodies. No matter how young they are, the little fatheads are white on top. And no matter how old, they have a twinkle about them. I prefer the stiff wooden matches that come in small coffin boxes from the nicer restaurants. I like the redheads, too, for their honesty. Matchbooks are the most practical books there are. Close cover before striking, they say. They don’t use a single unnecessary word, unlike other kinds of books, whose authors take their time, pursuing a much more ambitious object, but shedding less light on it.

  *

  Pam and I were talking about war around the dinner table tonight. We were discussing our plans for disaster, on bar stools at the kitchen counter. I’m dismissive of the danger, even sarcastic. After all, we’re in the center of our house in the middle of the country. We aren’t in Baghdad, which might as well be a mythical city of Arabian nights and gardens. We aren’t in a war zone, even with three teenagers between us. My sarcasm, however, brings us into conflict. It doesn’t win me any allies. And so the discussion turns into a fight. No clouds of poisonous chemicals in our battle, no biological agents, other than the mustard gas of separation. It hasn’t sent me on the road, with all my possessions piled on a cart and two or three-days supply of water in whatever vessels I can carry. Instead, it gets me out of bed hours later with an upset stomach. I’m up at three in the morning, having fled to the shelter of a word processor.

  *

  The wind is blowing on Guernsey Lane. It’s whipping a plastic tarp into a gallop. It has the tulip tree swaying in the small back yard, just outside the window next to my desk. Pam is away, spending the weekend at her house in the country. I was invited, but declined. I was unwilling, as I saw it, to be a guest. Can I feel like a guest in my own marriage? I am feeling as if I had traded my birthright for a message of pottage. In short, I am feeling sorry for myself.

  What is pottage, exactly? Is it a lumpy cold dish, a sort of pottage cheese? Or is it something hot, thin, and acrid, a soupy stuff, with a slick of oil on its surface? Whatever it is, I don’t want a mess of it.

  *

  Pam’s house in the country, which she calls Fox Run, has no history. Nothing prior to our personal anecdotes, our kitchen history, our stories of battles royal with fire ants or the storming of the lintels by wasps. It’s midway between the East Texas towns of Athens and Palestine, on twenty acres. But it has neither orators nor scrolls, no Pericles, no exhorting Jeremiah. There are no laurels to be won here, and no olive trees to sit under. Yes, we have our chronicles of trips to the WalMart on the loop or to the Blue Moon nursery in Edom. And we have tales of thin meals in the Montalba Café and feasts at Judy’s Kountry Kitchen in Poyner. There is no history here other than what we are making. We can record it in snapshots and conversation, and in laughter that years from now might be as brittle as parchment.

  *

  Pam rearranges our furniture twice a year. The buffet in the dining room all winter gets transplanted to the living room in the spring. A sofa that was snug against a wall is replanted below a window. It baffles me, this change of seasons in furniture. Still, it does no serious harm, so I go along with it, planting my fingertips in the rows of my laptop keyboard. The spring rains are falling on the skylight, above the place where my writing table is and had better remain.

  *

  I work out five days a week at the Verandah Club behind the Anatole Hotel. All I do there is walk on the treadmill, read the paper while I walk, and then shower. My friend Corky exercises there too. When I saw him today, he declared that a parent is only as happy as his saddest child. His son has just returned from the university to live at home again. I’ve heard the same sentiment before. It has a nice balance to it, as phrase-making goes, but is it true? Maybe a father will be happier in retirement, free from the bother of work, than his son will be at a dead-end job, or unemployed, lounging in the middle of the week in his Jayhawk sweatshirt and playing computer games, his high school diploma stowed in the father’s garage.

  *

  I remember almost none of my childhood. Summer afternoons must have actually happened, whether I can recall them or not. There had to have been Sundays with relatives, narrowminded aunts, blowhard uncles. I must have had my childhood friends, my cohorts. We played chemin de fer in the Monte Carlo of our bedrooms and pretended to be Bond, James Bond. We posed as John Carter of Mars on a berm in a backyard, then hid or sought each other, until we were called in for dinner. I must have had dreams, or at least daydreams, but not of the grey in my beard or my thinning hair. I’m in my fifties. My brown eyes are still as they were, but behind the ellipses of two corrective lenses in a frame balanced on my nose, as I peer nearsightedly into the distance of the past.

  *

  Saturday night, getting groceries. My college diploma stays behind, the row of books is left on my desk, the ceramic cup with a handful of pens in it will wait for me at home, as will the letters, coupons, a lighter, and an ashtray. They can practice what it will be like for them after I’m no longer around.

  *

  Ben comes out of his room after his favorite basketball team has lost. I have little consolation to offer him. No more, no less than I might offer after some greater disappointment, some loss, in my opinion, of real consequence. I wonder what it’s like for him, this defeat that he suffered simply by witnessing it? What color is it? Does it have a bland, slightly bitter flavor? Is it thin, thick? A paste sticky with regret, like when a wish isn’t granted? Maybe it has the odor of ashes after a house fire, a smell that will never come out of any clothing left hanging in the closet. So I ask him. “You okay?” I get no answer from him. Zero engagement. I’m talking to myself, in a room where a blade of air separates speech and silence. I have lost, among the evening’s other losses, his attention.

  *

  April 13, 2003

  Out in East Texas again. I can’t sleep here.
  Ben went to his prom last night, and by now he must have returned home to Guernsey Lane with our two cats, Boots and Cleo. He was to have called at midnight but did not call.

  Restlessness, unhappiness – more of the former. My little disturbances don’t seem to bother Pam directly. As we’ve learned in therapy, she has boundaries. But I’m restless in the night, and it keeps her awake.
  “Is there something I can do for you?”
  “About my moving so much?”
  “Yes.”
  I tell her she can sell the house on Mockingbird and pay our debts.
  “Oh, please,” she says.
  She sounds disgusted with my answer.
  “I expected Ben to call but he hasn’t. I’m wondering if I should drive home.”
  She says not in the middle of the night and tells me to call his mobile.
  “What time is it?”
  I don’t know the time, and it’s dark in her bedroom. I’m in a strange house where I can’t find either my watch or a switch to turn on a light.

  At 5:30 in the morning, I’m sitting up to read under lamplight in the living room. This is Pam’s “country place,” or “the ranch.” When the June bugs and beetles fly into the screens, it sounds like popped corn. Why do these insects want light? If they got inside, what then, would they be satisfied? A crane fly with the thinnest wings and legs has a teenaged gawkiness as it drags its long body along the sill.

  At 6:30, I look up from my Robert Stone novel. It’s daylight. Light in the sky, above the stand of trees at the front of the property. Lines of puffy clouds, shadows. There’s a rosy color just above the treetops to what must be the east. There’s an inevitability to the day, evident at dawn. In the act of getting lighter, the sky never stops. I can look away, I can shut my eyes, but the daylight is certain, brighter and brighter as the moments pass. Startling at first, with all the pleasures of any beginning, after a while the light is ordinary, and then unnoticed, and by noontime it’s just another day.

  *

  I have the psychological habit of concluding too easily that I am being treated unfairly, but don’t understand and cannot define what fair is. Resentment seems to be a permanent part of my psychology. It resides just one layer down. Sometimes it’s an emotional charge left over from my habit of saying yes when I want to say no. Or of saying yes when I don’t know what to say, and yes might be the best answer. I need to live more contentedly with no. Until then, there’s resentment.

  *

  Was there ever a less likely couple, one less suited to lying down together, than a cowbird and a cow? I saw them keeping company in a grass field this weekend, along Highway 19, on the road to Montalba.

  I was passing over Wolf Creek and Bear Creek, each of the road signs signaling like a Boy Scout badge how far I’d come. There was a herd on the far side of the fence. And I saw them, a bird on the back of a cow. I would think the cow would frighten the bird, or even vice versa. But instead, they seemed happy together. If I waited until the cows came home, this is where they would come to, with white birds standing on top of them, looking for bugs in their hides. And what is the lesson here? Any insight, offered by bird and cow? It seemed to have nothing more to offer, no analogy to man and wife, no symbol of symbiotic relationships, nothing to help me interpret my marriage or make my visits to Montalba more palatable. Also, according to the internet, the white bird I saw was not a cowbird; only two species of cowbird are found in North America, and neither of them is white. So I did learn something. The brown-headed or bronzed North American cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds; they lay so many that they threaten the survival of the birds they parasitize, the blue-winged teal, the ferruginous hawk—laying an egg for the teal or the hawk to tend, turning teals and hawks into foster parents, while the cowbirds pursue their love life elsewhere. As the father of two adopted children, and now a stepfather providing for Pam’s son, maybe there’s a lesson for me in that?

  *

  East Texas. What time is it? Don’t know. It’s dark in this bedroom. I’m in a house where I can’t find either my watch, my phone, or a light switch. Up is as undefined as down. Nighttime is moving through the window, turning inside out the difference between inside and outside. This is one of those times when the past seems easier to change than the future. I am keeping company with my regrets. Looking back with a sleepy eye over my fifty years, as if years were things that one could see, can I imagine them different? I might as well regret the day after tomorrow for its brevity and its coming folly.

  *

  The house on Guernsey is in a flood plain. When the creek rises, we worry about our lounge chairs and the cushions that the squirrels have torn open. We are having a fence built out of corten steel, sheets of it welded together, for the smaller back yard. The sheets will be ten feet tall, on a wooden baseboard and an opening of hogwire so flood waters, if they come, can pass through. This smaller back yard is the one that doesn’t descend to the creek. And Pam and I are discussing whether to coat it with polyurethane, or to simply let it change from its handsome grey blue to a natural rust. Floods are a worry, but we have the capacity to be bothered by practically anything, and even in the sling of a hammock that Pam has hung between two elm trees, at the edge of our creek, I can be ill at ease, brushing off the red ants that are racing across the obstacle course of the netting.

  *

  Spring in Texas. If you can imitate wildflowers along the highway of life, then you will never want for admirers. You will appear in the family photographs taken on Sunday afternoons after church, when mothers act as they never would otherwise, putting their infants by the side of a highway, their toddlers a few feet from a speeding semi. Like baby birds, children are deposited in nests of bluebonnets, Indian paints, and flowering clover, with purple blooms rising like the blond curls of a baby’s hair, which is as fleecy as the clouds far above the noise of the highway and the crying child posed for a snapshot.

  *

  June 2002

  All of us were created in a spasm that causes us to shudder, too.

  Ben turns eighteen this week. When I brought him home from the hospital and held him in the driveway of our house on Inwood Road, under our blue cedar tree, and against my khaki suit, I had ambitions. Allegedly, for him. What was I thinking? Now, I think about how to discourage him from watching hours of TV a day; or, if that’s too grand a goal, to prefer anything other than televised wrestling. Or maybe to get him to come out of his room, and wash up, after being told over and over to please do so. Let him change the cat box once a week, or at least change them when they stink, whichever comes last. To be fair, I no longer have grand goals for myself, either. One of these days I hope to see what’s right under my nose and to enjoy Ben for the love that I have for him. And for no other reason. I do admire him now for his suffering and bravery. It’s an unspoken admiration. Speech in my family is reserved for critical judgment and other acts of misunderstanding.

  Was I any different than he is? I never understood my parents. I didn’t care to, or just didn’t care generally. Bored by them, I had my own agendas. I thought I was going places. In my case, I went into libraries, and sat cross legged on their magic carpets. Books were my north and south, east and west. Each page was a ticket punched one way only.

  *

  Father’s Day. Eden gives me three Gerber daisies. Ben giftwraps a movie, Goodfellas. My role is to provide them an occasion, so they can have a taste of the pleasure of giving, although neither of them seems very pleased. Their attitude? It’s a let’s get this over with disinterest in the day. In that posture they are their father’s children. After Father’s Day passes, I stay up until two in the morning, meaning Monday. I am counting the orange petals on the Gerber daisies, and the blue minutes as well. If I choose to, I can feel as unneeded and unloved as the white fuzz — what is it for? — the white fur on the stalks of the daisies.

  *

  Rain is coming down this morning. It’s falling with a weight and a speed that will have consequences. This afternoon, or maybe tomorrow, rainwater will be rushing in the backyard creek. It’s a rain hard enough to be represented by equations, with key variables squared. It will be will be even noisier tomorrow than it is now. It was vertical and will be horizontal. It may rise, as it did one season, sending me to the phone book to look for gabion under the Erosion Control heading. It was not a popular heading. There were no ads, only listings, and not any of those in boldface. Standing in my backyard, in this heavy morning rain, a few feet from the edge of Bachman Creek, I can see that the edge of my yard is washing into the creek. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I walk back to the house across the flat mown grass. I need erosion control, an engineer, one of those reticent men who don’t approve of advertising and won’t bother to provide the public with anything more than his name and number. I admire people who have the confidence to stop floods. I’m not one of them, but I’m inclined to believe in them.

  *

  The dark outside belongs to crickets and frogs. Their voices fill it up. Are they talking about the pleasure of staying up late? Late at night, their noise is what passes for silence. But if they have the outdoors, I own the indoors: a puddle of lamplight on a table, and the flat screen of a laptop, and a bolus of tobacco in the bottom of a briarwood pipe. It’s sweet to stay up until I simply can’t stay up any later, until I am pulled into the bedroom by the gravity of fatigue. I have acquired a taste for a quarter to two in the morning. I know how to savor my yawns and to be satisfied by the many small sensations at that hour. For example, if I close my eyes before I turn off the lamp, when I open my eyes again the grey light of the neighborhood hovers diffusely at the bottom of the clouds outside. There’s a glow beyond the window, and it’s enough to get me to the bedroom without bumping into one of the chairs around the dining room table. This night light that I would have mistaken for dark had I never shut my eyes will accommodate me.

  Nothing is quite so dark once you have seen the inside of your own eyelids.

  *

  When a teenage boy stays in his room all day, who can tell if he will one day extend this inactivity into a life that others will call shiftless; or if, on the other hand, I am in proximity to an incarnation of the Buddha. I want to say something meaningful to Ben. When I go into his room, he does only one things: he waits for me to leave. I know that after I leave, he will shift position, but only from WWF on the TV to a computer game on a different screen. He will fire an electronic gun over and over. He might bother himself to download a Metallica album. Or, tired out by that, return to his bed, where he’ll cup a stereo headset over his ears and shut his eyes. On the other hand, maybe he is the Buddha, teaching me that even when we don’t know how to love, we do it anyway. Isn’t everything that matters just like that. We don’t know how to die, do we? But we do it anyway. I would like to tell Ben something motivational. Like a coach, I want to summon up the memory of past heroics. I want him to sprint onto the playing field. But this isn’t halftime, it’s just a summer afternoon before twelfth grade. As he waits for me to leave his room, I am hoping that the truth is “on the other hand.” Though, if so, I suspect that this other hand will be the famous and unlikely one, the one from the Zen koan, the “one hand clapping” that no one can fully imagine.

  *

  Nature is an abstraction; but the world is real.

  The Pacific Ocean that I remember is not the same as the one that I observed. I remember a slender ship that I saw on what appeared to be the horizon, and a skein of feint smoke from its stack. The water was anything but clear. It was earthy, more brown than blue. I couldn’t see through it, though I knew that it was deep.

  These days, I have an ocean of trees, and their depths are also invisible.

  I want to know the names of all the trees in my yard. Hickory, cedar elm, red oak. So I learn them, then forget them. This naming isn’t a parlor game, because there are no parlors anymore. I try to name them off as if it mattered: sweet gum, ginko, live oak, yaupon and Nellie Stevens hollies – and those last two may only be shrubs, which are something different, smaller, evergreen.

  Going smaller still, there are the flowers: coreopsis, turk’s head, salvia, zinnia, daisies.

  What about plants in the yard that have no flower? The coleus, the sweet potato. Are they flowers? Or, just plants?

  I know the names and then forget them. It is scary to forget so easily, a foretaste of what is coming. Forgetting is the classical image of death, Lethe, a river of forgetfulness. It has a secondary meaning, too, for most of us passing over it, of being forgotten.

  *

  George Oppen’s poems appeared in the Objectivist Anthology, Poetry, Hound and Horn, and elsewhere during the early nineteen thirties. His first book of poems was praised by Ezra Pound, who saluted “a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man’s books.” That was Pound, a beautiful writer, though he pulled some of his verses from other men’s books and some of his ideas out of the gutter. The picture of George Oppen on my New Directions paperback shows a man with a face thin as a hatchet, wearing a white shirt buttoned to the collar, and a dark knotted necktie. Serious, yes, and the poems inside have the serious opacity of stones. I found the paperback in Archer City, after driving three hours to see Larry McMurtry’s bookstore. And I took it down from my shelf tonight. For me it conjures up an afternoon I spent with George Oppen and his wife, Mary, in their San Francisco apartment. I went there with his niece Mari, who I had met on campus during the months I lived in Berkeley in 1973. I already knew of George Oppen. Robert Fitzgerald had passed around a poem of his in my poetry class at Harvard. So, I asked Mari if she would take me to visit him. Whatever the chain of circumstance was that led to our forgotten conversation, it has bound me to him.

  *

  August 2002

  Yardwork. Only the foliage of the trees makes this labor bearable in the heat. If I were in the creek bed, where there’s no shade, I wouldn’t last an hour. What would I be doing down there anyway, other than picking up trash. I might be swinging a pick axe above my right shoulder and bringing its point down on the rocks. Good for me, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m under the live oaks, whose small leaves are more valuable than coins. I’m under the hickory and the pecan trees, all of them with nuts more numerous than my beads of sweat. Using an ax, I’m cutting up dead branches. Like a pimpled kid who shoots his new BB gun at a sparrow on a wire and then is surprised by remorse when he happens to hit a bird, I take a swing with the ax at the thick trunk of a bois d’arc and make a gash in a wood hard enough to be used as piers in the foundations of homes. The fingered leaves of a red oak are pointing every which way. Among the hundreds of directions, there’s one pointing right at me, as if to ask, why did I do that.

  *

  My task this evening: to make a packing list of everything on my tabletop. A stone from the back yard is a good place to start. Then there’s the little Buddha, and a stopper for a wine bottle, in the shape of a rooster, which Dolores and I found in Portugal on our final family vacation in 1997. I can’t leave out the ceramic heart, which was a gift, and I also can’t remember who gave it to me. I see the dancing Shiva, surrounded by a ring of copper flames, with the copper Ganges flowing from either side of his head, one leg raised and bent at his copper knee, while the other is planted on the head of Evil. It’s easy enough, listing things – a tassel from a furniture showroom, an admission ticket to Westminster Abbey. I have nothing to add about the ceramic coaster from Greece, with its geometric blue pattern, or the torn cover of the spine of a book I never returned to the Harvard College library. William Blake’s Prophetic Writings, Vol I, Oxford. Or maybe I do. I wonder if there’s still a gap on the library shelf at Harvard. A space between two books, and the book on the right would be Blake, Vol. II. More likely the space has collapsed, disappearing thirty years ago in the stacks of Widener Library. The hexagonal crystal on my table with Love etched on the back surface of its glass was one of Dolores’s favorite things. It was from Neiman’s. The framed photograph of Ben and Eden with Luciano Pavarotti — Dolores snapped the photo, after a performance of Andrea Chenier at the Met. That was also in 1997, in October. I need to give up on my cataloging. I won’t make it as far as the shelves behind my desk. And I haven’t taken a step into the adjacent dining room, with its Persian rug, its candles on the table, its ten chairs with fabric on the seat cushions, or the bowl of rocks on a ledge below the fireplace, or the branding iron from a trip to Mexico, the three acrylic obelisks from I don’t know where, and the yellow mask of a jaguar from Belize. There are the things in the kitchen as well. Pans, plates, salt and pepper shakers, limp dish towels – I won’t try to go there either. Better at this hour to go off to the dark of my bedroom and to a number of dreams, feeling lucky I’m not having to pack them – not the household objects, or the dreams, either — though that might be simpler than naming them all. Lucky that I’m not going anywhere, other than to sleep.

  *

  To describe the forest of two in the morning requires knowing where to start, and also when to stop. If I don’t stop somewhere, I will be lost, wandering from one tree to another. The bark of each tree is as unique as a fingerprint. I might feel my way from one mottled surface to another. I could wait for an edge of the moon to appear from behind a cloud, revealing my current position. I might see a knothole, or a thorn, by the light of the moon, when the empty hour is as round and luxurious as a yawn.

  Words tumble out of my fingers, making the passage from my head to my hands, slowed by my silent sounding of them. They appear in rows, machined on a computer screen, or like so many seeds in a furrow. It’s laughable, embarrassing, to think that I’m doing anything meaningful, or that anything is at stake in this planting of words. They do sprout into stalks of sentences, however, some of them already wilting under their burden of making sense. What am I trying for, or hoping for? That some of the sentences might be as perennial as the daffodils in my yard, with their yellow trumpeting foreheads? Most of my sentences will be as transitory as the blush on the wildflower I drove past last weekend in East Texas. I tried to identify it, but the best I could do was wagon wheel, which it could have been, or Indian paintbrush.

  *

  Ben wrecked the old maroon Mercedes a month ago. He was spooked by a car horn on Inwood Road, less than a block from home. The Mercedes leaped a curb, and he ran it into a telephone pole. I am sorry to have lost this car, which had so much personality. It even had its own voice, a stuttering diesel, like the sound I used to hear in my childhood, when I fixed a playing card with a clothes pin against the spokes on the wheel of my bicycle. It has been forty years since I did that, and nearly that long since I’ve seen a wooden clothes pin. It’s true, time does fly. Whether you’re having fun, or not. Time has wings no matter what. Accidents go just as quickly as child’s play, and childhood itself. Was it during Dolores’s lifetime, or after her death, when I drove her maroon Mercedes to Y camp one summer to retrieve Ben? If after, it must have been the summer just after. Ben had gone to Y camp with his Temple Emanu-El scout troop. Both of us hated scouts, and he quit not long after Dolores died. But maybe I had him continue for a month after she died in July. I might have sent him off, thinking that “normal life” needed to continue, even though that was impossible. When I reached the camp that summer, Ben gave me no sign he was glad to see me except, when he saw the maroon Mercedes, he burst into tears. It was his mother’s car. After her death, I used it to teach both Ben and Eden how to drive. It was built like a tank and just as safe, though it had been rear-ended twice. And where is now? Flattened, junked, recycled. It has the impermanence of the material world, and also the everlastingness of an object of deep affection.

  *

  A Friday evening. Pam is happy enough to be out of town again at her house in the country, with her girlfriends and her bottles of Cabernet, Jason’s black dog, and a .38. If I were a better husband, I would be happy for her, but I’m not that person. Instead, I’m sulking and feeling left out, though I would not consider for a moment surrendering, and joining her at that miserable tract house, not for all the ice tea in East Texas.

  *

  Was it Zeno, or some other Greek philosopher with a name that might be used today for some small, sporty car, who demonstrated that one could never pass from point A to point B, because the distance between the two points can be divided in half an infinite number of times, thus creating an infinite number of spaces to cross. Thirty years ago, when I took college classes at UCLA, I carried a thick purple textbook on the Greeks edited by Walter Kaufman, who also translated Nietzsche in my Viking Portable Edition. It seemed to me, as I crossed from Royce Hall to my dorm room on a hill above the college quad, that Zeno was misleading, as are so many people I have met, who are absolutely certain about something and just as certainly wrong. What did seem true then and has remained so is the principle that everything can be divided in two: those who like my son’s wild red hair, for example, and those who don’t, people who have heard of Zeno, and people who haven’t.

  *

  Is it possible not to be sorry that the world will end? It will all be over, maybe not in the near future, but in a future that is nearer with every breath. One sunrise will occur on the last day the sun will ever rise. There will be a certain afternoon when the last leaf falls from the sycamore on the bank of the creek. I’m looking at that tree this late summer morning, with my back curved into the net of a hammock, and the newspaper across my chest. How would I ever know which leaf will be the last one to fall, either the very last, or just the last this coming winter, in January or February of 2003? There is always a last thing. A last look, a last try. A last day occurs, and not just every year, but, for someone, every day of the year. On my last day, the scalloped edge of the morning newspaper will top the reports of catastrophic events with a decorative motif, providing a border to whatever disasters have already happened – a collapsed bridge, a knifing in a bad neighborhood. Tragedy will be as it always is, yesterday’s news. And loss, like a newborn butterfly, will always flutter over everything that has happened, even over the pleasures of a summer morning.

  *

  2003

  June already.

  On Ben’s 19th birthday, I saw a blue jay hopping from a branch to a wooden fence. There was a time when I saw a bird or a butterfly, I thought, it’s a message; or, it’s Dolores. That sense has weakened. Nowadays, events are just events. The pool service was here today. First, a man in my backyard skimming leaves. Then, the same sunlight that had been on the pool an hour before was illuminating the procession of numbers in the window of a gas pump at the Gulf station. And later, after dinner, a ribbon of frosting like a thick noodle around the circumference of a cake with nineteen burning candles. A birthday is about being a new age, having a new number, a number that might not be tattooed on your arm, but still, in its own way, marks you as doomed.

  *

  What if the weather was actually inside my body, as Verlaine suggested about the rain in Paris, which was raining in his heart. If I take this idea and tease it along, a drizzle falling steadily enough might become droplets at the corners of my eyes. And perhaps the arc of my moustache would then become a rainbow. There’s no rain today. So I can entertain the sunnier thought that this cloudless day is inside my forearms, and each of my fingers are rays, or baby birds on the nests of my palms.

  *

  Japan.

  On a trip with Pam to Japan – a trip with no teenagers in tow. First to Tokyo, then a spa city with Mt. Fuji in the distance, and then via train to Kyoto.

  The train from Arushyama to Kyoto Station stops in six different neighborhoods. The clouds on the hills above eastern Kyoto are as thick as futons. The forests of bamboo and maple are woven as tightly as a tatami mat below the clouds. The orange gate of a Shinto shrine, a torii, separates the sacred from the mundane. The rainy season is supposed to be over by now. Tell that to the clouds.

  After dark, when sightseers are on the Howagaza river, the cormorant fishermen put on reed skirts and set baskets of wood on fire, swinging the sparking baskets out from the prow of their flat boats, for headlights on the river. What’s most exotic about our vacation in Japan? The tones of voices, like birdsong out of the mouths of human beings. I wear a yakuta instead of pajamas and eat miso soup and a bowl of sticky rice that comes before dessert. In two weeks here, I haven’t received a single email spamming me about penile enlargement. I’ll probably have dozens waiting for me back home. As a totem, I am taking home with me a paper coaster from a Kyoto restaurant. I like the Japanese writing on it: the three iconic characters, and a fourth in the center. The coaster is a rough square the shape of a TV set, and the letterforms are reversed out of a brown circle. All the characters are rough edged, as if they had been scratched by hand.

  Each night at dinner in a Kyoto ryokan I have another lesson in the ten thousand flavors of fish. This is a small island. Its meals, however, can remind you of the depths of the ocean. In the book I’m reading it advises: Break through your deluded mind and you are Buddha at this very moment, just as you are. That’s the instruction, but I remain unpersuaded.

  *

  The Japanese writer Soseki Natsume wrote fiction in the morning and poetry in the classical manner after lunch. Crows barking near the Yatsuka shrine are a reminder that one can always hear but seldom understand. After a breakfast of pickles, miso soup, and soba noodles, I may write a poem in the classical manner myself. Maybe a tanka, with a prescribed number of lines or syllables. It could be five lines, thirty-one syllables – the sort of poetry that an emperor might have written before his ascension, when he was still only the crown prince.

  After the second night in our ryoken, we declare to our hostess that we cannot eat soup in the morning again. It’s rude of us, but we want no fish, and no pickles the first thing after we wake up. We want the western breakfast option, which was then brought, so we could enjoy the strangeness of scrambled eggs.

  I imagine explaining these chicken embryos to a Japanese guest at the Mecca Café on Harry Hines in Dallas. I would expect him to mask his disgust, as he uses a fork to poke the soft, yellow animal.

  In Kyoto this morning, we are delighted with our two triangles of buttered white toast.

  *

  In the dry gardens of Kyoto, you can see rocks poking out of a sea of raked gravel, the dark heads of rock, the softness of the moss, a cloud cover of Japanese maple. With some prompting from a guidebook, I can persuade myself that a cone of sand is Mt. Fuji, or that a long stone is the neck of a crane, and that the arbitrary rock, across the way and just below some shrubs, is a turtle. The pachinko parlors in Japan are another matter. For all their signage, they remain completely unreadable. They are crowded in the middle of the afternoon. At all hours, the parlors invite players to take the zazen position, lost in their own moments, engaged and detached at the same time.

  *

  It’s lights out and far away from home in the ryokan in Kyoto where Pam and I are staying. Dinner was served in our room by our hostess, in her Japanese dress. She closed the shoji screens after serving us, but whether for our privacy or hers, I don’t know. The task on vacation is no different than during the other fifty weeks of the year. I have a morning to fill, an afternoon, and then, most difficult of all, a long evening after a dinner of sea urchin roe and sour pickles.

  *

  There are more Shinto shrines than Starbucks in the Gion district of Kyoto. We walk the area, where we have nothing to do, or nothing we are supposed to do, other than sightsee. When the traffic lights change, the walk and don’t walk signs have peculiar patterns and make a sound like birdsong. The vending machines we pass have Suntory fruit juices in them, but also Coca Cola. We have no jobs to go to, so we set off to see a Shinto shrine or a Buddhist temple or a dry garden of raked gravel and mossy stones. These dry gardens, with their seas of raked gravel, make waves out of ridges. In the most famous of them, there are fifteen rocks, arranged so the visitor can never see all the rocks at once. We sit on the wooden step of the temple counting them up. Soon enough it’s time for a lunch of soba noodles. Then, more shrines, in the afternoon heat. Or we walk down a street, dipping into a shop that sells ceramic plates and woodblock prints, our foreign foreheads as pale as the crest of a wave in one of the prints of Hokkaido, and our backs as stiff as the snow-capped cone of another Mt. Fuji. At night, we’re back in our room in the ryokan. There are shogi screens, tatami mats, fluorescent lights and, just outside, another garden of bamboo, rocks, and gravel. The first house that I owned in Dallas, with Dolores on Inwood Road, had a “Japanese garden” off one of the windows in the living room. It, too, was a small space enclosed by a bamboo reed fencing, with gravel on the ground. What we never had were Japanese dinners: the small dish of pickles that comes with dessert, as though we might actually want a sour vegetable with our melon or our plum.

  *

  I do my reading before entering the territory of travel. Guidebooks, histories. Under a live oak in my backyard, I read about Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion, or the Ryoanji Temple and Rock Garden. Sometimes though there is local guidance, as there was this morning when we stopped at one of the lesser shrines. A sign in English instructed us. Throw a coin into the slatted tank. Pull the rope in front of the shrine and clap your hands twice to get the attention of the local god. Then, bow your head.

  No matter how mysteriously beautiful Kyoto is, my thoughts are of home. Only three more nights in this paradise, but I am longing to be back on Guernsey Lane even more than I wanted to get away. That could mean I have a happy life, or, just as likely, that I’m unhappy no matter where I am.

  *

  On the train from Kyoto back to Tokyo, a stream of Japanese characters disappears across the electronic sign over the door of car number seven. All the train personnel are in uniform—beige pants, jackets, white shoes, and the kind of billed caps that belong on pilots or police officers. The train is speeding by the dry riverbeds, the unraked rock gardens, rice fields, basins of green water, the blue and grey tiled roofs. I can see laundry hanging on the balconies of apartments as we pass. There are cemeteries on the hillside, with short stone columns and, I’m guessing, the cremains of the dead. A horn sound. It’s a mournful chord as we enter a long, dark tunnel. Then, on the far side, the bomb of daylight explodes in our faces, pieces of sunlight falling like shrapnel on the fields and ponds and the blue tiled roofs. I look up at a uniform. It’s on the slender figure of a girl pushing a cart down the center aisle, selling pretzels filled with chocolate.

  *

  Back in Dallas now.

  In another universe I’m a professor living in a rainy university town, wearing patches on the elbows of my tweed coat. Below my wide wale corduroy pants, I have on my pair of soft shoes, maybe sneakers. By now, I’ve written two scholarly books, one on the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, another a study of Ben Jonson’s masques, neither particularly applauded, but good enough for tenure. I have married and stayed married, or just as likely divorced, in which case my daughter, now fifteen, would be living with her mother.

  *

  Whatever these things are wheeling in front of the bluff, they are very nimble, and their wings are tilting. They must be birds. They are flying, and have white circles, almost like targets, on their brown wings. Pam offers the opinion that they are bats, and that could be true. There are clouds of insects in the soft light of a lamp mounted in the sycamores alongside the creek – not moths, but smaller, like gnats. So we have the insects visible in the lights we had Lentz Landscape Lighting install in the trees to illuminate the bluff and show the chalky white limestone; and now the bats, two of them, or it could be three, are swooping in and out of the dark and the brightness.

  September, 2003

  Last Sunday started with a phone call from Ben. He’s left home for his freshman year at the University of Kansas. Things are not right. He’s skipping classes already. He sleeps half the day and the rest of the day sits in front of his computer. When I ask him, he doesn’t know what day of the week it is. Wednesday? He isn’t sure. What time is it there? He doesn’t know. It may be 6:30. No, he says, it’s 7:30. I can hear the tapping of computer keys. I suppose he has his phone on his shoulder and his attention on the computer screen. If you don’t know what day it is, or what time of day, it’s either a very bad day, or a blissful one.

  I always wanted to inspire Ben to a life of achievements. Instead, he has retreated into a room. He feels regret for days lost, but no way to find them. I don’t have much to offer, just a few bromides: Be positive. Be optimistic. Smile. The universe is full of sunshine for those who can see the light. Of course, I don’t think any such thing, but I don’t see the point of sharing my bleaker views with him, or of saying out loud how unsure I am how to help him, what to say to him, how frightened I am for him. He’s already infected with the same fears.

  *

  Thinking about that day, that phone call, what I find most hurtful, as I hung around the house on Sunday, was neither rising too early, nor listening to the rain, nor seeing a hummingbird on the feeder, which stayed on as if it were the last day of summer; and it wasn’t, later, baking loaves of bread, but that for Pam this was just another day with nothing to worry about. She went off to the market. When Dolores died, from that moment I was left alone, because nobody else will ever worry as I will about Ben.

  *

  It rains, the afternoon washes away, it gets dark. The lamp on the tabletop throws light to the windowpane. The garden is disappearing, the grass is running off into the night. Everything, no matter how still, speeds by. Me with my pipe, the bowl as black as Africa, Pam in the bedroom with her book. I’m in front of a laptop making notes about my business partnership with Ron Sullivan and how to end it. Someone said that to do nothing at all is the most thing in the world. It could have been Oscar Wilde, and probably it was.

  *

  A Saturday. We spend part of it with Pam’s friend Lisa and her husband, Ted. Ted’s an architect who doesn’t design but who manages projects for a construction company. He’s unhappy with his work. He’s also a recreational sailor, so we have been invited to go sailing with them. Boat ownership is a kind of social class marker, and sailing is one of those skills that men take pride in demonstrating; it’s the kind of skill I have managed to avoid all my life. Somewhere in the middle of Eagle Mountain Lake, we are in the same boat. The starboards and the come abouts belong to Ted’s language of sailing. It’s a speech as liquid as boat slips, clubby, companionable, belonging to a society of hearty hellos. We’re supposed to be enjoying this. No matter the darkening sky, which even a novice notices, or the wind picking up, or the first tugs on our outboard, which fails to catch. Nothing is supposed to scare us, not even the alarms of a few spare lights on shore, which seem very far away.

  *

  I discover a lost list of to-do’s behind a stack of my books. Half the lines are crossed out; the other half presumably were never done. It’s a fragmentary record of chores that filled the hours of a Saturday behind me. Whatever happened to the “outdoor CD player” I never went to find? Or the poem I might have completed, had I paid more attention to the word “write” with the circle around it? Both must have been left on a lower rung of the ladder of tasks, one or two steps below the mysterious instruction “cereal/potato chips” and the much more straightforward “clean closet.” I’d like to think the urgencies that went unnoticed over that weekend had no ill effect; or at least, none that I can put my lazy finger on. I will still be driving to work tomorrow morning, despite the lack of a horizontal line through “car insurance settle.” Like clothing in a heap at the foot of an unmade bed, the to-do’s are a tangled reproach. They’re welcome to remain on this creased note, which is as dusty as the wooden floor of the closet that has yet to be cleaned.

  *

  Fall, 2003

  My difficult daughter, who has never belonged to me, not in her eighteen years, leaned on me this evening, during concluding services of our High Holy Days. While the cantor chanted Hebrew phrases of praise, I put my arms around her like a shawl, my fingers like fringes, and I prayed for our futures.

  *

  Stillness is much praised. On the other hand, a waterbug on the surface of the pond is a celebration of movement. I watch it skating. It zigzags, as if it were writing a prescription in illegible script for my do-nothing moods. I might be cheerier if I were this bug that rarely stands still, if standing is the right word for what it does. Maybe it simply prefers being a moving target. Or it actually has some task. Either way, it’s nothing like Wally, my dog, who most of his days stretches out on the bed, asleep, or just stays motionless, except for the rising and falling of his chest. Even Wally, however, scrambles up at the sound of the back door opening. He’s dog-alert to the possibility of making his escape. And when the door opens, he hears the opening notes of his route into the andante of an afternoon, nose down, sniffing at the cadences of the grass, happy, I think; though not, I think, happier than the waterbug, as Wally pauses, angling his heavy head, puzzled by the flash of movement on the pond.

  *

  Always some pleasure in beginnings. The first page, if you are a reader. A blank page, if you are a writer. The first sound of a phrase, the start-up sputter of keystrokes, the thought before there is any thought of getting stuck.

  I’m trying to read and enjoy Rainer Maria Rilke, who is so much praised, but I find it not too meaningful, and not very readable. I’ve noted this quote: “God is the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.” If we are the leaves, who or what is the branch or the root? I would prefer to be the fruit. Let God by the trunk of the tree, or the soil for that matter. God as soil would make more sense. It might be okay to be the leaves much of the year, the leaves of an aspen, for example, golden and quaking on a crisp day in late October in Chimayo, or beside a stream near one of the other villages in northern New Mexico, where ristras of red chiles are hung from blue lintels. But later in the year, no, after the leaves fall, and decompose. As for fruit, it doesn’t last either. So why would God want to be the fruit? God should be the eternal sap of the tree, or God can be the sunshine, or the moon on a cold northern night. God can be both sun and moon and take the two ancient names of Artemis and Diana.

  *

  September/October 2003

  Lucy Quist called this morning, at the office. Since I didn’t recognize her name, I wouldn’t take the call. Then my receptionist said “It’s about Eden, your daughter.” So I spoke to her. She was a stranger, who said she was “a friend of Barb’s.” Barb, it turns out, is my daughter’s birth mother, natural mother, real mother. Barb – that’s about right, that name, because there is likely a painful patch coming. My life is barbed enough, thank you very much, without my own daughter drifting entirely away from me, as she is already tending toward doing, even before this call. Lucy, there’s a strange twist in your name as well. You are knocking things loose. Lucy Quist is bringing that feeling of loosey goosey dread into my dreams. My daughter’s once familiar name is going to melt, thaw, and dissolve into a faraway cloud. Barb has found my Eden, who will now be officially lost. Lucy tells me that Barb wants to contact Eden, but wants my permission. I tell Lucy I need to ask Eden, but in fact I already know the answer. I have no doubt that Eden will want the contact. She has said so all along, many times, from the earliest age. Dolores told me once that there was something was missing in Eden, and that she would never bond to us. Perhaps Barb has been what’s missing. Or, maybe not. If something is indeed missing in Eden, I believe it is something destroyed by a poison that was passed to her in the womb, from Barb.

  *

  Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Rainer Maria Rilke

  But then it is also true that the pronouncements we hear in a doctor’s office, the lump discovered, the test results, are neither helpless nor deserving of our love, and that all the beauty and courage in the world won’t change the facts of the case.

  Perhaps our most beautiful, courageous acts are dragons themselves—fat, nasty ones, with furrowed bellies, and a stench in their mouths, who have the thankless job of guarding our hoarded coins, and protecting us from seduction by the princesses who exist nowhere except in our fantasies.

  And it could be that the tobacco-stained bowl of my pipe is a cave, a tiny grotto, and the flame that darts out of my lighter, with its blue bottom and its wavering gold tip, is, in its deepest essence, the fiery breath of a different kind dragon, this one harmless, and no bigger than a pile of ashes.

  *

  Nothing to do this evening at the end of the year. An evening with no checks to write and fit into their envelopes. No articles to read until an author’s name at the bottom of a column. The heat is rushing from the furnace, breathing and subsiding. A paperclip lies on my desk, as flat as a grave stone. Other monuments on this desktop cemetery: a postcard from Sue Benner, Dolores’s friend whose exhibit of painted silks will appear in a gallery in Door County; stacks of books, a ceramic heart, and another heart in chunky glass, and a hexagonal crystal with the word Love etched on it. Messages almost as direct as Wife and Mother and dates divided by a dash on a headstone. If I could set up a late-night picnic and spread out a blanket and keep my wineglass from tipping over, I would invite the ashtray from Suvretta House in St Moritz, where I took Pam for her fiftieth birthday. Also, the branded coasters, and the horizontal row of hardbound books, which extends from Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez to Thoreau’s Maine Woods. My empty wineglass has a small red eye in the bottom of its bowl, centered above its stem. I only have a few minutes before bed, which is just enough time to look at the pictures in their frames – most of them photographs of Ben and Eden. I see the one with the two of them when they were seven and eight, standing beside Pavarotti, who’s still in his tunic after performing as the hero in Andrea Chenier. I also love the small clock from Tiffany’s for its serious face, which is no bigger than a silver dollar; it has its story, too, as nonsensical as any opera’s libretto. I suppose these things are part of me, through memory and chemistry. Why catalog any of it? No good reason, other than I have nothing else to do this evening. And when my memory goes, they won’t become a memory of me for anyone else.

  *

  2004

  Unusual to be this warm in January and for the sky to be such an unblemished blue, as it was today. But no one would call it wrong. We reserve that pejorative for acts that have an intention, or that might happen otherwise.

  What does the sky intend by its warmth and beauty?
  I’m only asking.
  I stopped for a moment on the driveway. I stooped for the morning newspaper and then again, to pick up a littered candy wrapper in the Asian jasmine. This is a weekend day when I should go walking on the Katy Trail. It’s a delightful concrete ribbon for families on bikes, inline skaters, dog walkers, and joggers passing the time with a run from Knox Street almost all the way to downtown. Instead, I run back inside.

  I can hear programming. It’s coming from the small TV set on the kitchen counter. Pam’s in the kitchen making soup. Sinatra’s on the TV singing, with “his very special guests” Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Jimmy Durante, Dean Martin, and Bing Crosby. Am I still in bed and dreaming? These are my parents’ entertainers. They thrill Pam, too. I think they recall for her a happy childhood with parents who had martinis before dinner and second homes in Palm Springs. Sinatra is singing Come Fly With Me. The black and white TV audience applauds. And who wouldn’t want to fly away today, into a sky so perfectly blue.

  *

  A dream of gym class, or maybe a memory of it:
  My arms are bent at the elbows, my legs bent at the knees, and my feet have nothing to push against except air. What am I doing there? Trying to do a pull up in gym class. I leap up for the bar. There’s chalk on my palms. And then I am hanging on the shiny steel bar, and wishing with all my weight that I was back on the ground. Holding my breath, as if the steel rod were the waterline of a grey lake, I pull myself up. I can feel the strain of it in my armpits, but I’m unable to put my chin over the bar. Some people do them quick, jerking themselves up or lifting fluidly, but that’s impossible for me, dreaming or awake. I seem to be held down by a compound of gravity and shame, and by an awareness of the line of classmates waiting their turn behind me and, for just another moment, slightly below me.

  *

  How sure I was seven years ago that I would be able to keep the plates spinning after Dolores’s death. I thought I could raise two children by myself. I must have told myself so, to cheer myself up. But I was fooling myself. It might have been false bravado. As it turned out, it was a hopeless task from the beginning. I didn’t know what I was doing, or what to say, and Ben and Eden were disinclined to listen to me in any case. And why should they have? After all, I had been unable to prevent the catastrophe of their mother’s death. In the years that followed I was deficient on many occasions where wisdom and calm were required. If I had a wish, it wouldn’t be to return to the days when Dolores was alive, or to fast forward past all the present troubles. Instead, I wish we could simply be happier together around a dinner table. I wish I had a gift for both of you, a lucky shell, an abalone shining with mother of pearl, something for each of you you to keep in a pocket or wear on a chain around your neck. Hidden, but there to touch. And this talisman would bring good luck and memories of wisdom and benevolence. The plates would be off their sticks. Instead, they would be under our noses, with tender lamb on them, yellow rice, and a healthy green vegetable.

  *

  This morning the warmth of bed is more appealing than usual, and the workday feels further away, like a far country whose customs and language I have neither the energy nor the desire to familiarize myself with. Isn’t there work I can do right here, under these white covers? Maybe spend the next hour or two worrying over my son’s bad habits. I will try to understand how he can sleep until four in the afternoon after staying up half the night watching TV or playing computer games; and often it’s more than half. I can worry that he will never be happy, and also worry that he will be content in his room, since both outcomes are unsatisfactory. These concerns of mine are a labor. They may require office supplies: a desktop as vast as the future, with a Bunn coffeemaker on it to help me stay awake. What will my new workday be like? I can stay busy not attending meetings and refusing to answer the phone. In a few hours it will be time to skip lunch. After that, time to leave unopened the stack of third-class mail, catalogs, and solicitations, which have a name resembling my own ink-jetted on their envelopes. In the remaining hours of my workday, I will start the job of doing nothing at all. I can take the late afternoon to climb a ladder to nowhere. Then, in a dream of my own, half asleep in the desert of this queen-sized bed, I can observe through half-shut eyes my co-workers descending and ascending.

  *

  Man is only man at the surface. Remove his skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery. Valery

  That explains it, this morning’s mysterious presence of a sprocket, one of those wheely things with notches, on the floor of the shower. It must have fallen out of my nostril, hitting the tiles without a sound, or with the sound hidden under the rush of water from the showerhead. I waited the rest of the day for some malfunction, some failure of movement, slippage, a loose chain rattling, but there was nothing noticeable. Nothing except a slight whir of thoughts spinning, as I swung slowly in the hammock all afternoon. My ideas were as light as clouds, disengaged from the mechanics of the live oaks and robotic squirrels. I was going nowhere as another evening descended, just back and forth, neither forward nor backward.

  *

  Where am I running to with all the urgency of someone running away? Out of breath, running toward that day that is coming to meet me even faster than I am moving toward it? On that day I will find myself truly out of breath, although perhaps no longer tired, as I run out of time. I will break through the finish line tape of my life. That will be a peculiar day, when the future passes right through me and recedes like an echo. On that day, it will be clear to all concerned, not that many will be concerned, that I never did have anywhere to run, along with the stones and the trees, the ashes in my pipe, and the bark of my dog.

  *

  Every morning the same thing: I put on a pair of pants, that soft second set of legs, and then a shirt, with its cloth chest, light on starch, its hard buttons down the front like vertebrae that are out of place, and its tubes for my arms. I open a drawer for socks, either for the browns or the blacks, and another drawer for underpants. Dressed in this second skin, I fit into a kitchen chair. The coffee is circumscribed by its cup, the cereal by its bowl. Everything is contained in something larger than itself: the kitchen in the house, the house in a neighborhood, a city within a country and, eventually, a continent. Everything is a boundary within a boundary, even the globe in its cocoon of air. Holding that thought, I’m ready. To enjoy the day – seeing the bark that surrounds the trees, the fur that coats the dog. Just so, this day that I’m enjoying will rest neatly in its container of seventy or eighty years, and I will ignore the hinges attached to the lid that will close over it all.

  *

  Routine physical. It begins routinely enough. Height and weight. I have my physical once a year, part of the passing of the year. First comes a handful of spring days with rain, then three months of baking Texas sun, before crisper afternoons where there is no scent of fruit on the trees. Fall disappears almost as soon as it arrives. In the nondescript winter we are smug about in the South, it’s time again to draw the two tubes of blood from one of the too tiny veins in my arm, which are as blue as the sky on the last day of summer. I am on statins, and occasionally gemfibrozil as well – though the pharmacist warns me about the combination. My triglycerides are not the right number, and but LDL and HDL are also poor performers – the good kind not good enough, the bad cholesterol more robust than it should be. Also, levothyroxine, for my underachieving thyroid.

  *

  Did Jesus have a smart mouth? He was Jewish, and I know the sort, a smirking Jesus who talked back to Pilate, the Jesus who said, “Thou sayest so,” to a bully who had the power to crucify him. The Jesus I knew growing up in Los Angeles hated shop classes and never took carpentry. His dad owned a sweater business. His mom was frumpy, but not frumpy enough to actually be a virgin. Her son may have preferred to think of her as one; how could he think anything else. Also, his name wasn’t Jesus in Los Angeles. It was Mickey or Richie. And he had a comfortable boyhood. He never thought he would end up in the suburbs though. That was his dad’s heaven, it wasn’t for him. He went to UCLA, married, took a job, earned a living. Not even twenty years after he turned thirty-three, he abandoned any thought about a living a remarkable life. He traded that in, for the hope that he would experience an unremarkable death. Cancer, heart disease, maybe, but definitely not the ironic fate of a carpenter nailed to two pieces of wood. He had his dreams. They may have once included a girl named Mary, but none of those dreams came true. He wasn’t the Jesus who knew from the beginning how everything was going to end because his dad was God and, somehow, though it’s hard to understand, so was he.

  *

  On my way back to my office after exercising at the Verandah Club, which I do five days a week, I was listening to public radio. Glenn Mitchell was conducting an interview, asking the intelligent questions, holding up his end of the conversation. His guest mentioned that the Buckeye Trail in the Great Trinity Forest begins at the end of Bexar Street south of downtown. I’ve lived in Dallas for thirty years. I’ve never seen or even heard of a Great Trinity Forest. How great could it be? Dallas is a city of shopping centers and chain restaurants. It’s all brick and mortar, a place where real estate is the most real thing. Could Dallas also be the home of a forest, great or otherwise? A forest, where I would walk in the shadow of hardwoods and feel the brittle bark of pecans on the edge of the footpaths. In whose steps would I be following, as I looked for the buckeye itself, its bloom dilated in fear at the sound of my loafers? It seemed as unlikely as a cottage made of gingerbread discovered in a clearing, with smoke rising cheerfully from its chimney, or the gleam of a golden ring at the bottom of a stream. But now I know. There’s a Great Trinity Forest. I have heard of it. How lucky, to be listening to a local public radio station and to hear this civilized praise of a local wilderness. I could as easily have been elsewhere on the dial, though it isn’t actually a dial, but a rocker switch and six black buttons. The term “dial” is nothing more than a figure of speech.

  *

  Paradise is four walls and a door with a privacy lock. There are shelves with books. I would rest my elbow on a desk, an art deco table from the thirties. I would have a cup of coffee, and a glass of ice water as well. And there would be a shallow rectangular ash tray, with a pipe cradled in it. The bed of ashes under the pipe would half cover the name of a hotel, maybe a Swiss mountain lodge. There might be a window in the room, so I could see the ocean; a window isn’t absolutely required, as long as the ocean is there. Maybe it’s best not to have the window, to avoid listening to the soughing of the waves, though I would still want the temptation of the ocean. It would separate and at the same time connect me to a farther shore.

  *

  Unhappiness with Pam. There should be something I could say, but I don’t know what. A mouthful of words, but I don’t have them. Words that would untie knots and free us from our unhappiness with each other. But words don’t help. Maybe the small objects in our lives can takes us there — the silver rings on our fingers, photographs of better times, memories of vacationing in Kyoto, panoramas, a river whose name we’ve already forgotten, the sunset, after a day of walking between Shinto shrines. I should force myself to say how perfect Pam is, or that our marriage makes life worthwhile, as if to declare it might make it so. This seems to be the view of the so-called rational emotive therapists, followers of Dr. Albert Ellis, who teach that we are what we think. So, it isn’t what happens to us, but what we think about what happens, that determines our happiness. It’s an honorable position. And it allows for no whining. What would Dr. Ellis have done had he had the life of the coyote cartoon character who gets an Acme safe dropped on his head from twenty stories up? If he were in the cartoon, what would Dr. Ellis think then? The safe will drive him through the pavement. That safe will prove to him that life is not safe, one of those philosophic propositions a cartoon demonstrates so effectively it cannot be disproven in a lifetime of therapy.

  *

  In a cab, on the way to catch a flight. California here I come. The plane leaves less than an hour from now. Is it necessary to describe the curb and a leaf outside the window, to note that it’s a spring day, that the azaleas are blooming? If the plane goes down somewhere over the southwestern scrub, in New Mexico or Arizona, and if anyone manages to figure out my password, these few words will be my last words. Not a suicide note, but they will have the gravity of a message from the dead. So perhaps I will take these last few seconds to say, Goodbye, I love you all. I leave you with plenty left to do, and nothing more to say.

  *

  The origin of my latest argument with Pam has been lost in the loose folds of our anger. What was it this time? Money? Or simply the hostility in our language, an imprecation, or a put down? It doesn’t matter much, although the glass of this half empty day was shattered. I could see lights flashing and hear the warning whistle of an oncoming train, but I proceeded onto the tracks anyway, and against my better judgment. We are on the rails now, heading in opposite directions.

  *

  If I’m not my thoughts, what am I? I’m not my knees in blue jeans, or the hair on the back of my arms. I’m not the veins, those blue earthworms under the soil of skin on the back of my hands. Not the moles on the heaven of my upper arm and the reddened, rough caps of my elbows, the holes in two nostrils, and my breath, definitely not that, soughing in and out of an open mouth, forming a word now and then, but mostly saying nothing, and busy keeping me alive, as I keep my thoughts to myself.

  *

  2004

  April already.

  What to do today? One thing after another. As in every year, each day different, every day the same. A simple April day, anticipating warmer weather. My work responsibilities on a Tuesday, or a Friday, and just as often on Saturday at home.

  Last year, her birth mother found Eden in September, and vice versa. That made for a terrible year; in some ways, one of the worst. I knew that my heart was broken and there would be no healing it. Eden was eighteen, I was fifty-two. Then there was the worst year of my life, six years earlier, the year Dolores died in July. That was a bad one. She had back pain in January and went to see a chiropractor. It turned out to be cancer, discovered in February. Treatable, Dr. Jacobson told us, but not curable. Before that, I probably thought of my third year in college as the worst year in my life, when I wandered around Cambridge at night, the year before I dropped out. I used to repeat Frost’s poem Acquainted With The Night to myself, where the poet describes himself walking out in rain and back in rain. That year it seemed like I couldn’t go on, though it turned out not to be so. Then there was the year I was fourteen, and my garage band buddies replaced me with Clark Schenz, who was more popular and, besides, he could sing the new Dave Clark Five tunes. I thought I would never be unhappier. At fourteen, I had already forgotten being eleven years old, when my father told me, in response to the misery of an eleven-year-old, that I should always ask myself about any unhappiness, “What will it matter, ten years from now?” If the past is any guide, I might conclude that the worst year of my life hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it will be the year my father dies. He’s in his eighties, so it could happen any year now. That may also be the day I realize that he was right those many years ago. It will be the worst time of my life, and a matter of indifference eventually.

  *

  Trip planning is exhausting. I have to choose departures and arrivals, reserve economy instead of compact cars, arrange for the smoking rooms for Pam, the partial or ocean views, each decision a matter of weighing the value of pleasing or disappointing, as if by making these decisions upfront I can also determine how Pam is going to feel about it later. Even though life has taught me otherwise. The happiest days simply happen, as unplanned as weather. It’s a lesson I can’t seem to remember, much like the Spanish I studied at a school for diplomats in Cuernavaca, and then, thirty years later, on a rainy afternoon in San Miguel, nothing but Buenos dias, senor remains, or, with some hesitation, como esta usted.

  *

  More about Pam, as things unwind between us. I need her, but she’s not the person I need. Who might that be? Someone who appreciates sarcasm, negativity, all those unpleasant traits that are my second nature. Instead, I have Pam, who takes offense at every word, but seems to want little more from me than “Thank you” and “Yes, Dear.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she is exactly what I need.

  *

  When I see someone in the grocery store I haven’t seen in years, we ask each other, “How are you?” I tell her my youngest has gone off to college, so we can gasp in surprise at the fact that time passes. It’s as if only then, in an aisle near the apples and the spears of asparagus that were recently in the ground, that the woman I’m greeting realizes that her hair is white, and that life is a series of errands, trips to the grocery store, but not countless trips, and not an endless series.

  *

  November 2004

  My father believes President Bush is a puppet surrounded by master thieves who are looting our country. The election was today, the polls are now closed. I believe the United States ends at my eyelids, and all I need is sleep in order to right all wrongs.

  *

  How’s it going? I’m glad to be asked, it’s a reason to break the silence. An entire day indoors made this a holiday. I have been sleeping in, sleeping through the afternoon, and then watching the TV as if something happening on the screen was the same as something happening. It has taken me all day to say conclusively, “Nothing’s on.”

  Thinking about my nearly adult children:

  They bound themselves to me by their distress, by their cries as infants, and, later, by their failures and disobedience. And more lately by the more serious unhappiness that seems to stick to both of them, their loneliness, which seems like despair, as they have discovered separation, emptiness, and meaninglessness. Why think about this today? I got a phone call today from Eden, my difficult daughter, whom I have managed to keep off my mind, or at least to worry about less, since she went off to college. I know the bromide that a parent is only as happy as his least happy child. Pam likes to say that. But it’s not true, it’s much more complicated than that. To get the exact measure of my unhappiness, I divide my daughter’s unhappiness by the distance in miles between us and multiply by an unknown constant which is a measure of my heart.

  *

  My children are as happy to be away from me as I am to have them off my mind. Happier, probably. I have all the time in the world now, which means thirty more years, or even forty. I have no hobbies to bother with, no sailboat to work on every weekend, no cottage in the piney woods or a second home anywhere. Nothing requires me to spend my time replacing rotted boards or repainting where the summer heat or the winter cold have done their damage. So I am free. I can spend my evenings recording any thoughts I might have. For example, about the rug on the floor near my desk, the one Dolores and I bought in the shop at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe in…1978. I can notice its vegetables dyes and the zigzagging design in the style of Two Grey Hills. I can wonder about the life of the Navaho woman who wove it, and why she chose greys, blacks and browns, which contrast equally well with the red rock country of her tribe and the bleached hardwood floor at my feet.

  *

  Venice, our other dog, is kept indoors. This still doesn’t keep her from barking at squirrels and passing cars. Her bark is a sermon she delivers as faithfully and with all the conviction of an evangelical warning of doomsday. Sir Winston Churchill called his dark depression a black dog. This black dog, however, belongs to my stepson, Jason. She’s part shepherd, part chow, and usually cheerful, though she can also be vicious. If it’s always three in the morning in the dark night of the soul, it must be a perennial summer afternoon in this dog’s life. Lying on her side, her tail thumping against the hardwood floor, she keeps one eye open, like a glassy brown marble. She’s watchful, but not out of wariness. She has nothing to fear from the legs of the sofa, no reason to distrust the floral pattern of an area rug a few feet from her nose or the plastic apples that Pam has placed on our coffee table, though fake apples could disturb even the glassiest eye.

  *

  Our outside cat is in for the day. The finches sound off, protesting in their birdhouse. The two dogs, Venice and Wally, don’t remember how I chose the two of them from a litter in the bed of a pickup in the parking lot of a WalMart in Palestine. That was years ago, and they have forgotten yesterday. One of them is in an armchair, the other lies on a white bedspread. This is the household on Guernsey Lane where we all belong together, at least for now. Dogs, cat, birds, five human beings as well, each of us both connected and also hidden from the others, as if we were Russian dolls. I’m off to bed. There are three children in their rooms. Pam’s sleeping. To get to her, I pass the soft florescent rectangle of the aquarium in our kitchen, with its bottom of small brown pebbles and the fish I forgot to mention.

  *

  It’s slippery even in the shallowest water when I’m cleaning the creek behind our house on a Saturday afternoon. It’s the clumsiness of the fit of my black wading boots, and partly my own clumsiness. I’m unstable. I’m holding a heavy bag of trash and can’t throw my arms out for balance. This creek would not be a pleasant place to fall. It’s a cold day – November – and in some of the eddies there’s a head of foam, maybe a chemical, a fertilizer or a pesticide washed into the creek by the rain. There are turtles, and a few fish. But mostly what I find is
  Styrofoam and other plastic from the street, since the creek bends upstream and passes under Northwest Highway, where people in cars throw out their coffee and soda cups, trays, wrappers, and other trash from their fast-food lunches. Some is in the water, much of it is caught in branches along the sides of the creek. This creek bed has been widened by erosion, so much so that there isn’t enough water to fill its width, except after heavy rains. Nature in the creek is an early snowfall of packing peanuts, and schools of plastic bags that swim downstream.

  *

  December 2004

  There’s nothing regular in the percussion of raindrops on the skylight. Likewise the intake of air through the stem of my pipe has an improvisational air. Now it’s time for the scotch and ice riffing against my teeth, and a scoot of desk chair wheels on a hardwood floor. It’s a vibe, this after midnight quartet, playing variations on an old standard, which is silence. It has the title Time for Bed.

  *

  I visited Ben at KU – Baggy blue jeans, wooden cap, fifteen pounds overweight from sloth and alcohol. He could be a panhandler on the street rather than a college student failing his classes and not succeeding at happiness either. He is simply unable to cross the intersection of childhood and maturity. It does him no good to notice how cloudless a day it is, how perfect the lawns of the quad, or the fact that nobody who looks at him has any inkling that he is anything other than a handsome, charming, smart, and precious young man, if I were I to point any of that out to him.

  *

  On my way out to Pam’s house in the country.
  I have Jackson Browne and my own lamentations for company. The sky is light as a feather on the towns along the highway, on the church spires, the gas stations, the cheerless lake on the left and the right, the other cars on the black ribbon of highway. What would it take to free myself from the chains of the atmosphere? Not much. Like a birthday party balloon accidentally let go by a child, I would sail upward, my trajectory determined by nothing other than a breeze and natural laws. Unnoticed at first, there would be no alarm, until a cry was released from the orb of the child’s mouth, and he pointed at my vanishing. Then, the heads of the others at the birthday party would tilt upward for a moment, as I ascend, out of sight and out of mind.

  *

  What does betrayal taste like? It’s tart, like a lime. Not the lime that’s known as a twist, the lime in a little white bowl, or between a bartender’s thumb and forefinger after he has already poured the tonic on top of the gin and the cubes of ice, but the lime that’s added to unstable soils, dolomitic quicklime, hydrated lime, the lime that human bodies are doused with in movies about gangsters, a corrosive lime, a lime the taste of which nobody ever enjoys, tart or not, not while they are still alive.

  *

  Sometimes I’m the body in motion that tends to stay in motion; other times the one at rest staying at rest. Tonight, in bed in the dark, shifting from one hip to another and exploring for the cold spot on a convex pillow with my concave cheek, I’m extending these laws of motion in order to demonstrate the corollary of restlessness.

  What are the laws of uneasiness, which turns like a wheel in my back, drawing me in one direction and then another? My thoughts are racing from the proverbial pillar to the nearest post, though I can’t say for sure which is which. I think the pillar is the stone one, grooved, classical. The post, on the other hand, is wood, cedar, and untooled.

  *

  The author of The Purpose Driven Life appeared last night on The Larry King Show. According to his message, if I can summarize it, our lives are nothing but preparation. Our cursory, disappearing life is preparation for our next life, which is everlasting. The sprinkler throwing an evanescent spray over beds of azalea blooms that will fade — preparation. The white shirts, bagged in plastic, brought back from the laundry by Pam, who ran off to her house in the country, upset with me and leaving me here in the city to keep house by myself — preparation. So I have all weekend by myself to prepare. And this morning is like the core course at a public university, three hundred of us in the big lecture hall, taking notes or doodling, half listening to the distant lecture, which is given by the sunshine.

  *

  Is it time now to unpack the fifty-three years that are past and travel light for the rest of the way? Since the distance ahead will be half the distance behind, one of the tasks may be to slow it all down. Not so much by looking back, or by stopping at every roadside attraction ahead of me. And not by stumbling, which can slow things down considerably. There have already been enough stumbles to this point. Besides, it’s probably less damaging to stumble on the way up then it would be now, when I am headed downward. For now, maybe the task is simply to live the longer life, the one measured in moments rather than in years.

  This weekend I am a figure in a landscape, pot-bellied, middle-aged, and philosophical, attaining or at least digesting whatever wisdom the Sunday papers impart. In lieu of a second home in the country, so desirable to many, I will settle for my own back yard. The pond with a few goldfish will be my lake. I have the lawn for my ranch, the two pear trees for my orchard, and the sycamores and live oaks for a forest.

  *

  Pam gave me a present once, a picture she took of me on Monhegan Island, which she framed, and on the matte she wrote an aphorism from Oscar Wilde: To do nothing is the most difficult thing in the world. The most difficult, and the most intellectual.

  When I brush my teeth after breakfast today, does that count as doing nothing? In my book it’s something, or at least not nothing. Nonetheless, I’m going to call it nothing. I’m going to count the chores I do today as nothing as well. Cutting myself some slack, I will define something as nothing when it suits me, in the same way that I can drink a glass of water on Yom Kippur and not consider it a violation of my fast.

  So, doing nothing, I take two trash bags from the pantry, put on my big rubber wading boots, tuck my blue jeans into them, and climb down into the creek at the end of my backyard, if down is a direction one can climb. I fish the trash out of the shallow water, t pry an orange plastic ribbon from the fingers of a tree branch, and cross from bank to bank, stooping to pick up Styrofoam cups, the white curls of packing peanuts, the plastic bags that are as clear as jellyfish, and the beer bottles that have made their way here from a celebration upstream. It’s exhausting. But can it also be nothing? I think it can be. What qualifies it as nothing is that it’s one of those tasks that is never completed. I do it, but It’s never really done, it’s only done for now. It’s finished, but only until next time, like brushing my teeth, or like breathing, the repetitious task of taking a breath.

  *

  Visit home.
  In the thirty-seven years before I was born, my father did all kinds of things. He sold newspapers from a stand he built on a streetcorner in Chicago, which was a better job than his own father could secure during the Depression. He served four years in the Army during the war; for two of them, he was guarding the Panama Canal. Then he married. He bought a house in California for less than $10,000. As I sit next to him in Oceanside, I wonder whether I have thirty-seven years ahead of me. I’m taking three pills a day for cholesterol, hypothyroidism, and other defects. My father never shows any concern about the end of his life or how close he might be to it. He reserves his strongest feelings for the poor performance of Dodger pitching, or the costs of a car repair. On my visit home, we do the hugging that is now the thing to do, although it was no part of my childhood. It’s a brief hug. We spend the time together seated on the two easy chairs in front of the television. We are watching a ballgame, the news, or the Sunday morning commentary he disdains. He holds onto opinions that he formed before the days when he drove a laundry truck. After he lost that job, he sold peanut brittle from a stand on Lincoln Boulevard. It was not unlike the newsstand job he had as a boy, except he had a wife and two children, and there was no snow in the street, only sunshine on his shoulders, as cars passed him by. He was passed by aerospace engineers going to work at Hughes and, on other days, by surfers on their way to Ballona Creek.

  *

  Advice from Betty Gouge, a therapist I have seen off and on for thirty years: If you want to be happy, you have to learn to comfort yourself.

  There are products people use to help do this: tobacco, alcohol. Ultimately, though, the business of my happiness is best managed without overhead, and I need to manage it that way.

  *

  There was a book about the lives of children that I read when I was working on a program for public television in 1975. It used a classic repartee between parent and child as the title of the book, or a call out on the cover:
  Where did you go?
  Out.
  What did you do?
  Nothing.

  What are you doing is a phrase that sometimes substitutes for Hello. Nothing is the answer I often give when someone asks me that. And there’s no reproach in doing nothing. What does the Japanese maple in my garden do other than hold its position. It has nowhere to go and nothing to do. That said, it may be busier than it appears. Moving back and forth in a small wind, it could be rocking in prayer. And if has a prayer, it must be one of praise rather than supplication, because what could it ask for? Prosperity means nothing to a tree. No one ever sees it sweat for nutrients. Whatever it is doing in the soil, it does it underground. It isn’t straining for sunlight, though it was planted in the shadows of oaks and pecans. These trees are also standing still, their trunks dressed in flowing robes of ivy that drape the ground.

  *

  It’s the end of a summer day, but not really the end, a feint of an ending, when the last of the sunlight is a halo around a cloud. The dog is still outside, enjoying it while he can, which would be good advice, if dogs gave advice. The night shift hasn’t come fully on. The fireflies are still at their day jobs in the grass or wherever they stay. The moon is up, but only barely, a head prematurely bald. The fish are already under the covers of the pond. The mockingbirds have some unfinished business. This is a happy ending because it’s not really the end; there are the short hours left until bedtime. This summer evening tastes like a dessert, chocolaty, and rich enough to stay with me hours later as I am falling asleep, an aftertaste.

  *

  “How’s your weekend going so far?”
  My stepson Jason asks me this. Jason is like a trained bear, always polite. He’s home for the summer from college – art school, really – Savannah College of Art and Design.

  How’s my weekend going so far? What a thing to have someone ask me in my own house. The hearty fakery of the world cannot be escaped even at home. When Jason leaves the kitchen, where I’m making pancakes, even though it’s already afternoon, he instructs me to have a nice day.

  *

  Peter Matthiessen writes in The Tree Where Man Was Born how nature cleans up after itself, after a kill: “In a day and night, when lions and hyenas, vultures and marabous, jackals, eagles, ants and beetles have all finished, there will no sign but the stained pressed grass that a death ever took place.” Reading the names of these animals is another way of seeing them. Both seeing and reading are an observation. There has been a summoning, if not a reckoning. Mambas, adders – wouldn’t I rather see the word than the thing itself?

  I have been reading about Africa, the colonial Africa of European settlers, of ranches in Tanganyika, farms in the Ngong Hills, and of wives in khaki pants and smooth, high boots, who are not happy that their husbands are gone hunting for weeks on end, though not entirely unhappy about it either.

  *

  The empty phrases, the fake, hearty greetings and howdy dos that roam on the great windy plains are always polite, and they never quite touch each other. I like the airy spaciousness of it out here, big enough to accommodate all the farewells in the world, with room to spare for the see you soons. The have a nice days have a plateau all to themselves, distant from the comaraderie of the what do you says on their distant butte. I like the requests that are commands, the exhortations to be well, to take care, to keep in touch, though they are hardly robust enough for the out-of-doors, and are more at home inside; for example, at a barber shop, where I can read men’s magazines and nod at the push broom waltzing with the footrest of a Koken chair. In that undemanding environment the greatest challenge is to turn pages without moving my head, while the barber shaves my neck and makes one-sided conversation. How was your weekend he might ask. Or, more in the moment, how’s it going. Going to hell in a handbasket would not be the right reply. The answer is fine. Not that there’s a need to answer questions like this. Whatever I would say has been said already, many times, which is what they all say.

  *

  13 November 2005

  Fifty-four years old today. Marriage in disarray. Much of it, as I see it, because my two children are in their own kinds of terrible trouble. There is no room for their disturbance in this marriage. I am not behaving well either. Both Ben and Eden seem so profoundly unhappy. As impossible as it is to be of genuine use to either of them, it seems even more difficult to let go of the notion that I can be. I can’t seem to let myself give up, though that may be the only helpful thing I could do.

  I keep believing I can do something that I cannot do.

  *

  What to say about Ben? I’m uncertain about most everything concerning him. He withdrew from school. He lives in an apartment in Addison with his friend Ian. For the most part, he sticks to his room there, where he plays World of Warcraft five hours a night and worries about the governance of his guild, which is the group of forty or so young men who also play. He has seen Dr. Humphrey once in the past month. He’s taking Lexapro, once a day, but it has no effect on him. I try to see him for an hour or two a day. It breaks my heart to see him, because he seems so wounded and unhappy. It feels worse for me not to go. Is he mentally ill? Or is he simply so disappointed in himself that he can’t stir enough to act on his own behalf. “Depression” has never sounded so heavy. Ben stays up at night, unable or unwilling to sleep. He has a disoriented, frightened look. He won’t answer his phone. Sometimes he will not come to the door. What will happen to him if I don’t help him? But then, I don’t know how to help him; I only know to try. I bring him the classifieds from the Sunday paper so he can look for a job, but have little hope that he will do that. I drive him to job fairs. I instruct him on each step. I ask him to shower, to brush his teeth, to brush his hair. I clean up his room for him and hang up his clothing, just to bring some neatness to his surroundings. I care; apparently he does not.

  28 November

  Thanksgiving weekend has come and gone. I bought plane tickets for the flight from Phoenix to Dallas for Eden and her friend Edward Downer, and they came in Wednesday night. Eden’s attending Prescott College. Ben showed up at the house at nine in the morning on Thanksgiving. I was sleeping until eleven; when I woke, I couldn’t find him. Pam didn’t know whether he was in the house or gone. I found him in bed in Jason’s room; he hadn’t been to bed at all the night before. He was on the bed, dressed in his slacks, his good shoes (a pair from the Johnson & Murphy outlet store in Oceanside), and wearing his striped, long-sleeve shirt. I took his shoes off and left him there to sleep.

  We all had dinner together: Eden and Edward, Ben, Jason, Pam’s mother, Martha, and her brother, Frank, and her cousins Johnetta and Floyd. Floyd is a nice, friendly man, in his mid- fifties. He was a fullback on his college football team at SMU. Originally from Georgia, he boasted that he was once “the fastest white boy in Texas.”

  I didn’t see Ben at all on Friday or Saturday. Eden and Edward spent most of Friday with Barbara, her “birth mother,” and Barbara’s boyfriend Rusty. On Saturday, I drove Eden and Edward around Dallas – a sightseeing tour for Edward’s sake, with stops at the DMA and the Nasher and the obligatory drive by the Book Depository. Eden seemed put upon and bored, as she always does. We were all performing I suppose. And so with bogus sentiment I dropped them off at Terminal D just before sunset. Eden’s returning to Dallas in three weeks; she’s done with Prescott College. I am not looking forward to the awkwardness of having her in my daily life again, but it’s likely she will seldom be around me, after she gets whatever she decides she wants – a room, until she can find herself an apartment in Denton. I can look forward to a lifetime of perfunctory visits, the rewards of parenthood. Maybe I will be wrong. Maybe. Maybe somewhere down the line we will all be comfortable with each other.

  *

  Sunday today. Late afternoon, I drove up to Addison to gather Ben, so he could shoot baskets with me at the Verandah, which is my health club behind the Anatole Hotel. He’s a good shot and seems to take some pleasure in it, and that’s my mission. It masquerades as exercise. After forty minutes, we stop. We go to Sal’s down the street from Dolores’s old office on Wycliff. He has a meatball sub sandwich, we share part of a pizza. The Giants and the Seahawks are playing on the TVs in front of us and behind us. I wonder whether he would consider, if he will not a find a job, going back to Brookhaven for the spring semester and taking courses again. How many A’s would it take to raise his grade point average to a 2.0, which is passing? When do classes start for the Spring semester? In January?
  He says in January.
  I ask him if he knows what day.
  He bristles. He says it’s not even a consideration.
  I tell him okay, but he needs to decide what he’s going to do and what he expects me to do. He smiles at that.
  “What I want you to do,” he says, “isn’t going to happen either.”
  He wants me to leave him alone.

  30 November

  Who’s responsible?
  I hold myself responsible for what has happened to Ben. My second marriage, to Pam, has damaged him, or so I think. It was one too many abandonments for an adopted child, perhaps. First, given up at birth. Then, Dolores dies.
  Too much change.
  Sometimes I hold Dolores responsible – for everything. If I hadn’t married a woman twice my age, I would not have adopted children. If Dolores had not died, she would have been able to give Ben what he needs and cannot get from me.
  Sometimes I blame Ben’s birth mother, whoever she is, or his birth father – the long line of his genes, which I can do nothing about. So much of what he is seemed to be baked in.
  Sometimes I hold Ben responsible. But not often, and not much. He hardly seems to have anything to do with the hole he has fallen into.

  4 December

  Sunday again. Angry words with Pam, who’s out in East Texas this weekend. She had planned for the two of us to be with Lisa and Ted Gupton in East Texas this Saturday night, but that wasn’t a good plan. I drove down to Houston with Ben on Friday afternoon because Patti was there; we stayed with Molly and John in the Woodlands. John calls Molly “Babe,” over and over; it’s in half his sentences. As for Molly, she seems mildly disappointed with life in general – she’s an unappreciated mother of three grown sons, and an undervalued wife.

  Friday night, I took everyone to dinner. On Saturday morning, I went with John to take Patti to Bush International. Patti was in Houston because her oldest son, David, will be coming to M.D. Anderson for surgery. He has cancer of the tongue. His cancer is rare enough that M.D. Anderson is his best hope, even though he lives in the Bay Area, less than an hour from Stanford, or the medical centers in San Francisco.

  Ben and I drove back to Dallas on Saturday, in time to rent a pick-up truck that afternoon. Then we drove up to his apartment in Addiso, and loaded his bed – a metal frame, a box spring, a mattress – and his desk and chair. Ben is moving back home.

  I’m working out a routine for Ben.
  Up at 8:30, brush teeth, shave, glass of orange juice, some toast or cereal.
  Lights out at midnight, after brushing teeth and taking a Paxil.
  Tuesday at 6 pm, Thursday at 9 am, to Dr. Humphrey.
  Shop and cook dinner for one, on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and maybe Friday as well.
  Tasks during the day, to be determined.
  Learn to take care of the pool, for $100 a month, which will provide gas money and pay for the $15/monthly internet game fee.
  Exercise daily – either walk for 45 minutes, or go to the gym.
  What else?
  Heal up, regain a sense of yourself – but how to accomplish that?
  In a month, or maybe after the turn of the year, start again. That could mean entering a nine-month training program for Microsoft certifications. It could mean taking and holding a simple job. Six months from now, begin taking courses at night to complete core courses and reach a GPA of 2.0, so a return to KU might be possible. Billie Ellis suggested what’s needed is not raising a damaged GPA, but just erasing the past failed grades and simply starting over.
  But none of it is simple, because none of it will happen.
  Ben wants none of it.

  5 December

  Monday, Ben’s first weekday at home, and I’ve already run out of things to ask him to do. This is the futile dance we are in. I did wake him up at 8:30 as promised. He sits in a daze on the side of his bed. He’s wearing long blue underwear. He does seem to have slept. I tell him to brush his teeth, make his bed, drink a glass of orange juice – I pour the glass of juice for him. Pam is already out of the house – she’s gone to her personal trainer or whatever other her activities are – and we are barely speaking to each other; she’ll have nothing to do with Ben. I ask him to spend his morning putting away his clothes, putting his room in order, and then, “Call me, and if I’m not available at work, leave a message.”

  Pam sends me a bitchy email mid-morning, misspelling half the words. She writes that she can’t read the note I left for her, that Jason needs his $500, since there was no reason for “Jace” to be punished, and is Ben supposed to be on his computer all morning? (I’d written her a note that Ben was going to make his own dinner.) Ben calls me. I tell him to go shop for his food and I’ll see him at noon. When I come home at noon, Pam is having lunch with Maria, her maid, and the two of them are watching TV. Ben is in his room. He hasn’t put his clothes away, but he has shopped for food. I tell him to put the clothes where they belong and then take him with me to Riviera Pools, so we can buy a chemical set. I make arrangements for Riviera to come to our house Thursday at 9 to give Ben instruction and bill me hourly. Ben reminds me that he has an appointment with Dr. Humphrey on Thursday at 11. I’m feeling…that false optimism I feel when I have a plan, even one that will never work. How is it that I am so perfectly capable of persuading myself that what will never work is at least worth trying?

  Next, I ask Ben what he would rather do, walk to Blockbuster Video for his exercise, or go to the gym? He says he doesn’t know, but I tell him he has to make a decision and then do one or the other. I’m going to the Verandah and then back to work. When I come home early, at 5, Pam and her friend Alana are drinking and smoking in the living room. The gas fire is lit in the fireplace. Ben’s curled up in his room. He tells me that he’s had a lot of stomach pains and has been going to the bathroom repeatedly. He hasn’t walked or worked out. Best I can tell, he’s done nothing from the time I left in the afternoon until now. The room is dark. I leave him there to sleep.

  He sleeps the rest of the evening, doesn’t cook his dinner, doesn’t get up, doesn’t play his computer game or watch the Mavericks. Around 10, I go in to give him his Paxil, and to take his shoes and his jeans off, so he can get under the covers. He hasn’t brushed his teeth, he hasn’t showered today. I tell him I love him and will take care of him.

  Nothing I do will help him. I know that, and at the same I can’t believe that.

  I find some antifreeze in the garage and put in on the front porch to remind me – here’s something Ben can do tomorrow, he can put antifreeze in his car. That will fill 15 minutes of his day. It’s late at night now. Pam’s already asleep. So I go out for a drive by myself, and I drive past our old house on Wenonah, and past our very first house, on Inwood, where I brought Ben home from the hospital, and past where Prince’s Hamburgers used to be. When Dolores was in Baylor Hospital, she asked me to go get her a hamburger from Prince’s, which I did. I’m listening in the car to another Jackson Browne song. When I stop at a gas station on Oak Lawn, a guy comes up to me, hustling for something. He asks me if I know where Orange, Texas is. He tells me he has a six-month old child and that he isn’t asking for money. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s very cold out. “I’m on the way to the hospital myself,” I tell him. “I have a child with cancer and need to go see him.”

  6 December

  I’ve already run out of ideas to keep Ben busy. Unless I turn to real demands. I picked him up today at 11:30 and took him to NorthPark, where we buy a moleskine journal so he can list his activities each day. I ask him to write down twenty things he is willing to do each day. What does he think of any of this? Does he hate me for my pointless efforts? We have lunch at Corner Bakery. He is smiling some but unwilling to do much. I drop him off at Blockbuster and tell him to walk home – solely for the exercise. Can a father cure a son’s depression? All I can do is demonstrate that I want to.

  I could have him walk his way back home each day, from further and further away. That would be an odd program – much as I walked around Paris each day, sadder and sadder, he would walk. He would walk his way to health, even though I certainly didn’t. He would walk home to find himself. I wonder how many days before he refuses to go in the car with me, unwilling to be let out somewhere new each day. He went to see Dr. Humphrey tonight. While he’s gone, I open the black journal. Sure enough, he has written down yesterday’s events: stomach pains, sleeping. He has made his list of exactly twenty items, as asked. Get up, make bed, brush teeth, maintain the pool, cook dinner, play World of Warcraft. It’s a neatly written list, and very readable. His hand is far better than mine. He is careful with his characters. It’s also heartbreaking; the obedience, and the blue ink. Tomorrow, he has nothing scheduled, so I will get him up at 8:30, have him make his bed and brush his teeth. Then, he can go to his old apartment to retrieve his phone charger – that is the sole task he can come up with. At least it’s a practical one. I’ll pick him up at 11:30 and take him to Barnes and Noble to find a book he wants to read, though he won’t want any. I’ll drop him at Lakeside Park, so he can make the long walk home. From there, he can read ten pages, and write one page about it. That will be another day.

  Why do we “fill our days”? Simply to cover up our anxieties about living. But what are we anxious about, and how does our worry benefit us? Maybe I am the one creating the crisis that is Ben’s unwillingness to do anything at all.

  Jason comes home from wherever he has been, bringing a painting he has made. It’s junk, or perhaps it isn’t. We must make our encouraging comments about it: Wonderful color! Very complicated! He is pleased with himself and his place as an artist. “Oh, I like it,” I hear Pam telling him. He has his dreams, and a mommy who loves him. Ben has neither. Instead, he’s in retreat. What’s ahead of him? How can someone with no dreams at all take a single step toward them?

  December 8

  I’ve written an unsent email to Ron Sullivan. He and I have been business partners for twenty one years. We are in the process of dissolving the partnership, but he is resisting that. He complains that I won’t talk to him. That’s fair. I don’t want to talk to him.
  “Ron, you and I have completely different views on what’s wrong with our relationship,” I wrote. “There’s no reconciling our views. We have an irreconcilable difference, and we should not be in business together. You seem to think there are only two acceptable ways for us to end this business relationship. One is for me to walk away and start over with no benefit from the connections I have with clients and colleagues. The other is for the relationship to end with your retirement in 2010. The first option is unfair to me. I can’t accept it. So I’m working with you to achieve the second option. But it is your option. I am making every effort to satisfy your requirements for this option that you have chosen, even though it’s not the option I would choose. My option would be to immediately end the relationship on terms I think are fairer to me. I know why I want to end our partnership; it’s because there is no benefit to me having you as a partner. I’m not responsible for the fact that you’re of no benefit to me. You are responsible for that. I’m committed to the success of our company. You and yours enjoy the benefits of my commitment. I understand that you’re angry, but talking to you is not helpful to me. It’s not worth doing.”

  So, here I am. My business relationship, bad. My marriage, probably disintegrating. My daughter rejecting and replacing me with her “birth mother.” My son, descending, and no path upward.

  December 12

  Ben seems a little better today. He gets up in the morning and goes to bed in the evening. He smiles some. I have tasks for him. With supervision, he works at them. On Saturday he washed my car. On Sunday he cleared the gutters, using a ladder on the garage and then climbing up on the roof of the house. It took him some time to do it all. And it did not go that smoothly. After lunch, I went outside to see what progress he was making. He was sitting on the roof, looking confused and defeated. He seems to deflate or run down and then cannot start himself back up again. Tomorrow he’s going to see Patricia Wood, a psychologist; Thursday, he’ll see Irv Humphrey. The following Thursday, both of us will go, and I’ll push for some plan, some next place Ben should be. I want Ben to complete his core courses and raise his grade point average to a 2.0 – but he objects to even trying. So then I want him to get certifications. And then, find full time work. If he doesn’t want that plan, what does he want? And what can I do to help? I continue to schedule his days with something to fill his time, while he waits for evening and his computer games. Do I set a deadline? Find a job by January 14, or no more World of Warcraft. And when he finds a job, how that does end? What then, where does he go from there, with no college and no training? I can’t see out that far. But then, where do any of us go? And if we don’t function well? Surely at a minimum we can ignore our feelings enough to simply provide for ourselves. Work, pay, eat, sleep.

  My nephew David has his surgery at M.D. Anderson on Friday. I spoke to Patti in the afternoon, and she was optimistic. David’s tongue cancer is so rare in someone as young he is. Surgery removed the cancer. He had some reconstructive surgery as well. But the news was worse by the time these two procedures were completed Friday evening. Patti didn’t call. Instead, I heard from Joe. There was more cancer than expected, and seventy percent of his tongue was removed rather than the anticipated fifty percent. There was cancer at the tip of his tongue that needed to be removed; that removal will make speaking very difficult if not impossible. More cancer was found toward the back. It, too, was removed, raising the possibility that David won’t be able to swallow solid food, since this back portion of the tongue covers the air passage when a person eats. If that passage can’t be blocked, then food can’t be swallowed without a risk of choking. It’s grim, horrifically challenging.

  Patti called me on Saturday. She’d seen David that morning and, despite the results, was encouraged by him. The pity of hearing such bad news from the surgeon the night before had given way in the morning to realism and a half-step toward acceptance.

  I spoke to Mom and Dad Sunday night. It’s odd that they never called me to talk about David. Maybe not odd; rather, for them, predictable. We don’t seem to have that closeness as a family that others do. Dad was irritable. He seemed concerned about foolish things – would Patti lose her job, and how could Ben, a 21-year old, not at least get a job “flipping burgers.”
  I was glad to get off the phone with him.

  For all the “challenge” in lives that included the Great Depression and World War II, they seem to have no empathy for failures.

  2006

  January 5

  I’ve taken away Ben’s car and his computer, though he keeps another computer at Ian’s apartment. Today, he failed to come home after I dropped him off at Dr. Humphrey’s this morning. So, I also took away the television in his room. These punishments, so championed by Pam, go nowhere, but nowhere is where I seem to have gotten with him anyway. He had an MSCE information meeting tonight at SMU Legacy, which he said he wanted to go to, but he failed to return home for it. He hasn’t come home at all. I suppose he’s with Ian or Alex playing World of Warcraft or simply escaping me. He has an appointment with Dr. Wood tomorrow at noon. I made the appointment for him, and I’ve left a message again on his cell phone, which he doesn’t answer, but I don’t expect him to be home tomorrow at 11. I’ll come home just in case, to give him his ride. Ben seems to have surrendered to whatever devil has seized him for the past two or three years. He won’t go for a job, or to school, or take an independent step away from the small circle of his pleasures – a friend or two, following sports, playing computer games. I have nothing to offer him other than inconsistent punishment and continuous hounding. I can’t either pull him forward or let go of his hand.

  Could I be any unhappier with him? Probably so. Perhaps I should count my blessings, but the math of that is both too elementary and too challenging for me.

  Eden came over tonight. She seems to be doing well and pleased with her new apartment in Denton – no roommates, perfect freedom I dislike her chattering and her constant harsh judgments of others, but I’m able to keep out of her way.

  That is what I’ve been unable to do with Ben. How to work out my love for him? With sternness, with standards, with compassion, with understanding? I’m capable of the first and the third, but less so of the second and, least of all, the last.

  *

  Why does Ben curse when his shots don’t go in the basketball hoop? Is it disappointment? Or maybe it’s his way of saying he’s better than that. We went to the Veranda Club to shoot baskets for fun, and for the exercise. Is there something at stake that only he can recognize, some menace warded off by the ball swishing through the net?

  For him to be this lost at twenty-one, that’s not unusual. He is lost in his unhappiness. Others, no doubt luckier, are lost in their plans, none of which will come to pass. Dolores loved the lines from Auntie Mame and liked to repeat them to me and to her clients in therapy: “Life’s a banquet, and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.” If I tell Ben that life is a banquet, he might agree. But he is having bitters for his appetizers.

  *

  Ben seems to have no ability to take steps forward. He failed at KU and returned home, where he stays in his room playing video games. Pam says I need to put him out under a bridge with the homeless; and then, she says, he will change. Irv Humphry, Ben’s psychiatrist, suggests that I need to look for a structured environment for him. He says I am not able to provide that structure. So I take Dr. Humphrey’s advice. I consult with other experts – apparently, it’s a business, helping parents figure out “where to place a young adult who is failing to move into adulthood.” I’ve identified two or three residential “facilities” out of state.

  Most of them seem to be for young adults with substance abuse problems. I make appointments for me and Pam to visit one of them anyway. I’m out of answers. But on the day we’re scheduled to go to Boulder, Colorado, to inspect a place called Aimhouse, Pam is unwilling to go. I told her I wanted her to come with me, but not if this trip is about how nice a place we’re staying in or what restaurant we’re going to for dinner. That offended her. She tells me she’s going to a hair appointment instead.

  I flew to Boulder myself and went through the Aimhouse visit, which was confusing enough. But then, as I’m waiting in the Denver airport for my flight back to Dallas, I got a message from Pam, “Don’t come home.” Ben calls as well. He tells me that Pam has taken his clothing out of his room and put it outside. Moreover, he can’t get into the house; his key doesn’t work. I tell him to wait for me, my flight will get me back to Dallas later that night.

  That night, after Ben picks me up at the airport, we stop for something to eat at the IHOP on Northwest Highway. When we finally do get to Guernsey, the house is dark, and no one is there. My key doesn’t work, and I have to break the glass inset on one of the back doors so Ben and I can get in. In the morning, I call Bees Keys to arrange for a locksmith. They refuse to come out. I suppose they were the ones who changed the locks while I was gone Perhaps Pam has told them I’m dangerous, who knows? I don’t know. It’s a shock.

  The next day, a knock on the door. I’m served with divorce papers.
  I have to conclude there has been some advance planning for all of this, but it doesn’t help to think so.

  *

  Letting go is as difficult as releasing your breath under water. It can be done, though. First step, hold on, and let the compound of air and panic balloon in your lungs. Second step, hold on longer, hold on, hold on, hold, hold, hold.

  *

  Soon enough, but not soon enough, I will have passed through this. Once again I’m looking into that expressionless face of a catastrophe, and more loss. What is it this time, a mouth is saying. Same old same old. My task, too, no different than before, after Dolores died. To get from here to there, to comfort myself by telling the same small child, the one who will never grow up, not to worry, even though the way through the woods has more shadow than path. If I look up through the branches, it could be noon. It could be two-thirty, maybe later. There’s enough sun left to make it, though not to make it back. That’s the fact, that’s the way things are. Wherever it is I’m going, I’m going to stay there.

  Afraid of being alone? No reason to be, I can tell myself. I have the table for company, with its four fine legs. And dozens of books, each one waiting to open its arms. Two children in a framed photograph are there to be seen. What does the water glass say, when the ice in it chatters? And even the silence hums: no melody, but the prelude to a performance, the long evening tuning up.

  *

  You’re keeping me from doing what I want to do. I say all this out loud to Wally, my dog, who Pam left behind with me. The words have the texture of a soft black snout, nudging at the book I’m trying to read at one forty-five in the morning.
  I’m giving in by going to bed.

  *

  Some days the emptiness is the sky. Other days it’s the room with its table, lamp, and shelf of books. Also, a brass key on the table, the one I can use to lift a metal plate that covers the water meter by the curb. The key has China stamped on it, a country you could dig all the way to when you were a child.

  *

  Twelve triangles, each pointing to a number, one through twelve, and each separated by four tick marks, forty-eight of those in all, in a circle, and from the center above Tiffany & Co, a thin pointer sweeps, one tick at a time, marking something. What is that something? The more of it you count, the less of it you have. Time is a riddle with an easy answer; the sum of it always adds up to zero.

  *

  What is happening in another distant country? Wars, uprisings, throats cut. All of it is happening as I speak, or as I remain silent, occupied or preoccupied by bringing a pot of water to a boil on the stove, the hard sticks of pasta softening into noodles, a head of crisp lettuce, a knife breaking the shiny red skin of a tomato.

  *

  March 15, 2006

  I need to start playing tennis again.
  Nick Glazbrook is the architect Dolores and I worked with on Inwood and then, massively, to remodel the house on Wenonah. Nick’s also a tennis player, and he and I are friends of a sort, and I’ve shared some of my troubles with him. I bumped into him, and I mentioned tennis; he suggested next week and sent me his email.
  We had this exchange today, sent, replied:

  From: Mark Perkins ()
  Subject: Re: TENNIS
  May have trouble getting on a schedule until next weekend because I’m already scheduled for almost every weekday next week until Friday afternoon. I think it would be terrific (and really helpful to me) to be hitting again, so don’t take this scheduling difficulty as indicative. I’ll have the time, and I’m a definite yes. Mark

  Nick Glazbrook (glazarch@swbelllnet)
  Re: TENNIS
  That’s fine Mark. I’ll be looking forward to it. I am going to get some new practice balls.
  For what it’s worth, I asked that your name (first name only) be added to a list that our priest reads each Sunday called “Prayers for the People, for the Holy Spirit.”

  Su amigo,

  Nick

  *

  I don’t want to see Pam at the gas pump or in the grocery store. Not at the Starbucks either, when I ask for a tall misto, which is what they call a café au lait, in their shortest cup, for reasons as unclear as the pale brown mix of milk and coffee. It’s said there are no negatives in the unconscious, where our dreams stay after we wake up. The green shades in the bedroom are drawn open, and a yellow finch sings in its lavender cage. This “not wanting” of mine is also a cage. My longing for Pam perches on a dowel, moves its wings, and hops from one lavender corner to another. She’s gone, gone, gone. What others have survived, I will, too. Still, I don’t want to see her at the Home Depot, or at the Museum of Art on a Saturday afternoon, leaning over the small rectangles of information, reading names and dates. I especially don’t want to see her in a glass of J. Lohr Paso Robles cabernet, acrid, tannic, and as blood red as a heart, always at room temperature, in an elegant, shapely glass.

  *

  I’m reading books of wisdoms. Stop leaning into circumstances, one advises, and rest in awareness. Practice tolerance and understanding, another one counsels. Expressing difficult feelings does not make them go away. Everything must be released from perfection. However, none of this seems very practical. It is about as helpful as noting that the sun will rise and the sun will set, and that nothing I can do will add or subtract a moment to the day. Okay, noted. The time spent reaching into a drawer for socks that match my shoes is an interval that can be divided into an infinity of moments.

  When I drove past the corner of Mockingbird and Auburndale, it was impossible not to be full of longing for Pam. The light was on inside, it was dinnertime. That’s her, I thought, there in the old house she owned and held on to during the five years we were married, probably always expecting to return to it. The blue Porsche Boxer at the curb is the one I bought, the one that she used to drive away. Why love the people who hurt us? I asked my sister that, after Pam left, taking at first nothing but five boxes of bank statements, credit card records, and the cards she gave me on birthdays and for Valentine’s. Oh, my sister said, laughing at us both, it happens all the time.

  *

  This house on Guernsey, where I intend to stay if the outcome of my divorce allows it, has never been my house before. But it is now, months after Pam and I have “separated.” I want it and don’t want it. I want the failed life we lived in it to come back so it can be lived again, but successfully this time. I want the pain to be gone. I want to go back and fix it. That is never going to happen. The only way the hurt will be gone is if I leave it behind, and let it become smaller as I go away from it, not because it is smaller, but because I’m further and further away. Up to this point, all I’ve done, for all this distance between Pam and me, is keep my pain with me, like the stone she gave me on one of our trips together, sneaking it into the carry-on bag I toted for her from Kenya to Tanzania. Put the stone down, put it down for good. The lesson here isn’t new, but it seems the lessons that matter most are the ones that have to be learned over and over: be patient, be forgiving, keep going.

  *

  I put the hose in the pool to fill it up yesterday, but forgot to turn it off, so it the water ran all night. The green garden hose is like a garden snake, at first whipping back and forth and then, quieting, it disgorges a flow of water into the deep end. My marriage to Pam was another thing I let go on too long – over too long a night, as it twisted. Those five years were a mistake I should not have made; they will have their unmaking in the years of nights ahead.

  Pam is presenting lists of “what’s hers,” as part of the divorce process. It amazes me that she would insist that the silver footed bowl she found in Clignancourt, the flea market north of Paris we visited on our honeymoon, is hers rather than ours. She says it was a gift. Likewise the Porsche, although my name is on the title alongside hers – above it, actually. And the woven hats from that narrow street in Beijing, or was it Shanghai, and the wooden prayer house from Bangkok, and even the opium bed, from Indonesia, which we found at The Barking Frog, a local store on Cedar Springs Road, where she also cajoled me into saying yes to a massive carved teak chair no one ever sat in. Everything she wants to take was apparently a gift. The lucite art candles from Stanley Korshak — true, they were a gift, bought for Pam one at a time over five demanding years. But the rug from Packards in Santa Fe, which hung on the shop’s wall, a block south from the Plaza? It was bought on my birthday, on a trip Pam charged to my credit card. That trip was one of her gifts. I was her prince once upon a time, but now I am a frog, and a barking frog at that.

  *

  It was this way – denial, fear, sorrow and mistrust. Five years of failing and staying, until I didn’t need the courage to leave, only the courage to be left.

  *

  2007

  Is it the pair of shoes from Japan that is the object most out of place, where it rests now, on my hardwood floor? The rug from the gift shop at the La Fonda hotel belongs in my study, even though it’s a long way from Santa Fe, and even further from any Navajo reservation. And there’s the stemmed wineglass from Italy on my writing table, its glass base resting on the circle of the blue ceramic coaster from Greece. All from elsewhere, now here. Same as me. But of all these things, it may be the water in the wineglass that is furthest from its origins, which is a cloud high in the heavens, as swollen as a pillow on a darkening afternoon. Where is this water going next? I admire its transparency, its fluidity. When I tip the wineglass, look at the way it runs toward my mouth, at first slowly, and then with abandon, as if it suddenly discovered the joy of gravity and no longer cares what will happen to it.

  *

  I’m reading in the newspaper about Anousheh Ansari, the female tourist in space who told Oprah she would have given her life for the experience. “I always said that if they tell me it’s a one-way ticket, I would still take the trip.” Of course, that is life itself. A one-way trip, and that’s all. How wonderful for her, to have wanted something so much and then to have actually done it. She saw 32 sunrises and sunsets in a single day. Circling, orbiting. And space, she said, “smells like a burnt cookie.”

  *

  Many days still thinking about Pam. I think of my story in one sentence, if I’m feeling sorry for myself: “Male bewitched by female.” And if I want to add a pinch of bitterness, it’s “Naïve fool duped by witch.” The story I want for myself in one sentence is very different. It would be “Man says goodbye.” I need to say goodbye, but I don’t want to say goodbye. That’s where the wound is.

  Susan Sontag wrote in a journal: “As soon as one tries to hold fast, it’s like trying to make this breath serve for the next one.” And she added this epigram: “’Truth rides the arrow of time.” Not quite sure what any of that means. Through my divorce, I’m clinging to my emotions, and they are clinging to me. Sontag also wrote about love: “It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that the other person may just walk off with your skin.” I wonder about that, too. Once you’ve been flayed, what difference does it make whether the other person walks off or not?

  Of course, I was in a troubled marriage, from the beginning and throughout. Looking back is probably the least truthful way to see what was there.

  *

  An ordinary day. The toast popped up as it does, the juice is orange as it goes into last night’s wine glass. The email, however, from Pam, who left me eight months ago, which I received on the laptop in what used to be our study, that isn’t so ordinary. It’s a bit of burnt crust and bitter citrus. My father used to tell me, when I was upset as a child, I should ask myself about any upset: What will it matter, ten years from now? So I’m asking myself now: What will this matter years from now? What will it matter when I’m drawing the last breath before my very last breath? I know that day is coming. And it may be tomorrow, that last day. Then, the sweetness of even this very unhappy time will be something I will wish I could taste, just one more time.

  *

  November now, the evenings are blacker earlier. More turtlenecks and piped corduroy, no sandals and lemonade. It’s cold out, practically freezing, if I compare it to summer, though this is a warm enough night, and the stars, white as frost, are actually burning. January would be around the corner, if months had edges. I’m eager to walk down the corridor of December, with its hollies and holiday decorations. Time to go to sleep now. It will be another year soon enough.

  *

  Two tickets to Nabucco and Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions on the table—that, and time on my hands, if only a minute or two before tucking myself in for the night. I don’t need or want anything more than to notice the ei, ei in Einstein, and the concluding o of Nabucco.

  *

  Pam filed for divorce 2/26/2006.

  Things that make me continue to think about her: the flames in the fireplace do it, as does the sound of running water in a fountain or, truth to tell, a wind chime. Flatware, or plates in a cupboard stacked like hats, and cloth napkins, even without napkin rings; also any bottle of J. Lohr Cabernet. Cigarettes, of course – Winston Lights 100s. My dog, Wally, when he’s napping, either on the white comforter from Yves Delormes, or on the Baker sofa with its cylinders of armrests separated by two nubby cushions. Any blue sports car will do it, too, on any city street—but mostly Porsches with the top down – and pony tails, blonde hair pulled through the back of a cap. Spiky high heels, Wolford catalogs, plaid skirts, Chanel. And the dog again, waking with a yawn or a whimper, the tinkling notes of tags on his leather collar sounding the alarm as he goes from bedroom to living room. Poor Wally. Does he give a thought ever for the wide-bottomed bitch Chow named Venice, his sister, who left with Pam?

  November 13, 2007

  Odi et amo, I love and I hate. Nearly two years gone. I long for Pam, and I hate her, too, for the lies she told to me and about me; the money she took from me; the harm she did Ben and Eden. None of this can be undone. I have had lovers since, girlfriends who seem to care for me, but it doesn’t take away the longing I have for Pam. She damaged me and left me. What did she have that I so needed? Odi et amo, I hate and I love.

  *

  Ben’s heroes, in posters on the walls of his bedroom, all of them dead: Dimebag Darrell, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. First names, last names. Or, nickname, first name.

  *

  Safety first. What a rule.

  *

  Remembering the time I was waiting for Dolores to die. Her cancer had been discovered in February, and her time was short – just months. Our children, boy and girl, kept to their routines – school, games, meals. I no longer read to them at night. Instead, I looked at both of them with disbelief and heartsickness. I was alive and they were alive, but I knew our lives together were ending soon. We all knew.

  *

  What I did not know was that in the wake of their mother’s death these children would flail and drown. Both the girl, eleven, and the boy, thirteen. The boy, closer to his mother, never did recover. Our family drifted. There was a second marriage, a despised step-mother, and school failures, then a divorce, and years apart. Separation, it turns out, was to be our unwanted theme. So I found myself ten years later living alone, with no way to change the past and little hope for repair or any unblemished future.

  *

  I’m proud of how I have behaved, and of how have I held up under a furious assault, motivated by greed and powered by lies and meanness.

  I don’t know what is that fueled the anger in Pam. Or why she took her revenge, on me. But for her, that was apparently my use.

  *

  December 2007.

  It’s cold. I could turn on the heat but don’t. A therapist I’ve gone to for years told me years ago that I needed to learn to comfort myself, but I am more interested in bearing the discomfort than in alleviating it. This is a cold season. The lights twinkling on the houses of my neighbors seem to have no more value than trinkets, emblems of an unfair exchange.
  I am staying in the darkness and the cold.

  I have nothing to do this evening in my house on Guernsey Lane. Sit at a desk, look around. What is there to see? A Tiffany & Co. clock, a snapshot of Dolores in front of pink azaleas, the silver Dunhill lighter. I might as well have my eyes closed, and soon enough I will.

  *

  “It is written” is a phrase that conjures up the expectation of truth: as it is written, in the end of days when the mountain of the Lord’s house, etc. Other signs that what follows has the status of authority or at least the stateliness of a proclamation include terms such as thus, henceforth, and, especially, lo. Mostly the words are archaic and are given the respect that used to be accorded to the old. But much of what is written after these words is disputable, and no amount of thus and henceforth can make it otherwise. Rather, the truth is found in the things that were never said, much less written down, in a touch, an unrecorded sigh, and in the memory of the same.

  *

  For reasons that I never discussed with the cat, I decided that Shamus won’t be allowed to spend the night in the house, even on winter nights when there is frost. He would like to stay on the imitation Eames chair in the living room, with the authentic Jim Thompson silk draped over its arm, if he cannot stay on the comforter from Yves Delormes, which is as white as a field of snow, though much warmer. He would settle for the flagstones that border the fireplace and retain heat from the gas fire that keeps us both warm, before I turn the stem in the floor counterclockwise, or is it clockwise, on my way to the bedroom. But, in or out, it’s not his choice to make. He expresses no opinion about it. He leaps like a good cat from the cradle of my arms, his claws out, when I open the kitchen door to put him outside. His eyes are half awake, but widening.

  *

  For hours I’ve been reading self-help books: learning to say no without feeling guilty, wising up on friendship, and offering a hearty hello to my current crisis. I wonder about combining all the wisdoms in these books into one wisdom. How satisfying would it be to actually say no to a friend in crisis, instead of turning these pages. One line of black roman letters disappears after another, left to right, left to right, like the widths of grass behind me when I used to mow the lawn on the hottest days of the year – sweating, wanting a glass of ice water, with plenty of grass uncut ahead of me to the wide end of the yard.

  *

  Look was the first word I ever read; or, the first that I remember reading. That was in Kentwood Elementary School, probably in 1956 – fifty years ago last year, in September. I’ve been reading ever since, and looking, too, my eyes not nearly as wide as the two ‘o’s, or able to see through the hard “k” of the world.

  *

  I thought surely Pam would want to come back to me. Or, if not that, she wouldwant us to still be a couple. She could keep her house on Auburndale, which she kept throughout our marriage, her safe house, for the return she must have contemplated from the very beginning, and I would stay in the house I bought for the two of us. She would want to come back. Not because she would see that she had made a mistake leaving me, or because our separation from each other would be unbearable to her, or for any good reason. Reason was never part of our marriage. My thought, that we aren’t over, was also unreasonable. As if we could still have a beating heart, even though our breaths were always like the widely spaced breaths of the dying. From the beginning, we were near the end. And there is little left of us now. We are an unsigned document. We are the draft of a final decree in the trunk of my car, as we send each other messages about income taxes and insurances through our bored attorneys.

  *

  This house on Guernsey is on a creek, but far from it. Safe enough from floods, and from the bits of styrofoam, as white as foam on the water, and the plastic cups, the wrappers, the packaging and debris discarded on the roadway and falling into the creek upstream. This is the house I bought for Pam; for us, in part, but for her completely. This is the house I brought my two damaged children to, after their mother’s death. At the time, I still thought that the end of our family might not be the end. Pam was a landscaper, and these acres were grounds for her to work. There are turtles in the creek, near a broken dam. The small fish move through the shallow water. On the south side of the creek, vines descend on the face of a chalky bluff. I never cared for any of this. Not for the roots of the trees that protrude from the bank, or for the blue herons, or the sunsets. Odd then that I should still be here, and Pam has left. My children are gone, too; one of them fled, and one was pushed away. The nights of our marriage when I couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t share a bed with Pam, I would walk in the gardens she had planted. Those nights belong to me now, along with the creek. Pam left the creek for me to clean up. So, on this Saturday morning, I’ve climbed down a concrete drain pipe, down the eroded bank, wearing waders and carrying a black hefty trash bag. I’m picking up cans on the stones and bits of foil in the water.

  *

  What is God’s name? When Moses asks, God answers, Ehyeh asher ehyeh – I will be what I will be, and I will be with you. So God is the one who will be with me, as I try to let go of what is lost. Can I make a pledge? I will love my children who have hurt me, for Thou art with me. I will love again after my wife has left me, for Thou art with me. I will rebuild my house and make it my own, for Thou art with me. I will repair the day, hour after hour, for Thou art with me.

  *

  The catalog of what Pam took, which she prepared as part of our divorce, was a ten-page single-spaced typewritten document. I kept it as a souvenir of souvenirs. Her desires were as translucent as the greenglass bowl from the antique market in Paris – “Listen to your wife,” the dealer told me, when I balked at the purchase. There’s the fabric from one of the Russian “republics,” selected at the folk art festival in Santa Fe, and a ceramic from Kyoto, rough, homespun, and contemporary, too, with its brushstroked crane. She demanded the hats from China, a Muslim cap from Zanzibar, and bedskirts, towels, two chairs and an ottoman, a Tibetan rug, and a Porsche. A garlic press, a broom, a breadbasket—she wanted every object that she listed, refusing to share; her refusal was so fierce that I like to pretend it was her way of holding on, rather than letting go.

  *

  The year has cruel ways of reminding us of what has ended. Buildings do, too. Hotel rooms, symphony halls, park lands, certain roads, a tree—even the names of cities and countries – Thailand, Kyoto, St. Moritz. Maybe tomorrow someone will cast a new spell to break the spell of my old life, releasing Santa Fe, the Crescent Hotel, the Mecca, Sheers, a vase of flowers, risotto.

  The time Pam spent at her house in the country, that was my time, too. Her tasks: painting the wooden lintels and the brick veneer, or using a broom to knock the wasp nests from the eaves, watching sunsets, lighting candles, listening to torch songs, smoking cigarette. She bought herbs at Blue Moon, lumber at McCoys, and a sliced beef from Sheps. I stayed home in the city, disbelieving that she was happier to be alone. But she had her decisions to make and made decisions easily, disinterested in looking back.

  There are still a few things that were Pam’s that she forgot on Guernsey and I then failed to return: fabrics from India, which she used as runners for her table settings, and a green metal ashtray in the shape of a leaf. There are bottles of balsamic oils and vinegars, a breadbox, supplements, and the venison sausage from her brother-in-law’s ranch in Llano (left behind in the freezer). She left the cookbook from Chez Panisse, and the wooden tray on the opium bed in the far garden. Some of these things I kept from her, a secret trade for all the things Pam took away. My secret theft. I have decided to turn the Indian fabrics into pillows. I’m hiring a seamstress to cover two square forms; the fabric colors – aubergine, gold—are as lively as a stew, some raja’s soup, though inedible with its sequins and threads. It’s a soup Pam might have made on a winter Sunday night, with buttered garlic toast and a glass – though the glasses are gone now – of ruby wine. And she would be carrying it to me on the goldleafed tray she also forgot to take.

  *

• Some Days, 2008 - 2023

  
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  January 2008

  Happiness is a horizon, not a place to get to, no matter how fast or far I go. Happiness is nothing to be owned, and not a place to live, although from time to time I might visit there. Happiness is the life waiting for me, once I get rid of the life I always wanted.

  The title of a comic that used to run in The Los Angeles Times: Another day, another dollar. In those Los Angeles times, I ate my father’s scrambled eggs at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings. This Sunday in Dallas, I’m still mourning the loss of two wives, my scattered and damaged children, and the homes we made. I’m reading in a book about the forms of happiness. It counsels that discarding disappointments may be no less necessary than letting go of the Sunday newspaper and its color comics.

  *

  Is this love, this longing for someone who is happier without me? If so, there’s no shame in it. I could write a poem and send it. I could say here’s a gift you do not want, just letters on a screen, a prayer of serifs and syllables. Read it silently. It won’t be my voice, and you won’t hear the longing or the shame.

  *

  My future came to me years ago.

  Had there been lights on the path, it would have been a different trip. If rivers had been my course, I could have been carried by their currents. And if I had had wings, my bird’s eye view might have shown me where the safer passage was, as night fell.

  As it was, I didn’t see the miracle of my breath right under my nose, and much of what was remarkable went unremarked.

  *

  Rainy night, rain on the metal roof. After an hour, there’s little difference between the sound of the rain and my boredom.

  The night falls and keeps falling and never finds a place to rest.

  *

  Maybe I have experienced enough and will write about it now. I have the rhythms of sentences. Life has happened to me, enough of it, so I can talk about it, and just not imagine it. It’s a task, to take what has happened and write it down. Not exactly down, as I am looking across the backs of my hands at a laptop screen. The task is to get it across. Or, through a mysterious process, to get it out of me, to move words from wherever they are to where they need to be.

  My dentist, Dr. Rao, tells me that my teeth are worn smooth. She believes I must be grinding them at night. She recommends a shield that I would wear when I sleep, a semi-circle of plastic molded to fit my lower teeth. I think the smoothness has resulted from ears of gripping the black plastic stems of the pipes I use to keep my hands busy in the long evenings. I don’t smoke in public. I’m not out running errands on Saturday mornings with a pipe in the corner of my mouth. But I do seem to want the busyness of fussing with a pipe, matches, a lighter, tobacco, when I am trying to sit still.

  I received Dr. Rao’s advice but did not take it. She wanted to upsell me, to provide a value-added service in addition to the regular cleaning and x-rays that are her products. She’s still a young woman, making money. She bought the business from my previous dentist, who moved to Colorado; he had also bought the business from the dentist before him. So Dr. Rao has a practice to build and perhaps a debt to pay off. Unlike her retired colleagues, or the most traditional practitioners, she needs to be selling. She can try, but she’ll get little more from me than a cleaning every nine months. She can count on that; she can take it to the bank. I have inherited a propensity to produce plaque, and I will be a regular.

  *

  Bedtime gives me a deadline. It makes it easier for me to write a sentence late at night. I’ve turned the valve near the fireplace and lit the gas, which burns around a pyramid of stone balls that Pam bought after we discovered that our two-sided fireplace, which divides a living room from my study, doesn’t draw well enough for a wood fire.

  The balls aren’t actually stone. They are a heat resistant ceramic. They sit in three tiers –seven, eight, and seven balls in three rows for the bottom tier; six and six in two rows for the middle tier; and then a single row of five balls on top. It’s pretty. The blue hearts of the flames whip upward to bright orange crowns. Even this artificial warmth is comforting. I have a picture of Dolores at arm’s length on my veneered writing desk, and photos of Ben and Eden as well, from when they were younger. A sealed baggie from the tobacco store in Preston Center holds Devonshire or Indian Summer. The Dunhill lighter, which is silver and smooth, was a replacement for the one Pam took when she left. Hers was gold. I bought it for her in London years before we were married. She never used it, so I kept it for myself. I can imagine her deciding to take it, along with the financial records, which she removed from the house the day I went out of town, looking for a group home for my dysfunctional son. I went to check out Aimhouse in Boulder, Colorado

  The pipe between my teeth is talking back to me now. It uses a dialect of suck and puff. It’s exclaiming smoke.

  *

  Work five days a week. On Saturdays I make lists of things to do. On Sundays, there’s the local paper and the thicker Times. The hours are such small receptacles, it doesn’t take very much to fill them. One week, then another. A month, a year. What do I want to do with my days. For today, my answer is unattractive. I want to whine. I want to resent how little I have to show for a marriage to a woman who left me, or for the care I offered to a daughter who has turned away from me. Tomorrow, however, I will leave all complaining behind, and habit myself, as Whitman put it, to better dreams.

  I want to bathe in a gratitude I do not feel for a life that has been aching for a long time. I want to acknowledge, if not feel, the goodness in the things of the world.

  Today is today. Cold outside. Cold inside, too, even with the gas fire lit, and the lamplight. A dry, middle of the country, end of January cold. I’m at home by myself, after a day at my office. I talked to a girlfriend on the telephone earlier this evening. She has a wariness in her voice, as if our conversation were a contest.
  “What do you mean?” she asks.
  “What do you mean” is her way of saying she either dislikes what I said or my tone in the saying of it, or probably both. I’m grateful for her nonetheless. For the companionship on Friday nights or Saturday nights. But I’m not in love. And she isn’t, either.

  It’s raining.

  *

  My black cell phone has an opaque glass face that I can slide forward with my thumb, revealing a keypad with twelve buttons.

  I have a wool turtleneck on, trousers, and sock. My fingers are chilled, and there’s a stiffness and tenderness in my back, something edgy in my joints. I may be ill, or just overly tired. I place my hand on my forehead. It’s hot there. When I swallow, I can feel a ball of soreness at the back of my throat. Unwell, definitely.
  Checking my voicemail – “You have no messages.”
  Maybe not, but there is a message in the cold.
  This silence is full of sounds. The little whipcracks of the flames in the fireplace. The tapping of raindrops on the skylight, constant and irregular. The laptop is humming, processing, processing.
  It’s hard to sit still.

  *

  An advice columnist is paid to answer a letter in the newspaper. She writes that people drag around phantom relationships because they remain attached to the idea, long after the person is gone.
  True, of course we do. Even when the person was there, it was the idea we were attached to. What idea? True love? Blue eyes? A martini with a green olive?
  That’s what I may need to figure out.
  Maybe it’s not so much an idea, but an ideal—something I think I want but that doesn’t exist, as appealing as a cloud in the shape of a circus animal, or the true heart.

  *

  The garage door rises on its tracks. My car’s there, the gym bag on the floor in the back seat, and my fat black daytimer. I’ve backed into the driveway, I’ve headed onto the street. The blocks are so familiar. East on Northwest Highway, then south on Inwood to Lemmon, then east toward Turtle Creek. Familiar, but on this morning as extraordinary as a dream, vivid and hallucinatory.

  If I am a sinner, my sin is lack of gratitude.

  The wind is up, lifting with it the branches of trees. The shrubs are dancing, really shaking it.

  Where does the wind come from, and why does it blow? Are there wild angels in the corners of the world, their throats distended and their cheeks full, as they expel their breaths? We are inclined instead to talk about air currents and no longer see in the world the angel, or any agent, at work.

  *

  February 2008

  Five senses, five sentences. One thing I saw, one I smelled, one tasted, one touched, one thing I heard today. Or perhaps all of this in one observation.

  There were workmen in the backyard on scaffolds in my empty swimming pool, which was drained of water. I’ve never touched the brown rubble in the bottom of the pool. No odor of chlorine, no cold water running off a wet bathing suit, no sounds of splashing.

  It’s a Friday, and the first day of February.

  *

  Sunday night.
  I drove out to Debra’s house for dinner. Her mother is in town from Cleveland and staying with her for five weeks. The drive is a straight path west on Northwest Highway, passing Bachman Lake. There was a parade of cars at the entrance to the park in front of the lake. On the north side of the street, small retail – taquerias, tire shops, the storefronts of businesses that cash payroll checks. And, further on, the strip clubs and bars. I have the radio. Chatter, music. A soft push on the gas pedal or the brake, the tension of steering. And when I lowered the window, the air of the evening is in my nose and on my tongue.

  *

  Still life, under lamp light.

  Black cashmere sleeves. Two cuffs – cylinders of black ridges that cover my wrists. The backs of hands extend and separate left and right, fingers and a brown thumb, fingers and another thumb. Nails, pink semicircles and chevrons of darker pink that end in a dirty cream border. The tips of fingers touch unserifed letters on a keyboard; a, s, d and f on left, and j, k, and l on the right, and then the smallest right finger on a colon and semi-colon. Between the frames of two hands, a foreshortened pipe stem. Out of the mouth of a blackened bowl, a thin snake of smoke, aromatic with an odor of Indian summer. The taste of heat, small pops of sound, a tide of breath that approaches and withdraws.

  Sitting, leaning forward. Elbows on the table, wrists resting on the laptop, fingers curled, perched over the keys.

  No sound, other than the unspoken words I say to myself, one after another. I am taking my own dictation. And the tap of keys.

  A red hairline appears under a word on the screen. A misspelling.
  A green zigzag under every sentence fragment.

  The screen is waiting, as if it wants to go. It’s waiting for me to give it the gas.

  *

  At Starbucks I order a tall misto.
  It was called café au lait when I was living Paris in an apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine, not far from Mouffetard and around the corner from the Pantheon. It came then mostly in a heavy, porcelain cup, half dark coffee, half steamed milk, and with an aroma of heat and bean. If I want it at the Starbucks in Inwood Village, or the one on Northwest Highway in the shopping center, I say “misto.” “Mixto” would make more sense, for the mix of dark and light. At Starbucks it comes in a paper cup, with a brown sleeve. The cup is smoother than the sleeve. The boy behind the counter is talking to a customer about the band that he plays in and the gigs they have. She’s in a band, too – the customer. I recognize her from the Verandah, my health club, where I work out on workdays. She’s a singer. That may explain why, when I see her at the Verandah, she’s always singing to herself. Maybe she’s rehearsing. She sings out loud, but under her breath, as if she can’t help herself and is aware that she can’t.

  *

  I’m rehearsing as well, more than I want to. One of the songs under my breath is the “don’t come back home” message that Pam left on my cell phone two years ago. But I did come back home. I was too tired to do anything else.

  A moment after I picked up Pam’s message, I received a call from Ben.
  “Dad,” he said. “I know you said this has nothing to do with me, but I can’t get in the house.”
  His voice was calm, almost dull.
  I told him it would it be okay, but neither of us believed that. The house was locked when I got there that evening, and my key no longer fit the front door.
  The garage was open. I got a hammer from the tools on a workbench. My clothes and Ben’s as well were on the floor of the garage. Shirts and pants were still on hangers. Underwear, socks, t-shirts and shoes were in grocery bags.
  “What the hell,” Ben said.

  *

  I try to spin Pam’s atrocious behavior into something else. Why don’t I instead try to spin myself into regaining my good judgment? What’s needed now? Mostly the decision to stand up straight and let go. I am declaring myself glad to be rid of her. But I’m neither glad nor resigned to it yet.

  What were the comforts she offered? Pleasures, indulgences. What was the fantasy that she provided me that I won’t let go? When I was seventeen years old, what fantasies protected me from unhappiness? To not be ordinary, unadmired, unimportant? And now that I’m fifty-seven?

  Whatever she offered, I will need to supply myself. I can throw off self-denial, and welcome luxuries and pleasures. As for the fantasy of being back with her, I need to lose it, and also abandon my need for it. If she was elegant, I will have to be elegant myself. If she was beauty and artifice, I will have to be beautiful. I can craft my surroundings, my clothing, my dinner table.

  What I am feeling is not love, but lovesickness.

  Strong emotion passes, like a storm or a fever, but its consequences can be permanent, if I let them be.

  *

  I’ve forgotten the water. It’s still on, overfilling the pool. When I turn the small wheel clockwise to shut the valve, the pinched water whistles through the pipe, as if it were rushing to make it through before the valve closes. It gets louder and louder, until it comes to a stop, like the rising notes that bring a musical performance to an end. The grass is soft enough, the air tastes cold, and there is an odor of night descending. The great good world is all around me, if I can only remember that it is.

  *

  Birdsong this morning. It’s cheerful, though the small brown birds are not. They seem anxious and flighty.

  There are so many birds here on Guernsey. I see them in the yaupon hollies, in the red oaks and the live oaks, in the far yard and in the creek.

  The pigeons on top of a stone ledge have talons that are hard as bone. Whatever a heron carries on its flight over the creek is as hidden as its past and its future. I see birds in every bit of the sky but have no bird’s eye view. I can hear them. Their talk is all singing. They have a bold, beating life.

  The only birds I have ever touched are the dead ones, birds with one wing cocked unnaturally, a neck broken, on the pavement or the grey driveway or on the wooden deck near the window these birds flew into.

  Birds are as dainty as time, flying away.

  They have a taste for kernels seeds, mites, and other indigestibles. They eat a mixed multitude of feed.

  Is there such a thing as an old bird? They are all youths.

  *

  What I would like to ask Pam:
  Was there someone else?
  Were you in touch with an old boyfriend while we were married? If not, how long was it after you left that you reached out to him?
  Was your desire to get money from me part of your decision to leave? Was that because you wanted the resources to rebuild your home in East Texas, which had burned in a fire?
  Did you “always” plan to leave?
  How many decisions did you make in our marriage because you wanted to be prepared to move on?
  If you loved me, how could you have hurt me as you did?
  Do you miss me?
  Actually, I don’t want to ask her, but I do want to know.

  *

  I imagine Pam sitting in front of the mirror on the dressing room table two years ago. She’s in her middle fifties. She is leaning forward. She thinks about having an affair with her high school boyfriend, Tom Hoopingarner, who still calls her from time to time. Tom is divorced now, and he loves her, as so many men have. But she wouldn’t want to have an affair – better to be single and to have him as a lover in the open. No more dreaming and wanting. Her marriage doesn’t mean that much to her. True, her husband has supported her and her son for five years. And he would never leave her, but that is almost reason enough for her to leave him. He is her third husband. It would be nice, she thinks, to move on to a fourth. Exciting, different, satisfying, at least for a time. Also, there’s money to be taken from this third marriage. And it would become hers, not shared. She could take half a million dollars from him. Maybe more. Furniture, too; rugs, lamps, antiques, much of which she bought over his objections.
  The Porsche would go with her as well.

  *

  March 2008

  Debra and I left a charity event last night. It was put on by the Southlake Women’s Society. Open bar, too much to drink, a cover band of attorneys and local businessmen with enough skill to play the greatest hits. Wives were more limber than husbands on the dance floor. The couples were shaking their hips, holding each other or separated, and mouthing the words of the tunes to each other or to themselves.

  *

  March 2008

  I’ve volunteered to be a supernumerary in Tosca – many rehearsals, then performances at night. There will be a performance for school children, where I will go out into the audience between acts two and three so the children can see me in my soldier costume. I search for Cavaradossi in the church, but only find the basket where food has been left for him. And I’m in the firing squad that executes the hero. Most of the supers are gay men who know each other and appear in Dallas Opera productions regularly. This will be my one and only time, because it takes so much time. The stars are in their own world. Massimo Giordano is the tenor playing Mario Cavaradossi. Kathy Naughtstad, soprano. She’s Floria Tosca, the singer. Wolfgang Brendel sings Scarpia. His lieutenant, Spoletta, is sung by Dan Cangelosi, who’s from Cleveland, the Parma and Seven Hills area, though he tells me backstage that he’s been gone from there twenty-one years.

  I took Debra to dinner Saturday night after a Maverick’s game. We went to Medina, in the Victory development. There was a young woman across from us with short blond hair, Pam’s cut, and I was unable to keep from staring at her.

  *

  The more you hear something, the more you think it’s true. Jesus rose from the dead. Cold water boils faster than hot. True or not, if you hear it often enough, you believe it, no matter how improbable it is.

  *

  Something happens, and other things follow. I am married, there are two children, my wife dies of cancer, the two children grow up, and we all grow apart; they left for lives of their choosing. There was a second marriage as well, and plenty of trouble from that. One step after another. Here I am, in a house with a dog and a cat. And now a girlfriend, though not in the same house. So I do have company on Friday nights and Saturday nights and, if I want it, on Sundays.

  *

  Paul McCartney, mon semblable, mon frere. I read that your marriage to Heather Mills was costly. You had five hundred million dollars, and she took fifty million of it with her, after four short years of marriage. Ten percent of everything. And in your case, everything was a whopping sum. My Heather? She and her spikey high heels walked out with closer to twenty percent, after five years. I miss those heels, though. I miss her ankles, her legs. No doubt I am missing the money she took as well. But here I am, in the house I bought back from myself, with the cat, the dog, and my bruises.

  The cat has his paws on the keyboard.
  Hey, Shamus, talk to me. You’re always telling me things will be okay, eventually, but I never believe you.

  Debra has the voice of a Clevelander. It’s an unpleasant voice, nothing mellifluous about it, nothing soft or Southern.
  Should I be looked for someone else again? Fit, smart, sixty-year-old man would enjoy the company of a sensual woman with a mellifluous southern voice.
  Or, mellifluous old man would enjoy the southern company of sixty women. That might be the better ad.

  *

  Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Whatever you observe, smile at it and be grateful for it.

  Tick, tick. There is no tock. The evening has moved smoothly from one moment to another, the quiet of the house as heavy as a pudding. The day has ended, after midnight.

  *

  Gratitude is what I need. So many say that gratitude is a prerequisite for happiness. True, it may be the necessary precondition. Do I have to be thankful in order to be happy? Maybe, maybe so. One Saturday as we stood in the parking lot at Temple Israel, the working class synagogue that we grew up in, in Los Angeles, Rabbi Soloff asked Lori Dickerman what she wanted from life. I just want to be happy, Lori replied. And Rabbi Soloff chastised her. He told her that happiness isn’t anything to want. Do something worthwhile, he said, that’s what to want, and let happiness follow. In our synagogue, a plumber, Mr. Gordon, was the big macher. He was up on the bimah during services. I wonder if he was happy. He certainly did something worthwhile, unclogging drains and replacing toilets.

  I am grateful, I suppose, for my health; I’m grateful for money sometimes. I’m grateful for my dreams.

  *

  I don’t want to get married again.
  What I want to do is to pursue dreams and find pleasures and meaning in each day.

  I want to understand myself. I want to find satisfactions in the workings of my heart and in my observations of the world.

  *

  Brian Bevolo, one of my employees, is complaining in his office today. He says that morale is “in the crapper.” He hates coming in. Is there any gratitude in that?

  *

  A blue jay sails by my window. It crosses paths with a Japanese maple, when the tree is budded and as green as a lime at the start of spring. It finds a perch for itself, with its claws on top of the rusted corten steel fence. The ledge it lands on is no wider than an eighth of an inch. More than blue, the jay is dappled. Everything is dappled; in nature there is nothing but a multiplicity. Blue, grey, dirty white, a dark beak. I can’t see its eye, but I can try to see eye to eye with it, if I am grateful for a perch on a steel fence.

  Gratitude is a bird’s heart, a small engine of happiness.

  The bird calls, cries, sings. None of it is to me, but it is all for me, if I can receive it.

  I went to the Verandah Club in the middle of the day. Corky Sherman was there, and Rob Yaquinto, with the butterfly tattoo on his shoulder, and Harvey, who must be eighty. Harvey is a vain old man, still slender. Whether his curly thick red hair is dyed or not I don’t know. It must be. Someone at the club told me that Harvey landed at Normandy on D-Day. These days he’s proudest of his hair and his moustache. His biggest worry is the stock market.

  *

  Laughter is the vaulted ceiling in the temple of happiness.
  I may not need to be happy, but I do need to be happier. I need to laugh more, which is something Debra and I rarely do together. That’s not a good sign. Perhaps I should count laughs the way Debra counts calories. The fact is, we may need each other’s company, but we don’t seem to enjoy it all that much.

  What is happiness then? It’s well-being. It comes from working on goals and caring about others, and, maybe, having others care about you. It sounds very simple. It sounds as though it should be available to anyone.

  *

  Continuing with this, a list of gratitudes –
  The pleasures of reading.
  The routine and the companionship, however superficial, of my business.
  My pipe and the busyness of lighting it and puffing on it.
  Talmud class.
  Debra’s smile, which appears every so often.
  Yoga practice and sweating heavily.
  Tennis games at TBarM
  Ben’s simple goodness. However difficult he is, and however much sorrow he feels, and I feel alongside him.
  Larry ‘wolfish and Mark Kaman and Bill Worley and Bob Herman.
  Shamus following me into the backyard.
  Wally, who rolls over on his back and whimpers and squeaks excitedly when I come home.
  Dolores’s wisdom, which I’ll always have with me.
  Patti, who keeps me in her thoughts.

  *

  More things to be grateful for:
  Kate
  Jocelyn
  Katherine
  Jo Anne
  Joe, who calls me at one in the morning, an urgent call, to tell me that my desire to “know the truth” about Pam, why she left me, whether she was in love with her high school boyfriend, and did she leave me for him – all that, he wants to tell me, is a waste of time, something I cannot know even were I to ask her. I’m not grateful for his call, but I’m glad that I can listen to him rambling on, because he needs someone to talk to. I’m grateful for my ears, eyes, bruised heart, and all those organs I ought to agree to donate upon my death.

  *

  Still thinking about Pam. In my love for her and hatred for how she hurt me, I am two people who cannot make peace with each other. Some days I am scarcely on speaking terms with myself. Other times, the two of me engage with each other, bickering, and even accusing each other of lying.

  *

  I read this, but forgot to note from where:
  “In these years I have learned to manage sadness. Little by little the losses in my life are turning into a sweet nostalgia. I want to transform my rage into creative energy and guilt into an acceptance of my own faults; I want to sweep away arrogance and vanity. I will never achieve detachment and compassion or enlightenment; I do not have the bones of a saint, but I can aspire to fewer bonds, a bit of affection for others, the joy of a clean conscience.”

  *

  What I might be grateful for today –

  My business, which engages me.
  The azaleas, the Japanese maples, purple blooms on the vincas near the creek.
  My comfortable breaths.
  Rabbi Bentzi Epstein’s invitation that I come to a second night seder at his house, which will probably last until two in the morning.
  Debra, who called me from her car in the middle of the day, because she was going home to take Isabella to the vet. She was afraid that Isabella was dying, but when she came home Isabella was wagging her tail.

  I was tired much of the day and came home early myself, after stopping by the Trammell Crow building to pick up my opera packet. Dismayed this evening, missing Pam once again, and wanting to be comforted by her.

  Will this ever go away? And if so, to be replaced by what?

  *

  Grateful for the love I experienced with Dolores; not based on desire, but on respect, and caretaking, and friendship.
  Grateful for the passion I had for Pam and the pleasures I shared because of her.
  Grateful for Debra’s company at yoga, and for her eyes.
  Grateful for the taste of garlic in a dip from Central Market, spread on crackers, and the blonde Belgian beer.
  Grateful for the present pleasures of reading and the future promise of page after page and for the rhythm of sentences.
  Grateful, sometimes, for the responsibility I feel for Ben and Eden, and the satisfaction I took in doing my job of providing for them. I have a picture of them on my desk. My cousin Molly took it, a few months after Dolores’s death. Ben’s hand is on my knee, and my hands are on Eden’s shoulders. We are all wearing glasses, doing our best to see.

  *

  I’m rat racing these days and working hard for the sake of a future happiness. I’m putting up with remodeling the house, meetings, plans, workmen and disturbances. I worry about the expenses but tell myself this task will leave me satisfied. I’m busy with it, which is helpful; it’s a goal, something to accomplish. Sometimes I delude myself with the ridiculous thought that I am completing this for Pam, finishing a project she wanted done. As if I am telling myself unconsciously that she cares what I am doing; as if she still thinks about me.

  After Dolores’s death, when Pam and I became lovers, I would go to her house on Mockingbird in the middle of a work day and go to bed with her in her white bedroom, covering myself in her linens, curving myself against her freckled back. I was deeply happy to enjoy her. No matter what, that pleasure was good.

  *

  When Eden left me for her birth mother, I felt helpless. It seemed to me that my family had been ruined and there was no recovery from it. I thought I would never be able to put the three of us – Ben, Eden and me — back together again. And so it has been. I am still unreconciled to the loss.

  Something of the same feeling, when Ben failed at school. I couldn’t quite recover. My dreams for him were gone.

  *

  Happiness, both in the moment and looking forward:
  When Dolores, Ben and Eden and I went to Big Bend, we spent the days together and stood outside at night under the stars. We ate at Kiva, in Terlingua. For that moment, we were happy together. I thought our days were building blocks for a love all of us would have the rest of our lives.

  *

  April 20, 2008

  Tennis match today with Gary Stolbach.

  A phone call from Eden; she was in her car coming home from tutoring. She used the time to complain about her students, who don’t respect her.

  Eden’s married now, to Ben Rhodes. At the wedding, the groom and his friends wore kilts. Barbara was there, and Eden’s half-sisters, though I don’t remember them. I do remember the make-up artist needing extra compensation for working on the task of covering up the enormous tattoo of a rose that Eden apparently has on her chest.

  Poppy calls back to accept an invitation to my Seder, which is next Sunday night.
  Debra has talked me into having the Seder, after I had decided to let it go this year, for the first time.

  I’m grateful to Debra for doing that. And for the passing of time this long day, because it has been a lonely day. I’ve been too sad to do much; but time passes, and the day will end.

  *

  Thinking about Pam every day and missing her terribly and do not understand why. There must be a way out of this, but there only seems to be a way through it. Journaling, busyness, therapy, exercise, the office – none of it has worked, or worked for very long. This longing may be nothing more than sadness. I need a pill, a better diet, more sleep, a different chemistry. Each day, some pleasure. And for the years to have some meaning.

  Whatever it is, maybe I never will get over it. Somethings you don’t. Enough time goes by, and you forget, or remember only occasionally, and that’s the best you can hope for.

  *

  If I were more aware of my own needs, I would read less and write more.
  I would eat one delicious meal a day.
  I would hug or kiss someone every day.
  I would tell the people on my staff how much I admire them every day.
  I would sleep more.
  I would do less, or do fewer things, but each one would be done more patiently and more attentively.
  My physical health is something I am happy about. When I consider my good fortune, I am grateful for it.
  Studying makes me happy.

  If I were more aware of my own needs, I would have a shorter list of things to do.
  I would congratulate myself more often.
  If I took more responsibility for fulfilling my own wants, I would say hello to a woman with long and slender legs.
  I would shut my eyes and sing my own praises.
  I would let Eden and her hatefulness go, because I cannot undo the past.
  I would let Pam go, because I cannot undo the past.
  I would see the moment on the tip of my nose. The present moment hovers like an angel. And like an angel changing her clothes, one moment changes into the next.

  If I breathe deeply and experienced peace, would I recognize it? Would I even appreciate it, before my mind would talk it away?

  *

  End of April 2008

  Now I lay me down to sleep
  I pray the Lord my soul to keep
  If I should die before I wake
  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  Does anyone not know his quatrain? The trochees to start, then the three lines of iambs.

  Hatred and anger – can there be one without the other? Both are disfiguring and horrible to see. Yellow hatred, brown anger.

  My inability to feel hatred – despite what I might tell myself – that’s something I’m glad of and am grateful for.

  *

  Does anyone say “longhand” anymore? I move my wrist to the right and then return it to the left margin, as though my arm was the returning carriage of a typewriter. I do remember typewriters — Royals and Underwoods, and IBM Selectrics with their silver globes covered in characters, like tattoos, only raised.
  Longhand.
  For how long did women learn shorthand, a notation that allowed them to transcribe a fast talker. Before there was shorthand, there was longhand.

  A pen rests on the side of my middle finger, held there by another finger. Which one is the index finger? Which, the forefinger? The forefinger is the one you point with. The base of the pen is in the valley between finger and thumb.

  Longhand.
  The spots on the back of my hand are multiplying. Age spots, dirt spots, shapes like stains. Age is staining me.

  Once upon a time, everyone wrote in longhand. There were no backspaces or deletions, only cross-outs and scribbles, and wads of crumpled paper.

  Longhand can be done with a Bic pen. If you are writing in longhand, you are an author who went to a university, not a secretary who went to school to learn shorthand.

  If you wrote in longhand, you had the embers of a fire smoking in the fireplace at the end of the room, which is the library in your manor. You had a pipe – Baudelaire’s, the one he said had a face as black as an Abyssinian. You would not be worried about mouth cancer; more likely you would have already contracted syphilis in your twenties, as Donizetti did, and, after writing whatever it is that longhand allowed, you would go insane in your forties and find yourself – if you knew yourself then – in an asylum. And you would be dead two years later.

  But this is not my story, and I am not laboring to set it down in longhand. I prefer the nearly inaudible tapping of fingertips on a keyboard, and the feint, unhappy hum of a hard drive, as it does the laboring, performing whatever task of fetch that I am commanding.

  *

  I am burning the midnight oil. Is this any different than the oil that was burning at the more reasonable hours of eight-thirty or nine?

  *

  Possessions, the work I do, social status, knowledge, education, physical appearance, abilities, relationships, personal or family history, belief systems, political, nationalistic, racial, and religious identifications – are any of these essential to me? If none of it is, does that frighten me, or is it a relief?

  What will I know when death arrives that I do not know now? Death is a stripping away of all that is not me. But the dead body is not me, either.
  When Dolores died, she lay there, but not really.
  She was gone, but where?

  *

  From the beginning of Andrew Greer’s The Story of a Marriage:
  “We think we know the ones we love.
  Our husbands, our wives…we think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know.”

  Pam thought that she loved me, and she may think that still, referring only to the past. But what was her love? A kind of gratification, not so different from the love she had for her cigarettes, though less physically compelling. And she discarded me as easily as she might toss a cigarette butt.

  *

  I worry about not having enough money to finish my house, or enough in savings to be secure, or enough, I suppose, to keep Debra or win someone else. What I learned from years with Pam is that women can be won with money. And, at least initially, only with money. But then I never owned Pam’s heart. I rented it. It was mine as long as I made the payments.

  I want to be content with myself, if not by myself. Dolores would counsel that there is no deeper pleasure or meaning without relationship.

  *

  I want to see my name on the spine of a book. My poems are a journal in another form, both less private and more so.

  Characters that are part of my character:
  Dolores, vivid in memory, a teacher, transformative.
  Ben, who is mine and endlessly difficult.
  Eden, who has left me for a life of her own.
  Pam, who discarded me.
  Old friends – Richard Levine, Richard Heine – in Southern California.
  Newer acquaintances – many, for companionship, and from time to time.
  Tennis partners, and those I see in my Torah or Talmud study classes, and strangers who go to yoga on Tuesday nights when I do.
  Work? More and more I want out of the office early, and prefer leaving to leading.
  Wally and Shamus are the animals I take care of.
  Debra, who is real enough. She would be with me if I asked her to be. She is the one I have, if I would have her.

  *

  I may have another forty years, which is plenty of time to lead another life, rather than following the path I’m on, or turning back on it, and revisiting the unhappy past. I have been harmed by the past ten years. I don’t need to be damaged tomorrow.

  What I am doing this year: Seeing Debra, playing tennis with Gary or Steve, reading, improving my house, taking care of Wally and Shamus, talking to Ben or Eden, having coffee from Starbucks and pizza from Coal Vines, walking on a treadmill at the Verandah Club, going to Talmud Wednesday mornings and Torah class Monday nights, Harvard Club lunches, attending events, visiting museums, listening to lectures or readings, keeping a journal through poems, appearing in Tosca, attending a cooking school, having breakfast with Billie Ellis or Joe Jacobson, serving meals at The Bridge, meeting for drinks at Fearings – the Rattlesnake Bar – or at the Crescent.

  It is not a heroic list, but it is intermittently good enough.

  May 2008

  Mother’s Day.
  Possible to be alone and completely content? I don’t think so. There is too much pleasure missed. There is too much meaning missed, when experiences are not shared. But why care about pleasure or meaning missed, rather than the pleasures of being alone and how meaningful that time alone can be.
  Reading, watching TV, working on a project, exercising, eating a snack, planning a trip, going to the art museum and wondering what it might be like to go home with one of the many beautiful strangers there.

  *

  Meaning and pleasure – the two legs to stand on.
  How to let go of the losses I have had?
  When I say move on, it must mean move forward. It means I need to also stop looking back, because that’s not where I’m going.

  *

  Fell out of love because I was discarded.
  Spent my days keeping busy, rat racing from one task to another, one plan to the next. It’s not hard to fill the hours between waking and sleeping. There are fewer days with every one that passes; in time, there will be no more time.

  *

  Fatigued but still here. My feelings for Pam are thinning. I’ve spent more than a year with Debra now. I do like her smile. I don’t like her voice, or the working class debunking she wants to do of all fine things, or her insecurities, or the silliness of her favoritism toward home and family. I am part of her life but I will ever be central to it. She is one of those people whose best days were yesterdays, and she is determined to stay there, in Southlake where her children grew up, or in Cleveland, where she did. Or, wherever those children who were her past go to in the future. I also wonder, of Debra and of anyone else I might meet from now on, what do I have to offer them that is needed. Meals out, conversation, travel, entertainment, and holding each other. It’s hardly enough to be sustained, and not valued enough to be worth working for.

  My business is more of a struggle than it has been. I am watching the clock. The demands of my house have sapped some of the excitement out of earning money; all of it will go to remodeling or paying off the debt for another two years. After that, if things go well – after that, it may be fun again.

  *

  Eden is married, for now. She’s in her world of school, work, and friends. In a way, given how talented she is, she’s wasting her time; in another way, she’s living as she chooses, as we all are. Ben’s in Boulder, Colorado, apparently for the long term. He has no school plans. He’s found a place for himself at Whole Foods. He lives alone and does well enough to keep himself going. Both of them are lost to me for now; with Eden, I suspect for good. The more we are apart, the more we will remain apart. They went away from me even when we were together in one house, as soon as I went for Pam. Our group of three was shattered. But then I doubt I had the emotional skills to hold the three of us together whether I had married Pam or not. I’ve always been too self-absorbed. I’m not one to dedicate myself to someone else, not even to my children.

  *

  Can I learn to describe instead of to comment?

  *

  I can’t change what has happened, but I can change my mind about it.
  How?
  At first, by pretending.
  I can praise my children and their courage, admire the decisions they have made, and respect them.
  I can tell others what Don Godwin told me, that Pam did me a favor by ending our marriage.
  I can frame my new life as new freedom, strength, determination, happiness, love, and a revelation.
  I can finish the house that I have made for myself and enjoy it.
  I can invite old friends to share my energy and accomplishments.
  I can get closer to Debra, and go from companionship to friendship.
  I can think there’s nothing bad and much that is good.
  I’m healthy, I have resources, hopes, aspirations.
  I’ve never been as capable, wise, patient or powerful.
  What can’t I do that I want to do?
  I’m the happiest I have ever been right now.
  But will my pretending help?
  It may be the only thing that will.

  *

  A cool morning, late May. When I breathe in, it seems as though I am filling my lungs with the light in the bedroom. Wally stays in all night and needs to be let out. The cat stays out and wants in. He’s at the door. He isn’t my cat really, but then whose cat ever is.
  The cat leaps up on the kitchen counter, where I keep his bowl.
  “Hey, hey kitty, hey Shamus.”
  His name would be Seamus to my daughter Eden, who first found this cat and named him. She was in her Irish phase, which she is still in. Eden has moved out, as has my son. Their mother died, their stepmother walked out, but the dog and cat never left.
  Neither did I.

  *

  My house on Guernsey is at the end of a cul de sac and on more than an acre of land. A creek runs behind it, and a bluff rises behind the creek. It’s unusual, this park-like parcel so close in to downtown, and a few blocks from the Tollway. The bluff is shale and soft rock. Over the years pieces of it have fallen, so there are large rocks in the creek. Mostly it’s a pretty sight, even the brackish water. But after hard rains the trash that is washed off the streets upstream is left in the creekbed — bits of styrofoam caught in the brush and branches, packing peanuts eddying on the water, orange or blue plastic strips waving like pennants form the low branches of trees along the creek, and clear wrappers and plastic bottles.
  It has been raining for three days, but not today.
  I stand a while in the kitchen looking out a window toward the black iron fence, the rectangle of my swimming pool and the bluff beyond it. All the trees have leafed out, the red oaks and sycamores, and the bluff is hardly visible behind their canopies.

  The outside decks around both sides of the kitchen are wet from the night before. I begin thinking about the coming week, but I shouldn’t. Only what’s immediately in front of me, think about that, and not even about that. Think about nothing at all, which is impossible.
  Wally’s at one of the kitchen doors. His paws are up on the glass. He’s barking, as if there’s something exciting about getting in.
  I’m already in, and I don’t see it. Perhaps he can tell me.
  Wally is mine because I took him off the back of a pick-up truck in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in East Texas, when Pam and I were going together. Before we married, we spent weekends at her “country place.” I chose him from a half-dozen brothers and sisters, because I liked his grey and black coat. Be’s part Australian shepherd, part chow, and part who knows what. Pam picked his sister, an all-black chow with a dark spot on her tongue; that was the dog that followed Pam out the door.

  Let’s stick to today, can we?

  Probably not.

  *

  The house is a project; as such, it entertains me. It is something to do, which makes it something worth doing. I bought the house on Guernsey back from myself in the divorce that followed my broken marriage. What a disaster, marrying and leaving our house in Greenway Parks where Dolores died and Ben and Eden were happy – or, happier.

  It might have been better had I sold Guernsey as a result of the divorce; but there I go, looking back.

  This house does need work. It will never be what our old house was. It doesn’t have the “good bones” that realtors might have said about our two-story brick home on Wenonah. In these first two years after Pam left, I’ve mostly done repairs. There are no holes in the ceiling in the living room now. The hardwood floors were blond before, and now they are mahogany. I’ve redone the kitchen, replacing JennAir with Viking and Sub Zero. What used to be the boys’ bath, when two messy teenage boys were in the house, is a guest bath now, and fully remodeled – limestone slab floors, a Duravit washbasin sitting on top of a Philippe Starck counter, and a woven blind on the window that gives off a fragrance of sandalwood. The brick fireplace in my study is clad in limestone now; its mouth is bordered with bands of oil-rubbed bronze. The entry tiles near the front door have been replaced with the same fossilized limestone in grey and feint green slabs. The study walls are lined with newly built bookshelves, painted a rich red brown; the color, from Benjamin Moore, is called English Manor. And I replaced the front door with a crafty, carved door in warm Honduran mahogany; it’s coated with marine spar varnish.
  That’s all for now, inside.

  The old soffits around the house were torn out and replaced with tongue in groove painted pine. New recessed lights illuminate the perimeter of the house, and new Artemide sconces are mounted outside every exterior door.

  I plan to replace the composition roof with seamed metal. It’s already being done on the detached garage. Inside the garage, I had floor-to-ceiling closets installed on the back wall and added a handsome, slatted redwood garage door. Decks on the north and south sides of the house were torn off, reoriented, and rebuilt with no visible screws, and then stained. I’ve had the pool redone, using glass tiles from Ann Sacks. Landscapers planted four Japanese maples, four hollies, a white bud, a magnolia, dozens of hydrangeas, ferns, and white blossoming azaleas.

  I’m not done with it. A master bedroom and bath and walk-in closet will replace the combination of my daughter’s old room and my son’s old room. Raised ceilings, glass walls replacing brick, a Japanese soaking tub, a concrete double lavatory, and, maybe, Poliform closets. Gone is gone; I want to remake it all.

  I’m thinking about a stairway up through my former stepson’s bedroom, and then adding an upstairs study, with an upstairs deck in ipe wood looking out to the bluff, away from the house and toward the creek.

  All this is a year or two from done. And then? That’s a question that will also repeat, an adult version of the small child’s why, appended ad infinitum.
  I don’t ask why anymore. I ask what then.

  *

  I had the blended family that did not blend. We were lumps in the distasteful soup of our lives together. It lasted five years. Time enough for us to grow comfortable with our judgments of one another. In the end there was simply no getting used to our differences.

  The house on Guernsey was appraised for the divorce, and when Pam refused to accept the appraisal, I paid her the extra she asked for, though the initial appraisal was accurate enough. I didn’t have the endurance that conflict requires, or any appetite for it. I want unpleasant things over with. In stressful times, I would rather have a quick wrong answer than wait for what’s right.

  *

  I volunteered to work in the line of volunteers who dish out food to the homeless at The Bridge, the shelter in downtown Dallas.
  Who are these people who are homeless? Did they fall off the bus the rest of us boarded? Or did they never manage to get on.
  They each have names. Someone gave them a name on the first day of their lives.
  I was in a serving line with seven or eight volunteers. We were behind the stainless counter and the trays for food. A paper plate was passed to me from my right. It had the portion of chicken breast and the serving of mixed vegetables. Vege-all, a college roommate of mine used to call it, making fun of it. My turn. I was mashed potatoes. One scoop, then pass the paper plate to the volunteer on my left, who was the ladle of brown gravy.
  Scoop of mashed potato, over and over.
  It’s nice to have such a defined task. No choices required, other than whether to look up and say hello or answer the “thank you” from one of the people moving with a tray on the receiving side of the counter. Most of them were young black men, but not all; some women, some older. Some were lively and talking with a pal or the stranger beside them, socializing; others, not at all.

  *

  Here’s how it works, after catastrophe. You see what has happened and that it cannot be undone. That takes a year, maybe two, and those are bad years. It can seem almost easier to change the past than to move forward. You may not believe in yesterday, exactly, but it is more real than the present. The present is a sad fog. The best part of every day is the end of the day, with its exhaustion and relief from exhaustion. Then, after however long, nothing really changes, but you seem to be feeling better. Maybe you are all cried out. Maybe you are simply tired, and tired of it. There is no turning point, there is no single moment your upset ends. Instead, the black becomes grey, and the grey holds, and the grey is light enough for you to make your way in it. Through it, if that happens, but certainly still in it.

  *

  Hope is whatever is unfinished. Whatever still has a chance.

  Eden tells me she’s moving to Amarillo. Or to Clarendon, a town 60 miles southeast of Amarillo. Her college degree, of whatever kind, will wait. She’s running off with whoever it is that appeals to her at the moment. That’s Eden, making one move after another. It may be with Steve, the trucker, who earned his money taking FEMA trailers to New Orleans after Katrina. Or with Keith, her boyfriend from forever. She tells me that Valerie Leland, Nick’s mother, a woman who befriended her when she was at Greenhill, has taken her in and will be giving her jobs to do.

  Who knows what moves Eden? And with Eden the question may also be who doesn’t know, other than me, because I’m the one she likes to hide from. I have a dream of a future in which I never talk to her again and am happy to have lost all contact with her. Her treatment of me is quite unreal, this daughter who has declared that she isn’t my daughter. It helps some that she has let herself become so unappealing — in attitude, and even physically – overweight, pimply, foul smelling in her breath and on her body. She is slovenly, dirty. She could of course change all of that, if she wanted to.

  At the Bridge again, when I am serving, I see hundreds of the homeless who have come for a meal. Mostly men, most of them black. They, too, are unattractive, and almost deliberately so. Not all, but most of them. One young man’s eyes roll up in his head as he waits for his paper plate of food to place on his tray. I wonder what sickness he has. It seems sometimes that the fairy tale equation of physical beauty with health and character may have some truth to it. That equation used to seem unfair to me; shallow, at the least. But maybe it’s so, and we are our looks.

  *

  I’ve lost those things that are conventionally declared to be the things that matter most. The home I loved on Wenonah, and my family – first Dolores, then Pam, and Eden; and, in some ways, Ben as well. What choice do I have other than to choose life, to reach out, and start over. I might need to learn not just to comfort myself, because I’ve already learned that, but to enjoy myself.

  As for Eden, I can do little more than love her as best I can, expecting nothing back. Years from now, we may reach each other. It’s possible. It has happened for others, this returning and rediscovering.

  July 2008

  I’ve returned from California. In honor of Mom and Dad’s sixtieth anniversary, we all went out to dinner.

  Who knew that I would ever envy them their marriage?
  This might provide a mocking title for my family memoir: Little Did I Know

  Terry Adelson, Patti’s first husband, has moved to Ocean Hills, where my parents live. When I was there, he stopped by their house on Delos Way. He stays longer than Dad would want him to. Terry talked and talked, until Dad said to him:
  “How do you say adios in Spanish?”

  *

  Should I move? Somewhere else would be nice. A house that is not this house, a life that is not this life.

  I could return to the beach where I grew up. I left so long ago, never thinking how I would miss it. But it may not be the beach that I am missing. I don’t miss the asphalt path down the side of a hill from the coast highway, or the expanse of sand, or the peeling white paint on the lifeguard station, and the waves breaking. I could go back to them anytime.

  I went, the last time I was in Los Angeles, to this same beach. I stayed in my street shoes, and walked in the direction of the ocean.

  It can be good to return to places that haven’t changed much. To places, like the ocean, that cannot change. At least it seems they cannot change, as I measure by my lifespan. Man is not the measure of all things, because some things are immeasurable. The seashore, or the very edge of it, where the sand is wet, was as cool underfoot as it ever was, when I took off my street shoes. When a wave withdrew, it retreated in the same wake of foam, the same thinning sheet of water disappearing into the sand. Last time I was there, it was late in the day. The sun was falling fast, exactly as it always did. Soon it vanished. The light that remained seemed to come from somewhere under the horizon, just as I remembered it, a tail on the coat of the light that followed the same disappearing sun.

  I walked along the shore. I stayed on the damp sand, and held my shoes. The houselights were coming on, in the homes on the hillsides. They were like campfires, each of them sending a signal.

  And this happened as well: Of a sudden, but with enough warning that I had time to be wary and even a little frightened, someone was walking toward me on the beach. There was no one else. Just the two of us doing nothing but passing each other.

  *

  How did I manage to get to Guernsey Lane?
  I’m not at home here.
  What is it like then, to feel at home? Home is childhood, a long time gone. Los Angeles, the Westchester area, the playground, the schools. Kentwood Elementary. Orville Wright Junior High. Home is a street number, 7940, and the name of the street, Belton Drive. Home is a phone number easy to remember, 670-4891, even though I haven’t called in decades.
  That was the home I wanted away from.

  India is somewhere I want to go now. Somewhere so far from home.

  *

  File, edit, view, insert, format, tools, table, window, help. Are these commands, or names? The word “honey” isn’t honey; it isn’t sweet or sticky, and it has no taste.

  *

  Surprise endings are considered skillful.
  Why, my poor Mathilde, my necklace was made of paste!
  How many stories end just that way? A life is ruined because of a misunderstanding, due to pride, or foolishness. One false step, and every step after that takes you further away from what you intended. If you even had an intention. When I was 22, I met a woman who was 44, and we stayed together. Was that a false step? “We got together, and we never got apart,” as Dolores told a friend, who was making a video of her when she was bedridden and a month away from dying.
  Well, not never. We’re apart now. I became a widower, which was a surprise ending, and a beginning as well – the beginning of other surprises.

  *

  What did Eden think in the early morning when she learned that Dolores had died? Until then, she was happy enough, but never again.
  She was only eleven when I woke her in the dark to tell her that mommy was dead.
  “Do you want to see her?” I asked. A van or a hearse was on the way to the house, sent by the funeral home, to pick up Dolores’s body.
  Eden kept her head down, she mumbled some kind of no.
  She might have been too sleepy to understand, and it was dark, and she would not have fully understood even if it had been noon.
  After that early morning, one thing happened after another to her, and most of them were bad. I married the wicked witch when Eden was fourteen. We moved, and Eden lost the second story bedroom she loved, with the magnolia she could climb and hide in, high up, just outside her window.
  I explained the move to her.
  “We need to start over. I can’t expect Pam to make her home in our house, that’s not fair to her.”
  Fair to Pam? Eden hated Pam – that was her attitude, which was unhelpful. She was a fourteen-year-old girl when she told me she wanted to me an “emancipated minor.” Her best friend Dana had told her about it. It was a declaration of her intention to escape.
  She had a brother – has a brother — but Ben was no use to her. He was a year older. Mostly what he did was pick on her. Eden did not want to breathe his breath.
  So, that was her home life.

  *

  How did Eden develop her arrogant voice, her snotty, bratty mouth? Maybe it would be easier to explain out of what materials it was made. She was the anti-girl. No sugar or spice in her, just bitter. Mostly she was angry, with a bit of fear mixed in. She was angry at the facts of her life and afraid of accepting that all of it is her responsibility and also her fault.

  *

  I need to take a breath, when considering Eden. Probably what is easiest to describe is what she looks like. What do people see when they see her?
  She is not pretty, not conventionally at least. Her hair is brown and greasy; she keeps it covered with a butch bandana, a kind of do-rag, a la Little Steven. Small brown eyes, off-color teeth – I tell her to brush them but she never listens. She’s chubby and pimply, even now in her twenties. Her breasts are grandmotherly large. She has belly fat. What else? She’s a shorty, close to ground, as Debra likes to say.
  She likes to wear thrift shop t-shirts and raggedy jeans.
  So, what a stranger looking at her would see: Eden looks as though she doesn’t care what she looks like. That’s about right, that’s how she looks.
  Of course, she does care, as everyone does.

  *

  What else do I know or pretend to know about this fellow passenger in my family who has jumped ship?

  Eden likes to talk. You name the subject, she can carry on. Eden can tell you everything you want to know about Mulder and Scully. With perfect strangers, she can be unnaturally disclosing. She boasts about her disturbances. She was a Wiccan, a cutter, bi-polar, a drummer, a gamer. Her favorite pie is key lime. She can lie to you without blinking and has always been able to do that. Her sense of it is, say whatever you need to say, your need to say it will makes it true.

  Another way to describe this loose relationship Eden has with the truth:
  If she decides to tell you her story, it’s hers not because it actually happened to her, but because she is the one telling it.

  *

  Seven years after her mother’s death, Eden opened the window in her bedroom in the house we moved to after I remarried. It must have been after two in the morning. This house on Guernsey Lane, she thought to herself — this home Eden shared with Pam, Jason, Ben and me—it never belonged to her, and she was never at home in it. She wanted out. So she went for a ride in the Taurus that I bought for her, maybe to see her friend Sean, a freshman in the dorm at UNT. The dorm was an hour away. She wanted to stay all night there.

  *

  The house where she did feel at home – her house – where her brother, her father and her mother lived with her – the house on Wenonah in Greenway Parks – that house held her snuggly in her bedroom upstairs. Out the windows she could spy through the lumpy branches of a magnolia. It was as though she was in the woods in her room. The glossy green leaves, rusty underneath, pawed at the pane of glass. She never slipped out of that room; though, had she wanted to, she could have climbed down the magnolia, hidden all the way by the branches that spread like a skirt to the ground.

  In those days, she must have still thought of us as her brother, her father, and her mother. I say that, though I don’t know that.

  *

  I told Eden early on that she was adopted. Ben, too. Unlike Ben, Eden always wanted to know more about it, even when Dolores was alive. Always. About her real mother, brothers and sisters, or half-brothers and half-sisters. Less so about her father, but about him, too.

  She wanted to know who her real parents were, though “real” is not the word I ever used. Instead, I talked about birth mother this or biological father that. But for Eden, those were dodges, and I’ve come to believe she was right. There was a time when she thought her “birth mother,” Barbara, would save her, or that she would feel at home at last with the three half-sisters that Barbara had by different men. But she discovered that she couldn’t feel all that close to her half-sisters, because she didn’t grow up with them. Then again, Eden can’t be all that close to anyone. It’s a disorder she has. One of her half-sisters is older, and two are younger. Eden is the special one. She is the one about whom Barbara must have said, while Eden was still in her womb, “This one, I’m not going to keep.” No doubt Barbara had her reasons.

  *

  Barbara told Eden to forget about her father. She had never married him He pushed her around, he hit her, he left, he’s gone. Barbara did show Eden his picture once. When Eden saw it, all she could think was how young he was – younger than she was when she saw his picture.

  *

  Eden was often sick whenever I called her. Ulcers, in bed with the flu, allergies that stopped her up. She’s had a “wonky stomach.”
  “We need to see each other more,” I said, the last time I called.
  She really didn’t appreciate it. To her, I was always pushing for something.
  She told me she would call me.

  *

  I found some papers that Eden left behind. She seems to have been writing a memoir. Or, keeping notes, and journaling. Some of the impressions I’m recording are hers, rather than mine; they are from her writing in the first person.

  Was she writing a memoir? At twenty-three, she has plenty to say in her “my life until now” narrative. Perhaps she does. My teacher at Harvard, Robert Fitzgerald, who translated Homer, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and near the end of his life took on Virgil and the Aeneid, told our poetry class that anyone who had lived to age five owned enough material for two lifetimes of creative writing. Maybe so. But having enough raw material isn’t the same as having the craft and the experience and the judgment to process it, or to manufacture out of it something interesting, or least brave and true.

  *

  Eden has never suffered from a lack of conviction, that’s clear. What she thinks at the moment, she fully believes.

  Eden’s war on me has consumed half her lifetime. It began after Dolores died, when Eden was just eleven. At I hardly noticed, perhaps because of the fog that Dolores left me in, or a thickheadedness of my own, but in a year or two, Eden had transformed from light to dark. From a self-delighting sylph to a morose little beast.

  At fourteen, when she proclaimed that she wanted to be an emancipated minor, I didn’t know what that was. Eden however knew it all by sixteen. Sneaking out of the house at night, telling lie after lie. I thought, it’s just adolescence. Puberty, hormones.
  Maybe, maybe. That’s the thing about life and thinking about life. There is no proven cause and effect, there’s only a sequence. And any explanation may simply be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. When B happens after A, we say that B happens because of A.

  I may need to write a memoir of my own, just to hold my own. Not a memoir, really, but an account. And as I recall I have the title for it, too:

  Little Did I Know

  *

  Betty Gouge is a psychologist I’ve gone to talk to off and on since I was in my twenties, when Dolores encouraged me to go, after I had left KERA and was at home wondering what to do next with myself.
  I went back to her “for support” while I was going through my divorce.
  In one of the “sessions,” Betty put her hands together. She wasn’t praying, and she certainly wasn’t applauding
  “What does she have that you need?” she asked me.
  That is the question.
  Golden hair, silky southern voice, a perfect posture, knows how to set a table. Apparently I needed all of that.
  Her social status appealed to you?
  Yes, how could it not, my own family embarrassed me.
  How?
  I don’t know, but I always wanted to escape them.
  Because they were relatively poor?
  Yes.
  And she was rich.
  She wasn’t herself, she didn’t have anything, but her family was wealthy, and she had that very appealing confidence of a person who grew up entirely secure, a long-legged debutante, a country club blonde.
  But she hurt you.
  She let me know early on that I mattered to the degree that I was useful to her, but I was less important to her than her china settings and less valuable than her twenty acres in country.
  But you miss her and want her nonetheless.
  Yes.
  Betty would nod as though it all made sense to her.
  You’re lonely, she said.
  Not really, In fact I’m not lonely. I have a girlfriend. She’s a smart, working-class girl who made it through law school after raising three children. Her breasts are real, and she has a narrow enough waist. When I waited for her to try on dresses at the St. John boutique in Highland Park Village, I overheard one of the saleswomen talking about my girlfriend’s body.
  It’s like dressing a doll, she commented.
  So, I’m not lonely at all. I was in love though, and now I’m heartbroken.

  *

  Eden is getting married to Ben Rhodes.
  What I’m not saying to her but am thinking:
  Do what you want, but I won’t be helping you.
  You make one mistake after another and there’s no telling you otherwise.
  If I tell you, don’t marry him, you’re both in school, neither of you have any means of support, so you have no business getting married, would that change anything?
  Barbara is telling you, “He’s a keeper!” Isn’t that what you said to me? But Barbara is a mess and a moron.
  So, go ahead, move to Denton, marry Ben Rhodes, but don’t be calling me to say you can’t pay your rent, when the jobs you say you’re both going to get never happen, or they don’t pay enough, or they come to an end.
  Things come to end, as you will find out.

  *

  Put one word next to another like a bricklayer, then one row of words on top of the last.

  Nearly three years without Pam. It hasn’t been long enough.

  *

  How to describe my relationship with Debra? I am on her list, but somewhere after the dogs and well behind the adult children, their wives or potential wives or husbands, and the possibility of grandchildren. Also, after her mother, who lives a thousand miles away, and her sister, who lives around the corner from her mother. I’m after the niece, the memories of Debra’s mother’s third husband Ralph, her several cousins, friends from her first marriage, and her memories of Connecticut. It’s possible I’m not that far behind her favorite donuts from Biaggio’s in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, which she recalls so fondly. Somewhere far back, that’s where I am. Also in the line ahead of me, anyone who lives on Tuscan Ridge, her street in Southlake, and anyone who might vote for her in a municipal election she haven’t yet decided to enter.

  I called out to her once or twice this weekend, but she was too far away to hear me.

  *

  When a beautiful deed dances and sings, you can hear in that music the mothers and fathers of holy generations dancing and singing along. That’s something I read in one of the daily emails that Chabad.org sends me. One of those statements that seems equally true and false; it makes sense and it is nonsense

  *

  There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet fails so regularly, as love. Erich Fromm

  Ben and Eden turned me into a father. They did it at first with a tiny grasping finger, and later with their unwillingness to be what I imagined they could be. Fatherhood has been too difficult for me. I’ve took my chances and made my choices. I enjoyed so little of it. And now it’s time to move ahead, or at least to move on – both of them going their way. I’ll stay. What the three of us will have is what we have left: duty, habit, a memory of togetherness, maybe. Unlikely with Eden, more likely with Ben.

  *

  Thoughts written on the way to somewhere else – to bed for the night, or to the refrigerator for a snack. A choir of breaths, the soundings of thanks – for my son, who isn’t at home, but in another city in a group home for young adults who seem lost; and for my daughter, who has fled to another family, her birth mother’s, where perhaps she will find whatever she could not find in the family I created for her. For my first wife, who died, leaving me to try my best to appreciate the second wife, who has filed for divorce. A thanks as well to my parents, who are of no help; they have been great teachers of independence. And if there’s still time, I would also like to thank whoever is playing the peppy music that is meant to usher me away from the microphone and off the stage, before I make more of a fool of myself.

  *

  I saw the MSN home page today. It offered a weight loss tip from the Amish. How might I reciprocate or pay the Amish back for their tip? Thin as they are, in their black coats, they probably have little interest in my telling them about job trends from 2007, which MSN provides. Nor are they likely to be concerned about the living fossil caught on film. I could ask Miss Manners, who has a link on the same MSN home page. But probably not best to send one of them a message from the other link, which sends me to a page that would let me email a friend about Beer Can Day.

  So much to read on these webpages. How else would I know about the dodos found off Mauritius by Dutch sailors at the end of the 16th century? I learned that dodos were as big as swans, with two or three curled feathers on their round rumps. Walghvoghels, in Dutch, or dodaersen—fat-asses, an animal with diamond eyes, a melancholic look, with a monk’s cowl for a head, and very small wings. These repulsive, flightless birds had no experience of human inhabitants on their island, which had emerged eight million years before in the Indian Ocean. So they were not afraid, and they allowed the sailors to beat them to death.

  *

  These days I think of my last marriage as a trick, a stunt that Pam performed, like a girl standing on a pony and riding in circles. Whatever made me think that it could last? The pony became tired, and Pam lost her balance. She looked out over the fields through an opening in the striped circus tent that was pitched near a crossroads. Maybe the strong man turned her head, or she had dreams of the big city. Just as likely I made the mistakes. I failed to applaud again and again. There was no high wire in my act, just plumes of chalk, and a headlong rush, somersaults, a barrel, shadows. I need more reality in my life, but I need illusion, too. For now, however, I must do without the illusion of love, unwilling, at least for a time, to be duped again, even when the duping was a pleasure.

  *

  Kafka: “The arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made.”

  Thinking of Pam, who is not thinking of me. This is the preoccupation of the one who was left, the brokenhearted one, whose life has been turned upside down. My shoes are pointed toward the ceiling this evening, making it more dangerous than usual to be smoking my pipe. Maybe there will come a time when I’ll laugh at these thoughts. So why not laugh now? If only it worked that way. My future self won’t see the world as I do tonight. Recovery lies in some other place I haven’t looked yet, because I don’t even know if it’s there.

  I drove by Wenonah today, in Greenway Parks, as I do so often. This was the home Dolores and I made. I know it figure and ground, the rooms we furnished, the colors of paint on the gypboard; the magnolia, red oak, and the three sweet gums we planted in front. The sweet gums are all grown up. The house belongs to someone else now, the house has forgotten about us. Dolores died upstairs, just beyond the windows. I sold the house after a death and a remarriage. They say, if these walls could talk, but walls don’t speak and never saw. The two bedrooms that belonged to our children, who are dispersed now, lie under a seamed metal roof that weather is turning grey. I miss the house, but this is an unrequited longing, and like all such longings it is misplaced.

  *

  I’ve read that God is like a mirror. When I celebrate, heaven does. I worry about the future, I regret the past, I totter on the sharp point of the present. I am homesick for a place that never existed. I remember, and I forget. I forget who I am, then remember I was never that at all. I never see the points of no return. I think Pam and I are both idiots. Me for loving her. Her for not loving me. Surely I am wrong about this, both ways.

  *

  Loss, longing, the one hardly felt and denied at first, the other undeniable as it goes on and on. Life is a ready-or-not proposition. No turning back, but there’s a lot of turning around and looking back for what might still be there. I can see it. And I see it become smaller in the distance with every step forward.
  I didn’t sign up for this journey. But it has started anyway.

  *

  A puzzle:
  I grew up on the shore of the world’s deepest ocean.
  How to feel at home in this dry place?

  *

  There’s not a light in the middle of the passage, but there’s navigating in the darkness.

  *

  Mourning is about separation, but it begins as an attempt to keep the connection. Writing about mourning, which is part of the process of letting go, begins as act of holding on.

  Ten years after Dolores’s quiet death, after the intervention and tumult of a second marriage, I’m no longer grieving for Dolores, and only from time to time remembering.

  *

  My fingers are tapping on the desk. This is the hour when I try to rediscover my dreams, rather than listening to the cat mew because he wants to come indoors on a rainy night. Both of us have our unattainable intentions. The best I can do is relight my pipe, read for a bit, and continue learning to number my days.

  *

  After the parentheses of death and divorce, of children grown and gone, it’s time to forgive. To start with, to forgive the crimes of others that remain not only unsolved but unconfessed. So far, forgiveness is a horizon I can never quite reach.

  There is consolation in what someone called the summer lightning of happiness. Can I try to be happier? I cannot try to be taller, but I can stand up straight, which may make a difference.

  In the fullness of time everything is probable. Time, which is both full and empty – time, which someone clever said is life’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once.

  *

  The house I bought for Pam is my house now. The acre of garden that she used as exercise gives me a place to talk to myself in the evenings, with my beer and my papers. What I’m doing mostly these days is talking to Pam – to a wife who hasn’t left yet, because in my wishful thinking I haven’t allowed her to. The divorce is not yet “final,” though of course it is. So, here I am missing her, cursing her, and even reading her Garden Club mail on the opium bed near the pond with the yellow flowers whose names she neglected to tell me.

  *

  Wisdom is as simple as the three chords in rock and roll, or the riff with notes that seem so hotly invented, though I have heard them all before. It’s time to break down the doors that are already open and discover the familiar. All things are one, and there are two sides to every story. From our prison cells, let’s be free to lead lives that show us the way out, the way that, looking back, is a path that was there all along.

  *

  What is this brown spot doing on the back of my hand, spreading over the low hill of a vein? Irregular in shape, it’s an inch from the inlet of my thumb and forefinger. It’s a stain on a creased map.

  When we know things well, we know them like the back of our hands. But aging is an unknown geography, with its obstacle course of knuckles and grey hairs.

  I may have forty years left in this wilderness. There’s no sign of interest from the heavens, and I have nothing to melt into a golden calf. If there was a leader, he is gone. Only the querulous tribesmen are left, and their multiple wives, none of them satisfied.

  *

  Cat, dog, man – not sure I would call this a household, here on Guernsey Ln. One of us lies on the Turkish rug, on his side. One of us howls at the siren sounds from Northwest Highway. One of us goes from room to room, from one posture to another. One of us is always tired, or seems so, and needs a haircut. One of us is paper, one rock, one scissors. Two of us eat the same thing every day and drink nothing but water, lowering our heads to an aluminum or a pyrex bowl. One of us eats yogurt and carrots. One of us never complains and seems companionable. One jumps for joy. One of us has large, glassy eyes. One of us sits at a desk at one in the morning, while the other two are like parentheses on the sentence of a rug.

  *

  I’m going through catastrophe as if it were a tunnel in a mountain, where I turn my headlights on and drive full speed ahead. No worries in this safe cylinder about being sideswiped. There is only the straightaway. Lucky me, to feel so untroubled. At least for today, I can roll up my sleeve to the needle of disaster as if it were a vaccine. I have immunity, pinpricked already by loss and grief, sucker-punched, stabbed in the back and in the heart, my throat slit from ear to ear, and the cut is as wide as a grin.

  *

  The next time I throw myself off a cliff, will I be any wiser? I will at least see the edge next time, and sense the danger as a tickle in my stomach. Just as I did the last time.

  *

  Trying to remember “the time when”–and also trying not to. St. Moritz, Paris, two weeks in Kyoto. Bangkok, Phuket, Chang Mai. Fishing at Lake Chelatna Lodge. Waiting in line to see Mao Tse Tung’s body in Beijing. On the balcony of the Four Seasons in Austin, the cigarettes and the bats. None of it fits together, just as Pam and I didn’t. What price fun? The names of places are the best of all that is left of these memories.

  She done me wrong is a theme we have all heard too much of. It has resonance, but not originality. That I did her wrong has some share of the truth, but it doesn’t inspire a new lyric either. How about: I will always love her, but I am no longer in love with her. That’s nice, that’s balanced. It’s a lie, however. She stabbed me in the back, she stabbed me in the heart, but who cares? I do, but that isn’t enough to interest anyone else.

  Nobody wants to hear about the woman who left you, how she did you in, or took your money, or embittered your children. Everybody already knows that story. They have heard it many times, often to the sounds of the same three chords. I need to learn to comfort myself. The techniques: watch TV, drink Scotch, read whatever I am reading to the very last page, and go to sleep.

  *

  Day one, God said let there be light. But said to whom? There was nobody there to see the light either. Adam, six days away, was unilluminated by that first light, a light by which he might have seen everything from one end of space to the other end of time. Today, it’s just a Tuesday, in the year five thousand and something. Not much to see at all. The light’s different now. It’s more limited than it was at creation. I can see a silver Dunhill lighter on my desk, and two knifes, a fork, and a spoon, each of them beaded, with the words crocodile, monkey, bat and cat on them, sans serif, in all cap characters. And, in my mind’s eye, I can also see the shop across the street from Café Pascual’s in Santa Fe where I bought them, one utensil at a time, each a keepsake from a different trip. I am seeing by the small sparks from that very first light of creation, though at this hour, and at my age, it isn’t light enough.

  *

  I’ll take my summer vacation in the back yard this year, one evening at a time. I’m not carrying a camera, and I won’t be ducking into the dark interiors of old churches. Instead of luggage, I’m carrying a Peroni, or some other so-called premium beer. It has a crisp taste, refreshing enough. According to the warning on the bottle, the consumption of alcoholic beverages will impair my ability to drive a car or to operate machinery, but I won’t need to do either. Not on this trip. I have no borders to cross, and I can walk in circles for as long as I want to, and at my own pace.

  *

  Found on a shelf in a kitchen closet: a small package of one inch #17 wire brads. They look just like nails to me. So, what is the line that separates a brad from a nail? Is it the six rills, like ritual scars, that are below their silver heads? I can read where they are made. China, of course. And what they are made of, zinc. But then there’s the more mysterious place of their packaging, Aliso Viejo, which is a lovely name. I wonder, what is zinc? Is it found under the earth? And why the c at the end of the word, rather than a k? Sealed in the grave of this small, see-through tub, the brads give no hint of any longing for a hammer.

  *

  What music I’m listening to these days? Most often it’s Jackson Browne, either from Saturate Until Wet or from Late for the Sky. I also play and replay a tune that I’m forgetting the name of – the one with childish laughter, surprise, and a touch of sadness. Most of his songs are like this; they are tales of the melancholy end of things, and the twilight of a coming loneliness made even darker by the shadow of receding joys, with their D chords and A chords and E chords, and the slides on a guitar. How well it all goes with the peanut butter I’m spreading on a slice of soft bread, the sticky cream on the brown wheat, and the even stickier gore of the jam.

  *

  Things I wanted that will never happen: a house on the ocean and a room in it with bookshelves and picture windows; also, a daughter with a light, laughing disposition, and a dreaming son who works hard and earns the admiration of others. Impossible, really. I would settle for the acceptance of reality, which is hard enough, and for knowing the true names of things, and for having the mental facility for accurate description.

  *

  It is possible to spend a summer hour on an opium bed beside a pond in the back yard listening to water falling over the bowl of a fountain and onto matted algae. The white water lily is raised like a fist over the green lily pads, as if white water were a kind of lily and green lily were a kind of pad.

  *

  I went to a short series of classes at The Writer’s Garrett, where the teacher was a poet named Farid Matuk. Who named him Farid, and in what country? I would guess it was a place with the sun glaring on the white walls of houses and with dust on the roads. There was a fragrance his mother and father remembered, some bloom dispersed, like the spell lost before he was born, and when they tried to recall it, it came to them mixed with the salt of the ocean they had crossed to get to their new country, where they could never be completely at home. Surely his vegetable name was nourishing to them, feeding them, as they fed it to him, with its flavor of memory, a soup that is never a clear broth.

  *

  Rainy day. Amen, so be it, it is so. And writing this, in praise of an imaginary dog no longer beside me. His dog’s ears might have pricked up at this shudder in the sky. He might have cocked his head toward the rolling, drumming weather. Faithful and reliable, loyal, worthy of trust and trusting, he’s dead now. What’s left of his bark lies under the brush strokes of the grass, the arcs of violet, yellow, and green. Warm under the yard, he stays dry enough as the drops begin their fall.

  *

  Just some thoughts today, one after another, from reading:

  From Anne Frank’s diary: How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

  What an odd thing for her to write. Lot of good it did her, as she waited moment after moment for the boots on the street, and the barks of Germans.

  From Oliver Sachs: Near death experiences have all the hallmarks of mystical experience, as William James defines it: passivity, ineffability, transience, and a noetic quality.
  Noetic? “relating to mental activity or intellect”

  McEwen: Dealing with issues of conflict and control is important. That’s what mindfulness training is all about—getting a better grip on yourself. It also helps to be physically active and maintain good habits of sleep.

  *

  Desire is full of distance. No wonder we call it longing.
  The hummingbird seems to have such promise. Pity it isn’t kept.

  On the deck, bougainvillea, the word itself trailing and luxuriant, its sound like pale purple blossoms and sinewy as the vines running down the sides of a copper planter.

  Thirty minutes is a time span. It’s time enough to be late, or early, or to get ready. Seventy years is a lifespan, barely long enough to look around, eat something, and fall back to sleep, the sleep that comes after a lifetime of dreams.

  *

  I dreamed of a country whose aristocracy included Prince Matchabelli. The citizens there had two noses and only one eye. Perfume, which accounted for ninety per cent of GDP, was more valued than beer. That was in a faraway place and a long time ago. It was a land fearful of succession, of what might happen when the prince ascended to the throne. Revolution was in the air. The young hated the given order, while the old, stinking of envy, refused to cede. What now? The moon has already risen. It is the dawn of a new age, if it can be called dawn, when it isn’t the sun in the sky, but only the pale, bald duffer of a moon.

  *

  If I had only a minute that I could count on, counting isn’t something I would do. If there were only thirty seconds left, would I have time to worry about the time?

  What would I do, if I had no time to think?

  My children dislike me, but they are far away. They don’t take any time.

  Forget eating and sleeping, or pissing and moaning. No time for any of that. I can’t decide, but indecision takes time I don’t have.

  I might observe and describe, use the eyesight that I will soon lose, or the hearing that will soon be deaf to every sound.

  The light is failing. I no longer need an alarm to wake up; the morning whispering is enough. I can see my reflection in the window. The branches of the trees outside are turning into silhouettes. I don’t know the names of these trees, or the names of the grasses. I think of the psalm, through the righteousness of charity I shall behold Your face.

  There’s only a moment left, then half a moment, and then half of that half, an infinity of halves that will never run out.

  I have no clearer way to see the big picture than in miniature.

  *

  I thought Pam would never leave, just as I fail to imagine that I’ll be gone, too, in a future that is closer and closer. All of us fail to see things as they are, and as they will be one day soon. How could it be otherwise? It is difficult for me to see that the front door of my house, a heavy Honduran mahogany, will close without me one day. Even the oil-rubbed bronze of its hardware has a life of its own. And the marine spar varnish will fade in its own sweet time. Even the days of the street address numbers, a stainless Helvetica that I installed on the lemon-colored brick column at the street – those days are numbered, too.

  *

  Going to yoga today and every week. Bikram yoga, which is hot yoga. It’s an intense workout. It took me by surprise the first time I went to the Sunstone location near my office on McKinney. Thirty-four positions, ninety minutes. Each of the thirty-four positions has a name in a language that might be Hindi. But we yoga students also know them by their homelier nicknames, which are called out in sequence by the instructor. Cat and Cow, for example, when we are on all fours, alternatively arching our backs and lifting our behinds. Not all of the nicknames are animals. Some, like Final Spine Twist, simply say what they are. Child’s Pose puts you in a position no child ever was, forehead on the mat, arms extended as if in prayer, but it is humbling, which having children will certainly do to you. My instructor today, a young woman named Lakshmi, makes medical claims for all the poses. Placing the forehead to knee stimulates the pineal gland, chin to chest works the thyroid. We are removing toxins. When we are on our backs grasping our knees, we are massaging internal organs. Mostly, however, we are sweating. We are in ninety-eight-degree heat until the final breathing, with lights out. Like bodies in graves, we stay on our backs then, heels together, toes out, hands at our side, palms up, living in something called savasthana. We are told to thank ourselves. For that, the word is namaste. When I hear it, I think of the Malaysian Chinese couple who worked for me and Dolores years ago as babysitters, when Ben and Eden were very little. Theology students at Southern Methodist, they had gentle manners and perfect English. The woman’s name was Ho Han Yan. The man’s name I’ve forgotten, or never asked. We called her Esther, and he was John.

  *

  What belongs in a journal?
  I can record an observation of the Japanese maple the night before, as I saw it through a glass panel in the door of my study. I can wrote that I was pulling weeks this afternoon from the circle of pea gravel that borders the pond, or how I kicked at a mound of dirt that was as soft as sawdust, stirring up the society of the ants. Or I can start at the beginning, with the first yawn, and waking up at 8 a.m. to a white world of sheets, pillows, and comforter. I saw colorless sunshine coming through the silk curtains that had come all the way from Thailand, their origin in a filament out of the salivary glands of silkworms that feed on the mulberry bushes that grow on the Korat Plateau in that country’s northeast. I could elaborate. I might mention Empress Si Ling Chi of China, who first discovered silk, perhaps while sitting under a mulberry in a palace garden. She was having tea when a cocoon fell into her lap. Of course, that wasn’t anything I observed, and I don’t know how the secret of silk, guarded for millennia, came to Thailand, despite the painful death the emperors imposed for any smuggling of silkworm eggs, cocoons, or mulberry seeds. No matter. This journal only needs to note the sheen of the silk curtains in my own bedroom.

  *

  Robert Fitzgerald, my teacher at Harvard, translated the Aeneid near the end of his life, taking longer to work and rework the hexameter than the travel time from Troy to Rome. And his lyric poems were collected in a slender volume he titled Spring Shade, combining in that name the positive and negative. He had his friendships with the famous. He associated with James Agee and Carson McCuellers. He also had the less famous conversation with me, on a spring day in the shade on Massachusetts Avenue, at the end of my junior year. He told me that anyone who had lived to the age of five had enough material to write for the rest of his life. I think about that sometimes, as I look at my laptop screen, with its corporate landscape of green hill, blue sky, cottony clouds and tiny mountains. These mountains are distant, though they are no further away than arm’s length. At age 5, what did I know about loss, death, love, and betrayal? Then again, I must have been expert from the beginning at sentences that go nowhere and disconnected phrases, because I produce them so easily. By age 5 I might have already mastered my inability to sustain a thought beyond a single paragraph, or to keep the flow of the shortest exercise going. Ask my mother. Even at age 5, I probably spent my time confused about what my next activity should be, whether to look or see, to walk or run. Even then, I had little to say of interest to anybody, and I accomplished next to nothing before naptime, when all I was capable of doing was sleep.

  *

  September 2008.

  Andre Watts performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 at Bass Hall with the Fort Worth Symphony this past Saturday night. He had done the same, or something similar, forty years before. That’s when I heard him for the first time ,at Royce Hall on the campus of the University of California. Back then I dreamed of becoming accomplished, not a Bass or a Royce, with my name on a building in the style of another age, but someone who mastered a difficult skill. An Andre Watts, mopping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, mouthing notes as he plays, and applying himself to the piano with a display of ferocity. When he finished, he may have needed a smoke or a nap. At intermission, he was gone. I stayed to listen to the recording of a nightingale, which was used for Resphigi’s The Pines of Rome. The notes came tumbling to the outskirts of my seat before falling back. It was a piece played by symphony musicians in their sober suits; even the women wore black, respecting the conventions.

  *

  Objects do not take pride in their qualities. A stone is veined like a cheese. Is it happy in its immobility? The sun warms it. Is it pleased with its density or geometry?

  The door to this simple house is cut from Honduran mahogany. There are glass panels, for wings of light on either side of the stained and sealed wood. The hardware has a nickel finish; its silver has a shade of yellow in it.

  *

  October 2008

  Going back to making lists of what I am grateful for, as if writing them down might work, as a prayer is supposed to work.

  I’m grateful for my sister, for spare ribs at Debra’s on a Sunday evening, and for Wally, who’s the one who is genuinely happy to see me.

  Another day, another three more things: Ben, the warmth of the sun in October, the sound of laughter on the television.

  *

  Visiting California.

  The song playing on the radio of the rental car takes me down a winding road of memories. Forty-five years ago, I was in a garage band playing the Ventures, surf music, and only instrumentals. The Beatles wiped us out in 1964. None of us could sing, and I wasn’t cute enough. Thirty-five years ago, I graduated from Harvard. Twenty-five years ago, more or less, my two children were born. Ten years ago, or so, I was widowed. Five years ago, or so, I married Pam Caldwell. Two years ago, I was still married. And years from now everything will have happened years ago. The hand on my wristwatch is jumping from second to second. Song or no song, what’s under my thumb is only a steering wheel, and not “the girl who once had me down.”

  My parents live in Ocean Hills. It has been renamed from Leisure Village, though the main street that loops around this development of twenty-five hundred homes is still called Leisure Village Way. It’s October, there’s good weather here, as there always is. There’s hibiscus, eucalyptus, and hummingbirds.

  My father’s meaner than he was ten years ago. At 92, his face seems to ask, Why do I have to put up with this any longer? When he has to, he sits up. He’s recovering from a fall, and seems as lifeless as a plastic plant in the tropics of Southern California, with its bougainvillea and whitewashed walls, its eucalyptus and citrus.

  But then, I’m not the best judge of dyspeptic behavior. I’m the one who smokes a bitter tobacco in a stained brown pipe. I like distasteful things.

  *

  I still need to list things to be grateful for.

  In the car, driving past rocks and brush, enjoying an arid, beautiful Southern California.
  Listing to the radio – grateful to hear Walter Cronkite’s sonorous voice, in a clip about Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972.
  Lunch with Richard Heine, late afternoon, at a Chinese restaurant in Fallbrook, where he lives with Teresa. She’s his second wife; she is his Beatrice. He fell in love with her when they were barely teenagers. After he saw her again, decades later at a high school reunion, he left his marriage for her.

  Another day, another three:
  Breakfast with Richard Levine, Jean, and Jean’s daughter Pauline, who’s a junior in high school but still very pleasant.
  A concert in the clubhouse at Ocean Hills, with Diahann Carroll and her band. The arranger is on piano. There’s a bass player, a gesticulating drummer, a saxophonist, a trumpeter and a trombonist.
  Is there a number three? Maybe bringing the rhubarb and strawberry pie home from the Village Kitchen in Carlsbad for my father, though he didn’t seem to care much.

  Every night, so the instruction goes, I am to write down three things I am thankful for that day. Every night, a monotonous gratitude.
  This is a technique guaranteed to boost my happiness. So I’ve heard. And not just momentarily, according to the article in the in-fight magazine that I read on the flight to San Diego.

  But whether I do this or not, I do have something to be grateful for.
  Dolores’s death, my failures with Ben and Eden, Pam’s betrayal, losses of money, a broken partnership in my business – none of those things happened today.
  And for that, I can be very grateful.
  Wary, though.
  What I don’t want to do is stumble into unhappiness tomorrow.

  *

  At Filippi’s on India Street, in San Diego’s Little Italy, on the edge of downtown. Richard and Jean like this place. Meeting here for pizza is fun, but finding parking on the street is no fun at all.

  *

  My cousin Bev calls when I’m visiting my parents.
  I’m in the next room, and I can hear my mother telling Bev that I’m outside, as though I wouldn’t want to be troubled to come in for the call.

  Later, I ask my mother about a mat in one of the bathrooms. The mat has a stain on it, it’s always been there, I mean for years, an unappealing rust stain. If it won’t come out, why not throw the mat out?
  I point it out, and my mother asks my father about it.
  “Norman, have you ever noticed this?”
  “No, never noticed it.”
  I tell my father that this is a mat they’ve had for thirty years.
  “Oh, easily,” he says.
  “That stain is probably thirty years old.”
  “I took it from a motel in Santa Barbara.”
  “What do you mean, you took it?”
  “I stayed there,” my father said, “and I took it with me.”
  My father is ninety-two, my mother is eighty-seven.

  *

  Still at my parents’ house on Delos Way in Oceanside.
  The pine tree and the bougainvillea, and a lemon tree in a corner of the yard. What I do here when I visit is mostly wait – for a meal, and for the trip back to the airport.

  Mom and Dad may be waiting too. For sickness and discomfort and death, as they inhale and exhale. On this long October afternoon there are flies buzzing around us on the patio. The flies must know. They are relentless in their interest in us, as though determined to make sure that we know, too.

  *

  Back in Dallas.
  The year is coming to a close.
  The decks around the house have been torn off. Whoever built them years ago drove shiny nails into brand new boards, but the boards are rotted now, and the nails are tarnished. Someone painted the boards a silvery grey, but that paint has worn off now. Everything old was new once. Nothing lasts. The thing we demolish was once somebody’s favorite. The same will happen to my own efforts. But that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to remodel, as though I will be the one to get it right.

  I’ve turned the peaked ceiling in the living room into a tray. The brick fireplace is clad in limestone, its mouth lipped with oil-rubbed bronze. My new interior colors have names made for marketing: Creekside Green, English Manor. There’s marine spar varnish on the Honduran mahogany door. The vinca, planted last year, are blooming by the creek; their small, purple flowers are like secrets and surprises. The deck that’s gone took its color with it, the former Moonshadow Grey.

  *

  Gratitude is a bird’s heart, fragile and fleeting. It flies through the Japanese maple, when the leaves are green as limes each spring and red as apples in the fall. I am grateful today, for the light in the sky, for the afternoon that becomes evening, for the invisible border that separates and unites them, for the moment between them. I am grateful for water, and for all kinds of fluidity – my runny happiness, my sloshing unhappiness, and whatever fills the cups of my hours. I am grateful for paper, for my Last Will and Testament, my Revocable Trust, General Durable Power of Attorney and my Directive to Physicians, which I’ve left on my table overnight and will leave behind eventually.

  It’s two in the morning. What am I doing up?
  My resistance to the pleasure of sleeping is turning as pale as a sheet.

  *

  November 2008

  I don’t have enough of what I need to enjoy the day today. The raw materials are upriver, the passage down is dangerous, there are savages on the riverbank, with poisoned darts.

  Some of the happiest people believe there was a God who spoke to Moses at Sinai from out of a cloud. And not just that there was, but that there is. I’ve never seen God. Not in a single blade of grass or in the legendary grain of sand. As for God in the cloud, the clouds that I see are sitting like a hat above the hairline of the sky. They look as if they were as soft as felt. These clouds could be the hat that God might wear on the blue forehead of His face. They are like the hat a football coach might wear on a sideline, if God were a coach, with stubble on his chin and a headset in his hand, as he studies the field or curses our bonehead play. If we win, it’s the brilliance of His game plan. And if we lose, then it will be said that God can be no better than his players.

  *

  Customers in the Dream Café at the Quadrangle are having a conversation. They are defining happiness, and what’s needed to be happy. One says it’s the pursuit of pleasure; another, the finding of meaning; a third, some combination of the two. I’m at a different table entirely. I can smell the morning in the mouth of my white coffee cup. I may need the past for an identity and the future for fulfillment, but right now, all that I need is on my plate, a sea of ketchup and a shore of hash browns.

  A need for happiness is a prison; when it’s shattered, the cell is open.

  *

  We are told in Leviticus what animals we can eat and what we cannot. Beasts who have cloven hoofs and also chew their cud are acceptable. Those who have the cloven hoof but do not chew their cud, they are unclean, abominations, although this is law in translation and may be misunderstood, as most animals are misunderstood. Those who chew their cud but do not have cloven hoofs, they are as lucky as a rabbit’s foot. Fish are also categorized. If scales and fins, they can be fried, steamed, broiled, or poached. Fins but no scales, swim away. Shrimp or oysters in a light wine sauce or garlic butter are not for us. And there are permissible and impermissible insects. I would want to err on the side of refusing. Why risk angering God over a beetle? All of this is food for thought. These are large rules that cover everything, as they confine us as snugly as a coat, or like the carapace of a forbidden lobster.

  *

  I have packets of seeds on my bookshelves that I kept as souvenirs. The packet from Butchart Gardens reminds me of the drive that Dolores and I took north from Seattle into British Columbia. We were in Seattle for the opening of one of urban marketplaces developed by The Rouse Company. Could this old seed still be good? Most of other packets are wildflowers, though you would never know it by looking at the seeds. There is nothing blue in the Bluebonnet and no sombrero on the Mexican Hat. The black-eyed Susan, who would know it from eyeing the bits in the packet. Indian blanket, lemon mint—these names are much prettier than the dustpan specs on my palm. All of these seeds look more like something picked out of a dry nose than the bouquet that might have been gathered, after a season in the garden, had anyone ever planted them, and then cared for them.

  *

  Past, present, future –sometimes all three are together in a memory. I was in Jackson Hole, staying with Pam at Amangani. And one morning we went fly fishing. We had a guide with us, on the Snake River. A few cows were lapping up water, one of them turning to greet us. The river was flowing unhurried. The measured casts of our fishing lines unfurled like the flag of the last free state. This must be the life, I thought, with the cold current up to my waders. I had no way of knowing that in a few short years this and that would happen. Pam and I would marry, and her divorce attorney would email my attorney a list of her demands. At that magic hour when the sunlight was like coins on the river, I was actually the fish, dumb trout, enjoying a moment’s pleasure. The soft lines were curling on the surface of the water, while something hooked and barbed was being cast.

  *

  Family life.
  You would think, to see the photographs, that our lives were nothing but celebrations. Cakes and presents. The red, white and blue Fourths, the orange and black Halloweens. Baked turkeys, yams steaming like breath, holidays, new year’s, the Valentines year after year. What a wonderful world, where children are happy to be seen with the parents. Sunlit vacations to California. Ninja turtle poses in Italy in front of a bronze horse. The wooden gateway to a shrine. Nobody’s grouchy, not a sign of it even after the eleven hours of traveling. I can see the life of the ten-year-old girl with the winning smile. Her small face has no pimples and no determination to express her disgust or opposition. These are the days of not yet. Mom hasn’t died yet. Dad hasn’t remarried or divorced. Nobody has dropped out of college. Nobody has been picked up by the police at two in the morning. Instead, we are smiling. There are gifts and festive meals. We play in the snow and never have to shovel it.

  *

  Yearly physical today, with the customary blood work.
  It’s not yet noon, but it feels like the end of the day. Nothing to eat for the past twelve hours. Through the hollow in a needle, into the narrow tubing, and then into glass cylinders, my blood makes its entrance. It’s red and exuberant, like a red gown, sweeping down the stairs into a ballroom, a crowd of one watching it move.

  *

  Prairie voles pair up in lifelong bonds. Or so I’ve read. Male prairie voles that partner with a mate then develop a brain chemical that leads to depression during times of separation. Maybe this is what loyalty is, a chemical. The pain of separation serves a purpose; it keeps males close to the nest. This is the neurobiology of monogamy, as it has been studied in rodents.

  *

  Putting one foot forward is good. The problem is the other foot, the one dragging behind. It is a weight as heavy as concrete. It plunges into the earth, and into all the layers of the dirt underneath.

  *

  At the hotel, there’s the do-not-disturb card that can be inserted into the lock, but it’s disturbing just to be here.

  *

  November 2008

  My birthday month. A season of elections, early darkness, colors on the trees, and the trees giving up their leaves, as they shut down for the winter.

  I’m grateful for the quickly passing hours, for time alone and for company as well, and for the passing of the cold I caught traveling, with its fatigues, its sniffles, its stuffiness.

  I’m grateful for Ben’s call yesterday. He tells me that he met John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and talked to him. Ben can be a steady young man. I can see him staying with his grocery store in Boulder, Colorado all his working life.

  *

  My parents seem uninterested in me. Or, if they are, and both of them would say that they are, they are unable to express their interest.
  How’s your business, my father might ask.
  My mother will wonder whether I am still seeing Debra and mentions that she’s surprised I have never married a Jewish woman.
  I will answer that I never met a Jewish woman I was attracted to, and the conversation will end there.
  I live three hours by plane from them. I don’t visit often. Typically no more than twice a year, and for many years only once.
  My life has embarrassed them. I didn’t marry a woman my own age. I didn’t have my own children; I didn’t produce heirs. I kept to myself. Knowing that at some level they disapproved of me, I shared very little with them. So we grew apart. We were separated by my unwillingness to be judged, though all parents judge their children.

  *

  A haunting by sorrow, by a long low tide of loss.

  *

  My three things today:
  Bentzi Epstein, the DATA rabbi, has a crazy exuberance about him. It’s beautiful, though he himself is an unattractive man, fat, bearded, with a body one wouldn’t want to touch.
  Rob Wilson is still at SullivanPerkins. He goes home at noon to take care of a new puppy, which he acquired after his boyfriend of four years left him.
  I’m on the treadmill today at the Verandah Club. I am loyal to it, and it is faithful, too. I saw Bill Gilliland at the club today. He’s someone I always enjoy seeing. And why is that? I appreciate his good nature, and even more his evident affection for me. He flatters me, which is always appreciated.
  I quoted Yeats to him today.
  “Only God could love you dear without your yellow hair.”
  The line comments on how all our loves are forms of use, exploitations of the qualities that attract us. A woman’s body, a man’s wallet. I loved Pam for her yellow hair, certainly.

  *

  In the fall of 1973, at the start of my last year at Harvard. Elizabeth Bishop taught a course in letter writing. Robert Lowell taught the poetry writing course that I most wanted into. I had already taken the prerequisite with Robert Fitzgerald, who was a gracious, gifted teacher, but admission to Robert Lowell’s class was a competition. You submitted poems and Lowell then admitted you for one of the limited number of spaces. All the Harvard poets wanted in. So I submitted three or four poems and waited. The decision appeared on a typed list, posted outside the door of the class. I went to check it on the first day and found my last name, on the posted list. But when I entered the classroom, Lowell stared at me with such a strange look, as though he was disoriented. Who are you, and what are you doing here, he seemed to be asking, though he said nothing. As it happened, there was a Perkins admitted to the class, but a different Perkins. It wasn’t me. The class was full. I hadn’t been chosen. I had to ask myself Lowell’s unasked question: Who was I, and what was I doing there?

  *

  Three more things:

  I am grateful for my years at Harvard, for my love and understanding of poetry, and for my courage in the face of disappointments.

  I don’t think I’ll ever be as lonely as I was at twenty, and I am grateful for that.

  I’m grateful for Dolores, who taught me, and for the memory of Dolores.

  Taught what? Generosity, sweetness of temper, patience, kind laughter, and the joy of empathy.

  November 8

  A warm day, early November.
  Closing out a year.
  Socializing:
  Gary and Marcia Lawson met me and Debra for dinner at York Street, which is on Lewis Street.
  Poppy and Don invited us to dinner Saturday. Don will be full of commentary on the election of Obama.

  I went earlier today to see the Bodron Fruit house on Cherokee Lane, on the AIA tour.
  Other odds and ends:
  Saw the Eliasson Take Your Time exhibit for members only at the DMA.
  Chatting with a hard hat construction manager from McCarthy, on the site of the Wyly Theatre in the Arts District.
  At Central Market, my groceries were checked out by Christina – Ben has taught me to notice, if not care about, the young people who work in grocery stores.

  *

  I can face some things by turning my face away from them. Facing it by forgetting it, and letting whatever the harm was slip past me on a river of years. There may always be a faded scar. As for getting back to where I was before, the longer I wish for that, the longer I will have no relief.

  *

  November 16, 2008

  Last Monday, November 10, I received a strange call. It began with a recording that asked if I would accept a collect call from Ben Perkins. Push 1 to accept, it said, but the call ended before I could respond. I didn’t know where the call was from. It came from a 402 area code, which is Nebraska. It turned out to not be from Nebraska. It took me some hours of work to unscramble it and discover that I had received a request to accept a collect call from Ben, who was in jail in Rawlins, a town off US 80 in Carbon County, Wyoming.

  Ben had gone to California with his friend Brian from the Wild Oats grocery store where they both work in Boulder, Colorado. They took Brian’s car. Brian went to buy marijuana, and Ben tagged along, or so he claimed.. On the way back they were stopped late at night on I-80 outside Rawlins. They were stopped for speeding, but Ben was smoking marijuana when they were stopped, and there were fourteen pounds of marijuana in the trunk of Brian’s car. Ben was placed in the back seat of a highway patrol car and sat there, handcuffed, for ninety minutes.

  He spent three nights and days in jail.

  The first evening after I learned where Ben actually was, Debra and I were having dinner together at Palomino in the Crescent. Ben’s in jail, I told her. I got a very strange phone call, from Wyoming, I said. I was looking for an attorney for him, making calls, and vetting as best I could.
  I told her that one of the attorneys I found had represented Matthew Shepherd’s killer.
  “What are you doing,” she said. “You need to get up there.”
  I did need to go up there, but apparently I also needed to be told so.

  *

  I found a lawyer in Rawlins through phone calls and Internet research on Tuesday, and took a flight to Denver that evening. From there, I drove four hours to Rawlins, much of the drive through blowing snow. I was barely able to see. I got to a Hampton Inn in Rawlins at 2:30 in the morning and requested a 7 a.m. wake-up call.

  I saw Ben Wednesday morning; the jailers let me do that, though I was told it wasn’t a visiting day, and I could only have ten minutes. He was behind glass. He wore orange and white striped prison clothing. He was frightened. I was in a visiting room and we could only speak on wall phones.

  Ben was scheduled in court that day, where prosecutors charged him with a felony accomplice and possession. Prison was a possible consequence. The judge, a Mennonite magistrate substituting for a district judge who was in the hospital, set the bond. She was former prosecutor herself, and not sympathetic.

  Although it was nearly impossible, I met a bond demand for $20,000 cash deposited in Rawlins bank before end of day. With Mike Busch’s help, I was able to have it wired; it made the 3 pm deadline by three minutes. I also wrote a $10,000 check to Ben’s attorney in town. And with that, I was able to do what was needed. I brought Ben out of jail Wednesday evening. Thursday morning, he met his new lawyer, Dave Erickson, who had himself been a judge in Rawlins.

  We had one other immediate task. We drove to Hanna, a neighboring town, where Brian’s car had been impounded. Ben had to retrieve his clothing and a backpack and other belongings. And so we were done. By late Thursday afternoon I had driven him back to Boulder, and I took a plane back to Dallas.

  How could he be so stupid? How could he put himself in such a vulnerable place? I can pray for Ben all I want, but I can’t undo what he does. Both of us are frightened now.

  Coincidentally, that Thursday morning, Debra and I were to have gone to Cordevalle, the Rosewood resort in San Martin, California. I had planned a four-day trip to celebrate my fifty-seventh birthday.

  Life with children has been an upsetting reality for many years.

  *

  I’m angry, frightened, and hurt, but I’m not sure that I’m disappointed. And if I’m not, it’s because I’ve learned not to be. What do I expect from either Ben or Eden? Adopted at birth, they are two lives of unknown backgrounds. Provenance is what an antique or a work of art has; it’s part of what makes them authentic. I don’t know my own children’s provenance. But I know they both had wonderful possibilities. Nothing about either of them seemed limiting. I had that pleasure of anticipating what they might do or become.

  The most wonderful thing about any new child is how a birth fills a father with hope.

  With time and losses, that hope recedes. As the shape of a life becomes clearer, so too do its boundaries.

  Ben and Eden are both lost souls.

  Two souls crushed by loss, by doubt, by failure, by a lack of love, they would say. I would say by their resolute refusal to be loved.

  They are my two children, but they are so often scarcely mine, other than legally. Unhappiness seems to own them.

  *

  Three more reasons for gratitude –

  Grateful for the fire in the fireplace, for the flames wavering, and the warm glow.
  Grateful for the herb tea in my Pillivuyt cup – a white cup, with its brasserie pattern.
  Grateful for November, and all the other months of the year.
  For books on the shelves.
  For courage; life would be impossible without it.
  For my strange strengths, which allows me to smile even today.

  November 26

  Thanksgiving tomorrow.
  More than a hundred people were murdered in Mumbai, in attacks coordinated by Muslims on seven locations, most of them hotels where Westerners stay. I had planned a trip to India two years ago, but never went.

  What else? Thinking some about finances, though this isn’t really about finances. When Pam left in early 2006, I had $1.8 million in my Schwab accounts. Today, it’s around $600,000.

  Eden says she’ll come over tomorrow afternoon at 2; we’re going to drive to Debra’s aunt’s house in Rockwall, for dinner with Debra’s family.

  Ben’s in Boulder. He talked to his lawyer today. He’s under the shadow of his bond and a hearing that has been postponed until Tuesday, February 6, 2009 (“continued,” in the language of the courts). His buddy Stephen has invited him over for Thanksgiving.

  I’m not looking forward to driving up to Rawlins from Denver in February.

  Through the end of October, SullivanPerkins has produced $600,000 less in net sales than in the previous year. 2008 has had its many difficulties.

  Rabbi Epstein invited me and Debra for Sabbath dinner. I declined.

  *

  Thinking of a jingle, which I hear on television at Christmastime:
  I just can’t seem to forget you
  Your Windsong plays on my mind.
  Plays on my mind? Maybe it was preys on my mind. Probably it was stays on my mind.
  When I think of Christmas, I think of the odor of pine and spruce.

  December 26, 2008

  Dad has fallen outside a movie theater and struck his head; he was taken to the emergency room, then to rehab, where he will spend New Year’s Eve.

  *

  2009

  January

  In the silence of this morning – the hiss of a kettle, falling water, birdsong. And in the space between the last birdsong and next, a different silence.

  What to do with the collection of hearts on my table?
  The wooden one reminds me of grieving. It was a gift from The Warm Place, where Ben and Eden went for counseling after Dolores died. The breakable ceramic heart? I don’t remember who gave me that one. Then there are two glass hearts – a beefy, rough-edged one and the small red heart suspended like a tear drop in clear glass. I don’t know where those came from either. That’s the whole collection. Let others have their salt shakers, their nutcrackers and Santa Clauses. I’m holding on to the few hearts I have.

  *

  I’ve been writing, to myself, for thirty-five years. True, I’ve completed no slender volume of lyrical essays, and no first book of poems. There were no early triumphs that raised all expectations. I do have some titles, though. But give it time. No doubt I will see my name on the spine of a hardback one of these days. And perhaps something of mine will be adapted into a screenplay, by someone more workmanlike, who cares more about popularity. If so, I might even see its title on the marquee of a movie theater, if theaters still have marquees then. The red plastic letters will be so fat and round that even I will be able to make them out, despite my failing eyesight and my very advanced age.

  *

  Reworking a thought I already had –
  Putting one foot forward is good. The problem is the other foot dragging behind. It’s the one that feels heavy with the weight of the past. Life goes on, and I’m moving on, widowed, divorced, struggling children who are no longer children. I’m in my furrow, and some days hitting a stump that will not budge.

  Reworking another thought:
  My father’s meaner than he was ten years go. Mom’s frailer. In their California, she’s the bougainvillea trailing over the stucco wall, purple on white. He’s the lemon tree, planted near the doorway.

  Another one:
  The tobacco’s bitter in the blackened bowl. Rumor is, it’s a killer, but I like things that are distasteful.

  All of our days are numbered, and I’m counting them down.

  Rethinking one last time:
  The leaves on the Japanese maples are shaking like fists. It makes sense that they would be angry; they have no ability to do anything about this wind or the other inevitable disturbances of life, other than to hang on.

  *

  The longing for partners who are gone is like a low tide. It approaches and withdraws, over and over. And each time, it seems to come less close to my bare toes, which I am pushing into the damp sand. I am discovering, at first to my surprise, and in spite of everything, what a pleasure it is still is to go walking on the beach.

  *

  Why did my father trip on a concrete step on his way into a movie theater? An accident like that might bring any of us down. A miscalculation of how high to raise our foot, a failure of the muscle in our thigh to execute the necessary lift. My father fell hard. His head hit the concrete. It broke him in public. And now he’s at home, after some rehab, but damaged and an invalid and barely able to walk, instead of the robust ninety-five-year-old he was a month ago. He was proud of his age, as though it was something he had achieved, or he had done something exceptional to merit it – his TV watching regimen, or the cold cereal he eats, or his temperament, which has not always been sweet, especially in recent years. One thing I’m sure of, he’ll never made it into another movie. He never will see Tom Cruise as a “good” Nazi in Valkyrie, which is about a plot by Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler. How silly of him, to stumble toward death that way.

  *

  I saw La Boheme at Fair Park on Saturday night. Rudolfo and Mimi sing to each other in a garret. In the version that I lived, it’s an apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine, and there is no Mimi. I am borrowing a book, Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre, stealing it from Catherine Demongeot’s bookshelf. It’s 1973.

  *

  Another visit to Oceanside. My mother has fractured her ribs in a fall. A spot on her lungs showed up on her last CAT scan. She sleeps poorly and has lost 15 pounds, and she tells me she’s dying. Not this weekend I tell her. It’s a Friday, and I’m going home to Dallas at noon the next day.

  *

  I read this yesterday: Always ask how a situation, any situation, can help you grow, how it can teach you to treat yourself and others with more loving-kindness. That’s what I read. It may be wisdom, it may be treacle, but that’s not what I was asking in my situation today. I was sitting in an Italian restaurant, tapping my fingers at the bar while I waited for my to-go order. I needed to be back at work and was growing more and more impatient. So my question was, how hard is it really to make a calzone?

  April 6, 2009

  Ron Wuntch is dead. Or, as it said in the obituary I saw today, Dr. Ronald J. Wuntch, 56, unexpectedly passed away on Friday, April 3. I knew Dr. Wuntch as Ron. He was the “scoutmaster” of Troop 729 at Temple Emanu-El during Ben’s brief time as a cub scout. We didn’t participate all that much, and we stopped going after Dolores’s death. Ben didn’t like scouts, and I didn’t either. He told me later that he was bullied in the troup, but what I remember most was how even-tempered Ron was, and how cheerful. He was diligent, in the way scout leaders typically are. His son Marcus was in the troop, and Ron was enthused about making the hiking trip to Philmont, which is the Boy Scouts of America National High Adventure Base, and leading his Marcus there. So, what happened? The “Unexpectedly passed away” in the obituary doesn’t tell; for that, I needed an article in the Dallas Morning News, which reported that a 56-year-old man jumped from the sixth floor of a parking garage at NorthPark Center, “according to the police.” The article in the News continued: “The Medical Examiner’s office identified the man as Dr. Ronald Wuntch, podiatrist, but did not release the manner of death. Police said the incident was a suicide. The man reportedly jumped about 9:30 a.m. from the parking garage near Nordstrom and was transported to Baylor University Medical Center. A NorthPark representative declined to comment on the incident, referring all questions to the Dallas police.”
  Here are my questions, Ron, or some of them:
  What happened to you?
  Why did you decide to take one last hike off a parking garage?
  And did you remember Ben, from one of the years you were scoutmaster of Troup 729, a boy who never fit in? I was just a dad, uninvolved with the troop, and I was put off by your enthusiasm for merit badges.

  *

  In California again –

  Mom and Dad are talking. Their dialog belongs in one of those foreign films I watched once in an art gallery. Take your sweater off, Mom says. That’s what I’m trying to do. I think the sweater is too small for you. Oh boy, Dad says, but it’s unclear who or what he’s responding to. There is much to learn from the dying, but the lessons come in a class that requires prerequisites, none of which I want to take. Maybe being in your nineties is like that dream I’ve heard about but never actually had, the one where you find yourself in the classroom although you are no longer in school. There is a test to be taken, but you are unprepared. You don’t have the number two pencil, much less the slender blue book in which all your answers must be written.

  *

  In California again –

  I’m delivering a xerox of my power of attorney to Wachovia. The name of the bank doesn’t matter, but my mother can’t seem to learn to say it. She’s 86 and very competent, yet thinks it’s necessary for me to have this “power.” I suppose a mother wants her son to be of practical use at some point, and she is at that point. I’ll drive to the bank, I’ll pay the small fee. I’m only in town for a long weekend, and my mother keeps insisting that she is at the end of her long life.

  There are plastic flowers and plantation shutters in my parents’ house on Delos Way in Ocean Hills. Opera’s on the radio this Saturday morning.

  *

  November 2009

  Mom is hanging on, but she’s let go of Dad. She’s put him in a group home. She says it’s because he falls and cannot go to the toilet by himself, which he insists on doing. The trouble of watching over him is too much for her. But I suspect that in part, or even mostly, it’s because they never liked each other much. It’s because sixty years together was enough for her. That’s what I think, but what do I know? I’m just the debtor who owes his life to these two strangers who met in Los Angeles after the war, and to the other stranger who introduced them.

  *

  What do we owe the dead? Why are we speaking to ashes? We talk and talk about our dear ones so much that nothing in life has more presence than their absence, but we do all this talking to ourselves. We come to the cemetery and to the headstone. But we come to few conclusions and make no headway, when we consider the ends of things. Gone by death, some; others, just gone.

  Loss always wins.

  *

  Small differences separate grace from disgrace. The book on the shelf in front of me and my father’s descent into wordlessness.

  Waiting for a taxi, then time to go. Like the buzz of a hive but with less purpose, the cab chatter.

  *

  There’s dying going on. I can’t describe it. I can leave all description to cameras. With the push of a button, you can push out my thousand words of the way.

  *

  “In the end of days” is a phrase so beautiful it masks its meaning; it is a confusion of hallowing and harrowing,

  The journey I am on now: between having the desire and losing the capacity.

  *

  They’ve torn out the ceiling. Snowy insulation covers the ground. I’m remodeling.

  A cup of coffee, the Sunday paper – I’ve packed light for traveling over the tabletop.

  Solomon asked for wisdom and was wise. Birds singing in the garden never ask.

  *

  My father is in a steady decline.
  This hasn’t been much of a year for writing in a journal. One can only whine so much or say the same thing so many times.

  *

  2010

  New Year’s Day.
  This is a cold winter in Dallas. What if I were not to get up tomorrow morning? I’m not referring to dying, just to sleeping in, to staying under the covers. Death is a far-off event, unthought of even as I row closer to it through the fog. In that same fog I see my father at the end of his life, and my mother, who has her cough and her nausea. My children are still looking to me, but they also do their best to look away.

  *

  I’m slipping down, though it feels like an uphill climb. I am out of breath on the path that isn’t a path. Fifty-eight, fit enough. If this were centuries ago, I might be dead already.

  *

  The forecast called for rain and mixed snow, but there was no rain, only the large wet flakes falling all day and most of the night. This morning, how beautiful! There’s the gradual warming and – what do weathermen call it – the accumulation, the white bonnet of snow. Snow dust and snow clods are dropping from the pecan trees and live oaks and sycamores, from their bent branches, some of them split. The shrubbery is bowing down. What is that bush with the bright orange berries? Birds are feeding in it. These are birds with russet feathers on their breasts, a white circle around their eyes, and pointed orange beaks. Waxwings? I can see them, but I’m not sure how to name them. I used to have the names of things, but all of that is melting.

  *

  The drive to Debra’s house on Tuscan Ridge never varies. I go to the end of Guernsey and make a left across Northwest Highway (that’s a strange phrase, “make a left” – it must baffle elderly foreigners trying to learn English). Then I follow Northwest Highway, passing places I will never stop: the gentlemen’s clubs, where the gentlemen’s trucks fill the parking lots until two in the morning; and the taquerias, the pawn shops, the check cashing businesses; there’s the park on the left alongside manmade Bachman Lake, and the parade of cars at the beer barn where Mexican girls in tight shorts are sitting outside on directors’ chairs; and also, the cheap chain restaurants with their illuminated signs. I chose Debra, she chose me; all these streetside attractions will be for other people. I do think from time to time about all the things I’m not doing, but I can’t both stop and go.

  *

  What is there to learn from the mediations of Marcus Aurelius other than how little has changed over the centuries? I’m reading this book of meditations in the piquant translation from 1909. It’s clear enough from Aurelius that vanity and celebrity have always had their day. It’s apparent from the book itself, the bright red hardback Harvard Classic, number 2 in the five-foot shelf of books. This is the so-called Edition Deluxe (there’s vanity) with the Veritas shield on its cover (for celebrity). In a paperback world, who wouldn’t be cynical about this enterprise? It’s an imitation of unread leather volumes, belonging to woodpaneled rooms and private libraries. It has decorous gold in the design, and marbled endpapers that are like no marble ever quarried in the mountains of Italy. Those mountains must also have been the source of the stone for the sculpted bust depicted in the out of focus photograph on one of this book’s first pages. That up front page used to be called a frontispiece. It might still be called that. The photo of the bust, labeled Emperor Marcus Aurelius, is inset in a cream border. And his blank marble eyes are looking off to one side. It’s a timeless human gaze that signals thoughtfulness or interiority. It’s a look still used by authors and rock musicians today, when they want to suggest that something’s on their mind. It’s also a look used by teenagers refusing to look straight at the camera and smile in response to a parent’s request, a teenager saying with that sidelong look, No one commands me! I’m an Emperor!

  *

  Passover, 2010. Blood on the doorposts. So it shall be a sign of the birth of freedom to pass through bloody doorposts as we go into the wilderness. This was an exodus from a certain evil toward a possible good. Every final departure is like that.

  *

  I have no sense that there is a right answer to my life. I am filling in the ellipse nonetheless, blackening it as neatly as I can with my No. 2 pencil, and answering as instructed: none of the above.

  *

  When the ark of the covenant was lost in battle with the Philistines, and the priests dispersed from its service, then there were prophets, who spoke with a singsong beauty of kings and exiles, and of faithfulness and iniquity.

  New times require new sources of strength.

  *

  It’s daylight savings time. At two in the morning it became three in the morning. What can it mean, to be “saving daylight”? Am I storing it up for some darkness ahead?

  The light after six this evening is gravy light. It’s the same time, but it’s extra time, too, lighter later, if only by the trick of adjusting the clock forward. Losing an hour is a strange way to prolong the light.

  *

  If I were something else, I would be the grass that withers or the flower that fades. I would be the pebble on the seashore turning into sand, and then the sand falling down the narrows of an hourglass. I would be the rosy cheek of the lad, and not the one with an inflammatory skin disease, but the young athlete in the 1890s. I would never be his monument, though, the one more lasting than brass.

  *

  Years are passing. No matter how much I try to postpone it, I am settling for less. And this isn’t the less that is more, it’s the less that is better than nothing. Here I am as I have been for decades, up at nearly two in the morning. And what am I writing? Less and less.

  *

  Tomorrow is over my shoulder. Some days it will be wearing the velvet robe of mid-October, other times as barefoot as July, but always walking at a pace, until it passes me by.

  *

  I saw the evidence of things unseen on a Tuesday morning, where the blue of ocean met the blue sky in a line. I was standing on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway. It will be an hour’s drive north to Oceanside, where my father is living in a small group home now, confused and unhappy. He’s ninety-four. In the lines on his face there will be a plea for mercy that is the same as his expression of grievance.

  *

  I had no reason to shop for groceries today other than wanting to leave the house and for the company of people. And if the people disappoint me, at least I will be among the fruits and vegetables. I will have the fun of visiting the cold cases of milk and other dairy.

  *

  What am I doing any of this for? Hard to answer. I’m passing the time, whittling words that can be as stubborn as wood. I’m writing this journal for myself and nobody else. And if nobody else ever approaches me out of the forest, and I never get to offer these beads of words in trade for an island? Then I’m doing it all just for the doing of it, and for the saying of something, even if I have nothing to say.

  *

  June 2010

  My parents are difficult, but that’s their life. Dad is close to dying; at least, everyone thinks he is. Mom has placed him in a residential home. I am going out to Southern California regularly now, flying into San Diego, renting a car, driving north to Ocean Hills; but only for extended weekends. I go for four-day visits.

  There’s the sharp caw caw caw of a bird. It’s already warm in the house, though it’s not yet nine in the morning.
  This heat will be with us day and night for another three months.

  *

  Many things keep me from asking Debra to marry me. In part, I am more committed to loneliness than to happiness. I also fear becoming Debra’s unhappy husband. It would be a life of listening to her gossip and the accounts of her children’s lives, which she never tires of. And so, thus far, I prefer the status of boyfriend.

  I do have my own home, which I’ve worked hard at making. I have a yard that reminds me of Pam, but of my own independence as well. This place is my place.

  A dragonfly lights on my forearm. A droplet of water stays on the edge of a lotus leaf in the pond. The goldfish swim away from each other.

  *

  Some thoughts, a sequence of non-sequiturs –

  Though it’s difficult to walk in its ways, study it to the end of your days.

  Old age can be an unexpected dawn.

  My father has lost his mind, but not his interest in his three meals or his desire to brush his teeth.

  Hard to picture the life that comes after life, but even harder imagining nothing. Impossible, in fact.

  *

  Eden has returned home to live with me. She’s my child, but she doesn’t want to be. I’m her father, a label that makes us both uncomfortable, but her more than me.

  *

  An old dream: of writing from a room with a window, and a view of rooftops, and a European city beyond and, as if in tribute, below.

  This morning, what am I doing thinking about old dreams? Don’t I have enough to do without the past? On the way to my office I pick up a coffee from Starbucks, my tall misto, which reminds me of café au lait and mornings in Paris in 1973.

  *

  Tomaz Salmun, I am completely baffled by your writing, charmed by it, too, but not enough. To read three of your poems is the same as reading ten thousand. So when I have the opportunity to sit in front of the real you, in a Saturday workshop at the Writer’s Garret, I will keep my thoughts to myself, just as you to have done in your poems. You publish, but you are not public. That must be your strategy. It’s not a bad one. We can each do each other no harm that way.

  *

  I’m spending late hours placing syllables on a screen, making a path with them, as if they were small stones.

  Time to go to bed. I close my eyes. More syllables. They rise through the air of my thoughts, pop like bubbles, and vanish.

  *

  I read an article about a son whose parents have their good health in their nineties. The son begins to lose weight. He feels a loss of energy that no amount of sleep can restore. So he goes through tests at the hospital and receives a diagnosis of renal carcinoma. Cancer doesn’t run in the family, but a hard mass of three centimeters has managed to rest on one of his kidneys.

  *

  Where are my south seas journeys, my whale oil, the fuel for my work. Where are the bars I fell over drunk in, the flophouses, and the beatings. Where is my extreme authenticity?

  I have been traveling around a tabletop, navigating toward an Indies of verbs. This has been a forty years’ passage. Dreaming clouds overhead, the lamplight for sun and moon and stars, and the alphabet beneath my feet. As for the worth of what I’ve written, most of it should be thrown away. And all of it will be. If there’s a paragraph I wish would be kept, that will have to be enough; just the wish itself.

  Some of the poets I read, it’s as if they were decomposing. Words in what were once strong sentences fly apart on the page; so distant in meaning is one word from another that I can barely make them out; they are nothing but sounds.

  *

  A shattered mirror reflects more of the whole truth in its brokenness. The handicaps of my age are a weight, but as the weight bears down, I am is closer to the ground, and finally close enough to see.

  *

  Frightened of life and its alternatives, I have no God that I trust or would recognize, though we might meet at any moment.

  *

  At this hour when only the trees and the wind are awake, I wonder what sense it makes to say that a tree would sleep. Writing lets me say trees are disturbed by the wind. I’m working, so the trees have to work nights, too, angry to their roots at being used by a dilletante looking for a nighttime subject.

  *

  In my empty after midnight house, the clock on my desk knows how to stay up. Its hands have time to keep. The hands are circling, and the more they move, the less time I have.

  *

  The blink of an eye, the wag of the dog’s tail, a heartbeat. I try to assign a value of one to each of them, which means comparing. Speed is the measure I come up with first. Only later, associated emotions.

  *

  August 19, 2010. My father has stopped eating. Anna Wilson says he won’t make it to Labor Day. Who is Anna Wilson to say that? I’ve known my father nearly sixty ears. Anna Wilson I’ve met once, but now Anna Wilson knows better than I do.

  *

  Months have gone by since I was here last, in this journal. You wouldn’t know it, to judge by the distance of two returns on a keyboard.

  *

  Still thinking about Pam, longing for her sometimes, unable to curse her in my heart. She used me as a handle, as the rungs of a ladder. She hurt me like the drunk driver who veers into oncoming traffic and smashes into the other guy, killing him and his family of five, and walks away without a scratch. She left me like the prize fighter who takes a dive after a few sloppy rounds, unwilling to go ten and happy with the guaranteed payday.

  *

  The truth about my sleep doesn’t have to do with how much less of it I got the night before last, or how much later I went to it last night, or much earlier I woke from it this morning. The truth is, whenever I’m awake, I’m tired.

  *

  These are my customs of the neighborhood: keep to yourself, wave in passing. Nine years after I moved into this house on Guernsey Lane, I can name three of my neighbors and know only one. That may be the thing I like best about the block.

  *

  Before the wheel was invented, alcohol was brewed on a riverbank in China. First the ancient impulse toward intoxication, and only later civilization. With a beer in my hand, that makes perfect sense to me. My redwood deck is a bamboo forest. I am reinventing the wheel in my own stoned age.

  *

  I followed a trail of words along the paths they made. In this way I have managed to wander for decades. I warmed my hands in the moonlight of a monitor. Pine cones, photographs, three boxes of matches, two smooth stones, and a metal rabies vaccination tag in the shadows on my desk. Mostly I traveled at night, sometimes until 2 in the morning, without a pillar of fire for direction or a cloud for a sign.

  *

  Stop complaining that you have been harmed, and the harm will disappear. That is what Marcus Aurelius wrote. But he was Emperor, wrote in Latin, and was misinformed.

  *

  Thinking again about a Dunhill lighter –

  I use a silver lighter now to fire the wad of tobacco in my pipe, not the gold Dunhill lighter that Pam took with her the day she left in February, 2006. She must have stopped at my desk, picked it up, and decided to take. Or, more likely, she came to the desk in order to take it. It was hers, after all. It had been a present, a token of love I bought for her in London on a trip without her before we were married. Though she never used it, which is why I kept it for myself, she must have wanted it, or at least not wanted to leave it, the day she left me. What was she thinking? I was out of town. She walked through the house, taking her time, as she looked on tables and shelves for objects of value, happy to be shopping at a store where everything was free. She was moving efficiently. Whatever of value she found and could claim, she did.

  *

  I might only write a single line before I go to sleep. And then another tomorrow, and so on. As if I could keep myself alive with these lifelines.

  *

  August 2010

  My father died. None of us where there at the moment of his death, only after.

  My father used to Capitalize the random words in the handwritten notes he would send me from time to time, enclosing them with an article from Newsweek or the Los Angeles Times. These notes of his with eccentric capitalization would look like a Poem of Miss Emily Dickenson’s. He always printed, too. I don’t believe I ever saw his handwriting, other than in his signature applied to a final medical directive.

  *

  A sequence of non-sequiturs –

  Josiah burned the chariots of the sun and pulled down the altars the kings of Judah had erected.

  A bird in the branches of a yaupon holly ate a round red berry.

  I lost my favorite umbrella, the one I bought at Madeline Gely on Rue St. Germaine.

  Nothing is true except what has already happened, and not even all of that.

  *

  Never in my boyhood did nature seem to better represent the divinity of things than when I listened to the reassuring repetitions of the Pacific. I would sit in the warming oven of the salt air, with the surf breaking in a spray that spread like the wings of angels.

  *

  If I am required to recognize the one God when I lie down and when I rise up, I should be grateful there is only the one.

  *

  November 2010

  Much colder today, a drop in the temperature. The wind blows down from Canada, or from the plains of the great Dakotas, and there is nothing to stop it. And so we wake up to the smell of a far-away north on our doorsteps in Texas.

  Ben came home last night from Colorado for Thanksgiving. His first day here, he wanted to visit his mother’s grave. Does the pink granite headstone have something to tell him? I went with him, and got out of the car when he did. Whatever it is the headstone said to him, if it’s cold and of a distant origin, like the wind, or something much warmer – whatever it was, he keeps it to himself.

  *

  I’ve been pushing myself through the pages of the book of Isaiah. There isn’t much in it to cheer me up. What is the point of all the warnings? They seem hardly useful in that time of limited broadcast. And the endless pronouncements on Tyre and Babylon. It all has the quality of “I told you so,” a report of what will happen as a foregone conclusion. They say that prophesy is successful even when it proves to be false, because repentance and changes of behavior have averted the divine decree. But predictions of woe and destruction, of weeping and pain are always plausible as prophecy. Who with any experience of the world could not foretell that things will go badly?

  Lord of Hosts is also a curious phrase. It doesn’t seem appropriate for a host to shame all the honored of the world, though that’s what Isaiah proclaims, if the translation can be trusted. I suppose the host here is not a reference to hospitality, but to the numbers of angels in the armies of God.

  I want to be trusted, though not for prophecy. I want to write clearly. I should put the good book down and get back to my own writing, which is sometimes good enough and needs to be better. But first, there’s plenty to be learned this morning by putting a jacket on and going outside in the drizzle. I can walk through the backyard to the pond. I can breathe and observe. My goldfish are not as numerous as the stars in the sky, but neither have they been destroyed utterly by herons from the creek.

  *

  I call myself a writer, after spending year after year writing in secret, with the night draped over my shoulders. I’ve resisted bedtime my whole lifetime. So many nights, and each one with secrets of its own. My nightly companions: a desktop and its soil of buried pens, a pipe, matchbooks, photographs, a wallet, eyeglasses, and a small round clock. And the two fingers on this clock. They point to the hour and the minute. Called hands, but they even can’t hold on to a single moment. The third hand on the clock? It’s the second hand. It’s as restless as a teenager as it jumps from second to second, shouting out a truth with every tick.

  *

  Another day, with its cup and spoon. I get the phone call from a friend whose father has cancer and lies in a hospital for his last hours. My friend says he’s tired now, but it isn’t his turn to be tired, or for that last fatigue before we sleep.

  *

  Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requires.
  Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

  He hated her, he loved her. The poet knew what I didn’t know when I first translated this couplet from Catullus forty years ago. Catullus is admired for his brevity. But how long did he suffer before he “moved on,” as we say these days. The married woman he carried on with, a Roman stateman’s wife, what was her name, Clodia? Did he ever forgive or achieve that indifference that he might have longed for even more than he longed for Clodia? Did he ever attain that coldness that is even harder than forgetting? Two thousand years have come and gone, but his syllables still hold his admission of helplessness.

  It isn’t the truth but as close as I will come to it.

  *

  He shall measure it with a line of chaos
  And with weights of emptiness.
  Isaiah 34:11

  Who hasn’t looked up on a cloudless day with the sun in the sky and not felt the weights of emptiness? Lucky if you haven’t. And watch out, don’t trip over a line of chaos on your way back inside to the grilled cheese sandwich on the kitchen counter and the tomato with its shiny skin next to a sharp knife.

  *

  February 2011

  The TV said it was unnaturally cold this morning and a good day to be indoors. It’s February, even here in the South. Geography may be on our side, but the season is against us.

  *

  My silver Dunhill lighter was a ridiculous expense, compared to a Bic lighter that does the same job. I am curious about Alfred Dunhill, so this morning I googled him. I learned a bit of his story. Alfred inherited his father’s saddlery, but he turned to automotive accessories. In 1905 he patented the Windshield Pipe, to allow smoking while driving. He subsequently opened a pipe and tobacco store near the London men’s clubs in St. James. In 1956, when I was four years old, the Alfred Dunhill brand brought the first butane lighter to market. Its original design is unchanged from the one in my hand this morning. Mine has a lowercase alfred dunhill stamped on its bottom. It has the feel of utilitarian luxury, though I’ve never smoked a pipe while driving, only while aging.

  *

  One of these days, and more likely at night, the whisper that there’s not much time left will be offensively audible.

  It was only the day before yesterday I was too young. Now I’m too old. How’d that happen? The skin is wintry on the back of my hand, and this morning I woke up to find my father’s nose in the middle of my face.

  *

  I’m up, but today has already been put to bed. And the events of today have the tousled, mixed-up air of something almost remembered, images half seen through narrowed, nearly closed eyes. Was that a banana that I sliced on top of the cornflakes this morning? Was the front door locked and the dog looking out the window as I drove away? I never saw the color of a neighbor’s house at the end of my block, though I passed by it today, twice. At midnight, there was nothing left to do except write the obituary of another day, noting that the tall misto I had this afternoon would have been called café au lait in the bistro downstairs from my room on Rue Cardinal Lemoine in 1973. What was there to say about the cup and its green mermaid, other than there was not nearly enough caffeine in it. There isn’t enough in all the fair trade coffee from Costa Rica to Kenya to forestall the fog settling on my shoulders now, just ahead of lights out.

  *

  April 2011

  One of the pleasures of living alone is the option I have to watch the Oscars at Debra’s house instead of at home. I can curl up on Debra’s couch instead of mine as I make the long sit toward Best Picture. And then, after that terrible waste of time, I can drive back in the dark to a home void of any residue of the lethargy left in the air after three and a half hours of watching TV on a Sunday night. I can open the door to the fanfare of my dog, Wally’s tail thumping against the wall, as he greets me with all the emotion of the best supporting actor thanking the Academy.

  *

  To Oceanside –

  In two hours I need to be at the airport and on the plane for California. My mother’s eighty-nine; both of us need the time together. I do more than she does.

  *

  And back to Dallas –

  After my visit to Oceanside, I had a car accident on my drive home from airport. I must have looked away at the moment a car in front of me came to a sudden stop. How else could it have happened? It was night, I was tired. The boy whose car I hit called his father for advice. Neither of us called the police. We pulled off the road and exchanged information: names, licenses, phone numbers, insurances. Nobody hurt. The road had nothing to tell me, and the streetlights said hurry up, go home.

  *

  2011

  Why I would want to go to Buenos Aires for my sixtieth birthday this November? It can be explained, but not without reference to Borges, the tango, and the five syllables in the word Patagonia. Whatever time I have left in my pocket, I need to spend quickly. Or so I am whispering to myself, as I put my clothes in the dryer. It’s only a Saturday. Maybe instead of traveling so far, I should do a tango with the broom in the kitchen closet. I can tap the dustpan at its feet to ask permission. I can name the waterfall in the dishwasher Iguazu, and then set off on a hike through my own back yard.

  *

  I’m happy when I’m cleaning. I like the hungry mouth of the dustpan and the straw-footed broom. There’s a pleasing whir to the dishwasher, and to the spinning of my clothes in the dryer as well. And after I’m done, when my neck’s bent in the shower, it’s a thrill to wait for the falling water, severing me from both the past and the future. The showerhead is as low as the fruit of a forbidden tree.

  *

  Still a Saturday morning.
  I swept the walkways of leaves and pulled weeds from their beds. I have trash to take out. Whether any of this is a violation of the Sabbath, others can judge. Mrs. Linehan, who comes and goes from the house across the street, is doing her chores, too, and she seems innocent enough. When death comes for her, when she waits for it in her bedroom with the shades drawn, she will be able to answer for her Sabbath crimes. I believe she’ll have something satisfying to say.

  Much of what all of us do is dusting and sweeping up dust.

  *

  Debra seems to go from one crisis to another. Most of her worries are financial. Her fears seem both insurmountable and not all that serious. I might care for Debra, but I’m not good at taking care of her. I can’t make her happy. I don’t want to finance her forever. If I could be more observant, that would be helpful. I’m looking at her photograph on my desk. She’s smiling, as everyone always does when their picture is taken, and I’m doing my best to see her unhappiness.

  *

  Who doesn’t love windows? They are paths. You can go down them without taking a single step.

  My desk will always face an open window, a closed window, a draped window, or even one that’s blinded. Then again, any room is a room with a view, if only of walls.

  *

  Many consider Hindu holy man to be a living god. I saw this headline. It was written about Sathya Sai Baba, an “Indian guru” who died April 24, 2011. It sat atop an article, on the occasion, if that’s what it should be called, of his death.

  *

  The books on my desk are stacked like props. And there’s the branch of bamboo in a vase – pointy green leaves – and the monitor of my laptop is up on its hinge, shedding light on this small stage for whatever drama I can improvise. Will I be taking a bow, and waiting for applause? Then exiting to the wings? Am I aware that the curtain is coming down?

  *

  Why does something that was once thrilling turn into something that isn’t? The piquancy of cola goes flat; the sweet becomes sickening. The poetry of Billy Collins turns into prose, barely interesting. The thrill is gone. That’s what the great bluesman concluded, his own playing becoming repetitious over the years, predictable, at first only to him but eventually — he feared, then suspected, then concluded — to everyone.

  *

  My father didn’t seem very interested in me. To be fair, I never showed much interest in him, either. It’s possible his affection for me was hidden, like an underground stream, and I kept myself to the surface, where I had my footing. As soon as I could, I got away – to college, and then to another city. Then, years of separation. Should the two of us meet again, which seems as improbable as anything could be, it will probably be the same: the silence of time gone by echoing in the greater silence of time to come.

  *

  Here’s an understatement: It was a bad idea to have married Pam.
  Even at the time, I had more than one second thought. With her crazy icy blood, the only question was whether I would freeze to death before drowning, though I ended up being burned.

  *

  The course of art since 1977 would surely look different, and better, had Blinky Palermo stayed alive. That’s what Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker. I have no idea what the course of art has been since 1977. Does it even make sense to say that it has a course? Blinky Palermo, fight fixer and ex-con, got himself into the news for his “dealings” with Sonny Liston. When I read “dealings,” I think drugs, or maybe cards, and about guys named Sonny and Blinky. When I see 1977, I think, that was the year I quit my first job after college. I stayed home that year, and the next, trying to write a first novel, then writing a screenplay and a script for Quincy, a television series that starred Jack Klugman as a coroner who lived in Marina Del Rey. And then the following year, a month or two before John Lennon was murdered, I accepted a job at The Richards Group in Dallas. So I began working with graphic designers. And that’s what I’m still doing, thirty years later, having less impact on the course of art than a punch from Sonny Liston.

  *

  Having cut five stalks of wild grasses and put them in the glass vase I keep on my table, I am denaturing them further by writing about them. Poor grasses, already torn out of the soil from their place by the creek, where they tolerated the sun all day and enjoyed the moon at night; now they are in four inches of water, their bottoms exposed.

  *

  I want Ben to be more like Wally, our dog, who understands that I love him. Wally is unashamed of himself. He never wonders if I’m disappointed in him, and he finds it simple to be grateful.

  *

  The two themes of any life’s journey:

  From the Kotzker Rebbe – “There is nothing more complete than a broken heart.”

  Even in the Polish winter, the snow in Kotzke was not as crusty as its famous rebbe. Known for having acquired impressive knowledge at a young age as a student of the Bunim of Peshischa, the rebbe had little patience for false piety or arrogance. A small corner of the Polish night was illuminated by the fire of the manuscripts he wrote and then burned before his death. In the collection of his overheard sayings his best-known declaration is recorded: All that is thought should not be said, all that is said should not be written, all that is written should not be published and all that is published should not be read. That night, those things that were written were rising, bits of white ash, as if they were published on the cold sky and read by the wind.

  He burned his manuscripts?
  There was a collection of his “overheard sayings”?
  Did I read the paragraph above and copy it? It doesn’t sound like my own writing. Perhaps borrowed, added to, adjusted slightly – stolen, reused.

  *

  The wisdom of my trees appears in the summer. This year, as most years, it’s hotter than one hundred degrees, day after day, and we’ve had no rain for two months. So the leaves are turning brown as if the trees were dying, though, come next Spring, you’ll see, they were only surrendering.

  *

  What do I write down, when I have nothing to write about? I can state just that, complaining about the barrenness of my creativity, whining about my fatigue. That is the inexhaustible subject. My inability takes as many shapes as Proteus, though it is less entertaining than those stories of gods and the sons of gods.

  *

  Eden agrees to go out to dinner with me, but that doesn’t mean she’s willing to talk in the restaurant. The burden is mine to make conversation. Strange, given how gabby she typically is. She’s living in another city now. I don’t know why. She guards her secrets. I am still talking to her these days, but without much response. Three months from now, this silence of hers may no longer seem awkward. It will sound as natural as the sky, and just as neutral, and there will be less reason for me to feel challenged by it, and more reason to be fine with it, perfectly fine, if only because I am used to it.

  *

  If I say I didn’t get what I wanted from my life, I’m not talking about goods or services. When I say “what I wanted,” I usually mean what I wanted to achieve and never did. I tell myself there’s still time, but that isn’t exactly true. Early achievement is something entirely different than whatever I might still be able to achieve in the twilight.

  *

  Reading Seamus Heaney on Auden. He remarks on what a poem is, its compound of magic and wisdom, song and truth – or, as Auden summarized it, Ariel and Prospero. And that led me to Joseph Brodsky, and paragraphs from his essay on September 1, 1939. But first, a detour, because the lines are in my head, where they have lodged since 1972 or thereabouts:

  Lay your sleeping head, my love,
  Human, on my faithless arm.

  I can’t quite call up the next lines, where something is burning away. So I look it the poem up online:

  Time and fever burn away
  Individual beauty from
  Thoughtless children
  And the grave
  Proves the child ephemeral.
  But in my arms till break of day
  Let the sleeping child lie
  Mortal, guilty, but to me
  Entirely beautiful.

  Like so much else in my past these days, it was half-remembered.

  I went back to my notebooks and read journal entrees from 30 March, 1999, twelve years ago; I wrote about my visit to my parents, two years after Dolores’s death.

  Life is a lake, with its ripples of years, those circles that are drifting outward. We are in the center, as the ripples move away from us. And we are on the shore, too, able to skip pebbles across the surface of the water, disturbing it for a moment.

  *

  October 19, 2011
  Yesterday in the news: Bengal tigers, bears, a grey wolf, lions and a monkey escaped in the last hour before nightfall from an “animal farm” in Zanesville, Ohio. All the cage doors had been left open by a suicidal keeper, who then killed himself. And the loosed animals—they were shot to death by the local police, all except for the monkey. The monkey had been eaten, earlier in the evening.

  *

  If I were to tell Debra that I no longer wanted to be with her, what would that signify? Boredom, a change of heart, and the liveliness of my desire for something new.

  *

  “Baha’uddin decided to uproot his family and seek a new home somewhere to the south. The step was well taken, because Balkh would eventually be sacked and most of its inhabitants slaughtered.”

  Well done, survivor. You knew it was time to leave, even if your destination was unknown, or was only “somewhere to the south.” For you, God was a mirror in which you saw what was needed for your wife and children, and you became a mirror for God to contemplate His names and qualities.

  This was in the thirteenth century.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Isaac Reegler did the same. So did Ben Perkins. Leaving Piatra Neamt and Dubrowna, before the slaughter to come. They were young men, though, and uprooted only themselves.

  *

  This is the year after my father’s death. When the Dodgers are on TV, I think of him. And this year, the Texas Rangers were in the World Series. They played the Cardinals. Losing in the seventh game, they broke hearts. St. Louis won it, thrilling their fans. So it seems to have always gone, but this year’s ballgames have not been the same. My father’s death, and with it the end of his particular devotions to the game of baseball, changed things. This year, there was a flaw in the diamond. I can’t see it, but I feel it. Of course not everything has changed. The green of the infield and outfield, the dirt paths between the bases, the chalk lines from home; those things still seem eternal. So does the way a pitcher lowers his head when the manager comes to the mound in a late inning, before motioning for the lefty to come in from the bullpen.

  *

  Rain on the roof, rain on the branches and their leaves. The glass is cold a few feet from where I am sitting and radiates cold. There is nothing much to see at this hour of the night, but what can be heard is reassuring: rainfall, the fountain, street noise, and the unsilent night, with its rainbow of sound.

  *

  I can never remember the names of flowers. Agapanthus, which are lilies of the Nile, intense blue starbursts that float on long stalks. Guara, clouds of tiny white blossoms. Stephanotis, plumeria. I look them up, I repeat the names. Sooner or later, forgotten again.

  *

  One life is shorter than another, or longer, more joyous, or less bearable, and death is forgetting.

  *

  If I were sitting in my room all day, with no job to go to and no colleagues to talk to, if I had only the unspooling of my thoughts as entertainment, would I be in a daze? Time would pass. I wouldn’t have a thought for yesterday or tomorrow, and today would be a day without a number. My body would be at the center of my attention. Hungry or thirsty. Being comfortable would matter more. I would have a seat at the table, my forearms at rest, and my ribs, under a drapery of flesh, containing the countdown of my heart.

  *

  Second thoughts about Eden: Adopted at birth, Mother died when she was eleven. Father remarried to a wicked stepmother. Birth mother reclaims her. Married, divorced, ill, wandering. This is a good drama, but not a good life.

  *

  I don’t observe well. I don’t even see well. Much of my life is unremembered, as though it never was. I have very little ability to describe my face, though it meets me in the mirror every morning. I peer through the fog of my own worries, which are less real than fog. I am buried in a wrapper of my own making. What happened? That’s a question I can never answer – much less, how it happened to me.

  *

  I don’t read novels very often, but I finished one last week. There’s not a single sentence in it that I admire. But it’s a book of five hundred pages. Like most novels, it has characters and settings –baseball players, lovers, a college, a lake. And one thing happens after another, until, after many turnings, nothing more happens; it’s over, and the book lies on the table undisturbed in the coffin of its jacket, the stadium and the professor’s daughter together forever, in a place without verbs.

  *

  Debra and I went to Santa Fe for a few days. On one of them we drove over to Tesuque. All along a mountain road there were woods, thick in some places, other places less so, and the higher we went, the more twisted the trees, until the few that remained, stunted and bent as if they had been born old, disappeared around another switchback in the thinning air. Then, nothing but rocks.

  *

  When does failure begin? Is it when the ball is hit on the ground to you, and you think, “I can’t throw it to first.” Or when the bad news arrives, the diagnosis. Or when you decide to not study, taking your chances and forgetting or ignoring that you only have one chance, and the test is today.

  *

  Reading this, allegedly from Hermann Hesse: ‘Knowledge can be communicated, wisdom cannot. A man can find it, he can live it, he can be filled and sustained by it, but he cannot utter or teach it.”

  Hermann Hesse was unwise to write this. A human has a need to speak the truth and to teach it, however foolishly, and even if only to himself. Even if words are inadequate, they are all that we have, and we must use them.

  We are also meant to make judgments. For example, that the second “n” in Hermann is unnecessary, but the second “s” in Hesse needs to be there.

  *

  Ben has decided that there’s no pleasure in difficulty. He has been keeping to his room these past several months. He has stolen these days away from classrooms and from working life, and also from the hopes I had for his progress in the world. He seems happy enough, or at least indifferent. Money is a problem, and it will be more of one in the future. “Earning a living” is a only a line on his to-do list, and it remains undone. As someone who has worked six days out of seven since before Ben was born, I wonder how he does it, how he is able to do nothing: his daily breathing, the miracle of sight, the motion that only belongs to the living, the living he never has to earn, how does he do it?

  *

  I would go body surfing in the summers when I was growing up in Southern California. Our house was walking distance, though I rarely walked it, to the Pacific Ocean. Diving under a wave, I would hold my breath, something I do these days only metaphorically, and never with the same burst on the other side of the wave. Back then, I would make an arc underwater, and then rise to the surface, coming up for air, and to the calm of the sky and the darkness of the ocean, the wave at my back dwindling on its way to the beach behind me.

  *

  I was reading some of the obituary paragraphs in the Harvard Magazine that arrived in the mail today. In this current issue I saw the name of someone I knew, though not well. There was Christopher Ma in the columns of print. He appeared not in alphabetical order, but in the order of the year of his graduation, and as it’s done in alumni publications. On the same page as Christopher, I found the paragraph for the alum who spent a few years at Banker’s Trust, before joining his wife’s family’s business, where he rose to become president and, five years later, changed the name of the business to his own. I noticed that he “leaves” only a brother. I also read the obituary for the guy just ahead of Christopher, the “talented schoolboy athlete” who left the College after a year to head west, living the life of a blacksmith, cowboy, and carpenter in Colorado and California, and only then pursued a career, if that’s what it was, in construction and, later, as a “master craftsman.” He was also a voracious reader who returned to the College at age 60 – my age now – hoping, or so the obituary said, to fulfill a lifelong ambition to become a high-school history teacher, although illness intervened. And then, Christopher Ma. I remember Chris now from a class we took together, where he passed me a xeroxed copy of George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody. That’s not mentioned in his obituary. Instead, I learned that he was a senior vice president and an innovative pioneer, and I can read the names of those he left — Nathalie, Olivia – “leaving,” as though they were something he might instead have taken with him.

  I wonder who wrote these obituaries. Here are exerpts, exactly as they appeared:

  John William Hawkins ’61 died November 13 in New York City. He spent a few years at Banker’s Trust in New York before joining his wife’s family’s business, Paul E. Reynolds Inc., one of the oldest literary agencies in the country. He rose to president of the company in 1980 and changed its name to John Hawkins & Associates in 1985. During his 45 years as its head, the agency represented such leading authors as Joyce Carol Oates. In 1976, a particularly good year, he negotiated what is thought to be the publishing industry’s first million-dollar contract, for James Clavell’s The Noble House, and Alex Haley’s international best seller Roots, which he also represented, was published. He was a beloved and respected friend to his writers. He leaves a brother, Richard, ’63.

  William Edward Schumacher ’71 died October 12 in Boulder, Colo. A talented schoolboy athlete, he left the College after a year and headed west, living the life of a blacksmith, cowboy, and carpenter in Colorado and California. He also spent time in rural Mexican villages and learned Spanish. His love of working with his hands led to a career in construction. Later, he became a master craftsman, creating fine cabinetry. A voracious reader and lifelong learner, at age 60 he returned to Harvard and completed his A.B., in 2009, hoping to fulfill a lifelong ambition to be a high school history teacher, though illness intervened. He leaves a daughter, Nissa Morais, and a son, Jesse; another son, Will, predeceased him.

  And here’s the one for Chris:

  Christopher Yi-Wen Ma ’72cl died November 23 in New York City. He was senior vice president for development at The Washington Post and an innovative pioneer in the world of new media. A former correspondent at Newsweek and editor at U.S. News & World Report, he joined The Post Co. in 1997 as vice president and executive producer at the Post’s online subsidiary where he oversaw operation of the Post’s website. He was an inventive and visionary executive who embraced the technological changes that were upending the newspaper industry.

  This was Chris – we were in Robert Fitzgerald’s class together. Both of us had xeroxes of Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody, From the 12th Century to the Present Day. Sitting next to each other at a rectangular table – that’s it, that’s all I can remember, other than the kindness in his voice and the roundness of his face.

  One more obituary I found myself editing:

  Wendy His-Wen Chang ’12 committed suicide April 21 in Cambridge. A Lowell House resident from Irvine, Calif, she completed an English honors thesis on Edith Whֵarton. She used to be a talented artist pursuing a secondary concentration in visual and environmental studies, a designer for the Harvard Advocate literary journal, a costume designer for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a member of the Crimson staff and Crimson Key Society. She was known as a vibrant personality and an amazing cook, and she was wholly unknown. She leaves her parents, C.J. and Ingrid.

  *

  I hear Ben screaming at the television in his room. The Jayhawks are playing UNC. There’s a championship at stake. It’s a prize that a player will carry with him the length of his days, as confidently as carries a basketball, transferring the ball from one hand to another the length of the court. His victory will remain in the record books, as though there was a book, and on its thick spine embossed in gold the word Glory.

  *

  Why do I have so many different plants in my backyard? It would be enough to have only roses, and just those that climb, their vines thick enough to be trunks, rising and twisting on the black iron fence, and growing high enough to pass the imaginary line that separates a bush from a tree.

  *

  Tick tick. How many moments are left? No matter how few, I can always divide them in two, making more.

  *

  No matter what it is, there is a word for it.

  Analemma is a figure-eight pattern the sun makes, when an observer plots its position in the sky at the same time every day, as he stands in the same place for a year. Who was the first to do something like that? And to name the pattern?

  Bioluminescence – the natural phenomenon that lets glowworms glow and fireflies spark in the dark.

  Auralation might be the sound words make in your head, as the words in a sentence tumble through the phrases all the way to the cymbal of the period at the end.

  *

  I read this: “The great majority of people in the world drift through life, never realizing that their future will be the one they create for themselves. The minority who achieve great success are people who know what they want and have a plan for realizing their objectives. They know what they want and how they are going to get it. Your goals should be specific, they should be measurable, they should have a deadline for their achievement, and they should be divided into manageable pieces. Know exactly what you plan to achieve, when you plan to achieve it, and how. Review your progress regularly, correct your course when necessary, and never give up.”

  Okay, I suppose. Good enough. Though even reading those flat, deadly verbs can be chilling. Don’t ever drift; instead, you must know, divide, review, correct.
  There isn’t a giggle in any of these sentences. There isn’t even the beauty of a sigh or a hesitation.

  *

  Ben has allowed no one to guide him across the water. He made his decisions. So now he is lost in a darkness so thick he can touch it, as he sits in a room by himself, his own jailer. But that may only be my view. It’s also possible that Ben has solved the equation of rising and falling. I can hear his laughter behind a closed door.

  *

  This is the year of the dragon. I was born in the year of the metal rabbit. No wonder my approach to solving problems is usually mechanical.

  *

  2012

  March 20

  In the newspaper: “Tens of thousands of tearful Copts bade farewell to Pope Shenouda III in Cairo.” That is the exact sentence. This is my question: Is there anything else that can be “bade” other than a farewell? During the funeral of the patriarch in the cathedral of St. Mark’s, the long-bearded priests were dressed in black and chanted hymns. The pope’s body lay in an open coffin, in a white robe, “his head topped with the traditional golden crown.” Imagine the tears of the Copts had the crown not been the traditional one.

  *

  Reading from The New Yorker – It’s cherry blossom season. Japan Society will present a program called Kabuki dance, led by the dancer Bando Kotoji, “whose melancholy precision relays a sense of the ephemeral specially during this time of year.” Then the sentences become even weirder: “Eustache presents a world of tradition-bound youths who grow like weeds from a streetwise urban populism as artistically fertile as it is politically risky. After the evening performances, members of the audience will drink sake and malt liquor and write the plainest of poems.”

  *

  Plato proposed that all we can see in this world are shadows on the wall of a cave. These days, all I can see are shadows of the shadows. My eyes are open, but it doesn’t help. Even a red rose I’ve cut from the bush outside my bedroom this morning looks like an abstraction by evening, as it bends down from its stem. I had placed it in the funnel of a glass vase on my desk, a few inches from the brown of my hands, which are discolored by age, and practically under my nose, which can smell none of its fragrance.

  *

  Thinking about Dolores tonight. The child she had at 15 had only one child, Dolores’s grandson Michael. And Michael, with his drinking problems, never married. So, end of the line. Dolores will never be Sarah or Rebecca or Leah. Her descendants won’t be numerous as the sands or the stars. She wasn’t Eve, who was the mother of two, although one of them was a murderer. How proud could Eve have been, with Cain as her only living son? Although with no other mothers around to ask her how are the children doing, maybe it wasn’t so bad. She could keep the grief to herself, hiding it even from Adam.

  *

  Wally has fleas. Lucky for him that he can retract a foreleg to scratch his chest. My leg has no such use. It slides down the tube of my pants every morning and keeps me upright. I’m grateful for it though, and glad just to be alive and kicking.

  *

  The Pacific Ocean taught me: to dive headfirst under any wave, no matter how large, and to hold my breath long enough to burst into the air on the far side of the wave, away from the shore, and to spit out both the salt water and the fear.

  *

  I’m spending fewer evenings counting syllables or measuring beats. I’m writing fewer poems with any meter. I never did have anything in particular to say. And I had no one I was writing for. My writing has been a workout, it’s just for exercise, treading water, to see if I can stay afloat on a lake of words. There are no waves to dive under, no need to hold my breath. Most of the time I hardly get my hair wet, and I stay dry until beddy bye.

  *

  I like Debra’s eyes, I admire her waist. Her legs, though — are less tapered and shorter than I prefer. Also, her temper is much shorter. I could easily say: “Let’s break up, there’s no reason for us to continue. You have your children, your politics, your friends. You think your work is important. I’m not needed.” What then? What would either of us have to lose? I would lose the repetitive evenings out in the restaurants in her neighborhood, where she is comfortable and never pays. We wouldn’t take the trip together that she might go on with me, my treat, if she has time, once a year, and then reluctantly. She would have few regrets.

  *

  I’m leaving town in an hour. Ben will need to get up before noon today, so he can drive me to the airport. Will I be concerned about his availability when I’m one hour from leaving this world? (This world, as though there were any other.)

  *

  Saturday morning.
  After going through the garden with a pruning shears, I’ve filled seven vases with cuttings and blossoms. Flowers unnamed, sometimes unseen. Bamboo, rosemary, sticky spruce or juniper – I don’t which it is. The water plants from the pond –the lilies and pickerels. I can be both wide-eyed and blind, childlike and over sixty, in my own backyard of lollipop trees and the flowers with smiling yellow centers that all say have a nice day.

  *

  Eden called me. She talked for an hour and a half. Twenty minutes in, I was thinking to myself how long would it take her to finish, and what could bring her monologue to an end. Mostly I wondered how she ever got to be as crazy as she seems, this adult who was such an enchanting little girl of eight and nine and ten. She worked through her usual repertoire on the phone — badmouthing strangers, reciting her physical problems, complaining about sleeplessness, her need to see the doctor, the various bad decisions she was making that she insisted were the right thing to do– loaning her car to strangers, adopting cats and dogs, and praising those loners and losers who are this season of her life’s cast of characters.

  *

  First my drooping upper eyelids, then an infection in my gums, and now a bit of scaliness between the middle two fingers of my left hand. Despite recommendations from a dry eye specialist for drops and from the periodontist (titanium implant), so far I’ve committed only to a cream that treats eczema, available at the CVS at Inwood and Lovers. My old dog is farting while he sleeps on a worn rug. His skinny chest is rising and falling. He’ll be okay, though. I can leave him where he is. I drive to CVS. Even my car is ailing; it has a burned-out low beam on the driver’s side.

  *

  April 2012

  Afternoons, Saturday nights, and Sunday hours. These horizontal days there are things I look forward to, but nothing I look up to. I’m not from here, and when I go back home to California I’m not from there. Not homeless, but nowhere at home. Getting further and further away, but also getting toward. The years tighten up. I’m holding on but only to keep from slipping down.

  Working at writing, lifting rocks. But why? Don’t give it another thought. Mostly what I can give it is time.

  *

  August 2012

  Launched in 1977, Voyager carried a gold-plated disc with sounds and images of life on earth. It was reported in the news this week that Voyager has left our solar system, 35 years and eleven billion miles from Earth – the territory of our sun’s heliopause, according to the article, where solar winds subside and our sun’s influence gives way to interstellar space. If I write every night, each sentence is a kind of voyager, years and miles from any reader. Some take the point of view that the religious who pray every day are only talking to themselves. I suppose I am doing the same.

  *

  We all agree on the acceptable day of our death. It is always the day after tomorrow. This understanding, with its margin of security, makes today as secure as a velvet rope.

  A velvet rope that keeps us from entering the least exclusive of clubs.

  *

  The normal eye bathes itself in tears at a slow and steady rate. That’s how it stays comfortable, no matter what. In the same way, suffering is accepted and managed, and often though not always survived, slowly and steadily.

  *

  “The Eternal Father said to me, ‘I can see that this is a stiff-necked people.’” Deuteronomy 9:13
  I have a sore back this morning. My neck isn’t bothering me though, thank God.

  *

  August, 2012

  Curiosity landed on Mars this week. Didn’t watch, not interested.

  *

  Sanctifying time, which is infinite, is a way of worshipping God, who is Eternal.

  Time is a measure of the distance between here and there. What if it could be crossed over with a single step? This morning I put my left food down and with my right stepped to the end of time. My right knee bent, I lunched forward, like warrior pose in yoga class, my left arm reaching toward the sky, and I touched with the tip of my left forefinger the day after the last tomorrow.

  *

  Rabbi Akiva offered this insight: Of all the generations, only the generation of those who left Egypt for the desert had no share in the world to com. That querulous generation who marched into a Sea in their tens of thousands, who stood at Sinai and, later, had the tablets thrown at them and the golden calf, they knew God too well — so well, they were resented by Him.

  *

  Can I be happy about what hasn’t happened? A kind of positive in the negative? For example, the comfort I take from the deaths of others. I’m reading the obituaries on the back pages of my Harvard alumni magazine again. This magazine is mailed to all alums. It’s probably a way of keeping the connection with potential donors. It organizes deaths by class year, rather than alphabetically as the local newspaper does. So it’s easy to find my peers. And I can also experience the warning of reading about those younger than I am, the ones who completed their term papers, took their finals, but failed to remain alive.

  *

  Today I was putting my hands on the spindles of the rib cage that cradles my lungs, as I flattened the curve of my back against a wall. I used to do that when I was child – how old? It was thought that I had scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, and I could correct it, or at least improve it, with exercises. Scoliosis? We called it sway-back. Not to be confused with the graham cracker-like crust my mother would favor when she made a cheesecake. That was zwieback.

  *

  Half full, half empty. That’s the glass with me and Debra in it, as we’ve been for years. Most days it’s lukewarm, and that’s good enough. We are keeping it level.

  *

  I need to buy more fish for the pond in my far backyard. There must be a reason I am unable to find the ones I already put in the pond. I looked this morning. The water was black and there was algae, but these are goldfish, and they are as bright as flames. Looking for them is a little like looking for the reasons I no longer remember my eighth-grade teacher or the street names in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where I lived for three months when I was twenty-one. It’s like searching for the young woman who broke my heart thirty years ago, or the older one just last year. Things that should be found are lost. I can no longer find in my dark, watery memories the price of the head of lettuce and the red Roma tomatoes that I cut into pieces for dinner this evening.

  *

  This morning I have decided once again to live one day at a time, after having tried unsuccessfully to live two days at a time. Also, since I’m accustomed to carrying the past with me years at a time, I need to lighten the load. But even a single day has its weighty problems. In the morning I am already worrying about afternoon. The dark night of the soul is said to arrive at 3 a.m., though in my experience it comes at any hour – even at ten in the evening. What can be done about that? My emphasis needs to be more on the living rather than on the number, or so I’m resolving. I can try. The run of my years is a single long day, which officially begins just as today did, with opening my eyes.

  *

  Staying home in Dallas. A truck passes, the dog barks. What actually happens is that the dog barks, and then I look up to see the truck. So much of experience happens that way: things are there already, but only noticed later. Maybe everything is like that, already there, and then noticed after a while, if at all. What is not like that? Life, death, the shape of the leaf on a Japanese maple, the green on the grass. Happiness is here all along unnoticed, and all I need to see it is the right barking dog.

  *

  I visited the Transcendental Meditation business here in Dallas. It’s in the same strip shopping center as India Palace, one of my favorite restaurants. Also, a Chili’s. The TM facilities are upstairs though. It amazes me that this business from the late 1960s has made it, all these years later (as has Scientology). On the walls inside, the testimonials to the impact of meditation are provided by David Lynch. It might do me good to have a heart meditation, hands in prayer, breathing in and out. To be at peace.

  What is the point of being “at peace”? Maybe it’s so when there’s only a minute left, all the time I have will be all the time I need.

  *

  November 2012

  Thanksgiving weekend:
  Watched The Long Goodbye on Netflix over this long weekend. Arnold Schwarzenneger makes an early, uncredited appearance. The stars are Nina Von Pallant and Elliott Gould, though not in that order. Sterling Hayden, too.
  I heard Andrew Watts perform a Grieg piano concerto with the Dallas Symphony.
  I saw The Impressionists, from the Clark Collection, at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, and envied Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, who married a French actress and bought thirty Renoirs.
  A weekend of seeing and hearing.

  Onions and Venice, the Doge’s Palace, the Renoirs – thirty of them. This was Sterling Clark’s collection, his getting and spending. The hour Debra and I spent walking through the museum passed quickly, like the hour at the Thanksgiving table after days of shopping and cooking, unlike the long day of cleaning up, which I am postponing until tomorrow.

  *

  Will Eno, Title and Deed:
  I try to live every day like it was my third-to-last.

  Wally barks when the pool man is working in the yard. He doesn’t seem able to restrain himself. What could he be saying? It’s a sentence he forms of a single word and repeats over and over. Ruff doesn’t really transliterate it. Maybe Wally is living this day as if it were his third-to-last, and his barking is inexhaustible because he knows there’s always tomorrow, a buffer day, when nothing truly bad can happen to him, as he lies near the pool, which is clear again, his tail twitching, his ears pricked up, his one eye on the single floating leaf.

  *

  I’m not from here. I’ve spent years at the head of the wrong line. I’m doing nothing that matters to me, but who else is going to do it?

  I should be able to sort this out.

  *

  I filled a bowl on my kitchen counter with matchbooks. What do all these matchbooks have to say for themselves? Mostly they use their smoky voices to repeat the names of restaurants. Some of them are slurring when they ask for enough light to see a bar glass; those are the ones that also reek of ash. And what can I say to them? I’ve been willing to live matchstick by matchstick, using them, striking them, and satisfied by their flame for as long as it lasts.

  *

  There are no calendars in the house. I think it’s the 14th today, but it may not be. I have trouble numbering the days. I know January has the first, and there’s the fourth in July, and Christmas comes reliably on the twenty-fifth. I’ve always been confused about my father’s birthday – was it the twentieth or twenty-first? In his final months, my father no longer remembered either. He asked me how’s my brother. I never had a brother. I think he must have meant Lester, his own brother. The two of them took had taken offense when they were old men and had not spoken to each other in years. Lester, the kid brother, the one his mother loved best, was a trumpeter who played with big bands in their heyday but mostly earned his living as a music teacher in public school. I have no idea what day of the month Lester’s birthday was, or what month. I only remember the most memorable dates. Who would ever forget February 14? No wise husband, though I’m no longer married. Pam is over in her house now, and I’m in mine. I still remember her birthday, though, because it’s either the same day as my father’s, or it’s the one that his isn’t.

  *

  By and large, my books keep their own company. The Essential Talmud has no comment on the Inner Game of Tennis. Stacked on its side, Emotional Freedom is comfortable enough under the weight of an Edith Wharton novel. The travel books in their lightweight jackets are squeezed into rows. I admire my oldest books: a Treasury of the Familiar, an Inside USA by the once-popular John Gunter, the green spines of The History of Psychology, which have the family resemblance of volumes one through six. Passengers on the unmoving train of my shelves, my books keep to themselves, heads down, unaware of any Gardens by Design in the Forbidden City. And if there’s a Conspiracy of Fools in The World of Our Fathers, or The Optimistic Child ever visited bitter Philip Larkin in The House of Mirth, nobody’s talking about it.

  *

  Visiting Mom in Oceanside. She is worrying over the crumbs I might have left out on her kitchen counter. In her nineties, her thoughts are troubled by ants. When she’s gone, thoughts about her will likely trouble me, multiplying at night on the counters. She will be beyond worrying over crumbs, or over any of the other inhabitants that are likely to be in her forever home under the grass at Eternal Hills.

  *

  A dusting of snow is unexpected at the end of the year. So is Ben, who moved back in with me some years ago. He’s as quiet as the snow and even more beautiful. He has lots of time but little energy. Like a dog beloved, he sleeps half a day, an old dog, too deaf when the front door opens to greet me or to open his cloudy eyes.

  *

  Noetic is one of those words I have to look up repeatedly, as if it were immune to the power of memory. Of course my memory is like the battery that has been on too long; t’s running out of juice, and there’s no charger for it.

  Christmas Day, 2012. It’s snowing.

  Debra and I met at Christmas time in 2006. So we’ve been together six years, the last three not as much together.

  If I think this is as good as it will get, is this good enough to keep going?

  *

  Often I will simply copy a paragraph, for the pleasure of it. Sometimes making small edits, sometimes not.
  Here are words from I don’t know where:
  The scent of oudh, the prized dark resin called agarwood and aloeswood written of in the Vedas, which are the oldest of texts. It has the luxury of damask and cardamon, and of frankincense, a prized tree sap, powdered with attar and the ground petals of roses from the mountains. It carries the odor of flowery suede, the bright and buttery scent of sandalwood, and of amber and lavender, saffron and musk, mixed by Omani women. It offers a spell of the faraway, and it fills the afternoon with a distilled oil, burned, intoxicating, ruinous.

  *

  The end is filled with a silence that has been there all along under the noise.

  *

  Guernsey is a cul de sac that opens at the top of the street to Northwest Highway, which becomes 114 to the west, after the strip clubs, liquor stores, taquerias and payday lenders. I’m driving to Debra’s house, which is on Tuscan Ridge in Southlake.

  The hundred thousand dollars I’ve given Debra this year is yesterday’s news. She is unimpressed. She is more interested in letting me know how her day went and expressing the opinion that I should be on anti-depressants.

  I’m her porter, always carrying.

  What to do is a puzzle, but an easier one than knowing what to want.

  All the straight edges of my jigsaw life are already in place. Still, it’s hard to fit the interior pieces together. There are tabs, also called knobs, blanks, outies, and males. And there are blanks, also called pockets slots, innies and female. Irregular shapes, difficult patterns, and no picture on the box to show me what my finished life is should look like.

  Let me end the year with some quotes:

  Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
  Doris Lessing

  In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.
  Allen Ginsberg

  *

  Spring 2013

  Sometimes when I read, I copy it down – quotes and phrases, and sometimes I copy them here. As if this were a commonplace book:

  What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never been seen again.
  Jack Kerouac

  Nothing is more important than an unread library.

  Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?
  Tell me, what is it you plan to do
  With your one wild and precious life?

  This last from Mary Oliver.

  I would not describe my life as particularly wild. As for precious, maybe, though only to me. No, not only; precious to Ben as well. His abandonment will be complete when I go.

  *

  A turning point is when you turn around, that’s the point of the expression. The point doesn’t turn, you do.

  *

  Why write about the small and personal? Why not be vatic? Go big, as they say, or go home. Voyages to Byzantium, not trips to the grocery store.

  *

  At the Burning Bush, God tells Moses, I am the Eternal. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I told them be fruitful and multiply, a host of peoples shall come from you, and kings shall go forth from your loins.
  He was referring to me. I am among the host of peoples.

  *

  Other sayings; copied down, for the most part:

  To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.

  Live every day as though it will be our last. Live every day as though we will be on this earth forever.

  What amazes the angels is this uncanny ability of a human being: to stick his head in the clouds and yet keep both feet on the ground.

  And this one, too, which is as cold as space:

  There is a place so high that all things are equally nothing there. No good, no evil, nothing can be added or taken away, the righteous are dust, the wicked are dust.

  *

  From the Harvard alumni magazine, one of the back pages that reports on various class years and what individuals in that class are doing:

  1989

  Susan (Schwartz) Levin is the author of Unlocked (Skyhorse Publishing), a memoir of her life with her autistic son, Ben.

  *

  Winter 2013

  To begin again. Simple as that. Up as always until 2 in the morning. Writing three, four lines of promises, then to sleep.

  *

  Whenever I go walking to the creek behind my house, I see how the grass is struggling. Some of it is dying in patches under the live oaks from too much shade. In other places the grass is burned from too much sun. That’s how it is with St. Augustine. It’s never satisfied, unlike the Asian jasmine, which is willing to creep along the soil, though its leaves are broader and darker than any blade of grass. Despite the runners, St. Augustine can never escape the weather. I’ve read that it enjoys the Caribbean and Mediterranean climates. But then who doesn’t? St. Augustine grass is also susceptible to an incurable virus that has the cleverly-named acronym SAD, for St. Augustine’s Decline. There’s nothing saintly about St. Augustine grass, though when it’s thick as a carpet it will crowd out other grasses, beating the Bermuda, zooming over the Zoysia, and it also does well near swamps and lagoons, fresh water marshes, limestone shorelines, steam banks and lakeshores. It should do well on the Mediterranean shore of North Africa, not far from Hippo, where its namesake Saint Augustine was Bishop and Restorer of the Faith, after his conversion. That was in 387. He was said to have been born on November 13, which is my birthday as well; his in 354, mine in 1951. Other than that, St. Augustine and I have nothing in common. He was a doctor of the church. And as the Roman Empire disintegrated, his were the thoughts that spread like grass near a swamp.

  *

  After I met Mr. Tambourine Man, I found him difficult to follow, though jingle jangle was the perfect description for this morning. I had never known anyone before whose first name was a musical instrument, although there have been girls named Viola in the pages of literature. Truth be told, it has taken me years to stop my bootheels from wandering. I prefer being stationery beneath the diamond sky, where I can stay in place, or beneath any sky, even the one with a few clouds, like today, when it was drizzling, and the dog was nosing against the fences framing my yard, and the grass was yellowed by winter. Hey, I sang out to the dog, hey Wally, trying to get his attention, but Wally is old, he has cataracts, doesn’t hear well, and he ignored my song.

  *

  I’m not interested in immortality. I say I’m not, though everybody seems to be, to judge from the remarks of the priest at a funeral I attended yesterday. I came home to my modern house, to the one upstairs room with its glass walls, where I could see the empty branches of the trees at eye level. The red oaks still have some of their leaves, though they are the burned, bitter color of a leaf hanging on, clinging not to its life, since that is already over. The sky had that look of another century. It was a sky painted by European painters and preserved in heavy, gilded frames, the kind of sky that has a turmoil of clouds and end-of-day pinks. It was a husband who had died, two days before Christmas. He was someone ahead of me in line, as I sat in the pew and then at home, waiting my turn.

  *

  Who will ever read any of this, written at the end of the year? Eden, my daughter, my reader? Ben, son of my right hand, who shows no interest? Debra, who may marry me, unless it so happens that she buys a winning lottery ticket first? My mother, an improbable 92? My mother has never opened a computer or used Microsoft Word. That leaves you, Wally, my only dog, faithful as Achates, looking up at me from the rug, your tail showing its sense of rhythm as I say your name. After your name and good boy, now that I have your attention, I need to teach you to read. Let’s begin with the alphabet, phonetics can come later.

  *

  That “perfect family” Debra and I had dinner with tonight, their ordinary happiness out of reach for us, with our disrupted lives –
  I had to wonder what I was doing there at all – the mother whose birthday it was, the three young sons with their attractive wives or, in the case of the youngest, a girlfriend; the two “cute as buttons” grandchildren, and the patient paterfamilias who picked up the check for the table. He’s Fred, a slender German. The woman is Marianne, fat and Italian. She was Debra’s neighbor when Debra lived in Fairview. Debra was her best friend then. And now I’m here, Debra’s aging boyfriend, with a seat at the table.

  *

  Wally’s heart beats fifty percent faster than mine. He’s willing to please, or I think he is, though he often seems confused how that might be accomplished. He cocks his head toward me, wondering what I want with my many repetitions of directions. Anything I say seems to encourage him to wag his tail even faster, which may wear him out. He may be using up those rapid heartbeats, of which he has, like all of us, only an allotment.

  *

  Not much to say, but always talking. Seeing this and that, but never observing. Listening to the notes that the wide world plays.

  If I could hear the voice of God in the breezes, that would be divine. If I could hear the voice of God in running water, it would be a revelation. Probably terrifying too, and crazy-making. Probably better just to hear the wind and the water.

  *

  Rosemary in my garden. It has a forest scent, woody and spikey. A serrated odor, as if there were a smell to an infinity of small peaks.

  2014

  We rode an elevator up Reunion Tower to the observation deck on New Year’s Day. We did it for no reason, or because we had nothing else to do, or in order to celebrate the cycle of the year with a full circle view of landmarks in a landscape. From an observation deck, everything was below and beyond. The city was a miniature. We were above it. We can smile at it – at the noodle of the interstate and the rectangles of offices, and at the tiny ship of human construction contained in the bottle of earth and sky.

  *

  The wind is up today. It arrived from where it comes from. The science of it can be understood as a commotion of molecules, air under higher pressure rushing into lower pressure. Then there’s the song that asks does anybody know where the wind comes from, before it starts to blow on a Saturday night. On a Saturday night, I might need someone to tell me where to hang my hat, or to simply hold onto it.

  *

  I am marching in a parade of numbers that are as numberless as the sands, as the stars, as the fruit of the seed promised to Abram, if he would go forth from the land of his fathers to the place that God would show him.

  I am tallying dollars and wondering what it all adds up to. I am counting down the hours left in the weekend, the days after the turn of the year, the years since this or that, and the decades before I disappear into the long count of centuries.

  Leave your homeland and go to the land that I will show you. Abraham went without knowing the destination. Debra, on the other hand, won’t go out to dinner unless I tell her the name of the restaurant before we leave.

  *

  Pam gave me this quote from Oscar Wilde – that doing nothing is the most difficult thing of all. She wrote it as the caption of a photo she took of me on Monhegan Island. I was doing nothing, then. Tonight I’ve done next to nothing. I’ve relit my pipe over and over, made another trip to the refrigerator, changed channels, put the lighter down, and come to the end of an evening. There’s a line I’ve always remembered from Penelope Gilliatt, “You think it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing.” I like its grammar, just as I did the billboards that advertised the Hitchcock movie The Birds, when I saw them above the streets in Los Angeles: The Birds is coming. Same with the title of Rabbi Soloff’s book for young adults, which we used as a text at Temple Israel of Westchester: When The Jewish People Was Young.

  *

  Morning light. If I respect its silence, it will reveal the familiars: a clock from Tiffany & Co., a deck of playing cards, the letter opener Pam gave me, which I use to clean the blackened bowl of my pipe, a vase of rosemary sprigs, a Master lock (combination unknown). Also, the torn back of the spine of a book, its dark blue skin with serif letters in gold, William Blake’s Prophetic Writings, edited by D.J. Sloss and J.P.R Wallis, Vol. 1. Oxford. I don’t know how I acquired it, but it has its place on my desk. A college memento, probably from Widener, or one of the other Harvard libraries. I have my place on earth’s tabletop, too. I am a memento of this moment, along with the trio of jays and the branches they light upon, and the bright orange of yaupon berries, and the windchimes, the metal rods producing a harvest of sounds that are weightless and beautiful and leave no trace. All of it is so fleeting.

  *

  After going to an exhibit of Turner paintings.
  Reflections?

  My life at sixty-two, as a kind of shipwreck:

  If I have a straight timber to hold onto, then I will have a chance to look back from afar and to catch the last glimpse of the ship as it sinks and disappears from view. Now I am simple, afloat on the ocean, bobbing with the rise and fall of the water, but fearful of what will happen when darkness comes and there’s no moon. How will I hold on when I need to sleep? I do have time to puzzle over what happened to me. I am ruling out icebergs as the cause, since this is the tropics. I can weigh which has the greater likelihood as an explanation, mechanical failure or human error, though there’s no chance of knowing the answer. In the end, I can let go. No more grieving for what went wrong. It’s task enough to keep treading, alternatively to float on my back, a chestful of air my only floatation device, my eyes fixed on the night sky, my breath the only breeze.

  *

  This could be the hundredth time I’ve wondered what I’m doing with my life. Or it could be ten times that number of times. Not wonder in the sense of awe, as I might be astonished by the wonders of the ancient world, and there are only seven of those. No, it’s more like the sleeper suddenly awake to find that he’s still behind the wheel, in an automobile that has already left the road. Jarred in a bumpy ditch, and startled by the rapid approach of what might be a concrete wall…

  *

  What is there to want out of a day as beautiful as this one, with its painterly sky and all the vanity of downtown, the concert hall with the donor names in brass, the art museum that is grander than anything inside it, the urban park, its bandage of green grass freckled with empty benches? No one but my dog is missing me, and even that is uncertain. I’m glad to be out of my room, gone from the chair where I spend so much time, and away for an hour from the unblinking eye of the bulb in my desk lamp.

  *

  Two by two.
  1776.
  Turning thirty.
  Numbers are a description of the world, as much as colors are. Numbers speak for themselves. But I can give them a colorful voice and stack them against one another. Four will die from shark attacks this year. Red. Half a million will die from water-related diseases. Blue.

  *

  I’ve come to the end of being the boy with his hand up in class, seated in front, the one who knows the answers and wants to be called on, the one with the “good head on your shoulders,” and the “bright future.” At sixty-two, I don’t want to be called on. I have the years to answer for. And I have the same future as the one shared by my fidgety, failing classmates. I’m sitting with them now. Our knees are trapped under the small wooden desks. We are happy or miserable in the back rows, doodling on sheets of paper. Some of us, having stayed up too late and failed to do any homework, are laying our towheads down on our arms.

  *

  February 2014 –

  Bottles of wine, vineyards on hillsides. The birds in the sky, some singular, most of them flying in crowds. Sports jackets, blouses and stockings, lots of blue jeans and designer denim. It’s Saturday afternoon in Napa. Debra and I are here for Valentine’s Day. The line at the bakery next to Bouchon in Yountville is too long for us to wait for a heart-shaped cookie. All this stylish popularity would have surprised George Yount, had he been here to see it. But he’s been dead for the past hundred years. The baked goods from his time have gone stale, along with the sentiments of women in bonnets who loved calico, which is a plain-woven, unbleached cotton, less coarse than denim, but still very cheap.

  *

  Eden has a bitterness that I cannot understand, though I am trying to respect it. She’s unable to forgive whatever crimes she is accusing me of, which are entirely imaginary, or at best overstated. I would have been a better father if I could have been. But children have their own way of posing the problem and also proposing, or even providing, their solutions. My mother once informed me that the resolution to my troubles with Eden was to live long enough for them to resolve on their own. I don’t think that day will ever come.

  *

  I could have stopped this morning for the dog lying on the side of the road. It was no longer there by the time I returned home in the evening. No telling in the dark whether some citizen came to fetch it, or a city service had picked up the brown body and removed it for disposal, the gifted athlete no longer swift, no more wagging, no straining on a taut leash, but off of it for good, nothing more to smell.

  *

  A heart is pear-shaped, the size of a fist, made up of muscle and covered by a pouch. That pouch must be where the fondness is, and the worry produced by absence. Longing’s in there, too, and resentment, in this membranous, thin, pliable, and transparent pouch.

  *

  It’s unhealthy to stay days away from everyone, in my glass box of an upper story room, banging away at an electronic keyboard that fakes its cries.

  *

  I saw a man wearing a hat today. Not a gimme cap, or a baseball cap, but a real hat, with a brim – and not a cowboy hat, either. You don’t see fedoras or pork pie hats today. No surprise then that “hats off” is one of those phrases nobody says anymore, unlike in the days when every man wore a hat. Then it was something you said to express admiration, because, golly, it took guts for her to take the train by herself, so hats off to her.

  *

  Early afternoon. I’m on an exercise break from the office. I do this take five days a week and have for twenty years. I get on a treadmill at the Verandah Club, which is behind the Hilton Anatole, and read the Dallas Morning News, which by mid afternoon is already old news. Five fish were hauled up from the depths off the coast of New Zealand yesterday. They were translucent, with so little pigment in part because there’s so little light four point three miles down where they live. This made its way into print in the morning news of my landlocked city, to be read during my workout on the treadmill at the Hilton Anatole nineteen point five minutes in.

  *

  Azariah was mentioned twice today in an article I received via email. Azariah, high priest during Josiah’s reign 640 years before the Common Era. He was written of in 1 Chronicles 5:39. His grandchild was carried into the Babylonian captivity. His name was recently found by an archeologist in the City of David, inscribed in the clay of a bulla, which is a seal and also a word you don’t hear every day, or even twice in a lifetime, unless you’re in a medical field, where bulla is a blister. Dating as far ago as the 10th century BCE, the City of David is the oldest sector of Jerusalem. It’s outside the old city’s walls, which were built by Suleiman the Magnificent twenty-five hundred years later.

  *

  March 2014.
  My new neighbors are meeting with a painter this Saturday morning. His white panel van is parked across the street, not far from their SUV. It’s that time of March, closer to April than to February, when the last leaves, the crisp, stubborn ones, are still falling. The first pollen is also floating down, yellow green, like a snowfall. My new neighbors have not moved in yet, but they have their plans, even though a For Sale sign is still in the front yard. Maybe they will paint the interior as white as a museum wall. All the beige rooms so familiar to Mrs. Linehan, who died, will be white. The rooms familiar to her children, who are themselves in their sixties, will be white. It’s the adult children who sold. The accumulated dust will be gone, the debris removed, the windows undraped. There will be trucks in the driveway, and the noise of power tools, and Styrofoam cups and paper sacks from the crew’s fast-food lunches blowing into my yard. I should walk over and meet the new neighbors. I should bring a bottle of Chardonnay, or a gallon plant for a new garden. They would show a polite, neighborly interest in my hello, which also needs remodeling.

  *

  The bitter waters were made sweet, and the bread of angels fell to the earth in those days, when people who had marched together into the sea broke into a song, and they miraculously knew all the words and stayed on key, though it was a song not one of them had ever heard before.

  *

  Nobody knows what the next word will be, when there’s nothing on your mind and no rhyme or rhythm to fence in the roaming on your tongue.

  “Rhythm” is an interesting word. It has none of the usual vowels, odd letters, means “repeated pattern,” and looks the same at first but doesn’t sound the same as a word that means “same sound.” It takes a step, then turns around a corner.

  *

  What is there to say that hasn’t been said, or to do that hasn’t been done. I can travel a hopeful path repeatedly, saying the same words of gratitude – prayers – over and over, and grateful to have those words.

  *

  Thirty years ago when I went somewhere by myself, (for example, to an art museum), I would look at the couples, the pairs holding hands, especially the unhandsome ones, and I would wonder what shyness or strangeness kept me alone. Not now. After two wives and other lovers, painful losses, and half a step from old age, I can be in front of a canvas with no one by my side, and I am satisfied enough to be outside the frame.

  *

  The Eternal One spoke to Moses, saying, speak to the whole community, tell them to be holy, because I, the Eternal your God, am holy. But why? Why should humans be holy because God is holy? Aren’t we more like the goat carrying our sins into the wilderness than we are like God? But we are told to stand at the shore of the sea and be holy, attend to the dying and be holy, see the goodness of life and be holy. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, our God almighty, the breadth and the depth of the earth is filled with a holiness that flows from God. Should it then flow from me as well?

  *

  March 2014

  The Spanish village of Castrillo Matajudios, whose second name means “Kill Jews,” will hold a referendum in April to decide if it should change the name of the village, which offends outsiders and embarrasses residents. The issue will be decided by the village’s fifty-six registered voters, who will be asked whether they want to keep the name or change it to a name the town once had, Castrillo Motajudios, which means “Jews Hill.” It’s the difference between Ah and Oh. The polling place will be inside the church. Cookies will be served, stamped from the dough of suffering with a cross-shaped cookie knife.

  *

  I’m waiting through the twilight in a chair at the edge of the creek. I should be tired enough to do nothing, after a day of work, but it’s difficult, being still. I watch the transit of herons and listen to the squirrels chattering. I don’t usually see or hear much beyond my personal troubles. This end of day I’m trying. A duck flies through the creek bed; it’s riding on the last light of the day. There’s a kinship at this hour between things that were strangers an hour before. There are different twilights, and shades of shadows, but all intervals of time are illuminations. Just before nightfall, my thoughts are as sharp as a blade of grass.

  *

  Ice in the glass and a liquid over it. Macallan 18, with its bite. My thoughts are as good as nine out of ten whose names have become names. But no one has seen a line I have written; I’ve turned row after row, but it’s all seed and no crop.

  *

  The smell of coastal California is eucalyptus and oleander, ice plants and warm dirt, air and salt. The sound of it is agapantha, stalky, and with a purple flower. The sea and sky reflect like a mirror, with the honesty of surfaces that never change, however much I’ve changed. I came from here. Could I ever come back here? On the coast, with the wide ocean in front of me, the future is more plausible than the past.

  *

  I’m not a ghost, but invisible, and not invisible, but unnoticed.

  I’m a sight unseen and will be less than a shadow in a few years, not even a memory.

  I saw the soft light of yesterday’s white moon in the night sky. It was beautiful, reflecting, and calling me to sleep.

  The present slips. Past, present – all of it is mysterious. Inside me, a flow of beating blood. Life is in me as if I were a shell, both a container and contained.

  *

  Turning 50, Tolstoy wrote A Confession. That was in 1879, after War and Peace, Anna Karenina, fame, and wealth. He asked what was the meaning of his life, and wondered why live rather than die. It seemed to him that there was reason and there was faith, but he couldn’t embrace them both. Reason was a denial of feeling, faith a denial of reason. But maybe reason is not so rational as Tolstoy supposed, and faith not so irrational. Faith is neither revelation nor the consent of the child to the parent, but the longing for meaning, and a longing that is meaningful. Faith is the strength to turn waiting for something into looking for something. It’s seeing the papery skin of the finite and feeling beneath it for the bones of the infinite. It’s seeing Ben, Eden, Debra, Patti, my neighbor across the street — but not as I used to see them, but like the redbird seen this Spring morning out of the corner of my eye, startling and beautiful.

  *

  When you reach the page in your own story where you discover that your life is ordinary, you are probably less than a thousand words away from understanding that there’s nothing you can do about it. And from there it may only take another paragraph to no longer want to. You will be no hero, there will be no new characters. The rest of the story is less about the plot than it is about the punctuation. You might even be bored enough to skip ahead to the end, turning to the last page, and beyond, facing the white end paper on the inside of the back cover, that clean, uninscribed rectangle.

  *

  This scrap pile of words that seems to have no shape has in fact taken decades of work, evenings wrestling with angelic verbs, afternoons turning speech into song, and sometimes even early in the morning, as I’ve listened in the silence for something that wanted to be spoken. I’ve thrown sentences down like tablets, breaking them in disgust. And syllables like stones, laying them in a path ahead of me for the sake of adventure, through a humming jungle or a desert, over the flatlands, or toward the mountains on a horizon so far away that they were never my real destination.

  *

  June 2014

  If today the 27th of June were my birthday, then the months ahead will be eventful, according to my horoscope. I should take a deep breath and get ready for the fun and games. I need to believe in myself and my dreams, because the world needs my compassion and courage. And since today is not my birthday, the new moon is falling into one of the more expansive areas of my chart, and my thoughts can still be remarkably positive. That’s good. What I think about now will be my reality later, so I am focused on my highest ideals– also, truth be told, on my mortality. Circling the zodiac and naming the signs, I have to wonder what the future will be like after I die. The same, I forecast, as it was before I was born.

  *

  At the introduction to meditation held the last Sunday of the month at the Shambhala Center on Midway Road, we were told to focus on our breath, though it is harder to ignore the ache in the center of my lower back, or the tilt of the blue pillow I am sitting on — the pillow on a mat, the mat on a polished hardwood floor—or even the unbuttoned last button and wedge of belly beneath the rose red shirt worn by the man on the dais, which could be called a podium, or a stage, though my eyes are tilted down per instruction, in a soft focus, disengaged I suppose, if supposing were not part of the problem, and if the rose red shirt were not as noisy as my breathing.

  *

  My father looked into the benefits of meditation after he lost a job as a sales rep in his late fifties. He had been replaced by the boss’s son, a younger man. My father dyed his hair, so the black that was turning grey became an odd reddish brown. It looked unnatural to me, in part because I knew him. And he tried transcendental meditation, which also surprised me. Whether it worked for him or not, I don’t know. Whether it helped, which is a step or two below “working” – probably it did. I’ve gone myself once or twice to the Shambhala center, which is north off Inwood Road, passing by Jesuit Prep on the way. In Buddhist and Hindu traditions, Shambhala is a hidden kingdom. Some texts mention the village Shambhala as the birthplace of the final incarnation of Vishnu, who will usher in a new Golden Age. Over time, Shambhala came to be seen as a pure land, with a reality that is spiritual as much as geographic.
  Musical, as well, in the title of the song by Three Dog Night.
  It’s where you wash away troubles and wash away your pain, with the rain of Shambala. What you don’t do is insert a second h after the b in the title of the song.

  *

  Better a possible good than a certain evil. This sentiment was attributed to Socrates. He is alleged to have said it before he took hemlock, as a comment on the current conditions in the society around him, which he knew were not good, to the afterlife, which he had certain knowledge of. When I look up hemlock, I learn that it has a smooth green stem and is hollow and spotted in places. It can grow as tall as eight feet. Its triangular leaves are divided and lacy, its flowers small, white and clustered. If you crush the leaves, there’s an odor, and the smell is rank. The same smell, and so a similar name, clings to the needles of the hemlock spruce, which is an evergreen found in Pennsylvania, where it’s the state tree, and all along the East Coast, and in some Midwestern States and in Canada as well. This spruce isn’t poisonous however. It has short, fat needles and bears seeds through the cones at the very tips of its branches, which dip under the weight. The moral here: some things simply smell bad, without being dangerous at all.

  Why remember Socrates and his justification for ending his life? When I was a senior in high school, I was in “advanced placement” at UCLA, and I took a philosophy course. Linda Foley was one of my classmates at Westchester High, and she rode with us – the smart kids, on our way to Westwood and, so we thought, to greater things in the future. I remember the excitement of my philosophy texts – the hints of a world I wanted to be part of. But Linda Foley committed suicide not long after high school.

  So I heard, and I have no reason not to believe it.

  Memory is imperfect. When I recall something that happened, what I remember is never the same as what happened. And the memory itself isn’t the same the next time I recall it. So with every recollection, the past seems to change.

  Not so the present or the future for Linda, however. Once dead, dead forever.

  *

  Something I am reading:

  When God identifies himself to the Hebrews at Sinai, in Exodus 20:2, he says, “I am the Lord your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt.” He doesn’t declare himself to be the one who created the heavens and the earth, or the one who fashioned Adam from the dust and Eve from the rib of Adam. Why? In order to be believed without any doubt. After all, the tribes in the desert never witnessed the creation of the world or the extraction of woman from man. But they themselves had experienced the exodus. They knew its fear and joy. They had seen the sea parted, and they had seen the same water swallowing the pursuing army of Pharaoh. They knew God existed. They had felt his miracles. They believed. They had known God in their own day, and in their hour of need.

  Some of them, though, might have offered alternative explanations for everything that had happened to them. In an era of disbelief like ours, it is easier to not believe, or to explain away even the miraculous.

  *

  Planning a trip this year to Peru with Debra. We’ll fly through Houston to Lima, then on to Cuzco, staying in Belmond properties in the Sacred Valley. A hike in Machu Picchu, nights in Cuzco, an overnight trip into the Amazon to birdwatch, a train trip to Lake Titicaca, and then back through Lima and home.

  Today, though, aside from a trip to the bookstore to pick up a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa and a guidebook for Machu Picchu, including Cuzco and the Inca Trail, and then a stop at the grocery store in the same shopping center (for four lamp chops, scallions, heavy cream, a carton of broth, and two russet potatoes), I am staying indoors. It’s a hot July Sunday. I did have time to watch some of the Wimbledon finals; handsome Roger Federer was defeated in five sets by the Serb, Novak Djokavic. I got onto bridgedoctor.com, for lessons seven through twelve. And for an hour or two in the afternoon, I lounged in the chaise by the swimming pool, reading the first chapter of Death in the Andes, and then Chapter 5, The Road to Cuzco, in Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas, which is both tedious and fascinating in its account of the ruthlessness of the Spaniards. An hour of turning pages, interrupted by dives into the cold water and a swim from the deep end to the shallow.

  Is it misspeaking to ask how many days do I have on earth? The question almost suggests that there might be days other places, though I believe no such thing. There may be eternity, but not days.

  Today I have done next to nothing, and that small space next to nothing turned out to be too narrow to make room for Wolfgang Puck’s Modern French Cooking, which I had left open on the kitchen counter, after reading the recipe for Lamp Chops with Cream of Shallots and one for Pommes Lyonnaise.

  *

  Summer 2014

  The trip we are planning to Peru comes after we attend Jonathan and Kelly’s wedding in Colorado Springs, which takes place the week before the party Debra is determined to have for her birthday. Between the birthday and Peru, there are the usual markings on the calendar, Labor Day, Halloween. The other days are uncelebrated. They can be remembered, if at all, as Mondays, Tuesdays and by other distinctions without a difference. It’s not fair. These unmarked days don’t deserve that disrespect.

  I’ve been a subscriber to Poem A Day for months now. I receive via email a poem seven days a week. What I have learned: There are hundreds of poets writing thousands of poems a day, and probably also writing them at night, under a goosenecked lamp, after their children are put to bed, and after their husbands or wives have finished watching TV, assuming these spouses didn’t leave them a thousand poems ago, disrupting the poetry of their lives together with the arbitrary line break of divorce.

  *

  At Debra’s house, reading, and unhappy to be there. I’m unhappy generally. The two of us are a moment away from ending things, and an equal distance away from spending the rest of our lives unhappily together. She asked a question:
  “What was the one thing you did that made you feel most free?”
  I said, “I don’t know” and then, “Maybe when I went off to college.”
  I need to revise that response. I felt most free in the ocean below Playa del Rey, when I was bodysurfing, and a wave rose over my head, and I would dive under it, and then come up behind it, as the wave broke and fell apart, running until it was spent, a thin sheet of water wetting the sand.

  There’s the T.S. Eliot phrase, a fragment, “in the mountains, there you feel free.” At the ocean, there I felt free. Its power wasn’t my power, but I was able to borrow it.

  Freedom and danger and skill and restraint, in the ocean and the waves.

  *

  October 2014

  Le Bateau Ivre was the bar and bistro in Berkeley when I lived on Ward Street in the Fall of 1972. It was named after the Rimbaud poem, so it got me interested in Rimbaud. The next Spring, when I went to Paris, I took the train to Chantilly outside of the city in order to see the place Arthur Rimbaud was from. And I “borrowed” a paperback of his poems, which was on a bookshelf in the apartment I rented on Rue Cardinal Lemoine from Catherine Demongeot’s mother.

  Now, on October 20, 2014, I’ve reading about Rimbaud again. And also, in a coincidence of dates, about Richard Francis Burton. Both were adventurers as well as writers. Rimbaud was born on this day in 1854, and on this day in 1890 Richard Francis Burton died. They crossed paths in Harar, Ethiopia – this all seems in itself something that would make a fable, or provide a point of debarkation for an imaginative essay. Rimbaud arrived in Harar in 1884 as a merchant-trader looking for exports – or as a former poet looking for something no one has yet been able to understand. Burton arrived in Harar on Rimbaud’s birthday; he became one of the few Europeans to visit the forbidden Muslim city and come back alive. Here’s an excerpt from his account of the visit: “…I offered as a preliminary to visit Harar in disguise, thus traversing the lands of the dreaded Eesa clan, and entering a place hitherto closed to us by a rule with the worst of reputations. I could not suppress my curiosity about this mysterious city. It had been described to me as the headquarters of slavery in Eastern Africa, and its territory as a land flowing with milk and honey; the birthplace of the coffee-plant, and abounding in excellent cotton, tobacco, saffron, gums, and other valuable products. But when I spoke of visiting it, men stroked their beards, and in Oriental phrase declared that the human head once struck off does not regrow like the rose.”

  Rimbaud’s house in Harar is now a museum. He had lived in the rooms upstairs, with his shop below, and he watched the unloading caravans from his window.

  One might quote again Menachem Mendel of Kotze, on Rimbaud, or on any of us, that there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.

  *

  Saul Bellow, 1976, Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “After years of the most arduous mental labor I stand before you in the costume of a headwaiter.”

  Gustave Flaubert: “To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

  *

  Meditation practice seems to mostly involve listening to my breath. But if I listened only to my breathing until the end of time, I would never hear the sound of a bird, the cries from its throat, the fluttering of its wings. I would miss the squeal of tires on the street, or the barking dog. I might as well be deaf, and there I would have no captioning to spell out the continual dialogue between the world and me.

  Another point of view:
  If I could focus on my breathing as the guide in the buttoned shirt instructed at the start of meditation, I would hear the music of the spheres, the sounds of eternity, the hum of the way it will be after my death, the melody before I was born. But it was impossible. All I could do at the first lesson in an office suite at the Shambhala Center on Midway Road a block or two from Alpha Road was to see and then try not to see the open button on his shirt, the slab of belly, and the tufts of reddish hair.

  *

  I’m looking for the adventurous woman who wants to be in motion. She would care about neither children nor parents nor any fixed points, but only about the two of us, as we hiked the high Andes in November among the ghosts of the Inca, the orchids, the sudden rain, a parrot coming to its vegetable nest on the side of a rock. She would be a lover who cares even less about our future together than she does about our separate past. Rather, I’m not looking, but, at least today, I’m longing to be found.

  *

  I’ve had more than enough of my face. I’m tired of the bulb of my nose that I inherited from my father and the chipmunk cheeks that my mother contributed. And my hooded Mongolian eyes? They might be the legacy of violations seven centuries ago – hooves on the steppes, blood in the snow. All of it together is the crooked smile of the past. But I have to tolerate it, I had no say in the matter. The shadow of beard that must be shaved, the parade of my teeth that must be brushed. It’s my shell, this shabby hand-me-down, and the mirror tells me that it’s my own.

  *

  Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. Andre Gide.

  “Leave the door open, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself come from, and where you will go.” I read these sentences, then copied them. They had already been said, but it made sense to for me to repeat them. To say they must be said again, however, is probably not true.

  *

  It is not the words that ascend, but the burning desire of your heart. Baal Shem Tov

  The ancients thought that things in this world – the sun, the moon – had their own music. They knew long ago how a stretched string, plucked, would produce a musical note, the pitch of it in proportion to the length of string, and the intervals between pleasing sounds in ratios of simple numbers. Writing is a sitting exercise. Falling under the spell of numbers, stringing nine syllables together so they vibrate, I might create music of my own. What reading other writers tells me is that anything is possible, though not everyone will be published or should want to be.

  *

  “He is not more famous than Homer, just more familiar.”
  Kurt Tucholsky – 1890-1935 – a German Jewish writer and satirist in the Weimar Republic.
  His books were burned by the Nazis.

  Why have I written this down? More interesting to me, as I re-read it — why am I unwilling to discard it? As though there might be a moment years from now when I will want to be reminded of Tucholsky. This is the nub of all these pages – why write them – the answer to that is, for the writing practice. But why ever go back to them?
  I have no reason to be reminded of any of this.

  *

  In praise of humility, or modesty, or moderation:
  The more space you occupy, the less room you leave for joy.

  *

  The idea of giving a psychedelic drug to the dying was proposed by Aldous Huxley, with the thought that it would make dying a more spiritual and less physiological process.

  *

  If the hedonists would know the ecstasy of the divine light, they would abandon everything to chase after it.

  *

  “We have already said that the true Dadaists were against Dada.” Tristan Tarza, Memoirs of Dada

  *

  “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth, there is no happiness like mine…” Mark Strand

  *

  The tree doesn’t hold back its leaves but lets them flow open or glide away when the time is right. The water doesn’t make its own decision about freezing or not; that moment rests with the rule of temperatures.

  *

  Crypto-Jews lived in Mexico in the 17th century under the surveillance of the Inquisition. They developed subterfuges to avoid having their Jewish practices discovered. Crypto-Jews had active roles in the cacao trade, and the Inquisition used reports of fasting from chocolate on Yom Kippur as evidence of the secret practice of Judaism.

  *

  …Once out of nature I shall never take
  My bodily form from any natural thing,
  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
  Of hammered gold and gold enameling
  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
  Or set upon a golden bough to sing
  To lords and ladies of Byzantium
  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  Yeats

  *

  When I was living with my parents and sister in Westchester, the closest beach was called Toes. I never understood why, but that was its name. Our house on Belton Drive wasn’t far from the ocean. It was small and confining. But the endless dark water of the Pacific seemed to reach into the future I was hoping for.

  *

  “…an escape into one of the many conventions that are set up in great numbers like common shelters, along this most dangerous path.” Rainer Maria Rilke

  *

  January 2015

  In an entry from January 1882 under the heading Sanctus Januarius, Nietzsche writes:

  “Today everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favorite thought: well, I also want to tell what I wished for myself today and what thought first crossed my mind this new year, a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge, and the sweetening of all my future life….I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse. I do not want even to accuse the accusers….I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!”

  *

  What is the difference between this exercise of daily writing at 63 and the work I’ve done at night for forty years — writing poems, sometimes metered, mostly not? It’s that these paragraphs are only worked on for the half hour of their composition, while the poems were worked and reworked until I was ready to leave them alone. Neither the prose nor the poetry is a record of observation. I am too unobservant for that. Sometimes here I will copy wisdoms, or write variations of what I have read. I might write my own aphorisms, attempts at quotes that will never be quoted. Is there any audience for these paragraphs that lie somewhere between craft and typing, polishing and keyboarding? Not one I know of. My reader is the same one who listens to the songs I sing to myself when I mumble along with the radio in my car. If I think as a Chassid might, that God who reveals himself in all things is all things, then God is my reader.

  I should date these paragraphs, but I seldom do.

  It is a timeless practice to assign a time to what we do, to number the day, month and year. Numbering is measurement. The authors of business books preach that what we measure is what we value.

  *

  With the heat off this morning, my house is in the upper fifties. Cold, for Dallas. Wally with his fur coat seems unbothered. His skin, though, is no thicker than mine. He’s hard to stir this morning; not asleep on my bed, but collapsed there.

  It’s clear outside, and very bright at 8 am. The stack of unread books on my table is higher than eye level, at least when I’m seated, looking down at a screen and up at the windows and the rectangle of glass in the side door. The trees outside are reaching up as well. Even what creeps along the ground, the English ivy, the monkey grass, that too is upward bound, though it will never get close to the sky, any more than the tallest tree will.

  *

  Do we have any task other than to get from here to there?

  That is my task for the year ahead, but I need to ask: Is there a there, or do I have nothing but restless movement ahead of me?

  I was almost on time this very cold morning to Talmud study, which I’ve begun to attend on Wednesdays at 7:30 in the morning. I sit a few chairs over from Brad Sham, the voice of the Dallas Cowboys, and ten feet from David Stern, our rabbi, who remains boyish twenty-five years after first arriving at Temple Emanu-El. He has the charm of his good humor and good looks, a sunny manner, and intelligence. He has the good fortune of admirable ancestors and, I imagine, promising descendants. There is a lightness to his disposition, at least in public, a bounce to him. Beyond any of these qualities, David is simply an attractive person. He leads us in passages from Berachot. The discussion is about prayer and decorum; specifically, when is it permissible to interrupt one’s prayers to greet someone, and does it make a difference if it’s someone one fears or honors. Can it be done mid-sentence, or only between paragraphs of a prayer, or not at all?

  Sara Yarrin is our reader. She has a practiced manner and the engaging inflections of a bright child. Sara is probably in her late seventies. She’s aged these past several years of my sporadic attendance at Talmud. These days, she loses her place, in the pauses of the readings that are interrupted by the comments that David invites and typically praises, no matter how uninteresting they are.. Those prone to commenting around the table – Mel, Alan, Mort Prager, two or three others – they will make their remarks. It’s an elderly group in the room for the most part. No one under forty, and many who are over seventy. Early risers, these old people. There are almost as many women as men, but not a single woman I would enjoy looking at.

  *

  A conversation with Ben, who responds from behind a closed door.
  I ask, Did you let Wally in?
  No.
  I can’t find him.
  He’s probably in the tall grass.
  The conversation ends.
  Wally, the dog we share, is nearly blind and mostly deaf.
  Ben comes out of his room in a few minutes. It’s very cold this early morning. There’s a film of ice on the rectangle of the lower pond in my smaller yard.
  He’s still out there? Ben asks.
  Yes, I reply. I found him.

  Ben does love Wally. Understandably. Wally is one of his very few friends, and without doubt the most constant of his companions.

  *

  Reading tonight, just as most nights – magazines, short articles. I am in search of easy endings. I bite into a New Yorker review of a television show, the Showtime series called “The Affair,” and I come to these phrases about two characters the author of the article dislikes:
  With their upside-down mouths
  and sad talk about fate.
  It seems admirable, this writing that uses every sort of vowel sound, the long, short and in-between, the music of these words and their satisfying movement to a conclusion.

  One perfect line is not enough.
  I want to write a paragraph that I know to be useful and believe to be beautiful. And then a sequence of them, woven together.

  *

  If I were to paint the world that I see, it would be an abstract painting. Or, it would be a blur. My gaze is inward. I only see well enough to navigate through a corridor, around corners, and away from the sharp edges. I see just well enough to not trip and not spill. And I could no more give an accurate description of where I have been than I could describe where I think I am going.

  *

  February 2015

  Unsaid to Debra:
  When I’m buying something for you, or giving you money, or helping your business, or making a repair at your house, your voice softens, and you speak sweetly. You pay me back with the reward of a few words. But otherwise, you seem to have no interest in me, and you are hardly interested even then, other than in what practical use I might be. So it seems. If I’m not useful to you, then I’m of no use to you. I may be wrong, but that’s how it seems. And what do any of us know other than how things seem to us? I don’t know anything in this world other than what it seems.

  Sabatini, who died February 13, 1950, wrote this first sentence of Scaramouche:
  “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

  March 2015

  The end of getting along and going along seems to be approaching. Debra wants the life that she has. Is that the same as having the life that she wants? Not exactly.

  *

  From my reading:

  “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal – that is your success.” Thoreau

  “What amazes the angels is this uncanny ability of a human being: to place his head in the clouds and yet keep both feet on the ground.” – Chabad

  “What we call Fate is something that entered into us long ago and has only just emerged, to be perceived by anyone. But we might have perceived it at its inception.” I’m not sure where this is from, perhaps from the Chabad emails as well, but it is among the more interesting perceptions. The use of “might” is doing a lot of work here.

  “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” – Rumi, 13th century, in present-day Afghanistan, Sufi mystic, poet, Whirling Dervish.

  “Today like every other day we wake up empty and frightened. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love be what they do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Rumi

  “There’s fifteen, twenty more good years if I’m a bit careful. There’s what I haven’t written. It’s sunny out, though cold. I’m going down to Jane Street, to a coffee shop I like, and then I’m going to write this poem.” Mark Doty

  “Meanwhile our loneliness, on which so many laws are based, continues to consume everything. The present remains uninhabitable, the past unforgiving of the harm it’s seen, the future translucent and unambiguous in its desire to elude us.” I wonder, reading this, if I copied the first sentence down wrong.

  “He could have placed streetlamps along all the pathways of wisdom, but then there would be no journey. Who would discover the secret passages, the hidden treasures if all of us took the lighted way?” – Chabad

  “Without faith there is no prayer. With faith, why pray?”

  “Before some questions, we must be still, questions we must cease to ask, and let ourselves be. To those questions, the stillness is itself the answer.”

  “Living and dying run on the same business model, one hand washing the other. Tears are wept over the newborn baby and over the dead equally.”
  But they are not the same water.

  A person shines or tarnishes at the end of life.

  “You don’t learn by having faith. You learn by questioning. And yet, this is a matter of faith, too – the faith that there is a truth to be found.”

  *

  Charles Kingsley’s wonderful poem, which I came across today:

  When all the world is young, lad,
  and all the trees are green,
  and every goose a swan, lad,
  and ever lass a queen,
  then hey for boot and horse, lad,
  and round the world away,
  young blood must have its course, lad,
  and every dog his day.

  When all the world is old, lad,
  and all the trees are brown,
  and all the sport is stale, lad,
  and all the wheels run down,
  creep home and take your place there,
  the spent and maimed among,
  God grant you find one face there
  you loved when all was young.

  *

  How many weeks or months before all of this will seem silly, overwrought, and an embarrassment? Of course, that could be said of most anything I have written or done, from age thirteen on.

  *

  End of March 2015

  Have spent so much time wondering whether to say goodbye to Debra, yet in truth Debra has been telling me goodbye for a long time. We’ve barely spoken in the past two months and seen each other only once or twice. Still, the prospect of an ending, which I have told myself a thousand times I want, seems as desirable as stepping off a cliff.
  Am I afraid of being alone? Why would I be, if I have told myself for years that I am already alone.
  I called Debra today. No return of the call.
  I’m sending flowers to her office tomorrow, a way of saying both goodbye and hello.

  *

  I read somewhere that the trees in the forest have no questions for God – they never ask what is the plan. I think about that when I see a blue heron or white egret, one of the big-billed birds, walking in the creek bed. I wonder about their untroubled hearts. They have their worries certainly—food, danger. They rise into the air, moving away when they sense my presence. They don’t seem to want my company.
  Who would blame them?

  *

  Before I was formed in the womb, so I’ve read, my days were set in place. They are lessons I am here to learn. A day arrives and departs, never to come again. Never, because no two days have the same lesson to teach.

  *

  The world is a garden of fragrances and fruits. And if at the moment it tastes bitter, I need to peel away the rind, to find the fruit inside.

  *

  The world isn’t created by words, but it is interpreted and understood by them. If I have a thought but can’t it into words, what form is it in?

  *

  When we peer into darkness, trying to understand what is happening to us and why, that’s when we have some chance to see the light.

  *

  Brugmansia, or angel’s trumpets – a shrub, a small tree, with pendulous flowers.
  Can I listen to it?

  *

  May 31, 2015

  Debra, I’m very sad that we are no longer together. I know my sadness will stop, though how long that will take – a month, a year – I don’t know. Five years ago, I thought we would always be together, married or not. I knew then that I wasn’t the priority in your life that I wanted to be. I thought I could accept that. I cared about you anyway. But it turned out to be something I could not accept. It was too much of a struggle – the gap between how much I wanted to be with you and how unimportant our time together seems to be to you. That’s something I haven’t handled successfully the past few years. Hurting as I am right now, it’s difficult to accept that I won’t see you again. What I know for certain is that you won’t return to me on your own. If there will be a return, the effort will be mine. Losing me for you is primarily a practical loss, no deeper than a dollar bill, and easily found. And perhaps you will find someone else who is easier emotionally than I am – someone who will want from you only what you are happy to give.

  *

  Debra, the conversation we had Friday night is the one I wanted to have when I asked you to meet me. It needed to happen. I’ve been postponing it for a year, in part because despite my unhappiness I continued to believe, or tried to, that we were right for each other. Perhaps also for all the ordinary reasons – not wanting to be alone.

  I still don’t quite accept that I’ll never see you again. If I reach back to you in a month or a year, because I want to be with you, despite trying not to want that, I hope you’ll return the call or the text or the email.

  3 June

  A few days later. Not all better, but much better.

  4 June

  What would be impossible – to see Debra as a friend, just for company, with no expectation that she can offer me what she doesn’t have to offer. And to remain free to find someone else, which I am now.

  6 June

  Being grateful for, or remembering:

  How Debra and I met after we had both been left by someone we had committed to, and we helped each other.

  Debra in her silver dress at Art Jane’s, the first time I saw her.

  How Debra looked at me when I told her I didn’t have my wallet, on our first dinner date, at a restaurant in Colleyville.

  Her email to me after, telling me she was looking forward to seeing me.

  Watching Curb Your Enthusiasm with Debra Sunday nights when it was only the two of us.

  How I was with her when Isabella was sick and after Isabella died.

  How I tried to help when Debra was crying because of all her struggles with money, and she was saying that she “couldn’t catch a break” (such an old-fashioned phrase).

  All her phrases.

  That she told me at Palomino in the Crescent that I needed to get on a plane and go rescue Ben, because she was right.

  How she helped me with Eden and helped Eden over and over – however unattractive Eden’s behavior was, or my behavior was, and however much I was giving up.

  Debra after the third glass of Chardonnay, Debra in skin-tight white pants, Debra in an animal-print top at Nonna’s with the disapproving Highland Park wives at the next tables in khaki and white blouses; Debra’s beautiful breasts, her eyes, waist.

  Debra screaming at me in a hotel room on the Israel trip.

  Debra in my car asleep, mouth open, on the way home from wherever we were.

  Debra on the glacier in Patagonia and her delight in “getting help” from the younger, more handsome guide.

  Buying clothing for her.

  Sunday morning, Spero licking my plate.

  Trying to have sex with two dogs almost participating and most definitely distracting.

  Always grateful for those first years. The unhappiness that came later, that too is something I need to appreciate, though not tonight.

  *

  A bird observed from my chair by the creek – grey breast and grey sky, a white ring around its neck, the dark brown around the circle of an eye, its long slender beak, toes lightly on a dead branch that reaches over the creek, a hundred feet over my head.
  And then, it flies off.
  What might I say to it?
  Now that you’re gone, show me the way to remain here. You were doing what you were meant to do, arriving, leaving, with no regard for what day it is, no judgment of yesterday or concern for tomorrow.

  *

  The time the dog ran away only to be found, the trouble with a bully on the schoolyard, the girl next door who turns out to be the beauty of the reunion, the ordinary dad, the wife who drinks, the child who doesn’t care, the dawning of understanding that the arc is bending downward and even the memories of yesterday will be gone tomorrow.

  There is a story being told, and it doesn’t matter how it ends, only how it sounds.

  *

  A life of years is like wind. It rushes to the four corners. Pull away the pedestal that all our wisdoms rest on, and they will fall of their own weight. They will break into pieces. The ends of things are concealed. The nothingness behind, the infinite ahead, and the neon sign on the roadside are all the same place.

  *

  Summer heat first thing when I woke up, the slow fan turning in the bedroom. It’s a Monday, so it matters what I do or don’t wear. I chose the brown not the black belt, and my shoes were lace up brogue not slip-on loafer. This is what I went to college for, I thought to myself, putting on my laundered shirt, my finger on a button. To wear these clothes, rather than a jump suit, or a uniform.

  *

  Why am I so tired? Is it the medicine? I’m taking my levothyroxine. It feels more like the fatigue of having nothing to do that I care about doing. A newspaper’s at the end of the driveway. One of these days there won’t be any news for me to read, because on that day I’ll be news, my story an obituary.

  *

  What I admire in Tomaz Salmun is how he wears a mask of words, his idiot phrases as immune to meaning as a stone. His lines offer nothing more, each as blank as the stare of a crazy person, but harmless, and homespun.

  *

  What’s the difference between writing before bedtime and when I wake up? Night and day. Both times have sirens that lure me from the effort. After midnight, there’s bed, pillows, sleep, and permission granted to do nothing in the dark. In the morning, I have an office to go to. So I glance at the clock and daydream. The second hand makes its circle, and the sound of its drumbeat is gotta go gotta go.

  *

  Am counting the breaths taken today from the haystack of breaths that are left, each one as slender as a blade of grass and lighter than a finger. That would be the grass that withereth, a cousin to the flower that fades, and the passing show; the finger the one always moving and pointing on the hand of time. First breath, last breath, those are the bookends. In between, days that seem countless but aren’t, and prayers when you lie down and when you rise up. I can recall my Sabbath school days, my bicycle, my mitt, the salt sea and the white new moon in Los Angeles. Then Dallas and my money-numbering years. My hands are on the rail of the span that bridges from one abyss and to another. What to do is always a puzzle. Even more so, what to want to do, now, at my age, when the straight edges of my life’s jigsaw are already in place.

  *

  Recalling, and probably repeating, this fragment:

  The money I gave Debra over the years was yesterday’s news as far as she was concerned. She was unimpressed, as we talked over dinner in a Southlake restaurant. She was more interested in letting me know how her day went, and in expressing the opinion that I should be on anti-depressants.

  *

  What is a turning point? It’s when you turn around; the point doesn’t turn, you do. Like the time I tried to take a poetry writing course with Robert Lowell my senior year at Harvard. Or maybe I was only a junior then. I thought I had been admitted – the name Perkins was on the class list. But it was someone else. Lowell looked up at me the first day of class, with a look on his face that said you don’t belong here. I thought he was speaking to me. In retrospect, it may have been Lowell speaking to himself, one of his confessions. I dropped out of college for a year after that, and limped back only to graduate, barely making it back, and never turning back.

  *

  I’ve never been interested in other people’s children. At least, not in their ladder-climbing, box-checking sons and daughters. But sometimes there is the one who has troubles, the child who comes up to me and says, or doesn’t say, that I have to consider I might be wrong about everything. That child is my child.

  *

  Online dating these days.
  A question for a woman on one of the dating sites, who has her picture with a teenage boy wearing a red bow tie, maybe dressed for his prom:
  Is the young man in the photo your son?
  I could tell her my two are thirty and thirty-one. I’m a widower, sixty-three, and starting over. I don’t send the question, because I don’t care about the answer. Saying I’m a widower is probably fair though. It’s one of my identities.

  *

  Journaling – a path to health? To self-reflection? To self-pity and the sort of wallowing that leads in circles and never forward? The theory seems to be that expressing oneself is clarifying, which it can be, and that clarity is healthy, which is debatable. Illusions and self-deception may be more valuable for the most essential act in this time of lowest spirits. That’s the act of placing one foot in front of another as I summon up the energy to simply move ahead.

  *

  August 2015

  Randy’s is a famous donut stand that’s open 24 hours a day. Famous, because the stand has an enormous donut on top of it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in the dark night of the soul it is always three in the morning. At least at Randy’s on Manchester Blvd in Los Angeles you can get a donut then. I was born a few miles from Randy’s, and I went back to visit two weeks ago. I was doing some of the soul searching that comes with going to a memorial service for a relative I hadn’t seen in forty years and discovering at the service and the banquet hosted at a country club afterwards what a wonderful man he was – with scores of childhood friends and a grieving wife. Bruce, my cousin, had died suddenly.

  My uncle Harold once told Bruce, who was a few years older than I am, to visit me when he went to Dallas for Market Week in the wholesale furniture business.
  Bruce’s reply:
  “Why would I want to do that?”

  Randy’s is one of those architectural classics of kitsch in Los Angeles. The enormous donut on top of its small building is made of gunite, so just as edible as the swimming pools made of the same substance. Sharing the parking lot with Randy, another stand, where I could have had “the best burger in town,” if you can believe what you read.

  *

  Why despair over the end of togetherness? Better to have gratitude and thankfulness, those sober relatives of joy, those close cousins to happiness.

  *

  Borges, 1969, the poem “Cambridge”:
  We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

  *

  When I think about Ben and Eden, I wonder whether anything I did made much of a difference for them – either to help or to harm. Their lives seem such a powerful argument for believing that each of us is fated, that we are what we are, and that nurture is no match for nature. So, I am interested in those studies of twins that appear now and then, which demonstrate the dominance of genetic traits. Or, to use more old-fashioned language, the power of the blood. But here on the subject of twins comes Caroline Paul, whose twin sister Alexandra was an actress on Baywatch and a celebrity. Caroline advertises herself as a firefighter, a pilot, and an author. She is relative unknown, but she is no slouch – graduating from Stanford in 1989. Probably being a lesbian has something to do with her choices. In any case, she writes that one in ninety live births results in twins, but one in eight begins as twins, and this phenomenon of “the vanishing twin” is explained by positing that one of the two fetuses is either absorbed into the mother’s body or assimilated into the surviving twin. So many of us born alone may once have had a sibling in the womb. However weird and unrecognized this phenomenon is – and I’d never heard of it – what might it mean for the survivor? Caroline Paul asks if it’s possible that we could have a subconscious understanding of our past in the womb, or a feeling of certainty that something is missing. The oddest and creepiest sentence in the paragraphs I read: “Five tiny fetuses were once discovered in the brain of a child.”

  *

  The meanings of words are as multiple as the meanings of our experiences and our feelings about them.

  *

  From my reading:
  HaYom Harat Olam – today is the birthday of the world. But Olam can also mean eternal, and harat can have two meanings as well, birth or pregnant, as in Jeremiah 20:17, when Jeremiah says that his mother had been harat olam, eternally pregnant. So HaYom Harat Olam might mean “Today is eternally pregnant,” which is it is – pregnant with possibility, though not eternally. The writer continues: “Wake up, look at the gift you hold in your hands, the treasure of today, which is eternally pregnant, a gift waiting to be opened.”

  *

  From Joseph Conrad: “Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly.…Faith is a myth, thoughts vanish, and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow—only the string of my platitudes seems to have no end. We say, Pray, brother, forgive me for the love of God. And we don’t know what forgiveness is, nor what is love, nor where God is.”

  Above, the perfect writing of someone who grew up speaking Polish.

  *

  What work is worth doing? Work that is mined from toil, fashioned by craft, and fired in the kiln of your own heart. You bruised your hands. You overcame fear. You persist without reward, and despite the opinion of others.

  *

  Is there such a thing as wasting time, or killing time? Time doesn’t belong to us that we can waste it. It doesn’t have a life of its own that we can take away.

  *

  If love is the goal, when will I reach it? When will I hold it tightly? Or when I will open my eyes and see it is already here. And for love, substitute happiness. Or heaven. Love, happiness, heaven – none of them are “things” I need to find or prizes I need to win.

  *

  Reading this – probably from Chabad:
  The entirety of life is reflected in your individual lifetime. And in each of your years, you pass through the entirety of your life. And in every day of your life you are born, live your life through, and pass on from this world.

  *

  Read in one of Maria Popova’s “Brainpickings” emails, this lengthy excerpt from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst (abridged, with sentences and paragraphs omitted, but as stunning as a string of jewels):

  The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives – even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available.…(W)e also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have the lives we would like.

  We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason—and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason – they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

  We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do…We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.

  Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage.

  Because we are nothing special—on a par with ants and daffodils – it is the work of culture to make us feel special; just as parents need to make their children feel special to help them bear and bear with – and hopefully enjoy – their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done: first, ideally, we are made to feel special; then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not….

  When people realize how accidental they are, they may be tempted to think of themselves as chosen. We certainly tend to be more special, if only to ourselves, in our imaginary, unlived lives.

  So it is worth wondering what the need to be special prevents us from seeing about ourselves – other, that is, than the unfailing transience of our lives; what the need to be special stops us from being. This, essentially, is the question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what kind of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing special? Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life – the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life –the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it. For modern people, stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives; and by what sabotages the pleasures that we seek.

  We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives – lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction – are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not – or not necessarily—alternatives to, or refuges from, our real lives, but an essential part of them.

  There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unlived life. Each member of a couple, for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with the partner’s unlived lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves. So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

  There is a gap between what we want and what we can have, and that gap…is our link, our connection, to the world… This discord, this supposed mismatch, is the origin of our experience of missing out.

  *

  From the above, this sentence:
  Our solutions tell us what our problems are.

  And:
  We are always living a double life, the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

  *

  Am I a loving father? Yes.
  Ben is enough even at his worst for me to love him all his life.
  I could be the same with Eden as well, but my love for her has been expressed by not resisting her rejection of me.

  *

  Louis Agassiz: one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one’s acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in.

  *

  On writing what troubles you:
  On the keyboard, a nearly noiseless patter of the keys is as comforting as a soft rain. Write something down, and you lay the burden down.

  *

  Old Wine, a poem I came across, is old-fashioned poetry. No one talks like this, we might say; no one talks like this anymore, certainly, and probably no one ever did, except in a poem. That said, many have felt like this, then and now. With a tip of the hat to its author, Margaret Widdemer:

  If I could lift my heart but high enough/My heart would fill with love/But ah, my heart too still and heavy stays/Too brimming with old days.

  *

  Joseph Campbell – We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

  I first heard of Joseph Campbell from Mr. Faber, a professor in the Psychology Department at UCLA. He was a handsome lecturer, and popular in part because he of his good looks. His lectures would fill the large hall where our class met. He assigned Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, and Joseph Campbell. Very 1968, both assignments; and very California. I can’t remember anything else about that class, or even whether it was a survey course of some kind, or something more defined. I was in high school then. I got Advanced Placement credit for this course, and for Introduction to Logic, which was taught by Donald Kalish, who co-authored the text that’s still on my bookshelf. A group of us would leave Westchester High in the afternoon and drive up together for classes at the university. That must have been in 1968 when I was a senior. Hey Jude was on the radio. It seemed very sophisticated, as we thought we were as well. We were advanced. Linda Foley was one of the classmates riding with me. Later, after high school, Linda committed suicide. Whenever I think about those car rides, Linda is the only one I remember.

  *

  Chabad has a variation on Joseph Campbell’s thought. In my “daily dose” today from Chabad, it says, “How will you receive all that heaven wants to give you? By being empty. Full of
  ‘what will become of me,’ or of ‘where is life taking me,’ there’s no room for life to enter. But a simple, open spirit is filled with joy from heaven.”

  Or so the “daily dose” that came in my email says. Joy from heaven is the life waiting for us, if we are open to it, and if we are empty enough to be filled by it.

  *

  Reading about ancient libraries:

  Callimachus, poet and scholar, wrote a 120-volume catalogue of the work in the Library of Alexandria. The catalogue has not survived. The library itself was at its peak in the time of Ptolemy and thereafter declined. It’s unclear what parts of it survived the various conflicts and destruction in Alexandria from the time of Caesar, forty years before Jesus, until the Muslim invasion in the seventh century; the conquering Arabs were the last to see any part of the library in operation. Much of what remained in it may have been carried off to their royal libraries. Some sources say its final destruction was ordered by Caliph Omar, who was quoted as saying, “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if they are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.” Such is the attitude of the believer who already knows everything that needs to be known.

  *

  Thomas Edward Brown, the author of My Garden, is a Victorian poet whose poem has the weird diction of an even earlier era. It is sweet at the start , but in the end, it sneers, and has the smugness that always belongs to those who are confident that the majority shares their opinion.

  A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
  Rose plot, fringed pool,
  Fern’d grot –
  The veriest school
  Of peace and yet the fool
  Contends that God is not-
  Not God! In gardens! when the eve is cool?
  Nay, but I have a sign;
  ‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.

  Where did he come up with the word “wot” from?

  *

  Denise Levertov writes of “the ache of marriage” and how we “looks for communion and are turned away.” Her short lines conclude:

  It is leviathan and we
  in its belly
  looking for joy, some joy
  not to be known outside it

  two by two in the ark of
  the ache of it.

  *

  God said to the Israelites, “Let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.”
  Does God need a building or a place to live? Is this the same God that created the universe, and now he’s looking for a room for the night? What Rabbi Sacks suggests is that we need to make the effort, if we want God to be among us. “The in-dwelling of God among the people cannot take place as long as the people are passive and do nothing to help bring the sacred into the world.” It sounds like busy-work. We are given this task so we have a task. Children are asked to clear the table after dinner because…they need to “contribute.” But there is an alternate reading of “I will dwell among them” by the 19th century commentator Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michel, who was given the acronym Malbim. He wrote, “I will dwell among them is I will dwell within them, in them, the people, not in a sanctuary. We are each to build a Tabernacle in our own heart for God.”

  *

  Tradition is not life, but it preserves life. Goals are not life, but they can help guide our lives.

  *

  Reading this:
  To be comfortable with yourself, you need to know that your thoughts and emotions are not who you are, they are just events.

  *

  One of the messages from Chabad, another “daily dose”:
  How can the tragic saga of a life be seen as “a glass of wine,” as it was by Joseph? He recognized that his life was a purposeful journey; the one which his soul was sent down to this earth to travel.

  *

  “For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…the work for which all other work is but preparation.” Rilke

  “We have plagued ourselves with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.” Mary Oliver.

  “In whatever situation you have gotten yourself, there is purpose, and only one purpose: to go higher.” From Chabad

  And this, also from Chabad:
  “It isn’t miracles that are wondrous, but the natural order…that there is something rather than nothing, and predictability rather than chaos. Why does gravity behave today the way it behaved yesterday? Does anyone know why? Does anyone have a reason why there should be anything at all?”

  *

  Tolstoy: A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

  *

  Much of what I am doing now is just writing what I am reading. Copying it, for the most part. It calms me to do it. I may or may not be learning from it, but I am calmer for it.

  *

  Can you change the past by what you do tomorrow? Yes, because you will change the meaning of the past.
  Wherever you are in the future, the past will become the path that led you there.

  In that way, the past is always changing. Not what happened, but what it allowed to happen in the future.

  How differently do I think of my past with Dolores now, after Pam and Debra, and after Ben and Eden?

  *

  There are statements that are so true that the exact opposite is equally true Statements such as “ultimately nothing divides us,” when everything divides us, or that “family is the most important thing,” when it can also be the least important. Perhaps this is something that applies to most generalizations. And the greater the generalization, the more obvious the application.

  I might dub this the “law of opposing truths”:

  The bigger the scope of any generalization, the greater the likelihood that both the generalization and its opposite are equally true.

  *

  The human condition: to gaze upon the Promised Land, but never to enter it. We are forbidden, by a power that we cannot see face to face.

  *

  Wabi Sabi is a way of living that emphasizes finding beauty in imperfection, and by doing so accepting the brokenness of the world.

  Kintsugi is a related notion, it’s the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery so that the breaks are not hidden – a crack in a vase might be sealed with gold. A damaged vase in its irregularity can be beautiful, even more beautiful than the perfect, unbroken vase. It is an art that encourages us to find a treasure in the scar.

  All of us get broken. Hemingway, much quoted, wrote in A Farewell To Arms: The world breaks everyone and many are strong at the broken places.

  *

  God is always speaking to us. He creates the world every moment with his words.

  *

  From Nietzsche:
  No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.

  *

  Wasn’t this from Kundera? The Unbearable Lightness of Being? “The first rehearsal for life is life itself. It is no more than a sketch, a first run, a trial – and not even that, because a sketch is a preliminary drawing for something that will follow, something more finished. In life, the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing more finished to follow.”

  *

  Another quote:
  “When human beings decided they could fly, two paths lay before them: to build vehicles lighter than air, or to use the air’s resistance. In the end, the path of resistance proved more successful.”
  Maybe.
  Did anyone actually try to build a vehicle lighter than air? That would seem pointless from the very beginning, if the idea was to transport a human body, which is never lighter than air.

  *

  Why write about grief? Not to find what cannot be recovered, and not to pay respect to the dead or the lost. But to find the right way to live without denying or forgetting what happened in the past and will happen again in the future. Writing about grief is a recognition, and it can become an appreciation.

  I can take my pick from the losses in my life, as anyone can from their own.

  Dolores – I lost her wisdom though not all of it, some of it I retained; I lost the assurance she gave me of being respected and desired. I miss her engagement, her high spirits, her openheartedness, her compassion for others and even for unpleasant others, which she kept without a surrender of her good judgment.

  Eden – she’s living, but she’s lost to me. The hurt is for the life that might have been. It’s a grieving for something I never had. It’s a shadow that I dispel by closing my eyes to it. Eden seems now to have been preordained to disappear from my life. She is the source of no happiness, and perhaps it’s exactly in that deprivation that she has her satisfaction. It’s hard for me to fathom her disdain; it feels so unmerited. I don’t know what I should be sorry for having done; my flaws, although many, are shallow in comparison with the depth of her rejection. She has an emotional sickness that she has no awareness of, or any desire to treat. What am I grieving exactly? I suppose it’s the absence, or an imagined life, with a charming daughter who admires her doting father. I worked toward it, I planted and watered, but the tree withered, its ugly branches brittle and dead inside, the remaining leaves, if any, have turned brown.

  Ben – Grief is a flower that is always rooted in love. I am grieving for Ben’s sadness and his loneliness, for his neglect of himself and his many potentials. Why won’t he repair himself physically? On his long weekends he sleeps half the day; he is tired of his own company. I want to push him into activity, however impossible it is to do that. Heaviness of body, heavyhearted, weighed down in spirit. I love Ben and am frustrated with him, and with his unwillingness to engage with a better version of himself.

  Both my children are misplaced in the world. But aren’t we all, aren’t we all not only far from home, but uncertain of where home is.

  *

  William Henley, editor of Kipling and Yeats, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s friend. Henley had his leg amputated, and Stevenson put aspects of Henley’s outsized personality into his creation of the character of one-legged Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

  Henley wrote Invictus, and this, on the carpe diem theme: “O it’s die we must, but it’s live we can.”

  *

  Wally follows me one more time from my bedroom to the study. His toenails are drumming the floor. Blind in his old age, and mostly deaf, he has sense enough. The metronome of his tail still works, his nose can still ask the big questions. Come over to me, old friend, my good friend. Let’s you and I discuss those questions into the night—a scotch in my hand, a milkbone under your paw. Let’s settle the mystery of the difference between hair and fur, and whether that spec on your belly is flea or, in my current opinion, only a speck.

  *

  If I say, “this is the last thing I would do,” it means I would never do it. But it also means it’s what I would do if time was running out. And time is running out. I can easily hear the whisper of emptying sands.

  *

  Went to a play at Kitchen Dog Theater this evening. It was one of those stories of extreme human behavior, and it was all as unlikely as hummingbirds in a snow storm. There were husbands and wives, a house set on fire, and there may or may not have been infidelity. Either way, lots of shouting.

  *

  It has been “one of those days.” A Sunday. Now that I’m done with it, what have I done with it? Some toast and coffee, two sets of tennis, then a hot shower. My trip for groceries was made without luggage, though I had plenty to unpack when I returned home. Nothing happened on a Sunday that you would call a religious experience, other than the pattern of light blue crosses in the weave of my shirt, right under my nose. I watched television, football games and movies. I read two articles from an old New Yorker, one about 3-D printing, the other about drones in Pakistan. Made a sandwich for lunch, a salad for dinner, and did anything I could to avoid working, which seemed stale and unprofitable.

  Something I’ve written before:
  Why think about the small and the personal, why not be vatic, going large? Forget about Cheerios or watching television. Make the voyage to Byzantium instead.

  *

  God spoke and the world was created. Word and object. First the word, then the object. The ripe, heavy apples hang from the tree of knowledge in paradise. If they even were apples – Jewish sages argued for grapes, or dates. If I could walk on air, I would see everything that will be gone too soon. What was I meant to do? Whatever it was, my circumstances don’t permit it. I have nothing I need to add to my life, but much that needs to be taken away. Mostly the illusion that I have not lived the live I could have or should have – this poisonous idea needs to be gone, this rotted fruit from the tree of false consciousness. The life I am living is my only life. There is no such thing as wasting my potential, there is only how I spend my days.

  *

  What’s the matter with the house across the street? It has been vacant since my neighbor’s death two years ago. Betty Lou Linehan and her family built the house, and the one next to it, and this one across the street, which is mine. Our three homes are from the early 1950s. So they are as old as I am. Betty Lou’s vacant house could provide a moral, a lesson about transience, or at least a turn of phrase. Instead, it has nothing to say. Its front door is like a headstone – one without an inscription.

  *

  God created the world, promised Abraham that a people would come from him, told Moses his name, fed the Israelites with manna from the sky and honey from the rock. That’s the nature of a creator. Transforming, making one thing from another, and declaring all of it good. What have I made today? Sandwiches on the kitchen counter and a Macallan with two ice cubes in my glass.

  *

  The older I get the more ordinary I am. Is this wisdom, or is it giving up? What happened to that exceptional child, the boy who was first in his class, who won the awards, the best disciplined and most determined? That boy who skipped ahead has been left behind. These days I hear my friends say how smart their five-year-old grandson is, and I think (but do not say), how it’s far easier to be a wonder at five than at sixty-five.

  *

  Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden – Philo

  I can see that in a baby, so bent under the weight of life he can only crawl. And I will bear it in mind.

  Raining today. If this day were a person, it would be a monk with a vow of silence, wearing a robe against the cold. Not a single conversation all day.

  Golden lamplight, my finger tapping on a table top. Ice dropped into a glass, the cubes chattering to each other. A white box matchbook from a restaurant at 10 Columbus Circle, to remind me of a noisy evening years ago. The hiss of a matchstick, as the head becomes a flame.

  *

  Neither of my children were born with a rabbit’s foot, or with a lion’s heart.

  *

  The Transcendental Meditation class is in a strip shopping center, up the stairs, above a restaurant that serves enchiladas and margaritas. Each of us has a word that we are instructed to repeat to ourselves, for the sake of its sound. So we sit on the folding chairs or a couch, keeping our eyes are closed. Our minds are like unleased spaces, ready for business. I’m of course unable to vacate my thoughts. Instead, I’m thinking, Debra loves Jesus and has green eyes, like a salsa verde, and beautiful women are intoxicating, like tequila in a margarita, and as piquant as the ring of salt.

  *

  Will I greet my last day with joy? If death comes as no surprise, if I live long enough for unkindness and disappointment to disappear behind me, then I will count myself among the lucky ones, no matter how few or many revolutions the earth carries me above the ground. It’s dizzying, going round and round, and it’s not always merry. I’m not able to understand it all. I suppose I was never meant to. I’m like a tourist, here to sightsee a thousand wonders on this packaged journey.

  I know how the stranger feels, when I lift up my eyes to the angelic hills.

  *

  “We see the ripples expanding in her consciousness, but we are no longer supplied with any clue as to what kind of object has sunk there.” Edmond Wilson on Gertrude Stein

  This is also the way it is when I read the poetry of John Ashbery, someone who writes in a clear easy language but makes no sense.

  In the glass hutch of my memory, a glow from a recessed light on the past. It reveals what never was or will be. Trophies on black lacquered shelves. Hearts, and the souvenirs of love, and from years of travels.

  Earning a living is an alien fire in which I’m consumed. How much of my daily life is an offering I was forbidden to make, but made anyway.

  Tired, in the hinges behind my knees, in the front of my elbows, in the bends of my fingers – two in each finger, but only one for each thumb.

  On these hottest days of summer, my words drip, drip into the soil of a journal, each drop trying to keep alive my green life and growth.

  *

  Here’s the presumptuous truth about angels: “With toil and persistence, asceticism and great sacrifice, a human being can enlighten his mind. He can reach so high as to perceive the world of the angels—or even to be granted the gift of prophecy. But, as hard as any of us may try, as long as our brains are made of gray matter, we can never attain the enlightenment of the least of those fiery beings.”

  Why do people have opinions, much less write them down, about things they cannot possibly know?

  *

  Divorced – and still troubled by it.

  Pam insisted that the silver-footed bowl we found in the flea market north of Paris on our honeymoon was hers, a gift, rather than ours. Likewise the car, although my name was on the title alongside hers – above it, in fact. And the woven hats from that narrow street in Beijing, or was it Shanghai, and the wooden prayer house from Bangkok, and even the opium bed from Indonesia, which we found at The Barking Frog, a local store on Cedar Springs Road, where she cajoled me into also saying yes to a massive carved teak chair no one has ever sat in. The Lucite art candles from Stanley Korshak—true, they were a gift. I bought them for Pam one at a time over five demanding years. But the rug from Packards in Santa Fe, which was on the wall of a shop, a block south from the Plaza? It was bought on my birthday, on a trip Pam charged to me. That trip was one of her gifts. I was her prince at the time. But now I am a frog, and a barking frog at that.

  *

  What I admire about hello is its simplicity, how sure it is in its purpose.

  *

  A regret – that I haven’t been to India yet. I’ve gotten no further than the making and unmaking of plans. But the idea of it did get me into a yoga studio. India; when I think it of it, I think of hair as dark as ink.

  *

  The fish in the pond may not know their fate any better than I do, but they know better than to ask the air for answers. When I end up, I’ll be belly up too, but not floating. I’ll be in a box under the grass. Or I’ll be in a furnace, transformed by a heat as orange as these goldfish, my body turning as powdery as pollen. I’ll be one and done. I’ll be dust and bits of bone. If there’s nothing more to it than that, or if there’s something, so be it.

  *

  I’ve been on many wrong roads. Have they taken me “even closer” to the truth, as was suggested in a message from Chabad that came to me today via email? I’ve seen no proofs in the night sky and even fewer by the light of day.

  *

  To the midnight music of toads and in lamplight reflected on a dark glass, I’ve composed my own exhalations to the silent trumpets of angels. Day after day, night after night, I have kept to my desk in the ending hours.

  *

  Quoting this again:
  “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success.” Thoreau

  And if you don’t greet them with joy, is that your failure?

  Could there be something to hear in the sky, the cirrus clouds screaming as they are stretched, or the nimbus sobbing, those wet and heavy clouds? There might be a grammar to it, with verbs and even commas. A diary of our days would be written in blue between the horizontal rules of stratus clouds. And in the cotton puffs of the cumulus, a loopy, girly script.

  I have read advice that I should start “journaling,” but I can see that it will lead to a lot of unnecessary gerunding. The advice is to write daily, in order to bring sorrow and fear to heel. I’m going out these days, I’m dating. When, I wonder, did party become a verb? I know it happened, and so long ago that it’s now an embarrassment, like a man my age still wearing blue jeans.

  *

  There is no greater light than when darkness shines.

  *

  Reading the love poems of Yehuda Amichai, it is obvious even in translation that it has all been felt before, the heartbreak, the leaving, and the remembering. What I’ve never said has already been said. Still, it remains to be said again. Breaths have been taken millions of times, but each of still wants to breathe.
  So carry on, keep at it. The task is not only to carry it, but to lift it up.

  *

  I’ve saved all my receipts. My MasterCard and Visa records can help me recall more accurately than a memoir where the desires of my heart were. My passions are in legal-sized boxes labeled by year on the refrigerator shelving in a storage room beside the garage. I have a project ahead of me – to take these papers that are the only record of my spending and shred them. I need to throw them all away. These dates and dollars have landed in a storage room as effortlessly as birds on a bough. They have coasted and rested, as though they had never been hunted.

  *

  5343 Wenonah is for sale again– the home in Greenway Parks that Dolores and I bought in 1986, where Ben and Eden had their favorite rooms and the bedroom where Dolores died. After marrying Pam, I left it behind. There was an open house this Sunday, so I went, to reopen memories. How small the room seemed where Dolores’s death happened at two in the morning, July 13, 1997. Not much has changed and everything has changed. She’s gone, and the memories are going. How soft her dying was, a few feet from the hardwood floors. I looked at the pattern of tiles we picked for the bathroom and the shower stall. For a moment, I stood in the same place, exactly where we were.

  *

  Mark Strand wrote that a cloud is a thought without words. This answers the mystery, then, for the person who says he has an idea but can’t put it into words. What form is it in? It’s a cloud, in motion and in love with the horizon.

  *

  Writing a sentence so true even its opposite is true: Life’s a mystery, breath miraculous, and death an illusion.

  *

  November 2015

  The clock on my desk is like an unwritten page. It will become an unread book by the end of the year. Its white face and thin black hands express the monotony and the cruelty of its movements. The trees at the window are keeping their own time with swaying branches. This year is turning. It may turn its back, or make a hard right turn. It’s November, the sky darker earlier, the cold in the air, the unleafing of the trees. Things leave a husk behind; things are not what they are in November, they are more a memory of what they were.

  *

  November 13

  Where does it come from, my desire to buy blueberries in winter? Does the color of the sky bring it on? A few clouds appear, and it might rain but then doesn’t. It’s grey, but not too dark, chilly out but not bitter. It’s not unpleasant. Why buy a blue fruit today? I’m having that “there’s nothing I want” feeling. Love hasn’t saved me, and it won’t. I’m sixty-four today. Maybe that’s it. I need a gift for myself, if only some berries to buy at the store, nothing as big or sugary or rich as birthday cake, but sweet enough.

  *

  What’s the reason I’m writing this if not to pass the time? What’s the reason for doing anything if not that time passes? Nothing can be done about it, so something must be done.

  *

  A brugmansia flower is also called angel’s trumpet, though what an angel would want a trumpet for, I don’t know. My dog Wally is no angel. I call him Wally, Wally Walloon, and Wally Walloo. The soft, unfocused look in his glassy brown eyes tells me that he knows as much as I do about angels, and probably more. If there is the call of an angel’s trumpet, it sounds at some inhuman frequency, and he is the more likely to hear it.

  *

  Another truth and its opposite, which is true as well: Life is renewed in every moment, and the past is the same as destiny and can’t be escaped.

  *

  Surely the Eternal is in this place, and I did not know it. So I told myself, when I went grasping for some happiness but could reach no further than this wisdom: The only whole heart is a broken heart.

  This is a comfort, a bit of grace, a suggestion of redemption. It suggests that sorrow has a purpose; and if a purpose, then a dignity.

  *

  Observing the cedar waxwings, wanderers in the winter. They come in flocks into my yard. I find four of them on the ground, dead. Their necks may have been broken.

  Those that are alive spend their time at the tops of the trees. I can hear them whistling. They are here for the food in the cedar cones and in the yaupons. Sleek grey birds, they wear their black masks like bandits as they raid for berries; their yellow bellies and the bright yellow tips of their tails give them away, as do the tips of their wings, which are dipped in red.

  What happened? Did the wind blow four of them downward? Or did one fly into the pane of glass in my kitchen window and the other three follow? How it happened, why it happened, what difference does that make? Four cedar waxwings are dead on my redwood deck. I’m left to do what one day will be done to me– finding and identifying, and then discarding.

  *

  My life is a sketch, a study for a painting that won’t be completed, with blood reds, sunflower yellows, and always blues.

  *

  Read this in “some book”: Human beings are beyond the reach of human judgment. Only love can reach us or hold us. Better to let the judging go, wiser to wait with patience and with humility for the hour, if it should arrive, of understanding.

  I read it on someone else’s page and now have put it on my page.

  *

  The starlight is hidden by the daylight. How’s that for a notion of God? It’s not exactly a description, but a way of thinking about a hidden God. Another way of conceptualizing God might be to not locate the divine in space, but only in time, not in a place above us, but in some place beside us, ahead of us, or coming toward us, each moment bursting with God’s struggle to be found.

  *

  Brugmansia is sometimes a small tree Its flowers are pendulous and trumpet shaped, its blooms are shades of white, yellow pink, orange and red, and its fragrance is pleasing, noticeable in the evening and attracting pollinating moths. But its parts are poisonous, and it can induce a violent trance, with sickening aftereffects, temporary insanity, the loss of awareness in hallucinations, and then forgetfulness of the entire episode. Yes, I know that tree – it’s the tree of life.

  *

  When my first marriage ended eighteen years ago, I knew that I would never again find anyone who would want to be me as I was when my first marriage began, forty years ago. I had nothing then. And I was young then. If I live as long as my father did, or my mother has, I may have thirty more years ahead of me. But I will never be young again. It’s possible of course I could have nothing again. If it happens, that “misfortune,” I hope to become like the birds, who own nothing and can fly. Indeed, they can fly because they have nothing.

  *

  Love is something we can learn to make out of nothing.
  I miss the delusion of love and would have it back, even if it’s never coming back, even if it was never there to begin with, and the love I had never ended because it never began.

  *

  My life is meandering. Hard to know where it’s going. I’m on a saunter, to use a word unheard these days in conversation, as rare as hearing ping unyoked to pong, or seeing someone make a beeline to a phone booth. So much has come to pass in my life. And most of what came has come to an end. Here I am, walking on the St. Augustine in my big back yard on Guernsey Lane, but not entirely here. My mind is a blade rotating through the years, discarding moments like bits of mown grass.

  *

  When I talked to Debra, it was often like talking to a flower. I could pretend that she understood me, but I couldn’t pretend that she was interested. She’s like the red, red rose in the Robert Burns poem – better remembered for some quality of loveliness than for any responsiveness. I appreciated her, though, whenever I could let go of any expectation or needs of my own. That is where the most meaningful challenge was, as it always is.

  *

  Nothing’s perfect in the world, so I must use what’s broken. Accept what happens, as if I had chosen it. Don’t look for the miracle, because life is nothing but miracles.

  *

  I read the following “advice”: Flow like a river, flare like fire. Love fearfully, fear lovingly.
  But I’m inclined to counter: I’m not water, or fire, or love, or fear. Also, I dislike being told what to do.

  I’m a writer, keeping my words to myself. I’m wounded, but brave. Experienced, but inattentive as well, and often ignorant.

  *

  Birdsong has the repetitiveness of prayer. Whether it’s a psalm of praise or of petition, I can’t tell. When the bird goes silent or is gone, it takes its notes elsewhere. It leaves a memory in the air. Birdsong can help me find my way through difficulty. I try to hear an example of prayer in its morning call. Or, to think of the world as being tuned. These notes might encourage me to see the day ahead of me as a miraculous music. Insight in birdsong: to hear, or imagine that I hear, praise songs and petitions in the first light of the day.

  *

  Weekend morning in Southlake.
  All the news in this wealthy suburb belongs below the fold. A neighbor cuts his lawn on Sunday. A powerful snowfall of white flowers from the crepe myrtles is rumored. Debra and I stay in our keep. We are not churchgoers. On my opinion pages, the music that serves as prayer in The Hills Baptist church can be left to the faithful who stand up and raise their arms, though there is room for letters on both sides of this issue. Our comforts are coffee and pancakes. If eggs, Debra makes them medium well, and she adds cheese when scrambling. If bacon, very crisp. And always, extra butter.

  *

  Who do I belong with? I want to be as loyal as a dog but have always resisted being part of a pack. I don’t want to be following, with my nose to the ground.

  *

  When I read the work of some of the authors, poets, and prize winners, I think, I can do that, I can do better than that. I have the same words they do. The same syllables they have are also my portion.

  *

  My father had a broad back. Didn’t he carry us all, once upon a time? At the time, I never thought so. I never gave him the credit that was due. He always seemed physically strong to me though, even the year when he was dying. He was in his nineties then. We were told he had a recurrence of colon cancer, though it did not seem to be killing him. Instead, he was collapsing mentally. One of his brown eyes was bloodied. The red ring of its lower lid looked raw. He was no longer seeing the world around him. What happened was he had fallen down and struck his head on a concrete step; and after that, everything was down. In his last year, my mother put him in a small group home. He was bitterly resigned to it. For some, unending speech is aggression. My father used silence mostly. He did say that he wanted to go home, but my mother wouldn’t let him. My father used to have an unpredictable temper, though nothing too far out of the ordinary. I thought: Get angry all you want now. Finally you have good reason.

  *

  It’s was always a burden to please Debra. She liked to say that it’s the wife who sanctifies the husband, so perhaps the effort was justified.

  *

  So much that I do in the world is done by handling it; that is, by feel. I can’t be touch blind or hard of touch. I can close my eyes or cover my ears, but I cannot shut my skin. And to be out of touch is to be diminished.

  *

  I once took a poetry writing seminar through The Writer’s Garrett. The teacher’s name was Farid Matouk. He had an enchanted name. Who named you, Farid, and in what country? Someplace with the sun glaring on the white walls of houses, and dust on the roads. Maybe it was a fragrance your mother and father remembered, when they gave you that name. You name is like a bloom dispersed, its fragrance lost, and when your parents tried to recall it, your name came to them.

  *

  A cardinal’s song sounds as if it comes from the heart. And if in truth it only comes from the throat, that is good enough.

  *

  I have four special rugs. The Arraiolos rug is the one I love most; it’s the Portuguese rug with green skin, and its knots are as tight as the nap of a poodle. Then there’s the Marrakech rug, which Dolores and I bought after drinking glasses of green tea with the merchant. The Santa Fe rug, which was our first, is a Teec Nos Pos that we bought from the gift shop at La Fonda Hotel. Last, the rug that I bought with Dolores at a benefit auction in Dallas; it’s Anatolian, and I admire its vegetable colors and its thin-skinned weave. Four rugs – I have them myself now. Dolores is dead. My second wife, Pam, is gone, and with her the rug from Packard’s in Santa Fe that we bought during our marriage; that was one of her demands in our divorce. I still have some longing for Pam, but none at all for that rug, with its stains of argument and legal mediation. She can walk over it all she wants.

  *

  I’m reading articles from The New Yorker. Three sturdy columns to a page, justified left, justified right, as if these articles can hold up the world.

  Or, seen another way, the black words on the white pages are like berries that can sustain life in a snowstorm. In a whitened world, you have no direction. You can be blinded by white. And in the darkness of white, you can keep alive by the juice of these words.

  *

  The vines of bougainvillea in the copper pot on my deck are overflowing with objections to all confinement.

  *

  I ate alone this morning in The Dream Café, which is in the Quadrangle and just across Howell from my office on McKinney. I tried to sit still and observe:

  Sunlight on the thick yellow paint of the walls.
  A Heinz Tomato Catsup bottle; the white label is a shield on a field of red, expressing the comic nobility of the product.
  Plastic thimbles of Half and Half in a basket; they are from Glenview Farms, which is probably industrial, despite the illustration of a blue farmhouse on the cap. The white thimbles, encircled by ridges, look like toques for tiny chefs.

  *

  Eden is leaving tomorrow, but she has been gone for years. I am wary and distant with her. I distrust her, I suppose. We don’t get along very well. I can be comfortable with the shadow of my hand, the point of my pen, the freckles and scrapes on the back of my arm, soreness, my breaths – with all of this passing life that is mine. But to be comfortable with my daughter, who will be gone soon enough, as will I, that’s a shore I’m not able to reach.

  *

  Sitting in my car too long, in too long a line at the car wash at Lemmon and Douglas. Time enough to think of Mr. Douglas, who was my English teacher at Westchester High School fifty years ago. He was balding even then, an older man, though probably much younger than I am as I sit at the car wash. He told our classmate Mary Henry that she was “full of devices.” Mary is no longer living, try as I might to unbury her from beneath a pile of memories.

  *

  What’s in a name? Lots, usually. Family history, world history, associations, references, storytelling, misunderstandings, mystery.
  The name Alfred is regal and at the same time subservient. It’s not Al, and it’s not Fred.

  *

  January 2016

  Teyku.
  Enigmas are answered in Talmud with this word, which is Aramaic and means something like “let it be.” It’s an acronym for tishbi yitrotz kushiot uva ayot; in English, Elijah the prophet, the Tishabite, will answer such questions at the end of time. Or, it might be an abbreviated form of the Hebrew or Aramaic for “let it stand.” Meaning, leave it alone.

  Some questions cannot be answered. Not by us, though we are expected to grapple with them nevertheless.

  *

  Here is an abridged quote from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit: “Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen, and in the spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. It’s the belief that what we do matters, even though how and when are not things we can know beforehand, or maybe not afterward either.”

  And here, trying to convey the same idea, but rewritten:

  If the premise is that we don’t know what will happen, then we can have hope. In what another writer calls “the spaciousness of uncertainty,” there is room for us to keep going. We can become comfortable not just with the unknown but with the unknowable. We do not need to be believers, aside from our belief that what we do will make a difference, though we may not know exactly how or even realize that it did.

  *

  Sometimes I need to express myself, to complain, to get a grievance out. Though it changes nothing, everything changes. I might say to Debra, talk to me, and let me talk. Let’s both listen, or pretend to. We can at least agree not to charge each other by the hour, if we agree on nothing else.

  *

  My across-the-street neighbor Rhonda and her problems are long gone, but the cat she left behind is still in the neighborhood. It’s a black cat. Carla calls it Dart, and she leaves her garage door raised a foot or so, so Dart can find shelter.

  *

  Another person is an anchor, so the tide doesn’t carry us out on the ocean of loneliness. Anchor us, hold us down, but don’t drown us.

  *

  The rain is falling. The drops are spotting the stepping stones to my fish pond, which a body of water that must seem smaller than a raindrop, viewed from the heavens. The smooth rock, the darkening stone, and a bird calling over and over. What to say? The words are hiding under the rocks in my head.

  *

  At night at the pond, bullfrogs are screaming. This isn’t screaming as in “screaming in fear,” and it isn’t screaming as in “screaming in anger.” It isn’t screaming at all, just bullfrogs singing, and not even that. It’s the voices of bullfrogs, vibrating.

  *

  Some years back, I asked Eden to go to dinner, father and daughter. It was the evening of Father’s Day, after all. But she declined. She said that she had decided to choose her company “these days.” “These days” are the only days we have. And one of these days, I will no longer be available. Eden, too, will come to her turn to leave this life — “this life” is a phrase we use, even though neither of us believes there is any other. Both of us in time will be forgotten by each other, and by everyone able to remember Eden or me, or understand our misunderstandings, or care at all whether or not we cared for each other.

  *

  I could write more about my daughter, Eden, who dislikes me and doesn’t consider herself my daughter. She might appreciate reading it after my death, since she, too, is a writer of sorts; words spill out of her like worms. She would never bother though. Disdain is her meter. Her rhyme is recrimination. She counts out her syllables of disparagement.

  Eden has the coldness of an artist, which could be lucky for her.

  *

  What is a greater source of the beauty of this world other than our fear of the next? “Night cometh” is inscribed on a clock face at the top of the Baptist church on Northwest Highway. Night is coming, though not with a sickle or in a hooded cloak costume. It arrives with the vanishing of the bright objects of the day.

  *

  Eden, my former daughter, has decided to withhold even the smallest scrap of love or respect. It is as Fernando Pessoa put it, everything I might say about her here are just notes in the margins of an erased text. Is it true that I no longer feel sorry for never seeing her? She has been too unpleasant for me to genuinely miss her. I am sad about it, though.
  And I do feel sorry for not feeling sorry.

  *

  If every moment depends on the moment before, then at my first yawn of the morning I might hear yesterday’s midnight concealed within it, like the smallest of the Russian dolls of the moments that have past. What if I took this further, but in the opposite direction? Then, in the first cries of a newborn boy, I might hear the wailing of all his days to come and, listening hard for it, the sob (if he’s lucky in his life) that will be heard from a mourner at his grave.

  *

  An email took me hours to compose, and then I reconsidered sending it. It disappeared from the screen.

  The smallest finger on my right hand has lifted from the key that mysteriously both enters and returns.

  *

  Debra sent me a picture of herself in her mother’s arms. Black and white, a faded photo. The text says “5 weeks old. 1954.” “Wow,” I texted back, “it’s like a dream from another world.” “That is correct,” she texted in response.
  “That is correct” is one of her stock responses. “Exactly” is another. In many of her replies, both in texts but also in person, she reminds me of that “Magic 8 Ball” that was a popular toy in my childhood. The toy was a plastic sphere that looked like an oversized eight ball from a pool game. It entertained you by providing advice or telling your fortune. You had to ask it a yes-no question. Then, turning it over, you would find an answer in the translucent window in the black plastic ball. As long as you only asked yes-no questions, the answers made sense.

  The Magic 8 Ball actually had twenty possible answers built into it – so, many more than Debra’s stock responses. Ten were affirmative, five non-commital, and five were negative. Examples of positive answers? It is certain, it is decidedly so, without a doubt, yes definitely. Apparently neither “that is correct” or “exactly” were among its answers.

  The Magic 8 Ball has its own Wikipedia entry. I learned that it was invented in 1946 by a man whose mother was a practicing clairvoyant. It was originally called the Syco-Slate, and at first it was sold as a paperweight, before it became a toy marketed to children. Abe Bookman owned it, then Ideal Toys owned it, then Tyco Toys owned it, and through it all very little about it changed. It’s still sold today, by Mattel.

  The Magic 8 Ball’s five “non-committal” responses? Reply hazy, try again; ask again later; better not tell you now; cannot predict now; concentrate and ask again.

  *

  I’m on the seesaw of old age. The pleasures of looking back often outweighs what I look forward to.

  In this notebook are notes that form chords, harmonies, and dissonances as well. I do this to do this, I have no greater purpose here. I used a lifetime of evenings, and some Saturday afternoons, getting down on the sand of this playground and doing these push-ups.

  *

  The arrow of time moves only in one direction. I’m not the archer, and I can’t see the target, and the arrow in its arc is falling earthward, faster and faster.

  *

  I have notebooks I handwrite in when I am away from home. Some are moleskines, with scrawls that I wrote in a hotel room, thoughts that I put to bed between the two black covers and left sleeping on the back seat of a rental car until I could get them home and wake them gently by the light of my laptop.

  *

  What are the reasons for the sin of pride in the circumstance of birth, the positing of superiority for one’s address, or color, or tribe, a belief in the fairy tales to which parents and entire cultures subscribe, the longing for belonging?
  The Irish have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. The French do as well. Who doesn’t? We Jews are the chosen people. We may even have invented self-importance, if that claim can be made without the claim itself being evidence for it.

  *

  Of all the weathers, I think it’s the cloudless days that show the emptiness best. The sun bullies the other stars into hiding. In the daily race that Camus wrote about, which hurries us toward death, our bodies are in the lead, our joys and even our will to live are far behind. Still, we carry on, feeling without really understanding the emptiness of a blue sky.

  *
  Visiting with a friend over lunch:
  The scar on her cheek was on her mind, so she pointed it out, revealing what she was afraid I had noticed. Skin cancer. But I had paid no attention to her skin. And even if I had, it would only have appeared to me through the fog of my own preoccupations. She turned the other cheek to show me the bruise, blue and yellow.

  *

  Writing isn’t the key to any happiness. It may however be a door that I open to escape unhappiness.

  Fifty years of writing, and I’m still searching for my own voice, something I would have thought I had no need to look for. Nothing has been easily found. I’m not deaf, but I think it will be difficult for me to know my voice when or if I do finally hear it. I try speaking this way and that way, always impersonating. My ears have been stopped up most of my life, as they will be eventually with dust.

  *

  I’m laboring and have little to show for it. I’m watching the clock. I’m waiting for the sleep that frees me from the obligations of the day and anticipating a sleep that will liberate me from my responsibility to time. Men with happy families can enjoy the distractions, those of us with troubles, or with no one, have our laptop qwerty keyboards. If I am only talking to myself, it’s a compulsion. And if I am talking to other generations, I’m only whispering.

  *

  First the grey in the skies. The birds are aware of it. Then the wind rising and flowing over the raised arms of live oaks and red oaks. Then a few drops falling in a rhythm. Downward the drumming of the rain comes on. It’s twilight, then evening, then the closing of the gates of the day. A wind encircles the waist of a dozing earth, which is dreaming the dreams of the living and also the dead.

  *

  I’m lying on my back, with my body in a hammock that I suspended between the trunks of two live oaks, next to the bed of azaleas.

  The beauty of the wind is unlike other beauties. It’s apparent in its effects. It’s the leaves that I hear.

  The sky is a pale ground behind the leaves, as I look up.

  Nothing is more elementary than looking. And so I remember: “Look” was the first word I learned to read and spell at Kentwood Elementary.

  *

  The typical phone calls with Debra fall into two categories. In the first, she retells a sequence of events. This call usually comes from her, when she’s driving somewhere and so has time on her hands, or while she’s walking her dog, which is done more for her own exercise than for the dog’s, as she takes those unattractive quick steps that she says burn more calories. In the second, the more classic call, when I call her, she’s yawning, nibbling on something, and not much interested in anything I say.

  *

  Two trips for later in the year: Prague in the summer, with a group from Temple Emanu-El, and then ice camping and wildlife watching in Antarctica in November, with Arlene, one of the women I’m seeing in this year of my efforta to “find someone” other than Debra. Debra declared a separation, and I’m doing what I can to keep moving.

  I learned a week ago that I’m a “victim of identity theft.” It has taken the IRS to formally let me know what I’ve always believed. Someone else is leading the life I should be leading – that’s one way to look at it. Or, I’ve lost my identity, as if that were something I misplaced and would recognize if I came across it in the back of the sock drawer. This time, though, it’s something official. The IRS has notified me. Apparently someone has used my social security number and filed for a tax refund, which is something I’m never owed. And once someone steals (borrows is another way to look at it) your social security number, you may be dealing with the resulting complexity from then on. It’s not like a credit card number you can cancel. So I’ve been jumping over the hurdles, informing the credit bureaus, etc.

  *

  “It is because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position for the sake of a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, ‘impossible marriages’ are the happiest of all.”
  From Proust, Within A Budding Grove, the second volume of Remembrance of Things Past.
  And my marriage to Dolores? It qualifies, as least in memory. It was an unlikely marriage, and if I had “known better,” I would have considered it an impossible one. Instead, I entered it without much thought of the consequences. I entered it arrogantly, as I have done with so many of my decisions, discounting the future.

  *

  April 2016

  It’s obvious to me that I’m still missing Debra or simply in need of her – not enough time has gone by for me to lose that need. I don’t care too much about the wisdom of others. My circle of course tells me I’m much better off, etc., but none of them care one way or another. Our losses are our own. We are in sole possession of them, and it may be that we own nothing so entirely as our unhappiness. I suppose Debra is collecting the negative judgments on me from her people. At some point I expect to call her, if it doesn’t happen first that somehow I am told that she’s met someone else – someone who will be as easy with family as she is, has the practical advantages that she requires. In short, someone much less difficult than I am. I can only hope that I’m over her entirely before that happens.

  I might wish her a wonderful Easter, glad that I’m not having to join her in a pew at the Hills Baptist church in Southlake, or to buy the overpriced meal afterwards at Trulocks for Debra and her daughter.

  It’s April. Everything’s blooming.

  *

  From Chabad – the typical display of profundity by contradiction:

  “If you find yourself on a single path to truth, the path of prayer and praise, or the path of kindness and love, or the path of wisdom and meditation, you are on the wrong path. Truth is not at the end of a path. Choose a path, but take the opposite path as well.”

  How many things are wrong about this paragraph? “Find yourself,” for starters. Then “path” and then all the pairings…

  So much that we say uses language that simulates something real, but at times seems as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Not just when standing at a podium, but across the kitchen table as well. When having breakfast together, while we butter the toast, our talk is not a conversation so much as a performance. Too often, and sadly.

  *

  From Pessoa: “Everything expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note, we can extract the gift of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.”

  Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese, published little in his lifetime. After his death in 1935, 25,000 poems and letters were found in a trunk. More from him, or, just below, from Ricardo Reis, which was one of Pessoa’s pen names:
  “As long as I feel the full breeze in my hair, and see the sun shining strong on the leaves, I will not ask for more. What better thing could destiny give me than the sensual passing of life in moments of ignorance like this?”

  I’m not separating his work into lines; prose and poetry are the same thing in translation.

  *

  Reading about, and baffled by, Salvador Espriu, a Catalan poet, and his poem The Bull-Hide (La pell de brau) from 1960.

  *

  The Baal Shem Tov taught that the vital force of each thing is itself God – its personality, its experience of pain and pleasure, its growth, its life. He taught that all of it is God, not that this is all of God.

  “He inscribed His signature within each thing He made. On the outside each thing is finite but on the inside you will find the signature of the Infinite.”

  Again, words that I think I understand, and the soap bubble is beautiful, but if I push against it, and sometimes if I simply touch it, it pops.

  “Look at a puddle of water, a grain of sand – there is nothing that does not contain endless wonders.”

  Yes, this is so.

  “They were made with infinite wisdom.”

  This is only “sort of” so.

  *

  Thomas Aquinas: “The road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs. Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: certain despite all our blindness, secure despite all our helplessness, strong despite all our weakness, happily in love despite all the pressure on our hearts.”

  *

  “Love and laughter and compassion and beauty were created so that the human and God could commune, and neither would be alone.”

  If God is perfect, God does not experience “loneliness” – at least not in any way I might understand. But if God can do anything, then God can be anything as well, including imperfect, should God choose to be. This must be somewhat the thinking behind the need for a “son of God” – people can understand that Jesus can share and even display human traits more easily than God can. Of course, none of this makes much sense.

  In the summer of 1997, on our last trip together, Dolores and I, with Ben and Eden, saw the statue of Moses Maimonides in Cordoba.
  What did Maimonides think? One of the 13 principles of Judaism as he provided them asserted that God is not corporeal. And for Maimonides, it was axiomatic, as a matter of belief, that God is perfect. God isn’t lonely, nor is He “angry” at us when we behave badly, or “pleased” when we follow the commandments. Those are ideas that are truly useful socially to control our behavior in society, but they are not true.

  *

  My eyeglasses are off my nose, they are aslant some papers. The round face of the clock smiles the time, saying how early it is and also how late.

  I am noticing physical pains, or just discomfort, something hardly felt at the small of my back or inside an elbow. I feel it as a fish feels the water; ever present, and usually unremarkable, almost part of my body or an extension of it. The pain at the elbow has a history, beginning as many pains do with force. With a tennis racket in my hand and striking a yellow ball.

  *

  Thinking back to…2007?
  There was construction all week at 8911 Guernsey Lane. The workmen were nailing pine boards, blonde and straight, to make a soffit under the roofline, along the perimeter of the house. Inside, new colors as well. I had them with an interior designer’s help. All of it to change if only superficially where Pam and I had lived together. The names of the colors were names of places: Yosemite sand, Creekside green, English manor, Texas leather. I could scramble them all together and make just as much sense of them: Creekside manor, English green, Texas sand. Every combination worked, except maybe not Yosemite leather.

  *

  Rewriting an old passage:

  After midnight I can pull the cover of a dark sky over my head. I can lay my head down on a pillow of deep thoughts. The cotton of the silence is as light as feathers. And there any higher thread count than in the sheets of these late hours?

  The next day, a new day. The morning of crepe myrtle and blue air and a river of asphalt on the way into work. The sun is a small warm spot on this overcast sky, no bigger than a butterscotch candy. Today I could taste it and not burn my tongue.

  Sometimes I don’t want to work at anything because I am tired. Rather, I want to, but I am too fatigued. Tired of it, and tired out.

  One day, I just might be too tired to wake up.

  *

  A question on an insurance form:
  Have you used tobacco products in the last two years? Not sure what work that word “products” is doing.

  *

  June 2016

  A “solo” trip with a group from Temple Emanu-El, led by David Stern and Nancy Kasten – to Poland (Krakow, Auschwitz, Warsaw) and to the Czech Republic (Prague, Terezin).

  Prague, in the old town, with its six million tourists per annum, is not an undiscovered destination. It’s an interesting one nonetheless, to the degree that it can be seen through its crowds. There are more churches than churchgoers in Prague, and six million books in its public library. I wasn’t in a library there, but I did visit churches with vaulted ceilings, gilded surfaces, and painted spaces; there were churches hosting silence and, in others, performances of Vivaldi and Mozart. I also went to the opera house, which is a church of another kind and just as ornate. I attended a performance of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride. I came home with a perfect-bound libretto, in Czech, and learned that the composer’s first name was Bedrich. There were many languages in Prague. I makes we wonder, why the babble of subjects and objects, gutterals, vowels. If it were all started today, all of human history, there would probably be only one tongue. The same sound for all of us, though with no better understanding of one another.

  In Krakow I visited Masolit, which sells English language books both new and used. I came away with a paperback of Symborska’s New and Collected Poems, published by Harcourt, which I could just as well have purchased at the Barnes & Noble on Northwest Highway, or on Amazon, but I wanted souvenirs. This one will entertain me for years. Other purchases in the Czech Republic? A hardbound and slender Letter to My Father, from the Kafka Museum. And two very expensive Moser vases, which I needed to have shipped to Guernsey Lane.

  *

  Who can measure or weigh the product of bone and blood, muscle and breath, the firing of a nerve – there is no scale or number to assign a value. A twenty-minute work may be the equivalent of the labor of twenty years. Or it may take a lifetime to do what might have been done in an instant.

  *

  In Kafka’s Letter to Father, purchased as a souvenir from a small house on the Golden Lane, after I stopped there on my downhill walk from the Castle that overlooks the old town of Prague, there’s a thin purple ribbon. The ribbon is not in the Letter, but in the book that contains it. It’s there to mark the place where I left off, and to keep the place where I might never begin again.

  *

  Before Prague and the Czech Republic, our group was in Poland. First in Krakow, and Auschwitz, then Warsaw, and the Jewish Museum there.

  On a train from Krakow to Warsaw, I read I.B. Singer again. I had brought A Day of Pleasure with me. And I read Symborska for the first time. The countryside was well groomed. Even the wildflowers seemed to have been put in place. The same clouds I see in my own backyard protected the Polish sky. There is one heaven, everywhere on earth, the same clouds linger and amaze us all, the same light of day that makes the stars invisible, though I supposed the stars themselves are different, depending on the hemisphere. The victims of the murders in Auschwitz looked up at the same heavens as my father did in Panama or my mother in Southern California.

  *

  I am curious about the world outside, but even more so about words on a page. I could no more describe a shirt than a forest. What I see in each are the letters “r” and “t.” I don’t seem to have much interest in other people, either; not in their conversations or their opinions. I dislike their judgments and ignore them or try to escape them. I don’t encounter them in the moment.

  Only later, I wish I had paid more attention or that I had cared.

  *

  Wisdoms collected:

  Make yourself small, and you can fly through the bars of any prison.

  You have a gift denied even to the angels – that you have a heart that can be broken and still be whole.

  *

  As I have read so often and in so many places, it isn’t money or the glory of place and power that brings health and happiness, long life and joy. It’s the noise of relationships. But that’s a ship that seems to have sailed without me on board. I either tore up my ticket, or lost it.

  So, since I’m stuck on land, what path to take? I don’t know. What I do know, I know how to put one foot in front of the other.

  *

  July 2016

  At the beginning of summer, the natural world is dancing. Every blade of grass seems to be on point, and there’s a tutu of spray from each of the sprinkler heads. What to do today? Thoughts are pirouetting in my head. For the moment, nothing. I’m listening to a bird and remembering a song from my childhood. In the lyric I remember, that robin redbreast “gaily sings.”

  *

  Reading a few poems in the paperbacks I bought at a bookstore in Oak Cliff. On most of the covers it says winner of this or of that – the Pulitzer, the National Book Award. However, much of what I read from these prize winners offers me no reward. These poems present puzzles there’s no need to solve.

  The Love Poems of Neruda, pocket-sized, are a different experience. I can read them in Spanish without fully comprehending, but I am satisfied with their hints.

  *

  This is the summer of cicadas and bird calls, and of oak trees, both live oaks and red oaks. The summers of my childhood were very different. They were summers of sand, the grains as numinous as the imagined life ahead of me, and of ocean waves and horizons. Those were summers of the waves that repeat, just as the cicadas repeat.

  *

  When thoughts can’t be found, they slip away, some of them downstream, others up in smoke.
  I can imagine my last breath, but not my last thought, the one that will never be found.

  *

  To say the simplest thing seems to take more time than I have.
  Sitting alongside the creek, watching a heron, and vegetable life that clings to the bluff. How long does it take for the rough rock falling from the side of the bluff to turn into a stone in the creek, and then, long after, into a smooth black pebble?

  *

  At the swimming pool:
  In the beginning I’m only leaning, my feet on the edge of the pool, my toes flexing, ready to push off. The water looks cold and feels blue. I have the time to stand still, hearing insects in the live oaks, listening to the up and down of their singing, which has a sound like an unzipping. Then, jump. It’s a burst, a surprise, like a balloon that pops at a child’s birthday party, but no tears or disappointment – just the opposite.

  *

  How to understand the qualities of plants?

  The oleander is popular and poisonous, from the fingers of its leaves to its delicate pink blooms. Dogbane from its birth is poisonous in all its parts.

  Unsurprisingly, the rose has thorns.

  *

  Taking notes outside – I’m writing on a pad, from the chaise lounge near the swimming pool. Imagine the pen as if it were a camera framing the tops of toes, a rectangle of pool, the bottom of the pool lighter than blue, the shelf of green glass tiles above the water, and an unseen breeze at the end of a summer day.
  Using ink and paper, but writing on wind and water.

  *

  Hours by a swimming pool. Nothing much changes but the light. It becomes softer. The evening is coming. A swell of the cicadas rises and subsides, a sound as regular as waves at the beach, summers in California. I don’t know where Dolores is, though so many want to tell me, from pulpits and from pages. There were no promises that she made to me when she was dying, so none for me to keep.

  *

  If I don’t do it now, then when?
  I have my excuses for not committing to writing something worth publishing, to leave my private thoughts in favor of a more public performance. The excuses vary. It’s raining, or the sun is shining. I can’t sit still. Or I’m in motion. My mind wanders and must be brought back again. And again. My mind is a well. I’m lowering the bucket but barely reaching the water. It’s easier, and more enjoyable, to read what others have written; it’s as effortless and as insubstantial as the smoke rising from a pipe.

  *

  Are yucca and the palm humiliated in their pots near the swimming pool? Are they bitter, dreaming of the desert. The lawn was cut yesterday – living things can only be allowed to grow so far. The neighbors would object otherwise.

  *

  When we say to each other “take care,” we mean be careful, don’t disturb, and keep it down – the noise of life.

  *

  Winter 2016

  How to keep warm on the eve of my winter birthday? The candles on a cake won’t do it. My hope is in the certainty of the seasons, that the summer will always return. In a thousand years, however cold I am in the ground, seeds will still be sprouting.

  *

  Reading this in my daily email from Chabad.org: “Where the dark is bright and silence speaks, at the moment when the sweetness of bitterness lasts forever, that’s the place and the time God is present, both inside the tabernacle and beyond the stars.”

  Tabernacle. That’s a strange word, both looking and sounding. But not as strange as “the sweetness of bitterness.”

  And also, it takes more than a simple contradiction to truly provoke. “The sweetness of bitterness” doesn’t do nearly as much work as, for example, “the sound of one hand clapping,” which also offers the frisson of wisdom

  The suggestion that nothing is something is a pleasing mental puzzle.

  *

  Ben lives with me. I did not anticipate decades ago that my adult child would be a roommate, while I marched toward the end of life. It’s not unpleasant, it’s just unexpected. I suppose he is unhappy about it, though as yet he is unwilling to do differently. He paused this morning to watch me making an omelet. He commented on Wally, deaf, blind, and over one hundred in dog years, who was in the kitchen and also enjoying the smell of bacon.

  *

  Debra, and women in general, seem in general to be unimpressed by abstractions. No wonder she was disinterested in my greatest ambition, which is to write well, and to write something that I admire. It has no chance of producing anything that can be touched or might be materially profitable. She prefers her china and the upholstered sofa in the living room to any dreams of mine, or the French curve of a headboard, its dark wood against the yellow cream color a decorator picked for her bedroom walls. I don’t blame her. No point in blaming her for her view of the world. Pam was the same, though given her dyslexia and lack of academics, she was more respectful. A woman’s fascination with objects is the material of the novelist with a preference for what’s real, or for the poets who want to describe stones or flowers, rather than those who think of the words themselves as the stones of their art and the poem or the paragraph as the flower.

  *

  Remembering, but barely, a childhood trip to Sonoma and Mendocino counties in Northern California. We went to the Russian River. There was nothing Russian about it. It could as easily have been called the rushing river, with its water rippling over the stones of its bed. There were pine trees, and a motel with a swimming pool, and a shuffleboard court with its triangle separated into numbered spaces, a ten at the peak and then pairs of eights and then the sevens under that. My parents took us there, me and Patti, so has become one of those places recalled after childhood’s end. I remember it for the name of the river, and for my parents as well. It was one of their acts of goodness that in the liturgy is said to be how we live on after our deaths.

  The brought us there, whatever the inconvenience or expense. Of course, they also went just for themselves; at least, our mother did. My father probably never wanted to go at all.

  *

  I am sitting still, to continue my writing ritual. That’s how I think of it. I write as a rite. But if it’s a rite of passage, it’s only time that is passing. Whether I get anywhere with it or from it or not, the earth will continue turning. Neither the earth nor I will ever turn a corner. We are simply spinning and spinning again, and again, which is dizzying.

  *

  2017

  There are things I can only do so much of when I visit my mother in California. For example, watching hours of public television on Sunday nights, after walking through the neighborhoods of Ocean Hills, her retirement community. These look-alike neighborhoods are named after Greek villages. The homes are themed, with white walls and terracotta-colored roofs. Also, for example, my mother informing me during the Downton Abbey or Doc Martin or Call The Midwife station breaks how she is ninety-five and, as she tells me more than twice every visit, I don’t understand that life is something you can only do so much of.

  *

  Sitting out on the “patio” of the house in Ocean Hills. And just listening, just trying to pay attention, which is as difficult a task as heavy lifting. It is heavy lifting in fact, so great is the weight of distraction. That isn’t the wind I hear, it’s the fronds of the palms. And the snare drumming of an airplane, and birdsong, as piercing as a piccolo. The front door is open, and the tv’s on inside. So I can hear that soundtrack as well. Inside, an old movie, with its out-of-date dialogue that must have seemed so natural in the 1940s. Does it sound that way still to my mother, as she listens to it? Something makes her laugh, and I hear that, too, though nowhere was it called for in the script of this visit to Ocean Hills.

  *

  How disappointed my parents must have been in me, when I was in my twenties, when they discovered that I was disappointed in them. I failed to recognize their gifts, much less thank them for them, even though I was the recipient of them. It took me more than forty years to honor my mother and father, and during none of those years was I wandering in a desert.

  *

  I’ve caught up with Wally, as time has caught up with me. Wally with his dog years, me in my old age. There’s no one tempted to call either of us good boy any longer. Those days are gone. My salad days are over. Wally’s dog days are over, too. Our years are shorter and darker, but oddly faster. Both of us are running in an open field, our ears bent back and our fur flying, running from the darkening behind us, and at the same time running toward it.

  *

  Thoughts for a last day:
  Too late. Whatever was left to do will be undone. Did I report to the office one time too many? Did earnlng a living become a kind of dying? And as for what I imagined I wanted to do, whatever I did yesterday is as close as I will come. The shallows of my breath ran up on the shore at the edge of life, and my breath withdrew back to the ocean it came from, the restlessness of the waves on top, and, below, a cold and a stillness, those deeps that are unknowable and unfathomable.

  *

  A child riding a bicycle uses both hands on the handlebars, until the day when he lifts both of them and says, look, no hands.

  *

  From a Chabad email:
  Someone is at the door for whom you haven’t prepared. Does your breath gasp in joy or fear? If you have set no table for joy, then it will be fear. But let joy recline across from you, and life is a feast.

  *

  From other reading:
  To understand someone fully, you have to know not just what they say, but what they have said in the past. And you need to know more than that: the direction that their words were pointing, and where they led.

  This may be a thought about empathy, which is a deeper understanding. Perhaps another way to say it: To understand someone more fully, you have to know not just who they are today, but who they wanted to be, and how they failed to get from there to here.

  *

  A number of the things I quote here but fail to put quotation marks around them are from the Chabad.org emails that come to me daily. Sometimes these messages make me cringe; other times, I want to copy them down. They all–or most of them—seem to come from Tvi Freeman. Often he makes a reference at the bottom of the email to their source, which is a prior pronouncement from “the Rebbe.” A wisdom recorded or recollected by a follower. Chabad also sends me links to videos. When I click on one of them, I will typically see a very unattractive-looking man, with a beard looking as though it hasn’t been groomed in decades.
  And I will think, “these are my people, but maybe not my kind of people.”

  *

  Each of us has something we have always wanted to say, something we only say to ourselves. It’s on our tongues, in our minds, our wisdom, our prayer, in the silence, in the light, and in the air.

  *

  What is my reason for these notes and quotes? It cannot be something I want to leave behind, because there’s no one coming behind me. My children have no interest in any of this, which is an opinion I not only understand but share. Do I have any thought that all this typing I’m doing, if that’s what it should be called, deserves anything other than to be discarded? Or, even less of a bother, deleted? It doesn’t need to be forgotten. To be forgotten, it would first have to be gotten. It’s impossible to disappear if you have never appeared. If I thought today was the last day of my life, one of the things I would do, even before coffee, would be to take every page, even this one if it’s on a page, and destroy it. Burn it if it was printed, delete it if it wasn’t.

  *

  Loneliness is a health hazard, according to an article that no one sent me. I saw it when I clicked a link in an email that had come to me unasked. The idea is intuitively true, although whether the threat is more like a cold on a summer day or the pneumonia that an elderly person succumbs to, I don’t know. Loneliness may be more like the persistent heartburn that might presage cancer of the esophagus one percent of the time. So, how much of a hazard is it really?
  I can’t say, and it’s something the author of the article chose to keep to herself.

  *

  I understand well enough how I came to own this 1.59 acres on Guernsey Lane, and why I still do. It’s the result of a marriage and the end of a marriage. After Pam left, I bought 8911 Guernsey back from myself, this home that I had bought for both of us. I tried to put the past in a box on a shelf. I remodeled. Even what I remember from our years together, I have repainted, as one does.

  *

  I want to ask Ben this, though he won’t answer: Why won’t you do the simplest things to improve your life? Sleep more, exercise, eat well. What would any father who loves you want for you? What I want you to do, I cannot do for you. You push away all help, always refusing, with your right of first refusal, to help yourself.

  *

  What is there to write about? Everything. And nothing; I can write about that, too. The white roots of grasses, the small goldfish in my pond. Myself, a small subject. God, who is big, and may be too big to write about. Praise and gratitude, for a gift given to me but denied to the angels, as one of the sages put it. That gift? To have a heart that can be broken and yet still be whole.

  *

  Why do I still remember this?
  The morning in 1973 when I met Robert Lowell face to face, his grey hair as wild as a burning bush, and his expression as unwelcoming. Robert Lowell, crackling with hostility, a mad poet, who seemed to be mad at me, even though I was a stranger, and perhaps entitled to the hospitality due any stranger. What had I done? My last name had appeared on the typed and posted list of students he had selected into his class. Yes, it turned out to belong to someone else with the same last name. I had the right name but I was the wrong person. So, my mistake. I had intruded in his classroom, where there was no room for me.

  I suppose this experience, this combination of displacement and disappointment, it must have a flavor with an aftertaste, or an odor, like the smell of burning fabric after a housefire, that is difficult if not impossible to get out.

  *

  Every writer has an attitude. Some make their observations from a distance and use their gifts of phrasing to make a melody. Others, though, seem to care about the snow geese, or the wren from Carolina, or the late fall goldenrod. Or they are interested in conversation. Or activities. I’m the first kind. My subject matter doesn’t matter to me. The black letters on my white laptop screen are instrumental, like piano keys, and most of my sentences have been scales done for practice.

  *

  My children are no longer mine. But then I never had possession, only a lease. The term of it was meant to be eighteen years, or a bit longer, with no option to either renew or turn them in for trade. As it turns out, though, my payments are never done. A son and a daughter, their chronological childhoods over, are both out of the house now. They are like the birds flown away into the branches of the magnolia. My daughter? That seems to be over for good, though it isn’t good. My son? I don’t know yet, and perhaps never will.

  *

  I am the Jew who never saw a burning bush. I have been in oceans but never in one that parted. And if I have a promised land, I don’t know how to get there, and I never met whoever made the promise.

  *

  A brown barn owl, big as a dog, was posing on the iron fence at the end of my driveway this evening. An owl is a startling sight. I saw it after the drive home from my office, which offered nothing more surprising than stop signs. Why did it perch where it did? And then it flew, staying in a lane visible only to itself.

  *

  Reading Mary Oliver. All this namedropping of plants and animals, of dandelions and goldfinches, is unseemly. It’s almost bragging. As though the heron in the creek bed was an endorsement of Miss Oliver. She calls out the three deer walking down a hill. She notes the jeweled eye of a toad. It is as if she and the marsh hawk were on a first name basis, as though they were friends. But certainly these are all one-sided relationships. True, they are going about their business, and she is going about hers, the poet, making use of them.

  *

  Once you have made yourself small, you can fit through the bars of any cage, you can fly through the darkness at midnight, and through the midday glare. That was the wisdom offered by Tvi Freeman, the writer of the daily message in an email from Chabad.org. The postage-stamp picture of the author showed a young man. He looked earnest, exactly the type to share his wisdom with a stranger. He has given me my flight instructions. But what are my qualifications to receive this guidance? It would be easier to challenge his statement than to alter my size. I am too old to remake myself or to even want to. I am a Jew, however. That much is true, and that may be enough, though I think of myself more as choosing than as chosen.

  *

  According to the Talmud, Bava Batra 14b, the broken shards of the first tablets were stored in the ark together with the whole ones. This is clarity about what must remain a mystery. The Talmud also suggests a subtle way of answering the unanswerable. Enigmatic questions are sometimes answered with the word teyku. It’s Aramaic, meaning, “let it be.” Perhaps it was a slang that the rabbis used, the way you hear FOMO today for “fear of missing out.” In those days, would anyone have feared missing out on an event happening elsewhere, whether over the next hillside, outside Jerusalem, or on the other shore of the lake in Galilee? Maybe so. With no social posts to learn about it, the missed event might have come to the rabbis through rumor, or as a tale repeated, something about loaves and fishes, water and wine, or a story about the dead coming back to life. And such reports could raise very serious questions, some of them unanswerable.

  Teyku, let it be, is also said to be an acronym for Tishbi yitrotz kushiot uva ayot; meaning, Elijah the prophet, the Tishabite, will answer such questions at the end of time. Such questions cannot be answered by any of us, though we try nevertheless.

  *

  Winter’s over. Now comes spring, then on to summer, and so on. A pattern, until the end of time, though before it ends, there’s time to listen to a bird’s song in the middle of the night; and then, a few minutes before bed, to note how late it is, and how late I am, in the autumn of my years.

  *

  The courtship phase never ends between people who fight each other, because it is impossible for them to settle down.

  *

  May 2017

  I saw Emily Dickinson’s handwritten poems at the Morgan Library this month. Her handwriting was decorous and compact, the ink flowering on the scraps of paper she used. The title of the exhibition: I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson. There were twenty-four poems in various drafts, and also, under glass, a small circle of her reddish-brown hair, which is called a “lock” for some reason. I have one of those, too –it’s a lock of Dolores’s hair sealed in a baggie. I have it in storage, in a box in the room off my garage. At least, I think that it’s Dolores’s. I could say “as far as I know,” as if there were a distance to my knowledge. Why not “as deep as I know,” since, more typically, knowledge has depth?

  *

  More on my visit to New York City with Debra. We are back together. We went to see Hamilton. That was “the reason” for the trip. For Debra the bigger thrill was an hour before the play started, when we went to the dinner down the street from the theater. Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen were at a table nearby. Earlier in the day, I pushed Debra to come with me to the Morgan Library and Museum. Aside from the poems, and the lock of Emily Dickenson’s hair, which was brown and gold as much as red, the exhibition included her “herbarium.” It was a book of pressed flowers and notations that she made when she was school age in Amherst.

  Is a lock of hair always in a near circle? And if we call it a lock, what does it protect or keep us out of?

  There’s no easy entry to the past. When our lives together are over, they are closed forever, though others can circle round and round the strands of memories. We can even keep someone else’s hair like a relic. Share it publicly in a museum exhibit, or keep it to ourselves in a storage room, as Emily kept to herself. She was Emily E. Dickenson, Emily Elizabeth Dickenson, who has come to be somebody, however dreary that is.

  *

  I enjoy a May morning in Central Park. I remember where I walked in this park forty years ago, when I was a burdened twenty-one year old with nothing much to weigh me down. I’m happier now than I was then. I may be happier now than I’ve ever been, or, certainly, less unhappy, which is the same thing. There are younger men in their twenties all around me. Their lives are ahead of them this morning. Most of my decisions have already been made. Most of my life has been lived. They, on the other hand, are green and uneasy, and probably trying hard not to doubt themselves. I’m confirmed. I’m like one of the statues on the edge of the park. I don’t know why these particular statues belong here, or why I do, for that matter, but I no longer need to know. I can read their plaques and that is enough – here’s San Martin, Argentina’s liberator, and there’s William Tecumseh Sherman, in gold and on horseback.

  *

  Memorial Day is coming at the end of the month. Monday the 29th, to nail it down. If I were to write something down every day, or write up a thought for the day, that might be a way to memorialize the interval from one sunrise to the next, Memorial Day or not.

  There hasn’t always been a Memorial Day, even within my memory. It took an act of Congress in 1971. So, well within my lifetime. I was twenty or nearly so and old enough to pay for my own laundry, which is something I did today. I picked up my dozen shirts from the Ethiopian who has told me his name more than once, though I keep forgetting it. I should have memorialized it. He’s one of those people so friendly you are think of him as your friend, though you are only his customer. I like to see my bundle of shirts on hangers traveling toward me on the loop of a conveyor. I wonder what that machine is called. And there on the wall above the cash register a sign provided a reminder: Closed for Memorial Day.
  I remembered then. My friend’s name is Emir.

  *

  From C.S. Lewis: “Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans lightly and works from moment to moment. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

  Yes, a focus on today is best, but perhaps with one eye looking ahead.

  *

  Ben and I took his beloved Wally, his best friend, to the vet on Lovers Lane, where Wally was put to sleep. These past weeks and months I waited for Ben to say it was time, which now he has done. There will be losses as there have been losses, each different, but each also the same. Wally’s death is the message that has been sent and can’t be taken back. I will have a small box with his ashes on an upper shelf in the bookcase that runs the length of the hallway. The box is a kind of paperweight, to hold down memories.

  It’s windy outside today. Winds descending like someone last breath, but I don’t know whose or from where. Wally’s shadow is a light in every room in the house. The black and grey fur that he shed until the last day of his life were like clouds that came down to rest on the hardwood floor in the hall – a hall that only yesterday was leading to him.

  *

  Alexander Pope, dead in 1744, “this long disease, my Life” over at 56. How is it possible that he was only eleven when he wrote this:

  Happy the man, whose wish and care
  A few paternal acres bound,
  Content to breathe his native air,
  In his own ground.

  Whose herds with milk, whose fields with breָad,
  Whose flocks supply him with attire,
  Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
  In winter, fire.

  Blest! Who can unconcernedly find
  Hours, days, and years slide soft away
  In health of body, peace of mind,
  Quiet by day,

  Sound sleep by night; study and ease
  Together mix’d; sweet recreation
  And innocence, which most does please,
  With meditation.

  Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
  Thus unlamented let me die;
  Steal from the world, and not a stone
  Tell where I lie.

  These are the words of an eleven-year old? Someone commented that the author of this poem had little sense of life on a farm, the back-breaking work, the insecurity, the death of your children for lack of medical care. And the comment concluded: Who has this “happy life”? No one. Only in writing.

  Elsewhere I’ve read that this poem, “Ode to Solitude,” was written by tiny Alex when he was twelve, not eleven. Maybe it was schoolwork and his parents helped him, as I often did for Ben with his English papers at Jesuit.

  *

  May 30, 2017
  Yesterday was Memorial Day. I went to the Temple Emanu-El cemetery on Howell to see the stone that tells where Dolores’s body lies. It is tilting forward. Falling, but not failing. Howell is an apt name for the street address of a cemetery.

  May her soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life.
  This is a sentence that could only be a translation. I try to imagine an immaterial soul being bound up.

  *

  Start of summer, sitting outside at the table with the stone circle top just outside my kitchen. Pam left this tabletop, I’m not sure why. She must have not had room for it on Auburndale. That’s the street in Highland Park she returned to, the home that has the sticker beside the front door: “This house protected by Smith & Wesson.” Sitting here outside on Guernsey Lane, I’m less protected – from the wasp that keeps joining me, and the fly that isn’t welcome, and the gnat that drowns itself in my coffee. Is there any insect with whom I share this life whose death I would mourn? Maybe the ant, though not a fire ant, and not, definitely not, one of those creepy ants that have wings.

  *

  The breeze that comes from somewhere – does it have its beginning in stillness? How is a breeze born? Does it come from the labor of the air? When does it take its first breath? Who hears the cry it makes entering the world? If a breeze makes a sound, it is slighter than the hum of the wasp that keeps bothering me. It is softer than the soughing of a rocking chair on a stained cedar balcony deck outside the upstairs room that I added to this house, after my divorce and my decision to stay. It is quieter even than the voice of the pages as I turn them, one after another, in a book that I’m trying to read, despite all distractions.

  *

  July 13, 2017

  What is there to say, Dolores. You’ve been gone twenty years. So much has happened, and many things haven’t changed. I no longer see a waxwing hopping from the paving near the pool onto the metal gate and think, as I used to, it’s you, there’s your soul. I have no reason to believe it will please you in any way to be remembered, but I still think it does.

  *

  A summer day ends gradually, and then all at once. Just so I might imagine the world ending, slowly, even imperceptibly at first, and then absolutely. Though not today, the end of the world, at least not this weekend, with a robin redbreast singing, and summer fully here. Today it’s easier to think of it all going on forever, the robin on the birdfeeder, the squirrels that are chasing each other around the trunk of a live oak, and the endless circle of opinions and conversations about life, death, life after death, and how life after death came to be called the afterlife.

  *

  From readings:
  The more a man is, the less he wants.
  I’m also reading about the practice of leaving stones on a grave:
  “The shepherd would carry a sling over his shoulder and in it he would keep the number of pebbles equal to the number of his flock. When we place stones on a grave we are asking God to keep the departed’s soul in a sling.”
  A soul in a sling? No, that isn’t what I’m doing. I’m letting myself know, and anyone else, that Dolores is loved.

  *

  The conservative mindset: the attempt to improve things will always bring unforeseen problems.

  *

  Mungo Park is not a park. He was a Scottish explorer of West Africa, who went into the unknown to discover the course of the Niger River in 1795.
  I had to look him up after reading Thoreau’s exhortation to “Be the Mungo Park of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes.”
  The strangest part of Mungo Park’s name is not Park, of course. How do you get yourself named Mungo?
  And Thoreau, ignoring that, goes on to say that we should take on our exploration “shiploads of preserved meats to support you.” And then Thoreau asks, “Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely?”
  There is no writer whose inventiveness and verbal wit I enjoy more than Thoreau’s. He can’t help himself. He is addicted to aphorisms.

  *

  “The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.” Stendhal.

  *

  Emerson’s Essays are as quotable as Thoreau, but less whimsical, less piquant, more sober, and less astonishing:
  “These roses under my window,” Emerson writes, “make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”
  And, most famously, but with much less truth in it:
  “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried….”

  *

  I very much admire this:

  “Sooner or later, every man is a failure in his own eyes. The gap between what he had once hoped and what actually lies ahead has become a chasm, and there will be no getting across. It is at this point, however late, that life begins”.

  This truth comes from somewhere, but I’ve failed to write down where.

  Surely It must well-known. But then I google its opening sentence, and nothing comes up as a match. It’s aphoristic enough to come from C.S. Lewis. Google returns as possibilities some oddball choices that begin the same way:
  Sooner or later, everyone goes to the zoo.
  Sooner or later, everyone gets covid.

  *

  David Whyte (Maria Popova quotes him often): “Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot. There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.”

  *

  If I stop reading, if I stop living so much of my life in a chair, what then? Am I what Debra called me, “only an observer”? Of this much I’m certain, I’m not observant. I barely see, and of the little that I see, I remember even less, and can describe almost none of it.

  *

  Fragments, fragments, fragments. This is what Pessoa wrote about the trunk of writing that he left behind, and what became The Book of Disquiet. So is my life and whatever I’ve managed to do or recall. It’s fragments, moments, pieces of a story with a sharply defined beginning and end, but the middle is a muddle.

  *

  Why are the very youngest children always screaming, whether they are happy or miserable? Just to be heard, perhaps, they raise their shrill voices. Every feeling they have is at a high pitch. They are small, so they cannot contain themselves. And they want to be public. With maturity, some of us develop that desire to not be noticed that is so difficult to achieve. Others never get there, and they continue to scream.

  *

  We are beneath the weight of the heavens. We are scampering the way insects do when I lift the rock they are under. Like insects, we are comfortable in the dark, and think we are safe only in the dark.

  *

  The universe is a mirror. We see ourselves in it.
  I’m reading about Martin Luther, the provocateur of the Reformation, one of the first of the protestants, and a notorious Jew-hater. “For Luther, the universe was an asshole, and he was a shit clinging to it, waiting to let go.”

  *

  Life: Inquire now about this limited time offer.

  *

  I can hold the beast but am incapable of skinning it.

  *

  August 2017

  Visiting my mother in Oceanside.
  She says, “I’m going to stop eating, I need to end this misery.
  And then, a moment later, “But I had to have breakfast.”

  *

  Sparkman-Hillcrest, the funeral home and memorial park, has sent me a mailing. My upcoming birthday may have provoked it. Maybe sixty-six is the magic number for the marketers of cemeteries. I returned home from a visit to my 96-year-old mother to find it.

  “Dear Mr. Perkins, Sparkman-Hillcrest has been honored to provide Dallas residents and their families with legacy memorialization for over 120 years.”

  I’m being invited to make an appointment with Judy Clark to “tour the park.” Judy writes, “We can look at forested ground spaces, urn gardens, glass niches, marble crypts, private family estates and more.”

  “There will never be a better time to secure your own memorial space.”

  How about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow? That might be good.

  *

  We are encouraged to have an “untruculent” acceptance of death, though the word itself exists nowhere but in writing, just as my acceptance of death exists nowhere but in theory.

  What are the lessons from this proposed acceptance? Love deepens, life expands. That too, is only in theory. My mother not only accepts death, she has a truculent resentment of her continuing life, and she argues with a fate that afflicts her no more harshly than that it demands that she wake up again, day after day.

  Wisdom says that an acceptance of death comes with the add-on acceptance of the invitations that living offers: To not wait, to welcome experience and “push away practically nothing,” to bring your “self” to your experiences, to find a place of rest in the middle of whatever stir you find in your daily life. Also, we are advised to cultivate “don’t know mind.” I need to take a class in that. I also need its prerequisite, Alan Watts’ explanation of the Taoist philosophy of cultivating the mental discipline of “not categorizing things as gains or losses.” Vonnegut came at this advice from a different direction when he remarked that life is so confusing we can’t even tell the difference between good and bad news.

  *

  September 13

  To my daughter on her thirty-second birthday: Which of us betrayed the other? Was it me you, or you me? It hardly mattered then, and it’s too late now. Sooner or later, I suppose everything becomes too late.

  I know the answer, though. I was your father and you refused to be my daughter.

  *

  Recalling the past accurately can be more difficult than imagining the future.

  The delightful rascals who were seven and nine years old are a few breaths from their mid-thirties now. One won’t speak to me, and the other is the difficult child – needing help, refusing help, and unwilling to help himself. When I think of the difficulties in my relationships with both of them from the time of Dolores’s death until now, the same phrase floats above my head, like a speech balloon, one of those thought bubbles in the comics:
  How did it all go so wrong?
  I don’t know, nor do I think “my second marriage” is an adequate explanation. It does explain some things, but not everything. It may be better to cling to the value of not knowing and even take comfort in not trying to know.

  After all, it was paradise in the shade of the tree of knowledge. I need to leave the unpicked fruit on the branch to ripen and rot.

  *

  On Interstate 5 in California, from San Diego to Oceanside, oleanders divide northbound from southbound. Passages of the freeway are dedicated to highway patrol officers. Memorials have been made out of exits. When I make this drive, my memories are sheltered by the eucalyptus trees. The white trunks, the peeling bark, and the fingerling leaves. These trees exhale the odors of my childhood in beach towns alongside the sea.

  At the ocean, I watch two yellow-legged gulls run on the sand, big birds with red spots on their beaks. They are not a couple. The sand feels like it always does on my bare feet. I am noticing that waves have edges. Also, that happiness is available, but only as much of it as you accept, and not a grain more.

  *

  There’s no such thing as my love for Debra separated from her love for me. If hers disappears, mine will go away with it. If hers isn’t here, mine’s elsewhere as well. It’s as Neruda has written: My love feeds on her love. It’s held in her arms without leaving mine.

  *

  Staring into darkness very early this morning. I’m waiting for the daylight. And when the light comes, where does the dark go to rest until its time comes again?

  *

  I’m visiting home, seven years after my father’s death. My mother’s home, not mine. Never was, though perhaps will be some day. My mother seems indestructible. But also as fragile and temporary as my visits to her. She is clearing the sputum from her lungs. It’s the last of her sounds before she goes down for the night.

  *

  I enjoy staying up late. It’s a habit I started when my children we’re babies and noisy in the house. I wanted the quiet time to myself. These days, it’s a pattern that leaves me tired every day. I do try to catch on my sleep, sometimes, but fatigue seems to have taken up a permanent residence in my body. It dulls my senses. My eyes fail to see. My nose won’t smell anything I can name. I don’t hear much above the noise of my thoughts, and I struggle to understand or describe anything real, rough, thick or clotted.

  *

  Did I read this?
  Any attempt to marry the mundane to the infinite will be met with rejection by the mundane.

  Or this?
  There’s no heroism in the separation of doing from deciding.

  Neither of these statements is obviously true, but each of them is provocative enough to be interesting. So, less an insight than a poke.

  *

  I’m listening to the pitch of a mosquito. There’s seems to be such urgency in its rising hum. The closer it comes to my ear, the closer and closer it comes to a scream. Is this the mosquito’s blood lust? It has the insistence of lust. Or it may be an urgency due to the brevity of life, the very few hours this mosquito has left and possibly, as I raise my hand, the very few seconds.

  *

  Willa Cather described the open spaces of Nebraska in O Pioneers, which I’ve never read but read about in Maria Popova’s newsletter. This landscape was for Cather “the great fact,” and the fact of it, the burden of it and what she called the “mournfulness” of it, seemed to her to be “hardly interrupted” by the man or woman passing for a time on its surface. Cather understood that we can become embittered by this “recognition of our weakness and of our inability to make a mark on the vastness of the land and the emptiness of the sky.” Today, there is a 610-acre Willa Cather Memorial Prairie south of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

  Debra and I were in Nebraska a while back. We went to see the Sandhill Crane migration near the Platte River one February. It was bitter cold and lots of fun. In those days, Debra and I did more together, because she was willing to “follow,” which she no longer is. Perhaps she was more hopeful then of a married life together for the two of us, and she was more willing to play along, temporarily.

  *

  I am writing things down. Why? It may be because I am, as Joan Didion said in her notebooks, afflicted by the inevitability of loss. Someday I will take all these notes, and all my unrevised poems, and the never ready to be published pages, and these embarrassing, sophomoric entries, and make a funeral pyre for them. Fingers crossed, I will know when I am ready to turn them into ashes, and I will have the time to do so, before I am ready to follow them.

  *

  I’m thankful, despite the distresses, which are not too much to bear. Thankful for my life, and for the lives of others. In prayer, it is the “Modeh Ani” message, which I might do well to refashion and repeat when I rise: “I give thanks to what is living and eternal. I have slept, and now I wake, and joy has returned within me. For as long as I might live, my soul rejoices in the never-ending mystery of life.”

  *

  Turn it over and over, for everything is in it.
  This was said of Torah study, in Pirket Avot, 5:22. But it may have been said in response to someone who wished to also study Greek philosophy. It was praise of Torah, but was it not also parochial? As if to say, no need to learn anything else; everything is in Torah. That may be the position of some portion of the community today, in Israel and in Crown Heights, Flatbush, Borough Park, and Williamsburg.

  *

  Lunch alone in a restaurant.
  At the counter, because I don’t count here. There are no tables for one, but I’m only one.

  *

  The farthest distance I can go is taking the first step.

  *

  To see through the masks, to recognize the unknowable, and to say, “Hello there, Anonymous.”

  *

  Occupied, preoccupied. Not much marching forward into the future. A lot of walking backwards, into the light of those days, taking roads back to the beginning, and sensing nothing ahead.

  *

  I’m having trouble communicating.
  My syllables are stumbling blocks. They are rocks mortared with no rhythms, spasms of speech with no chance of getting through, misheard, also misunderstood, and regardless irregardless, same difference.

  *

  The same rituals, the same language, the same tunes, that’s how I worship when I congregate. Better to sit still here. The rain sounds like popcorn on the rooftop. What am I in this rain other than dry? And the round face of the clock is all mouth, saying how early it is, and also how late.

  *

  Running out of time to solve the problem of running out of time. Could the problem be solved in no time if I took the time. No. Running is the problem.

  *

  My mother no longer wants to be alive. She’s tired of it and prefers to sleep. So she says. Is she dreaming of being dust? The breath she inhales insists otherwise. Her every breath insists that she will survive, even without her permission. Her life isn’t hers to discard.

  *

  Apologize, shut your eyes, compromise, that’s wise, no surprise.

  *

  Returning to Dallas again from California. As we come down, I try to count the thousands of lights on signs and streets from the window of the airplane. They are like jewels on the breastplate of the high priest of the city. And the imaginary coordinates of time and place burst in a moment of landing.

  *

  I was taught to turn out the light when I left a room. All of us in the family did that. So, entering a room usually meant walking into the dark. Or, thinking about it another way, I was always turning the light of the past into the darkness of the future.

  *

  I waited for something to happen today. Then, tired of waiting, I went to bed in the middle of the day. I shut my eyes and painted a masterpiece, an abstract appreciation of the many stripes of silence and the even more numerous dots of boredom.

  *

  My mother has been granted long life by whoever’s hands hold the threads or wield the scissors that do the cutting. Whenever I push back on her lack of gratitude for this gift of longevity, she lets me know that there’s nothing metaphorical about being old. Old age is not a scale weighted with memories or lightened by forgetting. She isn’t clutching a coin to give to the ferryman who will take her across a dark river. She’s ninety-six. She refuses to leave the house. She lives in her bathrobe, which is a thicker cover than her bruised skin over her fragile bones. She eats her meals, she watches television, but what she seems to enjoy most is questioning life and the fate that has afflicted her with another day.

  *

  If I have ever been met by an angel, the message I received was the divine speaking without voice and without a body. The presence of the descended angel was be in the thoughts arising in my mind. The angel and the message were one and the same.

  *

  I’m too tired this evening to make the effort of smoking a pipe. I’m too tired to do the work of lighting and relighting. I don’t have the will to fill the small, blackened bowl. I’m not strong enough to take the cuts of tobacco between my thumb and forefinger, from a baggie that might have Indian Summer or Devonshire written on it. And the baggie would require unsealing, and then resealing. I would have to pinch together the two sides of a plastic track. And then there’s the weight of the silver cylinder of a Dunhill lighter. It’s too much, all this work, for the volume of smoke that rises on its own in a cloud, then dissipates, and disappears.

  *

  The family Dolores and I put together was undone by her death, then a second time by Eden, and probably for good. Eden’s dishonorable behavior, her ill will, and her lack of character can only have come through birth and from her blood. Neither Eden nor Ben remembers Dolores very much. In their ingratitude, they have left that task to me, both the remembering and the gratitude.

  *

  I am comparing the obituaries at the back of the Harvard alumni magazine with the photograph and the discoveries of the brilliant graduate assistant in the university lab portrayed on the cover. She’s a brilliant Chinese researcher. She has her doctorate in mathematics and is changing the world. The dead however are brilliantly unchanging. I can read about my classmates. There’s the standout schoolboy athlete who earned eight varsity letters in track and field and was named an All-State quarterback in Ohio, where his record for discus still stands. He’s the one who left “the College” in his sophomore year and made his way to San Francisco, where he co-founded a magazine and built its readership from zero to nearly a quarter million in three years. He also became fundraiser and advocate for a number of liberal causes, after starting a firm that raised millions for Greenpeace, PETA, the Sierra Club and the ACLU. And then there’s the dropout who suffered from multiple sclerosis for much of his adult life. When he was forced to use a wheelchair, he decided it was time to return and complete his degree, which he did. He leaves a sister, Patti. His life partner, David, had predeceased him. As far as I know, he never met the classmate who left college after his freshman year and finished his undergraduate degree at a university in northern California, then came back east and lived in Martha’s Vineyard, working as a carpenter and boat-builder. That classmate’s passion was for surfing, which led him back to the Pacific and across to Hawaii, then to the Cook Islands and finally New Zealand. There with his wife he made a farm in the hills of Hikurangi on the North Island, where they grew their own vegetables, harvested fruits and nuts from their orchard, and lived “a simple, honest, creative life off the grid.” He leaves his wife, Sakura, his mother, Emma Cabot, his sister, Cabot, and Bud, his brother. So, today, on a day when the only thing that seems worth writing is my own obituary, the alumni magazine has arrived, with its news of Harvard, that prestigious place where I was out of place when I was young. My obituary? After graduating with highest honors, I wrestled with God and with becoming human. There is no knowing whether or not I prevailed, or remained wedded to self-deception until my death.

  *

  November 2017

  Where did the day go? I asked rhetorically. I was watching the pale robe of twilight disappearing over the horizon on a Sunday in November, taking with it all the sunshine and most of the birdsong. And then later, in my room upstairs, I asked again. Where did the time go? This time, I wasn’t referring to the years in my lifetime. I wasn’t whispering last words from a hospital bed and I stared up at the ceiling tiles and the fluorescent tubes. I meant simply the forty-five minutes just past, the ones before bedtime, when I meant to read or write but instead watched TV. I was toggling from channel to channel. I found Jean Claude Van Damme and ESPN2 far more compelling than The Person and The Situation, which is the book on my desk with Malcolm Gladwell’s blurb on its cover. He called it, “my constant companion over the past ten years.” I saw the time and the time left. It was 1:31 a.m. My Sunday had gone all the way into Monday. The battery icon in the upper right of my MacBook Air was at 39%. And I am at a lot less than that. I may be at 9%.

  *

  Delete and delete again. That’s advice for improving my writing. Better to be going deeper than further. That’s advice for life. See no difference between gain and loss, or between good news and bad news—that’s another wisdom, maybe the primary one, if the goal is either serenity or indifference, two qualities that are sometimes represented by the Buddha, other times by the cat.

  *

  My childish memory of Mordecai I. Soloff:
  Rabbi Soloff provided a proof that God exists–a truth that will never be proven but was true in that moment nevertheless. We stood in the parking lot of the former union hall that housed our Sabbath school. This was Temple Israel of Westchester, our stucco synagogue where the big macher was the plumber. We were high school kids, all of us headed for college. We knew that the smart thing was to believe nothing. Certainly not in the soul, and definitely not in God. His voice rising to heaven, Rabbi Soloff grabbed the collar of my best friend Richard’s brown leather jacket, and stared right into me. “Do you think there is no difference between Richard,” he shouted, “and this coat?”

  *

  Debra and I went to India earlier this year. We went in February, so we were there over Valentine’s Day, and Debra found an engagement ring in Jaipur. We were taken by our guide, Vijay, to one of the many jewelry emporia. Her ring is a large tanzanite stone surrounded by diamonds. It seemed to a trip requiring shopping in every city we visited. I brought back a small artwork, which is now on my table upstairs. It leans back on the miniature stand holding it like an easel. No bigger than an index card, maybe three by five, it’s a picture of two blue deities, painted in watercolors on translucent camel bone. A souvenir from India, where we saw forts and palaces, and gold calligraphy, and monkeys on rooftops. Its painted border has a smudge of blue now. I did that damage when I handled it, not realizing that its colors were not fixed. I wanted to look more closely at the lover with his flute, the blue girlfriend with her basket, and in the leaves of the tree behind them, winged and feathered, a bird that could be Garuda, if the blue boy were Lord Vishnu.

  *

  Many writers who are also fathers have a desire to leave behind words of loving guidance to their daughters. Yeats, Winters, and others have done so. Their poems are sometimes a warning. There are amulets of protection against the cruelty of the world. Always gracious, their lines begin in praise of a daughter’s beauty. They admire her posture, and might comment how she will beguile the world but also attract its dangers. My story isn’t that. My daughter has chosen to find her way by leaving me behind. In the unhappy past of her imagination, I remain a jailer, while she has escaped from the prison of her childhood. Eden has her version of the past. And I suppose, like a fever, it keeps her warm. No father is an island, but sometimes he must live on one, and no matter how he might thirst for it, he knows that the sea is salt and not fit to drink.

  *

  December 2017

  Debra and I went to Santa Fe and rented a house. Her middle child, Josh, and his girlfriend Wendy stayed there with us for Christmas. I brought my black notebook and wrote in it – notes, the usual fragments.

  *

  Iconic is the name of a book store on Water Street, not far from Coyote Café.
  I spent an hour there. Surrounded by youth. This is what you have in paradise, a lot of lonely young people who believe they are exceptional and are not wrong.

  *

  Debra is out buying groceries for the house. Too much of the day is disappearing while she runs this errand. I am both wasting my day and enjoying my solitude.

  *

  The fireplace has sticks of wood in it. Through the window, spruce and cottonwood — relatives of the firewood, most of them still living. The trees might wonder whether the smoke rising over our adobe house is the bodies of their mothers or of their sons.

  The parabolas of fireplaces in our rented house, these frowning fireplaces, their mouths blackened. And the obligatory string of chiles on the front porch like shriveled tongues. The chiles are in bunches, as if they were carrots or bananas.

  *

  My mother told me that the world will be “a good place” as long as there are men like me in it. She may be the only who feels that way. What am I going to do when she’s gone? I will be blue. It will help to remember her. Also, to remind myself that there’s no blue without things that are not blue.

  *

  At what point does the past cease to be an explanation for the present?

  *

  The borders between things allow us to see both this and that. It’s easy enough to separate the oven from the kettle on top of it. But the day doing nothing and the work day are both one day, and often they are the same day.

  *

  I will give myself until noon, and then give myself the noon itself. The sun is at its height in the sky, and the sky itself is mine in its expanse. I will have all the jewels, the lapis and garnet, topaz, and the emerald of the grass.

  I have read that you only own what you have given away. Is there then no sacrifice in giving? No loss? If so, it’s impossible to tell the difference between gain and loss.

  *

  The wind is in the willows, and the piper is at the gates of dawn. This sounds very good, but I have no willows, and there never were any gates. And there is no dawn, either, just the sun and the light.

  *

  I saw names I recognized on the books in the Iconic bookstore. David Weber, for one; he was married to Carol and lived on Mercedes in Dallas. His book has Yale University Press on its spine. Marc Simmons, author of more than forty books, had a home in Cerillos. All adobe, and no electricity. When I was a guest there, I woke up at the end of the seventeenth century. And a book by John Kessell, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. His was an autographed copy.

  *

  Josh and Wendy have gone back to Colorado. Debra and I are staying an extra day or two. We’ve moved, to The Inn at Vanessie, which is a hotel attached to a piano bar. At the moment, I’ve gone back to the Iconic bookstore. In the Santa Fe I wish we were in, Debra wouldn’t be back in the hotel room scrolling through Facebook. And in my Santa Fe, my name would be on the spine of one of the books on the shelves of the Iconic on Water Street. They would also know my name in Café Pascual.

  There’s a street kid outside the bookstore. He’s making origami out of a dollar bill, which is more than I can do. “My friend,” he says, addressing me. He asks if I have a quarter to put in his blue coffee cup, which is empty.

  It’s sad to see him there, though it’s his choice to be seen.

  *

  2018

  My mother died in January on the 18th. She stopped breathing an hour or so after I arrived at the house on Delos Way in Ocean Hills. Patti was already there. She was in the back yard, while I sat in the bedroom. Mom was sleeping. I was talking to her while she was resting. Or, I thought she was. Then a moment came when she seemed even stiller. And I came to understand after a time that she was no longer breathing. We will say, “She died peacefully in her bed.” That was the truth of it. It was as she wanted, with both her children at her home. I cried when I saw her motionless. It seemed both impossible and the most real of things at the same time.

  My mother wasn’t much of a caretaker, but she did take care of herself and all plans for her burial. She left very little for me and Patti to tend to.

  She loved her brother and her sisters and her mother. We children mattered some –that’s how I saw it – and her grandchildren a little less, and she cared nothing at all for dogs or cats.

  She could be giving. Mostly, though, she gave orders. In the years of her dying we had as much in common as we ever did, and I renewed some of the ties between us. I grew closer to her than I had been since I was a young child. Whether she felt the same, I don’t know. At times these recent past years, I thought I was marching to the place she held for me in her heart. At the end, I think we enjoyed a deeper bond of shared opinion; both of us were disappointed in me.

  *

  My mother was not Naomi. I was never Ruth. Still, I can say to her, “Wherever you have gone, I will go. Sooner or later, your dust will be my dust.”

  Our two lives have been a circling of each other. Or, just one circle, with my mother at the center, and me an outbound ripple. And sometimes, unlike the concentric ripples that proceed in larger and larger circles, the further away I was from her, the smaller I was.

  *

  Making observations –
  There are guards at the gate. Reality often needs to enter incognito, to be recognized only much later.

  *

  I am chained to my children. Invisibly, emotionally, metaphorically. I am trapped by the bitterness of my daughter and by my son’s sadness. I can do nothing with them, and they want nothing or little to do with me. I never meant to be their oppressor, but both seem to have cast me in that role.

  The sages say that even when the oppressor is righteous and the oppressed wicked, God stands with the oppressed.

  *

  Death is humbling, but a humble spirit may touch a truth that is otherwise out of reach. After Dolores’s death, I needed to begin again. Impossible, however, to entirely leave her.

  I’ve been in the room with two women – Dolores and my mother – at the moment of their last breaths. Time is a riddle. It passes and also remains. Time is infinite, but it fits into the smallest spaces. It’s in the room that contains the sickbed, the body that lies face upward, the noisy ragged breaths, then the last breath, and the silence.

  *

  There will be no one to read this or to care that it was written. I do it for my satisfaction, the same as taking a breath. This sentence is spoken directly to God. This paragraph is as close as I will come to burning bush. I never see the divine face, whether I hide in the cleft of a rock or not. I don’t understand what I am doing, but I believe in it.

  What more to say about my mother?
  That her life seemed as though it would go on and on, and then it ended for no reason obvious to me, though not against her wishes. She did her exercises and took her pills each day, even while she disparaged the effort. She asked out loud why she had been given another day. In the time before memory, she was my world. Then she became the room I fled from, leaving through a door she left open for me. It was not my portion to understand her. Over the last decades of her life, our time together was intermittent; a four-day weekend, a short visit. Her death does what every death does. A question finds lodging at night in the recesses of my heart – the question of what is more believable, the unicorn, the yeti, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or that she has entered into the world to come.

  *

  Statements that are just as true as they are false:
  Herman Hesse: When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity, the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.

  *

  I was told that there’s a place open on an October trip to Russia – seventeen hours on an airplane for the experience of staying in the Four Seasons in Moscow and the Four Seasons in St. Petersburg. There is luxury here in Dallas; so, no reason to go anywhere to find it.

  *

  When I’m reading, I share the language of others. Their expressions come through the scrim of my sensibility. Their words bound together carry me like a raft along the currents of the evening.

  *

  Listening means as much to me as seeing. What I see is undifferentiated, or hidden in the puzzle of the world. But I can distinctly hear the cries of birds and the squirrels that are racing up the branches. I am myopic and live in shadows but can hear to a far distance.

  *

  Everything must go – sign on the window of the Thomasville Furniture store in Southlake. Thomasville has declared bankruptcy. It is going out of business, escaping debt, either starting over or ceasing entirely. This could be the motto for any of us: Everything must go. In the various directions that this phrase takes me, all of them are the right direction. They all lead to the truth: everything must go.

  *

  Jimmy Dunne, who rambles, always at some point in his ramble says, “Long story short.” But it’s too late for that, isn’t it? I like the phrase long story short. That, too, is life itself.

  *

  I read this somewhere, or I think I did:
  There are questions to which we have to say, be quiet, be still, stop asking. The quiet, the stillness, that is the answer.

  *

  When I see the name Mark Perkins, it seems to be the name of a character, not my name, and, when I write it, not the author’s, either. There’s a distance between Mark Perkins and me. Could it be because someone else gave me that name?

  *

  Also, a thought about something I read:
  What if I were Isaac? My father was all too ready to sacrifice me, and on the altar of his hallucination. I don’t know. I suppose I never got over it. And my mother had nothing to say about it. No opinion, or none expressed. The one I loved was the mother of my half-brother, because she understood the needs of the cast aside, and how in the shadow of love lost, love might still be found elsewhere.

  *

  I read this:
  Compatibility is one of the achievements of love, not its precondition; a triumph, and maybe the most difficult.

  And this:
  We have learned to be kind to pets and to children, because we know they mean nothing malicious; we would be always kind if we recognized the child in each other, the puppy who is depending on us.

  (Dolores had that quality of understanding and generous judgment. For example, when I thought my mother was indifferent, Dolores guided me. Dolores thought my mother was shy, which she was, though it was not a quality that I had seen underneath the more negative judgments I made about her.

  *

  Gwendolyn Brooks introduces James Baldwin at an event in Washington, D.C., as “a human being being human.”

  *

  Adapted from reading:
  I need to scrape off the mud. I need to uncover and to be uncovered. If I can look into myself more deeply, and sift through the embers to find whatever sparks are there, and breathe lovingly on them, I might be able to make a flame. And in whatever time remains, I could live in the warmth of that fire.

  *

  I can imitate, adapt, even run up to the edge of copying, but I cannot say what I am unable to see.

  I have the talent to create. If also need to see, like God, that it is good.

  *

  Bryology. I saw this word, so I looked it up. It’s the study of mosses and liverworts.

  This morning I looked up at the bark of my trees. Live oaks, red oaks, sycamores, or what I think are sycamores. I can hear the birds but can’t see them. They must be there, up among the branches, the birds and their waffled nests.

  *

  We are physical. We have our limitations.
  There are rivers we won’t cross, and promised lands we can never enter.

  *

  If we are lucky, we will have a year in which we do things we will never do again. That usually happens before we are twenty-five, more often when we are twenty or twenty-one. We might have just graduated from school, or just dropped out. We are between what was before and whatever is coming next. And whatever comes next is likely to last a very long time, turning into our routine. We know that, but we don’t believe it at the time. Maybe in that year we do something remarkable, or it could be we do nothing at all. We feel excitement, or we have depression. We think of it later with longing, or with disgust. Either way, we will think about it for the rest of our lives.

  *

  The middle of the day has arrived before I have even noticed that it was morning. There’s nothing that needs to be done today, other than the dishes in the sink, the only evidence I have that there was a night before. I’m awake enough to finally hear the birdsong that must have been there for hours. The arrow of the day is flying forward, one moment hard to distinguish from the next.

  *

  Someone wrote about “that desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love,” but love is a different desert altogether. In that desert, there was a bush that burned but was not consumed.

  *

  So often when I am talking to Debra, it is as if I am using language “like a traveler, groping for a word that will be understood.” When I travel and try to communicate, sometimes “I delight the landsman, who is pleased with my respect for the circumstances of his birth.” Other times, I am dismissed as a tourist and an annoyance.

  *

  I was reading this:
  Loss changes the story we tell ourselves, as does time. We are different than we were before. What was lost is revealed when we see more clearly who we were then, though we still see less clearly who we are now.

  February 2018

  I took Debra to Mexico to see the monarch butterflies in the forest of Morelia. She’s wary, in Mexico. She’s distrustful of any darker skin. In Mexico City we stay in Las Alcobas, where Debra keeps herself in the room with her laptop, for the sake of Facebook, or for her law practice business. So I walk around the beautiful neighborhood by myself. The city, or the neighborhood we are in, is magical, sophisticated, and romantic. She’s having none of it, though, other than wanting dinner.

  In the shop windows, hammered copper cookware — cobre mantillado.

  *

  Comparing the endlessness of speaking to the emptiness of silence. Silence is echo and imagination. Speech is a sandpaper that smooths away definition. It is as constant in my ear as the traffic from the street. Silence is a comfort, a comfortable silence, which is neither warm nor cold.

  *

  Patzcuaro, Michoacan – after the butterflies –
  We stayed in Patzcuaro toward the end of our trip, in a beautiful hotel, where Diego (formerly Didier) lives with Gemma. He’s Didier Dorval, a French photographer, married to a Mexican girl. Both are artists and collectors, and they’ve transformed Casa de la Real Aduana into a luxury hotel in Michoacan. They must have been rich to start with, though how rich you need to be to be wealthy in Patzcuaro I don’t know. Gemma and Diego speak French but move easily between English and Spanish. He is a talker. We visit, and an hour later he has not stopped talking. Luckily, they have Alma, who takes care of the grounds and the guests. And there’s a dog, too. It’s a mastiff, huge and gentle, and named Akko after the city in Israel.

  *

  Can I see my mother and father as others saw them, rather than as I did, through the fog of emotion and judgment? I doubt I can do it. I was never able to.

  Richard Ford: “Maybe this is typical of our lives with our parents – a feeling that some goal should be reached, and a recognition of what that goal inevitably is, and then returning attention to what’s here and present today. To what’s only here.”

  I don’t know what else I could have done, what else I was supposed to do, in the time I had with each of them – how the time was supposed to pass, other than how it did.

  When we were together, we were constricted, tied down by something unnamed; fear, I suppose, either of misunderstanding, or of the opposite.

  *

  I am on a carousel ride. Yes, there’s the sensation of getting somewhere, but in fact all I’m doing is circling.

  *

  I am a ghost in the room I reside in. The furniture will survive me. Even the ashtray will.

  *

  Memory is a continuing act of creation. Memory is a Medusa, making the moving world stand still – fatally still.

  *

  I’m willing to speak when no one is listening. My words are as warm as sunshine. What is stopping me from sharing them? The resistance comes from somewhere, though I have never been able to find its origins.

  Is it ability I lack, or only stamina and enough time?

  *

  I read that there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. This must be the wisdom of a scriptwriter.
  I don’t intend to follow a script, I have no practice doing so, not in life, certainly.

  *

  Words like flecks of gold – I am spending a quiet morning sifting for them, shaking the mud and bits of rocks in a river of language, letting the debris fall, the abstraction and distraction. I am weighing this work in hours a day.

  *

  I found an excerpt from a letter sent by James Howell in 1636 to his friend Sir Thomas Hawk, describing a night out with Ben Jonson. Howell was the first to write an epistolary novel. He also compiled a six-language dictionary and was the author of a book of proverbs that contains the very first known instance of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. In his letter, he commented on the offensiveness of Jonson’s bragging. “Be a man’s breath ever so sweet,” Howell wrote, “yet it makes one’s praise stink if he makes his own mouth the conduit-pipe of it.”

  *

  Seneca: “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”

  Chamfort: “A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

  Neither of the above writers seem to have very high expectations for what might happen to him in life. Perhaps this is required for balance:

  Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of so many too things that I think we should all be as happy as kings.”

  The first time I heard the Stevenson line, I was in Robert Fitzgerald’s class. He quoted it. I don’t remember why. Maybe apropos of nothing.

  (Apropos? It comes from the French, a propos de – meaning, with respect to. Our of respect for the French language, you don’t pronounce the “s” at the end.)

  *

  The rain sounds like the wind tonight, rising and rushing.

  For what good reason are we ashamed of being old? Is it the ugliness of our bodies, the folds of our flesh, the crepe revelations of our skin, and the pouches under our eyes? The hair that sprouts in my ears and my nostrils reminds me that someday my mouth will be stopped with dirt. I know old age as well as I know the islands of brown on the back of my hands.

  *

  If it were in the cards to be married to Debra, we would be by now. We may need to save the phrase together forever for the headstones and live apart until we are buried. But even that will not come to pass. Debra wants to be cremated, then poured into an urn, and placed on her daughter’s mantel, alongside the ashes of the dogs she has owned. Daughter, dogs – I don’t belong on that mantel and wouldn’t be welcome there anyway. Which is exactly why we are not married.

  *

  “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” Emerson

  For me, fatherhood was an awkward skate. My stumbling was obvious. I fell and fell again. But the reactions of my daughter and my son? Those belong to them.

  What I gave Eden, she threw away – no returns on that deposit. Ben is a different story. There’s a mystery in our love, and I can never alter certain components of it – sadness, silence, worry. I know he’ll mourn me when I die. For Eden, it will be, at the most, just news, if that. When she hears of it, if she does, she will surely refuse to grieve. And it won’t be necessary. I’ve done enough grieving already in her name.

  *

  We were created to join heaven and earth, to know all we can and to praise what we will never know. We are Adam in the Garden before the Fall, hungry, and with a taste for fruit.

  *

  By the time my mother died I had become the son she wanted, in tears at her bedside. She asked that Eden come to the funeral, despite knowing that my daughter doesn’t speak to me and never sees me. My tears were for both of them – the child lost though living, the mother lost to death.

  *

  I’ve made the bed and now must lie in it; or, on top of it, on the white spread I bought with Pam in Paris, on our honeymoon in 2001. I’ve read that honeymoon is Babylonian, from the honey-based alcohol consumed for a lunar month in celebration of a marriage in Nineveh. For me and Pam, it was a new century and a new marriage. I lived through the end of one, but did not do so well with the end of the other. In the shop in Paris, we were told that the bedspread had been handcrafted in the south of France. We were not told it would be impossible to clean. Neither dirt nor memories will come out of it easily.

  *

  Thinking of Eden still. There’s a last day coming, and on that day it will have been years since we’ve spoken to each other. On that day, too, there won’t be anything further to say, not even goodbye.

  *

  March 12, 2018

  Nokie Edwards died today in Yuma, Arizona. It’s another nail in the coffin of my California boyhood. Nokie was lead guitarist for the Ventures, though on “Walk, Don’t Run,” Nokie played bass. I learned the thumping intro, the first and fourth fingers of my left hand sliding up and then down the fourth and fifth strings. I would guess that “Walk, Don’t Run” was the Ventures’ greatest hit. When I was a teen, I was all about running. A black, blind energy. I was sure the only direction worth going was away, leaving behind the beach towns and the surf. It never occurred to me that I would ever want to walk it back.

  *

  Kick at a mound of time, moments pour out of it like ants. November 13, 1951. July 13, 1997. January 18, 2018. My mother died, Spring began. Nothing divides one period of waiting from the next. Eternity can be found in the procession of days, each unique, though most of them difficult to tell apart; infinite in their divisibility, and all one fabric.

  I’ve read that you have to be empty to be ready to receive. But, like most people, I am full of whatever is spilling out of me.

  *

  I make assumptions and must do so. I meet a stranger. If his first name’s William, his last name is likely not Shakespeare.

  *

  Without meter or rhyme, verses are sentences.

  *

  Sacrifice makes sacred. Give something up, and come closer.

  There’s a charity drive going on through Temple Emanu-El. I’ve been encouraged to participate and have received instructions: Items can be dropped off at the front desk. Backpacks for children, bath mats, bed pillows, a bicycle for an adult (with lock and helmet please), a chest of drawers. There are refugee families who need gift cards to Walmart and a rice cooker. No matter where they are from, people need toiletries.

  *

  No light without dark. Days break. Broken, they become lighter, then lighter still, until every wonder is visible. And later, they become darker. Darker and darker, at first and at last. Any lesson in this? Pay attention, see what you can while you can.

  *

  As I get older it becomes clearer how unexceptional I am. I did what everyone does, marrying for richer or poorer, dying sooner or later, and using the same thirty or so words to repeat myself.

  *

  I have nothing to say tonight, but I still have time to write. If there’s no breath in these words, this is a defect of their birth. Midnight was their mother. The father is unknown.

  *

  Staying quiet can be very difficult. It’s an imitation of eternity. As a response to grief, or a reaction to my mother’s death, it’s a respected silence. It’s like holding my breath, which I used to enjoy doing under water as a way of testing myself. I was not testing my lung capacity as much as my will to persevere. That’s a test that should only be taken when you are close to the surface. If not, even if you are the greatest of all time, when you do open your mouth, your time could be up.

  *

  Flying home.
  On the plane, I expect an announcement from the pilot on my return to Dallas from California. After sunset, the night is above me and below me as well. I see the grid of lights in my home city. My carry-on items are safely stowed, my tray table is in its full upright position. I’ve read that the soul “returns home” when life ends. But when the time comes, will my soul announce that it is beginning its descent?

  No matter what I do, someone will be cleaning up after me. They will have to throw out the things I never needed but fear I might need some day. I haven’t brought myself to throw them away. So many things – and I paid for them.

  The more the plane descends, the lower I get, the clearer things become, the less abstract. What was only geometry a few minutes before turns into a house or a warehouse, the movement on an illuminated line becomes a moving van on a road at night.

  *

  It’s late, and I’m sleepy. My lipids are back from the lab, with a warning about the count of triglycerides, and all the other measures that prefigure who might awake tomorrow on the other shore. Time to go to bed now.

  *

  Failure comes in so many guises. There is the failure of the moon to come from behind the cloud, the tobacco that fails to stay lit in the bowl of a pipe, a cookie’s failure to stay crisp after dipping it into a cup of hot tea. Surely there is insight in the thought that “every man judges himself a failure sooner or later.” The manager failed to become a doctor, and the doctor is no businessman. Then there’s the boy with no ambition, who failed to try. That was the starkest of the failures, unless that was his wisdom.

  *

  Whatever made me think that taking a surfing lesson in Oceanside at my age was a good idea? I had neither the strength in my arms or the balance in my legs to do it. And yet it looks so appealing. And it’s the iconic skill of my youth in Southern California. Apparently the sands of the California beaches have already passed through the hourglass.

  Speaking of strength and balance – I hardly have enough of both to take fifteen minutes a day practicing my writing. And I’m not sure I have the skill, either, however much I want to call myself a writer. Why write? Maybe for the same reason as a wish to surf – to stand up on the rushing waves of the day. Almost the same, a rider or a writer.

  To call myself a writer, to become a writer, to be a writer.

  *

  After seeing a documentary about William Burroughs:
  I can understand why a number of the more adventurous of the Beats, some under the influence of botanicals, or intoxicated by the spiced air of Tangiers, chose to do their writing with words torn out of printed materials. They pieced their poetry together somewhat randomly. It was satisfying to make a meal out of leftovers, and to throw off the yoke of making sense. It was a sensibility. They could also rationalize it. After all, nobody creates his own words. Whatever we have to say, we go look for it, sometimes in the babbling brook, sometimes in the babble of other people’s sentences in the river of language.

  *
  Admiring a writer, but not naming him:
  He’s gifted. His command of vocabulary is so sure. His words are unusual enough to be fresh and yet plain enough that anyone can understand. Then there’s the cleverness of his ideas, which are uncommon, but adjacent to a commonplace – the passing or the permanence of love, the inevitability of death, a longing for immortality, trees, rivers, mountains, the darkness of night and the light of day. He expresses himself with a smile and an unexpected phrase that are entirely natural but uncommonly intelligent. The work is easygoing. So much so that it seems not to be written work, but as if it were spoken. It’s as if paragraphs came out of his mouth with no hesitation, rather than as a written product of the labor of days and his mastery over years.

  *

  Repeating, from something I read – altered, but only slightly:
  Sooner or later, every man is a failure in his own eyes. The space between what he had hoped and what actually lies ahead becomes a chasm and there will be no getting across.
  There may be a promised land, but he will never enter it.

  This might almost be my mantra, although I thought a mantra was not supposed to be unintelligible.

  It seems to keenly true. Other than the “every man”–I don’t know how true that is.

  *

  Ubi sunt qui antes nos fuerent

  I have come back to California. Of course I would be thinking of those who were here before me, my father and mother. While they were living, they could not command me to return, but their deaths have brought me back. I suppose I was never fully away. However distant, I was always on intimate terms with the ocean, the eucalyptus, the stucco, and the freeways. My father didn’t die here, in this house on Delos Way in Ocean Hills. He died in someone else’s house. I came after I heard the news, to be near his body. My mother had the better death that she wanted. She fell asleep and didn’t wake, and I was there. She was breathing hard as I sat by her bed listening, first to the breaths and then to the silence. On one of my last visits to Ocean Hills, she had said to me, “As long as there are men like you, the world will be a good place.” Those were among her last words to me. It was something I needed to hear, which was I suppose the reason she needed to say it.

  *

  It truly is as Bernard Shaw said it was: Life, never ceasing to be funny though we are dying, and still serious, even when we are laughing.

  *

  What Montaigne said he would answer if he were asked the reason why a friend was his friend: “Because it was he, because it was I.”

  I’m grateful for my oldest, longest lasting friends – the two Richards, in Southern California. Though I think we were friends simply because we were teenagers together. If asked why we three have stayed friends, I might give Montaigne’s answer.

  *

  What the daily email from Chabad.org encourages me to conside:

  “I can hear in my breathing the echo of the breath of my holy mothers and fathers, what they said and what they sang.”

  It seems far-fetched – indeed, so out of reach I would have to reach back to a life I cannot imagine in order to find it.

  *

  From my reading:

  What am I but a bit of the whole, a grain in the field, a footprint and even less than that.

  It is time to believe in the happiness that arises out of all the things I no longer need.

  *

  September 2018

  Revisiting a past wisdom: The smaller I become, the more room I leave in my life for something new. I can hope for that. I was always struck by the quote from Lampedusa, finche c’e morte c’e speranza. It’s an aphorism I first read as meaning there’s hope until death – as long as you’re alive, you can always hope. Now I understand it, though I know no Italian at all, in a different way – there’s hope as long as there’s death. An end to troubles.

  *

  From a Chabad email: Our thoughts are up in the clouds, but when we dance together, our feet are on the ground.

  I persist in loving Ben, however difficult he is for me to hear or to help. We belong to each other in spite of our differences. This is the love for better and for worse, for richer, for poorer, and until death, although no vows were ever exchanged. I love him with the weight of what often seems to be an unwanted love — whether he “deserves it,” or not. He can carry it all his days, lightly or not.

  Reread this as well: The only thing you own completely is what you can give away. True, or true enough.

  What is given seems unimportant. How it is given matters more.

  *

  A glass of wine. This pinot from the Russian River Valley has the odor of sour grapes. It is a long way from the rush of waters over stones.

  Wally wags his tail. He is sending me a message, but I’m not interested in receiving it.

  *

  What is the miracle I don’t see today, even though it is happening right under my nose.

  The trees in the back yard have no questions. They have never once asked what is the plan. The leaves are their only thoughts. If the white egrets or the blue herons walking in the bed of the creek ever wonder why are we here, they keep it to themselves. Saying nothing, they are wholly disinterested in the mysteries. Maybe they are distracted. With untroubled hearts, they arise and take to the air. They have sensed my presence and are not wanting my company.

  *

  I had my curiosity the day I was born. Probably even earlier, when I was kicking in the womb.

  *

  Satisfaction is on the dark side of the moon; it’s as mythical as the unicorn. I’ve looked in the clouds, on the ground, to the polluted, the pure, the sacred and profane, to dreams, to judgment. I’ve had my lifetime. No telling, though, what it meant.

  *

  In California I always notice the same plants. The ice plants and the oleanders, and the peeling bark of a eucalyptus. There are others, but I can’t name them. I can hardly see what I can’t name.

  On the drive north from the airport in San Diego to Oceanside, walls of oleander on the medians divide the highways. The peeling bark on a tall eucalyptus seems to peel away the time since I was last here. There are warm blooms on the ice plants. The weather is as temperate and uneventful as my childhood. For all the changes that time brings, this landscape is the same. Vegetable life, reborn year after year. The Pacific thinks so, too. It isn’t these hillsides that say you can’t go home again.

  *

  What’s it like being a dog, to hear from one meal to the next your yapping human with his incessant come, sit, stay. It must be provocative. It might compel a growl, or some other way of saying, hey, enough, leave me alone!
  I rarely ask a dog to do anything.

  *

  You shall be holy, for I am holy
  You shall be separate, for I am separate

  Separate, yes, and with mysterious powers, passion, and conviction. It could be called soul. How to define it? As substance, but never confined by form.

  *

  The moth I discovered under a bookcase must have been there a very long time. It must have forgotten how it ever got inside the house as it starved to death. Down to its last flutter, it might even have forgotten how to dream of flowers. No ants carried off bits of its wings. Stiff and papery, it remained perfectly still, spread open like two pages of one of the dozens of books on the shelves above it, a popular mystery, but with blank pages, and looking as if nothing kept it from flying other than death.

  *

  I was a learner on my own time when I went to live in Berkeley for months, the year I took a break from my classes at Harvard. I read Baudelaire and translated a poem or two. I audited Stanley Fish, who gave me a printer’s copy of his latest work, not yet published. It couldn’t have been Surprised by Sin, since that was published five or six years earlier. I snuck into Thom Gunn’s poetry class, where he dismissed the critic Yvor Winters, the critic who championed him, but praised Winters’ poetry, which he admired. I lived on Ward Street. The apartment on Ward was close to People’s Park. Now I’m closest to the end of my life, though I can tell myself it’s just the end of the middle. Anyway, most of my learning is done. What’s ahead is dabbling. Back in Berkeley, I translated the Baudelaire poem that begins Je suis le pipe d’un auteur. Will my pipe smoking, which I started at Harvard, give me mouth cancer? I don’t know, and I can say I don’t care, but I will care, for the sake of the months, the extra year or years, taken from me. When the time comes, I will desperately want that extra time, if only to smile at smiling death, both of us with stained teeth.

  *

  In the shapes of the clouds, the world has a way of saying what cannot be said. The wrinkled skin of the earth is whiskered with stubble at Eternal Hills, the cemetery where both my parents are buried. It’s off 78, east of the Pacific. They aren’t under a tree, but they are near one. I usually don’t visit, but I did my last time in Southern California. Their house on Delos Way – half mine, now — is in Oceanside, at least according to the Post Office. Eternal Hills is in Carlsbad, which is the more stylish of the two beach towns. I walked in a straight line over to where both their graves were in the grass. Tracing a more corkscrew path, a pair of squirrels chased each other around a tree trunk, continuing with a leap from the trunk to a branch, then from branch to bending branch. There were wasps retreating to their corners. Where my parents’ bodies are buried, all the markers are level, flush grey stepping stones on the mown lawn. Two jays, blind to the born and died, the beloved and forever in our memory, the flowers and the flags, kept a bird’s eye view on the surroundings.

  *

  I’m using a seed packet as a bookmark in my Wislawa Symborska Poems New and Collected paperback, which I bought at Masolit, a bookstore in Krakow. That was in 2016, the year Debra and I separated. Among my adventures that year: a trip to Poland and the Czech Republic with a group from Temple Emanu-El. The seed packet bookmark holds Jewels of Opar. I prefer the formal name, Talinum Paniculatum. Part shade to sun, care free – so the package enthuses. Easy to grow, it says. Tough but delicate, heat and drought tolerant, with a beauty that works almost anywhere, makes a beautiful border; those are the promises, though I am only using the seed packet to keep my place between pages 8 and 9.

  *

  As long as there are minutes before midnight, there’s a hope for the calendar day that I will completely wake up. Most days I give up too soon, switching the radio of my consciousness from station to station, turning the dial through the static, landing on clarity only from time to time. Sometimes I will find a compelling thought, and it’s like the tune that I recognize from its first few notes, the phrase brown-eyed, a riff, or a familiar chord. Most of my minutes are like the hours in dreams. When the day’s over, my fuzzy memories are of desks, pages, eyeglasses, and a money clip. Today, though, I noticed something: a cedar waxwing was outside my window, with a red berry in its beak, probably stolen from one of my yaupon hollies. Also today, I thought of an odd aspect of my excuse-making for not doing this or that – first there were the years when I thought, “I am too young,” and now I am in the years when I often think, “I am too old.”
  I’m never the right age to take advantage of my advantages.

  *

  What ability do I have to react to the unexpected? Unexpected, like the water bug that stops in its tracks on the kitchen counter when the light is suddenly switched on. It’s unexpected by me, I’m unexpected by it, and both of us are frozen for a moment by the surprise. I keep my eye on it. I reach for the fly swatter I keep in a kitchen closet. I know the water bug on my counter isn’t truly a water bug. It’s a big brown cockroach. The true water bug is an aquatic insect that seems to skate across the surface of a pond, though what it actually does is use its legs as paddles. But I call my kitchen counter roach a water bug anyway. And I’m not the only one that does so. I can google it. How to Get Rid of Waterbugs has over 600,000 views in the last eleven days. This must be the season for them. And I must be one of many who are thinking about water bugs at one in the morning. The bug on the counter has disappeared in the time it takes me to get my hands on the fly swatter. I go to bed. I should be sleeping under a light sheet, twenty feet from the bathroom sink where I surprised another water bug, a smaller one but just as fast, earlier tonight when I turned on a light. That one got away, too. For all I know, it’s now enjoying the darkness that has returned, the darkness that it was expecting.

  *

  We can’t avoid stepping in shit, no matter what path we follow.

  Therefore I decided this morning to run in place, which is a place as good as any.

  Though I may conclude that I am going nowhere, I might also accept that it this is the place where I belong. I can be comforted by the fact that everyone goes there eventually.

  *

  I’m happy to have a table, so that everything in my life isn’t a verb – there’s the pen, the pipe, a letter opener. Glad, also, that there are doors, so that most things – clouds, fish, a billboard –happen outside.

  *

  Reading (and adapting) a passage from David Whyte. I’ve never heard of him, but Maria Popova likes to quote him in her Brainpickings e-newsletter:

  “When I’m advised to let go, but cannot, because I know that the truest kind of love is unrequited love, and all love is unrequited eventually – then I can hope that I’m ready to settle down with the souvenir of my memories.”

  *

  To get where I wanted to go, a map may have been required.

  *

  Quoting:
  “A line that in its perfection will vibrate like the string that touches birth at one end and eternity at the other.”

  *

  I’m not required to understand the threats posed by the times I live in. I’m not required to have anything to say, much less something of interest.

  *

  Reading something over and over, to the point of almost memorizing it. Words are taken in, some of them to come out of my mouth later, some staying in the meditations of my heart.

  *

  Dreams –
  In the hours before waking, there are no life vests under the bed, and I am free to move about the universe.

  *

  Dragonflies – the shimmer and flitting of a fly, with a drop of the blood of a dragon.

  *

  How very little I know. And how much less do I have the words for what I do know. I needed the dictionaries my mother bought me as a gift for my college graduation. It’s obvious how little I have used them, the two volume OED, in the forty-six years gone by. Forty-six years! I can hear in that phrase an earlier echo. It’s Mr. Kordish, a short man with curly grey hair, standing at the head of our classroom at Westchester High School and crying out with great drama, “Ten years!”—a phrase from Eugenie Grandet.

  *

  When I’m on the patio of the house in Ocean Hills, I write in my unreadable “longhand.” I wonder where that word came from? It’s ordinary handwriting, as opposed to shorthand, so it must have originated in a secretarial school, to distinguish one request (“Take this down in shorthand, please!”) from another. I only use longhand to record the shortest of journal entries, or potential lines for poems. I look up at the white plaster walls and the tiles on the roofs of the neighbors’ houses. I’m not writing much. The words I’m writing down are far fewer than the fronds on a single palm tree.

  *

  First, throw away at fifteen years old the inheritance of many generations. Then, try to retrieve it at sixty or seventy years old. But it is impossible. You cannot take ownership as an adult of what you failed to take in as a child.

  *

  Rabbi Yishmael in a citation by Rashi on Exodus 13:18 stated that four-fifths of the people enslaved in Egypt refused to leave. They never came to Sinai. They never became part of the chosen people, choosing instead to stay in Egypt.

  *

  Death in battle, death with honor, death with dignity, that’s a Roman notion. Controlling how you die is dignified. But it’s half a step from there to glorifying suicide. Better to live with dignity than dying with it.

  My mother wanted to control her pain, or the possibility of pain. Also, the location of her death. Not the timing, though.

  And what about her attitude? Meaning, her readiness.

  Her willingness to die didn’t seem to be something she controlled. Rather, it was in control of her, as a depression might be, or any other blue mood.

  She had given up on something, but what it was I’m not sure. It manifested in the loss of having a path she wanted to be on, or a sense of direction – other than that direction all of us are going, which is down.

  *

  Reading some in James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street, from 1972. Baldwin saw the symptoms of a bottomless “emotional poverty” in American life, writing that “the terror of human life, of human touch” was so deep that no American could make any connection between his public and private life. He must have experienced an intense loneliness himself to have made this diagnosis. A gay black man, exceptionally brilliant, such a talented writer, preaching and acclaimed.

  *

  Wisdom, eternal truths, divinity:
  We cannot believe it is part of us. In truth, we are part of it.

  *

  Reading this –
  “We are locked in prisons of our own making.”
  Of course we are. How could it be otherwise? This perfectly describes the unhappiness I cannot seem to be rid of, in my fruitless efforts to have Ben follow a path he is unwilling to be on, or in my daydream of being a “real writer,” or in the fantasies of returning to relationships that are past the point of no return. “Camus wrote about those who prefer their principles over their happiness. They refuse to be happy, he wrote, outside the conditions that they have attached to their happiness.”
  What are my principles? What are the preferences that are preventing me from leading a happy life? What conditions am I attaching or requiring? Another word for these principles, preferences, and conditions: illusions.

  *

  Saturday, a day of rest, but also of boredom and loneliness. Ben still lives with me. He seems to have given up on the world. Perhaps that is because, as he sees it, the world showed no interest in him. I wonder how will he live into old age. His sister Eden is only a few miles away. She has a share in his childhood, but will claim none of it. She denies it. I can hear the rattle of Ben’s breath this morning. Weighted down by his flesh, it’s a labor for him to breathe. He’s added pound after pound. He spends the morning sleeping, but probably not dreaming. His sleep is a well, his heart is an empty sky. All afternoon his longing will be unchanging and as far away as a horizon.

  *

  My mother died this winter in California. Her death, January 18, stamped a date on the timeless, unchanging weather there. She had a fatigue that no night’s rest could refresh, and she fell into the sleep she had been calling for. The last months, when it seemed as though nothing would ever change, her frailty turned to stone. She had some trouble sleeping, so she used lorazepam. She’s sleeping through the night now.

  *

  The rose bush has died in its container. No more blooms. It drapes over the sides, its thin brown arms reaching out and full of thorns. Only the thorns have retained a kind of vitality; they are still as sharp as they were in life.

  *

  That there is anything at all, this miracle of the living, it’s a greater puzzle than the mystery of the dead. The liveliness of surfaces, like the grass growing on the grave. It’s astonishing. The depth of what it reveals, sitting atop what is hidden.

  *

  I was never a beautiful boy. Apparently I was an ugly one. That’s what my father told me. My mother had no comment. She came up with her own reasons for her disappointment in me, which alternated with her love. My mother was a reader. I was a writer who never wrote to her. I made money, but she took no pleasure in spending. If I was her mirror, what was I to my father? A book he had half written, but never bothered to read. My father’s virtues were simplicity and disinterest. The modesty of his desires, the veils of his silences, the room he left for others to be themselves. His vices? Unpredictable moods. Anger, sometimes. But his good humor was also in evidence. For example, the time he wanted his son-in-law, who continued dropping by the house on Delos years after the marriage to my sister ended, to shorten one of his visits. He asked him, “How do you say adios in Spanish?”

  *

  I have two children. The three of us are unhappy with ourselves and uncomfortable with each other. No surprise that the shiny tricycle of our family was unable to go the distance.

  *

  Difficult to say what you mean. Even harder to know what that is.

  *

  I’ve written down the phrase “Mourners, not mirrors, and instead of eyes, blinding pride.” I like the sound of it; not sure what it means though.

  *

  I re-read one of George Open poems today. I have his book Seascape: Needle’s Eye on the bookshelf that runs the length of my hallway. This book of his, a very slender paperback, was published by the Sumac Press. “Had it been water,” he wrote in one of the poems. He probably delighted in the tense of the language, as real for him as the car, the lake and the stars that he mentioned in other lines.

  I spent an afternoon with George Oppen and his wife, Mary, at their apartment in San Francisco. We sat at the kitchen table. I had come there with George Oppen’s niece, Mari – a girl I must have met her in a class I was auditing at UC Berkeley in the Fall of 1972 or Spring of 1973, the year I didn’t return to Harvard. But at Harvard, in a poetry class, Robert Fitzgerald had distributed a copy of one of Oppen’s poems, so I had heard of him and wanted to meet him. He seemed pleased that I knew his work. Flattered, maybe.

  *

  There are so many others in the world, no wonder it’s hard to find yourself.
  So much straw you might make your bed in.
  So much in which to be lost like the proverbial needle.
  And also, too much to read. It’s endless, the things that are written by others.
  To hear yourself, to even see yourself, you have to shut your eyes and put your hands over your ears.

  *

  I traveled this week on an airplane, where I was forced to become the audience for the chattering in the row behind me. Other people’s high energy is very tiresome. Their enthusiasms are distractions. Their conversations are like auditions from a script, and the performances are dull. Same with mine, all the way down. I brought with me a book that I had purchased in Moscow. It’s was a blue paperback of poems by Anna Akhmatova. It could not distract me. Her renown is evocative, but her poems say very little to me; the lines are as songless in translation as the “h” in her last name.

  *

  In the air from Dallas to San Diego.
  I don’t have heroes anymore.
  I don’t want to be anyone else.
  When I go back to Southern California, I’m no longer going home.
  The place that is no longer belongs to the time that was.

  *

  In my twenties, I traveled and dreamed about “my life,” as is there was such a thing, somewhere “out there.” And I thought that everything I saw would become part of my story; every new place was another doorway to that life ahead of me. I would be the person who had gone to Harvard, or who had live in Paris. Now when I travel, I’m more likely to see things clearly. The present is not part of some imaginary future. It’s simply the present. It’s not without consolations. Destinations no longer need to be meaningful. And I no longer need to have “potential.” My life is where I came from, and it’s where I am, but it’s not where I’m going.

  *

  Fyodor Dostoyevski – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch – “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he doesn’t know he’s in prison.”

  *

  Day after day, I write down sentences, without any link in what I’m writing from one day to the next.

  Are all these bits of colored glass forming a mosaic?

  A hundred phrases, collected in a net, as if these syllables were a language of butterflies.

  Different analogy:

  Put a line into a river of words, and be patient. Surely you will catch something. Or, hold a pan in the stream, and sift. Gold will be found, though it might be difficult to know it even after you find it.

  *

  It is recommended that I meditate on the Buddha’s Five Remembrances and face the reality of life. These are the five: I will grow old. There is no escape from death. This body will know sickness. Everything and everyone changes. All I have are my actions. This comes from the author of Mindfulness Yoga, who writes the column Guided Meditation.

  This brings to mind one of those “standardized test” questions that lists five items and then asks, “Which one doesn’t fit?” I would be vacillating between “This body will know sickness” and “All I have are my actions” before blackening the lozenge with my number two pencil to indicate “All I have are my actions.”

  *

  Ingredients, measured portions, time. Stir occasionally, then add, whisking constantly until combined, bring to a boil, reduce the heat. Reduce the heat again. Season to taste with memories. For a moment, then for years. Try other recipes.

  *

  What the well-to-do do well: We render the unpleasant invisible. What we look away from disappears. It’s there, but unseen, and therefore gone.

  Except in our personal lives. There, nothing can be disguised. I can’t avert my eyes. And I have not done well in my personal life, however well-to-do I may be.

  *

  I was foolish to fly away from my mother and father, rather than what I might have done. I might have become closer to them. They shared their defects with me. But they had wisdom, too. All of it as nourishing as any worm I could have taken from their beaks.

  Too late for that.

  *

  Why is it all so difficult, being Ben’s father? Or, put another way, why is Ben so difficult? He is so unhappy, so troubled. Try as I might, I cannot help being troubled, too.

  We aren’t the same blood but we have one wound.

  I can do nothing but “my best.” Being his father (and Eden’s, for that matter, though I am scarcely that any longer) is an ongoing proof of futility. There is some comfort in thinking that it could be worse, and would be, without my efforts, though even that thought may be little more than a crutch to help me continue hobbling.

  *

  Back in California again, on Delos Way in Ocean Hills. This is the house where my mother stayed alone. This is the air that surrounded her and the night that enclosed her. The flicker of her life continued year after year after her brother died and her sisters died, and her husband died, and her friends. She thought of herself as the last. Toward the very last, that flicker inside seemed to burn without her, as she waited and waited and wanted it to go out.

  *

  Eden was born exactly what she is. I tried and failed to do her some good. She seems to blame me for some wrongdoing. The tick of her self-righteousness grows fat on my blood. I cannot fathom what I did wrong, other than what I did not do, and could not – I have never had much of an understanding of other people.

  I would have given the sun, moon, and stars for the daughter I never had, the one of whom others might have said all her judgments are kind, and said of me, job well done.

  When a daughter hates her father and waits for him to die…. Well, that’s not true.

  Hate? Not hate – indifference and contempt, perhaps prompted by whatever lies her birth mother has told her, or encouraged by Keith, Eden’s husband, who is as damaged and disturbed as she is.

  Kafka wrote about his writing – “everything I leave behind me is to be burned, and to the last page.”

  I might say the same think speaking about my relationship with Eden.

  *

  My life has been a reversal of sorts, the narrowness of the careful young man opening up to a wider and wilder old age. Am I breaking down? I’m dispersing, scattering my selves, more careless each new year.

  Even more joyful, from time to time, despite reasons not to be.

  *

  Life may be better grasped in actions than in ideas. Still, in times of tears, I can make an ark of ideas, using words for wood, so when the waters rise I might be lifted up.

  *

  From….somewhere?

  When we are divested by our bodies of our power, we count the days that can’t be counted on,
  and losing sight of what’s already gone, recall what was sweet that now is sour.

  *

  At a memorial service, we pray that the soul of our dead be bound up in the bonds of eternal life, but we place pebbles on the top of a headstone.

  *

  In praise of nouns. Slippers that I never wear, the bathrobe, the dog, the dry food in my dog’s metal bowl, my eyeglasses, their tortoise shell frames and oval lenses.

  *

  What’s it like to stare at a blank screen? Not blank, but with a “window” that Microsoft Word presents, through which nothing can be seen.

  I have a hemorrhoid sensibility this late night. I’m squeezing to see what if anything I can excrete.

  Is dryness my condition or my subject? My throat is arid, so parched I cannot even spit.

  I need a secret. Something I have pretended not to see and can now reveal.

  Where is the sinewy topic that will be the rope of my rescue?

  *

  Just jottings, fragments:

  Life is a limited time offer.

  Looking for a life sentence – for the one sentence that will change my life.

  One line before sleeping, just as one life before dying.

  Sometimes being silent is like holding your breath and sighing at the same time. Holding your breath, only not under water.

  It was the friction that was the grease.

  That went well, she said. I wonder what they thought.
  That is something I never wonder.

  *

  Every day has a different way of nothing happening.
  One day includes a trip to the grocery store; another, yard work.
  There are phone calls and emails; the same, but not exactly the same.
  There are thousands of words written by someone else, a flood of words against which my own little skiff goes nowhere.
  Each day is different, making no difference.

  *

  Late nights.
  Didn’t I say this already? Haven’t I written this a hundred times, a thousand times?
  Even today, with all day off, I have waited until the very last hour to write this down on paper. I have waited until every other breath is a yawn. Resisting bed, sleep, and dreaming my dream that I will be a writer.

  *

  On an airplane again:
  I have the aisle seat. A child at the window comments on everything. His talking is shouting. His mother tells him to use his “inside voice.” It’s a wonderful phrase. But like all corrections, it doesn’t last.

  I’m not a little boy. I know how to be silent in public.

  “Use your inside voice!” That lesson is my condition.

  *

  Mysterious Monsters might be the title of a story about my children. There has been no pleasing either of them. Should I admit it? It would please me to not think about them. But it’s too late, far too late, for that. They are inside me and cannot be gotten out, much less gotten rid of.

  *

  I read The Flower today, after it arrivedin my “poem-a-day” email. It’s a poem by George Herbert that I remember from college. A brief bio came along with the poem. George Herbert was thirty-nine when he died, half my age now. Those lives of only thirty or forty years must have been rushing by. How much closer they were to God, the generations whose lives were so much closer to death.

  *

  On reading:
  Other writers and their sentences – one after another, none of them magical or having any definable attraction that would explain their power to draw me forward. To be reading is to be under hypnosis; the simplest clue can put me in that trance – the author’s name, the alliteration in a phrase, the off-white of the pages and the black type, words as numerous as grains, as tribal as ants, a swarm, even though I am the one moving while each single word holds its place.

  *

  Copied from Jonathan Sacks:
  Moshe – Meses – is an Egyptian name, meaning “child,” just as it does in Rameses as well (which means child of Ra, the greatest of the Egyptian gods). Who then was Pharaoh’s daughter, who rescued Moses, and adopted him, and named him Moses, saying that she “bore him from the water.” The name Bitya (sometimes Batya) is mentioned in Chronicles as a daughter of Pharaoh, and the sages identified her with the woman who saved Moses. Her name means “the daughter of God.” The sages wrote: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to her: ‘Moses was not your son, yet you called him your son. You are not My daughter, but I shall call you my daughter.”

  The tradition gives nine individuals who were so righteous they entered Paradise in their lifetime. Batya was one of these.

  “The sages,” “the tradition” – both are sources of wisdom, deserving of respect, almost automatically; not quite the same as Anonymous, but in the same category. They are authoritative, so much so that they do not need a precise identity. No ID required. The sages are never carded. They don’t need to show their driver’s license. And nothing government-issued is requested of the tradition.

  *

  Kafka wanted everything he had written burned after his death – fearing what? Embarrassment? Immortality? Or might this request be considered what is called a “humble brag”? As if to say, what I have left behind, it has power, enough so that it needs to be destroyed — even though I left it behind.

  *

  The street has a pale visual reality. Stop signs, gas stations, bus stops, the donut shop, and the laundromat exist dimly, only in passing, and even less than that. Sounds are more real than sights on my morning drive. Windshield wipers, rain on the windshield, for example. Unlike the same things seen day after day disappearing, the repetition of sounds becomes an earworm, a riff playing over and over.

  A dog has its nose, but I have my ears. I have my eyes as well, but few memories, and none of them sharp, of what I have seen.

  *

  The sensual experience of writing –
  I can see the black letterforms taking shape, one at a time in response to my fingertips moving across the keyboard. I can hear it, too, and not just the tapping of the keyboard, but the qwerty music of created language, and the words sounding in my mind, and sometimes in the air as well, when I say them aloud.

  *

  At twenty or twenty-one, my days were full of emotion; especially as I remember them. Those days were saturated with longing and expectations. The twenty or twenty-one years since Dolores’s death have not been like that. They have been emptier. After Dolores’s death my belief that anything could happen and much of it would be wonderful came to an end. I didn’t realize it at the time. I can see it now, looking back, which is the only unimpeded direction, though even that view remains cloudly. After 1997, I was no longer an exception, and nothing exceptional was likely to happen to me. Was it her death? Was it the weight of the two unhappy children I was left to carry? Maybe it was nothing but aging.

  *

  Lives can aften lived in reverse, with youth restricted by anxiety about the future, and old age a time of imaginings.

  Frost’s line: I never was a liberal when young, for fear I’d be conservative when old. Liberal and conservative are labels; but so, too, are young and old. It’s easy to be fooled by labels, and all the forms of shortcut thinking. At best, they bind our ability to be open to experience; at worst, they become our experience. A label needs to be seen as nothing more than a costume. Something worn, though sometimes a warning.

  *

  Some say Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden with nothing other than their clothes, which were new. Others say they also had a new understanding, but there is no indication that they understood either the world they were entering, which nobody had experienced, or the one they were leaving behind.

  *

  Sometimes I give in to the recognition that my past is more interesting than my present. The past also distracts me from thinking about the future. That future is limited. It’s small, and it’s getting smaller. I almost wrote growing smaller, but growth is not the right word for what is less with each passing day.

  *

  When a 9:09 or 2:02 appears on the gorilla glass of my phone, I think, I’ll never see a year with an echoing day and month again. Six years ago, in 2012, there was a 12/12/12. What did I think of that?

  *

  I was an unhappy child. But not dysfunctional. Our family was unhappy. But not dysfunctional. But the family Dolores and I made, with Ben and Eden, decided not to stop at simple unhappiness.

  *

  My sister and I own the home our parents moved to in Oceanside, when they, our mother, truth to tell, had had enough of Los Angeles. They spent their seventies, eighties, and nineties in Ocean Hills. We are their survivors. So now my sister and I have what the lawyers call “joint tenancy” – whether with “right of survivorship” or not, I don’t know. I left my parents at 17 when I went to college. Itt has taken me fifty years to travel the distance back to them. That is a journey I never intended to make. They are gone, and I am in their place.

  *

  On Delos Way: Deep blue and then, closer to the horizon, lighter blue. And then hazier. The red of the tile roofs and the white stucco walls. In California, I have nowhere else to go home to. There’s no place that I know. Home is not Los Angeles anymore, but it isn’t here on Delos either. Palms, hibiscus, the peeling eucalyptus bark. These are all California words, as shimmering as the hummingbirds on the patio at 4991 Delos.

  *

  We say “her death,” but I don’t think that my mother’s death was entirely her own. Not the very instant of her death. She was gone a moment before that moment it happened. She didn’t know, wasn’t aware, and couldn’t care if that breath, her very last one, was a gasp or only a sigh.

  *

  January 2019

  I can hear an animal screaming. More likely, it may be its ordinary voice, a bird’s cry, among the trees that border Bachman Creek.

  January 1 today. And cold.

  Very little is happening. The city streets are quiet. Restaurants that are open for late breakfast will be full – and probably livelier than most of the parties from the night before. We are obligated to attend New Year’s Eve parties, but our breakfast is something we actually want. Someone is choosing a poached egg on a muffin, covered in hollandaise; someone else, the French Toast stuffed with sweet cream. These are choices about hunger and desire and have nothing to do with any obligation to have fun.

  *

  Each sentence is its own world, separate, delicate, perfect or imperfect according to my ear, and having little to do with sight.
  Is there any such thing as a good-looking sentence?

  *

  Juan Valdez has died. Or, Carlos Sanchez, who played Juan for nearly forty years, as the pitchman for Columbian coffee. I would have thought he lived in Los Angeles or New York City. But no. Senior Sanchez, age 83, died on December 29, 2018 in Medellin, Columbia. I read an article about him yesterday, January 9, in the Times.

  Carlos Sanchez was in fact the second Juan; the first was a Cuban actor, who played the character after its creation in 1959 by Doyle Dane Bernbach of Madison Avenue. And there’s currently another, also named Carlos, cast after Carlos Sanchez retired in 2006. According to the Times, this current actor is a Columbian named Carlos Castaneda. That name, too, is a reminder, but of the end of the 1960s, of hallucinogens, the odors of wisdoms, and paperback books with colorful covers.

  *

  Herman Hesse:
  “Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.”

  *

  Thornton Wilder:
  “Not from weariness of life, not from a tragic protest against life’s difficulty, not from a dream of the declining years, but from some deep purely natural acceptance of the given assignments of youth, maturity, age, and death.

  This is what life is – a given assignment of youth, age, and death. Maturity is less certain, and is often an assignment skipped or simply never turned in.

  *

  “I would prefer not to.” This was Bartleby’s response. What is remarkable about it is the man’s unwillingness to do what he is asked to do, and expected to do, without any apparent reason. And he is in the most conventional, the most ordinary of conditions – he’s employed, so there are tasks given to him. But this is the answer that so many give to the unspoken requests that are the assumptions of others. I expected my son to pick a career. I assume he to wants to leave his room. But he would prefer not to. I could not conceive of my daughter’s callous behavior or indifference, but she, too, would prefer not to – not to be decent, not to be grateful, not to be respectful, not to be caring. In Bartleby’s case, he is at least explicit. He is open about it. He is willing to say it, politely.

  *

  I’m reading, a little at a time, the Anna Akhmatova paperback. I was attracted to this book, with its blue cover and red type, because of her name. Also, I was in the Dom Knigi bookstore on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. There was also the magic of the words Nevsky Prospekt influencing me. Dom Knigi (House of the Book) is in the famous art nouveau building that formerly housed the Singer Sewing Machine Company. What Singer was doing in Russia, I don’t know. I was there some months ago – in October 2018. I had walked from my hotel to the bookstore by myself, for the pleasure of walking and then browsing. It may be the translations, but for the most part the merit attributed to Anna Akhmatova is a mystery to me. I don’t know what she was talking about in 1914, or why. Still, I’m enamored with the sound of her name, which she chose herself; in doing that, Akhmatova was not only a poet, she was also a marketer.

  Debra didn’t go with me to Russia – she doesn’t approve of Russia. I made my own arrangements and traveled on a “Founder’s Trip” with Greg Tepper and Exeter. Just to Moscow and then St. Petersburg. Before I left, I bought a ticket to a performance at the Bolshoi in Moscow and another to a ballet at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg. Our group went to the Hermitage at night on a private visit. At the Hermitage, I was in a room of Rembrandts, as close to alone as I could be. We went as a group to Catherine’s palace, Tsarskoye Selo, outside St. Petersburg, where I saw the reconstructed Amber Room. Also, enough gold to bring on nausea. In Moscow, we had our private tour inside the Kremlin – a throne room and more gold. Red Square, St. Basil’s. I went into the subways on my own and walked through the Novodevichye Cemetery. A boy approached me to be my tour guide in the cemetery.
  “What country do you think I’m from?” he asked.
  “I don’t know, Russia?”
  He touched his black hair. “Russians are blond.”
  He was darker. He was Turkic I suppose, from Kazakhstan, or one of the other stans.

  *

  Chekhov described the human condition as a dislike of life combined with a fear of death. So, a constant dissatisfaction, and an undercurrent of fear.

  *

  For things that matter, that bring joy, time is required, and the management of time.

  The pump on the fountain in the west backyard is gasping, but not for air. It needs more water down its throat.

  I’m at my desk, late night, the usual.

  Reflections of lamplight on the window. An image of the lamp seems to be floating outside the glass of the window. There it is, in the dark, behind the pane of glass, this ghost lamp, and nearly as bright and as real as the actual lamp inside on the table in front of me. It’s as if this image, this double, were actually outside, not a reflection, but a piercing. Impossible, but there it is.

  Goodnight, night.

  *

  This is a game I played when I was a child on the block. One of us would close his eyes, and all the rest of us would run to hide. We wanted the perfect hiding place. We looked for shrubbery thick enough, or a wall high enough, or somewhere just far enough away – the loneliest places are the best for hiding. And we waited. Whatever we might have thought as we scattered from the one who bowed his head and covered his eyes, we found something out: it’s no fun hiding and waiting; it’s better to be seeking.

  *

  I would write about exhaustion if I wasn’t so sleepy.

  *

  January 17, 2019

  Mary Oliver died today at 83. My mother died January 18, but a year ago, and lived to 96. Dolores died two days after her 68th birthday, which was a July 11. Why, why not? I was 67 three months ago. There’s still time to accommodate to having no answers and perhaps even to lose all interest in the questions.

  *

  A reflection on my reading:
  Jonathan Sacks writes that God as we encounter Him in creation is universal, but God as we hear Him in revelation is particular. That is, a bush on fire but not consumed is awesome, but no more awesome than a night sky and its thousands of stars, its light from an almost unimaginable past and in a space immeasurably deep. A voice out of a burning bush, however, is a revelation. “Even a still, small voice,” Sacks writes, “can echo across millennia.”

  Where do I stand in reverence? Where do I feel awe? Is it when I stand on the edge of the Pacific and stare out toward a shore that is too far away to see? The ocean has never spoken to me out of its depths. I don’t hear voices – not even still, small ones.

  What is a still voice? And how is it different than silence?

  Even silence can be difficult to hear. It may be the most difficult to listen to.

  *

  Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Or is it Lord Rabbi? He writes that things have descriptions, but only people have proper names. This is not correct. Every national park has a name. We have named a bell after Liberty, there are individual trees that have names, and every ocean is not Pacific.

  *

  Where I drop my shirts off, at Towngate cleaners on Inwood Road, Emir knows my name. What do I know about Emir? I gave him my shirts on Thursday, and he tells me his second child was born the weekend before.
  He’s has always been cheerful, but now even more so.
  “How many do you have?”
  “Two boys.”
  “What are their names?”
  “Imran and Laqman.”
  I ask him to spell it.
  In the Quran, Imran is the name of Mary’s father. So, Jesus’s grandfather. Or, if the theology permitted it, God’s father-in-law. This is a point of view that might get someone put on trial for blasphemy in Pakistan. Laqman is simply a wise man; there is a sura with his name in it.

  I had thought that Emir was a Christian from Africa, like the Nigerian who owns Snappee Sticker and always has the evangelical radio station on. But no. They are much different in their looks as well. The Nigerian is stockier – more like an American. Emir has the slender body and features of an Ethiopian or a Somali. He has an ovoid head, not much hair on top, and a little beard.

  Nigeria, Ethiopia. The suffix “ia” must mean something. Perhaps like “jah” in Hebrew, meaning God, as in Hallelujah

  And Ethiopia is a magical name. Its five syllables are a travelogue themselves. Europeans once believed it to be a land of unicorns and flying dragons. Preston John was born there – keeper of the Fountain of Youth, protector of the Holy Grail, a Christian king from the East, and a descendant of one of the Three Magi. Of which one? The bringer of myrrh. Prester would not be his first name; it’s a title, presbyter, elder of the church. And some say that the search for Prester John is the search for a man who never existed.

  *

  “The human voice is just a sound in the air.” What sound isn’t? Underwater sounds, the songs of humpback whales.

  *

  There is a Buddhist text that declares that the desire for fame – the need to call attention to yourself – is so strong that it is more difficult to overcome than poverty or disease. But why is it necessary to overcome it? Milton wrote of fame that it was “the last infirmity of a noble mind.” It is a misguided desire for “immortality” – pointless, hopeless, shared by Ozymandius and those unknown whose graves are in the village churchyard. It is a desire for admiration. It could have nothing to do with “leaving a mark.” It might be more about staying, not leaving, and about wanting others to stay with you.

  In the Buddhist text, it says that the most reclusive of cave monks have the desire to be known the world over as the most reclusive of cave monks.

  Perfect.
  Is there really nothing but self-interest in the human heart?

  *

  A speculation:

  There are no things, only the divine words that brought everything into being. But we can no longer understand or even hear these words. As a result, reality seems empty, without meaning, just mere things. If we could only hear it with our inner sense, our innocence, we would hear the divine voice that no longer speaks to us in a stone or a dog or in our own restlessness.

  *

  February 2019

  Three things to be grateful for this Sunday:
  A cup of coffee. Time with Debra this morning and again this evening. Tennis at Seay Tennis Center this afternoon.

  What strengths did I call on today? Self-discipline, orderliness. I have been walking today, rather than leaping. I have moved forward, if only by a few steps.

  *

  From my reading:

  I can’t repair everything that is broken, but I can fix some of it. I can do something. And if there’s nothing I can do, if there’s really nothing, I would not even have recognized that something is broken.

  I’ve read the sentiment that people die when they feel completely alone. This may be true, but we also die no matter the company.

  Reading an interview with Orville Wright, from the archives of The New Yorker. Who is named Orville today? It’s a name as antique as Augustus. It’s also the name on small gold trophy I placed on the top of the bookshelf in my office. I attended Orville Wright Junior High, where I was awarded the Wright Record, a trophy for the graduating senior with the highest overall grade point average. Where I grew up, the aviation and defense industries grew up in post-war Southern California. Streets were named Kittyhawk and Wiley Post.

  *

  From Jonathan Sacks, who is writing about the commandment to honor your mother and father. I do think about that. My parents are dead. I’m a living parent, but dishonored by the behavior of my daughter. Here’s the passage I read today:

  “Upon hearing his mother’s footsteps, Rabbi Joseph, a blind rabbi, would announce: ‘I rise before the coming of the shekinah,’ the divine presence. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote, ‘Behind every mother, young or old, happy or sad, trails the shekinah. And behind every father, erect or stooped, in playful or stern mood, walks malka kaddisha, the Holy King. This is not mysticism. It is halakhah. The awareness of the shekinah results in the obligation to rise before father and mother.

  “On the two tablets that hold the Ten Commandments, the first five, ending with the demand that we honor our father and mother, speak to our relationship with God; the second five, to our relationship with others. Respect for our parents is bundled with fealty to God, our parent. Before God, we are children.”

  I notice that Sacks calls it the demand that we honor our father and mother. It is a commandment.

  As for Ben, however bumpy our relationship might be, there is a current of love running through him. It’s that love that is missing in Eden; I suspect it was never there from the very beginning. There is no spring in her from which it would flow.

  *

  Pictures and Words was the name of a business I visited after college. It was a documentary filmmaker’s solo practice. I don’t remember his name, but he was a Harvard alum who I found on a list of alumni willing to talk to senior or recent graduates about careers. Pictures and Words is a silly name, though not bad for a business that doesn’t need retail customers. Pictures and words, words and pictures – true enough, the two are often accessories for each other. The word is a caption for the picture, the picture is an illustration for the word. And, when written, words can have pictorial form themselves. Our alphabet is the more sophisticated child of a picture, eager to leave home and find its own adventure. The letters have a certain disdain for their elderly pictured parents, poor pictographic mom and dad, who know so little of the world. And older still, there’s sound — the ancestor of the word, but beloved; the spirit of the word, invisible but manifest.

  *

  From Jan Morris:
  “In some ways I like myself well enough in the morning. I enjoy the fun of me, the harmless conceit, the guileless complexity and the merriment. When I go walking in the evening, on the other hand, my shadow is less distinct and less encouraging, rising blurred to reproach me as the sun fades. I shall not be whistling then, but humming a more thoughtful theme, and I shall recognize what I don’t like about myself – selfishness, self-satisfaction, foolish self-deceit and irritability. Morning pride, then, and evening shame. But so what? Either way, I think the poet tells me, no more than a handful of dust…”

  Is this a brilliant diary entry? It’s either too literate for that, or re-written, or the practiced perfection of a skillful writer. It’s an entry, but also a parable of youth and age. Of self-knowledge gained over time. But then the “I think the poet tells me” ending – which also seems to me to be both harmless conceit and foolish self-deceit, a bit of poor-mouthing, and also a brag. She is making light of the truth, as shadows fall.

  *

  “Life is different for us in the tropics.”
  This is described as “The first line – the iconic first line – from One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
  Iconic? I don’t think it is. It’s neither a representative symbol or worthy of veneration. As much as I’ve heard of the novel, I’ve never heard of this line.

  *

  Where is this from? It can’t be Emerson, it’s not elevated or quirky enough. But then only a thread separates Emerson’s homespun cloth from the polyester of self-help books:

  “What stops us from becoming who we might be? Nothing does so more effectively than our doubts. There is one doubt that is most like a wound. That is our uncertainty about who we actually are. We know the facts of our biographies, but we have no clear sense of what we are worth. We don’t have a hold on our values and our judgments. We are in most things uncertain. We question ourselves, we see other points of view, we see forks in every road, and we have our doubts.”

  Probably from The School of Life, Alain de Boton’s outfit. Endless articulate wisdom, and items for sale.

  *

  James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in My Mind –

  “….I do not know any Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

  Such a wonderful combination of sneering and sympathy, of elegance and disdain. I admire his sideways condemnations, and especially the perfection of his aside, his “which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never.”

  If I had the talent, I might have written:

  Eden doesn’t need to love me. She has quite enough to do learning how to love and accept herself, and when she has achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – her problem with the father who adopted her, and cared for her, and treated her respectfully and lovingly, at great sacrifice to himself, will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

  *

  “Every father would want to have the love of his children, if only in recognition of what he had given. And if it is withheld, then he will hold something else in its place – disbelief.”

  On this subject I have information, piles of it – but no useful wisdom, and nothing I would call illumination.

  *

  Copied from my reading.
  There are two seas in Israel, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea – one full of life, one not. Yet, as Jonathan Sacks points out, both are fed by the Jordan River. Sacks writes that the Sea of Galilee receives water and also gives water. The Dead Sea receives but does not give. “To receive but not to give is simply not life.”

  *

  At a certain age a man has a desire to tell his story. I have that desire. But who can I tell it to? The wife who would have listened died long ago. Yes, we raised two children. One no longer speaks to me and for reasons of her own turned against me long before that. The other has neither interest nor curiosity. Friends? Better to call them people I know; it is unrealistic to imagine that they might want to listen.

  *

  In her separation from me, Eden is imposing on me a reflected image of what she experienced as an adopted child. She wondered where her mother and father were. Now she has left me to wonder where my child is. I have no address for her. We have no future together. So both of us have been separated from our family. She lost the past she might have had, when her mother gave her up. And she has made certain that I have lost any future with her.

  *

  “The most crucial of beginnings begin when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

  At a fork in the road? Take the left or the right, because there is something even more frightening in staying where you are.

  This is the crucial message for Ben’s life. He hasn’t heard it yet and seems unable to cock his ear in its direction.

  *

  Ben has a good heart but very bad habits. He can be kind. He is lazy. He can be diligent. He is unwilling to work for what he wants. He believes in loyalty. But he has very little belief in himself. So, that combination of good and bad. What can I do to help him? I want to surgically remove the bad, but it has spread so deeply that I would never be able to cut it all out. It’s on his vital organs. That leaves me with a different option. I can encourage the good in him. I can talk to him with more respect, treat him more kindly, and appreciate his loyalty. If it’s nourished, maybe this goodness will grow; maybe it will act like the light that gradually overcomes the dark, every day at dawn.

  *

  Insight is a flash of lightning. Writing is the long rolling of the thunder that follows.
  It could be otherwise:
  First comes the thunder, and after writing it down, then the lightning.

  *

  I spent three months in Paris when I was twenty-one years old. Less than three months, but long enough and lucky enough to experience the beauty and the loneliness of it.

  *

  March 2019

  Thoughts on school:

  I have no exams to pass. I am no longer in school.

  The only way to learn is to repeat – but I was one who skipped half of third grade. My handwriting never recovered.

  At Harvard, I “dropped out” after my junior year. I returned of course; completing what I do is what I do.

  And then, no graduate school, nothing further, no professional education. I left school in order to learn from myself and from the unschooled world.

  *

  Boredom is of use; I know that time is short, however long or tedious the party or the opera.

  *

  Debra has no plan for me, except to advance her own interests. What she is teaching me is not what she intended to instruct. Pam was no different. And Dolores? I’m unwilling to believe that she was the same.

  *

  “Mythology is what never was, but always is.” – Stephan of Byzantium, 6th century

  Where did I get this? Stephanus was a Greek grammarian who lived in Constantinople and certainly never said or wrote the line above. Not as I have it, anyway, because he had no English.

  This may be the same quote:

  “A myth is something that has never happened but is happening all the time.” – Joseph Campbell

  And there’s this version, from Jean Houston:

  “A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.”

  Plagiarism is always happening, too. As is stealing, borrowing, modifying, cheapening, and even disfiguring.

  *

  5343 Wenonah is for sale again— the home in Greenway Parks that Dolores and I bought in 1986, where our children had their favorite rooms. Upstairs, the bedroom where Dolores died.
  After remarrying, I left it behind. There was an open house this Sunday, so I went, to reopen memories. How small the room seemed where her death happened at two in the morning, July 13, 1997. Not much has changed, and everything has changed. She’s gone. Many of the memories are going. How soft her dying was, a few feet above the hardwood floors. I looked at the pattern of tiles we picked for our bathroom and shower stall. For a moment, I stood in the same place, exactly where we were. If a space can remain, why not time?

  *

  April 30, 2019

  Lars Engle sent a group email with a link to his mother’s obituary. Both of his parents were professors, but his mother, who lived to one hundred, was particularly distinguished. She taught at Black Mountain, worked on radar-related projects during World War II, and returned to college after the war for a second degree, earning a doctorate in mathematics. She led professional associations, played chamber music, and raised gifted children. Reading her obituary reminded me how out of place I had been at Harvard, in background and sophistication. I felt it but didn’t understand it. I was the kid whose parents never went to college and had no distinction, surrounded by young adults from accomplished families. I mentioned it to Debra and forwarded the obituary. She didn’t know what I was talking about or why. Her remark about Jay Engle was appropriate though.
  “That’s a life well lived.”

  *

  It’s impossible to read Clarice Lispector. Not impossible, since words are words. It’s unrewarding, more a duty than a pleasure. What’s impossible is not to hear Anthony Hopkins voice when I see the name Clarice.

  To what do I owe my willingness to do things I don’t enjoy?
  To childhood, to the habit of obedience. This has been my skill. I can sit at my desk despite the temptations of watching television or going to bed. Just as I had the willingness to study far beyond the joy of learning, in order to receive the best grade.
  This is what Ben and Eden were never able to do. They had the unhelpful notion that if they didn’t like doing something, they shouldn’t do it.
  I am always willing to saw the thick broken branch until it is in pieces light enough for me to carry to the curb.

  *

  June 2019

  Palmetto bugs, cockroaches, American brown bugs – this is their time of year. A young man from Berrett’s Pest Control has been to the house, spraying the perimeter and indoors as well. It makes the difference, or some difference, or a difference. Still, these “water bugs” are running along my stained wooden floors tonight. One comes up from behind the faucet in the sink as I am brushing my teeth. I will use a flyswatter to kill them, if I can – they are fast and skillful — but killing them one at a time is not a perfect solution. I am in anxious anticipation when I open a kitchen drawer, or worse, the drawers in the bathroom where I keep a water glass, a toothbrush, and a razor. When I turn the light on in my dressing area, I see one, disappearing under the low ledge of an open shelf. These insects are not at all like Kafka’s insect. In the real world, they are no spectacle; and they are masters at vanishing. Another one runs from the light and hides under the raised platform that supports my bathtub.

  Li Bai or Du Fu could write the perfect poem for them. In the economy of their movements they are a fit for classic formalism of the ancient Chinese court poets, for five or seven characters to a line, and the strokes of an ideogram as thin as a bug’s antennae. They belong in a poetic block. Their brown bodies are older than the Tang Dynasty, 8th century, and their speed is as ghostly as the court at Changan.

  *

  I didn’t know much about death before Dolores died. I had never been around it. I hadn’t seen real sickness. Grandparents had died, yes, but somewhere else, even if that somewhere was only across town. I had never heard a last breath. I was young and also lucky. So it all seemed extraordinary, as though what was happened to us had never happened to anyone else. The pains, the surgery, the pronouncement that nothing more could be done, the five months of comforting each other, and then the arrangements.

  *

  June 2019

  A reflection on Father’s Day, which is tomorrow.
  Is it astonishing or altogether ordinary, this seemingly total lack of curiosity that my two children have about me. When they were younger children, neither Ben nor Eden ever asked me a single question about my own childhood. They had no interest in my twenties, when they were in their twenties. This must be how it must be. Maybe self-absorption was required while they were growing up; their own challenges were so great, they couldn’t spare a drop of themselves. Too late, they may wonder what was it like for their father. What was it like, they might wonder, taking care of them? Of course, even if they were to ask me that now, I might not answer them honestly.

  *

  In a letter from Keats to a friend:
  “If a Sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”

  This speaks of looking for happiness nowhere but in the present. It also by the way has that odd and almost random capitalization that my father favored. His printed notes to me, which were usually encouragements, would be spotted with capitals on this or that word. And not necessarily just on the nouns.

  *

  “No one has ever seen a particle or a wave of gravity – the force that affects the movement of objects far apart. But we can observe the movement, and we think there must be a cause, so we give it a name: gravity.”

  “And what about existence,” a theist might ask. “We have a name for the cause of that, too.”

  *

  Obsession is like a carousel ride. I have the sensation of motion, and possibly of getting somewhere, but I am only circling past the same view.

  *

  Writing at night:

  Almost everything in this room will survive me. To the room, I will be a ghost. I may be one already, as insubstantial as I feel some nights.

  On those nights, I’m most willing to speak when no one is listening.

  *

  When I want to describe the brick, I say “red brick,” which is no more true than using “wine-dark” to describe the sea as Homer does. The brick has red in it, but its surface is speckled, with bits of blue and tans.

  *

  I’m making “preparations” for a solo trip to Romania later this year. It’s a place that must have been awful enough that Isaac Reegler, my mother’s father, preferred the slums of Manhattan, or at least imagined that he would. No one in my family knew why Isaac made the decision to leave –the women who managed my family’s memories didn’t care – so the typical reasons will have to suffice. He died the year I was born. He was not the best husband, and the family decided that the details of his life in Romania didn’t deserve to be remembered. According to the census, he was from Piatra Neamt in the northeast of the country. Wikipedia considers Piatra Neamt “one of the most picturesque cities in Romania.” We’ll see. My plan is to muddle through two weeks in Romania with a guide who will be my driver – so, long hours in a car, going from place to place, though not going nearly as far as the trip Isaac Reegler made from to Manhattan over a hundred years ago.

  I did have three others grandparents, whom I actually knew. None of them had much of anything to say about their pasts or their paths, either.

  *

  My other grandfather, Ben Perkins, was part of my childhood. He had my father’s mother, Elizabeth Zion, an American from Philadelphia who changed her name to Simon. After a divorce, he was remarried, to Molly. Ben Perkins smoked unfiltered Camels. He had next to nothing to say about the place he came from, other than he thought it was near Kiev and not far from the Dnieper River. And what little he said was only in response to my repeated questions. Just as I heard nothing about Isaac Reegler’s Romanian childhood east of the Carpathians, Ben Perkins offered nothing about the life he had before immigrating. And he had arrived in New York with nothing, not even with the Perkins name, which he must have changed himself, though he never said so. What had our family’s name been before that? He told me he didn’t know, which was hard to believe. He thought it might have been something that sounded similar, a Russian version of Perkins.
  “Maybe Purkin,” he said.
  I looked up Benjamin Perkins in the census records and saw “Dubrovna” recorded as his place of birth. Dubrovna, or Dubrowna, or Dubrovno. The city is on the Dnieper River, but in present day Belarus. Kiev is on the Dnieper as well, in Ukraine. Do you mean Dubrovnik, the search engine asked me. I suppose Dubrovnik is near Kiev, if you consider 800 miles away nearby; it’s in Croatia, another country, though the borders of all these tragic countries have been fluid over the centuries. Their borders are no more pinned down than Ben Perkins’ memory was, or my memories of either of these two departed grandfathers.

  *

  Am I there yet?
  Have I reached that place where the world is enough for me and I no longer need anyone to share it with. Am I ready to live without telling anyone that I am living? I can keep my eyes open, or I can keep them closed, but I don’t have to leave a record either of what I have seen or what has happened to me. I can listen, taste, smell, and think, but I don’t have to remember. Now that I am old, there is no future in remembering. The day is the world. It begins and it ends and it begins again.

  No, I’m not there yet.

  *

  Devotion:
  I devote myself to four things:
  To literature, the reading and the writing of it. To Judaism and the complexity of its language and history. To physical health. To loving relationship. In those four I have as much of the world as I want. What I can live without is a devotion to earning and acquiring that has taken so much of my maturity, has starved me of meaning, and deprived me of sleep.

  *

  Repeating this passage:
  Every man is a failure in his own eyes sooner or later.
  To which I am adding: Likewise, in the gap between what I hoped to become and what lies ahead of me, there’s a chasm. No getting over this or across this. But it’s exactly now, at this point in my life, however late it may be, that a more honest and less self-deluded journey has the possibility of beginning.

  *

  No insight, not one word of wisdom to offer here. Writing anyway.

  First comes the lightning, and only after the rumbling of the thunder. Curious, I look up “thunder” in order to learn that it’s created when lightning passes through the air. The discharge heats the air, which expands. And this air in the channel of the lightning may get to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit – five times hotter than the surface or the sun.

  *

  In the endless river of other people’s language you can walk, from time to time, on the moon reflected in a stream.

  *

  I fathered no one; even so, I am a father. How then did I come to have no connection to my daughter? We aren’t blood-related. Recognizing this, Eden broke off all connection and renounced me. She wanted no contact. She let me know first in an email and now with years of silence, depriving us both of sharing space and the understanding that might have come with time.

  *

  Bone-deep loneliness. I made the grass my ally and befriended the rocks in the fountain. The pillows on a teak bed were my support. Longing marked me as alive, along with the dissatisfaction in my longing.

  *

  Dog food and water in metal bowls. An oval lens, a tortoise-shell frame. Words and objects in nine syllables. Sentences, one atop the other.

  *

  To my ear, the eight notes of the bird call I keep hearing, as I sit outside this evening, are entirely repetitive. It’s also possible there’s variation, but I just don’t notice it. Or the same notes do repeat, but for excellent reasons. Maybe the bird has nothing more to say, and even other birds find it tiresome to hear the same eight notes repeated, over and over. Or the birds know what humans can never learn, no matter how clever we are or the number of our university degrees: that these eight notes are in fact all there is to say, and all that is worth saying.

  *

  Summer.
  There are no proofs of it inside the classroom, but every newborn day is like a puppy in its enthusiasm, with its colors and shapes, and every sound is a song, and the weather by itself is reason enough for joy, a naysay to even a minute of unhappiness in this glory of the early morning, whether I can prove it or not.

  July 2019

  The room on Delos is a perfect interior. It’s furnished, but not too much. There’s plenty of space for walking back and forth or even, if I want to, in circles. There are windows enough to glimpse the tiled roofs and the white stucco walls of the neighbors, but not so many to distract me from the task at hand – which is writing in a journal, which I will certainly do, if I have the self-discipline to ignore the patterns in the granite counter, the fifteen kitchen knives in a wood block, each knife its sized slot, and the Mr. Coffee. I will simply refuse to listen to him as he obsesses over the whereabouts of the former Mrs. Coffee.

  Out the open side door, through a screen darkly, more distractions: bedded hydrangeas, the green teeth of ferns, and the blooming lantana, where a butterfly has paused above one of the colorful clusters, its wings stuttering even while it seems to be at rest.

  *

  What do I do when I can no longer see what’s in front of me? Instead, fog, memory, the outline of trees like the lollipops in a child’s drawing, stick figures, and the skies as empty as a white sheet of paper, on which someone is drawing the same clouds that are following me everywhere.

  *

  Am in Oceanside or in Vista? Either way, I’m getting my hair cut this morning. There will be barber chatter, and Koken chairs, and a hardwood floor. Taking time to listen to every breath, before time takes every breath away. Plenty of misfortune all around me, but not today. Only joy, today.

  Speaking of joy: Koken, a German immigrant who created the hydraulic chair, also patented the “joystick” side lever that allows a barber to control it. In the 1950s, some ten thousand barber chairs were sold every year, by Koken and its rivals. They served a hundred thousand barber shops. And now? The Japanese have 70% of the market.

  *

  Let the distant school bells ring. It’s okay to be truant. There’s nothing to learned today from the teacher. The math is dust equals dust and ashes equal ashes. No exams on this, and everybody passes. When all memory of me disappears, I will be as archaic as a slide rule, as useless to know as the periodic table or the geography of Eastern Europe, and as misunderstood as the Missouri Compromise. There will be no correct answer to the question of who I was — not by short essay or by multiple choice, not even by true or false.

  *

  What I can’t name I can’t know. I see the flower but not the lantana, I hear the bird cry but not the robin or the sparrow.
  That said, I am still standing in front of the world with my blind eyes open.
  Isn’t there knowledge without words, though? Awe, for example; or the experience of reverence.

  I’ve spent the day fishing and catching nothing from the bottomless well of emails and newsletters and information online. I need to unsubscribe from the words of others, before their breaths replace mine.

  *

  On Delos Way –
  I’m in the room where my mother died. This room has changed. Not for the better, not for the worse. The furnishings are different. My sister and her husband, Joe, had the walls painted a shade of grey, almost a blue, but paler.

  Some memories are made to be kept, worked on, shaped, and changed. Most however simply slip away. They follow the same course as the rushing stream that carries us after them, as if we could stop it. We cannot walk on that water.

  *

  One word follows another, one life after another. Lives are like lines – some are straighter than others, some shorter than others, but at no point and never at the end point do we meet ourselves where we have been before.

  My childhood may have been in California, in a house on Georgetown and then on Belton Drive, under the skies in Los Angeles, or near a park in Westchester, but that childhood is gone; it’s more gone than it has ever been, almost as if suddenly, now that my mother and father are both gone. My time in California feels like an awkward encounter now. It’s a journey home to the place of my childhood, away from where I have lived my adult life. But what there is to encounter in California other than the ghost of the past. And that’s awkward. What do I say to a ghost? The best I can hope for is that this ghost has nothing to say to me.

  *

  It shouldn’t be difficult to recount that sequence of accidents that is my life. After all, I’ve lived it. It’s my story. Beginnings and ends would be easiest to describe. My start and my finish? They are the two pieces of bread on the simplest of sandwiches. Wonder bread, maybe, but still just white bread. My birth, my death – I have little to do with those. I have fewer choices there than a fast casual chain restaurant offers. If not white bread, it’s wheat or rye. Or sourdough. Maybe an English muffin, but probably not. In certain regions, it might be biscuits. But for all that, my first breath and my last are pretty much what they are for everybody.

  After the first, though, and before the last, the choices multiply. Mayonnaise, no mayonnaise, pickle, no pickle, onion, hold the onion. And meat, all kinds of meat, those choices and their consequences.

  *

  When I return to California after my mother’s death, it isn’t to the place where I had grown up. My parents’ last home in Oceanside, which my older sister and I inherited, isn’t the one we grew up in. It is Delos, not Belton Drive or Georgetown. That one, those two, are one hundred miles north.

  *

  I’m prepping for a trip to Romania this fall. Meaning, reading books on Romania. So far, the best of them is Athenee Palace by R. G. Waldeck. The title refers to a hotel in Bucharest. Its subtitle: Hitler’s “New Order” Comes to Rumania. The author was there, at the ritziest hotel in Bucharest, just before and just after the Germans arrived. She checked in the day Paris fell to the Nazis, which led the Romanian government to choose what at the time looked to be the winning side. Waldeck was a German Jew, a Jew by background at least. She was also a reporter for Newsweek, and she stayed in Romania, enjoying, in her way, the companionship of German officers in the dining room of the hotel.

  I will be in Bucharest, too, but the push for my trip is toward the northeast of the country. I want to see Piatra Neamt, which was my mother’s father’s home town. I’ve been “researching” Isaac Reegler, Sally Hoffenberg, and Ben Perkins, using Ancestry.com and looking at census records. My father’s father, Ben, is harder to trace. Both Isaac and Ben left Eastern Europe as young men, teenagers maybe, one from Romania, the other from near the Dnieper River, in what might now be Belarus. In Romania, I want to daydream about the early life of a grandfather I never knew, but whose incarnation I might be. This grandfather, Isaac, was hardly mentioned by his daughters. He died the year I was born. So, why spend time looking for him? I’m looking for myself, I suppose, as I’ve done before, in Paris, in New York or Los Angeles. He was Isaac. I wouldn’t be Jacob, who stole the birthright, but one of the grandchildren – one of Jacob’s children – Judah, Joseph, Issachar…

  My grandfather was Isaac the tailor. That’s a little like Tevye the Dairyman, but there was apparently little of the traditional in his life.

  As for my mother’s mother, Sally Hoffenburg? She was from Galicia, according to the place of origin line in the U.S. Census. Galicia is as undefined a location as the Indies might have been in the fifteenth century. No possibility of my discovery of her home town. Of all the grandparents, she was the one I knew best and visited the most, whether in her apartment in Westchester, where she lived with Harry Brodsky or, later, in one nursing home or another, where she was stroke-bound and suffering.

  *

  The “Sages” are always making quotable pronouncements. Their wisdoms appear in the “it’s said that” format. For example, it’s said that the world exists only by virtue of the breath coming from the mouths of children who study Torah. That’s a very weird idea, though perhaps necessary, to justify a way of life. Also, the “it’s said that” prelude suggests that the writer doesn’t want to take responsibility for what is being said. Better to attribute it to someone older, an earlier generation, a source of greater authority. It’s said that; meaning, this is wisdom, this has often been repeated, and it deserves to be.

  *

  No need to “hold a mirror up to nature.” I can look at it directly. But if I want to look at myself, I have only mirror images or photographs. Likewise, the only stories I can tell myself about myself, my own understanding, must be mirror images and, to that degree, they are likely to be misunderstandings. I may be my most interesting subject, and at the same time the one I can only know imperfectly.

  *

  There are plastic stargazer lilies on the kitchen table in the house on Delos Way in Oceanside. My sister put them there, after she redecorated, as part of the remodeling that she and Joe were in charge of after she and I inherited our parents’ home. The green cut stalks are glued to the bottom of the glass vase. There are three blooms and, on one of the stalks, two closed buds that will never open. Why the closed plastic buds? To make the lilies seem more realistic, I suppose; to suggest that change is coming, even though it isn’t.

  *

  What would Du Fu have written about the palmetto bugs that appear in this house? American cockroach, he might have declared, in an elegant sequence of eight lines, with five Hanzi characters in each one, get off of my bathroom sink. Wherever there is water, or a crack between surfaces, you arrive, wearing your dull brown armor, stock still at first, then running from my flyswatter or my slipper. You are racing for the corner over the stained hardwood. Survivor, desperate intriguer, you belong in the Old World. Your life is as risky as any hanger on in the court at Changgan.

  *

  I’ve hardened myself, if that’s the right expression, to the disappointment of never hearing from Eden. This experience of almost but not quite forgetting – how to describe it? It might be pictured with colors or sounds rather than with language. It is a weather. It’s a winter year-round, a rain that does not stop. That’s how I would communicate what it is to have been ex-communicated.

  *

  If today has a bitter taste, could it be because I haven’t peeled its rind and eaten the fruit within? This world was once a garden; everything in it can be sweet.

  *

  Memory is an act of creation, and writing can be a recreation. Go, little lines. Remind me of a thousand deskbound nights. Black numbers, white face on the clock on my desk. A water fountain is just outside, sounding but unseen. Taking in air, the pump gasps. Nighttime has settled in like a sediment. My reflection and lamplight are on the windowpane. I don’t write to be judged. Doubt is eternal, as is my inability to measure my worth.

  *

  Everything that happens, or that will, is no more necessary than the infinity of possibilities that have not happened and that never will.

  *

  At times in my relationship with Debra it seems that’s there not much love, there’s only being of use, and an exchange.

  *

  One of the Jewish sages is said to have said we should carry two notes, one in each pocket, one that says for my sake the world was created, and the other, I am but dust and ashes. Or so he was quoted in Polish, or it might have been Yiddish.

  *

  Advice:

  Write each sentence as if it were written under a sentence of death, recognizing in every line a breath, and with every one taken, one less ahead.

  Pay no attention to the moon, its reflection in a stream, and the drunken poet who stumbled in a mountain village, when the snow was falling in the night, and beyond, the frontier. The wind in the distance sounded to him like the truth talking to itself.

  The ultimate line is the penultimate, the one before the very last, the last one there’s still time to reconsider.

  The days are numbered. You can count them up or count them down, but write as if you can’t count on another.

  *

  Bits of acorns are falling from the red oak. A squirrel is feeding. Its discards are landing in my swimming pool. I call out to it, “Hey!” The squirrel is twitching but unbothered on the high branches overhead. In the next season, these skeletal branches will be barren both of leaves and of acorns. They will seem to hold the sky their arms. It’s all natural – other than the chlorinated turquoise of the water in the swimming pool.

  *

  Doing some research on Ancestry. I’m preparing, in part, for my solo trip to Romania in October.

  My mother’s father was from there. Isaac Reegler, who died the year I was born, or it could have been the year after. Isaac, married to Sally, who I called Nanny.

  Sally Hoffenburg, you died in 1979 at 86 years old. I don’t remember even being at your funeral, though perhaps I was. I knew you, but what do I know about you? You must have been born in 1893. You must have left Galicia, but when? Were you thirteen years old? Did you travel such a long way by yourself, to join a sister, or another relative, in New York? Did you marry at 17 someone you never loved? That was in 1911, ten years before my mother was born. We all called you Nanny when you were alive and we knew each other. Your life was not of much interest to me, your life in nursing homes, bed bound by strokes and unhappiness, your suffering life.

  Isaac Reegler, I was told you were a tailor. In Romania your mother showed you both needle and thread. She would have been the mother that you left behind, the one unknown by any of her five grandchildren. She was a thread you cut. Did you know if she was alive or dead when you moved from New York to Los Angeles. Perhaps she was your guardian angel in that City of Angels. In October I plan to visit Piatra Neamt, the city you came from, if it was the city itself you came from and not a village somewhere nearby.

  *

  The collectors are the destroyers. By assigning value, they empty a thing of what is valuable. The shell of the thing is left, a hard, shiny shell, but the soft flesh has disappeared and the spirit with it.

  *

  People use the phrase “this world” to distinguish it from other worlds; primarily, to separate it from “the world to come,” the life after death.

  Dolores has left this world. But she hasn’t left my world. She remains there, still within it. I can hear her voice. It blesses me, like birdsong or rain can seem to, and on the first day of fall, the season of school beginning, she teaches me as she did in the past, even more so.

  *

  It takes time to see things as they are, just like it takes time to make a friend. I need to befriend the world, warts and all. I read about famous painter who thought something similar; he was an artist with second sight, unclouded by age, and, with age, no longer in a hurry, despite having all the more reason to be.

  *

  I cannot find the right word for how I am feeling. Disappointment does not do it; it’s south of that. There’s time on my hands. My days have a smell, like chlorine from a pool. The birds in the trees are advising, give up, give up. I am word poor, with only one word for red. So I cannot tell a rose from an apple, and wines are more confusing than intoxicating. I am walking through the splitting of the sea, but I never participate in the rejoicing on the other side. I am tired of reading what has already been written. I want to read my own writing, in my voice, page after page until, after hundreds of pages, I can finally hear myself.

  *

  At creation, every living thing was a child of God – man and woman, but also the snake and the apple.

  *

  Books my mother gave me: P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous and a National Geographic Atlas of the World. The atlas came in a blue slipcover. It was oversized, just as the world is.

  I spent a few minutes before bedtime tonight reading Don Barkin’s poems. I knew Don at Harvard, where he was chronically depressed. I spent a Thanksgiving at his parents’ house in New Hampshire. I remember his dad chastising me after I told him that I never read the newspaper. His dad was a doctor. Don was a prep school graduate, from Governor Dummer, which we thought was a funny name for a school. It’s in “the village” of Byfield, Massachusetts. I googled Governor Dummer tonight; it turns out, the school has changed its name, perhaps tired of the jokes. The same prep school is now The Governor’s Academy. Don’s poems were published by Antrim House, and I think they’re just as good as those I read tonight by Akhmatova, in the Vintage edition paperback I bought in a bookstore in St. Petersburg. But Akhmatova is famous, as was the bookstore, which was housed in the former art deco Singer Building on Nevsky Prospekt. The building is known in the guides as House of the Book. I might say Don’s poems are just as good as Akhmatova’s. It’s debatable. But I’m certain that the aromas of the memories associated with each are equally fragrant.

  *

  Either the years are a train, the present pulling the past behind it, or each day is the birthday of the world, when even the past is new. Either way, time stays in motion. What is the best attitude toward the past and its pains? Can they be undone? There can be forgiveness, which might be worn like a mask. Ignoring, forgetting, acceptance, if you can get there. But understanding, likely never.

  *

  Going from sleep, buried in unremembered dreams, to the waking moment, which is a kind of resurrection. Begin again, eyes open, seeing life as it seems.

  What I want now: After so long being a mimic, I want to uncover what is characteristic. It has taken so long to try to see myself, as it were, eye to eye. I still struggle to speak in the first person, to speak simply. I don’t need to be afraid of my fears. I’m on the way to ruin – head balding, hands spotted, diminished, despairing of love, nearing seventy. After the journey work of these seven decades, I know I’m not the center of the circle.

  *

  These notes are particles. They are packets of powers left behind. They are fragments from the end of a night and at the end of a life. Even if discarded, they are a testament. Even if they are never noticed enough to merit forgetting.

  *

  In my teens and twenties I asked myself, am I old enough? Now, approaching seventy, I ask myself, have I waited too long? Always excuses for holding back, rationales for insecurity, fear, or, more politely, shyness.

  Dolores liked to say don’t let hanging back hold you back. It was one of her favored sayings. Original? Could be. Or quoted from somewhere.

  *

  Mishneh Torah: “Whenever the Sages instituted a prohibition because of the impression it might create, the act is forbidden even in one’s private chambers.”

  “Wisdom is like rain, it allows different plants to grow, depending on where it falls. And the plants are not the same; each one grows in its own way.”

  *

  September evening.
  Feeling as alone as alone can be. I’m both confused and unconfused about it. Do I have a friend in Debra? No, not exactly. A girlfriend, maybe. Debra is someone who has neglected me year after year. She has taken my money and also takes me for granted. But all these phrases are simply that; expressions, cliches. What exactly is this feeling I have tonight? It’s a pinch of self-pity, an inaudible cry, a delusion.

  When I think of my stumbles into unhappiness, for the most part the potholes have been other people – their judgments, longings, shortcomings. Alone, in that relationship I have to the world and to my own life in it, I’m happy enough. I have no unluckiness with my basic chemistry. I’m not only happy, but, from time to time, I’m serene. But of course this isn’t true, that “other people” are the problem, because my unhappiness with Debra or with other people belongs entirely to me. It is all mine. It is not some quality or lack of quality in them.

  *

  From an article in Conde Nast Traveler, though it could be the first sentence in a bestselling novel on the rack in an airport bookstore: “Few real estate agents can compete with Farhad Vladi, the world’s foremost purveyor of private islands.” In the novel, it might have been “could compete,” rather than “can.”

  *

  Eden doesn’t want to have children. Neither does Ben, though he would be a good father. Instead, each of them prefers to remain a child themselves.

  I’m working at night per usual. The lamplight on the desk and the two disks of light in the ceiling overhead are also busy. They are working against the clock my body keeps. My body is keeping time, but I never mind it. I should be sleeping at this hour when there is no natural light; so, in a way, I am working in my sleep.

  I’ve read that natural daylight is a hundred times brighter than this indoor light that helps me stay awake. It may be a thousand times brighter. No matter. I will not let natural light illuminate my behavior.

  *

  Imre Kertesz in Kaddish for an Unborn Child: “I don’t know why, instead of living a life that may, perhaps, exist somewhere, I am obliged to live merely that fragment which happens to have been given to me: this gender, this body, this consciousness, this geographical arena, this fate, language, history and sustenancy.”

  Exactly. Except, what an odd thing to ask, this particular why, as though there were other lives that we might have other than our own, and we would still, somehow, be ourselves.

  Could we not change our gender? Obviously, our geographical arena changes with no more effort than the purchase of an airplane ticket. And many people have changed languages. As for fate, if it’s what has happened, then no, it can’t be changed. But what will happen certainly can be different than it might be. Even a body can be changed, within limits. And consciousness? That, too, can be altered. Some would say it can be raised.

  *

  We are all victimized from time to time. But to be victimized without being a victim, meaning without wearing victimhood as a hood over our heads and covering our eyes with it, that’s what I would wish for Eden. But Eden doesn’t seem able to unblind herself; or, not yet. Eden is committed to her resentments, and she revels in lashing out.

  *

  Ben has a passion for the Mavericks. His hero is their star, Dirk Nowitzki; and now, Luka Doncic. How different is this from my passion for reading or my admiration for writers? It’s different in this way: I still believe that I might be one of them, while Ben is only a spectator. I’m envious of other writers and their superior skills. Sometimes I’m sad when I’m in a bookstore, and I judge myself, because I’ve done nothing, and I can see all the books on the shelves and the names of their authors. Perhaps Ben is better off with his passion. He has no envy of his heroes. He’s simply a fan. He’s never sad when he watches them. Well, maybe when they lose.

  The fan says, “We won!” But the win he wants isn’t his.

  *

  Kertesz is mostly unreadable. Not this sentence though: “I always did have a secret life, and that was always my real life.”

  *

  My first thought doesn’t need to be how to please others. How, for example, to give Debra the answer she wants to hear. It can be a factor, a minor note, but not the theme of the evening, the weekend or the rest of my life. But first, I need to know what it is I want. I’ve had a life of obedience to parents and, though none f them would agree, acquiescence to wives and girlfriends. And I work in a service business, where success comes from serving. So the habit of doing what I want has been hard to form, because the muscle of knowing what that is has been disabled by disuse.

  *

  October 2019

  It’s a lovely Saturday afternoon in October. I have a New Yorker article on my screen. Its author is commenting on “All My Cats,” a book by Bohumil Hrabel completed in 1983, “when Hrabal as pushing seventy.” That’s a funny phrase. Do we push any of our years, or do they push us? Either way, seventy must seem very old to the 20-something writer of this article. “In the book,” the article continues, “as Hrabal teeters on the brink of old age, the ever-multiplying cats that crowd his country cottage come to constitute his last real link with life.” I doubt that’s true, but then the article includes this quote from All My Cats, which seems to be a pose but is presented as the truth: “I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the ways girls used to love me when I was young.”

  I doubt every word of this, other than, yes, at some point, concerning a beautiful woman’s attention, that ship has sailed. What I doubt is that young girls used to love him when he was young, an unknown, barely a writer, and probably working for minimal compensation. What girl ever loved him or saw in him a means to the life she wanted? Though what do I know. Hrabel might have been the son of a wealthy father.

  It’s interesting, this article about Bohumil Hrabel, “the Czech master.” Hrabel died when he fell out of a window in his hospital room. He was 82. The writer of the New Yorker article supposes that Hrabel was leaning out the window, trying to feed some birds.

  *

  October 17, 2019

  A solo trip to Romania and Hungary; notes, from the journal I started and managed to continue for some of the trip:

  I’m in business class, though I have no business flying to Bucharest, Romania. The traveler at the window seat next to me has two phones and a laptop.

  The flight is Dallas to London to Bucharest. A soccer team boarded in Heathrow. Dark skins, all of the players.

  From the window of the airplane, I can see the squares of brown and green fields, as Bucharest is surrounded by agriculture.

  *

  October 21

  Hiking for an hour above Brasov with Costin, who is my guide and driver. He typically does “adventure travel” – climbing, treks, sports. This mountain we are on is called Timba, and the trail we are on is right on the edge of the town. It’s like a trail in a city park. The trees are beautiful; we’re being showered by the gold coin of leaves. I’m learning about the richness of the country and the madness of its people; the church spires, the competition between fervent beliefs, the envy of the believers. Romanian for “church” is biserica. It sounds to my ear very much like the Romanian for “cat.”

  In Bucharest, I had a different guide, Lisette. She had laughed at this similarity to my American ear. “I worship cats,” she said. Her name isn’t actually Lisette, but something starting with an L. Like so much else, the word has already dissolved in my memory. I can almost see it, as though it is falling off a ledge, but reaching out to me so I might pull it back and remember. It is reaching out, but I cannot grasp it.

  In Bucharest the Saxon buildings were elegantly joined, like layers of cakes. They are centuries old. Someone has still bothered to deface them with graffiti, which is modern as can be.

  Bucharest, thinking back on the days before yesterday:

  *

  Youth gone, young no more. I have never been anything other than too young or too old. Best now to avoid the mirror of the shop windows.

  I was never handsome, never in my glory, other than in my dreams.

  Even as a traveler, I am distracted. Am I reading whatever appears on my phone as a way to avoid the local air and water? Drugged by emails, smothered by news.

  October 22

  Leaving Brasov today. In Viscli, eating a pear that Costin finds on the ground under a tree. He picks up one for me and one for him. Viscli is a Saxon village, with a history going back to the 12th century. It has a white fortified church, which we went into. Prince Charles has visited here. It’s a claim to fame of a sort – a tourist attraction. The prince owns property in Romania, apparently not far from here – and it’s rentable. A guest can stay in his room.
  When I was planning my trip, I looked into spending a night there, but did chose otherwise. In part, because I’m here solo. If I was with Debra, the lure of sitting on a toilet owned by a celebrity would have been too much for her to resist.
  On to Sighisoara.

  *

  Each of these places has its particularities. It is all foreign to me, so much unknown, but I might say the same thing about neighborhoods in West Dallas or south of the Trinity, or east of Central Expressway, or downtown. There are plenty of places at home where I don’t get the order of the streets right – Elm, Main, St. Paul, Harwood. Not even after living in Dallas for forty-five years.
  Which ones are one way, and which way?
  I don’t know my own neighborhoods, much less the neighbors.
  So many details.

  Not knowing, and untroubled but what we don’t know. That is the status of both the living and the dead, and for the living it can be wisdom.

  There’s a saying, God is in the details. And if not, where else would He be? If he is everywhere, then he is in the generalizations, too.

  *

  In Sighisoara I am staying the night in Casa Fronius. No one else is here, other than a British family, twelve of them traveling together in Romania. I see them at breakfast in the downstairs dining area at Casa Fronius, where I have my table to myself. Each is saying hello to the other. The smart-looking older woman, the very handsome grandchildren. They are on day three of a five-day trip – grandfather, grandmother, two daughters with their husbands, the sons-in-law, their four children.

  Three of the grandchildren are tall, athletic young men. The granddaughter, Daisy, is seventeen, a beautiful young girl, and the last to come down to breakfast.

  I enjoy being here by myself. But what might it mean to have such a family? How much more satisfying to be a grandparent traveling with these daughters and sons-in-law, and with the youngest children, all treating each other as though truly they enjoyed the company and delighted in being together.

  I know nothing about this. It’s outside my experience – not as a child, not as a man. Maybe briefly, in the brief years before Dolores’s death. And even that was not the same.

  What am I to make of my family life? Mine is a life that is already made.

  October 24

  Thursday now, in Piatra Neamt. Coffee this morning in the Ceaulaul Hotel, near the Princely Court. My hotel is named after the nearby mountains.

  I have my several Romanian phrases, just as I did with Russian phrases when I went to Moscow and St. Petersburg a year ago. Those Russian hello’s and thank you’s have disappeared from my tongue, and their equivalents in Romanian will go the same way.

  Da, ma scuati, multomesc, and the always needed nu vorbesc romansche – it’s not much, but it’s enough to win a smile in the coffee shop.

  *

  I visited the synagogue Baal Shem Tov in Piatra Neamt. It dates from 1766, ten years before the American revolution, and six years after the death of the Besht, who was not from here, but from a place that was Poland then and is now Ukraine. After the wooden synagogue, but not entering, I went to the city archives in order to ask about Isaac Reegler, who might have been born February 11, 1887. Ancestry has suggested there’s also a “half sister,” Rose Reegler. I’m doubtful.

  *

  My thoughts can be like plexiglass. I see through them, but they are dividers as well.

  *

  Costin has picked up a river rock for me from just beyond the Bicaz Gorge. I also put one of the golden leaves from the trees in the Carpathians in my pocket. I don’t know their names, not the stone or the leaf, so I don’t feel wholly in possession of them. That task was our first task – bestowing named. That was the task of the first man, whose name was Adam. And naming was delegated to Adam by God. The name of the woman was Ishah, taken from man, but also Chava – love, the mother of life, designating a specific woman, that one. Everything has two names at least, the general and the specific. For the stone and the leaf, at least I know the general name.

  *

  When we arrived at the synagogue Ball Shem Tov, Costin needed to call an attendant to unlock the street gate and then the door to the wooden building. His name was Emanuel Nadler. It’s a responsibility Emanuel undertakes for tourists. I didn’t ask whether it’s a job or a sacred duty. Emanuel is a man not much older than I am. He’s an interesting man, a poet of some distinction and also an art historian. He has published both art history and his poetry under the more Romanian name Emil Nicolae.

  I spent thirty minutes, maybe more, with Emil. In looks, he is practically the twin of Robert Rendell, the Patton Boggs attorney I know from the Harvard Club, whose more distinguished brother, Ed, is the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. I can see in the faces of the Jews I meet in Romania that their kinsmen are praying alongside me whenever I sit in my chair at Temple Emanu-El in Dallas. They are my kinsmen as well.

  Emil is fluent in French, more so than in English. So I try out whatever is left of my high school French in conversation with him. I’m able to tell him that I’m a poet, too. He warms to the information and gives me a book of his poems, which is for sale in the synagogue. He also sells me one of his more scholarly works, a hardbound biography of Victor Brauner, which is a catalog of Brauner’s work. Born in Piatra Neamt, Brauner was a surrealist painter between the wars and a friend of Andre Breton. A native son and Jew.

  In those years between the wars there were 14,000 Jews in Piatra Neamt. They were forty percent of the population. During the war, the Jews in Piatra Neamt were never deported. They wore the star, and some may have been killed, but apparently most survived. It was after the war that they left, according to Emil. Under communism, Ceaucescu allowed the State of Israel to buy their legal emigration. It was a money-maker.

  Emil, or Emanuel, was born in 1947. He and his parents didn’t leave. On his block, very few of the Jewish families left. Another block over, all the Jews left. Neighbor influenced neighbor. Emil says there are only 145 Jewish families left in Piatra Neamt today, and most of them are intermarried. Those who still come to the synagogue Baal Shem Tov are elderly, or women, and it is difficult and rare to have a minyan.

  *

  Every movement of every leaf in every breeze has a purpose. It falls for a reason, if only a reason a scientist might describe as an effect. In that sense, it lands for a reason, decomposing as part of a grander composition.

  Is the I am of the leaf, or of a river rock, any less than my own I am? The rock will be in the river as the river moves on. It will be in the river after I’m bones. The river of time flows over me, smoothing whatever was rough in me, vanishing whatever distinguished me.

  *

  October 26

  Friday, at Casa Roata.
  Costin and I go to dinner together in Gura Humorului, in Suceava; this is northeastern Romania, where we will visit the painted monasteries.
  Just before Suceavita Monastery, there are wooden houses converted to shops with souvenirs and crafts for tourists. In one of them, I bought a skirt, a heavy fabric with gold threads, which I was told was made for a Romanian woman’s wedding. The seller had a conversation with Costin; it turns out that her daughter is Georgette Dane, a winemaker for Chloe Wine Collection, which is part of The Wine Group, one of the producers in Northern California (Benzinger, Franzia, Cupcake, et al.). And the woman has also visited Southern California, because her granddaughter is now in medical school at UC San Diego.

  Costin’s engaging. His business is Carpathian-adventures.com, but I found him through Exeter, so I’m probably paying many multiples of what a trip with him might have cost had I contacted him directly.

  October 27

  Saturday morning.
  A fly in my room at Casa Roata has nowhere to go; it came in uninvited, as we all do, and with no intention to stay. Its buzzing is bothering me, or pleading with me. I open a window. I unlatch a door.

  There are several families staying here in the cottages of Casa Roata, which is a sort of Disneyland Romanian place in the country. They are native Romanians, tourists in their own country; even for them, Casa Roata is a stage set.

  I’m not sure where Costin is staying. We’re leaving today, going by car through Maramures. We’ll stop to see wooden churches on our way to Sighet, which was Ellie Wiesel’s home town, and from which he was deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Costin offers the opinion that Wiesel was a fabulist. Costin has had plenty of experience with Jewish tourists and tours; it’s something Jews do – he well used to taking Jews visiting the sites of their grandfathers lives and destruction.

  *

  Dinner tonight is at my hotel in Sighet. Gradina Morii where I’m staying is impressive; behind it, a river, and a bridge I walk over in the late afternoon. For dinner, I’m seated alone at a circular table six feet in diameter. I’m the old man looking at the very attractive young in a hotel restaurant.

  What dignity is there in eating alone? Or in feeling disqualified by age from winning anyone’s attention?

  I have always been uncomfortable with my age. As I’ve noted many times in this journal, my age has been the porridge that was either too hot or too cold. At first, I was too young, and then I was too old. Somewhere in between I must have been just the right age but never realized it.

  I’ve heard of body dysmorphia. Could I have had age dysmorphia? When I was twenty, I thought I had nothing to offer; now, nearing seventy, I think no one wants what I have. So the years have gone. One reads stories of physically unattractive old men who seduce by the force of their personalities. Or more likely by the power of their fame or status. Louis Kahn, for example; that type, a triumph of self-confidence.

  *

  We stopped earlier today at Costin’s house in Maramures, where his dog bit me on the sly. She was a small dog, and her bite didn’t even break the cloth of my jeans. Vulpix – Foxy – was only recently delivered of a litter of pups. I suppose she was protecting them. Bellied, drooping, and hostile.

  On our way to Sighet we stopped at a “living museum” and shop that Costin knows. It’s part of his job to make sure I see whatever is supposed to be of interest. The shopkeeper was an old woman. She tells him about the suicide of a gambler in the village. He doesn’t know the man, but it’s news. So it’s shared. There must be stories like this every day in Dallas as well. I never hear them though. I’m moving too fast at home to even listen. Travelling through Romania, and constantly on the move, I’m still going slower than I do at home. And here there’s nothing else for me to do but listen.

  If every day has story, so does every hour. So might every moment. I should try to hear those, though the moment is passing so quickly and the event is often blurry. Yet every moment is telling a story, talking fast.

  Sunday

  I’ve lost track of the dates; is this the 27th, which I thought was yesterday? It of course doesn’t matter. Only my date of departure needs to be unmistaken.

  Daylight savings time ended this morning in Romania. Costin is driving, I’m the passenger, and we are on our way from Sighet to Cluj Napoca.

  We do we talk about? I have spent more uninterrupted time with Costin than with anyone within memory – not just more for these ten days, but more than in the past ten years. Debra and I see each other on Friday and Saturday nights. If we’re in the car together, she’s on her phone. If we’re at her house, she’s asleep in front of the television. So, our conversation rarely amounts to much.

  Costin and I talk about whatever we can think of to pass the time sociably. We comment on the sights on the road – he identifies a huge house as “owned by gypsies.” Costin talks about the weather station he works at, which is up the mountain from his house; it’s only a seasonal job. He’ll sleep there for weeks, when he’s not working as a guide. We also talk about past events in our lives. Money, social class, the light in the clouds above the roadway.

  We are passing towns where there are large, two-story homes on the street, new construction, some houses only partly finished, their magnificent roofs sheathed in a silvery metal that looks like a tinsel. “Gypsy homes,” Costin says. “They like shiny things.” He says they are homes “built for display,” with many more rooms than the owner needs, and built with money gained working abroad or through schemes. What schemes, I ask. “Importing untaxed cigarettes.” He says the gypsies build the houses but don’t know how to live in them, and often don’t even want to. They might burn a fire on a living room floor as if camping inside. Or invite the horse inside. “The tin decoration – all for display, it’s gypsy nobility.”

  It’s what the aristocrat does as well with his castles, I think but don’t say. Costin and I had visited the castle in Bran a few days before.

  *

  I’m in Cluj for the night, at a relatively modern hotel. There is a performance tonight at the ornate provincial opera house in the city, and I decide to go. The opera is Offenbach’s Orphee en Enfers. I talk to the young woman sitting next to me, who’s in Cluj on business. She speaks English and is from Piatra Neamt, but lives in Iasi. She’s in sales. She reps French manufacturers of lace from Calais and calls on interior designers in Cluj, to influence them, so that they will specify French lace for their clients.
  Noapte buna, I tell her.
  Buna sera, she corrects me.
  It’s only evening. Noapte buna is something to tell a woman when you say good night.
  The young woman wears a black pants suit. She’s also wearing flesh-colored stockings that come only to the top of her thick ankles. It’s not an appealing look for someone who sells an elegant French lace. Lace is a whisper. The fabric of her stockings, on the other hand, is a growl, or a horse laugh.

  When do the divisions of time start and stop in Romania? When is it morning, then day, then evening, then night?

  October 28

  Monday.

  Today, I’m taking pleasure in what Iris Murdoch called “sheer, pointless, independent existence.” She was speaking of animals, trees, and stones.

  Debra’s lack of interest in my and what I do is disappointing, but it can also be liberating. Yes, it provokes me, if I’m inclined to feel unappreciated. I tell myself it’s wrong. But can’t I as easily be grateful for it? This is a solo trip to Romania. It’s one of Debra’s unintentional gifts. I have no one to share it with, which might be sad; but, on the other hand, I do have this solo trip for myself. And Debra’s a poor traveling companion anyway, too involved in herself; she subtracts as much as she adds when we travel together.

  Also worth considering: How am I any different? Am I interested in her occupations and preoccupations? I may be more polite than she is. I do ask her what she thinks, and I will listen to her. But I may have no deeper share in her experiences than she has in mine.

  *

  The secret, which is no secret, is to redefine, to see disadvantage as an advantage, and to make use of it.

  What does it take to turn lemon into lemonade? Sugar, lots of it.

  Rather than pushing myself to find the beauty in the imperfection, I might see the beauty of imperfection.

  *

  October 29

  Costin drives me from Cluj across the border with Hungary to Budapest. This is where he turns back for home. I’m staying in the Four Seasons Gresham Palace, overlooking the Danube. Luxury, for the end of the trip. The hotel is art nouveau, but imperial, with a million mosaic tiles in the lobby, and lots of sparkling chandeliers.
  I’m an underdressed guest here. Costin and his t-shirt and jeans is off in the night alone in his Toyota, back to Romania.

  *

  In Budapest my guide is Julia Lengyel – a Jew who she tells me she didn’t learn she was Jewish until she was sixteen. Then, in her twenties, she was accepted in a program for “Jewish youth,” even though she was over the age limit, and she spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel. Her Jewish father had lived in Budapest throughout the war and “had the luck not to be murdered.”

  Julia studied economics in Budapest at the Karl Marx School of Economics (renamed after 1990). Her mentor there was Ivan Tibor Berend, the Hungarian historian, former President of the Hungarian Academy of Science, former member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, and now a professor at UCLA and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  I can look Julia up on LinkedIn. Under Education, it says she has a Masters in Judaic Studies from Corvinus University in Budapest. On LinkedIn she is “following” both Corvinus University and the Hard Rock Hotel Budapest.

  Julia has two sisters. One of them is a half-sister, “from my father’s second marriage, after my mother died.” One her sisters lives with a husband in Switzerland. The other is a cellist in Toronto who plays with Wellington Chamber Music and freelances for a group called The Guitar Guys. So, her sisters both live elsewhere.

  Leaving home is an Eastern European thing to do. My grandparents did it. Julia’s sisters did it. They left the east. For many Hungarians, life is like the sun, it moves to the west.

  *

  Auden in The Enchafed Flood (1950; “enchafe” – to heat up, to irritate) describes the sea as “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.”

  Is this a comment on the “crisis” of climate change and the threat of rising ocean waters, flooded shores, and drowning islands? Some dismiss all that as simply “the weather” and its variations, which we have always had.

  *

  Budapest’s central District V is a marvelous respite from the simplicity of the Romanian countryside. From the window in my room at the Four Seasons Hotel Gresham Palace, I have a view of the Chain Bridge that crosses the Danube. Around the corner, on the other side of Joseph Attila (the street is named after a poet), I can visit a gilded Gerbeaud, which is a coffee house that could as easily be called a cake house. I hardly know where I am in Budapest, but it is a pleasure to be lost here. I have little sense of the city. I set out walking around the few blocks that I think I know. I can be anxious sometimes about getting lost. My sense of direction is so poor. It’s much the same in my life. I have a sense that my life is only a street or two, at most a neighborhood, in a vast city.

  As for Jozsef Attila – I can meet him online. Born 1905 in Budapest, committed suicide 1937 in Balartonszarszo. Father, a soapmaker; mother, a laundry worker. Somehow he attended the Sorbonne and the University of Vienna. Career: poet and translator. When I look into it further, the hole I fall into deepens. Is his name Jozsef Attila, or Attila Jozsef? And was there a translation of his poems published in 1973, the year I dropped out of Harvard, edited by James Atlas, who was at the Harvard Advocate only a few years before I was? Why did Attila, or Jozsef, kill himself in 1937? Did he smell what was in the wind? According to Wikipedia, the poet was 32 and living in the house of his sister and brother-in-law in Balatonszarszo. He was “killed while crawling through railway tracks and was crushed by a starting train.” It’s accepted as a suicide, partly because he had attempted suicide before, and also because he left five “farewell letters” the day he died.

  Balatonszarszo is a village along the southern shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary. Here’s more, from Wikipedia: Jozsef (in Wikipedia, it’s his last name) was treated by psychiatrists for depression and schizophrenia as a child. When he was an adult, he was sent by the state to a sanatorium. He never married but fell in love frequently with the women who were treating him. His father abandoned the family, his mother died when he was a teenager, he was a self-described street urchin, he edited a literary journal, he joined the Communist Party. And so on. Now he’s buried in Budapest. From one of his “farewell” letters: “Well, in the end I will have found my home, the land where flawless chiseled letters guard my name above the grave where I’m buried, if I have buriers.”

  Did I write the name down incorrectly? Did the sign say Joseph Attila, or Attila Joseph, or Attila Jozsef?

  I can get lost in my own life, but also in the lives of others. I won’t confuse my own first and last names, but I can certainly misunderstand what to do, first and last. Only by narrowing the path can any of us can keep moving straight. But a narrow path can be dangerous as well. It can be a killjoy, although not usually as lethal as crawling along a railroad track.

  *

  October 30

  My last night in Budapest. It goes how the last of anything goes – not much energy, drifting, not doing much of anything. I’m not trying to “get the most” out of hours that are left. I’m thinking about the travel back to Dallas.

  People don’t rise up at the last, they lie down.

  *

  These travel notes are handwritten in a small black journal with a leathery cover that has a snap to keep it closed. There are pages in this journal from before the trip to Romania. The first writing in it starts with a mention of Israel – the trip I took with Ben and Eden after Dolores died. That was in December of 1998, when we went on the “family trip” with congregants from Temple Emanu-El. I had forgotten about these notes and never transcribed them. Other than a few families who traveled with us, the Kafkas, Cheryl Pollman, the Stolbachs, I don’t remember any of them.

  How to describe this journal? Meaning, the physical notebook. I look up “snap cover journal” and find “Notebook in Faux Leather Snap Cover – 4 x 7” on Amazon.

  That’s what I have as well – 4 by 7, faux.

  I could still transcribe these first few pages, but they aren’t travel notes any longer. Rather, they are time travel notes. I can rewrite them, interpolating and updating and adding to them, even contradicting what I wrote down then in the light of what I know now.

  I can the same with any recollection, whether from twenty years ago or yesterday.

  *

  From my reading:
  A child fears separation from his parents. A lover fears separating from the beloved. At the same time, we may want to leave, risking an unknown tomorrow, almost preferring it to more of the same.

  If security is what you need, and comfort is what you love, and you want the respect you imagine that others have for you, then, yes, stay where you are.

  You can continue to worship at the altar of routine.

  *

  The weather is changing. The unstable spring is gone. Summer is past reckoning, and the sweet interval of fall has vanished. I’m into winter, cold and dull. I’m feeling my aging. What did Ben Jonson write, that age was misery? It’s not that simple, neither the weather nor my aging bones. It’s storming outside today. The wind is doing damage. I’m trying to sleep but can only dream. And in my dream I am sawing broken branches of the live oaks, those holy trees of life that have broken off in the storm. I am cutting the big branches until they are in pieces light enough for me to carry, one after another, into a fire.

  *

  November 2019

  Looking up through the skeletal branches of the trees. Most of the leaves have fallen. I am holding the skies close, as if my arms were also the branches of the trees. Maria Popova writes in her newsletter about a forgotten book of poetry with illustrations by Sister Corita Kent. You are not everything, she quotes, from a bit at the end of a poem:

  You are not everything
  but everything
  could not be everything

  without
  you.

  This poem, with its spacing, has the look of the sixties. It almost has the fragrance as well, incense, or patchouli.

  I inherited two Corita Kent seriographs from Dolores, whose new life also began at the end of the sixties. I always admired from that time a line from Penelope Gilliatt. A line from a novel, or more likely a short story. “You say it’s nothing “but it’s not nothing.” The larger of the Sister Corita seriographs is in the modern frame Dolores must have favored, with flat, dark acrylic sides, and a sheet of clear plexiglass covering the art.

  *

  I’ve lived a whack-a-mole life, smacking at one problem after another.
  I’ve walked across the earth but left no footprints.
  Although, to be fair, the ground was hard.
  I’ve cried, but recorded very little.
  My achievements are trophies encased in an empty hallway.
  I’ve wandered, as a sheep might, herded by life.
  As the saying goes, blessed be the true judge.

  *

  Light is at the border of darkness, and darkness is the border of light; they are joined together.

  I still get the Chabad “daily” email. Occasionally I want to copy the sentences down verbatim. Usually, though, I’ll make an edit or two. For example:

  Abraham had come into days. He entered them one at a time. When Sarah told him to let go of his firstborn, he did so. God then told him to let go of Isaac, and he was willing. He knew how, because he had practiced with Ishmael, a boy that God rescued.

  What is interesting about all this? In part it’s the sparseness of the story, and the stinginess of detail in the telling. Also, if Abraham was more than a hundred years old when it all happened, he should have known better. Though what does that mean, “to know better,” in the context of encounters with the divine?
  It might mean not listening to the voices that he heard.

  *

  November 13, 2019

  I’ve “turned” sixty-eight, but am not turning one way or another, as best I can tell.
  And if I did, where would I turn? Turning to what, or from what?
  I’ve read the wisdom that there will never be any more than there is right now.
  But, any more what?
  Any more anything, I suppose. Any more hope, any more chances. As another wisdom put it, this is the day, rejoice, be glad in it.

  *

  I surrender. Ben and Eden are unlike me, and most of my purposes for them have been utterly defeated. They will refuse to take much of my character with them after I’m gone. I can give up now on whatever it means to live on through my children. And if my immortality relies on their memory, that, too, will be shaky. Remembered by my children? Maybe, and for a while. I have no grandchildren. And if I had, just as I barely remember my grandparents, any grandchild of mine would have very few memories of me. They wouldn’t know me. In that unknowing, I would be neither their ground nor their sky. What is the sky, and what is gravel on a path? It sounds like a childish question, if only because I don’t know the answer any more than a child does.

  It’s difficult enough to remember my own life. Even now, it’s somewhat as if it never was, I recall so little of my life.

  Another question: whether it’s good to remember the past, or more a distraction, even a subtraction, from paying attention to the present.

  *

  Crashing into my windows today: more cedar waxwings, by the dozens. I have no explanation for their dangerous urgency though there surely is one. Some survive the crash, while others fall to the ground, stunned and damaged, but still breathing. They are hiding their surprise. If this is natural selection, I can see no reason for it. I suppose it’s natural, in the sense that it is in nature, like so many accidents that separate who shall live from who shall die. “Crashing into a window” isn’t one of the lines in Unetanneh Tokef, during the spooky “some by this, some by that” recitation that is part of our High Holy Days literature. The Unetanneh Tokef liturgical poem, or piyyut, has been part of the Yom Kippur service for generations. It does say some by stoning, some of strangling; but never do you hear some by smacking into the glass of a kitchen window, some into the windows in my bedroom. Like a whirlwind, this flock of waxwings passes, leaving those who have passed away. My part in this? I’m the bird watcher. And I pick up the bodies of the dead. I use a kitchen broom and my blue dustpan. With no one looking, I fling them toward the open field of the property west of me, which is in the flood plain.

  *

  The world as we know it ends all the time.
  We talk sometimes about “salvaging the past.” It’s a phrase that suggests wreckage. In truth, things that are abandoned do not show well. When we go back to them, they have been disfigured or stained or eaten away. But not everything and not always. Some things have simply weathered. different than they were, and some are even beautiful in their different way.

  *

  In the backyard –
  The live oak rising out of the ground. The roughness of its hide, its leaves always open. Indifferent to the indifference of others, it allows anyone to climb it. I might share roots with this tree, we might be family, both of us created from dust.

  *

  A thought –
  At the end of days, all the battles will be won, and there will be no winner. We will see through everything, which is the same as seeing nothing. We will have our slippery, silky celebration, our joy brought to life by death.

  *

  A dream:
  I am listening for my voice. I am in a room with no windows. The two doors, both marked exit, are locked from outside. The question then: how did I get in here?

  *

  I have no vocabulary for my situation. After years of the same, my life has revealed itself as a game that cannot be won. I believe that every day is both a miracle and a mirage. I exercise, diet, have faith, and accept the wisdom of the ages and the also wise suggestion to keep a noise-cancelling headset on.

  *

  A sentence might spool out unexpectedly, a drool of words, but surely writing is more deliberate than that. My brain is yawning. I’m tired from the time I wake up until my time’s up, at one-thirty in the morning. I’m immune to inspiration. I’m dry as an empty cup. My clock’s tick tocking, but I force myself to stay seated, with the hope of something coming, some melody, some song out of nothing.

  *

  The lack of detail in the Biblical narrative necessitated the oral tradition and the commentaries. Pursued, the Israelites hurried through the splitting of the sea, with an army after them. Ahead, wilderness. So miraculous, in retrospect, that they never bothered to note the colors of the water, or how the spray felt on their faces as they crossed. Did it wet their skullcaps, if they wore those? Was it dry sand, or a dark wet seabed under their sandals, if they wore sandals? Hard in their haste, they took places on the other side, some of them singing. Difficult as it must have been to remember it, it is even harder to imagine it.

  *

  I can no more accurately describe a shirt than a forest, though in each of them there’s an r and a t. The hours are boulders, the day is a cliff, the seasons are smooth surfaces with no place for a foothold. It has snowed today, and when the ground freezes even the robins are wild animals.

  *

  Thoughts about writing –

  A sentence is a musical phrase; a word, a beat. Wine glass, ashtray, a book, a lamp; this evening, listening to the drumming.

  What does any of this mean? It doesn’t mean much. Just words. There is no long form story here, I have none worth telling. No adventurous youth, setting off. Only the familiar, four walls, a window, looking out on a garden – and that garden is not well tended. It’s bamboo and overgrown and in time will be someone else’s to neglect.

  *

  Life is a forced march through paradise.

  I’m at the edge of the orchard. I’m on my way out, the years already gone, the soft, rotting fruit has fallen from branches. Time to stop for the night. My work’s done for today, or so I have self-declared. The nothing I have accomplished is something, and my hunger is as good as a bellyful. I will leave my MacBook Pro on my desk. The blankness of its screen is snow without a trace on it, not the track of a bird’s foot, the four toes, with the three forward and one always back. Tallying tonight’s effort, I will count as double the weight of the dozen words written and deleted, rewritten and then deleted again, three points for the attempt to do better, and one for not giving up.

  *

  Thinking about the trees in New Mexico, where I used to go – with Dolores, then with Dolores and children, then with Pam. Debra is of course uninterested, because Santa Fe is not Cleveland, and New Mexico is not where “her people” are – Ohio, or Colorado. She cares nothing for what is new to her, only for the familiar, interpreted literally. The smell of pinon or the light of a farolito will matter to me, but never to “us.” There are messages of mortality in my thoughts of the landscape in Northern New Mexico, the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the winding road up to the Santa Fe ski basin, the streams near Chimayo, the thin trunks of Aspen trees. Aspen leaves, like a thousand small scales, seem to hold the season in the balance. This is the life they have, waiting for a wind that comes down like the law descending the mountain, out of a blue autumn sky, scattering their gold. The count of their days is a fair measure. Blessed is the true judge.

  *

  It’s true that if you sit long enough, something will come to you. It’s not always a thought, but it assumes the shape of one. It may be as tangled as yarn. It is a bird, now in a cage.

  *

  What are the laws that govern the nazirite? I came across this topic on Thanksgiving morning, as I am reading (skimming, mostly) three chapters a day in a translation of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Here is the excerpt, which provides some of the halacha that governs what actions are taken when a nazirite becomes “impure”:

  “When a nazirite becomes impure in one of the ways which require him to shave because of it, he must have the ashes of the Red Heifer sprinkled upon him on the third and seventh days. He then has his hair shaved on the seventh day. And after having the ashes sprinkled on him on the seventh day, he immerses in a mikveh as is required of all those who are ritually impure due to contact with a human corpse. He waits until sunset and brings his sacrifices on the eighth day. These sacrifices are: two turtle doves or two young doves, one as a burnt offering and one as a sin offering, and a year-old lamb as a guilt offering. All of the preceding days are invalidated and he begins counting his nazirite vow anew. If he shaved on the eighth day, he may bring his sacrifices on that day.”

  What can I make of any of this? It is provocative in its precision, its specificity, its implicit endorsement of following instructions exactly. How different it is than my own casual attitude toward every action I take.

  *

  From time to time, I become an angry old man. This has naturally influenced what I choose to write about.

  *

  I have nothing much to say about the heartbreak of first love. It has never been forgotten though. The depth of my first love seemed to correlate perfectly with the height of the loneliness preceding the fall. I fell instantly in love with a girl named Rise, who had an umlaut over the final “e” in her first name. Last name Goren, like the bridge master. I knew her all of two days, in Boulder, Colorado. Not for me, either, to write about my journey out of adolescence. When I was in my forties, I sailed around a personal Cape Horn, navigating away from my wife’s death; and then, in my fifties, further away from an estranged child. And in the more recent past, I have learned how little I control, how much I can put up with, and how surrendering doesn’t come suddenly, with a signing ceremony, though it may come with unjust terms of the peace, the fuel for other wars in years to come. In my experience, surrender to the facts happens with no sense of betrayal or humiliation. It comes when yourecognize that life is a mirror, showing you nothing other than yourself on its flat, silvery, impenetrable surface.

  *

  I looked at ancestry.com as I was preparing for my trip to Romania.
  When I tried to trace my “genealogy,” I didn’t get very far. Where exactly were my grandparents born? Who were their parents, or any of their family? I might as well ask where the “a” between the “e” and the “l” in “genealogy” came from, and why it isn’t an “o.” For family history, I could only get a few feet down the road; in fact, not much further than I can see from my doorstep. Time had utterly redacted the lives of my great grandparents. I found nothing that would flesh out their ghostly lives at work benches in Romania or Belarus or Galicia. I had no ability to smell the odors of their kitchens in Piatra Neamt or Dubrowna. The place names on a census were all I had for evidence, and that evidence was flimsy. Belarus and Galicia are little more than guesses. My blood is probably buried in ravines there, under the dirt and silence.

  *

  What is regret? Is it more likely to be caused by giving in, or by giving up? Whatever regret is, it isn’t caused by giving too much away, or by making sacrifices.

  If I am worshipping, I will always find something more to bring to the altar, whose blood I can splash on it, whose flesh I can burn.

  In the time that remains to me, I want to see the smoke rising into an empty sky whose blue holds a sweet odor of sacrifice.

  *

  Memory is a sea to drown in. Better to be the one who has hopes for a future on the far shore, or just across the border, than the one remembering.

  *

  When I was eleven, we went on a trip across country, Los Angeles to New York. We saw the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Jackson Hole, a motel pool in Cincinnati when there was lightening in a dark sky, the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty.

  My father drove us in a Ford Falcon station wagon that had faux wooden sides. In Chicago, he wanted to go to the streetcorner where he had sold newspapers during the Depression. He had used a wooden stand for shelter from the snow and the cold. And it was still there, his boyhood newspaper stand. It was faded, the wood weathered, and its green paint was peeling. Whether it was actually the same newspaper stand or not, he said it was. He had less to say about the Depression, cold, snow, the war, or earning a living. When his family moved to Philadelphia, where a relative owned a sweater factory, he sold the newspaper stand to an unemployed adult who had a family to support. My father was fourteen. If life is a lesson, what did I learn from this, if anything? Nothing from this. But from his life? To enter the world, to build a home, to live simply, to have and to hold, to do no harm.

  *

  The winter branch is bare. But in April, this red oak will leaf out, green reborn, coloring over the loss so apparent at the moment. Kindness to others is soil, sun, and rain. It nourishes, until buds bloom again.

  *

  In California again – some phrases – transcribed later from a notebook –

  Rocks and trees, the needles of a pine, the veins on a stone.

  Unchanging ground, the swift blossoms, the water as it runs, neither away nor toward, and the air always shifting. Warm nights, chilly days.

  If I am no longer competing, then I have won.

  The nothing that comes to me when I sit in a chair on the patio at Delos is plenty. The straight lines that cross in my notebook are running neither left to right nor right to left.

  Hearing the cawing. What does this crow think of the other crows?

  At the kitchen counter, with an open laptop — my fingers like the toes of a bird perched on a keyboard.

  Can I describe what I see if I open my eyes? I will do better if I keep them shut.

  To all the ones who came before me, I am your younger brother.

  My shyness is a fear of being found; even more so, of being found out.

  *

  There’s too much distraction in my life. It’s not helpful. What matters will wait for me to come to it. Whatever pushes itself on me, I ought turn away from. Since there’s nothing I need to buy, there’s no need to open my door to the seller.

  *

  “The old ways, Rabbinic, proscribed, seem to have two principles at their heart – first, the total authority of Torah; second, the necessity of purity in one’s connection to God, with immersion and the sacrificial cult.”

  These are theoretical principles however. I question how far they were ever applied to daily life.

  *

  21 December

  Isaac Reegler and Benjamin “Perkins” were two of the thousands — of the hundreds of thousands — who came out of Romania, or Moldova, or the Russian Empire, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. They fled pogroms. They ran away from the Tsar’s draft. They left the deprivations that were the lot of the Jews. In the past, Jews might leave one part of Europe only to settle in another. Booted from Spain, settled in Poland or Amsterdam or Greece. This time they did not stop. Instead, Ben and Isaac went to the ports of Rotterdam and Hamburg, by rail and on foot. They embarked on the cheapest steamships for the Golden Door into the United States. America was accepting. Factories needed workers. Tailors needed assistants. Mobsters needed drivers. And men arriving first needed women who came after. Salli Hoffenburg, my mother’s mother, came from Galicia.

  Were Isaac and Ben among the first to leave from their neighborhoods? The first from their street? Or did they follow a crowd? Did they read a come-on, on newsprint, or some months’ old message in Yiddish or Russian from a relative already in New York?

  What were they thinking? I don’t know. They never thought to share their stories.

  *

  Behold the soul!
  That’s a phrase that came to me today in the daily emails from Chabad. It’s an instruction, however, or an exhortation, that cannot be followed. I can’t behold my soul, which is immaterial. I can’t hold it, the soul, though maybe I can, with effort, be it. But what effort exactly? According to Chabad, I need to see through the distractions and the confusions of events. If I can see through the world, maybe then I can see my soul within the world.

  *

  I Live Again is the “autobiography” of Princess Ileana. Romanian royalty, she was the daughter of Ferdinand and Marie. It says on the spine that it’s a memoir. I bought it through Amazon after reading about Ferdinand, Marie, and the Romanian royal family, and visiting their castle in Bran, north of Bucharest.

  What would my memoir be titled?

  How about Shadow?

  There are days when we are no more substantial than a shadow. Even less than my own shadow, I feel as though I might be the shadow of someone else.

  How to describe a shadow? Dark, transitory, contingent. It exists because light exists – light that is blocked.

  *

  December 29, 2019

  At the end of the year, there is the start of the lists that appear in newspapers or magazines or on television. The best of this or that in 2019, the most important this or that of the past decade. We are after all at the end of the decade that began in 2010, depending on how you count. Some think 2020 is year one of the decade ahead. Others, that it’s year ten of the decade gone by. I’m on team 2020 new decade. So these last days of 2019 are for reflections on the dismal decade that will be over soon enough.

  According to one of the lists, these are among “the top 20 scientific discoveries of the decade”:
  Discovering – and rediscovering – species
  Kicking off a new spaceflight era
  Seeing animals’ unexpected sides
  Redefining the units of science
  Pushing reproductive limits
  Tracking down the Higgs boson

  Seeing animals unexpected sides doesn’t seem to be that impressive, but perhaps it is. Actually none of this seems too earthshattering. Biologists are naming 18,000 new species a year, though also telling us that as many as a million species – known and unknown – are at risk of dying out. And what limits were pushed, reproductively? In 2018, Chinese scientist announced the birth of two cloned macaques – the first time the technique succeeded with a primate. And the Higgs boson? I had to look it up, but then I also had to look up “macaque.” The boson is not a ship’s officer in charge of equipment and crew. It’s the “fundamental particle” associated with a theorized energy field, the Higgs field, which permeates the universe. In 2012, two teams at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced the detection of the Higgs boson.

  *

  January 2020

  Greater than is a symbol. Which is greater – the number of birds, ideas about birds, or the words that might be used to talk about birds? All of them are definitely greater than the words I can remember about birds I have forgotten.

  Greater than is a symbol, an arrow that points to the right, like a nose sniffing at the lesser thing, blind and certain, sizing what’s to its left as well as to its right, without ever once looking both ways. Greater than is vain. Greater than is inordinate in its pride and its two equal strokes; vanity has gone to its head, this symbol of inequality.

  *

  Advice to the old, what use is it? At some point, better late than never no longer applies. Advice to the old. It isn’t that nobody gives it, the bookshelves are sagging under the weight of it, but nobody wants to take it.

  *

  I’m reading Proust. Or, trying to. And thinking: It’s pointless, in our times, to describe in detail what can be seen, as if there were no cameras for that.

  It’s only the invisible that requires description; and not only does it require it, there is a desperate need for it.

  *

  From another Chabad email message, though I am rewriting it this wisdom:

  There are no wrong paths, only longer and shorter ones. Go wrong, and you will know it eventually, when you find yourself in a place where you don’t belong. And when that happens, the next step is simple. Go in a different direction, even when that requires you to take the longest path there, the longest, and the most difficult, by first retracing your steps.

  *

  Translating Eli, Eli, Hannah Senesh’s poem:
  “I pray that these things never end, the sand and the sea, the rush of the waters, the crash of the heavens, the prayer of the heart.” This verse was sung, in Hebrew, by the Montreal Girls’ Choir at the March of the Living in Poland in 1990. Elie Wiesel spoke at the event, but then stopped speaking, at a loss for words.

  Hannah was a Hungarian Jew. She came from a well-to-do family. She made Aliyah as a teenager, worked on a kibbutz, and taught herself Hebrew. In 1945 she volunteered to parachute into Hungary, not long before the end of the war in Europe. She was captured, tortured and murdered by Germans. What is it that makes some people choose heroism, while the rest of us live our lives on the sidelines. And we think of ourselves as tortured by difficult children or ex-wives or girlfriends.

  *

  Rilke – quoted often by Maria Popova, whose literary newsletters sometimes seem as though they were prepared in order to impress potential lovers: “For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

  Most overstatements are not simply over stated, but forty-nine percent false.

  Maria Popova is a lesbian, which may impact her particular choices of literary heroes.

  *

  “When a person purchases woolen garments from gentiles, he must check them very carefully, lest they be sewn with linen threads.”
  Maimonides, the Rambam, Mishneh Torah – Laws of K’layim.

  “Must” must be one of the most ill-used words in every language. And “should” comes right behind it.

  *

  From a Chabad email, referencing Likkutei Sichos (which means Collected Talks, a book that is a source text of the “core of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s teachings”):

  “Those who give – food, money, advice, knowledge, because they understand it’s fitting for those who have to give to those who don’t will keep the best for themselves. Those who give because they do not understand why they have and others don’t will give their best to those in need.”

  Apparently there’s giving, and then there’s giving. Debra does chastise me for being generous and yet complaining about it – or, least, pointing it out, as though I resented it, which of course
  in certain moods I do. Because there’s giving, and then there’s throwing resources away. But the Rebbe is correct. When the Temple has its food drives for Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, I will go to Tom Thumb and buy canned goods to donate. I do not give my best. I fill a bag with cans of soup, beans, peanut butter – cheap goods. Almost nothing that I buy is something I would buy for myself.

  *

  “Let me not lose my dream” – this a line from a poem published in 1922, in the magazine Bronze. It was written by Lucy Johnson, who was a poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though she was born in Atlanta. Born, 1890s; died, 1966.

  Our dreams will pass like the lives and dreams of everyone who came before us and those who will come after us.

  *

  “The idea of hurry-hurry is the most dangerous enemy” – Hermann Hesse. Even his name slows me down, with its double n.

  A poem Kurt Vonnegut wrote toward the end of his life praises finding the wellspring of happiness in the simplest source, “the knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Yes, but this is the wisdom the author acquires “toward the end of his life.” Ben and Eden seem to have concluded the same thing, but right from the beginning, and as a result both of them have next to nothing in the way of material accomplishments. Vonnegut is distinguished, praised, admired – he had more than his share, far more than enough.

  *

  The “poem-a-day” emails I receive often come with a photograph of the poet, which leaves an impression. For example, the photo of Hazel Hall, born in St. Paul in 1886, shows a dreamer. Her eyes see what no one else sees. Her head is aslant, chin up, throat bare. Hall was the author of Curtains (John Lane Company, 1921) and Cry of Time (E.P. Dutton & Co, 1928), poems collected and submitted by her sister and published after her death. Submission is a good word for the look on her face. She seems to have been in a daze. Her eyes are so open they seem to be shutting out whatever was actually in front of her. Hazel Hall died in 1924 in Portland. She had traveled there, or perhaps been taken. Either way, Hazel Hall is gone, John Lane is gone, and the cry of time is for the most part inaudible, drowned out by the louder noises of the now. Hazel Hall’s poem Habit begins this way: “Last night when my work was done/And my estranged hands/Were become mutually interested/In such forgotten things as pulse/I looked out of a window/Into a glittering night sky.” “And instantly,” she writes, “I began to feather-stitch a ring around the moon.”

  I can see her, at a desk, writing in longhand, with no revisions, and never even starting to scratch out a word. If someone the next day had asked her what was she doing, she might had answered, “Feather-stitching.” I had to look it up online, where I found feather-stitch embroidery, feather-stitch crochet, and even a feather-stitch crochet tutorial:
  Chain an odd number of stitches
  Chain one, skip the next chain and half double crochet in the next
  To start the next row, chain one and turn
  To make a feather stitch: Yarn over, pull up a loop in the chain-space
  Then you repeat step 4 until the end of the row. None of it makes any sense to me, but craft is like that. It is a mystery to the non-practitioner.

  *

  Ongoingness – The End of a Diary
  In 2015, Sarah Manguso published a book that uses the diary she kept for twenty-five years.

  Inspiration for what I’m doing here? No, not at all. I don’t keep a diary exactly. Very little about daily events. More often, this is a commonplace book, or a rewrite of what I have read. Quoting and reacting. All of this I may make use of, but just as likely won’t. Time will run out, as it does. The twenty-four second clock in basketball. The three score and ten (I’m almost there) or four score in life.

  *

  Percy Shelley – arguing for vegetarianism, or protesting the “practice of flesh-eating”: “How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe.” As I recall, Cain brought a sheaf of wheat as an offering to God, but Abel, whose offering pleased God, brought a lamb. It was the bloodletting in animal sacrifice that brought the priests in the Temple, representing all Israel, closer to God – a korban, a sacrifice, related to the Hebrew “k’rov,” which means close. To see life depart reminds us of the gift of life, and its Giver; we are the lamb, we are not wheat.

  *

  I typically misquote the beginning of Ecclesiastes 9.10, and either have forgotten or never knew the end: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” That is the part that I know. But then, it continues: “For in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.” And there is also the verse immediately preceding, which enjoins us to “enjoy life with your wife whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun – all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun.”

  It’s an odd encouragement.

  It’s time I read Ecclesiastes again, front to back. It may tell me it’s meaningless to do so, but I will find meaning even in that bleak pronouncement.

  However, instead of Ecclesiastes, I’m reading something that might be considered its opposite, a work that implicitly declares that virtually everything, in every detail, is meaningful. I’m working my way through the online offer from Chabad of “Three Chapters a Day” in Rambam. I am dutifully skimming his Mishneh Torah, though with minimal understanding. I am ploughing through its agricultural practices and the attendant laws.

  Mishneh Torah is a rebuke of sorts not only of Ecclesiastes, but of that other wisdom that counsels, “It’s the thought that counts.” No, it’s the actual deed, performed exactly as it should be, with every I dotted and t crossed. Intention may matter, but it is secondary. But then that’s something that we can also learn when we give a birthday present to our girlfriend and she judges it to be inadequate.

  *

  In 1928, the nature writer Henry Beston wrote about animals. He expresses himself beautifully, and with a humility about being human that borders on shame. “In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

  Maybe so. But then try calling Mika, a dog who spent a year on the streets in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. She will look at me with no comprehension, and without the social skill to even try to please me.

  *

  Whitman: I believe a leaf of grass is mo less than the journey work of the stars.

  Whitman’s diction has great charm. In his rhythm, his “the journey work of the stars,” there is the satisfying propulsion of the end of the heroic line in an epic poem. But more mysterious to me than Whitman’s words was the young man who handed me a paperback of Whitman’s poetry on the Metro in Paris when I was twenty-one. No conversation. He simply handed me the book as he passed by and was gone. That was in May or June, 1973. The paperback he put in my hand must still be on my shelf somewhere. In Paris, I decorated its dark cover with the small lozenge-shaped stickers that I removed, one a day, from the oranges I bought in the market on Rue Mouffetard. Those black stickers also had a word that seemed like a charm: Maroc.

  *

  Dostoyevsky wrote in a letter to his brother Mihail, after the commutation of his death sentence: “Life is everywhere, life is in us, ourselves, not outside.”
  Seems contradictory. If something is everywhere, surely it is outside as well as inside, and even more outside, which is unconfined, than inside.
  In any case, Dostoyevsky was not executed. He received a lesser sentence, four years of hard labor.
  When I was in St. Petersburg, I went walking on my own through neighborhoods. One day, I passed the house that was reputed to be where Raskolnikov lived, in Crime and Punishment. The was a plaque on the brick. What was I doing, going to Russia, walking around by myself? Like the murderer in the novel, I was doing it just to do it – for no good reason, in order to have “an interesting life.”

  *

  “Teach the free man how to praise.”
  This was Auden’s description of the purpose or perhaps the achievement of the poetry of W. B. Yeats. And in a later collection of essays, “Making, Knowing and Judging,” Auden writes that “there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.” There’s truth in that. There’s praise in simply calling out the things in front of your eyes in a poem. There’s praise in noticing. In life as well, we are in need of praise in the form of being noticed. We need no greater praise than that, especially from our closest companions. This has been so often at the heart of my unhappiness with Debra. From time to time, I will become convinced that she doesn’t notice me at all. She will ask me how I am or what I have been doing with the pro forma tonality of a mere social skill.

  *

  I have read that the greatest revelations are to be found not in prayer or study, but in the everyday world. Yes, that is probably so. But the smaller revelations are the only ones that seem available to me, the only ones that I am open to.

  *

  February 2020

  My trees, however barren and ill they seem this February, will put their green leaves on by April. After looking like grief all winter, they will reappear reborn. Whatever love the soil and sun has for them perseveres. But the leaves coming in April will not be the very same ones from Aprils past. If they were, then these winter branches today would be like a twisty cross, and the coming bright leaves would be a resurrection. Still, in the repetitive speech of the birds, I can hear the watchword of a faith. The creek after a rainfall says it too. There is no hurry in the rushing water. It is going nowhere this morning it hasn’t gone before. Same with the afternoon wind, which never gets ahead. The wind is a constant breath of the world, an exhalation. And in the silence of a faraway star, a command to listen and to hear.

  *

  I’ve just learned new information about the age of dogs. You can’t simplify it any longer, according to the experts. Say goodbye to the factor-of-seven rule. No more declaring that a dog year equals seven human years. According to the news, each of a dog’s first two years correspond to twelve human years. Which make sense, since dogs are sexually mature at two years old. Then, each of the other dog years count as four human years. So, if Mika is six years old now, she is twelve plus twelve plus four plus four plus four plus four – she’s forty, on the cusp of middle age, or over the border of it.

  *

  From Chabad emails:
  “For this I brought the universe into being!” So God says, when a human being does a single good deed. It is said that even the highest of the heavenly angels cannot do the same.

  “It is said,” “some people say,” “I’ve heard that” — these are the phrases people use when they want to assert something but not be responsible for it. So they keep some distance between themselves and what they are saying. Trump uses these phrases all the time. “I don’t know if it’s true, but, some people think so. I could be. Who knows.”

  He “puts it out there,” and his audience hears it.

  The Chabad message continues: “It is a triumph only available to us: to squeeze a drop of goodness out of our meaty, bloody selves.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at things, this favorable comparison of ourselves to the heavenly beings. We are graded on a curve. We’re ahead of the angeles.
  And if God celebrates, then so should we.
  Feel good, then, for what you have done for good.

  *

  More from my Chabad emails:
  “The one not open to receiving has little to give. Rain falls on the hard ground. It runs over, it floods. How can I break the soil so that it’s open to the rains, so seeds are nourished and growth happens?
  Good is all around. What’s needed: open eyes and a softening of the heart.”

  *

  More Chabad:
  “Look again and look within the other person, no matter how small, mean, ugly or wrong you judge him to be. Look past his clothes, his shape, the vulgarity of what he says, even how he behaves. There, under the masks, behind the emotions he shows, the pretense, the pretending, you may see his terror and his heroism. His challenges are unlike yours, but no easier, no less deserving of compassion, or even admiration, however impossible they may be to understand.”

  This is speaking directly to me.
  I am pointing to Ben and despairing of what he has done to himself and his apparent inability to be otherwise. It’s impossible for me to understand, but he is no less deserving of my admiration.
  If I look under the pretense and the pretending, I may see his terror and his heroism.

  *

  What is AEDP?
  Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy.
  On March 15 last year I printed out a page from the article “What Type of Therapy Is Best?” It appeared in my Flipbook feed, which is a collection of articles curated according to my preferences of subject matter. Articles about Israel, poetry, therapy, other topics I must have selected. This particular article had come from Vice magazine, a publication I’ve never seen on any newsstand – which is not surprising, since there are no newsstands. I had never seen Vice on the electronic newsstand either. That’s a place I frequent. It’s the newsstand at the intersection of my email and midnight, where there are dozens of magazines and hundreds of articles. I could spend all night reading this journalism, the work of others. And much of it is well done and worth reading. Worth reading? None of it has impact, other than it passes the time. Or, rather, the time passes. The reading doesn’t do anything, and the time passes on its own.

  Anyway. In this article in Vice, I saw the first mention of AEDP. “Depression is often a reaction to buried emotions that have not had a safe place for expression,” says Hilary Jacobs Hendel. She’s an AEDP psychotherapist. I wondered why she retained her middle name. Was Jacobs a hedge against the dissolution of her identity, or a reaction to her buried fears of the marriage to Hendel?

  Is any environment actually safe and, if so, safe from what? The AEDP technique that the article described is to physically experience your emotions, connect them to your thoughts, and thus “process them to completion.”

  If you don’t express, you depress. It’s possible. Usually, I think the opposite. I think that expressing them can also accelerate my troubles– that it might be better to not say it, to not even think it, if that’s possible.

  On the same page with the AEDP paragraph, another technique was summarized. My guess is this is why I printed out this page nearly a year ago. I wanted to save the paragraph about Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy. Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy recommends meditating to increase happiness or, at the least, “self-compassion.” The paragraph also “notes” that for some people mindfulness has the opposite effect. They become frustrated by their inability to meditate; as if even doing nothing is too difficult for them. So they beat themselves up even further.

  A week later, on March 22, I printed out pages from The Book of Life, from The School of Life, Alain de Botton’s venture.

  I wonder what was going on with me in March last year. I was looking for wisdom. And I wasn’t alone in that. The material I printed out from The Book of Life had thousands of total views. As many years (5775) as there are years from the creation of the world, according to the Hebrew calendar.

  These are the six chapter headings in The Book of Life:
  Relationships
  Work
  Self-Knowledge
  Sociability
  Calm
  Leisure

  I had printed out some, maybe all, from Chapter 4 on sociability. The secondary title of the printout is more revealing: What Can Stop the Loneliness?

  *

  There are many online businesses that are selling a sense of competence in the company of a master. MasterClass, for example, offers lessons from celebrity teachers in dozens of professions — chefs, mathematicians, carpenter’s wives. Steph Curry teaches how to shoot the three-point shot. Last year in August while I was in California, I came close to signing up for poetry lessons from Billy Collins, whose poetry is sometimes wonderfully clever, and at other times ordinary, even dull. Billy Collins was in Dallas some years ago as the honored guest at a Friends of the Dallas Public Library fundraiser. I was on the board then. The story is that our guest was hitting on Kate Park, our director, who was cute enough, though only in the way that a Radcliffe girl might have been when I was in colleges and the ratio of men to women was skewed enough that any young woman was a prize. Poor Kate. She’s dead now; illness, horrible tragic illness – whatever afflicted her caused her to lose speech, then coordination, and then the ability to breathe.

  My visit to the MasterClass site must have been tracked by the masters of online retargeting. I now receive follow-up solicitations, the emails that MasterClass sends marketing its services to someone who came to the site but failed to complete the sign-up. “Finish up to learn from the best,” one of the emails says. “You’re so close to enriching your life with lessons from today’s most brilliant minds, including Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman…” Sign up, it says, for the “All-Access Pass.” I can learn right away “ what took these instructors a lifetime to master.”

  Are you ready, it asks, “to finish what you started?”

  *

  Attention without feeling, Mary Oliver writes, is “only a report.” But a report may be the more valuable thing. You read it and reread it over the years, and the feeling that it provokes changes.

  And it’s not easy, simply reporting. You have to see, or remember, and speak. None of that is easy.

  *

  I have read that the six-sided star originated with King Solomon’s signet ring. Why, then, is it called the Star of David? Could the signet ring have been a gift that David gave Solomon, father to son? My parents gave me a signet ring for my Bar Mitzvah. It was gold. The monogram MHP was engraved on its flat gold face. The historical definition of signet is just that: a small seal, usually set in a ring, used to authenticate an official document, either instead of a signature or with one. As though signet was another way of saying “signed it.” I never used my ring for any such practical purpose. I though I have no memory of ever losing it, I have no sense of where it is, either.

  Just as a star might, Solomon’s Star of David has persisted over the centuries. Nor is it exclusive to the Jews. It appears with a crescent moon on a Roman coin minted in the first century of the Common Era. In Arab legend, the Star of David seal was said to have given Solomon, Sulayman to the Muslims, his Dr. Dolittle-like ability to speak to the animals. It was embroidered on Muslim battle flags in the Ottoman era, to rally the faithful. For Persian culture, so enamored of geometry, it offered the perfection of its two triangles, one imposed on the other, as Muhammed was on Moses or Jesus. It could represent eternity on the mosaic stones of mosques. The Jews in Prague carried a flag with Solomon’s seal in the 14th century. And it reappeared five centuries later as the central symbol for another flag, this one raised in 1887, at the end of summer in Basel, Switzerland, at the First Zionist Congress.

  *

  Youth culture isn’t created by the young. It’s manufactured by entrepreneurs. It’s sold as a product. It’s motivated by mortgages and ambition. When I was a teenager, I never thought of popular culture as min. Not the music, not the clothing, not the drugs or the slang.
  I understood that none of it was my idea. The mass movement never moved me. It made no sense to me. In the crowd, there is no movement. All I could feel in a crowd would be the claustrophobia of being surrounded. It’s the person who is by himself who has the advantages of motion – to move away, to move on.

  *

  When I describe a sorry state of affairs, I sometimes say that all I am doing is “telling it like it is.” But I am also admitting that I don’t believe I can make a difference. If I see myself as a partner in the making of the world, then I might also be responsible for making it better. That would mean telling it like it should be, or can be.

  *

  February 9, 2020

  There’s a party for Poppy Sundeen’s 70th birthday tonight. So many people say that they cannot believe so many years have gone by. Or that they have reached a certain age. Or, even more surprising, that their children have. I don’t see it like that. I don’t feel that way. The Grateful Dead’s tune speaks directly to me: What a long, strange trip it’s been. Emphasis on “long,” and I would say “unexpected” instead of “strange,” though that may be a distinction without a difference.

  And some days “disappointing” is the right word to replace “strange.”
  Those are not good days.

  *

  Am continuing with my project of going through the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides that Chabad makes available electronically. I’m reading it, though without much improvement in my understanding. Most days, I’m skimming. This morning before tennis, I found myself in the section that covers inadvertent errors and sin offerings needed to atone for them. Yesterday I read the section on sexual improprieties. It contained a portion of a list of forty-three improprieties. Improper seems like the mildest of rebukes, and not meant for crimes. In some cases, it is applied to inadvertent acts. Today, I’m more or less on scheduleI’m reading about food-related errors, and worshiping false deities, and other things to avoid. In the category of the worship of false deities, Maimonides lists “defecating to Peor,” which was apparently a practice, but very hard to see how this can be inadvertent.

  *

  A father to his children:
  I did not fail, I gave you the gift. You failed, you refused to accept it.
  The children respond:
  It’s true. We did not want it, because you failed to give us what we needed.

  *

  More Maimonides. Today, I’m reading laws regarding sacrifices or guilt offerings and sin offerings brought to the Temple after impurity for the zavah, the zav, the one afflicted with tzara’at. For this last category, it says that if a person afflicted does not have a right hand, a right foot, or a right ear, he can never regain ritual purity.

  Purity is a problematic quality. Maybe one of the most problematic. It can be a blindness, an obsession, a lie, a sin. We can be improved by admixture, and enfeebled by a mythology of purity.

  *

  The pages I tore out from my notebook are in the wastebasket like dead flowers in a pot.

  *

  The bamboo in my yard, jointed stalks and pointed leaves, is a mutinous army. It’s taking over, a tall green myriad marching across the lawn, jumping the sidewalk, and indifferent to correction or to good or bad.

  February 2020

  Debra and I went to Charleston. I wanted to stay in the Restoration Hotel and visit the city I had read about in my travel magazines. Mostly Debra stayed in the room with her laptop and her legal work. She came out for meals, when she wasn’t complaining about the room service or some other disappointment. I decided to get away from her, so I went on a “plantation tour.”

  The live oaks drip with Spanish moss outside the city. On a tour bus on my way to the plantation, the guide said it isn’t Spanish and it isn’t moss. From the Visitors Center on Meeting Street in Charleston, he drives the Grey Tours van over the bridge to Boone Hall. He was formerly an actor who left New York City. He mentions Tommy Tune and Liza Minelli. I asked him if he knew Maeve Kinkaid, my college tutor, who played on Guiding Light or One Life to Live and was married Meryl Streep’s brother. He says yes, then, no, it wasn’t Maeve Kinkaid, it was somebody else he remembers, someone who played a character named Maeve in one of the soap operas. Neither of us remembers well, and the recent past is always more confusing than the distant one. We are at the plantation. He tells us that the largest of the live oaks he points out was planted in the 1740s. The brick one room houses are where the slaves lived. They made four million bricks each year after the cotton season. Bricks, he says, were the main cash crop at this plantation. Much of beautiful Charleston is built from them.

  *

  Sometimes it seems as if everything I loved has faded like the stars at dawn. Those people and places and things I loved, many of them must still be there, though the night in which they shone for me is never falling again.

  *

  I keep retyping this, though it doesn’t seem either encouraging or helpful. Realistic, yes, but not useful:

  Sooner or later, every man is a failure in his own eyes. The gap between his hopes and what actually lies ahead has become a chasm, and there’s no getting across. There may be a promised land, but he won’t enter it.

  *

  And repeating this to myself as well:

  Reading The Flower, by George Herbert, who died at 39. Those lives of thirty or forty years, slower than ours, must have been rushing by. How much closer they were to God, with their lives so much closer to death.

  *

  There is always a second mountain to climb.
  Even after I am “come of days.”
  Now what?
  Less reading, more seeding, more choosing, more refusing, more at peace or accepting of all the losing.

  *

  Medusa memories; don’t look at them. Or I can, if I want to stop the world from moving.

  *

  1 March 2020

  Coffee with Jane Manaster after Talmud last Wednesday. She emailed me later a set of quotes that Guy, her husband, had gathered on the topic of happiness. Guy, who died last October, had Parkinsons. A retired professor of psychology at the University of Texas, he had been considering writing about happiness, and the gathered quotes were part of his preparation. I had the time this afternoon to go through the pages. I marked a handful of the quotes; Guy had collected dozens of them. Quite a few were attributed to lecturers who had delivered a Baggs Memorial Lecture. I needed to look that up. Apparently there’s a “happiness lecture” yearly, in Birmingham, England, named after Dr. Baggs.

  From the quotes:

  A quatrain that Guy attributed to Yehudi Menuhin’s Baggs Lecture from 1975:

  A moron is a happy man.
  He doesn’t give a damn.
  I wish I were a moron.
  My God, perhaps I am.

  Another quote, this one from Gustave Flaubert:

  “To be stupid, selfish and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking all is lost.”

  I think I have heard that one before.

  A longwinded one from, or about, Zhou Lijing, 17th century:

  “Often when he was intoxicated, he was inspired with some of his most excellent lines of poetry. Friends adored and greatly admired him. He loved wine, and often drank to the point of complete intoxication. High-minded in his pursuits, he enjoyed a leisurely life. Although he lived in a very simple house, he enjoyed his days fully. Though his clothes were ragged and full of mended patches he did not worry about them, regarding material needs as illusions. He amused himself by writing little poems or playing music, not worrying about whether he had achieved anything. He died a happy man.”

  I wonder what Flaubert would have said about Zhou Lijing “…not worrying about whether he had achieved anything.”

  Zhou Lijing is someone who had no “immortality strategy,” as it’s called. But here he is, still living, at least by name, within Guy Manaster’s collection of quotes.

  Friedrich Nietzsche earned two quotes. What relevance these lines have to the subject of happiness isn’t clear, and Guy can no longer explain or comment:

  “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

  And, “The future influences the present just as much as the past.”

  Guy included one from Bertrand Russell:

  “The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology; not in arithmetic.”

  Russell wasn’t aware of the atmosphere as reported these days on university campuses.

  More relevant, even if obliquely, this quote from William James (Wm James on Guy’s list):

  “The deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

  I met Guy near the end of his life. Jane had brought him to one of the Sons of Abraham meetings that was held at a mosque out in Plano. Guy wasn’t walking well, so she was helping him move along.

  He collected this one from Jean Giradoux: “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

  He also included lots of rabbinic remarks, including two from The Chofetz Chaim. Looking up Chofetz Chaim, I learned that it’s the title of a book, meaning Desirer of Life; nice, I think, for a man to become known by the name of his book. Here are his two:

  “The profits of compromise are nothing compared to its losses.”

  “A man should remember three things: That he has only one day to live; that he has only the page before him to study; and that he is the only Jew on whom the survival of Torah depends.”

  This one on Guy’s list was from The Hasidic Anthology:

  “A father complained to the Besht that has son had forsaken God. ‘What, Rabbi, shall I do?’ ‘Love him more than ever,’ was the Besht’s reply.”

  That resonated.

  Yes, but in my case, certainly with Eden, there seems to be so little opportunity to offer that love, and less chance with each passing day. “But” – it reminds me of that subcategory of chronic caller to the Crisis hotline when I was volunteering as a telephone counselor. Some of those chronic callers were called “Yes, but-ers.”

  A quote from a Oxford don who described his colleague: “What time he can spare from adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties.”

  Guy’s quotes on the topic of happiness take a wide view of the topic certainly. He gives himself latitude. So many of them might have been called “quotes that make me happy.”

  “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Logan Pearsall Smith

  Guy threw in a Yiddish proverb: “God gave burdens, also shoulders.”

  The many pages of the collection finally come to an end with Philip Larkin. I think of Larkin as a patron saint of unhappiness; at the least, sourness. Guy wrote down an excerpt from the poem about the damage parents do to their children, I don’t need to quote that here. Was Larkin ever a father? The last quote from Guy’s collection that I marked was this one, from Sir Winston Churchill:

  “Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.”

  *

  Sub specie durationis or sub specie aeternitatis. Do the mundane and the momentary matter less than the holy and eternal? Among my received wisdoms from Chabad.org: “Every day can be lifted up and made holy.”

  March 7

  Sunday. It may be the March 8. The day of the week is easy to know, the number in the month much less so. I don’t really count from one to thirty-one. I count one to seven, the cycle of the week, the mirror of the creation of the world, six days and then a day of rest. Or, I count five and two. The weekday, the weekend.

  Daylight savings time began this morning at 2 am. Tennis is coming at noon, Debra is returning from Denver later this afternoon. This appears in the roundup of news in my email from the New York Times (along with the coronavirus news and crashing stock prices); it’s a report on what might be taken as the“beginning of the end.” I’m particularly struck by the idea of a crater “a million light years wide” – using time as a measure of space. This is sometimes how I, too, think of my “distance” from an event. Not miles away, but years away:

  “Astronomers say they have detected the biggest explosion ever documented in the universe – very likely a gigantic outburst of energy from a supermassive black hole, which blew a crater more than a million light years wide through a galaxy cluster called Ophiuchus. To create a blast that large, one scientist said, the black hole would have had to swallow about 270 million suns’ worth of mass.”

  One scientist may have said so, but then people say nutty things all the time. Journalists like to hide behind experts who “say.” The journalist provides what we readers are to assume is a fact, because title “astronomer” or, even less specific, “scientist” is appended to it.

  *

  March 18

  Coronavirus has upended our lives. Business is disappearing and my employees are at home, feigning concern for their lives.

  I am scanning my portions of the Mishneh Torah daily. The sections I’m in are holding steady in their fixation on impurity, a topic that seems to coincide with our times, at least as portrayed in the daily news, which is filled with updates on “the virus,” policies and best practices for handwashing, the scarcity of sanitizers, the urging for us all to “practice” social distancing. Not a lot of additional practice needed in my case. I prefer social distancing. What was formerly my disability may at last be a strength.

  In the Mishneh Torah I am also reading ghastly things. Here’s a sample, in the English translation provided by Chabad: “When a person cuts flesh from a living being to feed to an animal,” if that person subsequently wants to use the animal as food for humans, for it to impart the impurity associated with foods, he must have had that intent from the start. All of which strikes me as weirdly unnecessary to have as a law, but the principle is worth thinking about. What impact does your intent have on society’s judgment of your action? Sometimes a lot; other times, none.

  The Mishneh Torah can be quite strange in places. But I might hear something almost as strange in a Trump press conference in response to a question about the pandemic. It’s a weirdness that seems to have little to do with my actual health. Purity and impurity, fears of the foreign, creepy Mike Pence, and the ever-present Dr. Fauci, who at 79 is remarkably happy to be advising us all on “the worse that is ahead.”

  Back to Maimonides –
  Tum’at Okhalin – what is the minimum measure for foods to be susceptible to impurity. For food to contract impurity, the slightest amount is enough. Even a single sesame or a mustard seed can contract impurity, as Leviticus 11:34 states: “Any food that shall be eaten,” which is taken to mean even the slightest amount. When it comes to the fear of impurity, you can never be too pure.

  Witness, for example, the individuals driving in their cars by themselves with all their windows up and yet they are wearing the flimsy blue masks over their nose and mouth.

  *

  A metal ball, an anvil, an iron shaft, a carpenter’s leveling tool, a smith’s donkey, plumb-weights used by builders, the iron beams used to press olives, a metal dispenser for a mill, the blade with which a scribe cuts off the tips of the reeds he uses to write, a metal pen, a stylus and a ruler a scribe might use to rule lines – all of these are susceptible to impurity. Maimonides lists them, each one with its independent name.

  What you find in experts of all kinds, and in great writers, too, is an obsessive concern for detail, a willingness to make distinctions, and a joy in doing that.

  *

  April 2, 2020

  The pandemic has been officially declared. Meaning, worldwide. And here in Dallas we are under lockdown, confined to our homes more or less. The grocery store is permitted, the cleaners is an “essential business.” The notion of being “essential” strikes me as a suspect concept, given that it’s something defined by government declaration. We are all living Howard Hughes germaphobic life now, but without the money, or the property, or the actresses to sleep with. I am following my regimen of skimming three chapters a day of Maimonides and have little stomach for it, but I’ve always been good at doing something forty -nine percent of me doesn’t want to do. I can follow a pattern. Chapter after chapter continues to declare the laws of purity and impurity. It is concluding soon, I hope, maybe even tonight, with the last of the endless sentences about mikvaot. But then a bit of explanation is coming, an elaboration. These laws are chukim, each one a chok, which means they are not rational proscriptions. Rather, they are Scriptural, and to obey them is a matter not just of conforming to them, but of proper intent as well. If I immerse in a mikvah without the intent to purify myself, I do not emerge pure. I am told to focus my heart on purifying my soul. My wicked thoughts and bad character traits will become purified by the intent to distance myself from the wrong counsel, and to immerse in the waters of knowledge.

  The section concludes:
  Blessed be the Merciful One Who grants assistance.

  That, too, has a foreign strangeness. Who blesses whom? And why does the Merciful One need to blessed by me? And what does bless mean exactly? When I look the word up, I find that “bless” is to consecrate with blood. To sprinkle, to mark, or to hallow with blood. It conjures up the sacrificial practices, when an animal was slaughtered and its blood sprinkled on the altar. So a blessing is an offering. Consecrate means to declare something holy. And holy means consecrated to God. The definitions take me in a circle. I say “bless you” when someone sneezes, but it is the Merciful One who I am to bless with my actions at an altar.

  *

  April 10

  Last night, our virtual seder. Debra and I were at her house in Southlake, Mark and Margarita in the Cedars, Bart and Susan in Oak Cliff, and Poppy with her son, Rick, off Forest Lane. And today I’m home. I had my groceries delivered, as I wasn’t willing to stand in the long line of people waiting for entry to Central Market – each of them six feet apart, with their ridiculous homemade masks covering nostrils and mouth. Who knows? Perhaps it truly is a performance that is saving lives, although it’s very hard to think so. Whether it is or not, I’m happy to be inside on this grey, off and on rainy afternoon, enjoying the isolation, which is normal life now and has been normal for me long before now. I’ve just read an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s Nobel acceptance speech, which bears retyping. When I type and copy it, I can almost fool myself into thinking I am writing it. Maybe at the least I will have a bodily memory of these words:

  “It is today exactly one hundred years since an unhappy and brilliant poet, the most awesome of all despairing souls, wrote down this prophecy: ‘A l’aurore, armes d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.’ In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.

  “I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as now I have with my poetry and also with my banner.

  “Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.

  “In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.”

  This bit of the speech seems to me not only grandiose, but a bit crazy, the words of someone who either knows nothing about human nature, or is in denial about what he knows; or, just as likely, is posturing, and in the most commercial of moves is giving his audience the lofty self-righteousness that it wants from his speech.

  I remember my Rimbaud, too. I remember the Bateau Ivre coffeehouse in Berkeley, and the book of Rimbaud’s poetry I pilfered from Catherine Demongeot’s bookshelf, from her apartment on Rue Cardinal Lemoine.

  *

  Reading Maimonides…still. In the laws of Murder and the Preservation of Life, I find information about the cities of refuge. It is is hard not see an entire world in this excerpt of shoulds and musts:

  “The Jewish court is obligated to construct roads leading to the cities of refuge. They should be maintained and widened. Any stumbling block and obstacle should be removed from them. On these roads neither a hill, a valley, nor a river should be left. Instead, a bridge should be built across so as not to impeded a person fleeing there. This is all implied by Deuteronomy 19:3, which states: ‘You shall prepare the road for yourselves.’ The width of the road to the city of refuge should be not less than thirty-two cubits. Signs stating ‘Refuge, refuge,’ should be written at intersections, so that killers would be aware of the way and turn there.

  וחיבין בית דין לכון הדרכים לערי מקלט לתקנם ולהרחיבן. ומסירין מהן כל מכשול יכל תקלה. יאין מניחין בדרך לא תל ולא גיא ולא נהר. אלא וסין עליו גשר כדי שלו לעכב את הבורח לשם. שנאמר (דברים יט ג) ’תכין לך הדרך’. ירחב דרך ערי מקלט אין פחות משלשים ושתים אמות. ומקלט מקלט היה כתוב ל פרשת דרכים כדי שיכירו הרצחנים ויפנו לשמ.

  “Every year, on the fifteenth of Adar, the court would send out emissaries to inspect the roads leading to the cities of refuge. Wherever they found flaws, they would have them repaired. If a court was dilatory regarding this matter, it is considered as if they shed blood.”

  Have I mentioned that I’m studying Hebrew? Conversation Hebrew, not Biblical.

  This regard for murderers seems to have as its purpose the maintenance of the social order. The rules provide an escape from the revenge of the friends and relatives of the murdered, and so prevent the “cycle of violence,” to use a term from current newspeak about the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. As if it is wiser to let it go, rather than to punish. As if there was no preventative value in the lesson others might take from retribution.

  *

  April 30.

  In a few minutes, May.
  If I really appreciated that everything passes, would I ever be upset? I would let my troubles pass through me as well, just as I am only passing through.

  *

  I’m reading a review of a biography of Kierkegaard. It’s full of phrases that seem to richly represent potential titles for a best seller. Who could resist: Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, and The Sickness Unto Death.

  The reviewer suggests that Kierkegaard made a career out of his own unhappiness when, these days, he might have chosen instead to regard his moods as little more than symptoms of depression and taken Paxil or Celexa.

  Kierkegaard, credited with the pioneering of existentialism (“the philosophical belief that we are each responsible for creating meaning in our lives”). Also, for the bromide that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. Better question: does it need to be understood, or just lived? Why create meaning? It’s hard enough simply to create a good omelet or a sauce. Why take responsibility for something that is impossible to achieve? But it could be that K’s statement is more about not allowing something outside of you, a church, a guru, a political program, create meaning for you.

  I think as I often do of my troubled son – troubling to me, at least. Ben looks into the future as into an abyss. The freedom he has in his choices are frightening to him, or bewildering, so he stays as still as he can, in the stillness of retreat.

  *

  From my reading:

  There is no truth to discover. The world is truth, but there is no need to look for truth out in the world. It’s inside you. Just learn to be quiet and listen.

  Sounds good; not sure it means anything, but it sounds good.

  *

  A Jewish notion of justice, from Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, Sanhedrin:

  “When all the judges of a Sanhedrin begin their judgment of a case involving capital punishment and say that the defendant is liable, he is exonerated. There must be some who seek to exonerate him and argue on his behalf, but yet the majority hold him liable. Only then he is executed.”

  This is both peculiar and wonderful. A rejection of unanimity, an understanding that a decision without dissent is a corrupt decision.

  *

  June 2020

  Saturday morning. As I was driving home from Southlake, I listened again to the CD Ben gave me for Father’s Day this year. Bob Dylan. I would never have thought of him as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite Christopher Ricks deeming him worth writing a book about, in praise of his poetry. A thick book, too. I met the very clever Professor Ricks at Harvard. What I remember from that encounter, other than his bald head and his performative energy, was an opinion he offered. Medusa’s frightful power to turn men to stone was a symbol of women’s power to compel men, willing or not, to have an erection. That was memorable. More memorable than Bob Dylan’s new album; one side of it is a single song called Murder Most Foul. It’s intoned, monotoned, a droning music, with the lyrics provocative in places, and cliched phrases in rhyme.

  *

  June 17
  A week since Ben’s 36th birthday. Nine days since his move to his new home at 9222 Church Road. I think he’s chosen well. It’s a condominium development, but not the typical conversion of an apartment complex, where residents are on top of each other, separated by walls that are too thin. Ben’s is a handsome development in a wooded area of Lake Highlands. It’s in the Richardson school district, too, though it’s just off Skillman between Walnut Hill and Royal Lane. Not that the school district will ever matter to him, other than when it’s time to sell. My hope is he’ll take some pride in his own home. He has used a large portion of his savings for the down payment –$60,000, which I matched as I had promised to do. So, a $120,000 down payment on a $160,000 purchase, leaving him with a mortgage payment that is more modest than a rent payment he might have had. He will have homeowner’s association dues; but in exchange, water’s included, and outside maintenance. Ben isn’t one to look for any additional responsibility. He doesn’t want to sow or to reap. So, no front lawn, no back garden.

  *

  From Maria Popova’s over-enthusiastic Wednesday email:

  “This knowing, at its most intimate, is a function of naming – for words are how we come to know meanings. Kimmerer considers this delicate dialog between a thing’s essence and its name:

  Having words for these forms makes the differences between them so much more obvious. With words at our disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

  Agreed. Whoever this Kimmerer is, the idea is one I’ve held as well. The passage is about plants and their names, which is something think about, now that Pam’s gone. She was my former resident expert. Without her, I’m not sure what’s growing in my own backyard, which is full of trees, bushes, and bedded plants, since I’m no longer on a first name basis with them. Maria Popova ‘s message continues:

  “The remarkable diversity of moss varieties known and named only adds to the potentiality for intimacy with the world at all scales. But among this vast multiplicity of mosses is one particular species inhabiting the small caves carved by glaciers into the lakeshore, which alone embodies immense wisdom about the mystery and meaning of life. Kimmerer writes:

  Schistostega pennata, the Goblins’ Gold, is unlike any other moss. It is a paragon of minimalism, simple in means, rich in ends. So simple you might not recognize it as a moss at all. The more typical mosses on the bank outside spread themselves to meet the sun. Such robust leaves and shoots, though tiny, require a substantial amount of solar energy to build and maintain. They are costly in solar currency. Some mosses need full sun to survive, others favor the diffuse light of clouds, while Schistostega lives on the clouds’ silver lining alone.

  What I take from this passage: A writer can write about anything, any topic, and spin gold from it, if he knows enough and has the words to convey what he knows. Maria Popova goes on. She comments, and quotes from Kimmerer’s book for pages more. I don’t have enough energy, solar or otherwise, to type it all here, though it’s all remarkable, but will offer a handful of lines, skipping around, picking sentences as if they were flowers:

  “The shimmering presence of Schistostega is created entirely by the weft of nearly invisible threads crisscrossing the surface of the moist soil. It glows in the dark, or rather it glitters in the half light of places which scarcely feel the sun.”

  Who is it that knows about such mysteries, and also has the ability to enchant us with descriptions of them. But then Maria Popova elaborates on the meaning of this moss that only exists in the near absence of light, and, as Kammerer writes, is able through photosynthesis to “turn sun into sugar, spinning straw into gold.” She expands the meaning of the moss, in a sensibility that is practically pagan in its worship:

  “But more than a biological marvel, Schistostega presents a parable of patience and its bountiful rewards – an allegory for meeting the world not with grandiose entitlement but with boundless generosity of spirit; for taking whatever it has to offer and giving back an infinity more. Kammerer writes:

  “Rain on the outside, fire on the inside. I feel a kinship with this being whose cold light is so different from my own. It asks very little from the world and yet glitters in response.”

  And finally, after anthropomorphizing moss, Popova makes her favorite moves, name dropping, offering life lessons, and telling us where to learn more:

  “This tiny moss is a master of ‘the patient gleaming of light’ – and what is the greatest feat of the human spirit, the measure of a life well lived, if not a ‘patient gleaming of light’? Annie Dillard knew this when she wrote: ‘I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.’ And Carl Jung knew it when he insisted that ‘the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’ The humble, generous Schistostega illuminates the darkness of mere being into blazing awe at the miracle of life itself – a reminder that our existence on this unremarkable rock orbiting an unremarkable star is a glorious cosmic accident, the acute awareness of which calls to mind poet Mark Strand’s memorable words: ‘It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.’”

  And she concludes with her theology:

  “To pay attention, indeed, is the ultimate celebration of this accidental miracle of life. Kimmerer captures this with exuberant elegance:

  The combination of circumstances which allows it to exist at all are so implausible that the Schistostega is rendered much more precious than gold. Goblins’ or otherwise. Not only does its presence depend on the coincidence of the cave’s angle to the sun, but if the hills on the western shore were any higher the sun would set before reaching the cave…its life and ours exist only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.

  Is it implausible? It is no more implausible than a stone or the dullest bit of dirt. Why is there anything at all? This is an unanswerable question that has been asked forever. And whatever the answer is, we have no means of verifying it.”

  Rereading all this, I’m not sure if Maria Popova wrote the last paragraph, which I’ve closed with a quotation mark, or if I did.

  *

  Notes, other thoughts –

  In the legal tradition that I’m reading about in Mishneh Torah, as Maimonides enumerates and summarizes the halacha – the law — there is no punishment without warning someone first that an action is prohibited. In our current tradition, ignorance of the law in no defense. According to Maimonides, who wrote in the 12th century, we must be warned. And if we have no intent to disregard a warning, our act is not deserving of punishment.

  What about the actions of someone who doesn’t agree with the rules?

  We are warned, “Wear a mask or you’ll be punished with a fine. “

  “No, I don’t agree, wearing a mask is unnecessary. Furthermore, you have no right to tell me what to do.”

  Today, laws are man-made, so a man might believe he can challenge them. The laws that Maimonides was clarifying were received by Moses on Sinai. Does he consider them subject to a challenge?

  *

  There was a mystical tradition that the Arizal, the Ari, who lived in the 16th century, so mastered hidden wisdom that all souls were healed. Why then is there suffering still? No answer. The only thing we know is that we don’t know.

  *

  Happiness is a strategy. “Come to a mountain cheerfully, and you are more likely to climb over it.” Are there techniques to create happiness? Several are suggested. First, write down the things you are grateful for. Every day. Also, list your strengths, and deliberately use at least one of them. Every day. Do something difficult but within your capability. Every day. The lesson here: Happiness is a practice, as much a yoga or keeping a journal. It’s as daily as the cup of coffee.

  *

  I like the advice columns, though I no longer see them, since I no longer get a daily newspaper. I used to read the Morning News while I was walking on the treadmill at the Veranda Club, where I was a member for twenty-five years, before COVID. And years before that, I was a subscriber. I took my daily dose of Ann Landers or Dear Abby like a vitamin, and read others as well. One of the best of them was “Prudie,” which was short for Prudence. It’s a perfect name for an advice columnist; prudence is a critical quality in someone who tells strangers what to do. Much caution is called for. I have a torn bit of newsprint that I’ve saved for years in my desk at work, from one of Prudie’s very prudent answers. It was given to a correspondent who wrote to Prudie about her impossible relatives and signed herself Thinking About Disowning the Family:

  Dear Think: When you ask how to “solve” this problem, Prudie thinks of the Zen proverb: “There is no solution; seek it lovingly.” This problem cannot be solved, it can only be managed.

  I won’t ever throw this advice away.

  Who was Prudie? Was she even really a she? Wikipedkia has that answer. Dear Prudence is an advice column that was initiated in 1997. Prudence was a pseudonym, of course, for the author – Herbert Stein, who quit the column after three months. The column stopped, but then returned in 1998, when it was written by Margo Howard. The column explained that “Prudence” had not come back from her needlework but had passed the column to her daughter. Margo Howard was in fact the daughter of Ann Lederer, who wrote under the whitebread name Ann Landers. Margo Howard kept it going for eight years, then came Emily Yoffee, and then Daniel Lavery.

  According to Wikipedia, the column’s name is a reference to Dear Prudence, a Beatles’ song.

  But is any of this from the “Prudie” that I have on a yellowed piece of newsprint? It may not be. For one thing, what I have comes from before 1997. And the Dear Prudence column starting in 1997, which Wikipedia describes, is on Slate, a publisher online.

  The road to the facts is full of potholes.

  And there’s more. When I look up “there is no solution; seek it lovingly,” the phrase is attributed to Socrates – with no mention of any Zen proverb. Prudie, whoever he or she was, seems to have gotten it wrong. Not that it matters, because the advice is good. And neither Socrates nor the anonymous Zen monk, assuming he was Japanese, would have used these English words anyway, and probably never wrote anything down.

  *

  Could this be true?
  “…professional writers rely on a region of the brain that is associated with expertise in musicians and professional athletes. In amateur writers, neurons fire in a different area, associated with visual processing. Writing well, one could conclude, is like playing the piano or dribbling a basketball – mostly a matter of doing it. Practice is the path to mastery.”

  I don’t know that being a professional writer is the same as writing well. And being a professional writer is probably mostly a matter of being able to stay seated. To go to your writing as you would to your job.

  *

  Logical positivism, born in Vienna in the 1920s, was a philosophy of language that insisted that propositions needed to be verifiable in order to be meaningful. So, all traditional metaphysical doctrines were meaningless, as are statements about right and wrong. Frank Ramsey, a British member of the circle, posited that “beliefs” should be understood by their consequences, rather than as logical statements that might be true or false. In other words, the meaning of beliefs or of a value judgment will be found in “the actions to which asserting it would lead.” And its meaning might reside as much in the mind of the listener as it does in the mouth of the speaker. Dolores had a series of framed art graphics with sayings on them from writers and statesmen. They are small squares, eleven by eleven inches each. My favorite sits in the bookshelf opposite my desk; I face it every evening. Gold frame, black mat, a white inner square with two faces, one black and one white, facing each other:
  “It takes two to speak the truth. One to speak, and another to listen.” Thoreau

  *

  Deuteronomy 15 – the remission of debts, every seven years. Good idea? For the borrower, yes, but not if you are the one who loaned the money.

  *

  How to speak to the dilemma many of us live with – I certainly do – which is our doubt, our inability to believe in the worth of what we are doing.

  *

  The Baal Shem Tov taught that happiness is the path to God, that happiness is our service to God. That must have been a popular message. It might also have had a disagreeable taste to those who were miserable.

  *

  “Without reproof there is no love, but not all correction is offered with love.”

  This is a wisdom that leads me to think about Ben and my desire for him to “improve.”

  Criticism can be a sign of love, if it comes from love. If I were indifferent, I would have no interest in seeing Ben better himself. But not all criticism is loving. Also, how do I know that what I want for Ben is good for him? Isn’t it just as likely that what I want for him is actually something I want for myself? I want to be “proud” of him, so to speak, as a parent. So I can take credit for him, as a parent. So I can’t be blamed.

  The fact is, I don’t criticize Ben. And I’m far from indifferent. I encourage, I support, I do what I can. My unhappiness with Ben is that he seems so unhappy with himself. I believe he is suffering.

  *

  I label, rather than see. Do I ever look at things with simple curiosity? Did I ever, even when I was a child? Or was I labeling from the beginning, judging instead of looking, and thinking rather than seeing. How to do this now, as an adult? To remove the screens that separate me from what is in front of me? To exercise the ability to describe a thing without using its name. If I were a painter, I could do it. I would draw, without drawing conclusions. It should be possible for me to cultivate this ability. I’m ignorant enough. I don’t know the objects in my world by their first names. I know the tree, but not what kind of tree; a bird, but not what bird exactly. Not that bird. And I should be able to describe that particular bird, using particular words as though they were colors, on the canvas of a page.

  *

  The world is as stable as I pretend it to be, even as it is being created every moment in my mind.

  *

  Everywhere I went today, people were at the intersections with signs asking for help. For money. Some are bedraggled, but not all. Some are missing part of a limb, a lower arm, part of a leg and the foot. Some have sunbaked skin. Some stand, some squat. At Northwest and the Tollway, in the median and at the corners, and on Lemmon at Inwood. Disengagement is one way to accept it. Let the despair be theirs, not mine. I’m in my car, with the windows up. I’m looking straight ahead and wanting the traffic light to change. Their shambles, their disarray, their public display of circumstances. I don’t remember when it all started, only that it wasn’t always there.

  So many people can’t make do. Or, that’s exactly what they are doing, at the intersections.

  I don’t want to slow down for them. Without the red light, I wouldn’t.

  *

  Edith Wharton in a letter to a friend wrote of “the piercing sweetness” of lines in Dante. I don’t remember it that way, when I had Dante with me in 1973. I owned the three volume version of John Ciardi’s translation, all paperbacks. But the copy I brought with to Paris in 1973 was only in Italian, Paradiso, Vol. III, La Nuova Italia, Editrice Firenze. I used a postcard from City Lights Books, San Francisco, as my bookmark. I’m not sure how far into it I got in it. I looked through the volume today, finding it on my bookshelf, half-hidden, but there. I do remember translating some of it, using blue ink on the pages. It’s a footnoted edition, but all the notes are in Italian, and some of those also have my blue ink translations scribbled on them. It looks as though I only got through the first thirty pages but also worked a little on the very end. I seem to have gone through every word in Canto Trentesimoterzo. On the very back page, facing the back cover of the paperback, I had written out the Verlaine poem, il pleure dans mon coeur – all four quatrains. And I find another postcard inserted in the pages, which have become spotted and browned, like my own skin. This postcard is a photograph of a Silk Tassel Bush, a California native. Purchased where? Maybe at the Huntington. I can’t know for sure. But on the back of it I’ve written bits of phrases from Robert Burton, “the fantastic old great man,” Oxford, 1628, along with his motto “A good thing is no worse for repetition.”

  Why all these notes? Made sitting myself in a café in Paris, or in the room I rented on Rue Cardinal Lemoine.

  I was going to “be somebody” when I was twenty-one and in Paris; no matter how unhappy and lonely I was, I did believe in myself. I was going to know as much of literature as I could hold, which was more than a handful. I was going to be a writer and a poet.

  That’s who I was; someone I’m not, someone I can’t quite let go of and don’t want to.

  On the postcard, which was also a bookmark – I didn’t have anyone to send it to, and I wasn’t interested in sending it – these lines from Robert Burton:

  “Do not, O do not trouble me,
  So sweet content I feel and see.
  All my joys to this are folly,
  None so divine as melancholy.

  Now desperate I hate my life,
  Lend me a halter or a knife,
  All my griefs to this are jolly.
  Naught so damned as melancholy.”

  *

  On Edith Wharton, quoting or paraphrasing here, from Maria Popova:

  When Wharton read Dante, it was for her a discovery of what could be done with words. It was revelation, with the mystery of rhythm, and the craft of it. Writing “can come from one who struggles, or from fluent masters whose coins of language tumble from their fingers.” Or through their fingers and into the keyboard of a MacBook Pro. Wharton wrote to her friend that anyone who hasn’t been spellbound by a book hasn’t known “half the joy of living.” It’s an odd thing to say. I wonder if it was poorly received by her friend. It isn’t true, either. The world is full of so many good things, and most of them are not in books. This is a point that Robert Lewis Stevenson made in his collection of poems meant for children, many whom — certainly many of the boys — squirmed impatiently when their teacher read to them. For those it suits, reading is a pleasure, whether Dante, a detective novel, or the daily news; but it’s only one pleasure out of many.

  *

  From my reading, Chabad.org:

  How do you receive what heaven wants to give you? By being empty. If you are full of yourself – fears, prejudging, holding back –there is no room for life to enter.

  Also, by accepting what is offered. Also, by jumping in. Dolores liked to say it this way: Don’t let hanging back hold you back.

  An open spirit can be filled with joy.

  *

  I want to join the company of those who have written. I want to exist on a shelf. Why? What does it matter? Why is it meaningful?
  No more or less than any other human endeavor this side of heaven.

  *

  Actions are reciprocal. If you give, you receive. If you teach, you learn. If that’s true, then, if you love, are you also loved, whether you feel loved or not? If so, there is no such thing as an unrequited love. You can love without looking for reciprocity, not expecting it, much less demanding it. If I am being used by someone, I am also using them, if only for my need of being used.

  *

  Edited slightly from my reading:
  There’s a town in northern Portugal called Mirandela, where the secret Jews invented a new sausage, which they made with kosher chicken and bread. They would hang this Alheira de Mirandela from their rafters. Their neighbors in that Jew-hating country would see what they thought was pork sausage, and their suspicions would be diverted, at least temporarily. Although the Jews were expelled from Portugal in 1536, one recent academic study found that nearly twenty percent of Portuguese today have Jewish ancestry. In 2013, Portugal became the second country in the world – Israel being the first – to grant Jews a right of return.

  *

  Nietzsche: “The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything in the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point…without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.”

  From Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening:
  Life remains a blessing/Although you cannot bless.

  From Sea Survival: A Manual, Dougal Robertson’s account of his family’s survival in a dinghy in the Pacific after the wreck of their boat: “You can expect good or bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative, as is good or bad management.” They were father, mother, and four children.

  *

  July 2020

  I’m at my desk this Saturday afternoon. I’ve already done the grocery shopping – peaches, nectarines, a Honeycrisp apple. A single Honeycrisp apple costs nearly three dollars, which seems expensive, though I personally would not climb a tree to pick an apple for three dollars in pay. Two black plums, a wedge of Cotswold cheese, which is orange and flecked, and a cooked chicken. The chicken is purchased for Mika, since the dog food kibble isn’t appealing enough by itself. I bought 2% milk, ruby red grapefruit juice in a plastic bottle, a head of red leaf lettucem which looks more like green bedhead hair than a round head. Also, cherry tomatoes in their tiny plastic coffin, uncut white mushrooms, a twelve-pack of Modelo Especial, Waterloo sparkling water. The water is black cherry flavored; I had a free coupon for it. And family-size Raisin Bran, a dozen corn tortillas, low-fat small curd cottage cheese, a package of Il Milagro salt chips, some other salted crackers, a small tub of jalapeno cream cheese spread, and blueberries. Now that Ben has moved to his own place, I’m no longer buying meat, and I’m cooking less.

  What else have I’ve done today? I’ve changed the tiny halogen bulb in one of two porch lights. Some light bulbs seem to last forever, no matter how long they are on. For example, the horizontal bulbs that are under the kitchen cabinets and illuminate my grey corian counters – those last forever. Porch lights, however, much be replaced often. Perhaps being on at night exhausts them. There is certainly a lot of darkness for them to illuminate.

  I’ve studied Hebrew for 45 minutes. My lesson is Sunday morning, with our teacher, Ruth, who’s in Israel now visiting her mother. She has the mother who may die “any minute,” year after year. There are three other students in the course. Two, Ruth and Audry, are modern Orthodox. Audrey Hayon’s father owned a Western-wear store in Fort Worth. The third, Donna Troutman, an African American, is marrying an Israeli. She’s either a court reporter or a real estate agent and perhaps both at the same time. All three are exceedingly nice; two of three are beautiful women; and none of knows very much Hebrew. I have the status of unattached much older man and am probably suspect. No reason anyone can pinpoint for me to be learning Hebrew at my age.

  Early today, I used a saw to cut up the large cardboard box my new NordicTrak arrived in yesterday. Now the pieces of the box can be trashed. Covid-19 has shut down the health clubs, so I am turning Ben’s empty bedroom into my gym room. It will also be Debra’s office. My twenty-five years of five times a week at the Verandah Club are at an end.

  It’s hot today – the hottest day of the year, so far. Over one hundred, certainly. Cutting up the box for thirty minutes in the sun is sweaty business. The heat is almost an illness, but I’ve managed to reconfigure an expanse of brown carboard into manageable rectangles, stacking them near the two grey trash containers, which are already filled with smaller pieces of cardboard, plastic sheeting, fiberboard, white Styrofoam, and other parts of the NordicTrak packaging.

  The sunlight is in the trees. I have the house to myself. In an hour, I’ll jump into the pool again, and later, drive over to Debra’s for dinner. These are the days; nothing wrong with them, but not quite right either. I do have my life to myself. I start to read from a paragraph I copied down two months ago and didn’t bother to attribute to its source. The woman who wrote it begins, “This is how my memory works.” She then proceeds to describe how she was sitting in the inner courtyard of the new Tiran Hotel, in the Sinai, drinking whiskey and watching the new moon, and the sky was dark blue, and she could still feel (or so she writes), the cool water of the Red Sea from snorkeling earlier that afternoon. She mentions the tiles under her feet. They are hot. And she concludes, “It is wonderful to know exactly when you are happy.”
  That last sentence must have been what attracted me to this paragraph, what led me to copy it all down. In part, because I have never felt any such thing. I do something, I do the next thing. But never did I know exactly that I was happy.
  This is not a complaint. It has been enough for me to simply keep going.

  *

  More from my reading, copied and modified:
  Is the world a garden or a jungle? A garden is tended, planted, nurtured. You create it. The jungle, on the other hand, doesn’t need you; in fact, it’s dangerous for you in the jungle. Nicer to look at your life as a garden, and at yourself as a gardener responsible for tending it. But in truth the world is a jungle, and your life is in danger.

  *

  “In Antonio Demasio’s book Descartes’ Error, Demasio describes patients with brain damage that left them able to think clearly but no ability to feel; that is, a sort of Dr. Spock-like absence of emotion.”

  So, what are the expectations for these patients? Are they coolly rational, is their thinking impervious to prejudice, over-optimism, or under-confidence? Are they entirely unaffected by the fear of failure? What Demasio found is that patients with this damage were in fact unable to make any decisions. They could make a perfectly reasonable argument, but couldn’t make up their minds. Maybe this is because it is true that there are two sides to every story. There are also good reasons to say yes and good reasons to say no. And there are usually good reasons to say nothing.

  Descartes believed that humans are rational – that this is our distinction and our glory. David Hume, a practical Scot, knew better. Most of us in marketing do as well. Our decisions are made by surrendering to emotion. Reason is what we use to give the justifications, and to rationalize, after our decision is made. We don’t even need to be aware of it, in order to choose it.

  Behavioral economics is the field that studies this. It studies what we actually do, rather than what we would do if we were acting in our own best interest; that is, if we were acting rationally.

  *

  Copying what follows from a page in an article that appeared in The New Yorker, September 22, 2014, with the title, “As Big as the Ritz”:

  “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still the quality of the idea, was harder to utter – it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men…It was a willingness of the heart.”

  It’s charming. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald. I assent to its rhythm even more than to its meaning. The assertions may be questionable one by one, but, taken together, they have the polish of an insight.

  Fitzgerald writes, “He paused speculatively to vault the high hydrant in front of the Van Schellinger house, wondering if one did such things in long trousers and if he would ever do it again.” I don’t know anything about this neighborhood and even less about trousers, but the sociology is so convincing; the sentence has that authority, and, through it, the narrator, and the author. And there’s just a touch of sadness to it as well. But why “speculatively”? It is yet another seasoning, a pinch of mystery. What is it comprised of, this beautiful authority, the knowingness of this writing? It’s in the choice of words, the speed of the phrases, the resonance of the sentence coming to its natural end.

  *

  From reading:
  “In the Austrian census of 1934, over half the doctors, three-quarters of the bankers, nearly all the marketing agencies and most ninety percent of the lawyers in Vienna were Jews.”

  A different question here: why was there a census in 1934? In the United States, we take ours once every ten years. The article goes on to say that Jews dominated textiles, the production of sweets, alcohol, furniture sales, and manufacturing. Two thirds of the furriers were Jews. Another question that occurs here: what were the Christians doing in Vienna? Anything other than buying, being served, and being resentful. Freud was in Vienna in 1934. So might have been Wittgenstein, if he wasn’t at Cambridge. Herzl was there, but much earlier, working on the Neue Freie Presse. Indeed, nine out of ten of the Jews in Austria lived in Vienna in those first decades of the century.

  “That said, many of them had converted to Christianity, or were entirely assimilated, or so they thought. Many never bothered to convert because they had so little interest in religious practice. They had not bothered to leave the faith community that the Austrian bureaucracy had assigned them to. Official records had them down as Israelis or Mosaic, but there was no record for most of them of belonging to one of the city’s 22 synagogues. Religion was only a personal matter, and in their personal view of it their affiliation did not rise to the level of importance or respect that would have required that it be formally denied.”

  *

  August 2020

  Hottest week of the year. This is a fact to which I can append the qualifier “so far.” It will be in the one hundreds through this weekend.

  After two months of working from home, I’ve returned to office – as of June, I was back. The drives in are quieter now, with far fewer cars on the roads. Most of my crew also still wants to work from home.

  Black Lives Matter demonstrators have been at it in Dallas. I can see graffiti on the white “construction coming” barriers at the corner of Turtle Creek and Fairmount on my drive into work. This corner of Turtle Creek and Fairmount is the property that a Canadian real estate company had planned to turn into the most expensive high-rise condominium in the city. They’ve had the land for six or seven years now, but nothing has been built. The project is named after its address, 2828 Turtle Creek. The white construction wall was nicer than most; no chain link fencing for this pricey real estate.

  BLM likes to root for the Palestinian “cause.” It sees itself as a natural ally with the BDS movement, since both are reductionist, antisemitic, and hiding under a cloak of morality. BLM is inescapably racist. So, naturally it would endorse the storyline of evil Israel, colonial oppressor; naturally it will “stand” with the supposedly darker-skinned Palestinians. So, naturally, I dislike BLM and find myself cheerfully saying that black lives don’t matter, if that’s the corner that BLM puts me in. Though, naturally, I only say it in a whisper.

  I’ve looked at various articles that provide facts that might rebut the talking points of the new orthodoxy, which posits that black lives are crippled by our justice system, our economy, our healthcare, our schools, our neighborhoods. The word du jour in every article about “people of color” is “disproportionate.” Just as the Israeli response to violence from Hamas or Hezbollah or any Arab is always can’t seem to be sized at the correct proportions. There’s always a crisis, and whatever the problem, people of color are always being impacted by it “disproportionately.” There is never progress, and no good news.

  So, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, using 2018 data:

  Black men aged 18-19 are 12.7 times more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers. Black men of all ages are 5.8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white men.

  A Pew Research Center analysis of the same data showed that the Black imprisonment rate dropped by 34% since 2006, the greatest decline across all races.

  Still, Black Americans, and mostly Black men, remain more likely than any other group to be imprisoned.

  Is it systemic racism or is this group, as a group, more likely to engage in criminal behavior? Or, does the first cause the second?

  Police shootings of “an unarmed Black man” (the phrase is used like a Homeric epithet) have fired up intense passions and led to demonstrations in cities across the country. George Floyd wasn’t shot, but he was unarmed.

  The Washington Post’s data shows that more than half of the people killed in police shootings in the past five years were white. But Blacks were shot and killed “disproportionately,” since they are only 13% of the population.

  You can now be killed disproportionately, which adds insult to fatal injury.

  Is the proportion higher because of systemic racism, or individual bad judgment by a police officer, or because Black men engage disproportionately in behavior that results in them getting shot by the police?

  Whites, lower cased except when at the start of a sentence, have been fatally shot at a rate of 13 per million in the past five years; Blacks, at a rate of 31 per million. The majority of fatal police shootings, nearly 80 percent, occurred when the suspect had a gun or a knife. Most are not unarmed. In general, officers will use deadly force if they believe someone is a serious threat. In those cases, in the past five years, where the police shot an unarmed person, 143 were white and 123 were Black, 63 were Hispanic and 21 were “other” or “unknown.” More whites than Blacks, but it’s disproportionate still. Nearly three times as many Black deaths per 10 million as white deaths.

  Capital B for Black; small w for white. Small o for other, small u for unknown, though in all these matters it is the unknown that truly looms large.

  October 2020

  Impermanence.
  Birds in the trees seem to be talking to themselves as much as to other birds. The creek has a language, too, with its words of water over its stones. The water makes a speech, over podiums of stone.

  Another bird will reply, but it seems to prefer soliloquy. Its speech is song. Singing doesn’t require two.
  I can Listen. It’s a shrill call and repeat, none of it to my address.

  I am straining to understand the world as it is. But maybe it can only be comprehended in relaxation. I do better listening than observing. My hearing seems closer to understanding than seeing is. In that same way, there can be more truth in music than in a photograph. Maybe less narrative, but also less deception. The truth is always hidden. It is unseen in the thickness of a shrub. I might uncover it in the dark, with my eyes closed.

  *

  What’s that falling from the branches overhead? Sooner or later everything falls, everything comes to rest. It’s a wonder we do not come to harm from what is falling all around us. Notes in the air, acorns from higher branches, debris discarded by the squirrel. How essential discarding is, and how difficult to do, though not for the squirrel, who doesn’t need to squirrel away whatever isn’t of use to him. The voice of the bird in the highest branch seems full of urgency, as though there is a message that must be delivered, however misunderstood. I am definitely hearing things. When people say this, we mean hearing things that are not there. True enough/ What I hear from the bird – urgency – might as easily be nonchalance, a bird yawn. Human beings misunderstand each other, even when we share a common language. How much more so do I misunderstand the world.

  The roses are reappearing along the fence line, painting the iron fence with red spots, an outbreak, life breaking out, in the warming fall weather

  *

  Abel, the first man whose sacrifice God accepted, was childless. His steps across the earth left no footprints.

  *

  I’m reading Scott Harney’s poems. According to Arrowsmith Press, his poems were discovered and “brought to life” by his death. Not exactly, but made public because his private life – illness, an early death.

  Is it necessary for a poem to be uncommon, to use language inventively, to dramatize, to refresh language? That may be the creativity that some readers want. They enjoy the artifice, especially if there’s no rhyme or pattern to the lines. Plain speaking is prosaic.

  *

  If our days are “numbered,” if our sequence is in place before we are born, then to what end? Why would anyone be predestined? And yet, every moment can seem to be, can be argued to be, the inevitable result of the moment before. And is it not only the number, but the purpose of our days that has already been “written”? All these metaphors.

  Each day arrives with its own message. We are living our lives in a classroom. A day begins. I am either resting my head on the desk, sleeping through it, or alert and taking notes.
  And there’s no remediation for whatever is unlearned, no being held back, the same material presented again. No two days use the same lesson plan.

  *

  Why place a burden of expectation on anyone – on myself, on my parents, my child, a friend, or even a lover. I wouldn’t treat my dog so unfairly, which is one reason I am more likely to enjoy the company of a pet than a person. The dog doesn’t have to be “right for me” in some way, much less “in every way.” It only has to hold its place on the bed or on the floor and take enough interest in its bowl of water or kibble to make it worth my while to provide them. It has pretty much nothing else it needs to do other than live its life. What a perfect standard for a girlfriend, wife, mother, father, child.
  Let the other be other.

  *

  Maybe there are a few specific things I must have from the other human being. Kindness would be one, or at least an ability to tolerate my flaws. An ability to allow me to not pretend all the time. My partner needs to be someone I am interested in coming to understand, which may be more achievable than insisting that I be understood.

  *

  Be kind enough, be vulnerable enough, be understanding enough. If that can be achieved, all the rest might follow any number of workable patterns –we might live together night and day or see each other only occasionally. Read the same books, see the same movies, or be completely ignorant of the other’s interests. Share next to nothing “in common,” but be a couple nonetheless.

  In other words, be what I need in order to be in a lifelong relationship, and be satisfied with that.

  *

  November 13, 2020

  My birthday in a COVID year. I’m at the Commodore Perry Estate in Austin. I drove down by myself because I wanted to spend an overnight “someplace special” even though I’m not traveling anyplace special this year. No travel in Russia. No solo travel in Romania and Hungary. But still, solo travel. It is easier to just take off and go than to even consider going with Debra. The two of us are seldom a twosome anymore.

  All the news, print and radio, has become infected with coronavirus, or with politics, since the election has just ended. Ended, other than denials of the facts, accusations of fraud, and the rest of the circus acts. Driving back from Austin, I am in Trump country. The biggest billboards say so on either side of I-35. And when I stop for food in West, which is a Czech tourist town with kolaches in the bakeries, I’m the only one in the restaurant ready to wear one of the flimsy blue masks that are on everyone in Dallas. So I keep it in my pocket. It doesn’t surprise me that the truckers and local customers don’t wear them. But neither does the waitress or the cashier, and there are no plexiglass barriers here, as there are in grocery stores in Dallas. Mask-wearing and other COVID protocols seem to be less in the service of public health than a matter of fitting in socially.

  *

  My waking dreams are of the beach below the bluff at Playa del Rey. I can see the steep path down, the dirt and broken asphalt; it was poorly maintained, by the public standards in California then. At the bottom, sand. In my boyhood there was no bike and skate path bordering the sand at the foot of the path. The sand had bits of tar in it. The water was a distance away. The reliable ocean, one of the stable facts of my boyhood; for all its movements, its approach and withdrawal, it seemed to embody permanence, the everlastingness of change. Waters running forward and then returning, the sand darkening at the edge of the shore. You could not hurt it, though it could certainly hurt you. If I have a theme from those times, it was my willingness to dive headfirst into the wave.

  *

  The facts are often sad, but never mean.
  A thought from elsewhere:
  “Where there is no forgiveness, there was no love. Only when our relationships have been transgressed do we know that our relationship is deeper than the anger – deeper, even than the facts.”

  *

  November 21
  Another Saturday.

  I may remember the Sabbath day, but I do not keep it. I could argue that all our days are holy; and from there, I might say that if the everyday is sacred, why the need for any ritual on this particular day? It’s in this way that we can talk ourselves away from the truth. An idea might make sense, but not be true to experience.

  According to the school of Hillel, on the Sabbath day we bless the wine even before the start of Sabbath, just before, because wine is the ordinary miracle.

  *

  Mika has unknown fears. She nervously back away from her bowl on the kitchen floor if I move behind her, or if I open the refrigerator or the door to the pantry. I usually need to leave the room and leave her undisturbed so she will eat. She fears a storm. And she will not cuddle or allow herself to be snugly held.

  Mika’s timid. She isn’t timid enough to be obedient however.

  *

  January 2021

  Why do I pay so little attention to the moon? Even profaned by footsteps, and scarred by lunar landing modules, it is still out of reach. White, in the night sky. Still wonderous – equal parts material and metaphor.

  *

  Awareness glows like a blush when you discover there’s no love, there’s only being of use. That said, it may be fair, or fair enough, this exchange. What did Frost write? Better to go down dignified with boughten friendship by your side than none at all.

  *

  Am I still a poet? Every sentence I write is written under a sentence of death. I write this in the spirit of Rabbi Bunim, whose first name, Simcha, means joy. He was the one who was said to have said, in 1800 or thereabouts, that each of us should carry two notes, one in each pocket; the one note should say, For my sake the world was created. And the other, I am but dust and ashes. Words to that effect, probably in Yiddish.

  Martin Buber in Tales of the Hasidim mentions this Rabbi and identifies him as Rabbi Bunim of P’shisker. In those days, where you were from was often part of your name. Where you lived described who you were. When I look up P’shisker, nothing comes up. All I can find is “whisker.”

  It’s possible to read Rabbi Bunim’s wisdom not as two phrases in opposition to one another, with one cheering you up and the other pulling you back down, but as something joyful entirely. Optimism in both pockets and from start to finish. Everything is glorious, even the dust and the ashes. Everything is here for our sake and happiness. The name Simcha supports this interpretation.

  *

  Sally Hoffenburg, who I called Nanny, died in 1979. She was eighty-six years old. Born in 1893 in Galicia, which was also called Austria. Nanny never told me her story, the circumstances, did she leave Austria by herself, or with others, and how old was she then? Thirteen? A little older? She must have been accompanied, even if she were older. I have nothing of hers on my shelves, not even a photograph. I have some books that I was told belonged to her oldest daughter, who died young. My other grandmother, Elizabeth Simon, was born in Philadelphia. Her last name was Zion before she changed it. She left nothing as well. My father kept nothing of hers to pass forward. There is no record of what was never recorded.

  Do not cast us aside when we are old. So we plead. Al tashlicheinu l’eit zikna.
  Our fear in old age of becoming invisible, isolated, without purpose, dependent. More isolated, more dependent, perhaps, than when we were heads of households and important at least to our children. But are we without purpose in our old age? Surely we have just as much purpose on our last day as we ever had. If that purpose is invisible, it is only because we have lost sight of it. In truth, it always was hard to see. Even when we were young, when it was covered over by our tasks and our busyness.

  *

  Consciousness glows on the strands of our nerves. It’s the awareness of I – this I that sees but is never in its own line of sight, always subject, never object. Where do I go, when I lose consciousness?

  *

  Who taught me? Who would I follow?
  In a family that fails, you are a follower without a leader.

  *

  When there is no love, there is still of use. If I can become happy with that, welcome it, appreciate it, embrace it, I will have an easier time. I will be riding on a wave to the near shore, to the western bank that is nearer with every passing moment.

  *

  Shaw, shaw – this was something my mother said when I was very little. It was a kind of “it’s okay, it’s okay,” when I was a baby. I should ask my sister. Does she remember being rocked or being held? “Shaw-a, shaw-a, bay bee.” Surely I must have heard this, this must have happened. How old at my oldest could this most loving of memories have been made? The memory is only a moment old, created or recreated, as I remember or imagine it, over and over. It’s a memory of nothing but a sound. Shaw could be from sheket, which is Hebrew for quiet, like shush, perhaps, but not the librarian’s rebuke or warning; instead, it’s an encouragement, a transfer of calm, a state of mind.

  *

  King David was dancing wildly and whistling before God.

  *

  Windfall. What does it mean? I think of it as a gain you did nothing to earn. It has that suggestion of size, it’s a large gain. If I find a dime on the ground, it’s not a windfall. Windfall profits are both large and undeserved. But where did this metaphor come from? From fruit, maybe; windfall fruit – picked up from the ground, after a gust.

  *

  Everything that has happened and that will happen has the same meaning as the present moment. So, study this moment. Everything is in it. If it makes no sense, neither does the future or the past.

  Are we the sum of what we’ve crossed off. Or are we only what we still have left to do? I am both. My past, my potential. Of course, anyone looking at me could say with reason that I have far less potential now than in the past.

  I am refusing to surrender what has already been lost.
  I never wrote anything I more believed was true than this.

  *

  The long blades of fescue, the green of the leaves, the swift water in the creek that is coursing from the rain yesterday.

  *

  The use of the phrase “resident alien” as it is translated in the Torah. Resident and stranger, in a place but not of it.
  This is a human condition. It’s my condition.

  *

  Reading in Talmud about the size of a dried fig, and the laws of transferring objects on the Sabbath from one “domain” to another, private to public, open fields, walled courtyards, and alleys bounded on three sides. These are of concern to those who concern themselves with dotted i’s and crossing t’s. I am reading sentences that are strange enough to have a patina of romance on them:

  “He may go out with a sela on a footsore, a locust’s egg, a fox’s tooth, a nail from a gallows, and any other entity that is hung on a person’s body to bring a cure, provided that physicians say that it is effective.”

  A nail from a gallows?

  *

  I have written this before:
  Life is a limited time offer. The riverbanks are crowded, and I need to jump off. I am holding my breath and sighing at the same time. Holding my breath, only not under water. Am I going to do something? And if so, what? Each day has its own way of nothing happening – its busyness of a trip to the grocery store, its yard work. There are phone calls, emails, words to read written by others, a flood of words against which my own skiff goes nowhere, each day no different, finishing off a week, a month, then years. I am struggling to write something in flowing form. I’m drifting in the current. What is the secret that I am pretending not to see, the sinewy strength that will be the rope of my rescue.

  *

  March 2021

  Some of these entries that aren’t quotations read like quotations, and I can’t recall whether I wrote them or read them and copied them down. Some of them seem too sensible and too well composed to have been mine.

  Much of what I am reading this year arrives online, unasked for. Via email – Tablet articles, Mosaic, Tikvah, the New Yorker. I should probably ignore what comes in without being sought out. That is a definition of conservatism, or narrow-mindedness, or focus, or happiness, depending on how I turn the stone over and which facet I see. I need to read more purposefully, privileging what I can hold in my hands. I need to turn actual pages. I have James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name. Could I write essays of explanation, of apologies for myself. In my case, with no thought about publication. I’m qualified. After all, nobody knows my name, either. But, unlike Baldwin, no one is waiting for what I have to say. I have nothing to pull the essay out of me. Not a single deadline, other than my life’s. Not money. None is needed that I don’t already have. Maybe all the more reason to do it. I’ve sold my years and am ready to spend what they have returned to me.

  How to start: Just so, with no road, other than what a daily quantity of words will pave, each one like a cobblestone, two hundred or five hundred or a thousand a day, piles of words wheelbarrowed in each morning, and then the wheelbarrow returned empty, ready for more the following day.

  *

  In the news – a COVID vaccine is available.

  *

  Another unwritten day. My memories of today are paper thin. But then, memories are a vanity. One winter after another, hundreds of leaves drop from the same red oak tree.
  Nothing needs to be remembered to have happened, to have happened.
  Even the brass monument will take its place on the card table at the garage sale.

  *

  I spent an entire day inside. I came into the evening wondering what it was I might have missed in the dearly departed sunshine. I opened the door, and it was evening, and already too dark to see what is no longer there.

  *

  Is it natural to want what you can never have? Or to look for what you will never find?

  *

  May 31, 2021

  Memorial Day.

  Reading the newsletter from Maria Popova. Rilke is one of her faves. I think most of his poetry is unreadable, or not worth reading. It could also be that I’m not worthy of reading it. I can take my choice from those options.

  Popova provided this –

  “When Kappus wrote to Rilke of the loneliness he suffered from, how even in the presence of those with whom he might have thought he would have experienced the closest bonds – with his parents, his sisters, his childhood friend – Rilke wrote back that Kappus might instead see it a different way. He might respect or even embrace his loneliness and suffering. He might consider that the gulf between him and others was exactly the space into which he would grow. ‘You suffer.’ Rilke wrote. ‘Those close to you are distant. This shows that your world is beginning to grow vast. And if what’s near you is far, then how enormous your whole extent is, reaching all the way up to the stars.’”

  This is cold comfort. It’s no comfort at all. It suggests that one cannot learn to be closer to others, or that to do so must mean keeping ourselves small. As if loneliness is the measure of the larger life we want to live or might someday life. No pain, no gain – like the message that is common in the weight room.

  *

  According to Kohelet, there is nothing new under the sun. But every moment is a moment that never happened before. Every day, life is renewed. Every day is a potential cure for the pathology of the past.

  If my life is here and now, then I am more alive by forgetting than I am enriched by remembering. Remember, we are told – remember that you were strangers, and slaves, in the land of Egypt.

  But is the one who remembers the most or the least alive? History can be used but also misused, as Nietzsche said, and our personal histories misused most of all.

  *

  Bronson Alcott was fifty-six when wrote this in his journal: “Life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife, children, a friend or two, conversation, neighbors, and a task life-long given from within – these are contentment and a great estate.”

  True enough, but it’s far from simple. Of his list of fourteen, I have the first three. As for the other eleven, each would make a topic for discussion, and there has been nothing simple about them. I also have to wonder how important it is to have a fountain, though I do have two of those. They can be annoying, when the pumps that run them suck air, or need other maintenance. Alcott then goes on to conclude, “On these gifts follow all others, all the graces dance attendance, all beauties and beatitudes that mortals can desire and know.”

  This sounds more like a professional writing than a human being speaking. I might add that children are “a task life-long,” though not necessarily “given from within,” and usually initiated in ignorance.

  *

  I read in an article from the Smithsonian that there are 50 billion wild birds in the world – at least. Six birds for every human.

  Which six are mine? The answer is none, if the bird are wild. They are free as a bird.

  The source of this 50 billion count? Data collected by users of the citizen science database eBird, correlated or combined with data collected by Partners in Flight and BirdLife International, and then reported in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Somehow –an “algorithm” was involved– researchers were able to estimate population sizes even for bird species with no significant data attached to them, in order to arrive at (i.e. make up) the final total.

  There were 9,700 species of birds considered. Only four belong to the billion bird club:
  House sparrow – 1.6 billion
  European starling – 1.3 billion
  Ring-billed gull – 1.2 billion
  Bar swallow -1.1 billion

  The lesson here? Maybe the more common you are, the more sex you have. Or you simply seem common, because you are more commonly seen.

  A reported 1,190 species, or twelve percent of all birds, have fewer than 5,000 individuals. There are also those few, those unhappy few — the 377 great spotted owls, the 630 Javan Hawk-eagles, and the Seychelles kestrel — with fewer than a hundred left.

  Rare birds.

  *

  July 2021

  The week of July 4th. Debra and I are in Ocean Hills. She has gone inside Albertson’s on Melrose to pick up our groceries. I am waiting in the car. If I were asked what am I doing in the Albertson’s parking lot, a one word answer might be, “Nothing.” And if I were asked what else? Breathing the gentle air in Southern California. Staring at the geometry of the shopping carts, inspecting the smooth and dark asphalt of the parking lot, naming the colors of cars, marveling the metallic surfaces of hoods and trunks. There’s a strip center across Melrose. Its businesses are named in neatly lettered, standardized signs. Grass on the islands that divide the streets. Jacaranda trees bursting with purple blossoms, a snowfall of blossoms on the ground. Whether manmade or natural, all this ordinary beauty is designed. An endless variety, each thing revealing and concealing what it is, and all its details are available to a tireless observer. But it does tire me out, my wonder at the world around me.

  If it were the last day of my life, the last hour, my last breaths, wouldn’t I want to hold on for a last look? Wouldn’t I pray for it, asking for the blessing of another minute, for two open eyes, for the sight of this strip mall. I would be full of longing for the shopping carts in Albertson’s parking lot. Maybe feeling regret, and joy as well, or even thrilled, refusing to let it go, and then, one moment further, in the embrace of life and death.

  I don’t have enough wisdom yet to die well, or without regret.

  *

  Ancestry has identified a list of physical traits that you might share with your ancestors: Unibrow, cleft chin, earwax, and so on. These, according to Ancestry, help define “who you are.”

  But then I’ve also read this:

  “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring name in the register of Light.”

  This is highfalutin, but it does ring true. And it continues:

  “History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one or the other is interminable and profoundly hidden.”

  If profoundly hidden, what are the grounds for saying something is important. Or maybe you know it’s important, because everything is important, though you don’t know how and even less do you know why. And then this oracular writer concludes by proclaiming:

  “A universe devoid of why, awash in is, where the contours of meaning come in shades of blue.”

  Shades of blue, ot shades of grey. This is a writer claiming to know quite a lot, for someone who also claims not to be able to even declare who he is.

  I had a client years ago who made a product that was used in the printing process, and he called the product Super Blue. He declared and with certitude that blue was every man’s favorite color. Even though this was the kind of statement that could so easily be disproved by a single dissent, he stood by it. Ben’s favorite color is orange. Mine probably is blue, in all its different shades, but I don’t feel obligated to declare a favorite. I like all the colors. There no need for monogamy when it comes to color.

  *

  August 2021

  An article in Tablet arrives in my email. It’s about the virtue of being neutral. It mentions the ideas of Roland Barthes. It’s about discovering a space to be neither for nor against. It asks that we stumble away from the Jesus who said “you are either with me or against me,” and from Marx who said the same. Also, to resist the progressive demand that we be anti-racist or, Democrat rather than Republican. In most circumstances, I agree. Sometimes I express my take on this when I offer my opinion that “there are no good guys,” no side to choose, at least not wholeheartedly. Remaining neutral is not necessarily indifference. Staying undeclared might allow us to be our contradictory selves. We can be freer to be ourselves. I’ve never read Roland Barthes, though I’ve heard of him. And I’ve heard that he’s difficult. From the article:

  “…Barthes…described as powerfully as Virginia Woolf the longing for a room of one’s own, withdrawn from surveillance. The struggle to have a room, he insisted, is a struggle for freedom, but also for an anti-gregarious space in which one can exercise one’s will to power over oneself, exploring new ways of being outside of social norms. Barthes pitted such privacy, the necessary precondition for self-construction, against the family’s outer coating, which stifles individuality, and the crowd, in which as in a school of fish, differences among subjects are annihilated.”

  It goes on. I’ve selected and edited the following excerpt:

  Private life may seem pathetic, seen from the vantage of the virtues that the state or the culture celebrates. It may even seem complicit with evil, refusing to fight against it, and retreating. But the larger culture can be exhausting. The neutral is essential to a livable life, one shared only with the people whom one cannot do without. What we need are more rooms of our own, more places to elude society’s imperatives.

  *

  The demand that we take sides comes with the imperative to be in conflict.

  *

  August 10 – 17 –

  A trip with Ben to California.

  First in Oceanside, then in a rented car up the coast, staying one night in San Luis Obispo and the next three nights in San Francisco at the St. Francis Hotel. The St. Francis, a Westin property now, was independent when it first opened in 1904. In its glory days it had its famous visitors – Presidents, Queen Elizabeth, movie stars – staying the night or making their appearances.
  A note on a scrap of paper from the St. Francis:

  The destruction of the future has become personal.

  I have a business card from the concierge, who wrote his recommendation for a barber on it. Richard’s Design, on Sutter.
  Richard, who is 82 years old, met me at 8 am on a Saturday morning to cut my hair and engage in conversations. My mornings were free because Ben slept in, often in a chair, where his breaths were gasps most of the night. His fat makes it difficult for him to breathe. He struggles to walk – the hills in San Francisco tortured him. He would wake up from time to time in the night. He kept me up as well, though I would pretend to sleep. I would watch him light a small cannabis pipe he purchased our first day in California.

  *

  “The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.” A. Chekhov

  I bought a used paperback of W. H. Auden’s commonplace book A Certain World. Sourced through Amazon, it was described on the site as being in “reasonable” condition. In fact, it is in tatters. The spine is broken, the book has fallen apart. I have a thick rubber band holding it together. The front cover is loose, the back gone. And I paid $27 for this $3.50 paperback. On the first page there’s a handwritten inscription: “Given to Jeanne on July 17, 1976, from Paul, on the occasion of the end of a partnership and the beginning of a friendship in this unCertain World.” Hard to parse the circumstances that preceded this message. The gift had been given two weeks after the Bicentennial. It had been given and subsequently given up. Perhaps Jeanne had given up on whatever had been between them. I took the book with me to California but hardly looked through the pieces of it. I wasn’t interested in carrying pieces of it downstairs at the St. Francis while Ben slept in or smoked pot – I had enough to read on the screen of my cellphone.

  Also held under the rubber band – a decal from the CBD store where Ben bought his supplies for our trip. It was a well-lit, slickly retail place called Cannabist. We drove directly there, our first stop after picking up a car at the San Diego airport.

  Ben wore his noise-canceling headset for most of our flight to San Diego. His head was nodding, his thick fingers playing on his knee; or he used both hands, his left around the imagined neck of a guitar and the other picking notes from imaginary strings. Ben wore slip on shoes, without socks, blue Nike shorts, and a black t-shirt in a size beyond Triple X. The airport in San Diego is named after Charles Lindbergh. It has a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis hanging in a terminal. I wonder how old Lindbergh was when he flew across the Atlantic? Ben’s age? Younger? Younger. Twenty-five years old.

  *

  From a Chabad email that I read while I was having coffee at a counter in the lobby of the St. Francis:

  You become what you speak; speak what you wish to become.

  And this:

  You that all know of You, You that all put their trust only in You, You that all plead only to You, You that no one knows who and what You are, we pray to You, because You alone, the unknowable, are known to all.

  Any insights in this insight? It seems to support an unintuitive approach to understanding, in which our knowledge increases as we learn what is not true, and as we become more aware of what we don’t know or can’t know. This is an approach that Maimonides might have called the via negativa.

  *

  August 2021

  Ben told me that he wanted to come to California to use up some of his vacation days. I asked him where he might want to go. He said to see the redwoods, which surprised me. So, after a night or two in Oceanside we drove north. I was impatient with him for much of the trip, which I regret. I was frustrated, because he could barely walk. He struggled to support his own weight. Also, his dependence on marijuana distressed me. I had difficulty sleeping in the same room with him because his breathing was so labored. He has harmed himself; it is so hard for me to see, and also hard to see how he will find his way out of it. He seems unwilling to try, saying “this is who I am,” which may be true. I know it’s also true that he could be otherwise. In San Francisco went out each morning on my own. Ben was incapable of walking up the hills. Meals had to be at the closest possible restaurant – a block away, two at most. And mealtime was the only time I saw him motivated to move.

  One morning walking by myself, I lost my bearings. I had a hand drawn map with me, but the scale was all wrong. I had the street names. Powell parallel to Stockton. Post, Geary, O’Farrell running the other way. Market appearing both at the top of the map and diagonally at the bottom. I had drawn the crooked lines on a sheet of straight-lined paper. It was map of confusion.

  *

  Ben has mastered an art of doing nothing. He has grown his body into the Buddha’s, as if fat were wisdom, and his inability to move were a spiritual state. His laziness is a communion with nothingness. What energy he has to spend will barely pay for his breathing. He inhales botanicals. They are keeping him high, however low he is to the ground. Indeed, he is grounded and unable to lift off. He is becoming the mysterious fat man. His home is in the depths. He settles on the bed, his breaths counting down.

  *

  I am struggle to be more sympathetic. What I call his laziness is also his struggle with physical pain. He is burdened with enormous weight.

  Where did the boy in Ben go? Did he wander off after Dolores died? Or only later, when he was unable to keep up; is that when he decided to stay down? However it happened, the boy seems to have disappeared. I am straining to hear the echo of his voice from whatever canyon he fell into.

  *

  Ben went with me to California, but we were far apart. Going away, we never got far enough away from the disappointments of fathers and sons. Mornings on Delos, he stayed in his bedroom. He was sleeping late, or biding his time. English muffins were in the toaster. There was butter and honey. It has been decades since I carried him in my arms or took him by the hand. He is not that boy, and I am not that younger man. Soon enough I will be the one who is in the ground. He will the one with the shovel, or the handful of dirt, tossing it down on me in ceremony, if there is one.

  *

  August as usual.

  Nothing sharply observed, no words to describe the stifling summer air, which can be understood, if at all, as an atmosphere.

  *

  I am never as unable to see the future as when I am around small children. Also, when I am around children I am most certain of the folly and the impossibility of being remembered.

  *

  What is time immemorial? What does that phrase even mean? Does it refers to the time that was before?

  Mine is the time that is fleeting, the time left, which I am advised to use now. I know better than anyone that I need to take it, even if I don’t want it. It’s already going bad, its seal is broken, there’s discoloration, a grey vegetable mold of decay at its edges. This is my time, and nothing can make it stay.

  *

  The end of life is a phrase as much as a phase. It is sometimes a terror. But is it especially terrible, or bitterly disappointing, or at least sad, if you die alone? People marry, or more likely stay married, because they don’t want to die alone. Why is it sad to live your last day unaccompanied by any of those who are staying behind? Since they can’t come with you, why are they required to see you off? And even if they are dutifully there at your bedside, at your home or in your hospital room, they are simply on the dock, waving bon voyage, very happy not to be going to your particular Caribbean.

  *

  My enemies include the mirror. Its hard surface rejects how I feel inside. My skin in its looseness is a sign of all that is constricting.

  *

  Reading the introduction to The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke poolside, as if I were a screenwriter on a summer day in the Valley. I suspect that this paperback will be one of those “I should read this” books, where the only part of it that I understand or enjoy is the introduction. But no. There isn’t a sentence even in the introduction that I can understand. And is there a single line of Rilke’s poetry that makes sense to me? No, not one. Robert Hass, I have a question for you: What are you talking about?

  I’m at an age where I can read books I skipped years ago. If I’m baffled by them, if I simply can’t make sense of the sentences, I no longer have the excuse of saying I’m too young to understand, I haven’t lived enough to understand. These days, my lack of understanding is purely on me.

  *

  Despite the book that my mother gave me when I was a teenager, my search for the miraculous is over. Truth be told it never started. Did I ever read P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, which is still in its jacket on my bookshelf? I can’t remember it. These days, I may wrestle with invisible angels, but I will leave understanding them to others. All that I have to do in the world is breathe. And then, out of breath, return to eternity.

  *

  Keeping these daily notes –
  They are, for me, prayer; a daily liturgy that changes daily, which I repeat late into the night. I repeat myself day after day and then forget what I have done.

  *

  A note from California –
  There’s a Starbuck’s mug in the cabinet of our remodeled kitchen in Ocean Hills. This isn’t a mug my mother or father would have bought. It’s a white mug labeled California, the Golden State. It’s part of the From Here Series and the Across the Globe collection. Naturally it’s made in China. Everything freely associated with California is depicted on it. Grapes, a seagull, a surfboard, poppies, a pine tree, a beach chair, cactus, sunglasses, Half Dome at Yosemite – small images illustrated, drawn, and printed in yellows and purples. A wine glass, a sail boat, palm tree, a beach umbrella, a strip of film, and a shield-shaped emblem for US Highway 1. There’s a movie camera on its tripod, and the Bear Flag of the Republic. This mug does a much better job of holding images than it does holding the heat in my coffee. The orange glaze of the mug’s ceramic interior rises like a half moon above the horizon of a caramel brown pool of my coffee. Coffee from half an hour ago, lightened with milk.

  What was my sister thinking? Buying this mug? This mug? It doesn’t belong in a house we inherited from our parents. Neither of them ever tasted a latte from Starbucks. This mug would never have belonged to my father, who sneered at the prices at Baskin Robins fifty years ago, swearing he would never pay thirty-nine cents for an ice cream cone.

  *

  On the patio at Delos: I’m listening to the wind, but it’s the leaves I’m hearing. I hear the motor of the small plane that flies in the negative spaces between the notes of a crow. I hear the crow’s three notes, then four, then four again. Preparing for an encounter? The crow is calling to, or maybe at. I can’t hear the difference.

  What else? The wings of a hummingbird trilling as it sips at the wine-colored blossom on an allium.

  *

  September 3, 2021

  I spent time today thinking about the rewording of Dolores’s headstone. My plan is to provide an edited version to Don Spradling at Spradling Monuments. He was so unresponsive over the past several months that I had to contact Michael Friedman, who is Temple Emanu-El’s “cemetery guy,” to ask for a referral to a different resource. That must have provoked Don to contact me. He explained that the past year has been “crazy.” The COVID and the COVID stimulus checks have been very good for the gravestone business; so, not just the increase in mortality, if there was one, but the $1200 distributed by the government.

  Debra’s in Cleveland, with her mother, sister Sandra and brother-in-law Brad. I’ve been putting together my thoughts, which aren’t many or particularly wise, on a structure for the payments Brett Baridon will make, should the purchase of SullivanPerkins go forward. Also, what Consulting Agreement might be appropriate.

  So, most of the day I have been wandering alongside my own unguided thoughts on matters where I am not surefooted. I also bought a sliced rye bread at Empire Bakery, a tall misto at the Starbucks across from Empire, and a new copy of Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year, at Interabang Books, so I could have a belated gift for Billie Ellis, whose seventieth birthday was in August.

  Last night, Michael came over for dinner with me and Ben. I grilled. Michael is Dolores’s grandson. We used to call him Little Michael, because he’s a junior. Here was little Michael on Friday night at my table, telling me how he held Ben in his arms. Michael had come home from the Navy thirty-seven years ago. He might have been nineteen or twenty then. Kicked out, for using marijuana or drinking. Little Michael is far closer to sixty years old then to the past where I want to place him. Over dinner he asked about friends of Dolores – about Joyce, Iris and Jud, and then Sarah, whose last name we couldn’t come up with, until Ben did without any trouble. Sarah McDonald. Dolores, Ben, Eden and I visited Sarah once after she moved to Oregon. It’s a trip Ben remembers more clearly than I do.
  “How can you even remember that?”
  “Why shouldn’t I,” he said, “I was alive.”
  He was ten years old.

  *

  All I have to do is speak. I can leave the understanding to others.

  *

  If I can see the sun rise and call it a miracle, then my search for the miraculous is over.

  *

  We measure the success of a life by its length. When we hear that someone has died, our first question is, how old was he? Our second, what of? That preposition is a presumption. It’s an insensitive intrusion. If the answer to the first question is a very high number, “of boredom” might be the answer to the second. Or, “of fatigue.” My mother was tired of living, and so she died. But it is fair to consider the length of our years as a most meaningful measure. Life is about many things, but certainly it is about endurance.

  What if our first thoughts were something very different than how old and what of? Those are two questions we ask out of concern for ourselves. We want to name our enemy – this or that disease. And we want to place ourselves competitively at a mile marker, as we are racing toward the same finish line.
  What if instead we asked, “What did he endure?”

  *

  I received a text from 213 423-7424: “Hey Drgreenrx fam! Gt 20% off every Tuesday! Keep your shelves stocked with your favorite products. Check out our full menu here: (Test STOP to unsubscribe).

  Dr. Green Rx was one of the cannabis dispensaries Ben and I stopped at. This one, in Vista, was the closest to Ocean Hills.

  Dr. Green Rx had my cell number because I had been the one forced to go into the store and buy what Ben requested. He had tried first, while I stayed in the parked car. But he was refused admittance; they required Ben to show his driver’s license, and it was discovered that his license had expired several months ago.

  *

  I am spending Saturday hours by the pool on these last hot days of the summer. I have my laptop, two or three books, my cellphone, pipe tobacco, pipe, and a blue Bic lighter. The tobacco is Indian Summer or Devonshire. Also, I bring my black, faux leather notebook, 5 x 7, which has a snap clasp and a pen clipped to it. The lined paper is cream-colored. So, if I have a notion, I can write it down. I can tear that page out later and type up what I’m able to read of my very poor handwriting. This, from a week ago:

  What connection do I have to the generations behind me, to my fathers and mothers, to the centuries of ancestors in Romania, or Belarus, or in the deserts to the east of the Mediterranean? Some, however unknown or misunderstood. What tie to the generations ahead? None at all.

  I suppose I am talking about heritage and legacy.
  Reading it over, it’s nonsense.
  When people say to someone, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” they aren’t referring to sentences like the ones above, but to false facts. Still, the phrase applies to most of what I write. I can read my own sentences and say, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  *

  19 September

  Sad, no explanation for it, just how it is this weekend. The weather’s nicer than it has been, not far into fall yet, but cool enough at night to chill the water in the pool. I jumped in this afternoon. Probably the last jump of the year. I’m feeling isolated, more than usual, and out of sorts generally. My poor sleep at Debra’s is partly to blame. I’m discouraged simply by being in her house sometimes. It can be very difficult to feel cared about, and impossible to ask for what I want. I don’t even try expressing my loneliness. She hears it as a rebuke, and I’m dismissed. My mood is seen as one of my tiresome flaws. These are days, which can extend into weeks, when joy goes into hiding.

  Deut. 31:17: …I will abandon them and I will hide May face from them…

  Where does God go to hide, if He is everywhere? He hides in plain sight, within the natural world. He disappears into the world’s apparent indifference. We are not so much abandoned then, as blinded.

  *

  Tennis on Sundays.
  I am sleepier than usual and easily exhausted. Maybe years of pipe smoking have damaged my lungs. Or, like my mother, I have a progressive disease. In her nineties she claimed to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She would take a plastic tube and blow into it, either to strengthen her breathing or to demonstrate its weakness. Asthmatics do the same. Ben used a plastic tube. He had a ventilator as well, which I still have, stored in a closet.
  My mother would do her exercise by walking around her living room. “You’re doing well,” I would tell her. “You’re healthier than I am.”
  I can imagine that the day will come when I find myself in a state of disappointed surprise that I won’t live as long as either of my parents. Dolores felt that way. Francis had died in her mid-seventies. When Dolores was sixty-seven, she came home from Baylor Hospital, diagnosed with stage four colon cancer.
  “I can’t believe it,” she said, bedridden after her surgery. “I won’t live as long as my crazy mother.”

  Both of my parents died of an unwillingness to continue living. Or so it seemed to me. My father was so discouraged. My mother had put him out of the house and into a nursing home, and he was mentally impaired. My mother had no such misfortunes. Eight years after his death, she was simply tired of living.

  *

  From Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: “I have lived…I have joined in ambitious hopes….Now – shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me…”

  Whitman: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on – and have found that none of these finally satisfy or permanently wear – what remains?”

  *

  I want to get rid of that hungry emptiness that needs…something. Something I may call love, but might not be love.

  *

  The confusion of living in a world of solutions to imaginary problems. Busyness, for example, as a solution for anxiety. Religion, or children, or a journal, as a solution for mortality.

  *

  September 22

  An email exchange with a friend who is interested in “Jewish topics””

  Jane Manaster ([email protected]) wrote:

  Zooming Eli Rosenbaum’s Holocaust Museum talk tomorrow via Holocaust Museum. And you?

  Jane must be nearly in her eighties. She was a classmate I sat next to during Talmud class, when the classes with David Stern were in person at Temple Emanu-El. Wednesday mornings, 7:30 am to 8:30 am. Too early for me, but I would go, and then drive from Hillcrest and Northwest Highway to my office on McKinnon for my 9 am start at work. I enjoy her company, to a degree; but she seems to enjoy mine, and to need it, more than that. Not unlike Nick Carroway, I am sometimes one of those listeners who attract talkers, and so I become burdened with the stories and secrets of others.

  I replied to Jane via email:

  “No that’s not one I’m aware of, just looked it up, don’t think I’ll participate. I’ve contributed to the museum but am ambivalent about its calculated extension of the events of 1933-1945 into the frontier wars of Anglo versus Indian, women’s struggle for the vote, and the marches in Selma. A very particular horror story is opened like an umbrella, under which we end up standing next to the Haitians on our border. Our particular Jewish story shares a shelter with the “genocide” of Palestinians and, one day soon, with the microaggressions on a leafy campus, its buildings of Georgian architecture, in beautiful fall weather.”

  *

  What if I wrote about my trees. I would start with the large red oak on the outside of my swimming pool fence. I sit on a Woodward chaise near the pool and read until it becomes dark, which it does closer to eight in the evening In August, and then progressively earlier, thought September, and to the very end of October. I look up into the branches of this red oak that was here at the end of Guernsey Lane years before I was. Before there were houses, it was here, near the creek; even before there was a paved Guernsey Lane, it may have been shading a dirt path. It would be a rich subject. A branch trembles when a squirrel uses it like a tightrope. Bits of acorn drop into the pool. Is it frivolous to write about trees? Many others have done so before me.

  “When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse writes. He continues, but after such a beginning he hardly needs to; just the opening phrase is enough.

  “Trees speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.” This is from the 18th century, by an anonymous English gardener. Anonymous? See the quote from Ralph Austin found a bit further on.

  Maria Popova recommends The Song of Trees, written by biologist David Haskell, who writes that trees are “nature’s great connectors.”

  Popova asks if trees are “our mightiest metaphor for the cycle of life.” For Haskell, a tree is part of plurality, a living network. To understand a tree is to appreciate “the dissolution of self into relationship.”

  From Ralph Austin, in a pamphlet on the spiritual use of trees which may have been written in the 1650s, though the author’s name sounds entirely modern: “The world is a great library, and …trees are some of the books wherein we may read and see plainly the attributes of God, his power, wisdom, goodness….For as trees, in a metaphorical sense, are books, so likewise in the same sense they have a voice and speak plainly to us, and teach us many good lessons.” Also, he writes, “though they are dumb companions, yet in a sense we may discourse with them…Not only rational and irrational, but even inanimate creatures have a voice, and speak loudly to men, and it is our duty to learn their language, and hearken to them.”

  So, yes, there’s a book in my red oak.

  2 October

  “Don’t know.”

  It could be an admission of ignorance, or an instruction. A declaration of helplessness, or advice. It could be a warning that it is better to not understand. Don’t know. Meaning, don’t do it, don’t gain certainty.

  It may be good advice, and a warning worth taking. Certainty can be more of a danger than ignorance; it can be a type of ignorance.

  Just as there can be beneficial ignorance. Ignorance plus humility may equal wisdom; it may even be greater than wisdom. As has been said: the danger isn’t what you know, it’s what you know that just isn’t true.

  *

  More, from my own backyard:

  The live oak wants the sunlight for itself. It leaves the azaleas in the shade. Its oak branches reach up, unable to touch the sky but always trying. Does the tree concern itself with any other living thing? It doesn’t seem to. Still, no one would call a tree selfish. I might speak of intention in a tree, a bird, a housecat – but not of moral behavior, or not exactly. I can hear a bird’s cry and, if I listen very carefully, the shuddering wings of insects. But I do not think of them as sad.

  Ben and Eden have gone their own ways, just as any bird would do. Every parent is abandoned sooner or later.

  Is God hurt by the silence of the world he made? Does he ever miss his children, or is it enough for him to summon the lightning and hear it answer.

  For Maimonides, attributing emotion to God, or will, the wanting of this or that – this was nothing but idolatry. It’s false belief. It’s punishable–though not presumably by God, who does not care. To believe that God is “like us” in any way – for Maimonides, that would be enough for you to forfeit your place in the world to come.

  *

  The spoken word is like a drop on the water. Even one word makes a ripple. An unspoken word is a cloud. On the move, it changes its shape and keeps its secret.

  *

  I have a new weekly habit, which is a chore, a responsibility, and a mitzvah. I call my cousin Bobbi on the weekends. Mostly, during my drives from Dallas to Southlake. When she comes to the phone, she brings her crazy with her. It spills out of the emptiness inside her. It’s a torrent of words, waterfalls descending to a stagnant pond. Not always, not every call. On the other hand, she usually understands that when I reach Debra’s driveway, I need to stop. Sometimes, though – actually, most of the time – she will protest, “wait, no just a minute more.”

  Bobbi tells me she loves me. She will text with links to YouTube videos of singers, or schemes for making money, medications, weight loss programs or supplements. She must be close to eighty, but she has the strong opinions of an adolescent. She can talk for twenty minutes with barely a pause, saying “Right?” from time to time, and “Are you still there?”
  I am still there.

  *

  You saw no likeness, you only heard the sound of words. Deut. 4.12

  Is it better to be the ancestor or the descendent, the tree, or the apple that falls from it?

  Everything bright and wet becomes dull. It dries, with nobody watching.

  If I visit the cemetery too often, and it will be the dead who are burying the living.

  Life lasts from the first hazard to the last hurrah.

  No book can tell you, only the road can show you.

  Symmetry, cemetery.

  I am not salaried. Nothing has been delegated to me. I gave myself tasks and am the only judge of how well I did with them.

  *

  Trying to light my pipe, but my cheap lighter will not work.
  I flick the metal wheel with my thumb. Nothing. Some sparks, bits of gold spit. So I say out loud, as a spell, BIC USA, Shelton, Connecticut, 06484.

  *

  If you are known, take another name, take any other, Rilke advised, so God can call you in the night. A strange thing to say, but I understand it. We are trapped by who we think we are, and by our past, unable to hear the call to something new. It means, I suppose, to let go of what others think you are. More than that, to let go of what you yourself pretend to be.

  *

  When I was a teenager, on the beach in California, I could go up to the water’s edge and stare at the horizon. The distance was as inviting, like the pages of an unread book. I had my unfinished life written there, my story, both a quest and a question.

  *

  How many times have I read pages of the most praised writing (Rilke is my best current example) and come to the end of those pages with no answer to the question, “What is he talking about”? I have scraps of paper that make as much sense. They are on my desk under a large postcard announcing an art exhibit that ended two years ago. What is on these scraps of paper that for no good reason I have never thrown away? Plenty, every one of them has a story – a notice of new restaurants opening, an unopened seed packet, a page from the prescription pad of my former doctor, who is now retired; also, ideas for travel, names of hotels, how to explore Glacier Bay, Vermijo Park Ranch, the Channel Islands, and lists of books, including one with the title, Its Never Too Late To Begin Again.

  *

  I’m talking to myself. The sliver of moon is listening. The leaves of the red oak pay attention in the dark, like that best companion who never interrupts.

  *

  My unretouched life – that’s an odd phrase. It might mean a presentation of myself as I “really” am. As if it were possible to be anything else.

  I could be unretouched because never touched in the first place. Never close enough to attractive to consider enhancements. Never close enough to others to be tempted away from myself.

  I can be a maker of phrases, a builder of lines. Lines that do not connect, but simply end, and, at the end of the line, what’s there? A pause. And in that space there’s possibility, fear, hesitancy, and a willingness to go on.

  *

  A dream:
  I’m backstage in an empty theater. The show’s over. And the spectators, which is all they ever were, are leaving the theater to go home or, some of them, out for a drink first. They have their own lives, which have nothing to do with my dream. In my dream, there’s clean-up to do in the theater, which is my responsibility. And it must happen before the next showtime, which is a production that will star someone else.

  *

  As the crow flies, that’s how we judge distance. As if a bird or anything living has ever traveled in a straight line. We might as well make music as the crow sings, cawing. It’s only the mythical crow who makes a beeline. But even the bee buzzes on an unpredictable path, jumpy and turbulent.

  *

  Hiking:
  When you come and go in wilderness you are told to leave no trace. But everywhere is wilderness. From my years of trail-running, I may well leave nothing behind, no trace of a voice, only an unattended shadow, and this shadow will be more mysterious because I produced it without light.

  *

  The dog is barking. Mika has her reasons. She is at the stop of the stairs, standing in front of a dark window at night. She is likely only confronting her own reflection. Even so, the world is in front of her, and she is talking back.

  *

  On Guernsey Lane, the crepe myrtles are all grown up. No one can remember their childhoods. I can enjoy the grace of their maturity, their white blossoms, their unpolished crowns. In the world of a landscape, aging is blossoming. For example, look at the roses planted against an iron fence and leaning away from it. Thin, thorned, the bush branches are elderly, brown and rough, with their toes buried in the soil. The pale red roses, upturned toward the sun, are beautiful as souls; at the least, they seem in their reach to aspire to that immaterial state. Higher up, far above my head, a squirrel runs along the bough of the live oak; it jumps into the arms of another weighted branch. The sun is in my eyes. I am no different than any other thing that feels the heat of the sun and the weight of the moment.

  *

  In order to believe that I can change the behavior of another person, I have to believe that that person has more in common with a dog than with a wolf, and not just any dog, but one with above average intelligence – an Australian cattle dog, for example, or a poodle. Even then, in my experience, no matter how many times I call, a dog won’t come; it just sits, cocking its head and pretending to listen, as I silently count to ten – silently, so the pitch of my voice can’t be heard as it rises.

  *

  I am in a stage of forgetting. First, the pages and pages I have already read in the thousands of books on my shelves, and now, more lately, what I did in my tens of thousands of hours that have already past. As for the books, I never turned most of their pages, truth be told, though I shelved all of them with good intentions. My life, however– I know for a fact that I lived it. I should be able to recall my unwritten days. Boyhood, a career, two marriages. I would think most of that would stick. I had children, and I was one myself. I try to remember what happened, but can’t, not with any certainty. I am winding down, like a season. In 1969 I was valedictorian. I had the potential of the morning. Now farewells are the largest portion of my wisdom, and I am looking for the good in good night.

  *

  Both my parents lived into their nineties. My mother was at ease with her last breath. Dad, less so – he was damaged by disease, and he protested the terms of his dying. Maybe he was despairing, unfulfilled by the routine of the life he led. Or he had heartbreak he wasn’t sharing. But if he tired of life, he never said so. He had lived through the Depression and a world war. He had married, then stuck with it all the way. Maybe he wanted to live forever, or just longer, and then just one more day. My mother did live longer. In her last years she often said she had had enough, but who knows whether that statement was true, or only said out loud and for effect. It wasn’t insincere, but it might have been deceptive nonetheless.

  *

  Thinking again about my parents, who were both robust in their nineties. My mother was sharp until her last breath. Dad had a fall that damaged him when he was ninety-three. After his death, my mother became tired of living. Never a model of joy, she had never been one to seize the day. So the day became for her was a bowl of hours it was necessary to swallow one spoon at a time. I told her once I didn’t expect to live as long as she did. After all, I had had the more difficult life. She had lived through the Great Depression and World War II. I had my experience of two marriages and the disappointments of two children, one of whom I haven’t seen in years, and neither of whom are interested in any of this.

  *

  October 7, 2021

  Heading to age seventy, seemingly at seventy miles per hour. Over the speed limit in the city, under it on the open road.
  Is there a moral? Perhaps I should get out of town.

  October 17

  All of us need the strength to imagine our lives, to make them up.

  October 20

  It may be true that I was not very capable in my twenties. But thanks to the obstacles in my way, now I am.

  *

  October 21

  Flying into Los Angeles. In that phrase I hear Arlo Guthrie, whether I want to or not. So often, what stays in my mind has come in through my ear. My nose is stuffy, and I have no mind’s eye. Sound is my madeleine. In front of the vault of memories, my ear has the key. Whatever I see barely enters; or, I barely enter into it. To have vision is taken to mean a deeper understanding, but my vision has always been even less than superficial. The surface stays where it is, on the outside; real enough, but disappearing from one moment to the next.

  *

  October 22

  I need to write, but have no pleasure in the difficulty of writing. It’s a masochistic exercise. I’m discouraged by my lack of command. Also, by what so much of my writing reveals – and what it fails to reveal. My writing embarrasses me. It shows my inadequacies – of thinking, of observing. Rote action has always been my strongest suit. I am good at picking up and almost but not quite copying what I read. The same is true of my behavior. So much of it is copying others, though not exactly.

  The relationship between what I want and what I do is less than one to one. So, it’s a fraction. I want to be better, I want to listen more and talk less, I want to be thoughtful, attentive, or useful. In all of it I am a fraction of what I might be. So, reason for discouragement, or room for improvement?

  I’m on Delos this October day. It’s a Friday. I’ll have lunch with Richard Heine at the restaurant he likes, called Z. It’s in Bonsall, thirty minutes from Ocean Hills, thirteen minutes from Fallbrook where Richard lives with Teresa. There is something about Richard that separates the two of us. I suspect it’s his goodness. He is always genial. He has a sweetness in his grain. And we have a love, however imperfect, for each other. I may need someone darker to match the unhappiness that lies just under my skin. I have sorrow, disappointment, and anger in my bloodstream. Then again, Richard left his wife for Teresa. He abandoned poor Corinne and her menagerie of pets – her cockatoos, dogs and cats, hamsters, pet pigs, and weasels. For Teresa, his junior high school girlfriend, who he encountered her forty years later at a high school reunion; that was enough to reignite whatever hormones were left in the embers. Or, more likely, he stayed touch all these years, hoping and dreaming, opening up Facebook, checking her address, noticing her divorce.

  *

  October 23

  Saturday in Oceanside.

  Is happiness something that I always carry with me, infused and innate and inseparable from me? Or do I have to earn it or win it or achieve it? Do I have to work at it? If so, then I have to worry about it. It’s like salvation in some theologies. The Calvinists had the doctrine of predestination. They granted all power to the heavens. However childish and anthropomorphic the notion, their God was sovereign and His sovereignty was uncompromised. And so, they relieved themselves of needing to do anything, other than believe.

  Do I feel less happy with myself the older I get, because the possibilities are fewer as the time remaining is less? As I age, I forfeit that sense of possibility that was so encouraging, even intoxicating, in adolescence. What might I have instead, in exchange for my forfeit of possibilities? The comfort of acceptance, if I can take that comfort.

  How can I feel good about myself – given that many of my dreams have proven illusory? That’s easy. All I have to do is wake up.

  I have no secrets to conceal, other the ones I conceal from myself.

  *

  It rained in the night, while I slept and woke and slept and waited for morning. I woke up dejected and remorseful. Unclear, how or why. Perhaps it was a reminder that the sins of the past will always reappear, and that nothing hidden ever goes away.

  *

  The white stucco walls and red tile roofs of Ocean Hills are as unchanging as the sky. Only the trees throw shadows; what is living reminds me that the day leans toward darkness.

  I’m in a retirement home masquerading as a Greek fishing village. Average age in Ocean Hills –over seventy. Are we all waiting for the catch of the day, or for the end of the day?

  Stuck in a stucco cell. I’m not sure I know what stucco is exactly. I can look it up: It’s a construction material. Applied wet, it hardens to a dense solid. It’s a decorative coating made of aggregates, a binder and water.
  Aggregates? A binder? Like most things, the definition needs a definition.

  *

  October 24

  Sunday now.
  Here’s a way to wade in, rather than standing on the edge of an ocean, afraid of the cold water or the crashing waves. First, write whatever occurs to me, and use a pen, writing in a small notebook, and not worrying about the continuity of sentences or the readability of my penmanship. Next, intervals of reading, like a spoon of sherbet to cleanse the palate between the courses of tasting. Then, more notes. Last, transcribing and rewriting in the Word doc that can be edited as I go, improving it, or at least removing what makes me cringe. From this document I might then discover if I’m lucky a line, or two lines.
  The beginning of something.

  It’s about overcoming reticence, about not judging too soon, about not letting hanging back hold me back.

  *

  The day long daylight is a container I am compelled to fill, if only with distractions. I pour whatever is at hand into the mold of the day. I can also let it be filled by boredom, or, worse, unhappiness. Both of those seem to be attracted to an empty day, like bugs drawn to something rotten.

  Cockroaches wait for lights out to search the kitchen floor for crumbs.

  *

  Rewriting:

  In the emptying theater of old age, the show’s over; the spectators are gone. I still have some clean-up to do, which must be done before the next showtime, a production that will star someone else.

  *

  A fan lives for the moment, or in a glorious past, and sometimes for the future, with the cry of “Wait for next year.” My father’s hours listening to the Dodgers, with the earpiece of a transistor radio in his ear, was a commitment to present time. Sport is food, the game is a meal. Whichever team wins or loses, we will be hungry again tomorrow. That said, my Sunday in front of the television watching football is an escape from the present.

  *

  Some thoughts on writing:

  The words are sounded but not spoken.

  Words appear by hand.

  Conversations with myself are put “on paper.” It’s improvisation. The current in my head flows through my hands.

  I want to write fewer questions and make more declarations. There is no one to answer and so no reason to ask.

  Use plain language. Whatever showiness I might exhibit might be in construction rather than in the vocabulary. For example, the poems of Li Po or Tu Fu are in tight artificial forms. They appear in squares or rectangles, with characters like symbols, aligned like columns of numbers in a ledger. There is a lightness to the thoughts of these poets, but the geometry of their poems on the page is as solid as a stone.

  Subject matter doesn’t matter. Whatever occurs to me in the moment is enough.

  *

  How do I tell the difference between information that is necessary and details that are arbitrary? I’m reading Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads. I don’t want to finish it. The novel provides thousands of specificities that might just as easily be otherwise. The girl has an upturned nose, the father sweats, the furniture is dark oak, and, on the plate in the restaurant, three eggs. Not two, three. The more it describes, the more arbitrary it seems, and the less real.

  *

  Rethinking an idea:
  We say “as the crow flies,” as if the crow makes a beeline, when even the bee buzzes on an unpredictable flight path.

  *

  I am living a life of starts and finishes.
  The space between them however seems to be empty.
  I get through the day, but do not follow through.
  Maybe I should try this: fill the time before noon with starts and finishes, then take the time before evening connecting them. Filling in the hole between them.

  *

  Before breakfast, after breakfast. Afternoon, late afternoon, when the loneliness of a day spent indoors is at its most emptied of the hopes I had of getting something done—no matter what that “something” was. And then, the evening. End of day, the end. I divide the days into intervals. Structuring. This reminds me of what Irv Humphrey, a psychiatrist who saw Ben for years in his childhood, told me, when he advised me to find Ben a place like Aimhouse in Colorado. “You can’t provide the structure he needs.”

  We need structure, pattern, intervals, tiny goals to meet, steps to take, boundaries, fences. And it’s fine if all of it is made up. We are fooling ourselves, and it’s essential to do so, it’s required, if not for our happiness, then for our sanity. We need not just the Ten Commandments, but the 613 laws that the Sages have extracted from the Torah, which Moses (our teacher) brought down to us from Sinai. Structure.

  *

  Structure, discipline –
  I don’t want to be as confined as the flower in a pot. Still, the bloom is beautiful, and the pot helps me see the flower, separated as it is and on display.

  On the other hand, there’s bamboo, which can’t be confined to the space where it is. Admired at first for its strength and growth, then disparaged for being invasive. Jumping borders, careless of anything that isn’t bamboo. It disregards the rosemary in my backyard and chokes the salvia. It even overcomes the grass.

  *

  At Ocean Hills, the house are “final homes” for some, second homes for others, vacation homes, dream homes. Downsized, upscale, under contract, or about to be.
  This gated community has the complacency of a cruise ship.
  There’s nothing to do here, and there’s everything a resident might want.
  What’s there to see on my patio at 4911 Delos? I see a feathered dreamcatcher hanging on one of the support posts of the pergola. So do the petite silver tubes of a chime, and a tarnished outdoor thermometer. I wonder if that thermometer was already here when my parents bought this house. There are beams of sunlight, and the crossbeams of the open lattice, making patterns of light and shade. Those have been here forever.

  *

  An old man with thinning hair, in his socks, still in the flannel pajama bottoms he woke up in, sits under a pergola in the late afternoon. He’s annoyed by neighbors’ voices, preferring silence and invisibility. He has turned his fear of rejection into arrogance and his shyness into snobbery.

  *

  October 28

  Everything passes. And yet the most common thing of all, and the most unreasonable, is to insist on holding on. That’s what we all try to do. It’s what we may even believe we are doing. Holding on to our so-called place in the world, holding on to our sanity. And we hold on to other people as well, because we imagine they will hold us in place. Solitude, when it’s unwanted, feels very dangerous.

  *

  Flying back to Dallas.
  Why does the baby cry? Same reason the dog barks. Both have their reasons.

  On the plane home, a woman in the row in front of me leans her chair back. What color is her hair? Simple question, but not easy to answer. Copper? Golds, browns. No need to wear a coat of many colors for anyone with open eyes. Multiple colors are swimming on the surfaces of things. Everything is more than one thing.

  *

  October 31

  I’m struggling with descriptions – how to say what I am seeing, smelling, tasting; I have trouble communicating, which is about vocabulary.

  From my reading:
  “What is smell, precisely? If I take a sniff of my morning coffee, that’s not actually a thing. It’s eight hundred separate volatile chemicals that are coming into the headspace above the cup, all of which exist at different concentrations, which my nose detects and my brain synthesizes into a unitary precept of coffee.”

  A unitary precept? This is what we do. We take the overwhelming complexity that is the real world and reduce it, simplify it, and attach a name to it, as surely as Adam did in the Garden of Eden. We symbolize. It’s what I do with the color I think I see, the sound I hear, the skies above me, the ground at my feet, and, to be sure, with the people I love.

  *

  I don’t own my time. It slips through my fingers. I only pretend to spend it or invest it. I try to give it meaning, which is my way of saying hello to it as it passes.

  November 7

  I’m traveling through a thousand universes – passing the woman selling flowers on the highway median, the forking branches of the cypress outside my window, the tennis ball as it hits the back line, Mika begging for a chew, Debra wheeling her overnight suitcase and the bag that contains her laptop. I use my eyes, I listen, and, most of all, breathe.
  Every breath is a ticket.

  Quoting Shige Oishi, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Virginia: “I mostly write about a psychologically rich life, which we define as a life full of interesting and perspective-changing experiences.” In his 2021 paper, he makes the case that “along with happiness and meaning—which many consider the prerequisites of a good life—psychological richness is a third dimension of human well-being.”

  “A significant reason neither a happy life nor a meaningful life captures the full range of human motivation,” Oishi writes, “is that both happy and meaningful lives can be monotonous.”

  *

  The solitude of a tree is a lively solitude, alive with insects, with squirrels leaping from branch to branch, leaves budding or turning colors or falling, twigs breaking, the tops of its branches going turvy in the wind, the mouthless singing, the bark of the trunk blackening in the rain. This is a crowded solitude.

  *

  Growth and decay are figure and ground.

  Growing is leaving. The decaying, the dying, are left behind.

  What we shed can be richer than our new leaf.

  What we win is paid for with what we’ve lost.

  The tree purchasing its place in the sun with falling leaves.

  Whitman praised a friend as “beautiful as a tree, tall, leafy, rich, full, free…” Free? A tree is just a plant, it’s planted. When lightening gathers in the storm, all a tree can do is wait. Fire approaching, it stays. Whatever it does, it does because it cannot do otherwise. This is nothing to admire. It blindly bends toward the sunlight, summer or winter. It repeats itself season after season. And however tall or leafy it might become, it remains at base what it was and will always be, wooden and stuck in the dirt.

  *

  November 8, Tuesday of my birthday week. The calendar pages are flipping toward my seventieth. Is this a destination? It’s not a stopping point or a turning point. With luck, it’s just another day passing. Debra is coming with me for a Friday to Tuesday trip. No reason for going, other than to leave a mark on what might otherwise be my blank memory of November 13, 2021. We’re flying into San Diego and staying a night in Ocean Hills. Then we’ll be in Palm Springs on Friday afternoon. I’ve booked a guided “event,” a tiny trip within the trip, for Saturday night. We’ll see the stars in the dark skies of Joshua Tree National Park. Looking at the heavens seems fitting for the occasion. I will be staring into the place I am moving toward. Death is coming like a disturbance, but all the agitations of my little light can disappear within the desert stillness and the distance of a twinkling night sky .

  *

  November 10, a Wednesday. I’ve read an interview with Joseph Yerushalmi, the former
  Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization at Harvard and professor at Columbia: “History’s openness means that it remains open to the best and worst.” Safra, who died in 2009, doesn’t seem to believe in providence, or that God is in control. He says that things happen in history that have not been planned or anticipated. “We only learn about them retroactively. I wish that only one passage in what’s called the ‘New’ Testament had appeared in the Hebrew Bible, because I love it: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ And it’s true; only at the end after the facts do things become illuminated. This thought consoles me.”

  It’s not consolation. Even now, I have little understanding of the things that came before in my own life, much less in my time. I can try to recount them, whatever portion of the past I can remember; but recounting, much less remembering, that’s not the same as understanding. My own experience of events that happened does not enlighten me; they still appear “through a glass, darkly.” And will I be known in the future, as the Gospel writer says? Not on earth, where there is no one interested enough to do that work.

  *

  Simone Weil – “Those who do not love each other are not separated.”

  This is an odd thought. It’s provocative. Those who do not love each other are not together, either.

  *

  November 18

  Lunar eclipse tonight. It is supposed to last over three hours; and, if so, that will make it the longest-lasting lunar eclipse in five hundred years. Visible starting just after 1 a.m.; or, around fifteen minutes from right now.

  *

  Life obeys the law of gravity. It eventually falls to the ground.
  There are ways in which my life has been disobedient. With age, I am more law-abiding. I am more observant of speed limits. I am more aware of the potholes that are on every road, no matter which one I take, whether the one less traveled or the other one. I understand that any road I take, whichever way it diverges, makes no difference, or a difference that will disappear in the end, at the destination. All roads do lead to the same place.

  *

  Description is impossible. I don’t have the eyes for it. I don’t even see through a glass darkly, but only abstractly. I see preconceptions. I see geometries. I see none of the detail that I would need to produce with careful brushstrokes, if I want to reproduce what is right in front of me.

  *

  I’m very tired of being in a hurry. Tired because of the hurry. If I can slow down, I might live longer in a single day.

  Zeno’s Paradox: The arrow must travel through a sequence of halfway points, and since the division in two never ends, the arrow never reaches the end.

  An infinity of halfway points. Always on the way, never there.

  *

  November 20

  Dinner with Ben. It was a make-up birthday dinner, since I was traveling on my birthday, which I’ve done most of my birthdays. It surprised me to hear him mention it, as though he were disappointed, as if he had been cheated of the celebration. Had he wanted to pay tribute to my birthday, but taken the message that I had no need of any tribute from him? That I preferred to be gone, that I would rather be with wife or girlfriend? That he was unnecessary and no part of what made the day special for me? It’s possible. We can hurt others without meaning to. I know I’ve done so with Ben and Eden both.

  We went together to Loro, on Haskell, on the other side of Central Expressway. It advertises itself as a fusion of Asian and barbecue. Ben did the ordering and the paying. He also told me he bought two tickets at $400 apiece for the Mavericks game when Dirk Nowitzki’s jersey number will be retired. Now he has a dilemma. The second ticket is for his friend Alex, but Alex has yet to offer to pay him back.

  *

  “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Surely that’s wrong, even though it comes from George Eliot, born this week in 1819, according to my Lit Hub email. It’s a statement that seems directed to me – however demonstrably false it is. It is never too late to try to be what you might have been, if you have the will to climb uphill and the willingness to fall back down.

  *

  November 22

  Qumquat – might that possibly be misspelled?
  It looks even weirder when handled as a search online says it should be, with a K.
  Kumquat.
  The seed pods of the mesquite trees.

  Vincent Van Gogh saw olive trees from the window of an asylum in San Remy. There were trees in groves, and he painted them over and over. But his object could not have been the trees, however often they were his subject.
  I am looking for an object to be my subject. For something to do, turning away from being, even from well-being, in favor of doing. This is what my horror of the grave must be about, a fear of just being.
  I can be dead, after all – and I will be. But I can never do dead.

  On the other hand:
  You can do well, and you can be well.
  There’s well-being, though no such thing as well-doing, not exactly; only well done, the act always in the past, as the life that did it is in the past.
  Death is all about the future, an unchanging, infinite future.
  But again, there is such a thing as doing well. At least for a while.

  *

  “The anticipation that an era of contentment and progress in Ireland would follow the emancipation of the Catholics had been falsified. ‘What all the wise men promised has not happened,’ said Lord Melbourne, ‘and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’”
  It’s an anecdote I’ve always admired, though I can never remember what situation provoked it, or whom to attribute it to.
  It applies everywhere: to COVID, to “defund the police,” to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

  *

  From my reading:
  Bryon wrote She Walks in Beauty, which then appeared in the volume Hebrew Melodies as a lyric set to the melody of Adon Olam:

  She walks in beauty, like the night
  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
  And all that’s best of dark and bright
  Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
  Thus mellow’d to that tender light
  Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

  There are other verses, but I don’t have the commitment to copy them here. This poetry is from the early years of the 19th century. I doubt that these poets we remember were called the Romantics then. Such categories come later, in university survey classes. Byron must have been interested in the exotic, and the Jews qualified. Byron was countercultural, a scandalous Lord. “Sometime after the publication of Hebrew Melodies, Byron left England, following the scandal of his marriage to his half-sister. He went to Greece to fight on the side of the insurgents against the Ottomans.” He died there after a fever.

  Byron wrote “The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold,” which also appeared in Hebrew Melodies. Dactyls. The line is from a poem about the Angel of Death slaying 185,000 of the army of Sennacherib, Sargon’s son, who besieged Jerusalem in the 7th century. God acted in defense of Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah, saving Hezekiah. In the 19th century an English lord still knew the story, as recounted in II Kings. Would a Senator or a President know it today?

  *

  Wood has grain. But not the kind of grain that was ever sown or could be harvested. Its longitudinal, and like the length of our days, it varies

  I could write in praise of “going against the grain” all day long. Of its risks, which I know, and the consequences, which I have known.

  What is authenticity? How do I recognize it?
  It’s in the grain of my experience. If I am a block of wood, and I feel the grain in me, and it is irregular, the lines not repeating in a pattern, then I am solid and real. But if the pattern of the grain in me repeats, if the surface is too smooth, then I am only a veneer.
  And if there is no grain in me at all? Then I am a laminate.

  Pine and oak are coarse-grained woods.
  Redwood, cypress, and aspen have straight grain that doesn’t weave or curl much, and its texture is smooth.
  .
  Meat has grain as well.
  To cut across the grain, I slice perpendicular to the fibers, so the fibers are shorter, and the meat is then easier to chew. But if I cut with the grain, the meat will be tougher to chew, and harder to swallow. This isn’t intuitive.

  Fabric has grain, as does the fabric of experience.

  Then there are the other kinds of grain, the small, hard dry seeds without a hull – maize, rice, and wheat, the component beings of bran and germ.

  *

  Thanksgiving 2021

  Twelve expected – eleven, since I’m already here, without expectation. Three dogs as well – Mika, Benny, and Spero. The attendees at the end of this plague year:
  Ben
  Debra
  Debra’s daughter Amanda
  Josh, Debra’s middle son
  Josh’s girlfriend Alicia
  Pat and Dennis, Debra’s aunt and uncle
  Danny and girlfriend, Pat and Dennis’s son plus one
  David and daughter or girlfriend, Pat and Dennis’s other son.
  I could list them like a cast, each with a lighthearted, which would say what else they had been in, and include some offbeat personal detail, the name of their cat or their obsession with Renaissance Fairs.

  Part of my assignment is to put the stuffing Debra made into a sixteen-pound turkey we purchased at Central Market in Southlake. I have basted the turkey with melted butter and the seasonings prepared by Debra. I put the turkey in the over at 325 degrees, just after 9:30 in the morning per my instructions. I’ve snapped the green beans, because I will be making the vegetable. Yesterday, I picked up a pecan pie as well as rolls from Empire Bakery. The guests will arrive at three in the afternoon, for dinner around 4 pm. Debra says she’ll be coming over to help at 11 am, but it’s already 11:30.

  Still to do: Not much. Sweep the decks and the front door steps. Change my clothes.

  *

  When Eden lost Tig, her stuffed animal best friend, we were all together in Thailand. Ben and Eden, Pam and Jason. That would have been in 2000, before we were an official new family. Was that in Thailand? I was able to retrieve Tig but can’t remember from where. Tig did come back to us. It might well have been from Thailand. And probably in a package, mailed to Dallas from Bangkok or Phuket or Chiang Mai. Even Ben’s memory of all this has faded, when I asked him today. Was it from Thailand? Could it have been from China?

  Tig, for Tiger. Tig mattered. Eden has always lived in her imagination; what she makes up is more real to her than her hairbrush or a car in the street. One thing is for real – I can’t ask her anymore what happened to Tig.

  *

  I’m in Oceanside. A bird is bellowing like a bull. What to call the moment when the air becomes colder? The sun is still shining, but lower toward the horizon. More glow than shine. The shadows point their fingers in my direction. Are the shadows cold? No, not at all, though you would think they were. Is this an example of the confusion of the senses? Darkness, which is looked at, is confused with coldness, which is touched. Not quite the derangement of all the senses, as Rimbaud might have called for, in his flight from Charleville to Paris and on his way from his mother’s house to Paul Verlaine’s.

  *

  Needing less. This is the paradoxical path to living a fuller life. Needing less, and thereby granting yourself permission to have a life in full.

  *

  Debra and I stayed at The Willows when we were In Palm Springs earlier this month for my birthday. Desert blue skies, bougainvillea, eucalyptus, and mesquite, the leaves of the trees like fingers and fronds, brown hills as close as a fence. I went walking, while Debra stayed in the room with her laptop and business emails. Little motivates her other than mealtimes.

  On a trail above the hotel, there was rock staircase. Even up there, it was difficult for me to find a place to be unseen. I don’t mean somewhere no one pays attention to me. I mean where mine are the only eyes. Even harder to be unheard. Not unlistened to, which is also the norm, but noiseless.

  Debra and I did go to Joshua Tree National Park for stargazing on November 13th, a Saturday night. Neither of us particularly enjoyed it, but Debra is less able to pretend. Especially on the drive there in the dark, when we were unsure where we were going, and she thought she was unsafe. We were out in a wilderness.

  No messages from the heavens were received on my 70th birthday. Nothing from the Andromeda galaxy, not a word from Regal, nothing oracular in Orion. Perseus and Cassiopeia offered neither prophesy nor protection. We did see Saturn and its rings, Jupiter and three moons – Io, Titan, and what’s its name.

  The moon was bright enough to dim the other stars. We saw it “clear as day,” with its terminator line, and the blackness on its face.

  Our guide, Alex, was dull as a docent. The group seating with us was all young women, twenty somethings. Profanity came easily to them. Debra and I are familiar with these groups of young women from other Saturday nights. We see them filling tables in restaurants, for girls’ nights out and ordinary birthdays. We hear their piercing voices, confusing loudness with happiness.

  *

  I do what I do because I did it yesterday and have no new ideas today. Or because I tell myself I have no choice, or in fact have no choice. I try to fill time, which cannot be filled. Much of the trying is unfulfilling.

  I have reached that ripened age where I can see without turning around that no one is looking over my shoulder. When I talk to myself my voice is clear.

  I take my time, and my time is scarce.
  Surely my heart has been beating all night long, and I was unaware of it.

  *

  When an animal hunts at night, it’s alert to whatever will nourish it.

  *

  What do I call that belief in myself, that I can do something I’ve never done, despite being less capable today than I was yesterday? Stubbornness? Stupidity is another possibility. Delusion? Optimism? Or, a necessity: it’s the drug I need in order to keep going.

  *

  Les Fleurs du Mal – tha thump, tha thump – the rhythm of Baudelaire’s title is a beating heart, the same iambic pattern I hear when I listen closely in the stillness. And the vowels open my mouth in a sequence that contains all the possibilities of language.

  Wittgenstein – the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

  *

  In my teens, it seemed inspiring to think that my future was ahead of me. But isn’t the future always ahead of me, even on the morning of my last day? The fantasy of the future can still pull me forward in old age. What I aimed for a twenty was as out of reach then as it is now. It can still tempt me, if I let it. Ambition. It can have the same fragrance, it can be as seductive – seduction is always a matter of deception.

  *

  Rain splashes on the roof. The sound of the air in a still house, the hum that I can hear, it makes me think that the night is plugged in. After the rain, the sounds of the run off.

  *

  December 9

  Do I really need to write this at 1:15 in the morning?
  For whom am I performing? What parent is inside me, whose approval I still need to win? The most relevant question is who do I think I am.

  *

  December 15

  The James Webb telescope has been called the largest science experiment in history. It will launcs from a space port in French Guiana a week from this Friday, on the day before Christmas. A rocket will throw the Webb on a path to an observing station one a month’s journey from Earth. During that time, according to what I’m reading, “Webb’s primary mirror and tennis court-sized sunshield will be unfolded.”

  A tennis court-sized sunshield? Incroyable, one might say in French Guiana. The hope is that this telescope will “image the earliest objects to form after the Big Bang,” which are theorized to be the stars that grouped together in the very first galaxies.

  Meanwhile, as it circles or on whatever its path is, back on Earth I’ll be watching three dogs on Tuscan Ridge Circle.

  *

  Take two, on the Webb telescope:

  After I played two sets of Sunday tennis, I read an article in the Sunday paper about the upcoming launch. Weather permitting, the Webb telescope will be sent one point five million kilometers into the sky. The article reported that the first stars flickered on when the universe was only — or, already– one hundred million years old. From the fog of that baby gas came galaxies, planets, microbes and, eventually, human beings. I was on the court at Seay Tennis Center this morning. The five-layer sunshield of the Webb telescope sat at the same time at a spaceport in French Guiana like a seed in a pod. When fully unfolded, the sunshield will be the same size as the tennis court. Sixteen gold-plated hexagons will snap into place, forming the Webb’s perfect mirror. It’s like a vision out of prophecy, a chariot with four winged animals and pivoting wheels, on a million-mile journey and twenty orbits around the sun. The Webb will keep an eye on the heavens. It will be tuned to a kind of light my eyes cannot see, looking into the past in the shadow of its sunscreen, far past the seventy-eight feet in a tennis court’s regulation length, the thirty-six in its width.

  *

  17 December

  A cauliflower is a fractal, each part duplicating the shape of the whole. Benoit Mandelbrot, whose name sounds like a crisp small pastry I might dip into my coffee, is called the “father” of fractal mathematics. The mother is unknown, but the mathematics are a mother effer, eluding my understanding. The concept has extensions though. History with its pattern of repeated experiences. Exiles and returns. All fractals. My personal history, the same. If not a fractal, than fractured, for sure.

  A cauliflower, and its parts –each of them a mini-me. Islamic design, with its patterning and repetition, the same.

  *

  You can’t live all of your life on the edge of tears. There’s too much risk of falling.

  *

  In the rooms where I now reside, the furniture will survive me. Even the ashtrays, after I’m gone. The oil paintings will patiently wait in their frames. The souvenirs of this or that foreign country, the rug from Marrakesh, the Italian sofa, the Danish chairs, all of them as comfortable as natives, will stay put, as if the house were theirs. Most of my tools will have new lives. The hammer, the Philips screwdriver. Also, knickknacks on my bookshelves – maybe not my books however, or my clothing. Those will probably be discards. Still, some of this “junk” could appear at a garage sale afterwards, though there will be no one willing to make the effort to set it all out; and besides, who would want to buy my postcards from Prague or my porcelain cat. My poor porcelain cat. With its paw raised, it could be wishing good fortune to the Japanese restaurant in some strip center, though I brought her all the way to Dallas in 2005 from a hardware store in Kyoto, when Pam and I were in love. Or at least I was.

  *

  The construction might finally be proceeding on my across-the-street new neighbor’s dream home, following a month of noisy demolition. The old brick house, which was no older than I am, has been taken down. Betty Lou Linehan’s home, which housed its share of dreams. Earthmovers are kicking up dust and emitting a stream of intermittent beeps as warnings that they are backing up. But in fact life is moving ahead. To be fair, Betty Lou’s old house was past any economical possibility of repair or remodeling. It needed to come down. It was a home built in 1951, the year of my birth, too, and vacant for seven years, since the death of its widowed owner.

  *

  25 December

  I know what it’s like to never reach my dreams. But dreams are immaterial, they can never be reached, only reached for. Maybe a dream’s highest purpose is to remain too high, always above, and distant enough.

  What does it do to be satisfied with what you do. Or with who you are. For years I considered myself too young, and after that I thought of myself as too old. When was the porridge ever just right? When the Lord declared to Jeremiah that he was selected in the womb and appointed a prophet before he was born, Jeremiah protested. Do not ask me to speak, he responded.
  “I am only a boy.”

  The lesson in this, we do not know who we are.

  *

  January 2022

  Take two, on last summer and the patio on Delos:
  The feathers of a dreamcatcher, the slender silver tubes of chimes, an outdoor thermometer – itself weathered – these are the things that hang on a support post of the pergola whose brown crossbeams and lattice provide shade over the patio. I noted them last August, as I sat in the backyard of the summer house, holding a notebook, and trying at such a late date to teach myself to say and write what I see.

  Isn’t it already too late? If I say so, it seems so.

  Why am I doing this, if not to discover what I can do. I want to spend hours a day, three or four at least, stringing sentences together. Not to hear my voice, which I would not recognize anyway, but to throw words on a screen, the letters one after another. As if though this white screen is like a mound of dirt I can kick, and the letters, disturbed, angry, or frightened, will come pouring out like fire ants. Somewhere underneath this screen is the home where a thousand words are lying undisturbed. And their queen is there.

  Am I writing only to make something that someone else will enjoy or consider? Maybe so. Maybe all I am doing is asking for attention. If so, that could be a reason for embarrassment about what I am doing. Unless I overcome it, it will be a reason for silence.

  *

  I am one of millions, and that my ambitions and unfulfilled reams are shared by thousands of others. When that ceases to be discouraging and becomes instead a fact that relaxes and comforts me, then I will be ready to “be myself.” “Be myself” — it’s a phrase that suggests something of more significance than it really has. When I can look without distress at the thousands of books on the shelves of the libraries without those unopened covers draining me of any desire to struggle over my own sentences, none of which are likely to make it into their company, then I can “be myself.”

  Even dwarves have outsized dreams.

  *

  Nothing belongs on a headstone other than a name and two dates. Loving father, beloved husband. The cliches are best. Standing at someone’s grave is no time to contemplate complexity; simplicity is satisfying and far truer.

  *

  Everyone has a life of disappearances.

  *

  The idea that the typical is a miracle, too, is not a new idea.
  It isn’t even much of an idea.

  *

  I long to know what I don’t know, I want something I cannot name and will never find. How is that even possible?

  *

  February 2022

  Patti tells me in our phone conversation today that “if you make it through your sixties, you’re home free”—meaning, likely to live a very long time. Our mother told her that. It’s one of those truths that is not true. And whatever could “home free” mean. There is always a cost to going home, to staying home, to having a home. Maintenance costs, for one thing, and lost opportunities as well.

  *

  I read the following advice:
  Flow like a river, flare like fire.
  Love fearfully, fear lovingly.
  But I’m inclined to counter: I’m not water, or fire, or love, or fear. Also, I dislike being told what to do.
  I have advice I want to give, something I only say to myself. It’s on my tongue, in my mind,
  my wisdom, my prayer. It’s in the silence, in the light, and in the air.

  *

  “…Jews have had an involuntary association with the word ‘race’ practically from its inception. The earliest formal definition of the word includes both animal and human aspects. Sebastian de Covarrubias’ 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola, Spain’s first Spanish-Spanish dictionary, defined raza as, ‘A breed of thoroughbred horses, stamped with an iron brand to identify them.’ To which he added, ‘In human lineages, raza applies to their bad side (se toma en mala parte), as in the case of the raza of the Moor or the Jew.’ Covarrubias’ remark reflects the Spanish usage of his time, influenced by the doctrine introduced by the Inquisition in the mid-15th century, of limpieza de sangre or ‘purity of blood,’ which drew a distinction between Old and New Christians—the latter being Jewish or Muslim converts whose ‘impurity’ barred them from serving in certain ecclesiastical, military and government positions.”

  *

  I found a scrap of paper in between the pages of Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early. Her poems on re-reading seem more suitable to a Hallmark card than to the Norton Anthology. The scrap of paper, which I must have thought worth keeping, was torn from an email. I probably printed it out at work. It has a title, Baldwin’s Life Companion. I can read “Forgiveness, 3) Trust, and 4) Acceptance.” So,“Forgiveness” must have been number two. What number one was, I don’t know; it didn’t survive the tearing. And there are bullet points. The first says, “Applying the Four Practices,” which are “1) Paying attention, 2) Learning to follow, 3) Dreaming, longing and acting, and 4) Becoming a powerful person.” These four belong in a “which one doesn’t fit” question on a intelligence test. The second bullet, “Traveling the World,” lists “1) The point of return, 2) Finding your people, 3) Choosing your stand, and 4) Faith in the process.” The capitalization and punctuation are more apparent here than any wisdom. There’s a last paragraph on the scrap. “There you have the beauty of Baldwin’s Life Companion, a book over-brimming with smart insights, inspiriting quotes, and practical suggestions, so you grow emotionally as you continue on your spiritual life journey.” Someone else can draw the lines between self-help, cheerleading, and religious instruction, but the lines are wavy. I wonder who this Baldwin is – certainly not James. Maybe Leticia? And I wonder most of all why did I
  tear this out, save it, and insert it in the Mary Oliver book? So much of the everyday is like that. It has happened, but why?

  *

  Debra and I go to lower Greenville on the Saturday night before Valentine’s Day to try a new and lauded Vietnamese restaurant. The restaurant is south of Belmont, near Oram. Parking is a problem, but we manage to find a place at a curb a block or two from the address and walk back along Greenville. I haven’t been on this street in years. It’s lively and pleasing – lots of people, places to eat, signage and street noise.

  The restaurant is overcrowded and our reservation isn’t ready, but we are seated after a while. And then we wait and we wait. Debra is very focused when we go out to eat on getting her alcohol. Food, too, but the alcohol most quickly. The delay in service upsets her. A little at first, and then more than a little. We are both in a booth, we are side by side. The décor is inventive, there’s chatter around us, there’s the liveliness of the servers and food runners. We’re inches apart, like lovers. We may even be touching. But none of it finds a place in Debra’s sense of the moment. She is filling with a gathering cloud of upset, until there’s only the cloud, and then the storm. We’re together, I think. Why not enjoy just that? Why not value the wait itself? We have each other for company. But she is having none of it for dinner. Dinner is only what’s on a plate that has not arrived.

  So it is with much of my experience with Debra. We live a narrow reduction of what the moment is. She’s insulted, she’s upset. She expects, and she’s unable to adjust. And there is no taking advantage of the unexpected. My other interpretation: It’s not my company that she wants, it’s two glasses of chardonnay or another Tito’s and soda.

  We ended up walking out.

  *

  Reading Milan Kundera again.
  I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being the first time in 2016, before my trip to Poland and then the Czech Republic with David Stern and the busload from Temple Emanu-El.
  Kundera had the playful idea that because everything only occurs once, life as it is lived has no meaning. It just happens, then vanishes. Life is unbearably light. Why lightness should be difficult to bear is less clear. One would think, the lighter the easier. And is that how life actually seems as it goes on? Each moment happening only once? Or does life actually feel repetitious, despite its sequence of moments that never occur again. Life repeats. I hardly notice the difference between one day and the next. What happens to me, happens over and over. If only I did experience the uniqueness of my thousands of moments. If I had that sensitivity, I would be more alive, not less. I would bear it all more easily. That life of unique moments might still not possess meaning (whatever that means), and taken as a whole, or looked at from the end of life, backwards, it might even seem preposterous, but certainly each day would feel infinitely more precious. What is rare is valuable; we prize the most what we see as unique.

  *

  What can I do with unhappiness? Embrace it? That’s a strange word to use, since it suggests affection. Acceptance is more neutral. It’s almost chilly; acceptance is barely warmer than indifference. It’s not a stream from a faucet of emotion. It’s more a drip, at most a trickle. Tricky, as well, to regulate, and not easy to register. Acceptance is a tone that is barely above quiet, like the sound that the audiologist uses to test your ability to hear. It’s subtle, like the changes of the lenses in an eye test, as the ophthalmologist asks,“Better? Better now?” His affectless questions express the boredom of repetition, as one lens is replaced by another with a tiny click, and the letters in the eye chart change, sometimes imperceptibly.

  *

  Moses made the second set of tablets himself. God then wrote on them. And this was when Moses was eighty years old.
  Project for me nine years from now: make two stone tables by myself and then carry them down a mountain.

  *

  February still.

  Zephaniah: “And I will sweep away the birds of the sky.”

  Roger Khetan is my concierge doctor. I don’t like him as I did Perry Gross or even Stephen Owen, who I went to for some years after Perry retired. Roger’s the first family doctor I’ve had who isn’t Jewish. He works under a new model, which requires an upfront annual fee in order to receive the personal service that Perry offered simply as part of his practice. Roger also calls me “boss,” which I dislike. I’m on the edge of retiring/ I asked Roger to recommend a therapist – someone “for support,” as Dolores might have said, as I go through this significant transition. He suggested Carlos Davis. I called Carlos Davis. His first opening is two weeks away. Is it possible he has two weeks of a full schedule? It’s possible. Even with nobody wanting face to face meetings. We are still in the COVID era of face masks, zoom meetings, and telemedicine. Carlos tells me all he does these days is “teletherapy”—nothing in person. Strike three is the bureaucratic packet I am required to fill out before our first session. I did appreciate one part of it. The forms had a space for me to write down my concerns. So I wrote them down. I worked on it last night in a Word doc and will be mailing it along with the other requested information to his office. So, why do I want to “talk to somebody’? I have any number of answers, a list of reasons. I didn’t want to ramble through the events of the past fifty years. I finished a draft Sunday night, thought again, edited…. I made a decision. I came to a conclusion. What I’m sending Carlos is below. The hottest problems are cooler, when written down; regardless of the battles, the bruises are feinter in writing:

  My concerns:

  I have an unhappy relationship with both my children. I have an adult daughter I haven’t spoken to in five years and an adult son I worry about. I’m angry about her and sad about him, though vice versa is true as well. This is what I most want to talk about.

  I am 70 as of last November and am retiring as of 1 May. So, I’m in a transitional time and have concerns about my ability to use the years ahead in ways that are meaningful to me.

  I live alone. I have a relationship of 15-years with a woman who wants us to be married and to live together. What we will decide to do is unresolved.

  It would be helpful to me to talk through these concerns – and to have some support. It didn’t occur to me to talk to a screen rather than face to face. So it’s possible that this will not be something I’ll want to continue.

  Background:

  Both my parents died in their mid-90s.

  I have one sister, a year older, and we love and care about each other though rarely see each other. She lives in Pittsburgh. We share ownership of a house in Oceanside, CA we inherited from our parents.

  Both my children were adopted at birth.

  I was married for 23 years to a psychotherapist who died of colon cancer in 1997, when our children were 11 and 13.

  I had a five-year second marriage when my children were teenagers; both fairly and unfairly, my children hated my second wife. She left, and I still miss her.

  I have owned a small business from 1984 until now. It was a creative service – writing, design, programming, for corporate clients. For many of those years this was a day and night, weekday and weekend responsibility. I am choosing to leave it.

  My intention now is to see what I can do as a writer on my own. I’m serious about that ambition.

  I also want to pare down, clean out, and come to terms with various aspects of preparing for the last years of my life – whether that’s 20 more years or, as it may be, far fewer.

  *

  22 February

  “The drawbridge by which Messiah arrives is raised; it can only be lowered from the other side.” (This, from an article in Tablet by Blake Smith, about Jacob Taubes – “the other side” must mean from the walled city where I am living.)

  2 March

  Election Day.
  Corinne is at the house from 9 until noon, so I go out in the morning. My task is to fill three hours. So I get cash at the ATM at Bank of America on Lemmon and Inwood, though I don’t any cash today. It’s for Corinne’s next time at the house, two weeks from today. She works at most three hours, for $130; usually, less than that, so perhaps earning $50/hour. No benefits, though. From the ATM, I go vote at Sudie Williams Elementary School, which is always hard to find. Taking Lovers to Elsby, then north and then curving left. It only takes five minutes. It’s a Spring election, and I leave blanks when I don’t recognize either candidate for an office, or whatever the constitutional issue is.

  I have more time to fill. I’ve brought my cell phone and some papers, but I still have nearly three hours. I go to Angela’s for coffee and migas, corn tortillas, hash browns. I try not to see myself in the other grey-haired men who come in alone for breakfast at nearly ten in the morning. They have their day to fill as well. What is this shame that seems to be brewed by the combination of age and being alone. The best I can do at Angela’s is forty minutes. Next, I drive to the public library, first the Bachman branch, which I think might be interesting to see. After two minutes inside the library, I decide to go back out to my car and listen to a zoom broadcast from a Jewish philanthropy operating in Ukraine. But I’m uncomfortable sitting in a parking lot outside a public library near Bachman Lake. It feels disreputable. As if I were waiting to abduct a child from a school field trip to the library. It feels dangerous in a different way as well. It’s the neighborhood. Someone Latin or Black, or homeless, might rap on my window, asking for money, or demanding it. So I drive to the Preston Royal branch instead and go inside and sit at a partitioned desk until a quarter to one, reading my emails.

  Time-killing, every other Wednesday. I will need to get much better at this. Or at least learn to feel better about it.

  *

  “From the One who is neither large or small comes the whale and the gnat.”

  *

  Life is the here and now, but not only. It isn’t only the moment. I haven’t had a life unless I have a past to reflect on; I don’t have a life without a future I can plan for, or dream of – any kind of future, even one I am dreading.

  *

  Barriers in the mind – at times, they are stronger than walls.
  I’m reading Psalms, to keep up with Meir Soloveichik’s fifteen-minute daily lectures, which he calls Bible 365. In Psalm ninety-something, the rivers clap their hands, and the trees of the forest rejoice, and the mountains sing. Also, light is sown for the righteous. What should have been abstract has become embodied. What might be passive erupts in action.

  *

  You only live once – YOLO. That phrase that became the cliché of young women in the 2000s, when it was meant to be a spur to…what? Taking risks, overcoming fear, pursuing pleasure. YOLO, a phrase that goes back centuries to an earlier cliché, to carpe diem, seize the day. It’s an exhortation without an instruction. The fact that we only live once is precisely the problem. We have no rehearsal and are unlikely to get the performance right. Our living is a kind of stumbling. Or, as Kundera suggested, we are living the first rehearsal, which is not a rehearsal for anything.

  *

  Stumbling out of Eden. the day after I ate of the Tree of Knowledge.

  *

  I read a rabbi’s wisdom that no one climbs without falling.

  *

  In my years of doing my best, what was the worst that I did? I was insensitive, at the least. I might have harmed my children, the more I tried to help them. After my death, all that will be buried in my grave. “Interred with my bones,” as Shakespeare put it. And what about the good I did? Did it make any difference that might matter? For a believer, the good we do adheres to us; we take it as our ticket into the world to come. It’s a strange idea, but then all ideas on this subject are strange.

  I’ve read: “The good the soul has collected is eternal. It can never fade, because it is godly, and God does not change. But the bad is unsubstantial, it falls away, never to return.”

  If the soul within me is eternal, then it existed before my body did. And if goodness is also everlasting, then my soul might be its reservoir. And right now inside me it contains the light of millennia.

  Inside me? As if it makes any sense to speak of the soul as having a physical location, inside or outside, up, down, or sideways.

  *

  Take two on Prudie’s advice: “There is no solution, seek it lovingly.”
  This saying from an advice column sat in a desk drawer at my office for decades. A young couple had asked “Dear Prudie” how to solve a problem the husband had with his wife’s parents. I tore this bit of wisdom out. The newsprint has faded. After I cleaned out my desk, I brought it home. Now it’s between two pages of Facing the Moon, the poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, translated by Keith Holyoak.
  “There is no solution, seek it lovingly.”
  My problem for which I have yet to find the solution: too many scraps of paper.

  *

  Reading in Psalms, 108 – “Moab would be my washbasin, on Edom I would cast my shoe, I would raise a shout over Philistia.” These are the varieties of triumph, as suggested by King David. I recall the Iraqi who threw one of his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Baghdad.

  *

  Reading of “God’s hosts.” Who are the “hosts” of heaven. Angels? Or the planets and the stars? If I begin to believe that God is as real as I am, however incorporeal, then everything changes, and the world is imbued with holiness.

  Belief is a feeling more than a thought, though it can be a feeling that arises as a result of thinking, or of hearing, or of persuasion, or of immersion in the words of Torah, Prophets, and Writings. To listen to what so many have heard before, and instead of asking why, to answer why not. To accept a providential world, where nothing is accidental, a world that is God’s and the fullness thereof. Where the world is God’s, but mine to rejoice in it.

  *

  This message comes in today from Chabad.org, one of the emails that are branded Daily Dose, or Daily Dose of Wisdom:
  “If you want your inner animal to stay kosher, chew your cud well. Don’t let the stuff growing on the ground enter your life without multiple ruminations. First ask, ‘Do I need to do this for my purpose in life?’ Then, once that question is answered, ask, ‘What is its place and how should I use it?’ This is the math to a meaningful, uncluttered life. Rather than the earth pulling you down, lift it up.”

  These “wisdoms” or instructions are simple to read, but not so simple to execute. I may not know the answer the very first question, “Do I need to do this for my purpose in life?” Do what? And what is my purpose? It’s interesting though. And odd, too, how a word like “cud” has no likelihood of being used other than with the word “chew.”

  *

  I have the stack of books on the table near a coffee cup, the ashes on a white tray, the MacBook laptop screen, the lined sheet of paper, the sharpened pencil. What would Li Bai or Du Fu make of this, with their moons in night skies and reflections of the moon in the rivers they stepped into. They also had the cry of a wild goose, a distant mountain, a gate, and the thatched hut. And out of that, twenty or forty handmade words, as elegant as skeletons, five of them in every row, the rows in stacks of four or eight.

  *

  When I was ten I lived on a busy street corner, across from fields that were owned by Loyola University and, further on, by Howard Hughes. My family owned a white stucco house on the corner of Georgetown and 80th. I’d run across street, with some purple berries in my fist, and play war in the fields. The berries were for throwing. They grew on the shrubs in our side yard along 80th. They were no larger than a thumbnail, and they would leave a purple stain on whatever they hit – on a big sister’s blouse, or a neighbor boy’s t-shirt or blue jeans. The names of plants were of no interest to my parents or to me. So I have no idea, then or now, what grey green shrubs those were.

  *

  I save things to save them. But to save them from what? I think something is important, but then, years later, I can’t see why. I admire a poem; it turns out to be unreadable. “Winter-Lull” by D. H. Lawrence arrived in my in-box years ago. Poets.org sent it, part of a poem-a-day service that I subscribed to. I printed it out. So here it is, two-folded pages, inserted between the pages of my paperback of Wistawa Szymborska’s poems. Whatever did I see in it that made it worth the paper it was printed on? Maybe it was the short bio at the end of the second page, which lets me know that Lawrence died young. Or the small, accompanying photo of the poet. He’s at a pier, his eyes looking away, gazing at a boat, if that’s what the distant, unclear object is. “Gazing” implies that appearance of thoughtfulness. Re-reading this poem now, all I can hear is its overheated diction, its “daunted,” “nullity” and “verity.” I may have saved it as encouragement. I might have been sending my future self a pep talk, a “your writing is as good as this” message. That’s what I’m taking from it now, before I tear the unfolded pages into pieces and drop them into a wastebasket.

  *

  This is a moment that usually arrives very late in the afternoon. The gates of the day are closing, and nothing has been accomplished; nothing much. Where does this notion of “wasting time” come from? Why would I think the hours were a white sheet of paper I had crumpled up and tossed in the trash. Can I see it another way? I let Mika out first thing this morning. I swallowed pills – statins, synthetic thyroid, a baby aspirin. I think it’s nothing, but it’s not nothing. I brewed coffee. I unpeeled a banana. I took a seat facing my bookshelves, alongside a window. Then I took my time. I read what was in my inbox. That took most of the morning, even though I told myself yesterday, very late the afternoon, that I was going to push delete more often, or at least sooner.

  *

  This is it, I tell Mika, as sternly as I can. This is your last treat of the day. Why do these tubes of rawhide “expertly hand-wrapped with lean chicken” excite you so much? How did they become such objects of desire? You are prostrating yourself at my feet for them. Well, that’s your business. As soon as I place one in the open clamp of your jaw, any illusion I have that your tag is wagging for me disappears. You disappear as well, running off with your treasure, sometimes under the dining room table, where you need neither a place setting nor any invitation.

  *

  I received a Lola Ridge poem via email from the poem-a-day service. In the black and white photo, Lola Ridge looks like Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting. I look her up on Wikipedia to learn more. Lola Ridge had an astonishingly painful life. So much change and disaster. She must have also had the capacity to move on.

  I read somewhere that living and dying “are like one hand washing the other,” and that the same tears cried over the newborn will be wept over the dead. It’s joy or grief, but tears both times.

  *

  The future requires no creed, and you are welcome to believe it or not.

  *

  It is comforting but not persuasive to read in Proverbs that a grey head is a crown of glory, and hard to admire skin when it is like crepe, or the brown spots I am coming to know like the back of my hand. There’s no polish for this tarnish. I don’t remember my numbers well, and I forget the names in the news. The words of the moment are lost in my head, and my body reminds me every moment where I am headed. My eyes betray me. My aches are like water to the fish. Small of the back, an elbow, hips, knees. The real losses, the ones I cannot forget, seem as irreversible as death. More so. My memory is a Medusa. It tries to make the moving world stand still. I am happy most days for no reason beyond the ordinary. I could as easily be unhappy for the same no reason.

  *

  A prayer for old age – the prayer my mother might have said during the last five years of her life: Teach me now to work through these hours without a need for distraction. Let me feel in relationship on these days without company. Help me to see the years ahead not as a trial to get through. Let me go through, and be untroubled when I am through.

  In her nineties, my mother said: “Why am I still living?”
  I would never say that. I won’t question what has no answer.

  I’ve been training all my adult life for what I am doing now.

  *

  A habit of making comparisons, which I have, leads to dissatisfaction. So I should learn to see things as incomparable. They say focus on the present moment and therefore be more content. Simple enough. It may also help to be dressed in a saffron colored robe and seated cross legged while listening to an inner voice. In my experience, however, the trouble with focusing on the present moment begins the moment I stop doing so. That’s when I realize that nothing got done. All I did was spend time, and have less of it now than before.

  *

  The paths I intended to climb have merged into the flat road ahead. I can see the same horizon point – it’s exactly where it was fifty years ago. I know dreams don’t come true; if they did, they would not be dreams.

  For an athlete, it’s obvious; the day comes when he cannot compete. For the rest of us, we have mirrors over a sink or a vanity to tell us where we stand. Or there’s the evening when we turn the page in some boy wonder’s biography and can’t find a spec of envy, even using our reading glasses, which we think we’ve lost, until we find them where we left them, under the lamplight on the bedside table.

  I’m on a road that doesn’t have curves. There are no scenic turn outs to stop for a view. If it changes at all, it will be a slope down. I’m staying just under the speed limit. And I suspect there’s a steep drop ahead.

  *

  The two-volume Oxford English Dictionary my mother and father gave me for my high school graduation has been barely used. And it’s apparent how seldom I have used either of these volumes. A dictionary for scholars, it’s a dusty ornament on my shelf. I’ve opened it five or six times at most in the fifty years gone by. Fifty years! This gift must have been my mother’s idea. She had a clearer sense of who I should be than I did. It was her ideas that gave me most of mine. To her, my future, however unknowable in its details, was certain in outline. I was defined.

  I might do a better job of expressing this, but my vocabulary remains limited.

  The two-volume OED on my shelf is like an urn with my mother’s ashes.

  *

  “In the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem the emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up their abode in a skull.” From Melville’s Journal. In 1857, Melville spent three weeks “in the Holy Land.” He was thirty-seven years old and made the trip on the advice of his doctor, as a respite for his deteriorating health. His remarks were caustic. He made observations on the barrenness of the landscape and the unpleasantness of the people. Samuel Clemens wrote much the same, though he made good use of the trip; his comments were published as Innocents Abroad, which became first great success.

  *

  There’s no fish that couldn’t live out of water for a moment.

  *

  My dog follows her nose through the world. She doesn’t push. She never leads by example. She’ll go where led, pulled by the odors in the grass. She accepts the collar and the leash. These restraints are her pass. She’s eager for them. I take her with me Friday nights when I go to Debra’s. On Saturday mornings, she waits for us at the front door. I take her for a walk, but she is also doing the taking. The two of us are tied together at two ends of a black leather leash; no masters, just the pull between us. Does she see it that way? Does she see it any way at all, with her head down, absorbed by whatever has dropped or dripped onto the grass, or in a mulched flowerbed, or at the base of a pole. Both the visible and the invisible are equally fascinating to her.

  *

  I was in my late twenties when I married Dolores. In my forties, I was left with the children we adopted. Dolores was gone. These two children had been abandoned once; now a second time. Both children must have been very angry. I gave up house the three of us lived in, for the sake of a second marriage. My children hated the marriage, and it didn’t last. When I reconsider these things, it’s hard for me say what was the most obvious mistake and what is just the way life goes. Maybe Dolores will tell me some day. She can be the judge. She may also have an opinion about what happened to those decisions she and I made for our house in Greenway Parks –which shade of white for the kitchen walls, what faucets in the upstairs bathrooms, the fabrics for the sofa, the shape of the dining room table and the patterns of the upholstery on its eight chairs. New owners overrode all of them.

  *

  The sequence of seasons has not changed. It’s easy to take it for granted. The blue of a summer sky, the leaves darkening and then falling, days of winter rains that fill the creek behind the house where I live now.

  Every May the leaves come back on the trees. Not the same ones, though, however much they look the same, in the same shades of green.

  *

  The life he wanted to lead was the exceptional life. The subjects he chose to write about
  were the unexpected ones. And when asked where in the wider world he had ever gone,
  Thoreau answered that he had traveled far in his hometown.

  *

  So many of Li Po’s poems are the same poem. The night sky is observed. He hears the rustle of autumn leaves. A woman sits at her loom, or she looks toward the moving river. There is a watchtower. She’s waiting for her husband to return through a mountain pass. This happens in English. And on the facing page, the lines of Chinese characters square up, flush left and flush right, some in four vertical rows, others in eight.

  *

  When I read Wistawa Szymborska’s poetry, I want to learn Polish, not out any unhappiness with the translation, but because her poems are so nourishing reheated that I wonder what they would taste like fresh.

  Even as leftovers they have the aroma of the bloodlands where my grandfathers’ grandfathers lived. They smell of Dubrowna and the Dnieper River. They are seasoned with a pepper from the million square kilometers that were once the Kingdom of Poland.

  *

  In my retirement I’ve begun to clean up or clean out the storage room attached to my garage. I question whether at the end of this exercise there is likely to be a significant reduction. How many pounds will I actually lose? The storage room is stuffed. These boxes are a kind of obesity—a morbid one. Still, it seems I should try. The exercise cannot hurt, the diet is overdue, but surgery is probably what’s needed.

  What could I have been thinking? To save so many bankers’ boxes filled with Ben and Eden’s schoolwork, stick figure lollipop tree art, trophies and ribbons, their knickknacks and notebooks. I have storage trunks deeper than coffins for their stuffed animals and hundreds of plastic toys.

  Ben and Eden don’t want any of this. Nobody wan ts it. It has been abandoned, as it should be.

  This is the age of storage, of things forgotten, but not gone, saved for a future that only existed in the past.

  My memory is an unwanted stepchild.

  *

  March 2022

  Today, Sunday, is the first day of Daylight Savings Time. I’m off the phone with Debra, who has gone to Cleveland. Conversations with Debra are mostly listening sessions; not entirely unlike my phone calls with my cousin Bobbi. If I do talk, Debra’s responses seem to come from someone doing two things at once. Something engaging, and also listening to me. Debra will often sound automated. She has her stock answers – “exactly,” “I can’t help it,” “what’s wrong with that,” “that’s your opinion,” “interesting.” These responses seem to come from a background of other tasks she is occupied with while she’s on the call. I am not of interest, much less the focus. With Bobbi, it’s different. She lives alone, and monologue is natural to her. When I call her, she needs to go down the various paths of her concerns. The past, disrupted relationships, money schemes, health habits. Like a pulpit preacher, she asks for an affirmation from the congregation periodically, punctuating her paragraphs with “right?” and “right?” When I do talk, she does her best to ask questions, because what she wants most is for the call the continue.

  *

  Months ago, I signed Debra and me up to go to the Heard Wildlife Sanctuary for a Saturday night hike. Tonight is the night, she’s in Cleveland, so I went myself. Along the Owl Trail, our guide carries a flashlight with a red lens, as stargazers do, although our group is mostly looking at our feet. We are trying not to trip in the dark. From time to time, the guide stops. He lets the group catch up, and he points his flashlight to show us the three-leafed ivy on the edge of the path, or the Virginia creeper that hugs the trunk of a burr oak. There are grapevines as stout as ropes, and bois d’arc boughs, and, after a descent, prairie grass revealed in the moonlight. Mostly there is no talking. We are listening to the insects. On a night lively with their singing, I wonder how the word crickets ever came to mean silence.

  *

  Can I tell the difference between Li Bai and Du Fu? I try to distinguish between their different qualities as poets. Each is formal. Both paint a picture with words, using simple nouns – mountain, river, moon, flower, husband. It’s hard to tell them apart. That said, I do understand what distinguishes Li Bai from Li Po and Du Fu from Tu Fu. It’s the same thing that separates Beijing from Peking.

  *

  Thursday, the third week in March, 2022.
  Dinner tonight with Ben, at Heim’s. It’s a barbecue place, on Mockingbird near Love Field. Ben wants to talk to me about Eden. He went to visit with her and Keith last Saturday. He says they are both much slimmer than they were and are looking good, and he thinks it may be because they don’t have any money – they have ramen diets. He tells me that Eden is doing well at UNT. She works 20 hours a week. She manages a community garden at the university, which requires physical work, and that’s also healthy and satisfying to her. Ben also had the chance to talk to Eden about what’s on his mind, though apparently not on hers. It bothers him a lot that she hasn’t spoken to me in seven years. “It’s wrong,” he says. I agree, it’s wrong, but why it bothers him isn’t clear to me. Unlike Eden, Ben has no partner. He has no birth mother and half siblings; he hardly has any family – just me, and, a long way away, Patti and Joe. He has so little, and Eden is part of the little he has, so perhaps that’s it. He feels the loss. I don’t understand it completely. I don’t know what he wants, or how might things be better for him. Would it help him, if he and Eden and I had dinner together, if only once or twice a year? It could be with Keith, and with Debra. Ben asks me why I don’t break through whatever the barriers are, as though that were possible. He asks why don’t I just show up at the community garden on the UNT campus. “Do you think she would run off?” He asks, “Why have you both given up?” As though that’s the state of affairs. He may be right. It’s true, I’ve more or less given up. I think that Eden enjoys her convictions. Her contempt for me has fueled her for many years, perhaps since she was fourteen or fifteen. She never did bond with me, and never cared to. So, for her, losing me was no loss. And if she’s happy, why should I disturb that? But I suppose I’m wrong about all of this. And I have my own mixture of sorrow and outrage because of her behavior. I have my own unhappy experience of Eden Henson. It’s something I keep in a box, with the lid on, fastened, put way, forgotten. It’s difficult to do that. It’s impossible to do it sometimes.

  *

  My clean out of the room off the garage raises an obvious question. Who was all of this kept for? Ben and Eden aren’t in school any longer. They don’t live here either. It’s time, it’s past time to throw away what they have left behind. Who will ever want these banker boxes packed with school papers and homework assignments? Same for Dolores’s “stuff” — the trunks of clothing, the plastic containers of costume jewelry, and the stacks of Dolores’s monthly planners. Her planners with the squares of her days filled in with appointments, to-do lists, phone numbers, and names. Useful reminders once, but no use now. I’m sorting through ticket stubs, old receipts, ten thousand photos, papers that are more like puzzles, and dozens of handwritten notes.

  *

  When I’m asked my status on forms, I check “widowed,” and ignore the box next to “divorced,” although I am both. Widowers need to move on. But where is there to go? Tomorrow is a narrow territory; there’s seems to be more room to breathe in the past.

  *

  Whether or not mankind is alone in the universe is an open question. To say a solitary man writing at a desk in his house, as I am doing, is all alone – that’s a true statement, but it insults my dog on the rug nearby.

  *

  What am I doing now, what am I up to, how are things going “these days”? These are the questions – the variations on the same question – that I am asked when I happen to meet someone I used to work with. In the grocery store, for example, or when I am buying bags of potting soil at Home Depot. Or, occasionally, at funerals.

  These days? These days are in an account earning no interest. I am spending them, what’s left of them, on whatever I want. I don’t say that of course. Sometimes I answer that I’m a student. I’m studying my tables. Not my multiplication tables, which I learned a long time ago and would hate to be re-tested on. I mean the downstairs table, a fake French deco with a handsome veneer, bought in 1987 at The Roxy, an antique store on Greenville Avenue, and the table upstairs in my studio, the one Danny Kammerath designed and made. Both tables are crowded with books. Both have chairs. Downstairs, a comfortable chair from Knoll. Upstairs, the Frank Gehry woven wood chair that is pleasant to see but no one enjoys sitting in it. Both tables are writing tables. They are the tables I’m getting to know as well as I used to know seven times eight or four times nine.

  *

  The porcelain Lucky Cat raises its paw on a bookshelf across from me. It’s waving goodbye to China. A golden, wafer-thin snake from the King Tut exhibit gift shop sleeps nearby on its acrylic cube. On another shelf, Frieda Kahlo with her monobrow stares from her picture postcard. What a conversation they could all be having after lights out, when the house is quiet and even the dog is sleeping. They live one above the other on the shelves of the same bookcase. Unlike inmates in the movies, who are housed in adjacent cells, they won’t need to tap with a metal cup on a cell’s cement walls, though there is a cup available. It’s on another lower shelf, a souvenir from Krakow, where I visited Oskar Schindler’s enamel factory. Their topic of conversation? It could be homesickness. Lucky Cat might also has something to say about the fickleness of fortune, which would fall on the deaf ears of the two faces in an artwork I inherited from my first wife 25 years ago. This is a woodcut print of faces cheek to cheek. It has aphorism of Thoreau’s on its matte. Transcendental wisdom, in two lines. One line runs along the top of the woodcut and declares, it takes two to speak the truth; the second line along the bottom then concludes, one to speak and another to hear.

  *

  My dog Mika is a rescue. I was told she was on the streets in Puerto Rico for a year after hurricane Maria. It may be true. A hard rain seems to truly frightens her. I like to think that animals live gloriously in the present; like masters of meditation, they know how to “be here now.” So, I don’t know whether Mika’s fear during a storm comes naturally, or is it mediated through memories. Does she fear a past that might come again? Normally Mika keeps her distance from me. She stretches on the sofa, or lies in a curl in her bed. But the storm and its lightning has upset her today. She shows it by lying down on the floor very close to my chair. She sleeps lightly. She might be wary, as she must have been in the past.

  Is the storm in her sleep any less violent than the one shaking the branches outside? If her rescue agency told me the truth, and she had been on the streets after Maria, she might be used to bad weather. She could be indifferent to it, rather than frightened by memories. But who knows what Mika might be thinking. If she wants to believe that being closer to me is safer for her, she can think that. For all I know, she is trying to comfort me by lying here at my feet, alone as I am tonight in a storm.

  *

  I’m discarding trash in the storage room. I’m unpacking the banker boxes. I’m unearthing receipts. I found one for Similac with a “4 at $5.99” price. Was that per bottle, or per carton? It’s from a Skaggs Alpha Beta that used to be on Mockingbird Lane. The store is gone, and Similac now costs ten dollars for thirty-two ounces, enough for a day.

  Our new baby, Ben, was tiny in his blue onesie then. He was drinking Similac. He was sucking on a baby bottle nipple. That same Ben is now an overweight middle-aged man. The more confounding fact is that Dolores made a deliberate decision forty years ago to place this receipt and dozens of others in a plastic baggie that she sealed with its press-on zipper. A receipt for Similac was saved so I could see it in the future. She preserved it for someone, in this sandwich-sized baggie. She kept it fresh, maybe even for herself, and for a future, as it turned out, that she was never going to see.

  *

  A plump grey bird fluttered above the brick pavers on the patio when I was having breakfast at Debra’s on Tuscan Ridge. I thought it was called a morning dove. No, she corrected me. Mourning dove, she said. Later that day a different bird flew into her house. This one was small and brown. It might have been a Carolina wren. She saw it winging in through the kitchen door she had forgotten to close, but never saw it again, even though she searched every room. What did it mean? She opened the dining room windows. Maybe the bird flew back out, but Debra didn’t know for sure. Debra had no explanation. She declared the bird an omen of something terrible. She thought it could be a predictor of death. It was not implausible. Her mother is ninety. And look at me, her aging boyfriend. Bird in the house or not, death is coming. Mom’s ninety. The still useful boyfriend is past seventy. Mourning’s inevitable as well. At first by you, and then for you.

  *

  “Mustn’t” is an extreme contraction. The “tnt” at its end feels overly compressed and ready to explode. And “contraction” is an odd word as well. Any relationship to the contractor, who hires the carpenters and the electricians? Or to a contract, or any legal agreement? This evening I need to make a contract with oneself. I mustn’t let the mirror, or any fear of numbers, discourage me from attempting, failing, and trying again. Yes, I’m seventy. With God’s grace I might be eighty, one of these days; and then, I don’t know, I might even wake up at ninety. If I let the new day be new, and if I am able to imagine what I can make of it, then however few or many years are ahead will be distant enough for planning and spacious enough to hold my dreams. I mustn’t withdraw into myself. I mustn’t contract.

  *

  Today, mid-morning, I decide what I’m going to do the rest of my life. The decision is to play things by ear. The shining sun, on the other hand, is playing by the rules. When I go outside, it keeps its hands off my shadow.

  I am no longer working for money, and I have the day to myself. What to do? My first tasks are negative: to not miss having somewhere to go; to not regret the decision to sell my business. It reminds me of the classic prescription for understanding the unknowable. Only by negative qualities can a mystery be described. Only that way can you approach the truth of what cannot be understood. You don’t know what God is, so you list what God Is not: corporeal, emotional, conditional, and so on.

  *

  What could be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive than the five poets I am reading this evening? I try one poem from each. Mary Oliver, Ada Limon – I am starting with these two, because I enjoy them the least. Mary Oliver is much admired. So many of her poems sound the same note, as she congratulates herself for praising the sea whelk or the snow goose, or for her observation of a daisy. Then there’s Ada Limon. She has drama. She takes it up a notch. Up next, Billy Collins. He’s a popular one, too — smart, amusing, though predictable in many of his last lines. Then another paperback. Between its soft covers, the solid, plain translations of poems from Li Bai and Du Fu. They always get me. The moon reflected in a river, a village gate, loneliness and longing, but more than that it’s the beautiful formations of the Chinese characters on the facing pages. Meaning is only the mortar for their stone walls. Last, my favorite, also in translation: The discursive, disillusioned, one-time Stalinist, one-time Nobelist Wislawa Szymborska, mon sembable, ma soeur.

  *

  Until I was in my twenties I always thought I was “too young” for this or that. And then, before I knew it, I began to think of myself as “too old.” And in between those times? I don’t remember. It would have been better had I never thought in terms of “young and old,” but it is very difficult not to.
  My advice on this subject?
  Between the time when you are too young and the day you decide that you are too old, a small window opens. Excuses can still come in, but you can choose to not see them, or not greet them. Go, get moving, because you don’t have long. Your time is always shorter than you think it is. Speed is what determines how far you get, what you get, and what you will become on the paths you take. That, and luck.

  *

  I still have my ambitions, even as I come to terms with my inadequate abilities. My circumstances are circumscribed. But I am unable to concede that I will never get done the things I set out to do. God knew how to rest from labor and to say that it is good, how to finish, how to be finished. I don’t know how to do that.

  *

  The psychologist S. Tomkins has identified nine ways of “being.” Two are blessings, but most are sighs. Engage, enjoy – those are the two good ones. Anger, fear, shame, disgust, and three others – those are not so good. One, however, is neutral. Can you guess which one? If not, then you can experience it now: surprise.

  According to Wikipedia, Tomkins was a “personality theorist who developed both affect theory and script theory.” Affect theory is a theory of motivation. It wants to tell you why people do what they do. What part does biology play and what else is at play. The nine ways of being are nine “affects” – they are neurological and behavioral, revealed in facial responses and visceral, bodily responses. That’s the theory. Script theory then developed out of this and is more about socialization. Feminine and masculine, for example, are scripts; they are “social constructs.” There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scripts: commitment scripts, counteractive scripts, depressive scripts, macho scripts, instrumental scripts, recasting scripts, and so on.

  Silvan Solomon Tomkins was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, just like Elizabeth Zion, my father’s mother, who used “Simon” as her last name. I wonder what the name “Tomkins” might have been, in the Pale of Settlement. Silvan earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and spent his first year after graduate school handicapping horse races. He then did post doc work at Harvard with Willard Van Orman Quine in 1937. Princeton after that. Silvan had a yiddishe kop. He was a smart boy and wanted to demonstrate that, which he did by theorizing.

  *

  My house at 8911 Guernsey will be for sale one day. My bookshelves will be torn out. The pulls on my cabinets will be discarded, just like the hours spent picking their finishes, the polished nickel and the brushed steel. No one will want the bathroom faucets
  that make Debra guess which way is hot and which is cold, however good looking they seemed to me. The rolls of unused wallpaper will be trashed, along with the stacks of extra tiles, and the other overordered leftovers that are boxed in my garage. These materials were saved for a need and never were needed. I remodeled every room after Pam left, but it was never my dream home. It will wake up under new ownership.

  *

  Two jays are chasing each other away from the small pond. They may be fighting. They may be playing, for all I know. It’s difficult enough to attribute a motive to other people; to know why birds do what they do is above my head in every way. I am watching them from the window beside my desk. I’m wanting to do anything but what I am doing, which is sitting and typing sentence. Day after day, I am trying make something out of written sentences. Is it any different than talking to myself? No need to judge myself too harshly. I have a foolish loyalty to an idea of myself. Is it self-delusion? Maybe. Probably. Trying to figure out such things, that’s for the birds. Whatever these two jays think they are doing, they are not wasting their time wondering about it.

  *

  There are more unread books on my shelves than ones I’ve already read, and of those I’ve read, there are only a few that I remember.

  I’ve written poems and journals since I was eighteen. I have pages in binders, and I’m going through all of it in the first year of my “retirement.” Some of these pages I’m tearing into pieces; some I’m rewriting, if it seems pleasing to do that. Don’t I know that others have already written more than enough? I have the evidence on my own bookshelves, and there are the bookstores, and the libraries. It doesn’t seem to matter to me. I am filling the day that is mine to fill, never minding that the same day is being filled by millions of others.

  *

  I am repeating to myself a line I’ve read in one of Ann Patchett’s essays. It’s in her book These Precious Days. It occurs in an essay about a priest name Charlie, who ministers to the homeless, although “ministers” may be the wrong word here. Charlie has been reading Dorothy Day, and he comes across a thought that helps him see that a particularly difficult homeless man he serves “is not my problem to solve but my brother to love.” That is a wisdom I needed to apply to Eden and Ben in the past. Perhaps I can apply it to my relationship with Ben now. He’s not my problem to solve but my son to love. For me and Eden, it may be a lesson learned too late, which happens in the school of life.

  *

  If I do it at all, I must delay no longer. So Whitman wrote, gathering the jottings he collected as specimens of his days. He added, in his characteristically odd, personal phrasings, “let the melange’s lackings and wants take care of themselves, as everything takes care of itself, one way or another.” It’s true. Things do take care of themselves. Even the small rabbit that appeared on the square of grass alongside my swimming pool this afternoon will take care of itself.

  On this mélange of a day, I’ve made no list and crossed nothing off it. My eyes are on the clock nonetheless. If there is a prize, it is either hidden, doesn’t exist, or has already been won by somebody else.

  *

  I have the same book with me around the swimming pool most evenings this summer. It’s Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians –Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy. This book manages to make what is difficult to understand in German nearly impossible to follow in English. One message does come through though: the lives of these philosophers were for the most part full of spitefulness. Their lives were even less felicitous than their writings.

  *

  Am I engaged in what Ernest Becker called an immortality project? I’ve bought the book, but a summary of the idea seems more valuable than doing the reading.

  Life is limited time offer. Just accept it. Meaning, take the offer and accept the limitations.

  Am I the sum of what I have crossed off or only what I still have left to do?

  Am I more about my past or my remaining possibilities?

  Raining day today. Protesting it makes no sense. It would be like refusing to surrender what is already lost.

  *

  March 27

  Debra is unhappy. It prompts her to ask, “When are we going to get married,” as though her mood is a reason to marry. Her mood is easily modified– by alcohol, by the passing of a day, by talking to grandchildren on her Echo Show, or by a post she might scroll through on Facebook. We go to dinner Saturday night at Adelmo’s; that turns out to not be where she wants to be. On Sunday morning we go out to breakfast, but Overeasy at the Statler downturn also turns into a bad choice. I parked at a meter on Main Street, and as we get out of the car she sees the disturbed black man screaming on the other side of the street. He’s threatening…someone. Then, the wait at the restaurant is unacceptable, the staff is indifferent. We decide to walk out. These are the events that are enough to cause clouds on a warm Sunday. Then we get to Yolk in Preston Center, and Debra gets a favorite table at the back. And immediately, as much as she might have been unhappy, all is suddenly well. She’s like the Spring shower. A downpour, then the calm.

  I suppose we should be married. But when I think about our marriage as an agreement, it looks like a flawed one. Only one of us would be going into it with nothing to lose.

  March 28

  11:30 lunch with Bart Weiss
  5:00 Dallas Chamber Music Society board meeting
  6:30 Gay Donnell Willis, at a budget talkback at Walnut Hill Rec Center
  7:45 Hebrew lesson, via zoom, with my teacher Ruth Precker and students Donna and Ruth

  Nothing essential. I am losing the battle of priorities versus distractions,

  March 29

  Last summer I sat on the patio outside the Delos house, and wrote in one of my notebooks. I was trying at a late date to teach myself to say what I see:

  The feathers of a dreamcatcher, chimes with four slender silver tubes, an outdoor thermometer on a support post of the pergola, the brown crossbeams and open lattice providing shade over a walkway.

  What I find so unconvincing about fiction – the arbitrary details, the display of descriptions.

  1 April

  Copied from a Chabad email: “We are not passive observers of this universe, but rather partners in its creation. We are the ones who assign each thing its meaning, who bring definition and resolution to an otherwise ambiguous world. Don’t imagine that you are just ‘telling it the way it is.’ Choose your words, choose your perspective, like a witness on the stand. Because the way you tell it, that is how it is.”

  This is cognitive behavioral therapy being recommended by the Rebbe. If only I could get Ben to see it. To stop what Dolores would have called his “negative self-talk.” He puts a disagreeable downward spin on all the events in his life. I simply want to say to him, “Cheer up!” As though that were an instruction he would be willing to follow or would be capable of obeying.

  *

  I have scraps of paper that I’ve placed in between the pages of books I’m reading. They aren’t bookmarks, exactly, though they could serve that function. It’s a habit of mine, and a better habit than turning down the corner of a page, a flap, a triangle that says “here’s where you are” and “continue from here.” My scraps have phrases or thoughts I think worth rereading, bits I was not ready to throw away. Much of what I have falls into that category of the “not ready to be discarded.” But why? Is it really such a loss to not remember something, to forget this sentence or that bit of wisdom? More often than not I read what’s on the scrap and wonder why did I save it. Just as often after rereading I put it back between the pages, still unwilling to let it go.

  For example, I read one today about how some observant Jews will light Shabbat candles “18 minutes before sunset on Friday, and don’t conclude Shabbat until three stars appear in the sky on Saturday night.” The sages explain the behavior as a way of stretching the sanctity of the day; that is, borrowing time from the ordinary day before and from the one after, to lengthen a sacred day.

  “We add from the ordinary onto the sacred.”

  April 4

  Monday, Monday.
  I think I need to write something that can be shared. Something that can be used as evidence, as if my life might be reviewed as though it were a trial. To avoid a guilty verdict. But I’m writing nothing like that. Nothing with a beginning, middle, and end. Just these daily paragraphs and, less and less often, poems.

  Ben called last night to tell me he received a call from Keith. Not from Eden, but Keith, who chastised him for talking to his sister about her refusal to have any contact with me. Keith is a jackass. I spoke to Debra about it after Ben’s call. She says Keith is malevolent and that he’s very much part of the reason Eden will not reconcile. Maybe so. But I don’t agree. It seems to me as likely that Eden’s marriָage may be a facilitator, but not a cause. Eden does what she wants to do. Debra can think otherwise. Ben, too, wonders whether Keith is the one “controlling” Eden. No, I don’t believe that. Still, it’s not altogether unpleasant to think that Keith is the villain. He is a villain, but they are a team.

  I have a heightened respect for Ben in this sad situation. I tell him that his relationship with his sister was his alone. I tell him it has been disappointing for me to lose my daughter, but that pain was for me to bear. He can have his own interactions with Eden and Keith. To whatever degree he can, he can accept their pretentions and dishonesty. He can decide how to deal with the burden of not being permitted to speak his mind. Perhaps he can enjoy whatever their company might provide. He seems very sad about it. Clear-minded, too. And, at times, he’s even able even to find the humor, as I do, in the fake righteousness of Keith Henson on his ridiculous high horse.

  Earlier today, I talked to Carlos Davis about some of this. He advised me to “journal.” The noun has become a verb, as nouns do so often, though the more normal course may be the reverse, when a verb turns into a gerund; for example, to walk becomes walking. Carlos tells me it will help clarify my own sadness about Eden’s upside-down behavior, her despicable disrespect, the unhealthiness of our relationship over twenty years, and its final disappearance. That’s a tall order for a journal. Eden and Keith are ugly human actors. Their constant “shit-talking” about everyone (that’s Ben’s phrase for it), has made it easier, and in some ways a pleasure, to have Eden out of my life. As best I can, I keep my upset in a box. The lid is screwed down. Still, from time to time, I feel it as a loss. Mostly as a loss of what should have been. That sense of loss continues to reside under the roof of the home my mental architecture has designed, and it seems as a practical matter impossible to evict it. As Carlos also said, the sadness will be there. How could it not be?

  Debra’s coming over tonight. We’re going to the Diotima Quartet performance for the Dallas Chamber Music Society in Caruth Auditorium at SMU. Then, to the after party is at Greg Hustis’s home.

  April 5

  Last session, with Carlos – what wisdom then? “Journal” about it, tell Ben you’re there for him, nothing more you can do, it will be sad, that’s just how it is.

  Mark Kaman leaves me a message this morning. Sally Wolfish died earlier today, and her funeral is tomorrow at 11 at Shearith Israel, which is the conservative synagogue. I’ll go, to be among the remnant of Israel.

  It was raining violently when we left Greg’s house after the afterparty for the Dallas Chamber Music Society concert. We left in the downpour, and because of it, worrying that the rain might be flooding the streets on our drive back. When I stepped off a curb on my way to my car, rainwater ran over the tops of my shoes. Opening and closing an umbrella as I got in and out of the car left me as wet as if I had jumped into a swimming pool. Debra stayed the night on Guernsey Lane.

  Everything was slightly off key this morning.

  I spent my first hour cleaning up after Debra – the cooked rice on the floor, where the dogs ate; the blender in the sink, the towels on the floor in front of all the doors. It had rained through the night, then ended, and the sun was shining. Then the call with its message about Sally. I have not slept well. It is a struggle to sit still. Brett emails me to ask about the “status” of an additional theme for The Catholic Foundation, and I work on it resentfully. This work for SullivanPerkins is also left over, something I need to clean up.

  Billie Ellis calls about meeting him for lunch at Parigi’s. So I do that, though I’m in the wrong mood for it. Billie has his usual tales of successes, business and family. He tells me that he has good news and…good news. His daughter Emily is engaged, and I don’t have to come to the wedding in Palm Beach. As though I would have been invited. His future stepson is a golfer. He’s a graduate from business school in New York. He’s the beefy child of a wealthy Southern family. Billie shows me the picture of the couple-to-be on a golf course. In a novel from another century, the young man would be described as “strapping.” I tell Billie that come the revolution I won’t be on the barricades to defend them. After lunch, I lose myself in magazine articles. I read them as though I were compelled to read them; then, on the treadmill listening to Bible 365. I get a call from Hyde– the programmer, probably from Bangalore, though with a 312 area code. Hyde is putting my “writer’s website” together. What I’ve seen so far is awful looking, and I’m wondering why in that burst of early optimism I decided to buy this service from webdesigncorp.com. The website seems pointless anyway. It may be another way of putting off working on writing. It’s a vanity and deserving of its own lines in Kohelet, which I’m reading.

  It’s has been an unusually warm day. I’m uncomfortable, because I’m reluctant so early in April to turn on the air conditioning. And it’s warm even now, at ten in the evening.
  Another day passing, and I have little to show for it.
  And why do I need to show anything? Shouldn’t the day itself be enough? Sufficient unto the day are the miseries thereof. Sufficient also whatever I have done.

  This is the day that the Lord has made, let’s rejoice and be glad in it. Surely this is not only a healthier attitude, but the right one.

  April 6

  Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own – Milan Kundera

  Attended Sally Wolfish’s funeral at 11. Listed potential writing projects. A mile walking on the treadmill. 30 minutes with a box of papers, diaries, keepsakes, photos, birthday cards, Eden’s leavings, in the room off the garage.
  A zoom at 4:30 with a former Israeli general, lecturing on Iran, what we, or “the West,” should be doing.
  At 6 this evening, GiGi shows up, so we can go to a Wednesday night opera. Bizet’s Pearl Fishers.
  Some time to read, some time to write. Interesting to see in the dozen diaries that Eden left from her teenage years how the first few pages are filled, but the rest are blank. We all get started, but very of us few persist.

  April 7

  Ann Patchett’s new book of essays, These Precious Days, arrives in a box from Amazon. The delivery was tossed over my driveway gate and landed in ground cover. I used to know the name of this ground cover, which does so well without any care, but I can no longer pull it out of my unkempt memory. My memory is a genizah of fragments, most of them no longer legible.

  The essays are skillfully written. What I recognize in these essays, and in the predictable Mary Oliver poem I just read, and in Milan Kundera, and in the Rabbi Sack’s “sermonette” in my email, and in the poetry of Li Po in translation, and Szymborska – what I takes away first is that the writing of others is a near bottomless well. If there is anything infinite, it is what one might write. Would a mathematician contradict this? Given that the number of words is finite, perhaps the number of their combinations is as well But, from my perch, the view seems to expand infinitely – combinations, subjects, tones of voices, stories.

  I copied the following down:

  Living and dying run on the same business model, one hand washing the other; tears are wept over the newborn baby and over the dead equally, but they are not the same water.

  I can’t say it any better, other than to comment: Maybe they are the same water, the tears that are shed for the newborn and the dying. Tears of joy and grief. Death is there, like a seed, at the moment of birth.

  I have a bit of paper with some lines from John Dryden in my book of Symborska’s poems. John Dryden! It’s a name from the Norton Anthology. It reminds me of the aspirations of English majors. Does anyone outside of a survey course or the pursuit of a doctorate read Dryden today?

  I bought the Symborska paperback in 2016 at Massolit Books & Café on Felicjanek St in Krakow. I had time to myself, after wandering away from David Stern and the Temple Emanu-El group tour. I had gone with the group, but I was by myself. A trip to Poland and the Czech Republic, tourist class. I remember Massolit because I have the store’s bookmark; it, too, has been left in the paperback Poems New and Collected that is stuffed with scraps. I tore the Dryden lines from a Today in Literature email, November 9, 2017:

  Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies,
  To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise.
  Succeeding times did equal folly call,
  Believing nothing, or believing all.

  It’s from Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which is a satire on contemporary politics. Published November 9, 1681, it targeted the anti-Catholic hysteria that followed the Popish Plot, and the politicians who exploited it, and the public that allowed them to.

  I am tossing this scrap. It must have seemed relevant to me in 2017, in the era of Trump.

  *

  I spent another 45 minutes today going through the banker boxes that I had used to package up what Eden left in her bedroom. She left for Prescott, returned, then left for Denton, and then never returned. After college, she drove off in the Subaru I bought her as a graduation gift. She said she was going for a “two-week trip.” But like the castaways on Gilligan’s Island, her two- week tour turned into forever. Unlike the castaways, she never intended to return. And she has never shown an interest in recovering any of her treasures – her rocks, beads, books, stuffed animals, diaries, cassette recordings, rainbow drawings, and secret declarations of hatred and love. My task is to throw it away.

  Eden was a hoarder. To a stranger’s eye, she kept things indiscriminately. I am somewhat the same, which makes it harder for me to put what she left in the trash without consider it. So I am going through her materials. She left diaries (most of them blank pages, after an initial entry or two). I am finding her poems and stories. Also the plot outlines for what she must have intended to become novels, much of it in the fantasy genre. And then there’s the “everything else” category. The rocks, bags of beads, endless buttons, crafty bits of stone or coral, seashells from our family travels, photographs that were developed at the drug store and dozens of cannisters of undeveloped film. There are audio tapes, her lists of things to do, receipts, and Greenhill School yearbooks. I can read anguished reports of love and lost devotion in diaries and notebooks. She left a mountain of greeting cards, schoolwork, and pages of her doodles. I want to save all the birthday cards and valentine’s cards with their notes of support, and very “love from Dad “– these are at least some evidence that I wasn’t the monster she has made of me in her memories. From Eden’s late teens on, she seemed to project every unhappiness onto me. Or so it seems, though truly I don’t know any longer – she hasn’t spoken to me in years.

  I can see in her notebooks how imaginatively she was writing, even as a young girl. Also, how in some respects we are similar. As I discard what she left behind, it puts me on notice. I have journals and poems of my own. My binders are full of paragraphs that no one will have interest in or the patience to read. And if they do, my sentences will seem as immature as what I’m reading of Eden’s. It’s a reminder to not die too suddenly. I need to leave enough time for the shredding or the burning.

  April 13

  I’m reading Proverbs in order to follow Meir Soloveichik’s Bible 365, which is a daily ten-minute podcast. For the most part, the reading is not interesting. I note in Proverbs a repetition of warnings to avoid the wrong woman. This from the wisest of men? And from one who, according to the story, had hundreds of wives? I am no further along than halfway through Proverbs, and I am halfway forcing myself to keep up the daily pace. Proverbs counsels that it is wise to accept reproof. Also, Proverbs offers the classic guidance that the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord.

  What makes a proverb a proverb, rather than simply a sentence? Most of these from Solomon seem to take the form, “The righteous do such and such, but the fool does this and that.” How is a proverb different than an epigram? An epigram seems to be a proverb that is particularly felicitous in its expression. Same with an aphorism. In all three, there’s the use of nouns to make concrete and compact ideas that might otherwise be abstract or shapeless.

  I came across this nugget today:

  What brightens the eye gladdens the heart.

  *

  Corrine was in the house today. To stay out of her way, I left from 1 until just after 4. I did some shopping for Passover at the Tom Thumb on Preston and Royal. I bumped into Julie and Mike Lowenberg in one of the aisles and said hello. The three of us are older than ever, but Julie looked even older than that.

  One more chapter in Proverbs, 16 – I found this:
  Grey hair is a crown of glory.

  April 18

  Monday.
  My Seder was this past Saturday night. Lots of chopping on Friday and Saturday – onions, garlic, red bell peppers, sage, Italian parsley, shelled pistachios. I use matzo farfel for stuffing and made what I always do: chicken breasts with matzo stuffing, a potato kugel, matzo balls for Debra’s chicken broth, haroseth to supplement for the small portion Poppy will bring, and green beans with tomatoes and garlic. Almost all of my recipes are from a book of Jewish cooking. I had a lamb bone from Central Market for the Seder plate. And then on Sunday I sat through an Easter service with Debra and her daughter Amanda, before taking them to Truluck’s in Southlake. From Sunday afternoon on, the cleanup.

  On Sunday, the loneliness of my semi-attached life seemed mirrored in the late afternoon sky. I saw it in the look Mika gave me as well. She sat in the far backyard, wanting something from me that I don’t have. Today, this Monday, is haunted by the past. I continue to throw out what Eden left behind – journals and audio tapes. I’m like an antique dealer, but dealing in memories, and in the odds and ends of a fatherhood and daughterhood that have come to an end. Ben calls this afternoon. He has that sad, distressed voice, his mix of anger and helplessness. He’s upset about work, where I can longer help him. Brett wants him to be of practical use. Unfortunately, the production art that is Ben’s trade, Brett has taken away from him. Michelle, our sweet receptionist, is quitting. So now Brett has asked Ben if he might take over parts of Michele’s job. Time entry, for example; maybe other aspects. And what Ben accurately hears is not a request to be helpful, but an insult. I understand that. How I wish he might be working elsewhere and not at this frustrating, disappointing job. But he seems incapable of taking himself somewhere else. However scary it is to start over he needs to be somewhere else – somewhere it might at least be possible that he would be valued and repected. I don’t know how to help him, and he has no one else to turn to.

  *

  I decided to always host my own Seder after the three of us went to the Bonnheims for Passover the first year after Dolores’s death. That first year, in 1998, we were strangers. Not just Ben and Eden, but me, too. I sat with them at the children’s table listening to the Bonnheim’s little wonderkinds, Ana and the other one, displaying how school smart they were. Sharp as tacks. So from then on, I hosted. And I found people to make up the group around my table. Mark Birnbaum and Margarita, Bart Weiss and Susan, Gary and Marnene, Poppy and Don and sometimes their son, Rick, who was Eden’s age. For Ben and Eden, it didn’t take. As soon as they were old enough they dropped out. I did it for them, but they were unwilling to do it for me.

  April 20

  The mountain climb of each day and the pack I’m carrying.

  Two choices as I sit in front of a laptop screen. Write about the past, or write about the present. Impossible for me to write about the future, I have no material. Not the evidence of my eyes or whatever I might discover when looking back. Odd idea for a project: do research on my future, look into it.

  April 21

  I’ve done enough for today. So, after stumbling through the hours, at six in the evening I retreated into the hammock between two live oak trees and read another of Ann Patchett’s sparkling essays from These Precious Days. I brought my cellphone with me. Also, binoculars for looking into the congestion of the trees over my head. And a small notebook. I found something already scribbled there, from the last time this notebook was open; however ridiculous, it seems to be a note made at a red light:

  In the stopped car, before I go and after I arrive – am I stopped, or only at rest? In park, or in neutral?

  Listening to the sounds above the hammock — the who who who who is answered, pretty conclusively, with who who whoooooo. What language is this? Words may have been withheld from vegetables and birds, but there are other languages.

  *

  David Leeson, who used to be on the Board of the Dallas Video Association, “passed away.” The news was shared in a group email, which then required multiple responses from various board members. There were comments, and this question:
  “How did David die?”
  My question:
  Why would we want to know that, if not to look for some lesson for ourselves, some evidence that what David had, we do not have. At least not yet.

  When I read Ann Patchett, I can recognize what I don’t have in any of my essays or writing of any kind. I don’t have other people. Not their voices or their thoughts. Only mine. I seem to have left everyone out. I don’t say what they look like, what they wanted, their side of a conversation. Why is that? Maybe it doesn’t just occur to me. Or others are not quite real to me. Or I am unable to care. Ann is novelist. That’s something I could never be. I stick to poetry and meditations, and I stay away from flesh and blood.

  Jane Manaster tells me she hates being in the house all day.
  I understand, but I don’t feel the same. I am reading an Ann Patchett essay about a priest, Charlie, who is helping two homeless men, and Ann writes, “homelessness is exhausting and dangerous.” That is also something I rarely feel – exhaustion, fear. Boredom, sometimes; or anxiety rather than boredom; and sometimes sorrow for all the days before today, though not exactly for those days, but for being unable to shut the front door and to just be happy being at home.

  I am trying to learn the “lesson” from the Ann Patchett essay, which Charlie provides: Someone he is helping is not his problem to solve, but his brother to love.

  It applies, if I can apply it.

  Ben’s not my problem to solve, he’s my son to love. Eden is not my problem to solve either. If that is not a revelation, it is certainly an aphorism.

  *

  April

  Found these notes about a 2016 trip with Temple Emanu-El to Poland and the Czech Republic. Have I already transcribed or revised them? If so, here they are again, like the unremembered past I am condemned to repeat:

  June 2016
  On the train from Krakow to Warsaw, reading I.B. Singer again and Symborska for the first time.
  Am I curious about the world outside? Or only about what’s on a page?

  I don’t seem to have the same interest in people that others have. I don’t care about their, conversations or controversies. Was I bruised by the judgments of others and learned to ignore them in order to escape them?
  It’s a loss. I could learn more if I paid more attention.

  In a Chabad message:

  Jacob our father never died, likewise Moses and maybe others, the reason given
  that they were high souls at one with Truth.

  Since Truth never dies, neither did they.

  Truth never dies? It may not die, but it can play dead for a very long time. It also plays hide and seek.

  *

  April 2022

  What does it mean to reinvent myself at seventy? It means to live without apology and to be as free from regret as possible. After leaving my business, some of what I am doing is the business of the past. I have the weight of cleaning out. It feels both like a waste of time and also entirely necessary. It is not a truth and reconciliation process, but it does provoke thought. Why not just scoop up everything in my storage room blindly, and toss it? There’s some wisdom in doing that, but I won’t do that. I am learning one of the lessons of aging from day to day. I don’t have the time, and I have all the time in the world. I am also learning something obvious, which is that when I am unhappy, as I often am, for no reason, I could as easily be happy, for the same no reason.

  It takes time to outgrow the past, or to become small enough, and withdrawn enough, to not want that engagement. I am learning how to explore my walls, bookshelves, the tabletop, the lighted rectangle of a laptop screen, and to discover what I can do.

  *

  One way to get out of the house is to get into the car. I have Mika and would need to take her with me. I haven’t read Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley but the title is a kind of virtue-signaling. Whatever Steinbeck observed, experienced, thought, or wrote he could have done traveling solo. It’s a pleasing pose, however; if a dog is my companion, then I must be deserving. I’m the sort of person who travels with his dog.

  When Mika and I are together, I don’t consider her to be “with” me; she seems very much lost in her own concerns, as I am in mine. Still, I could use Mika as a prop, as people do. You see them together in the photo posted on social media, even on a dating site. They are a couple, they are not alone, they are with their dog.

  Traveling with another person takes patience, an ability to listen to opinions or tolerate someone’s mood, and at the least giving up control of what’s playing on the radio. Traveling with a dog requires a willingness to make stops at a patch of grass.

  *

  The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. There’s an idea. Why not write a book of aphorisms? I haven’t read Kafka’s, though I bought Letter to My Father at the gift shop in the Kafka museum in Prague. I purchased a tiny metal golem there, too; it’s on the glass table in my living room now, with other travel mementos. How hard could it be, writing a book of aphorisms? First, I need to find a common opinion. Then, I have to turn it on its head or give it a twist of some sort. I’ve always enjoyed those kinds of sentences. Fifty years ago, I xeroxed La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims and put them in a green binder. I forgotten where I put the binder though. There might be a maxim in that. The importance of any object is often in inverse proportion to one’s ability to find it.

  A blurb from Princeton University Press says that Kafka wrote more than a hundred aphorisms in 1917 and 1918. They’re known as the Zurau aphorisms, after the Bohemian village where they were written. Was he hiding out there during the Great War? That would have been great for him, though it could be that Bohemia had no part in the conflict. The blub also declares that these aphorisms are “the most complex of Kafka’s writings.” That doesn’t seem flattering. An aphorism should be as simple and insightful as a joke. “The aphorisms merge literary and analytical thinking and are radical in their ideas, original in their images and metaphors, and exceptionally condensed in their language.” Maybe aphorisms in German don’t have the charm that I associate with the genre.

  *

  I’ve decided to reread my Szymborska paperback from back to front. As I do this, I come across the articles, poems, and other pages I used to print out while I was at SullivanPerkins. I saved and printed for thirty years at 2811 McKinney and then for another five at 4100 McKinnon. Now, I can’t always recapture the reason I chose what I chose to print out. Maybe it was meaningful, maybe I was especially bored at work. What was it that appealed to me about an article from The New York Times that required two pages for the print-out? It was just an obituary. The headline: David Antin dies at 84; Poet Created a New Performance Style. It might be the last paragraph that I wanted to keep — or the penultimate one, which says, “In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Blaise, and two grandchildren. He lived in Del Mar, Calif.” I liked the son’s name. I may have wondered if Blaise named the grandkids X-axis and Y-axis. And did David Antin frequent the track at Del Mar? More likely, it was this last paragraph that led me to print the obituary:

  “From the outset, Mr. Antin’s poetic stance was off-kilter and provocative. In the preface to ‘what am I doing here,’ the first poem in ‘Talking at the Boundaries,’ he wrote, without punctuation, “if Robert Lowell is a poet then i don’t want to be a poet if Robert Frost was a poet i don’t want to be a poet if Socrates was a poet ill consider it.”

  I’m throwing this two page David Antin obituary away. The Symborska paperback will be the slimmer for it.

  *

  Another view from the hammock – a bird, a woodpecker.
  Would I know a woodpecker if I saw one?
  Yes, I saw one.
  I have my binoculars trained on it, as the bird works on the trunk of a live oak. Its back is speckled, black and white and grey. There’s a reddish orange flame on its head. The long black cone of its beak probes the trunk. Then the bird jumps. It’s to the ground, where it’s even livelier. Jerky movements, like spasms, more hops than steps, all nerve and muscle. Anxious? But when it flies off, suddenly smooth, it becomes a bird in flight, seemingly effortless and graceful. Perhaps for a bird it takes less effort to be airborne than it does to stay still on the ground.
  I look it up on my cellphone, as the hammock sways. There, I found it, a ladder-backed woodpecker, adult male, with his red crown patch.
  My cellphone is a smartphone. It can show pictures of more birds than Audubon and Darwin saw in their lifetimes.

  April 26

  Steadfastness. To do work that is meaningful to me but doesn’t seem so to anyone else and, some days, not even to me.

  Another “important to me, but only to me”:
  Revising my poems, my stutter steps at paragraphs, and keeping up with whatever comes into my inbox.

  Well, not that last in the list — the emails and articles and daily news are not important to me. They are a habit I’ve not yet broken.

  They do break into my day though; they feast on my hours.

  I’m cleaning out. I tell myself it needs to be done. I’m emptying trunks and boxes. The problem is, I seem to be putting much of it back into storage. The ratio of what’s thrown away to what’s only rearranged is not ideal. I’m supposed to be trashing almost everything, to make it easier on Ben, or the scavengers, after I’m gone.

  April 30

  Another scrap between two pages in the Szymborska book: “But what if the person behind the urinal was not Duchamp, but the German-born poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874 -1927)?” So what might be the better question. According to the information on my bit of paper, Duchamp’s urinal “was voted the most influential modern artwork of all time.” It’s odd to have “modern” and “all time” in the same claim. Something modern doesn’t have much competition from the past. I suppose it could be a category extending into the future. If so, then Duchamp’s urinal might be beaten tomorrow or the day after, or at least challenged. By works created by machines, for example, endowed with artificial intelligence.

  2 May

  “Men are in awe of Him, whom none of the wise can perceive.” Elihu, from Job 37 –
  The answer to Job’s confusion and outrage over his suffering seems to be, “Don’t say you have been wronged by God, and don’t question God’s judgment.” In other words, your suffering is your suffering; if you don’t understand why you suffer, it isn’t yours to understand. Your life is not a problem to solve.

  A twist on Charlie’s insight, from the Ann Patchett essay: Life is not a problem to solve, but a gift to appreciate, and even to love.

  4 May

  Another scrap of paper, as I read Symborska poems, from back to front. I printed a whole page. I walked from my desk to the printer down the hall and retrieved the print out from the tray. Then I tore a section from it and kept the scrap.

  Dolores seems to have saved everything with her name on it. My savings are in recognition of the weakness of my memory. If I had a photographic memory, would I keep anything on paper? But I also have a hoarder’s instinct. I think something I don’t need now will be wanted in the future. Is it fear that has me holding on to things? It could be a habit of conserving, learned in part from my parents. I save papers in the same way I was taught to shut the light off when I leave a room or close the refrigerator door, to save the electricity. Luckily there’s no storage room required, no closets filled to the ceiling with all the electricity I did not throw away. Another explanation: I’m saving the work of other writers in these printed scraps from daily emails because I think that I may use it — borrow from it, copy it, steal it. I might make my own “commonplace book,” to support my claim that I’m not common.

  Here’s today’s scrap: “In a talk titled ‘Swimming Headless,’ Watts explores the psychological dimensions of Taoist philosophy and its emphasis on cultivating the mental discipline of not categorizing everything into gain and loss. Learning to live in such a way that nothing is experienced as either an advantage or a disadvantage, Watts argues, is the source of enormous empowerment and liberation.”

  This scrap does tell me something I need to hear. It seems to even offer a direct commentary, reflecting back on my reflections in the paragraph just above it.

  Then there’s this note, which must have been left between the next two Symborska pages by accident: “Brice Matthiessen In Conversation w/Emma Ramadan. Tuesday, April 9, 2019. 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.”

  The event has come and gone, but its reminder remains. And I have a scrap of interest in anyone with the last name Ramadan. This year’s Ramadan has come and gone. It brought its usual rise in rock-throwing and rioting by Palestinians on the Temple Mount. These rioters are incited. They are agitated and inflamed by any Jewish presence near the Al Aqsa Mosque. When Jews visit the Temple Mount, they are not allowed to pray; if they come in a group, even if no more than a handful, they are described as “storming Al Aqsa.”

  *

  Between another two pages, a folded two-page print out of ‘Winter-Lull,” D.H. Lawrence’s poem. It was emailed to me from poets.org through its “Poem-a-Day” service. I think I’ve already commented on this poem. I probably pulled it out months ago, unfolded its two pages, claimed I was throwing it away, and then reinserted it, so I might find it another day. And today is that day. Or it could have been a different Lawrence poem last time. In any case, I’m throwing this one out now:

  “Because of the silent snow, we are all hushed/Into awe./No sound of guns, nor overhead no rushed/Vibrations to draw/Our attention out of the void wherein we are crushed.”

  Once again, no idea why I saved this. It came into my email Sunday, January 13, 2019, at 5:00 am. I printed it out the next Monday at my office.

  I’ve never been crushed in or out of the void, but I have been hushed into awe by the silent snow, and more than once, in the ski basin above Santa Fe, just beyond Cotter’s. Also, by the beautiful surprise of snow in my backyard on Guernsey Ln.

  *

  Richard Heine emailed yesterday, asking me how I’m doing with retirement. I answered this morning:

  “I’m figuring it out. My sense of these days alternates between thinking I have all the time in the world and an understanding that my time is running out.  I stopped working for money primarily to test myself on personal writing projects. I intend — or whatever verb is just to the left of intention – to create a book of poetry and a book of personal essays and a third undetermined book.  These will be enormous challenges for me. I’m not sure that I have the skills or enough fortitude to do any of it.  But I now have the frustration of struggling with these challenges, at least a few hours every day. 

  “Then, there are the other things I want to do because I need to do them. I’m going through forty years of stuff, intending to throw out whatever I can bring myself to discard. I still have my children’s cribs, all their schoolwork, toys, and other things – so much, it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to describe it as “hoarded.” I have Dolores’s costume jewelry, her clothing, even some of the medications left over from her death 25 years ago.  I’ve always had the space for storage, so I’ve never been compelled to take care of all these leftovers. Given that my appetite for doing this is limited to maybe 45 minutes a day, I’m probably in for years of this discarding. 

  “Beyond that, I’m trying to gain a reading knowledge and some basic speaking knowledge of Hebrew. So I’m going off to Middlebury in Vermont for three weeks in July, for an “immersive” Hebrew language program, which should help.   And I have 1.6 acres of landscaping at home, and all the maintenance chores of a homeowner.  That’s what I do for exercise when I want to escape my writing table and laptop screen. 

  “Debra is 35 minutes away (she’s still practicing law and intends to continue for another two years at least). I have a dog. I have a large library of unread books and fifty or more emails every day to read. I’m continuing to study Judaism. Part of that is going through the Tanach (Torah, Prophets, Writings), which I’ve been doing for nearly a year. I just finished the book of Job, which offers this guidance: whatever suffering we may be enduring, never mind trying to understand it, the most we can know is that there are truths that are unknowable. Isn’t that the end message as Godel’s Theorem – that there are things that are true but that cannot be proven? If I’m remembering that correctly. 

  I’ll get back to California this summer. Probably in August.”  

  May 5

  Cinco de Mayo. Ben calls this morning. Billie Ellis does, too. I don’t take Billie’s call. I’m not in the mood today to sit through lunch listening to the tales of Billie’s perfect life. Life as good as it gets, from Billie’s point of view. Money, luxury travel, the perfect spouse, and talented children who are all doing well. Ben calls, as he does, because he needs someone to listen to him. He’s upset. He’s been treated disrespectfully by Brett at work. He is beaten down by his rage and hurt feelings. As he almost always is, Ben is frank and direct. For all of his difficulties with language, he makes his points plainly. He says he feels worthless. He has little to do in the office, and the make-work Brett gives to him, Brett either ignores, devalues, or re-does. I respect Ben. He has battled enemies stronger than himself all his life, and he survives. He is living with an unhappiness that he has no answer for. I ask if he’ll go to lunch with me, and we do that. I pick him up at the office. I wait in my car for him downstairs in the familiar parking garage. And we go to Avila’s on Maple. It’s Cinco de Mayo today. A hard rain is falling. We have to run from parking to the front door of the restaurant. How is lunch? It’s good for us to be together today. I’m glad to have a son I love very much. It is a strain sometimes – usually on both of us, and always on me. It is difficult to see him so unhappy. Still, I can stay alongside him in his troubles to whatever degree he lets me. We may console each other.

  May 6

  Yet another scrap. This one is advice on writing. It recommends copying others and then rewriting, which is one of my techniques. The piece is from Holly Willis, who teaches writing at USC. From what I’ve retained on my scrap of paper, she was writing about a visual artist, to start with:

  “How can we use this technique in our writing? Of course, appropriated texts provide rich resources, and the borrowed form is a well-known device in both fiction and nonfiction. In addition, Uman’s clever play of covering one portion of the image and then dissolving a different segment suggests a manner of both safeguarding and destroying our source material. If you appropriate a piece of text, what elements can be ‘covered’ and the rest ‘dissolved’? And how does removal forever change what remains?

  “Many writers cheerfully sit down and write without a problem. However, some of us can use a little help in the form of techniques that defamiliarize the writing process. Through tactics culled from fellow artists, we can step outside of our habitual approaches and play a bit, and perhaps see the world—and write it – anew.”

  I didn’t want to throw this scrap out. I think it’s brilliant advice. It gives permission, even encouragement, to copy and rewrite, which was part of my professional practice from the beginning. I used it as a copywriter at The Richards Group and at SullivanPerkins. I would look for what was well written, on the assigned topic, and use it – altering it, to a degree. If I was writing a brochure for a real estate developer, I would read Ada Louise Huxtable’s criticism of architects and their buildings. Phrases, sentences, thoughts well-expressed – hers became mine, hers disguised in mine.

  *

  Alice In Wonderland syndrome “affects the way people perceive the world around them and can distort how they see their own body and the space it occupies.” They might see body parts added to the face of the person in front of them, or hear others speaking very slowly or unnaturally fast. Or they have the sensation that they themselves are changing size. It was formally described as a distinct syndrome in 1955.

  People do have unbearable conditions. Some of the conditions have names, but not all.

  *

  Because my mother has died, I have no one to impress anymore. My father died eight years earlier, but his death was not so relevant to this. Maybe it’s only Mom whose opinion matters, hers the only praise we value supremely – she is the one. I have no one left who might say to me whatever the equivalent is to the “Good boy” I might say to my dog. I’m not anyone’s good boy any longer. I can’t be a good boy even if I want to me.

  Might some of this explain Ben’s utter lack of interest in achievement? He lost his mother when he was thirteen. Perhaps he also knows at the deepest level that there is no one whose approval he needs to gain.

  *

  From a page saved out of the September 16, 2019 New Yorker – “Postscript: James Atlas,” written by Judith Thurman: “James Atlas, who died last week of chronic lung disease at seventy, was a valorous combatant who knew both glory and defeat.” She’s writing about James Atlas’s work as a literary biographer, but he was a literary name I knew when I was at the Harvard Advocate. He was one of the accomplished ones, along with the Galassi brothers, Jonathan and Peter. I remember meeting Peter, but never Jonathan, or James Atlas. James Atlas was one of the bright stars. Judith Thurman reports that he was also her friend, “We met in the early seventies, in the offices of the Carcanet Press, a small Oxford-based publisher of poetry.” They were kids in conversation, the year I was dropping out of Harvard and writing embarrassing letters to Danny Kozloff about Rise Goren, and walking neighborhoods in Los Angeles on a summer job reading water and electric meters. “I was working as a cook in London, and Jim had just graduated from Harvard, where he had studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.” So, James Atlas had the bona fides. My experience with Lowell? I received from him nothing but a confused and confusing “what are you doing here” rebuke when I mistakenly entered his classroom. Back then, I thought I might be one of the chosen, another James Atlas, accepted into Robert Lowell’s poetry writing class. It turned out to be someone else, a different Perkins, on the acceptance list that had been posted outside Lowell’s class room. “Jim was at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, studying under the great Richard Ellmann. Master and protégé had a natural affinity as Jewish Midwesterners in a citadel of high English culture….”

  And so on.

  To get closer to what will keep me in the present, I need to throw the past away. Some things of the past. Maybe most things.
  Hard to do, though, very hard.

  *

  I had Friday coffee and a morning bun at La Madeline this morning. With Jane Manaster, whose old lady looks and manner are frighteningly predictive. Jim Moroney was at La Madeline as well, working on his laptop. La Madeline is his office away from home. His actual home, up in Bluffview, where I interviewed him for The Catholic Foundation, seems like a much more comfortable place. Perhaps he needs to escape from Barbara. Or he wants to separate work, which he does in this chain restaurant, from not working, or feeling at home in a public place from actually being at home.

  Jane is a researcher of sorts. She’s an author. She’s written books about nature for an academic press. One about Horned Toads, another about Mesquite. I asked Jane how she would go about tracking down the tree or bush I remember from my childhood — the one with purple berries that bordered the north side of our home on Georgetown in Los Angeles. She wanted to know the street address and the zip code. She says what I need to do is call the County Extension Agent’s office and ask for help.
  “Even if someone offers a possible answer,” I ask her, “how would I know if it’s the right answer?”
  “You look it up.”
  What if the picture I find online doesn’t match the one in my memory?
  Most likely it won’t

  *

  May 9

  I took Debra and her daughter Amanda to dinner at Il Bracco for Mother’s Day. We had a 4:45 reservation. When we arrived, the second half of the Maverick’s game was still on, and so I wondered about my motherless child. I had asked Ben in a text if he wanted to come to dinner with us, but he never answered. He would not have wanted to and would have said no anyway. And what about his Mother’s Day? Did he think of Dolores, or his loss, or did he not feel anything had been lost, since he’s been without a mother for so long. One time, he told me he found it difficult to remember her at all. I wonder. He could go to Temple Emanu-El cemetery by himself this Mother’s Day to see the new lettering on the front of her monument stone. Probably not the best thing for him to do. Better to watch the Mavericks, even if they lose. For Ben, Mother’s Day has become Mothers’ Day, something impersonal, a holiday to remember no one in particular.

  *

  Why do we love only this person in particular, rather than humanity, even though we have been commanded to love “our neighbor as ourselves”?

  In his essasy “On Friendship,” Montaigne wrote this about Etienne de la Boetie, who died at 32:
  “If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.”

  *

  I’m co-hosting a small event for Leket Israel at my house tomorrow at seven in the evening. My efforts to gather a crowd have had mixed success. There might not be more than ten people coming. I bought macarons today at Chelle’s at the Farmer’s Market. The house is prepared, though Mika’s dog hairs are still all over the floor. Jane Manaster, the other co-host, came over today. She wanted me to give her a broom so she could sweep the floor. Jane can be a difficult friend. She wants more time from me than I want with her. She is irritable, and offended –or so she claims—by my refusal to sit with her as long as she wants to at La Madeline on Friday mornings. I stay from 8:15 until nearly 10:15, which is an impossibly long time. Two hours is far too long. It doesn’t matter. No matter how long we sit, when I get up to leave, she acts as though it’s too soon, and that I’m leaving abruptly. Jane’s 83, hard of hearing, impertinent, and in distress because her son, Rex, a licensed attorney, is a meth addict. He functions, but has troubles. Jane probes into my personal life. She is unbothered by making intrusive pronouncements. She doesn’t respect boundaries. She is insensitive to what “the other person” prefers. So, in that sense, she’s not a friend after all. She acts at times as though we are in a romantic relationship, which is both depressing and ridiculous, and insulting, from my point of view.

  Funny how it works. Debra, the woman I sleep with, seems hardly interested in me. In a different world, Jane would forty years younger, and I would be at risk.

  11 May

  “Have a great day!” The salesgirl behind the counter at Chelle’s told me that, after I bought macarons. As though that’s an instruction that can be followed. She upped the ante from “have a nice day,” a farewell that has been ridiculed and perhaps can’t be used effectively any longer. Something anodyne became something stupid. The phrase and the smiley face that goes with it were used as a cultural touchstone in Forest Gump. These days we have emoticons.

  *

  I managed the Leket Israel event last night. It was nice. Not in the “have a nice day” sense; it went genuinely better than expected. Debra came. She brought Benny, her nutty little poodle. Jane Manaster arrived carrying with her the odor of an elderly woman. I’m not sure what that is exactly; maybe incontinence and a diaper, or a drugstore perfume that no one ever found alluring. Leah Beth and Harold Kolni were among the first to arrive, after the “guest speaker,” Lauren Yoked. Lauren’s the Executive Director of American Friends of Leket. It was good to see Leah Beth. Harold, too. They are the Chavurah couple I like the most. I never see them outside of a group function, but my feeling for them is within walking distance of the border of friendship. Leonora Stephen came. She is also a bearer of warm memories. There are people who carry into my presence a kind of sacredness, from their place in my memory. Leonora was in our bedroom the night Dolores died. She kept watch with me – a kind of shomer, keeping company with the barely living. Rabbi Amy Rossel showed up, as did Joan Gremont and her husband, a South African – Maurey, or Martin. They were from Jane’s invitation list. Also, A “modern orthodox” young couple who know Lauren, and another pair of strangers – Brian and his wife. Brian was one of those men who’s always performing. In every three sentence exchange, he provided at least two puns.

  Lauren presented gifts to the hosts. One for me, one for Jane. They were challah covers, and charming, with an embroidered Tree of Life on them. They came from Zion Judaica, in Brooklyn. Jane had no idea what they were – she thought hers was a pillowcase of some sort and offered it to Debra. I didn’t know what mine was either, but after everyone’s left, I looked more closely, saw the Zion tag and did some research. An embroidered Tree of Life challah cover, with the trunk spelling out Shalom in Hebrew characters – $15.99 online, reduced from $22.

  I’ve never had Shabbat dinner in my home. My family never did, when I was growing up. We didn’t welcome the Sabbath queen with prayer. We never lit candles, other than for Hannukah. So I’ve never had a challah on my table. Covered or uncovered. Lauren’s gift is handsome and meaningful. It will beautifully replace the red cloth napkins I’ve used in the past to cover matzot on my Passover table.

  *

  In the Book of Proverbs, it is said that “righteousness delivers from death.” That may be one reason that prayer and charity belong together. In the 1920s, Jews would pray at the Western Wall for their kinsmen in the diaspora who were sick and poor. When done with that, they would give to the beggars by the Wall.

  Jews in Israel. Jews, outside and inside Zion Gate, and the Jaffa Gate. Jews, the majority of residents in the capital at the beginning of the last century. In 1931, there were some 53,800 Jews in Jerusalem, 19,300 Christians and 19,900 Muslims. This count didn’t include the new Jewish neighborhoods outside the Old City gates.

  *

  I bought seven bags of Reddy Ice at the Tom Thumb on Inwood yesterday for my event. I used the ice to fill a heavy silver bowl, ornamented with silver grapes and silver leaves, that I borrowed from Debra. This bowl was a gift from her friend Art Janes. I also iced my featherweight aluminum wine vases. Small bottles of Ozarka water, mini cans of Diet Coke and Diet Sprite, and bottles of Chardonnay all needed to be iced.

  Seven bags. I still have three crowding my freezer.

  *

  Yesterday at Tom Thumb, a boy and girl were ahead of me in the check-out line. I had my shopping cart and seven bags of ice that were already beginning to melt. They had a wagon with their groceries. Addicts? Homeless? They were in their twenties, probably in their early twenties. The girl was homely, overweight, with a stud in her nostril. The skinny boy who was with her was sleeveless and tatted. The goat’s beard sprouting from his chin as unkempt as pubic hair. The girl moved ahead, passing the register.
  “Hey,” the guy said, “I thought you were paying.”
  He took out his wallet. He fished for a card. He seemed unfamiliar with the checkout procedure and accidentally pushed one of the “do you want to donate” buttons that the credit card reader foists on you at the grocery store before it shows you your own charges.
  The cashier thanked him for his donation. He was flummoxed, and at last he got his card into the slot. My ice was still waiting.
  The cashier looked down at her screen.
  “It says insufficient funds.”
  He tried again.
  “No,” the cashier said, shaking her head.
  The boy stepped out of the narrow lane to where the girl was. He protested to himself and to her, “I don’t know,” he said, “the money’s there.”
  My ice was melting. I pushed my cart forward to the credit card station and told the cashier I would cover it. $42, plus my ice, plus whatever donation the guy had picked. The couple looked me. They hesitated. Of course I considered that this had been their plan from the beginning.
  “It’s okay,” I told them, “I got it, it’s not a problem, you guys will figure it out.”
  Maybe that was their plan from the beginning, but I doubt it. They didn’t look like people who made plans.

  *

  May 13

  I took a tour this morning at Vickery Trading Company. Stephanie Giddens, who founded the charity, gave the tour. She’s doing admirable work. Unlike my work, which underneath it all so often consisted of helping rich people become even richer. At Vickery Trading Company, refugee women who are new to Dallas learn sewing on commercial machines and spend time with ESL teachers. It’s a 21-month program. At the end of that time (during which they earn $10/hour for on-the-job training by making garments that are sold online and doing some contract work for clothing manufacturers as well), they find jobs. At Peacock Alley, making pillow cases, or at Culwell & Sons, as seamstresses. All of them seemed to be Afghans, or from Muslim countries. They wore headscarves. Perhaps they had made those as well, although probably not using commercial sewing machines.

  *

  The only life I want to lead is an interesting life. The subject I need to write about
  must be an interesting one. Easier to say than to do. And what does one mean by interesting? Meaningful? Or simply eventful? When asked what places in the wide world he had gone to see, Thoreau replied that he had traveled far in Concord.

  *

  From ingeveb.org – a website translating Yiddish language archival materials, poetry, essays – this sentence:

  The uncircumcised sit like honored men at the doors of Jews.

  It should be the start of a story – no way I would not want to read the sentence that comes after it. “Ingeveb” is Yiddish for “in web”; the site says it wants to be “a central address for the study of all things Yiddish”—literature, language, and culture, and the next generation of scholarship. It’s a subscription-free digital journal, with an editorial board of scholars from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and so on. When I went to the site and clicked on the Text & Translations tab, I found entries such as Annabel Cohen translates Abraham Sutzkever’s poem, “Paris.”
  Anabel is translating Abraham.

  14 May

  A sentence above could as easily be a poem – not a Symborska poem, not as clever, but not dissimilar in attitude:

  The only life you need to lead
  is an interesting life,
  just as the only subject you need to write about
  is the interesting one.
  Easier to say it than to do it.
  And what does interesting mean —
  Eventful? meaningful?
  When asked what places in the wide world
  he had gone to see,
  Thoreau answered that he had traveled far
  in Concord.

  *

  “To translate into words the meaning communicated to us through experience.” As if there was another way to communicate meaning. You can picture an experience, with a painting or a photograph. You can provoke an emotion, with music. But meaning? Meaning is communicated with words. What does my experience communicate? What do my tears mean? You need me to say, because there are tears of joy and tears of sadness.

  *

  We apply the language of surface and depth to emotional or intellectual qualities. There are deep thoughts, and shallow people. It’s metaphor. Not that much different than our description of God taking us out of Egypt with an outstretched arm. Ideas are grasped, we can get out of situations, we can bury emotions.

  Melville, in the novel Pierre: “The trillionth part has not yet been said; and all that has been said but multiplies the avenues to what remains to be said.”

  We tag the world with words.
  Using words, we describe the world, but do lose some of our ability to really see it?
  There are no two words that mean the same thing, no two sentences that mean the same thing, even if we make a practice of replacing one with the other.
  When I define a word, I am not getting to the reality underneath it, the thing it is tagging but only to another word. The dictionary is a kind of thesaurus. It doesn’t offer meaning, only other words. The definitions are interpretations that exist “on the same level” as what is being defined. “Every interpretation,” Wittgenstein writes, “hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.”

  Sometimes I side with the words in my head even when there is no evidence in what I see in front of me. For example, what am I telling myself as I visit the Vickery Trading Company, seeing the women in hijabs?

  *

  May 18

  I’m listening to a podcast from Tablet, which is a Jewish publishing venture. Lael Leibowitz and his guest, a poet who has written a poem about her four-year-old coming home from Sabbath school with ideas about Jews, God, and the desert. The language is simple, but not plain. In the poem, God lives to one hundred, then to infinity, and then to zero. The poem has a mystery that plain speaking does not have.

  Before reading her poem, she mentions a comment attributed to James Baldwin, that poetry (Baldwin said art) “allows us to lay bare the questions that are hidden by the answers.”

  I’ve been reading Baldwin, too. I found an excerpt from Baldwin’s Letter from a Region in My Mind folded up between two pages of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, the extraordinary Ai Wei Wei memoir. Baldwin’s essay originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1962; I printed some of it at SullivanPerkins in August 2017. Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt: “…but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never –the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

  No capitalization of white and black, but none needed. I’m also admiring his spoken-sounding yet mannered aside “which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never.”

  A few days ago, a deranged man, only 18 years old, went into a Tops Market in a mostly black neighborhood and murdered ten people. He live-streamed his attack. He wanted to advertise it. Then, rather than ending it by shooting himself, he surrendered to the police. He also wrote and shared online a 180-page “manifesto” – expressing his hatred of blacks and Jews and castigating the “replacement” of whites by others. Given how I only seem to be able to write a paragraph or two a day, I have to wonder: how many hours did that take him? was he truly capable of writing nearly two hundred pages of text? Of staying seated and focused, for however long that must have taken?

  I re-read the page of Baldwin, from top to bottom. It is simply too good, both soothing in its rhythms and incandescent in its intelligence.

  *

  Another torn page found – from an article about YIVO and its holdings, which form a record of a world that was lost:

  “…to refer to Yiddish as a boundary at all is, more than anything, psychological – perhaps resistance on the part of contemporary Jewry to confronting parts of its past.”

  The Vilna Collections is now online – offering anyone who wants it a taste of the life that was despoiled by Nazis and neighbors.

  May 19

  Sometimes I can pull nothing out of myself. The best I can do is sit, or distract myself with reading.

  Ben calls this afternoon. He is in turmoil over his sister, my once-upon-a-time daughter. Eden has decided that I’m not her father and, whether I am or not, she wants nothing to do with me. She has her birth mother, her half-sisters, her husband’s family. She’s not alone. She has always found like-minded distressed souls to join her circle of the victimized. But Ben has practically no one. He doesn’t seem able to let Eden go, but he can’t go forward with her either. He wants to talk to her and does not want to talk to her. At one point in his call, he’s on the edge of tears. His voice quavers, and he apologizes for it.

  Eden is a little monster, and also deserving of pity.

  May 20

  Mark Berman’s guys are here planting ivy in the bed on the right of the walkway to the creek and abelia, blue salvia and blackfoot daisy to the left. All perennials, although in my garden they may not be. I seem to need new perennials annually.

  *

  I find another poem in my in-between pages. “Among the Intellectuals,” by Tony Hoagland – torn out of a New Yorker, probably in 2018. I see “1953-2018” in parenthesis after the dash that precedes the author’s name, just below the poem.

  The poet says that “thinking” is the religion of the intellectual:

  This was their religion.
  That and the light shining through the stained-glass ancestors.

  They preferred the name of the tree
  to the taste of the apple.

  These are wonderful lines.

  *

  Am I lucky if I live longer than a stranger I never knew? Am I unlucky that so many born before me will die after me? Some things do not need comparisons and yet we make them. When Dolores was dying, she said that it was unexpected that her nutty mother, who died in her seventies, had lived a longer life than she would. She didn’t say, “It’s so unfair.” It must have seemed unreasonable to her, maybe even offensively so.

  I am going through Dolores’s things twenty-five years after her death. They still have life in them, and they speak to me.

  *

  May 25

  What’s in the news today?

  A luggage search at a Detroit airport turned up a moth species not seen since 1912.

  The Uvalde massacre is the second-deadliest school shooting on record, behind Sandy Hook, which happened a decade ago.

  May 26

  I’m still reading Ai Weiwei’s 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows. He writes about his first years in New York City. His father was a famous poet; the son is an artist, attending Parsons. But Ai Weiwei lost his scholarship and dropped out. He also left the classes he had enrolled in at the Art Students League. Did he feel lost, with no structure and nothing to fill his days? I would have thought so. But no. He writes that he was happy to have days with no plans and nothing expected of him. He required no routine. He went through periods of boredom and discouragement, but he also wrote of this time: “Still, I knew that possibilities are never completely exhausted, and life itself is a great work of art, with room enough to encompass disillusionment and anomie.”

  *

  Another scrap between the Symborska pages – this one from a newspaper. The newsprint has darkened. It’s old. I’d circled the name of a song, part of a review of a Leonard Cohen album. On the scrap: “ What’s remarkable about The Flame, You Want It Darker and now Thanks for the Dance is the clarity and self-awareness with which Cohen wrestles with his own impending death. ‘I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game,’ he sang with a low deliberate finality on the 2016 record. But there is a playfulness to Thanks for the Dance that sets it apart from the previous album. Leslie Feist, who contributed…” It ends there, with a Do not forget the Neediest! message under a hairline.

  Leslie Feist? No idea who that is, but there’s quite a bit about her online. Born February 13, 1976. Known “mononymously” as Feist, a Canadian indie pop singer-songwriter, with four Grammy nominations and an Artist of the Year at the Juno Awards as well. Her father, Ben, was an American-Canadian abstract expressionist; her mother’s a ceramicist from Saskatchewan, which is a difficult place to spell. Under Personal Life, Wikipedia informs me that Feist has one adopted daughter, Tihui, who was born at the end of 2019.

  *

  Another scrap between the pages – the Szymborska paperback is bulging with them – this one is folded, a print out of three unpublished poems by William Empson. I toss it. I read the Empson poems once and don’t need to again. No type of ambiguity in my decision.

  A music critic’s review of a piece of contemporary classical music after hearing it performed at a concert. “I’ve heard it two times. The first time, and the last time.”

  *

  31 May

  Haircut at Boardroom Salon today. Rita is my “stylist.” Very chatty. She asks me what my goals are. It isn’t obvious whether she means for the haircut or not.

  My goal for the haircut, and for my appearance generally? To not be too obviously in my seventies. Best strategy, to avoid mirrors as much as possible. Rethink my attitude about this perhaps – I am 70, and with God’s grace I will be 80 someday. The goal is to not let either of those numbers discourage me from attempting, failing, and trying again, as I continue to imagine what I can make of myself. However few the years, they are distant enough for planning, and spacious enough to hold dreams.

  William Zinsser’s advice: Each day write down a memory. He suggests neverminding the number of daily pages, but the writing needs to have a beginning and an end. These memories that are recovered day by day need not connect to each other. Do this for 3 months, for 6 months, daily.

  Beginnings are easy for me. It’s endings that I can never reach. And middles are where I lose my way entirely.

  *

  One of the “projects” I’ve started: I’m going through decades of my attempts at writing poetry. Some of the writing makes me cringe, but not all of it. For thirty or forty years, I would write poems late at night; then, once I had twenty or thirty pages, perhaps in a year, I would print the pages out, place them in a three-hole punch, and insert them into a binder. Now I’m going through the binders. I’m throwing the pages away — the paper, at least, page by page. But the poems I want to keep, or might redo, I’m writing down again. Also, creating a file on my laptop and saving it all to a thumb drive. My plan? Once I’ve gone through all this “past,” I’ll compile a fraction of it, either to submit some of the poems to one of the “little magazines,” or self-publish my own collection. Some of the work I won’t want to save, but don’t want to forget, either. That‘s the story of so much that is around me. Either because there’s a bit of melody in it, or some other virtue, and I want it available to me should I ever decide to listen to it again. Or, just as likely, because it reminds me of how much time I spent on something with little meaning, other than that time is precious.

  I have so many samples of “need to throw this out” but don’t want to, because they remind me of being twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two, of living in Berkeley, and Cambridge, and driving across country, and two months in Paris, and of dreams and a sense of self that seem so misguided in retrospect. Do I need to look back in embarrassment, or can I be charitable and forgiving?

  They are leftovers. They leave an aftertaste.

  *

  June 2022

  Dinner with Ben at Ephesus. It’s a Turkish or Mediterranean restaurant just off Central Expressway and Meadow. He wanted to talk again about his call from Keith, and about Eden. I have my own thoughts, but have little of use to say; and even less to say to Ben, then what I might say to Eden. To her, perhaps this: I’m sorry, Eden, you are unwilling to remember anything good in our lives together; I can remember good things, meals and trips and times together. But you have your attitudes, and I have my memories. I think mine is the healthier way, to have a fondness for the good things we shared, but perhaps I’m wrong, and it’s more satisfying, at least for you, to look back in anger and contempt.

  *

  Nicolai Berdyaev –Russian philosopher, theologian, and “Christian existentialist” – actually Ukrainian, if being born in Ukraine makes any difference. His father was from a long line of Russian nobility and military officers. Nicolai went to university in Kiev. He wanted a career as an intellectual, became a Marxist, was arrested at a student demonstration and expelled from university, and later became a professor of philosophy in Moscow. Berdyaev was accused of conspiring against the new government in 1920. (He was praised by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago for challenging his interrogators.) Russian Orthodox, Berdyaev “was among those who choose to remain under the omophorion of the Moscow Patriarchate.” (Omophorion – the distinctive vestments of the bishops of the Eastern church.) He wrote over twenty books, including, in 1938, Christianity and Antisemitism. I think his comments are rich with understanding: “The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.”

  ּNicolai Berdyaev is one of many extraordinary human beings I had never heard of. He was a man who lived through the Russian revolution and World War II, who was interrogated by the head of the NKVD, who wrote twenty books on the human condition, many of them translated eventually into English: The Russian Idea, The Philosophy of Freedom, The Spirit of Dostoievski, The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia, The Meaning of the Creative Act, Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe, The Meaning of History, The Destiny of Man, Les Shestof and Kierkegaard, etc. He seems to have written a book a year.

  And yet, I’ve never heard of him, until today.

  His name was mentioned in an article from Chabad, which looked at the Exodus as evidence for God’s intervention in history. Chabad reports on the conversation at the burning bush as if it were tapping into God’s phone line: “Therefore say to the Israelites: I am Hashem, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.” Berdyaev wrote about this as well, rejecting the materialistic interpretation of history.

  *

  Yet another bit of paper between the pages of my Symborska poems: A member guest pass for the San Diego Zoo, “valid only August 14, 2019.” Richard Levine, his wife Jean and I spent an afternoon at the zoo. Our passes included Guided Bus Tour (we didn’t want the guidance), Kangaroo Bus (we never hopped on), and Skyfari Aerial Tram “subject to availability.” The tram was available at the zoo on the August day that we visited. We got into one of the cars of the aerial tram, the three of us together, for an elevated ride. It was like being in a cage.

  *

  June 5

  Sunday morning.
  It’s almost hot enough already to jump into the swimming pool.

  Last night, Debra and I went to a Shavuot program at Temple Emanu-El. I’m uncomfortable at TE. It’s an enormous institution, and I’m small within it. In part it’s my thin connection to it, to any of the rabbis, and to the thousands of congregants, despite forty years of membership, my son’s and daughter’s Bar and Bat Mitvahs and confirmations, my wife’s funeral in Olan Sanctuary, her burial at the Temple’s cemetery on Howell, and my own gravesite waiting for me there. But last night I was touched. A Saturday night, so we were part of a smaller group. The Temple was giving tours led by Rabbi Robins. She greeted me as though we knew each other. Debbie Robins was a young rabbi twenty-five years ago when she drew the short straw and presided at Dolores’s funeral. I thought she seemed inconvenienced, and I have not thought well of her ever since. But then, I don’t know what that morning had actually been like, for her or for me.

  Last night we were invited to walk toward the bima and look up at the tablets. I saw the ten utterances, the Hebrew abbreviated. At that moment I came closer than I ever have to sensing that something might actually have been uttered at Sinai, that God had indeed spoken to Moses and the assembled people, that there had truly been a revelation. And why not? Why could this not have happened, God acting in history, a miracle no more inexplicable than my standing in Olan Sanctuary. Is it aging that persuades me to almost believe? It might be. I’ve been impacted as well by the past three years of Tikvah studies and Meir Soloveichik’s lectures, and by the time spent reading the Bible, with its baffling blend of mystery, prophesy, simple storytelling, and incoherence. A recent visit to the Temple’s historic cemetery off of Howell Street may also have impacted me. I had gone to see Dolores’s new headstone last week, the first since I ordered the redoing of her headstone. I brought one of the smooth black river rocks from the backyard on Guernsey and placed it on the right corner of the monument.

  *

  Now I lay me down to sleep. Isn’t that a strange phrase. A wonderful, trochaic line, trochaic and archaic as well. It casts a spell.

  It’s suggestive. It leads me not beside still waters, but to consider that I and me may be referring to two differing things. As if I am the mind, or the will; me, only a body.

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Now it seems that there may be three of us, a trinity, though not necessarily a holy one. There’s the will, the body, and the soul. The soul is not I, but it is a part of I, it belongs to I. And if the soul survives, if the soul is kept, what happens then to I? And do I want the Lord to keep my soul? Surely I will want my soul back. No, maybe not; maybe I want it kept, in the sense of being kept safe. I want my soul guarded.

  So, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  *

  Sunday afternoon, back from tennis.
  The swimming pool, a spider, a flowering yucca, a broken vase.
  And the rusted metal legs of a side table.
  This still life with chaise lounge is hardly still; there’s movement in every direction. Dandelion tufts, called a pappus, are dancing on the moving water.
  It’s a still life with notepad. Too lively to hold within the four edges of the paper.
  Everything is in motion always.
  The world moves through time as well. In other summers, a paperback history of The Conquest of the Incas took the same place on the side table that the Ai Weiwei and Ann Patchett books have this afternoon.
  Breath, moving, as I’m shifting my position on a chaise lounge. I’m doing nothing, as if it were possible to do nothing. Even our dead bodies are doing something. Decomposing, I’m supposing – our bodies are busy returning to the dust.
  There are verbs for everything. Even when we try to be motionless, we are staying still. We have the action of staying.
  Movement in the notes of a bird song, too; its melody repeats, carried on the breeze.
  The darker grey in the center of the white cotton of the cloud. Rain may be coming. It will be moving down.
  Whatever in this world isn’t on the move is only pretending to be still.
  Under the bottom of a vase that lies flat on the glass top table, movement. Lift it, tilt it up, and when it moves, so does a fever of ants, lots of motion and intention.

  June 6

  Derek Walcott’s wonderful poem Love After Love –

  The time will come
  when, with elation,
  you will greet yourself arriving
  at your own door, in your own mirror
  and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
  and say, sit here.

  This beautiful declaration is in between the pages of my Ann Patchett book – not bookmarking, but staying there. My process is to discover it, to read it today, and then to throw it away. But I’m not ready to discard this. The time hasn’t come yet. Back it goes, into a book that I might also read again, some time from now.

  June 8

  Alfred Kazin on Dreiser, writing of Dreiser’s sense that “injustice makes society possible,” that injustice was “another form of the carnage that sustains nature.” Surely that’s wrong. We have agreed not to eat each other, and some day we may also abstain from mistreating each other.

  Hemingway, obsessed by what happens to you when you have made a botch of your life. No need to overthink it though. You live in the mess, that’s what happens.

  Lives of the Poets – This is a book I never read but was discussed in my “English section,” that breakout group that accompanied the massive survey course I took at Harvard, where the Norton Anthology, Volumes I and II, were the primary texts. My “section” was led by a graduate student. I can see him. Joe, last name Italian, and starting with a G, though not Garagiola. And I still remember his comment on Lives of the Poets, when he told me the takeaway, which was that all of them had miserably unhappy lives. Did Joe make it through? Did he go from being one of the best as an undergraduate to the triumph of admittance to the Ph.D. program at Harvard to finding his teaching position somewhere? These gifted graduate students were like minor league baseball players. All of them formerly the best, very few making it to the big leagues. Some of my undergraduate peers did. Lars Engle, from Harvard to Cambridge to Stellenbosch to his doctorate at Yale, and then a named professor at Tulsa. Lars is a scholar. I’ve seen reviews on the UTulsa site. He’s a favorite of his students apparently. He was chosen, too, to be one of the editors of a newer edition of the Norton Anthology, a book with a grey cover, its pages as thin as a Bible’s.

  Other classmates? Many that I can read about, and either envy or admire. Literary stars like Wendy Lesser. Intellectuals, like Patrick Glynn. International legal experts, like Harry Flectner. Merrick Garland, nominated but not confirmed to the Supreme Court, and now attorney general. I didn’t know him.

  It’s unlikely I would know anyone whose first name is Merrick.

  *

  For some of us, failure is a condition and not a momentary event.

  I read this, about “my generation”:

  “We are the children of rock and roll, which is a rebellion and, to that degree, both optimistic and naive. But the blues and country music are more likely to speak the truth, which is that rebellion is useless.”

  I believe it was written by a music critic.

  *

  Joshua Coleman’s email – topic of the day: “Why you should stop trying to reconcile.”
  I barely started, I didn’t for a moment think it would work. For the first year or two, I sent birthday cards. I talked to Keith, asking him to tell Eden that her grandmother had died. Nothing back. I no longer had Eden’s address, or her phone number. I asked Ben to send a message. He said he was afraid to do that. I stopped trying.

  11 June

  Ben was 38 yesterday. He’s coming over at 6:30 tonight. We’ll go to a movie at Cineopolis downtown –Ben, Debra and me. My other assignment is to pick up a Tres Leches cake at La Duni later this afternoon.

  *

  There is a majesty to the red oak that towers over the pool in the backyard. In its spread, in its strength, and in the ceremony of its seasons. The green of summer, the bareness in the first month of the year. The lion is the king of the jungle, but this oak is the king of my yard, though it may be fairer to say my red oak is the lion in the local zoo. The lion in the zoo seems lesser than its brothers on the savannah. So, too, this red oak, and my live oaks, my graceful crepe myrtles and my bois d’arc trees on the edge of the creek are diminished when I compare them to trees in forests or a wilderness. Compare the sunlight on the water of my swimming pool to the same sunlight on a river or an ocean wave. Everything manmade is an imitation. Smaller in meaning, even when greater in size. Debra has an opossum in her small suburban yard. She puts out bowls of water and scatters birdseed for it. Is it a wild animal?
  The lotus flower in my pond is beautiful, but tame.

  I suppose whatever is owned loses some of its dignity.
  But, if I will recognize that the whole earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, then every tree is restored to the same status, as is every bird, the opossum, all the flowers, and the weeds.

  *

  The jay in the oak, an egret on the creek. In the garden, azaleas, turk’s cap, coleus and the potato vine, iris and salvia. A turtle has made its home in my back pond. No sight now of the five gold fish that I purchased in the fish store on Inwood Road and released into the circle of the pond water. They may still be there though. The water’s dark, and it’s hard to see much of anything under the lotus pads and the spears of the water lilies.

  June 15, 2022

  Bloomsday, tomorrow.
  I took Tricia Magel to lunch today, while her car was being inspected at the Sewell Subaru dealership on Lemmon. Tricia’s a strange one. She talked and talked and talked. She’s not unlike a lot of people who live alone, and many older adults, and most women – though which of those characteristics were at the root of her gabbiness, I don’t know. We sat in a booth at Hudson House. Her Greek salad sat mostly uneaten in front of her. Her monologue extended for an hour beyond the lunch hour.

  Tricia worked for me as an account executive. Designers hated her, but the clients loved her. She was too smart for the kind of work she did. She was away for a while – breast cancer, which must have been terrifying for her. Then she returned, and then she left again, hired to lead marketing for UNT Dallas College of Law, which was one of our clients. She intended to stay with UNT long enough to qualify for the pension that is one of the many benefits of working for the state, but university politics intervened and her job was eliminated.

  *

  I’m reading the introduction to a book of stories by William Saroyan. Jane Manaster is a fan, and she xeroxed a few pages for me. I found this sentence on one of them:

  “…it is always hard work to write, even to write something immediately recognizable as worthless.”

  Love that. All of my paragraphs here are evidence of its truth.

  *

  July 1 – 21

  In Middlebury, Vermont, for three weeks of an immersive language program in Hebrew. I enjoyed the remarkable cast of characters at the school. And, no PTSD for me, being back on a college campus and sharing a dorm room and one bathroom with three other men.

  I’m reminded of the reunions I attended at Harvard. When I was a college student, I was so miserably lonely most of the time. And my one takeaway from the reunions: the place was so beautiful, how could I ever have spent an unhappy moment there.

  There were two Bobs and one Paul in my dorm room. Men of my age, we had the mastery of Hebrew that a three-year-old on the streets of Tel Aviv might have. So we sounded like drunks much of the time, or idiots, as we stuttered and paused through our butchered sentences. The rule at Middlebury is that you only speak Hebrew, all the time, though of course I violated. I would sneak away to the town and gab in English with a friend across the hall. Mostly with Gail, who’s in my class, a retired attorney for the Jewish Federation, in Manhattan. As for those idiots in my dorm room? One of the Bobs was a neurologist at Johns Hopkins; the other Bob was a retired professor of Philosophy. The youngster, Paul, only in his fifties, manages the programming for online billing at a division of Sony.

  The school was full of remarkable, accomplished students – both in the serious seven-week program, and in my “lifelong learners” three-week version. I also played on the Hebrew tennis team and was the best player – so, that’s remarkable enough, given how average I am. My doubles partner was a young woman getting her Ph.D. at Stanford in some branch of history that I’ve never heard of. In the “talent show,” part of the extracurriculars that the school engaged us in, as another way to learn Hebrew, Amir Milstein, an Israeli-born flautist who teaches at the New England Conservatory and has toured with Tito Puente, performed Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah as I’ve never heard it. I chatted, if my stumbles can be called that, with a Richard Levine. He was at a lower level than I am. He’s also a director/producer from Los Angeles, responsible for Nip/Tuck, Masters of Sex, and Submission, a film with Stanley Tucci. I told him about my childhood friend, and he stopped to look my Richard Levine up on the website for the San Diego Symphony.

  It was a wonderful three-weeks away. Much learned, no unpleasantness, and an unexpected joy to be in the company of Jews, though there were strangers in the program — students learning Hebrew or Biblical Hebrew for reasons of their own. For example, three young men from Saudi Arabia, two of them named Mohamed. And other students with a scholarly commitment to Christianity and an intention to study Torah in the original language. There were Christian students from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Africa.

  *

  Debra went to Cleveland the last week I was in Vermont to visit her mother and sister. She was home Saturday, but seeing me after more than three weeks apart wasn’t her priority. She spent Saturday night with her daughter, who had been housesitting for her. When I saw Debra on Sunday night, she seemed distant, as she does. When I gave her one of the presents I bought for her in Middlebury, I became more acceptable. She is like that. She expects tribute to be paid. Debra may have been disappointed in me for being out of touch during those weeks I was away. Our coolness to each other is of course two-sided. We don’t have an irresistible passion for each other. That much is obvious. When Pam was gone, even for a weekend, I was excited for her to return. That physical longing, and the anticipation of pleasure – I miss it, but I suspect it won’t ever be coming back.

  *

  July 24

  Debra and I are seated in a booth at Wildwood tonight, when a call comes from Ben. Eden has left him a phone message – a shocking recording. She tells him that Keith has shot and killed himself. Not today, but a week ago. Ben wants to call her back immediately, and doesn’t know what to say. I don’t, either, but neither do I intend to call Eden.

  *

  Can I write twice about this? I’m incapable of thinking twice, if by that I mean to change my mind about it.

  Home, after three weeks in Middlebury, Vermont, studying Hebrew in the “lifelong learners” immersive language program. People say after returning from vacation that they are back “to reality.” That seems a strange way to look at my life or my routines. That said, Middlebury was a bit like Camelot – a make-believe place, adults on an idyllic campus, with no grades, three meals a day served in a dining hall, libraries and games.

  When it was over, it was over. I left in the middle afternoon on a Thursday, but did not get back to Dallas until twenty-four hours later. A cancelled flight from Burlington to Chicago, a re-routing to Charlotte, an overnight at a cheap hotel, and a flight the following morning from Charlotte to Dallas. Then, on Sunday night, truly bad news.

  A call from Ben, when I was out to dinner with Debra.
  “Sorry to call you.”
  “No, it’s okay.”
  “I wouldn’t call but it’s a sort of an emergency.”

  *

  I have found out from Ben that Eden has a “go-fund-me,” open to anyone, online, to raise money for Keith’s funeral. I contributed to it, twice – an acknowledgment must surely go to Eden, but nothing from her, no response.

  The original goal is to raise $2,500. That has been surpassed. A note from Eden appears on the site. The fundraising will continue, she writes. To pay bills, and to allow her to go to therapy. All this to the public, but no chance of a private message to me.

  I look up Keith’s parents’ address in Fort Worth and send a condolence card. It doesn’t return with an address unknown, but neither is there any response.

  Is there a funeral? Ben hears nothing further about it. As far as we ever do find out, there wasn’t one.

  *

  28 July

  Trying to re-establish a pattern and the way to spend my days. In theory, I am replacing the monotonous emails I used to read for the first hour or two at my office each day with Hebrew study. Then, I am writing until 1:30, and then a break for food or an hour of exercise, or time in the storeroom, to sort, throw out, and reflect. Then, back at my desk until 6:30, writing or reading, or editing and rewriting.

  It’s difficult. This first week back has been unlike the weeks before I went Middlebury, when I found my footing. Now, I’m questioning each step.

  July 13, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dolores’s death, passed while I was in Vermont. I came out of the storeroom this afternoon with Dolores’s wallet. It’s not a man’s wallet. It’s horizontal, a large rectangle with multiple pockets. Its red plastic skin is cracked and peeling. Inside there are pictures of Ben and Eden from 1997 and before. I’ve never carried pictures of either of my children, or anyone else, in my wallet. I actually don’t carry a wallet anymore, just a money clip, for credit cards, a driver’s license and currency. The pictures I carry these days are on my cell phone. Dolores died ten years before the first iPhone.

  She kept her business cards in the wallet — white, with blue type. The type is all lower case, an e.e. commings way of wanting to be different. A statement of modesty, I suppose, this shy lower case type, whispering not shouting. There’s a prescription in the wallet from John Eisenlohr – for new glasses, June 1995. She also kept a business card from Robert Hogue, our flamboyant interior designer who seemed unable to stop himself from repeating dirty jokes. His typeface is elegantly engraved.
  What else?
  A SullivanPerkins PPO card, from Pacific Mutual.
  A blood donor identification card from The Blood Center at Wadley, type A+, donation date 11/15/88, cholesterol level 184.
  A Dallas Museum of Art membership card, expiring September 30, 1997.
  A credit card receipt from The Children’s Collection, four pairs of Khaki pants. Dolores signed Mark Perkins on the receipt.
  Another photo of Eden, pre-orthodonture.
  A Dr. Dolores Dyer library card, 5343 Wenonah, Dallas 75209.
  A card for The Science Place expiring 7-31-97.
  A receipt, trousers and shorts, payable to Circle Ten Council, Boy Scouts of America.
  A receipt from The Container Store.
  A plastic AARP group health insurance card.
  Her Medicare card, Dolores D Perkins.
  Her Verandah card, for the spa, where she did water aerobics.
  One of my SullivanPerkins business cards.
  Ben’s photo card from Mavericks Basketball Camps.
  Another photo of Eden.
  The business card of Fernando Carrico, Director, Hoteis Alexandre de Almeida, Hotel Metropole, Rossio n 30 1100 Lisboa, Portugal.
  A folded note with some medical information: Robaxisol – Back – 2 tabs 4x/day; Utram, 1 every 4-6 hrs for pain. On the note’s other side, a list and some writing: Librax rx, flu shot, meds to lose weight, wrist bump, intestine sore, dentist gives me antibiotics leading to low grade vaginal probs –
  What else?
  A Neiman Marcus InCircle card, for Miss Dolores Dyer.
  A membership card, American Psychological Association.
  An old driver’s license, expiring “on birthday 1982.”
  Her mother’s driver’s license, expired 1977.
  A business card for Bob La Vigne, Mortuary Services, 518 West Davis. This is the business where I went in order to retrieve the cremains of Mr. Burch – Blufird Birch, who was Dolores’s mother Frances’s seventeenth husband; and, a few years after, I went there again to pick up Frances’s ashes.
  Another photo of Ben.
  Dolores’s social security card.
  Another Neiman’s plastic card for Miss Dolores Dyer.
  A blank card the size of a business card with my handwriting, “For Dolores, for our anniversary, all my love – Mark.”
  A post-it that Dolores had written on: “Osa Peninsula, La Paloma, owned by American.” La Paloma, in Costa Rica, overlooks the Pacific. I don’t remember staying there, but it’s possible that we did.

  *

  Kathryn Schultz writes in Lost & Found: “Our parents had given us a love of ideas, and also the idea of love.” This is what I did not get. My parents were not affectionate. They were loyal, and their marriage was enduring, but in no way that was displayed did they seem to be in love with each other. I loved Dolores, surely. But there was nothing giddy in our love. I did consider myself lucky to have her in my life. She was certainly the person my sister called “a beautiful soul.” I’ve known nothing like it since. With Pam, a physical infatuation, that I am grateful to have enjoyed, notwithstanding all the down sides and even the permanent damage that was done. With Debra, neither. The two of us, Debra and me, are equally flawed. Both of us have our virtues as well. But there is a thinness in my feeling for her where the intensity should be. It may also be my immature unwillingness to recognize that at this time in life, what I have in Debra is as good as it gets and must be appreciated, even if or rather because it will never be any better.

  *

  Three more things in Dolores’s red wallet:

  A folded message, with Eden’s printing in colored pencil:
  “Dear Buckeye Bunk, Please come to the climbing wall after siesta. Bring this note. I have $50 for each of you. This is real.” The “is” in “This is real” underlined. The note is signed with an “X.”

  A paragraph on a scrap torn out of The New Yorker from the “About Town” section. The Magnificent Andersons is playing at the Museum of Modern Art, July 11 and July 13. Someone, it must have been Dolores, has underlined a phrase, “Dolores Costello, the fragile blond beauty of the silent era.” Dolores told me once that her star-struck mother, who collected fan magazines, named her after Dolores del Rio. I might have misremembered it. It could well have been Dolores Costello, “the fragile blond beauty of the silent era.” The dates are spooky – July 11 was Dolores’s birthday; July 13 was the day she died.

  Dolores, not Delores. Like “El Grito de Dolores,” as her friend Louis Lane said, “with an o, as it should be.”

  Last, in a manila envelope no bigger than a business card, Dolores had kept a gold cap from one of her teeth.

  *

  August 8, Friday.

  Passover is a week away.

  August 11

  “Poetry is the ashes of something that is burning well.” – Eliezer Cohen –
  Leonard Cohen was called Eliezer Cohen in the Sinai, when he played for Israeli soldiers during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Songs incubated during the time of that war were performed forty years later in concert halls and stadiums.

  *

  August 13, 2022

  My mother would have been 101 today. In her last years, at 94 and 95 and 96, she enjoyed declaring that she saw no reason to keep living. Why am I still here, she would say. My father, on the other hand, wanted to live to 100. He told me so. His decline disappointed him. As I write this, I am trying to remember the year of his death. 2013? I have to look at the obituary, which I wrote and can still find online. He died at 94. Born January 20, 1916. Died in August 2010.

  In Rabbi Haim Halevy Donin’s book To Pray As A Jew, Chapter 11, I find an explanation of the origin and meaning of amen:

  “The Hebrew word amen has entered almost every language in the world and is today one of the most universally known words. It is also one of the most ancient, originating in the Torah as a response of affirmation. In Deuteronomy 27:16-26, we find a series of pronouncements by the Levites to which the people respond “Amen.” The Book of Chronicles I (16:35) clearly shows that at the time of King David, the second king of Israel (c. 1000 B.C.E.), the people responded with “Amen” upon hearing the blessing, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from now and until all eternity.” The diligent reader who wishes to find “Amen” elsewhere in the Bible should see Numbers 5:22; Kings I 1:36; Psalms 41:14; Jeremiah 11:5, 28:6; and Nehemiah 5:13….” Rabbi Donin helpfully adds, perhaps for that reader a hundred years from now who might never enter a house of worship, but is reading To Pray As A Jew anyway, “The accent is on the second syllable.”

  I’m struggling to enjoy Rabbi Donin’s book and am likely to abandon it. Before I do, I am continuing with the Amen paragraph: “The Talmudic sages saw great significance in this word. Hanina stressed that the three Hebrew letters that make up the word “Amen” stand for the three Hebrew words El Melekh Ne’eman, (“God, Faithful King”). As such “Amen” is an acknowledgment of the yoke of the Divine Kingdom (Shabbat 119b).”

  Aleph, mem, nun – Amen. The yokes on you, unless you know your Hebrew alphabet, and that the transliterated El represents a Hebrew word that begins with an aleph.

  24 August

  Debra’s birthday today. We were in California two days ago, then flew yesterday back to Dallas. On the plane, I made a list of writing projects, potential subjects, not so much a to-do list as a think-about-doing list, though some of the entries are already underway or even completed:
  Revise my journals and collected materials. Throw out anything that needs to be discarded.
  Select from forty years of poems, to find a handful worth keeping.
  Revise John Stone and Meter Reading, and then complete Berry Wars, Patrick Wheeler, Eden, and Dolores.
  Consider other essays about early friendships – the rock fireplace in Greg Kirchoff’s house, the James Bond poster in Karen Kirchoff’s bedroom, playing chemin de fer with Peter Meyer, a chisel for shop class, Richard Levine and his tuning fork, body surfing in Playa del Rey, watching the Apollo landing with Richard Heine, the competition for school grades, a Valentine for Penny Borax, practicing classical guitar with Mr. Martinez, Phil from Sportsville, tennis with Coach White, my garage band, Richard Kaufield, Clark Schenz, busing tables at Jim Marin’s Bar Melody, soda fountains, newspaper routes.
  Write about Berkeley – Mari, Peter Whaley, Bill Stixrude, Lew Porter.
  Write about my months in New York, hitchhiking on the highway, Jacqueline Coral, the fifth floor walkup at 111 W. 89th.
  Paris – Laura Elithorpe, Rise Goren, Marie Strelin, Catherine Demongeot, Dante’s Paradiso, and Maroc stickers on a book of Whitman’s poems
  Work life – KERA, Santa Fe, decades at SullivanPerkins. It’s most of my life, and seems to have the least resonance.
  Marriages and other relationships, real and imagined – from Dolores to Pam, and then Jocelyn, Debra, Arlene, Gigi, and back to May Stein, Dolly, Gloria.
  Traveling – China, Thailand, Japan, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Russia, Romania
  Kinship – Ben and his discontents.
  So many subjects and the stages on which life is performed; I was strutting for a while, though I never thought of myself as an actor.
  All the above in eighteen months? That won’t be nearly enough time. I could let the time determine what I do, rather than the reverse. Stop when time’s up.
  Create a website as a storage place for these writing exercises, this practice. If there’s something worth keeping on a shelf, then self-publish it.
  .
  The goal? After hundreds of thousands of words, to learned how to write clearly, even artfully, and to refine a writing habit.

  And then, to take on something grand. But, this time, with the intention from the start of creating it for a real reader, someone who will turn a real page.

  *

  August 21-23. Debra and I were in California. I suggested it as a trip for her birthday. I planned to be gone four days, but Debra preferred to be home in Southlake on the 24th, which is her birthday. So, rather than being together in Ocean Hills, Debra willl be in the local restaurant that evening, drinking with her girlfriends – Falah, Pam, Carolyn, Cynthia — those who, like her, are nearing seventy, or are beyond it. The “girls” do these happy hours once a week. They are so pleased that the much younger bartender recognizes them. Being on a first-name basis with the servers – they really do like that. It’s better than being in California.

  *

  I’ve waited until the last hour of the day to something down on paper. My every other breath is a yawn. I’m resisting bed, sleep, and dreaming. And what is my dream, exactly? It’s about being a writer. Not writing, but being.

  Failure is like the unhappy family that is unhappy in its own way. There are so many varieties of it. There’s the failure of the moon to come from behind the cloud. There’s the tobacco in the bowl fails to stay lit. There’s the failure that can be forestalled, but is inevitable, the cookie’s failure to stay crisp after I dip it into a cup of hot tea. One of my favorite sayings asserts that every man judges himself a failure sooner or later. The manager failed to become a doctor, the doctor failed to manage a business, and the one without ambition failed to even try, though that might have been wisdom.

  What makes failure so variable, or so frustrating to define? It could be the lack of a standard for it. There’s more of a consensus about success. Success has rules. There’s the obvious, the yardstick that uses simple material measurements. But there are also alternatives that are respectable. For example, “leave the world a little better than you found it.” Or, “be satisfied with what you have.”

  If it’s true that my reach truly should exceed my grasp, then I can even succeed by failing.

  *

  More of the flight home from San Diego. I had my aisle seat, which is something I’ve insisted on, after a flight years ago following Dolores’s death, when I had a panic attack on an airplane and could not stay seated. I had to stand in the back of the plane, explaining myself to an understanding flight attendant, though I didn’t understand it myself.

  That’s in the past. It’s years ago. But the habits of boarding last, avoiding walking with a crowd down the passageway to the plane, and always booking an aisle seat have remained. I don’t take lorazepam pre-flight any more. I still do want the air on, though, because the temperature of the plane as I’m waiting for takeoff seems to matter. Too warm, not good.

  On this flight, there was a young child. He might have been four years old. He was fine with the window seat in the row in front of me. This child commented on everything, and he didn’t seem to hear a difference between talking and shouting. His mother told him to use his “inside voice.” Like all such corrections, it didn’t last, but I thought the phrase was charming.
  “Use your inside voice.”
  I already know how to be quieter in public. I don’t remember having any lessons, but I suppose it was something that I needed to learn.

  *

  What are you to make of your life, if you believe that your life is already made?

  That’s Ben. He can’t cut flour and sugar from his diet, even though he wants to lose weight. He can’t learn simple computer programming, because it’s not for him. Whatever he does, whatever he’s unable to do, he says it’s just who he is. Debra’s the same. Everything she does, it’s because that’s the way she is. The difference is that, unlike Ben, she also loves to affirm her satisfaction with the way she is. it’s not enough for her to just declaim an inability to change, she wants to insist that she has no interest in changing. No need to try to learn about something new. No need to try to appreciate something new. What she doesn’t like, she’s happy not to like.
  She’s proud.
  Unwilling to go to La Boheme because it’s not in English?
  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Ben, on the other hand, is very unhappy with who he is. So it is all the more debilitating for him to say, “This is who I am.” It’s a confession of helplessness. It’s succumbing to depression. It is also a false consciousness.

  He has the damaging belief that he has no control over his own decisions. Or that he could not change his feelings by changing his behavior.

  *

  Where there’s no forgiveness, there is no love. I’m thinking about Eden. She is unable to forgive me. And I don’t even know what crime was committed. Or perhaps she’s just indifferent. When Ben asked her why she wanted no further contact with me, she told him it was because I didn’t love her. Would that be a reason, even if it were true? I would think just for the sake of our past or the experiences we shared, we might enjoy each other’s company.
  But maybe not.

  Does she only speak to someone if that person loves her? It must be hard to answer in the grocery story, when the cashier or a bagger asks if she prefers paper or plastic.

  *

  A windfall is the fruit you pick up off the ground.

  *

  We are in the belly of the world, as in the tube of an airplane. Some of us may be in business class, but still, an infant on board is screaming.

  *

  The laws of transferring objects on the Sabbath from one domain to another, private to public, and all the talk of open fields, walled courtyards, alleys bounded on three sides, all these tamudic discussions, these are of concern to those who concern themselves with dotted i’s and crossed t’s. Talmud can be frustrating. It can also be infuriating. I don’t want to believe that what seems trivial can be critical, that what seems so superficial might matter deeply, even though that is a lesson from everyday life.
  It is something I rebel against.

  *

  How to distinguish one day from another after my children have gone their own ways, and my craft isn’t needed, and there are creases in my skin, and my desire is diminishing?
  Is this a challenge, or just life as it is?

  The emptiness of the day confines me. So I use deadlines as lifelines. I make a list in the morning, and go shopping for meaning, crossing off the items as I go down the aisles of hours.

  In this neighborhood, which is a village of mansions, there’s always the sunlight on the swimming pools. There are gates and rules.

  When there is no apparent reason for unhappiness, I can declare it incurable.

  *

  Wislawa Szymborska was born in Prowent, Poland. She moved to Krakow when she was eight years old, and she died there, ninety-eight years old. Her father was the steward to a Polish count, which sounds like an occupation in a storybook. Her biography continues. She avoided deportation. She went to university after the war. Married a poet. Divorced later. Was a Communist and supported show trials, and renounced Stalin only much later. The Polish “l” in her name has a slash in it. I understand that it is pronounced like the w in wool. Her name, Wislawa, is the feminine of Wislaw, which means great glory.

  *

  I thought I was writing poetry all these years. But looking back, I wasn’t. I was keeping a journal.

  *

  I have discovered Nicolai Berdyaev and read his short book or long essay Christianity and Antisemitism. Remarkable for its clarity, but also for the fact that it was written in 1938; it shows clearly how the coming murder of six million did not come out of nowhere. So many logs were being thrown on the fire. The fire was stoked in Germany, but wood was piled throughout Russia and Europe as well. I am reading a translation of course, so can’t judge the eloquence of the original, but it reminds me, although it is less elevated, of the James Baldwin essay Letters from a Region in My Mind. Baldwin says that the whites don’t need to learn to love the blacks; rather, he writes, the “Negro problem” will disappear when whites learn to love themselves, because the “Negro problem” will then no longer be needed. Berdyaev makes a similar point about Christians. The “Jewish problem” will disappear, if the Christian will look within and find the strength to be Christian.

  His book demonstrates a truth that is routinely omitted in documentaries about the Holocaust. In the typical filmed interview, the historian or the witness will say that the world could not believe the reports of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe – so unbelievable was the crime, it could not be believed. But this cannot be true. Read Nicolai Berdyaev. Not only could everyone believe it, anyone could see it coming.

  *

  Better to have someone than no one, just as it’s better to be breathing, to be above ground instead of below it, to be one body rather than scattered ashes and bits of bone.

  *

  There is nothing in my experience that isn’t common. Even the details are duplicates, they are multiples of the lives of others. It’s the arrangement of detail that is unique, and about even that I have my doubts, just as others have had theirs.

  *

  This is a notebook I have been keeping all my life, and it has been keeping me. As I re-read it, I am revising some of it. Unlike my life, I can do that, I can revise. And where improvement seems beyond my skill, I can tear pages out, one by one. Tearing them to pieces. Some of the pages I should set on fire. Or delete this word, or sentence, or paragraph. That, too, is nothing I can do in life.

  *

  In Los Angeles there are dream workshops. I’ve read about them. The “creatives” in Hollywood, actors, scriptwriters, “swear” by them. So, what about my dreams? In my dreams there is a house that is always grand, but in disrepair. It’s a big project and an even bigger disappointment. I have the sense in that dream that I’ve made a terrible mistake – I had the home I wanted, but I left it for this damaged mansion I find myself in. In the back of this broken dream house is a yard as big as a meadow. I can see into its shadows. It will never be made right, never completed.

  Why did I buy it? I’ve made a very bad decision. I left the home I had, for this house that will never be home.

  Not much interpretation needed for this particular recurring dream. It is in fact exactly what has happened.

  I could argue that it is a pattern that has happened to me over and over. No wonder I am processing it in my dreams.

  August 2022

  An email from Chabad.org today – copying it here, with minor revisions – to immerse myself in the wisdom of it:
  See that I am giving to you today a blessing and a curse. (Deuteronomy 11:26)
  Why see? Blessings and curses are heard, not seen.
  Perhaps the verb “see” is encouragement to look deeper, to see a blessing within every challenge, even within what seems to be a curse.
  If I step back, and close my eyes, I can see deeper within it Gd’s outstretched arm drawing me towards Him.
  August 29
  Reading an article online from JStor about incense clocks in the 1600s. In China, fire and incense were used to tell time, which makes sense – it’s a bit like carbon-dating, using a process of continuous decay.
  According to historian Andrew B. Lieu, incense has been used to measure time since at least the 6th century, when the poet Yu Jianwu wrote: By burning incense we know the o’clock of the night/With graduated candle we confirm the tally of the watch.
  It’s a timing by combustion. It involves trays, a pan of wood ashes, an incense trail, and stencils to create labyrinths, with longer paths to be burned through the winter nights and shorter in the summer. Seems very ingenious. No gears, no springs, and no ticking.
  The article explains:
  “To track smaller intervals of time, small markers were placed at regular points along the path. Some versions had little chimneys that were dispersed across the tray, allowing the hour to be read based on which hole the smoke was venting through. And some users may have used different kinds of incense at different parts of the path, or inserted scented chips along the way, so that they could tell the time with just a sniff.
  “But just in case the scent of sandalwood wasn’t enough of an alert, people also contrived to create incense-based alarm clocks. A dragon-shaped fire clock offers a particularly beautiful example. The dragon’s elongated body formed an incense trough, across which stretched a series of threads. Small metal balls were attached to opposite ends of the threads. Dangling below the dragon’s belly, their weight held the threads taut. As the incense burned down, the heat broke the threads, freeing the balls.”
  Bottom of Form
  Here’Here’s another description of incense clocks written by Father Gabriel de Magalhaen, a Jesuit missionary to China in the mid-1660s. These clocks were “…lighted at the bottom end, from which the smoke issued slowly and faintly, following all the turns which have been given to this coil of powdered wood, on which there are ordinarily five marks to distinguish the five parts of the evening or night. This method of measuring time is so accurate and certain that no one has ever noted a considerable error. The literate, the travelers, and all those who wish to arise at a precise hour for some affair, suspend at the mark which they wish to arise at, a small weight which, when the fire has arrived at this spot, invariably falls into a basin of brass which has been placed below it, and which awakens the sleeper by the noise which it makes in falling. This invention takes the place of our alarm clocks, with the difference that they are very simple and extremely inexpensive…”
  *
  September 7, 2022
  Returning today to a stack of items from Dolores’s saved papers. She must have saved for the usual reasons. She wanted a record, she wanted to remember.
  Did she realize there is never enough time in the present to review the past?
  Among the “treasures”:
  A seller’s statement, May 27, 1986, for the sale of 819 Elsbeth, her mother’s home in Oak Cliff, to G.W. Richardson. Selling price, $50,031.51. And who was G. W. Richardson? What I remember, Sue Benner’s former boyfriend Daryl bought the house, which he was going to restore. It was a happy day for me, to be rid of it.
  My Application for A Place on the Democratic Party General Primary Ballot. January 30, 1986. I ran for Precinct Chair, precinct 1181. I won by the vote of one to nothing. Since I didn’t vote for myself, Dolores must have elected me.
  A spread from The Dallas Morning News. Monday, February 14, 1994. She saved the Heart To Heart Lines spread in the classifieds. Hundreds of people purchased Valentine’s Day messages. Dolores outlined in red marker the rectangle with our message in it. She drew a red arrow to it as well. To Our Valentines. BEN & EDEN P. WE LOVE YOU MOM & DAD. There’s a pink heart in our box as well. The entire spread is littered with them.
  An envelope addressed to Frances Burch. On the Mother’s Day card inside, “Love you” is written after the printed message, and “your favorite daughter, Dolores.” In parentheses: “& son-in-law Mark.”
  April 29, 1986. A letter from the Governor’s office. Inside, on Linda Gale White stationery: “Dear Dolores. Thanks so much for hosting the reception given…”
  January 19, 1997, an article about Hillcrest from the local People newspaper. “At Hillcrest Academy, students’ integrity and self-esteem flourish.” Dolores was diagnosed with colon cancer a month later.
  An Event Proposal from The Verandah Club. It says it’s for “Dire Birthday Reception,” Thursday, November 9, 1995. Poor Dolores. She was zealous in the preservation of her name in newspapers, on leaflets, and in programs. But her first name was often misspelled, and here it’s the last. This proposal was for the “surprise party” for my birthday, which Dolores arranged. Fresh fruit presentation, specialty cheese presentation, Caesar salad (pre-tossed), vegetable crudite, pasta station, chicken piccata, ice tea, 20 bottles of wine/champagne – $1415.26 for food, $1527.94 estimated beverage cost. Wasn’t this the surprise party for my fortieth birthday? But I would have been forty-three that evening, almost forty-four, unless the 5 in 1995 was also a typo.
  March/April 1994 edition of Mental Health Matters. This was the newsletter of the Mental Health Association of Greater Dallas. Dolores is on Page 3 as one of the Prism Award winners. She won the Pamela Blumenthal Memorial Award for Outstanding Mental Health Professional. On the back page of the newsletter, I’m listed, too, on the Board of Directors.
  A letter from Regina Perkins, July 1996. “Hi – thought you might be interested in this brochure of our Alaska trip – This trip is kind of like when I joined the Marines – I couldn’t believe I actually did it until the day I left L.A. for boot camp – anyway I’m looking forward to it and I hope Dad is, too, although he says no – He will miss TV, but I think he’ll survive – just think about all that food available on the ship. I hope you are better by now Dolores – I did write to Ben and I think camp will be a great experience for him -take care of yourselves and maybe I’ll have a lot to tell you when I return – Love, Mom.“ All of this so typical of my mother. She was never able to mention my father without some kind of disparagement. As for Ben’s time at camp, he hated it. It was Camp Young Judea. Ben still remembers the awful bullying, which only stopped when he punched one of the bullies. And in July 1996, Dolores was not better; she was at the beginning of worse to come.
  A letter from Roberta Nutt, November 1986. It’s a letter to support the nomination of Dolores for the Women’s Center of Dallas “Women Helping Women” award, which Dolores did not win. Roberta included a copy of the questionnaire she had filled in as part of her response to a request for comments and biographical data. “Dolores’s personal life also demonstrates commitment to freedom of choices and growth for women,” she wrote. “Changed her own life from traditional housewife to practicing professional. Began a second family in a nontraditional dual career marriage. Valuable role model to other women.” I suppose in some ways it’s true, our marriage was “nontraditional.”
  Dolores circled “Sullivan Perkins Inc” in a Dallas Business Journal article that appeared at the end of November, 1996. The article was about the merger of two printing companies, and SullivanPerkins was only mentioned, but she cut it out with a scissors to preserve it. She was ninety days away from her colon cancer diagnosis.
  A certificate, Summer, 1997: “One Tree has been planted in the NFTY Forest in memory of Delores Dyer by Melanie Stein.” At the top, in Hebrew and English: “It is a tree of life to them who hold fast to it.”
  In a Ziploc bag. Clos Pegase Napa Valley summer 1995 newsletter; a birthday card from Laverne, “Mrs. Dyer, I hope you have a Bday and is able to forget all your problems and enjoy the day. I wanted you to know that I love you and hope you have many more happy birthdays”; a program from Cliburn at the Caravan 1995 Summer Concert Series, July 11, 1995, Sergio and Odair Assad Duo-Guitar; a receipt from Le Chardonnay in Dallas, Food and Beverage $500; a business card from Le Chardonnay on Forest Park Boulevard in Fort Worth – Michel Baudoin – Dolores wrote on it, “Jean Claude’s brother” and “$500 for 10 chairs”; a thank you note from David Adelson, after we attended his graduation in California; a Happy Birthday card from Mike & Carolyn; a birthday card from her grandson, Michael – “I love you Dodo.” Also, a birthday card from Gwen Ferrell, her once-upon-a-time neighbor at the Tecali Apartments on Cedar Springs. Gwen, who was one of the many injured birds that Dolores nursed, moved to Phoenix where her father and wicked stepmother lived. She turned the birthday card into an extended chat. “I can’t remember when we last talked,” she wrote on the card,
  “but Albert is out here now and committed to our relationship. I have had a really bad posterior nosebleed, but hopefully it (and 20 iron shots later) is over. Am very happy and hope you Mark and kids are okay. PS would Mark have a copy of the Sesquicentennial magazine with his article in it? Daddy took mine and Polly will not return it!”
  Also in the Ziploc, one more card, an elaborate one, with a folded crafted heart and colored threads, “To the Perkins Dyer family, 2-95, very special friends Happy Valentines – Pam and Jason.” A year after Dolores died, Pam asked me to go to an event in Fort Worth, and life unfolded from there. Unfolded? Unraveled.
  Dolores’s Plan-A-Month for July 1996 – all the squares are devoted to Eden and Ben. Ben is in Scouts, Eden at the Dallas Theater Center. Pick up Ben at 12, take to painting at 1. Pick up Eden at 2:30. Ben was in Camp Young Judea from July 16 to August 6, the nightmare that my mother thought “will be a great experience for him.” Eden had piano at 2 pm on Monday, July 22. She went to camp on Monday July 29; the note Dolores put on the calendar says “Bus at airport 10-12.” The calendar is a tasting menu of things we provided, in the hope that these activities would provide “a great experience.” For Ben in particular, and mostly for Eden as well, nothing came out as planned.
  September 11, 2022

  From the Maria Popova newsletter. It used to be called Brainpickings, but she renamed it Marginalia:
  “The desire for our own far-off country is the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence. The secret also pierces with such sweetness that, when in very intimate conversation, a mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; it’s the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell.”

  This is a quoted excerpt from biologist and physician Lewis Thomas, one of Popova’s many favorites. In her newsletter, she’s on a first name basis with him. Not sure why I printed this passage out or what I found it meaningful in it. Popova continues with an introduction to a further quote: “As Lewis considers the illusory nature of these shorthands for our longing, we are left with the radiant intimation that ‘the thing itself’ is not something we reach for, something beyond us, but something we are:” She then quotes Lewis: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing…They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found…”

  So the passage is about longing, and our confusion about the source of this longing, and it asks us to think about what we are longing for.

  *

  September 15, 2022

  However many years anyone may live, let him rejoice in them all – Kohelet. 11:8

  It takes moral courage to grieve. It takes religious courage to rejoice – Kierkegaarde

  I tear out things that interest me. I print out paragraphs. I fold up pieces of paper and insert them into books I might or might not open in the future. They are buried treasure. Or bromides, like the message in a fortune cookie. Or the cheap plastic prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Whichever it is, I found one today with an illustration by Tom Seidman-Freud. From June 18, 2014 – “With her husband, Yankel Seidmann and the famous Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, Freud established Ophir, a publishing company that produced Hebrew children’s books. Ophir’s bankruptcy led to Yankel’s suicide, worsening Freud’s own debilitated mental state. She ended her own life four months later, at the age of 38.”

  Tom Seidman-Freud, who was Sigmund Freud’s niece, was born Marta, but at age 15 she chose to be called Tom. She was apparently a very talented painter and illustrator. In Munich, she knew S.Y. Agnon and Gershom Scholem. She and Agnon teamed up on a project to produce an illustrated Hebrew alphabet for children, although the project evaporated. In 1921, she fell in love with Yaakov Seidmann, who had published a book of excerpts from The Zohar, which he translated himself into German. They had a daughter together, Angela. She, Yaakov and Bialik formed Ophir. She did stencil and colored pencil illustrations and chose the German text for the books, and Bialik translated into Hebrew. But Bialik abandoned the venture. After he left for Israel in 1924, the publishing company failed. Yankel Seidman despaired. In 1929, Tom and seven-year-old Angela came home to find Yankel hanging by a rope from the ceiling. Tom was destroyed. She stopped eating. She was hospitalized. Her uncle Sigmund came to care for her, but it did not help. She starved herself to death.

  September 21, 2022

  Joyce Tines had an affair with famous country singer Charley Pride. Joyce was a former Braniff stewardess and part of Dolores’s circle of friends. We would visit her, and sometimes when Charley was there, at her small house on Hanover. I saw an article in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News about the son they had together, Tyler Tines, or Tyler Pride.

  “Tyler Pride and his wife Charity share a daughter born to the two of them. But Tyler said he had adopted his wife’s son from a previous relationship, and together, the couple have adopted three additional children. The ages of the five are 14, 11, 5, 20 months and 3 months.
  ‘It’s never-ending at our house,’ Tyler Pride said with a laugh. ‘It’s constant chaos. Everybody’s going 32 different directions, which makes life fun.’”
  When the story first broke in 2021, The Dallas Morning News reported that a Texas court had used the results of a DNA test in 1992, when Tyler was 13, to decree that Charley Pride was the biological father of Tyler Tines. The court ordered that the boy’s surname be changed to Pride. So, Tyler’s legal name became Tyler Tines Pride. Smith County District Court “ordered that Charley Pride pay back child support of $92,000 and begin making additional support payments to Joyce Ann Tines, Tyler Pride’s mother, of $4,000 a month — until Tyler turned 18.”

  Yesterday’s article continues:

  “During our reporting in 2021, we made efforts to reach Tyler’s mother, who did not respond to voicemails or text messages.
  On Tuesday, we reached out to the attorney for Charley Pride’s widow but did not hear back.”
  *
  Friday, September 22
  Rosh Hashanah this Sunday.
  I saw Jane Manaster for coffee this morning. We’ve have been doing for some time. It’s burdensome. Jane is typically wounded by my fatigue with her constant querying about my personal life – about Ben, Debra, etc. She pushes, and I tell her to stop. We meet at La Madeline at 8:15, and when I get up to leave, no matter that we have been at the table for two hours, she acts as though I’ve rudely cut her off.
  I stopped at Central Market to shop for the upcoming week — salmon, vegetables, what I need in order to provide Ben a healthy dinner four nights a week, after we return from walking together at the track in University Park. When I get home, I find an email from Jane. She’s written me an apology, telling me about her son, Rex, who’s in his forties who is an attorney and a meth addict. I write back to her:
  Jane – I’m sure it’s in part my own failings that make me uncomfortable talking to you about my personal relationships.  I’ve always been a bit remote from others.  You aren’t the first to point this out and to complain about it.   Yes, my son loves me, and I love him; my sister loves me as well.  As have any number of other people.  Mother, father, wives, girlfriends, each in their way.  And there are those who like me. The degree varies from close childhood friends, to Dallas friends, to Emir who works at the dry cleaners.   Then there’s the larger number of people who admire me — most of the earlier group, plus many more.  From there, it goes to those who tolerate me – my employees, and others over the years. And then the vastly larger number of those who are indifferent (Temple Emanu-El staff, for example).  As far as those actively disliking me, that’s a number approaching zero, but it does include my one-time daughter, so I have that to digest as an unredeemed personal experience.   What I’ve found over many years is that being alone and taking care of myself is something I can do and something I want to do.  

  *

  Debra came to Dallas last night so we could go to see Al Franken, who was at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff for the Ernie Kovacs Award presentation. It’s my friend Bart Weiss’s show. Saturday night, we’re going to a Rangers game. The Cleveland Indians – oops, Guardians – are in town. Cleveland is Debra’s town, so it’s her team. Main goal these days for my encounters with Debra? To have as little unpleasantness as possible, despite her desire to confront whatever isn’t to her liking. She gives little thought to how nice it might be if she only kept her feelings to herself. She doesn’t like “the look on my face,” so she says, “What’s wrong with you.” And she says it in a tone of voice that I don’t hear as loving concern, but only as rebuke, or even contempt.

  *

  September 28. I’ve printed out another passage from Maria Popova’s newsletter, this one about “commonplace books.” She praises W.H. Auden’s book A Certain World, which I bought as a used paperback but have not read through. My used copy is falling apart. It’s held together with a rubber band, though the seller, through Amazon, described its condition as “good.” “Long before there was the Internet,” Popova writes, “there was the commonplace book, a creative and intellectual ledger of fragmentary inspirations, which a writer would collect from other books and copy into a notebook, often alongside his or her reflections and riffs.” And also: “Partway between medieval florilegium and modern-day Tumblr, the commonplace book has been particularly beloved by poets, whose business is the revelation of wholeness through the fragmentary.”

  That has been my business, too – the fragmentary. I have yet to get around to wholeness, much less to anything that might be called revelation.

  I need to look up “florilegium,” which I’m guessing must be some kind of flower catalog.

  *

  I do most of my writing so late at night, sometimes after one in the morning. Late at night here in Dallas, but it is morning in Jerusalem. What is poetry other than prayer? So much of it is a song of praise,

  *

  September 29

  Reading about Benjamin Peixotto. Benjamin Franklin Peixotto was appointed in 1870 by President Grant as the new American consul in Bucharest. He went to Romania to push on the local government to improve conditions for Jews. Anti-Jewish persecutions were intensifying. In 1877, the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire, creating modern Romania. Pogroms and restrictions followed – Jews could not be lawyers, Jews were not citizens, etc. This is the majority culture one of my grandfathers fled– Isaac Reegler, born in Pietra Neamt, in the northeast of newly independent Romania, around 1880.

  *

  September 30 2022

  Found this last night in a article from Meir Soloveichik:

  Neither will we say anymore to the work of our hands, ye are our gods. Hosea, 14:3

  Today, Friday morning, I went to my regular coffee with Jane. I am thoroughly tired of her. She seems to need to tell me how she feels about me, which is depressing, this elderly woman, in her eighties probably, wanting to confess her affection for me. Every time I say it’s time to leave, she asks for more time. Then, as I’m saying goodbye, she asks “Will I see you again?” It is ridiculous. Jane, I want to say, since can’t you be a younger woman, go find yourself an older man. After coffee, I went grocery shopping at Central Market. I bought swordfish and salmon and shrimp, so I will have food for Ben’s dinner tonight and next week. We are leaving for a long drive to Oceanside on Thursday. That’s the day after Yom Kippur. As I drive back from grocery shopping, I get a call from Ben. He tells me he’s at house. “Now?” I say. It’s only 10:30 in the morning. I’m presuming he’s had some upset at work, and he’s left the office, but this time it’s more than that. When I get home with the groceries. Ben tells me that Brett has fired him. Or, laid him off. He has been paid through today and has a check for unpaid vacation. Ben says the amount is less than he should get, but he “doesn’t care.” He has a severance letter to sign by next Thursday in order to receive his $2,000 severance. I tell him he also should have a 90-day payment coming, which I negotiated, but when I look at the sales agreement while he’s here, I realize that I’ve misunderstood. The 90-day payment is only if Ben was let go within the first 90 days after the sale. The sale was eight months ago. Ben stays for 30 minutes, then goes home. His back is hurting him, he’s not sure he can walk with me tonight, around the track at University Park, as we planned. I tell him to come over for dinner anyway. Either way, walking on the track or not, come over for dinner. My guess is he won’t.

  I’m sad this new, hurtful challenge in his life has happened, however inevitable I know it was. There has not been enough work for Ben at SullivanPerkins for several years. He hates his job in any case. So this is, in theory, “an opportunity” – better a possible good, a new job, than the certain evil of staying where he doesn’t want to be. But none of that is how he thinks, of what has happened. He doesn’t feel that way about it. Not today, and probably not for a long time, and maybe never.

  October 10, 2022

  A scrap of paper. It says “20% OFF.” It’s from the DrGreenRX cannabis dispensary that we went to in Vista. It was Ben’s only plan for California. He looked forward to it. Thinking about buying marijuana kept him cheerful, if he was ever cheerful, on the long ride to California. When we finally arrived in Vista, the DrGreenRX parking lot was our first stop. First stop, after a twelve- hour drive from the Comfort Inn in El Paso, day two of the trip. And even before we stopped at the house on Delos Way in Ocean Hills. But when Ben went inside DrGreenRX, security would not let him in the store. He needed to show a driver’s license to enter, and his license had expired. So, I became the designated buyer. I went in, using a shopping list he provided. I’m registered now at DrGreenRX. As a new customer, I will be entitled next time to 20% OFF.

  *

  16 October

  A discouraging ten days with Ben. Back yesterday, Sunday. Four of the days or our trip were spent mostly in silence, driving. Two days to Oceanside, two days back to Dallas. An overnight each way at the Comfort Inn in El Paso. Very little comfort there, or elsewhere, though Mika did come with us. Taking care of my dog make not be fulfilling, but she does not bite me the way an unhappy child does. I spent much of my six other days on the patio at the house in Ocean Hills. For these ten days, my main job in life was not to let it get me down.

  A lot of reading and time to myself in California. Much of it on the small screen of my cellphone, or on the laptop I brought with me. Articles from Flipboard, which is an app that consolidates what it thinks might be of interest to me. So, while Ben slept or smoked cannabis or otherwise avoided me, other than for meals, I was guilty of being interested in reading about a spray-on dress worn by pro-Palestinian beauty Bella Hadid.  Also, an article titled “All about the Etrog,” which came with a photograph of a silver etrog case. To judge from what Flipboard sends me, my interests are incongruous. I was served stories about “Twitter Cavafy.” The use of the word “reckoning” as a way to talk about history and grievances.  Annie Ernaux’s love affair and her book about it. An article by E. L. Doctorow’s granddaughter. A very dull short piece in the Christian Science Monitor, by a journalist who keeps all his paper documents. I also learned that Vladimir Putin is 70. He could be my barely younger brother.

  All of this was done to fill time, while Ben vapes marijuana or smokes it from a small glass pipe or plays World of Warcraft. Little has changed for him in the past twenty years, other than his weight. He’s now morbidly obese. He’s in such poor physical condition he’s unwilling to go walking in the neighborhood; even the most modest inclines at Ocean Hills are too much for him. What can I do? I can “stay positive,” I can “be supportive.” This is a rough equivalent for doing nothing, or so it can seem. I can’t help him much. And he seems even less able to help himself. He’s miserable. Ben is so unhappy he doesn’t even realize how much he mistreats me by his sullen temper. He certainly isn’t able to wonder if he might help me. With the cleanup on Delos, for example; or with Mika, or with a suitcase that isn’t his, or by making even a small effort to combat the dullness of the ten-hour drives, which he could relieve somewhat by talking or by being willing to listen. If I don’t speak, he will go the entire ten hours without a word. When I do speak, he gives back as little as humanly possible. A yes, a no. If I ask for an opinion, simply to draw him out, he responds, “I have no idea.” He knows I’m testing him, and he is happy to fail the test. Auras of hostility float around him, so palpable they are all but visible. His deep unhappiness is meanness on its surface. I think to myself, shouldn’t this be fun? The drives, the vacation? Couldn’t it be something rich, the two of us spending this time together? But he doesn’t have it in him. And, faced with his resistance, I apparently don’t either. He doesn’t shower. So, he smells. He doesn’t brush his teeth. In the confines of a car, I notice his bad breath. Coming and going, we share the room in El Paso. Two queen beds, but it is difficult to sleep near him. His troubled breathing is louder than any snoring I have ever heard. He gets up at different hours in the night and sits in a chair with his vape pen. I suppose he’s doing what he can, medicating for his anxiety, his self-loathing, his loneliness and sorrow.

  When I do get home late Saturday, and after Ben leaves, I shower. I buy a roasted chicken at the Tom Thumb on Inwood for Mika, and I drive over to Debra’s. She’s glad to see me but has nothing to offer me. No ability to offer comfort. I’m not sure she understands what that might be. I tell her how troubled I am, my worries about Ben, how difficult it is to spend time with him. She answers that I made the decision to marry someone much older than I was, and that was my mistake. She suggests I “talk to someone,” which is the advice that people give. I’m talking to her. Clearly not a helpful thing to do. What she doesn’t think to say is that she’s sorry I’m hurting. Instead, she wants to tell me about her sister, who has pneumonia, and her mother, whose cornea is scratched. It’s important to know that these are difficult times for Debra, but that her recent visit to Denver was “most enjoyable.”

  *

  First Sunday back, and I’m doing well enough. I had canceled out on tennis, and I’m sorry that I did that. I didn’t know I’d be coming back to Dallas as soon as I did. Ben’s out of work, Mika was with me, I could have stayed months. But the trip was not a happy one, and being unhappy at home seemed best. I’ve come to some terms with my loneliness. I do try to appreciate Debra, since she is the one I have. But I find it more comforting to spend the morning opening the piles of mail and catching up on bills. In the afternoon I went by myself to the Winspear. I have my two tickets to the 2 pm last performance of Rigoletto, which the Israeli stage director has set in Italy in the thirties. It’s compelling. The hall is full. I don’t have my regular seats, since this is a Sunday. Instead, I’m in the center, but further back.

  I have my seat, and the one empty seat beside me, because Gigi was unable to go. She’s in Houston with her daughter. And as it turns out, I’m not totally okay. The hall is full, but I don’t want to be by myself in the crowd, surrounded and disconnected, single. I also tell myself I don’t want to struggle getting out of the parking garage. Easier, if I leave early, at the second intermission, and skip Act III. Using that logic, it would have been easiest to simply stay home. In any case, I drive home at the intermission. Sitting at my desk, I watch a YouTube performance of Rigoletto. There’s a wonderful one, a phenomenal filmed version of the opera, with a young Pavarotti as the corrupt Duke of Mantua. I learn that Act III is where La donna e mobile is sung.

  *

  Sunday isn’t over, but I’ve had enough of it and go to bed early. Around 11:30, which is late for her, Debra calls me. She is crying, choking — “David’s dead,” she says. I think she is talking about her ex-husband, David Edmonson, ex CEO of Radio Shack, who left Debra for the girlfriend his son’s age, had his vasectomy reversed, and now has two children and a new family. There’s a moment when I’m not entirely unhappy to hear this news. But no, it’s David her cousin, eleven years younger than she is. I know this David. He’s Dennis and Pat’s son, Danny’s brother, Mia’s father, and someone who has been at my house for holiday dinners. He was here just last Thanksgiving, sitting at the extension table I set up when there’s more than eight coming for a meal.
  What happened?
  He felt sick, then he felt sicker, then he took himself to the hospital, with pneumonia, and a breathing tube; and then days later he was dead.
  All of it a surprise.
  His parents never even knew that he had gone to the hospital. He told Mia, his sixteen-year-old daughter, not to tell them, that it was nothing to worry about.

  *

  November 11

  Veteran’s Day. Nanny’s birthday. And a rainy day in New York City. I met my sister at LaGuardia in the afternoon. We are here for my “birthday weekend.” Months ago, after I saw the new Tom Stoppard play Leopoldstaat advertised, I bought two tickets, so Debra and I could mark my birthday in New York. But then Debra said she couldn’t go. She already had a trial scheduled the week starting November 14 and could not leave town, not even for the weekend before. Billie Ellis told me she could try to get the trial postponed, so I asked her. No, no she wouldn’t, she couldn’t. So I made my plans to go anyway and asked my sister instead. As it turned out, the other side wanted to change the trial date, so the trial was postponed, but by then I had made all the arrangements with Patti. I also realized that I preferred to do something unusual – to spend time with my only sister, which I’ve never done – rather than come here with my disinterested girlfriend. I’ve had many trips with Debra. I’ve heard her complaints about the restaurants, the hotel rooms, the speed of the wifi, the heat or the cold many, many times. I was happy to not hear them again.

  November 11 – 13

  Patti was not just an easier guest, but a more appreciative one. I had booked us two rooms at the old Macklow on west 44th — where Dolores and I used to stay. It’s a Millennium hotel now. I also bought us two tickets for Traviata at the Met, which could not have happened if Debra had gone. So, plans were set. Arrive Friday, the 11th; Traviata Saturday night, and Leopoldstaat Sunday afternoon. Also, dinner after Leopoldstaat, somewhere special. Gail, a friend from Middlebury and my online Hebrew lessons, lives in Manhattan; she joined us for dinner, at Avra.

  What Patti and I did: From the airport Friday afternoon, we went by cab through Queens. Once we were in Manhattan, very congested traffic into Midtown. Our rooms wouldn’t be ready at the Millenium until four, so we checked our bags and walked down the street to the Algonquin for a very late lunch. Hamburgers, and far too filling. So, no need for dinner. Just checking in, a bit of a rest after a travel day, and then out exploring. We walked down 6th past Herald Square to a Target to buy an umbrella, and then to Grace on 32nd. Almost everyone at Grace was Japanese. It’s not an ethnic neighborhood, just the vibe of the place. Grace was all deserts – and wonderful.

  Saturday, I left the room first and went to a Starbucks. I brought Patti back a coffee with “whipping cream,” which was per her request. The rain was over. We walked to Hell’s Kitchen for a second coffee and a pastry at Standard, continued up the east side to Lincoln Center, then crossed the edge of Central Park, passing the statues of San Martin and Jose Marti – those liberators. We passed the Plaza. Patti had a blister already. So we found a CVS for band-aids. Not a good enough solution. Next stop, a Cole Hahn store, so she could buy a pair of comfortable shoes.

  It was walking weather. We went down Madison to visit the Morgan Library and had a late lunch there. On exhibit: the drawings that Antoine St. Exupery made in 1943, while he was staying with a friend in Manhattan and writing The Little Prince. I remember a beige hardbound copy of this book in high school, in Madam Charnes’ or Monsieur Desrosier’s class at Westchester. In the Morgan we also saw a medieval reliquary and portable altar in gold and enamel, 19 inches tall and 26 inches wide. Its label said that it contained pieces of the True Cross. It’s the Stavelot Triptych, the work of artists from the valley of the Meuse river. A goldsmith’s masterpiece, the small altar was made in 1156 at Stavelot Abbey, which is in present-day Belgium. J.P. Morgan bought it, the way I might buy a side table from Cantoni or online from Wayfair.

  After the Morgan, Patti and I took a cab down to 73 Eldridge on the Lower East Side, practically at the corner of Hester and Eldridge. According to the 1910 census, Isaac Reegler and Salli Hoffenburg had lived there. We wondered if our mother had been born on Eldridge in 1921; but I don’t think so, by then the family had moved to Queens, probably near the neighborhoods that Patti and I had been driven through in the cab on a rainy Friday from LaGuardia. As for 73 Eldridge, it’s now a parking lot. The street was full of shopfronts, all the signs in Chinese.

  We walked north for a few blocks, then caught a cab back to the hotel. That night we hailed an open “bicycle” cab to Lincoln Center for the opera. $1 for 5 minutes – it was an $80 ride.

  Sunday was November 13, my birthday. Once again I fetched Patti her Starbucks. She dawdled in her hotel room. When she was ready, we walked to Best Bagels, but since it was midmorning by the time we got there, the line was out the door, so we had to have breakfast wherever – which was at Andrew’s Diner, where the bagel was white bread. Ready to walk some more? We walked down to 10th and 30th to see Hudson Yards, and we took a hundred steps onto the windy path of the Highline. On the way to Hudson Yards, I dropped my new umbrella in a trash can. It wasn’t the souvenir I wanted. Instead, I was looking for the Alfred Dunhill shop in Hudson Yards, so I could buy myself my birthday present: a new, very overpriced lighter. It’s not exactly the same one I bought Pam in London, or the silver replacement I ordered after she left with the gold original. So be it. The small lighter I ordered will be a magic lamp – rub it, a cloud of memories rises from it. It’s coming, in the mail.

  Back to the hotel then, and to the late afternoon play, Leopoldstaat, which was the trip’s “precipitating event”; after the place dinner at Avra, and done.
  It was a very happy birthday. It did its only job, which is to be memorable.

  *

  Saturday, November 19

  In the days after I returned from New York, I did not feel well. On Saturday, I used one of the free home tests for COVID-19 that the federal government provided. I tested positive. I called my doctor, Roger Khetan. He said no need to double check; if the test is positive, that’s conclusive. I drove to CityDoc anyway. Confirmed, positive. Roger also said no need for Paxlovid with my mild symptoms. So I bought Mucinex A-D and Nyquil, as he suggested. I’ve been “feeling puny” ever since, though well enough to be thinking about Thanksgiving. I’m hosting again – Pat, Dennis, Danny, Mia, Debra’s relatives. Debra tells me not to even mention that I had COVID a week before.

  *

  I’m reading further in Wikipedia about the Stavelot Triptych that I saw at the Morgan Library on my trip to New York. It’s a world gone by – religion, diplomacy, hatreds, wars, and status-seeking: “The Benedictine monastery of Stavelot ruled the Principality of Stavelot-Malmedy, a small statelet in the Holy Roman Empire. We know that Prince-Abbot Wibald (1098-1158) was sent on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1254. It is theorized Wibald received the two smaller triptychs as diplomatic gifts from the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus. After his return from Byzantium, he commissioned Mosan artists to create the larger outer triptych. The triptych remained in the abbey until 1792, when the abbey was suppressed following the French Revolution. The abbey was abandoned; the principality was extinguished. The last prince-abbot, Celestin Thys, carried the triptych to Germany during the Napoleonic Wars, where it remained until 1910, when a London dealer purchased it and resold it to J.P. Morgan.”

  *

  November 24

  Thanksgiving Day. Debra did most of the cooking, I set up the table, snapped the beans, and cleaned up afterwards. My guests on Guernsey Lane: Dennis and Pat, their son Danny and his friend Kristin, his daughter Sam, and his brother’s daughter Mia – Mia’s father, David, is the brother who died.

  Ben would not come. I haven’t seen him for a week or so. He has fallen into one of the many pits that open underneath him from time to time.

  Friday, November 25
  The day after Thanksgiving.

  Ben didn’t come by to walk on the track, he didn’t come for leftovers. I’ve texted several times, earlier in the week and today. No response.

  *

  In an email from Chabad.org:
  “How to you fix a place, a problem, a person – anything at all? By rejecting the bad and embracing the good. But do you focus on the bad or the good? It depends. When the soul shines bright and strong, with just a few details out of place, then you can focus on discarding whatever bad remains. But when everything is amiss, when darkness rules, then to attack the disease could prove fatal. Then you have no choice but to seek out the precious sparks that have survived.”

  Thinking about this one, too, from Chabad the day before:
  “Healing is always an inside job. You can’t stay outside and make lasting change inside. So it is with every fellow traveler through life to whom we wish to lend a helping hand. Nobody can come from the outside, stay outside and make real, lasting beneficial change.”

  Nov 26

  A quiet Saturday. Ben texts today:
  “Sorry MIA. Having rough time. Let’s start back on Monday.”

  *

  Monday, Nov 28

  Last night, after spending too much of the day watching the Sunday football games and channel surfing, I decided to sort some of my journal pages. To gather up the pages. To get a head start on this last phase of my project of reviewing my past writing. I did that. I took pages out of binders, separating journal entries from pages of poems, and collected and separated whatever might constitute a journal or a commonplace book into binders. Then, I did something related: I read a page or two of Proust, which is all I can bear. Like so many things, the C.K. Scott Moncrieff text is both admirable and distasteful. It provokes a kind of astonishment but I after thirty minutes I can’t bear one minute more of it. To clean my palette, I read Szymborska. I pulled out four of the saved pages that I had saved between her pages, re-read them, and then threw them away. These were the four:

  A copy of “Love After Love,” the Derek Walcott poem that Maria Popova applauds. It seems to express, at least today, something close to what I want in this retirement of mine, though elation is not required. Here’s Walcott again:

  The time will come
  when, with elation,
  you will greet yourself arriving
  at your own door in your own mirror,
  and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
  and say, sit here. Eat.
  You will love again the stranger who was your self.
  Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

  all your life, whom you ignored
  for another, who knows you by heart.
  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

  the photographs, the desperate notes,
  peel your own image from the mirror.
  Sit. Feast on your life.

  This is such a wonderful poem. It has no rhyme, but more than its share of reason. Short phrases, natural images, inventive without straining, true.

  *

  I also printed out Pi, one of Szymborska’s own poems. It was inserted into her Poems Collected and New, right on the page where this same poem already was. Not sure why. It’s marvelous though, in that colder, more distanced, and easily admired way, typical of Szymborska. In Pi, she writes about a number without end, even as she herself needs to come to an end. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but not the number pi. And then, “it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five, its uncommonly fine eight, its far from final seven, nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity to continue.”
  This is all in translation.
  Someone with choices had the dexterity to come up “nudging a sluggish eternity” and the good judgment to settle on it.

  *

  I had printed a salute to Szymborska, from Maria Popova. It was written in 2017 in her Brainpickings newsletter. Titled “Polish Poet and Nobel Laureate Wistawa Szymborska on How Our Certitudes Keep Us Small and the Generative Power of Not-Knowing.” In her usual overwrought Popova style, where every brilliant person is always writing about the same things “a generation before” and “memorably,” Maria names a number of the Szymborska poems. She singles out Utopia. She quotes from Szymborska’s acceptance speech at the Nobel ceremony as well. “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous I don’t know.’”

  I’ll probably not throw this out, not yet. It belongs back in the book on my desk.

  *

  Most mysteriously, but printed on April Fool’s Day in 2019 – a fragment about “The Twice-Born,” from a New Yorker article. This book is a memoir, the article is a review, and the events in the book take place in India. As happens so often, it’s no longer clear to me why I saved a fragment of a particular paragraph: “The tamasic mood was elegantly characterized by one of the city’s best-known residents, the Swiss artist Alice Boner, who lived there from 1935 to 1978. Taseer stays in Boner’s former home, and the memoir is happily leavened with excerpts from her diary. ‘The terror of the utter loneliness of death,’ she wrote, in 1954, ‘had given place to the feeling of the great community of death, the only real community, the only condition in which all differences are obliterated and all are one, merged into the same substance.’”

  As I re-read this quote, I needed to look up “tamasic.” What it says online — the source is Oxford Languages — tamasic “denotes a class of foods that are dry, old, foul or unpalatable, and are thought to promote pessimism, ignorance, laziness, criminal tendencies and doubt.”

  The world is too strange in its variety.

  *
  December 7

  On July 12, 2021, I copied and pasted another of Lola Ridge’s poems into my email and printed it out at the office. Subject line: Lola Ridge. Toward the end of my time at SullivanPerkins, I was spending half the morning reading emails, just as I am doing now, when I am no longer employed.

  I found the Lola Ridge print out last night between another two pages of the Szymborska paperback. “What on earth?” might be my after re-reading it. It’s a question that is an exclamation:

  My doll Janie has no waist
  and her body is like a tub with feet on it.
  Sometimes I beat her
  but I always kiss her afterwards.
  When I have kissed all the paint off her body
  I shall tie a ribbon about it
  so she shan’t look shabby.
  But it must be blue-
  it mustn’t be pink –
  pink shows the dirt on her face
  that won’t wash off.

  I beat Janie
  and beat her…
  but still she smiled…
  so I scratched her between the eyes with a pin.
  Now she doesn’t love me any more…
  she scowls…and scowls…
  though I’ve begged her to forgive me
  and poured sugar in the hole at the back of her head.

  from Sun-Up and Other Poems

  People truly do write everything.

  *

  Am going to Cleveland tomorrow, for Debra’s mother’s 90th birthday celebration and her family’s reunion. I had intended to stay a week and a day, but I changed my ticket to shorten my trip to a long weekend. Leaving tomorrow, a Thursday, and returning Monday.

  Ben has agreed to stay on Guernsey and take care of Mika. I haven’t seen him in nearly a month. He doesn’t answer phone calls. Most of the time he doesn’t respond to texts or emails either. Or, not immediately. He will text back after several days, “Sorry to be MIA,” he might say. “I’m having a rough time.”

  *

  Ohio:
  Breakfast by myself at the Sidewalk Café in Painesville, Ohio, this December morning. Neil Young’s Heart of Gold was on the radio. The waitress poured my coffee into a mug I brought in with me. I bought it as a souvenir at Gartman’s Model Bakery down the street, where I saw boxes of bailish, the Hungarian Christmas pastry. Sidewalk Café offers a “small breakfast” on weekdays. Two eggs, two link sausages, a piece of rye toast, hash browns. Only $7. After breakfast, I walked to the town green. An obelisk soldier’s monument was dedicated to those who fought for the preservation of the Union. Beside it, a bronze plaque with Abraham Lincoln’s profile; it was the face on a giant bronze penny. The obelisk carried a quotation from George Washington. Two sides of the square were guarded by churches and imposing civic buildings. The massive former Post Office building is now the municipal court and Painesville City Hall. The most impressive of the buildings was the courthouse for Lake County, with its statues of seated and nearly naked Romans, one on either side of the stairs that rose to a pillared portico that shaded the front doors.

  A cold morning.

  January 2023

  Sometimes when I read Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, I tell myself I want to learn Polish. Even though I know that is something I will never do. So, in that sense, I don’t want to.

  A large percentage of the things I want might fall into that same category. What is that category? It’s not “the unrealizable,” it’s “the unattempted.”

  I’m tempted by the unattempted.

  *

  Stacks of folded pages, things I’ve read, poems, articles, sentences and paragraphs that I either wanted to read again or, at least, did not want to lose. I’m not talking now about papers I folded and placed between the pages of another book, to be discovered. I’m talking about piles of papers behind cabinet doors.

  I need to catch up with all of it. These hours of reading my old journal entries and late-night writings are in my way.

  *

  Remembering other Januarys. New year’s days that have come and gone, year after year. My father’s birthdays. No more of those for him, but the date itself continue to move on the ellipse of its track. Pam’s birthday, still celebrated, as far as I know. Inauguration days, every four years.

  In January of 2020, before Biden’s inauguration, and after the riot at the Capitol, I was very ill from a lingering, disturbing flu. Illness had overtaken me in December 2019. This was before any pandemic. Debra has subsequently pronounced that it was COVID-19 that I had that January. As if I was patient zero. The illness had not been formally introduced into the United State yet; at least not as announced by the federal government. It had not had its debut or made its deep bow. That happened officially late February or early March.

  On January 26, 2019, Jean Toomer’s poem Her Lips Are Copper appeared in a Poem-a-Day emails. It went to , which was my email then, and for forty years. I’m rereading it tonight after finding it folded up in my Szymborska paperback. Same question as asked so often before. What was in it that I wanted to save?
  Maybe these lines:

  then with your tongue remove the tape
  and press your lips to mine
  till they are incandescent

  Did I notice how odd the word “tongue” is? Someone learning English struggles to get its spelling right. I complain to my Hebrew teachers how impossible it is to spell Hebrew correctly. Ayin and alpha sound the same to my ear. And besides, spelling so often doesn’t follow the ear. They respond that English, which I spell correctly, is even harder. It’s also possible that I saved this poem in order to keep the photo of Jean Toomer, who’s a man with a moustache. Or for the paragraph of his bio, which claims that Toomer “is most known for his hybrid classic, Cane.” I don’t know what a hybrid classic is, and I’ve never heard of Cane. The claim may be true nonetheless.

  *

  On Sunday, March 22, 2020, I printed out another poem. In Today, Another Universe, Jane Hirshfield writes that a diseased tree will soon be dead. I may not matter much to us, but for the ants and the red squirrels, the universe is disappearing. The tree will be lost, Hirshfield writes, leaving a “hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.”

  So much can be written about loss. There is no end to the eloquence on this subject.

  *

  Re-reading To Brooklyn Bridge, on a print out from Saturday, July 21, 2018. I studied this Hart Crane poem during my senior year at Harvard. I could make little sense of it then, and I can’t do any better with it now. Why did I ever want to read this? I suppose my desire to study To Brooklyn Bridge has something in common with the champagne flutes and other glasses that Ann Patchett discarded, after they had sat unused in a closet all her adult life. She had bought them when she was a young woman because of what owning them meant to her. When she was young, she wanted to be the kind of person who served champagne and owned flutes. And I wanted to be the kind of person who understood Hart Crane. I intended to be the master of English poetry. As though it could have a master, or I could qualify for that job.

  *

  What else did I copy or tear out or wedge between the pages of other books? Robert Frost’s poem Fire And Ice (“Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice”); Dance of Death, by Federico Garcia Lorca, but not the whole poem – just a paragraph, which seems to be about Wall Street (“Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it”); and another poem, titled XII, which is a translation of Sappho (“The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise/The loving heart/Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy/But before all else was desire.”)

  *

  On Tuesday, March 2, 2021, a year after the pandemic officially began, I was reading the Wikipedia entry for the monarchy in Bhutan. This, too, I printed out. No reason to have done that. It’s interesting, however, to read about Bhutan’s hereditary monarchy, which was only established in 1907 after centuries of dual theocratic and civil government. The Druk Gyalpo – the king in Bhutan – became both head of state and head of government. His absolute monarchy then became a constitutional monarchy in the 1950s, with an elected National Assembly, and “His Highness” became “His Majesty the Druk Gyalpo.” By 1969, the National Assembly had become the kingdom’s sovereign institution. So it goes. Jigme Singye Wangchuck (His Majesty) married four sisters in 1979. These sisters, descendants of the rulers of the old dual system of government, became his four queens, and each maintained her separate residence. The Wikipedia author or authors go on to describe the royal palace, its seven towers and their red roofs.

  *

  January 4, 2023

  I’m impressed by Ann Patchett’s essays in These Precious Days. I’m charmed by the felicity of her sentences and the beauty of her voice. I’m provoked, almost shamed, by the consistency of her happiness, the blessings in her life as she describes it, the pleasure she takes in her words, her approval of whatever has happened. When I read the writing I’m working on, and struggling with, as I compile paragraphs about the papers I found in a rolltop desk from my mother’s bedroom, I’m discouraged. My writing is as heavy as the desk was. It has none of Ann Patchett’s lightness, and none of the gracious judgment. I seem unable to disguise my unhappiness with life or to straighten the slant through which I see past and present. I am Alexander Pope’s poster boy; all looks yellow to my jaundiced eye. I envy Ann Patchett. I envy her skill, her mastery of writing; but far more (unless all of it is artifice), I envy her the life as portrayed, her friendships, the warmth of her world and how she sees it.

  *

  19 January

  If I am judged by the results, I was a terrible father for my two children.
  But I don’t I have to be judged by the results.
  I have my participation trophy. I own my certificate for having taken part.

  21 January

  My father’s birthday is today. Or maybe it was yesterday, January 20. That has always confused me. January 20 is also inauguration day. And it might also be Pam’s birthday. Or perhaps her birthday is the 21st as well.

  Oh well.

  Next up on my reading list, Kathryn Schulz’s book length essay, Lost & Found, which so far is simple and elegant and daunting in its intelligence. Also in its warmth. Her acknowledgments are themselves a splendid performance, in which she is enriched by the love and friendship of the most talented, loving individuals on earth. She’s the lucky person, the humble soul. And here I am, to the contrary. I’m walking under cliffs, not exactly friendless, but distrustful, and my attitude is anything but positive. The writing I am doing about the contents of a rolltop desk that was left in the garage on Delos Way reflects my unkind, stubborn voice. Irritable, self-interested, ungenerous, and cold.

  *

  22 January

  Two quotes on the same subject:

  Hope – the gift of forgetting. Wistawa Szymborska

  Can only those hope who can talk? Wittgenstein

  In my experience it is talking that often proves there is no hope — no seeing eye to eye, no saying the right thing.

  *

  31 January

  Freezing sleet. When I call Debra to check in, I need to put the phone aside while she talks for five minutes without a stop – most of it about Judy, her current legal assistant who is looking for another job. Debra does imitations, but everyone she imitates sounds exactly the same. As though, other than Debra, there is only one character, who is Mr. or Miss Stupid. After she finishes with her ridicule, and I have barely responded, because what she has been saying she has said many times before, I says, “What’s going on with you?” It’s as though she has remembered that there were two of us on the call.

  From Chabad:
  “Every day miracles greater than the splitting of the sea occur in your life. Stop and wonder. Then allow that wonder to crack the shell of your cramped little world.”

  I’m corresponding by email with Greg Kirchoff. I’m not sure I have enough energy for it. Greg has become a therapist. No matter what I write, he always has another question. It’s as though his goal in an email exchange is to keep it going for the fifty minute length of the standard session.

  *

  18 March 2023

  The March 2023 offerings from “creative dream work” arrive in my email. Some of the sessions are on site in Los Angeles, some are virtual. But “the intensive” is in Tuscany in September. “Our time together will include guided mat work, dream work walkthroughs and culminate with rituals designed to take you through an immersive process of creative discovery.”
  The business is led by Kim Gillingham, who should have an “as featured in” promo next to her name. She is as featured in The New York Times, GQ, Vox, Stylist ….

  *

  16 April 2023

  Sunday. Ben has not been by for a week. He is “struggling,” as he will put it, meaning he is doing nothing, other than perhaps playing video games. And I can do the same nothing that he is willing to do about his depressions. He visits this afternoon. I had planned to go this evening to Temple Emanu-El and be part of the Yom HaShoah commemoration, but Ben needs to use my printer and laptop in order to complete his taxes, which are due tomorrow. He spends hours on that. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t realize it would take so long.” He arrives at 3:30 and finishes after eight in the evening. He then asks me for two envelope and two stamps. Once or twice, he calls me over for help, but I’m not able to help. I don’t understand the tax forms any more than he does. Also, though I don’t ask why, he is completing his 2021 taxes; they were due a year ago. He works on the forms for 2022 as well. Did he never file in 2021? He makes no comment. It is indicative of our relationship. I don’t want to ask about 2021; it will only lead to being bitten. Ben has no idea that his mortgage interest is deductible, as is his real estate taxes, both of which are handled through his lender and paid through automatic withdrawals from his bank account. He doesn’t know the amounts or seem or have any access to them. I suppose he will simply ignore these deductions. In 2021 he was working at SullivanPerkins. He was paid for being there, because I was still there. In 2022, Brett let him go. That was at the end of September, so he had income for nine months. He has now been out of work for six and a half months. As far as I know, he is making no effort to find a job. When he finishes with the tax forms, I take him to dinner. He tells me that he deleted his Uber Eats app today in order to make it less easy to order the fattening food he has continued to eat, despite signing up and paying for a calorie restricted food service called Factor. A nutritionist I contacted on his behalf recommended Factor. He hasn’t lost weight in months. He has gained. He is now back to 340 or 345 pounds. It’s difficult for me to feel anything other than sadness. In that way, Ben is harming me. His weakness weighs on me. He is a dark cloud. I do my best with whatever ability I have to keep him off my mind. I wonder, what might my adult life have been, if I had never been a father? In one way, it would have been the same. Full of regret. I would be regretting that I had no children, instead of regretting that I have.

  I love him. I might say I’m disappointed, but the better word is heartbroken. Love has done that to me.

  *

  18 April

  Yom HaShoah, yesterday and today.
  I left SullivanPerkins for a reason not unlike Thoreau’s, who went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately.
  Deliberately. On purpose. My business was wearing away my life. It had become something I did without thinking.

  Deliberate is an interesting word.
  When you deliberate, you consider, you discuss, you even argue. Is there any connection between deliberate and liberate? If liberate means to free things that are bound, do you bind them again when you deliberate? Is it unliberated to deliberate? There’s doesn’t seem to be any connection.

  Thoreau again. He wrote to Emerson, to comfort Emerson after his five-year-old son died from scarlet fever. His words are a version of “life goes on”: “Nature is not ruffled by the rudest blast,” he wrote. “No genus or virtue so rare and revolutionary appears in town or village, that the pine ceases to exude resin in the wood or beast or bird lays aside its habits.”

  *

  April 24

  Reading an excerpt from May Sarton’s Journal (quoted by Maria Popova):

  “I complained to Lee that no one really looks at the garden. Her answer was accurate. ‘You do the garden for yourself, that’s all.’ Yes, I do, but I also long to give it, and in this it is very much like poetry – that is, I would write poems whether anyone looked at them or not, but I hope someone will.”

  April 25

  I have finished taking notes on the material Dolores saved in her dozens of manilla folders. These are folder that I have saved these past twenty-five years in bankers’ boxes. I kept them in storage, in a room off my garage. I’ve thrown away almost all of it now, but I do have the notes. And I plan to write an essay. What about? The past? A meditation on memory? The vanity of keepsakes?
  History is a written text. It can be studied. But memory is something inside me. I can recall it and change it again and again.
  History is unjust. It records only what it considers important. But memory has no such requirement. What deserves to be remembered is the same as what is remembered, however trivial or limited.

  April 27 – April 30

  In Denver for Josephine’s 6th birthday, and to observe life among the young parents, house-proud and prosperous, with their strollers, bottles of wine, and well-groomed dogs.

  1 May

  I hosted a reception for The Jerusalem Quartet for the Dallas Chamber Music Society. The performance and the reception were at the Meadows School of the Arts, on the campus of Southern Methodist. Mendelssohn, Webern, Tchaikovsky, and then risotto rolls, Thai chicken on skewers, and white wine.

  May 7, 2023

  I’ve been cutting pieces of the essay notes I took while going through the storage boxes that held Dolores’s papers and keepsakes. Random lines, for example:

  The moment when something misplaced becomes something that is lost.

  Without destruction, there is no creation. Unless you are beginning with a void, and that only happened once.

  We clear out old habits, or we try to. We stop doing what we were doing, in order to do something different. Out with the old, in with what’s next, which will be old soon.

  *

  Why did I store so much of this in the first place, aside from laziness, and my unwillingness to go through it all? I was kicking the can down the road; I was saving these boxes for another day.

  I moved them with me from Wenonah Drive to Guernsey Lane after I remarried. I was unwilling to let go. Was I storing it all because I thought Ben and Eden might want some of it – a photo, a piece of Dolores’s clothing, a child’s Mother’s Day card that one of them had made for her? I thought I was. Also, the things that Dolores had saved of theirs. I packed up baby clothes and day planners, framed awards and stuffed animals, thinking all this might be nourishing for them.

  May 30, 2023

  But this is all digression. I have troubles going in a straight line. I find the weeds so interesting and sometimes fail to see that I am lost in them.

  May 31

  There are thousands of books in the libraries and the bookstores. Hundreds of thousands. So many authors. It seems to be a feat that almost anyone can accomplish – writing a book that someone wants to publish and that others want to read. And yet to me it seems not just admirable, but unachievable, a task requiring skill and perseverance beyond anything I have demonstrated, despite writing for decades. Is it possible that writing a book is simply beyond my capability? Is it just one of the many things that others can do, but I cannot? What is that feeling, that “I could never do that” feeling? What is the name of that compound of admiration and discouragement I feel when I recognize that someone else has abilities I will never have? It can be a compound of admiration and discouragement. And the proportion of each depend. I can compare my tennis game to Nadal’s or Federer’s, or even to the lowest-ranked pro, whose physical abilities are entirely beyond mine. My feeling then is not envy. It is more honest than that, a recognition of my own limitations. I don’t have the ability, and I know it. However much I enjoy listening to music, I am not a composer. I can hum, but even carrying a tune is not in my repertoire. I have come to terms with the role that I have, which is to be in the audience. My job is to applaud. Yet, with writing, I cannot accept that secondary status. I am not satisfied by being a reader and only that.

  June 16

  At a baseball game on Monday night, Rangers and Angels. I had bought two tickets as a birthday treat for Ben. I told him he could ask Alex also, and when Alex said yes, I bought a separate ticket for myself, five rows up. My only conversation at the game was with the two people sitting next to me – one of them a police officer from Fort Collins who was on her way to Fort Hood to man a booth at a job fair. She and a fellow officer are recruiting for the Fort Collins police department. Fort Hood is being renamed because its current name honors a Confederate officer. It makes me wonder who Collins was.
  In the game: Shohei Otani hit two home runs. One to tie the game, and another in the twelfth inning to win it.

  *

  Unsure what to do with the pages and paragraphs left over from the detailed notes I’m using to write about Dolores’s papers and my task of discarding the banker boxes in the storage room off the garage. I don’t want to include these leftovers, but am not ready to delete them either. Gone will mean gone. Forgotten. So, these excess notes now enjoy the same status that Dolores’s papers had.

  *

  There’s a description of someone falling suddenly in love in Kathyrn Schulz’s book Lost & Found. It’s something I’ve never experienced, and I don’t expect to. I’ve been in love, though, and that, too, I don’t quite believe will ever happen again. For me love has been a very gradual experience, a mixture of companionship and loyalty and habit. No falling was involved. It has never been sudden. In my old age, I may not have enough time for it.

  *

  So many phrases are true in one sense but false in another. Life goes on is one of those. Dolores’s life didn’t go on–and neither did our family’s, not as it was.

  *

  There is no story in this journal. It is ending because it is ending. I’ve never been able to tell a story, only to ramble. I’m not concerned enough in my writing about engaging with anyone else; I write as if I have no intention of having anyone else along. I talk to myself, as most people do. And whether we do so silently or out loud, we are unheard. The difference in this journal is that my writing might be seen, even accidentally. Maybe on a desktop monitor, or on a tiny handheld screen. If so, it will be out of my hand.

  *

  Sometimes when you are able to do anything, there’s nothing you want to do. Too many options are no better than a shut door. Worse. The shut door invites you to turn the doorknob to see if the door will open.

  Retirement is not the word I want to use for my current status. I admit that it’s the label easiest to apply. I no longer go into an office. There are no more paychecks. I have retired. But retirement is one of those labels that feels uncomfortable, even as I struggle to find a better one. In that way, it belongs in the same family as significant other. I’m unmarried, but paired off with the same woman for years and need to label her. The comfortable label is a straw that eludes my grasp.

  *

  A stain by definition is difficult to remove. It’s a step or two to the right of dirt. But take another step further and you have a scar. A scar is what a wound leaves behind. It may fade with time, but once it’s there, it’s there forever, however feint.

  The same forces are responsible for a physical scar’s shape and size. What caused it, how deeply did the wound penetrate, where, what part of the body, and how has it been treated all matter. Scars can be flat or raised. Some are sunken or pitted, like acne, which most often appears on the face. And then there are the keloids. Keloid scars will rise above the surface and grow over time, becoming larger than the wound that caused them. Both flat and raised scars may fade, almost to disappear eventually. Not keloids. They never go away without treatment.

  I’ve read that a scar is a natural part of the healing process. That might only be true of the literal kind. Healing from a bullet wound is not the same as from a rooted sorrow you want to pluck from your memory.

  When I think of Dolores’s death and the wound it caused, what rises are the scars it left on Ben and Eden.

  Another factor in how a physical scar appears: the kind of skin you have. Or, to say it a different way, what you’re made of. You could be one of those who decides not to have children because, look at the world – overpopulation, climate change. On the other hand, you could be the Holocaust survivor whose mother, father, and sister were murdered, but you went onnonetheless — to marry, to have children and grandchildren, and perhaps to have nightmares as well.

  *

  Do I have trash, or mementos? Mementos. Not only photographs of the past, but objects that help me create my own picture of the past.

  *

  Paragraphs from an older journal entry, found in a notebook:

  November 2000

  Dolores asked me to write a poem for her, as if that would motivate me. She also tells our son to do his homework. Ben hates school. He’s no good at it. He hasn’t learned to enjoy what he’s not good at, and that being good at something matters far less than enjoying it and being happy with yourself. I told her no, I wasn’t going to write a poem for her. I probably should have said yes, I’ll be happy to.

  The house needs painting. It’s flaking on the porches and under the overhangs. The flakes are bits of dull color. But in the backyard the Japanese maple is a rich red. We have cool November nights and warm days to thank for that. The color of this maple happened suddenly. It ignited like a matchhead. I planted the slender tree eleven or twelve years ago, under Dolores’s direction. Likewise the fig ivy, which is mostly dead now. The ivy’s brown brittle runners climb the St. Joe brick from the living room to our green bedroom. Three years and four months ago, Dolores died. I’m marrying again in another month, to start 2001. Where are you, Dolores? What are you thinking? Nothing? Are you, then, nothing now? Are you at all confused? I know I am.

  *

  Another note, undated. I wrote it in a journal years ago, when I still lived on Wenonah:

  Dolores knew how to work a room. She was like a politician that way, kissing the baby that’s inside everyone. Dolores was ambitious for her good name, proud of her professional practice and of her position on local boards and committees, and of the awards named after her, the newspaper clippings, certificates of appreciation, diplomas, plaques and other honors that are still in a file cabinet in the attic. She had all the self-satisfaction of a late bloomer who proved everyone wrong. She had the confidence of a beautiful woman, which never left her, though it went underground as she was dying. In those months in 1997, she lay in bed upstairs, her ambition reduced to staying comfortable. She had a crazy mother who claimed to have married seventeen times. I was only Dolores’s third husband, and she wanted to get no further. When she died, she had our two adopted children, eleven and thirteen, but also a grandson in his thirties. Our two are older now, but they are still hers, at least for the moment. I so often wonder where Dolores is, which makes little sense, because I know where. And I have letters she wrote that show she had pretty penmanship even as a child, but I don’t expect her to write to me. I have ten plastic boxes of her costume jewelry, two dozen pair of her high heels, her Ferragamo boots, and her cow coat. I’m not truly a believer. Even so, it’s difficult to believe that Dolores exists only in the hearts of those who cherish her memory, in the phrase of the Union prayerbook.

  *

  June 18, 2023 –
  From my notes:

  When you work at home, you discover that the soundtrack of your life, at least if you live in a neighborhood, is the gas engine of the leaf blower. It is every day, somewhere within hearing distance. Invisible, for the most part, somewhere on the other side of whatever fences are meant to make good neighbors, the sound of the leaf blower is as intrusive as a knock on the door. People complain about unwanted phone calls. Long ago on a ringing phone in the kitchen, now on the cell phone that is wherever I am. But a cell phone can be turned off, or silenced. No such luck with the air of the neighborhood. My home would have to be domed, like a stadium, to keep it quiet. The trees are lovely, yes, but too many of them are also deciduous. Would it be a fair trade off to remove them, if I could replace them with silence? Probably impossible. I would have to replace all the grass as well, and any of the ground cover that required edging.

  This is my environment. I am working with it as much as in it.

  *

  Cut from the notes taken as I went through boxes in the storage room. These boxes are full of Dolores’s papers:

  What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget. So the song says. It refers to memories, and not only to the bad ones, but to those that may be beautiful.

  Dolores kept the invitation she had Willie Baronet and Poppy Sundeen create for my forty-fourth birthday. It was a surprise party at The Verandah Club. I can see her edits on drafts of the invitation copy, and her note about balloons and ribbons for the railings on the stairs that led up to the room upstairs at the Verandah where the party was held. She chose pasta, Caesar, chicken, cheese and fruit. She picked quantities and costs; also, the names and addresses of everyone invited. Some of those names might have been picked from a page in the phone book, for all they mean – I no longer recognize all the names.

  Dolores didn’t save everything, but it can seem that way. She saved a “Thank you for driving this morning I love you” note. That was from me – I recognize the handwriting. I have the Dearest Mark and Mrs. Dyer letter from Laverne, our nanny and housekeeper; we had bought Laverne a car as a farewell gift, and she was thanking us. What else? Hundreds of things. The letters from Kuala Lumpur that Esther Ho sent, with pictures of her daughter and recollections of Ben and Eden. “We received your letter and pictures since last year early 91. It is so great to hear from you again. Especially all of you are getting well. Ben looks smart and handsome. Does he still refuse to go to bed now? Eden is just like a young pretty lady. I still can remember the first time she called me. It was in the old house. She stood helplessly inside the baby-bed and said: Esther, hold me, Esther, hold me.”

  That was then. And now? Ben is morbidly obese and probably clinically depressed. He’s unemployed. He lives an isolated life, watching YouTube videos and playing video games in his condominium east of Central Expressway. Eden is somewhere in Denton, out of touch. No contact with me. Whatever I had to offer, it never held her.

  *

  I made lists of activities for the summers after Dolores died, so Ben and Eden would have their days filled. These are those notes, which I’ve now thrown away:

  The summer for Eden, when she was fourteen:
  May 31 – June 4 – Free week June 8 – 13 Boston June 14-18 Total Image 12:30-2:30, M-Thurs (part paid) Children’s Theatre Surely Shakespeare, 2:30 – 5 (part paid) June 21 -25 Total Image 12:30 – 2:30, M-Thur Dallas Children’s Theatre, 2:30 – 5 June 30 – July 13 Overland Adventure (paid) July 14-18 free June 19 – 21, Le Petit Gourmet, 11-2 (deposit paid) July 22 and July 22: DMA Sketching July 26 – 30 Vacation August 2 – 6 Vacation August 9-11 Le Petit Gourmet, 11-2 August 9-13 school prep/reading Ongoing: violin kickboxing at Greenhill, M and W, 6:30 – 7:45 Total Image 972-250-2926 Cooking: 348-7567 Swimming: call re summer programs.

  That same summer for sixteen-year-old Ben:
  Look for summer job/w hours Inwood Village or Tom Thumb or Albertson’s May 24-28 Free week May 31 – June 4 Mavericks Camp at Pearce (paid) June 5-6 – Ben’s birthday/Party June 8 – 13 Boston June 14-18 Driver’s Ed/Cooking June 21-25 Driver’s Ed/Cooking June 28 – July 2 Driver’s Ed/Cooking July 5-9 McCracken (paid) July 12 – 16 McCracken July 19-23 Driving/Computer school Possible: McCracken Inside Camp/Perimeter Camp – July 18 – 24 Call them about possibilities July 26-30 Vacation August 2-6 Vacation August 9-13 Reading for school/Driving August 16-20 Reading for school/Driving Ongoing: Guitar/more intensive Vic Duncan – call at Brook Mays Driver’s Ed: Sears 972-613-6363 McCracken Camp 219 833-1661.

  Lists, worrying about them, trying to be of use to them. I worked very hard at it, diligent as I am with most everything. But whereas hard work pays off for oneself, working hard for someone else may or may not.

  *

  June 21

  Dinner tonight with Wayne Malecha and Steve Buholz at Lover’s Seafood. Wayne tells me that last Sunday, which was Father’s Day, he saw my car at the park at Loma Alto and University, where Ben and I were walking. “You may be selling yourself short as a father,” he said. I had been telling Wayne at tennis earlier that day about my struggle to be of use to Ben, and my failure to keep Eden in my life.
  His comment filled my heart. He’s right.

  June 22

  Downpour and lightning, very dramatic, when I’m at the Preston Royal branch library, waiting out the time this afternoon while Corinne cleans my house.
  No walking with Ben tonight.

  Ben came over last Sunday for Father’s Day in the late afternoon. He had a card for me, which I put on the shelf in my dressing room with all his Father’s Day cards from the past few years. Like the others, it seemed to carefully chosen. It was a very hot day, but we went on our walk. We came back to the house, and we both got into the pool, and I prepared the coals in the grill. Ben told me something when we were both in the pool that surprised me. He said he didn’t want to live in Dallas his whole life. He wanted to go back to Colorado. But he wouldn’t move while I was still in Dallas.
  “You mean after I’m gone?” I asked.
  I mentioned that Debra probably wanted to move to Colorado, where her grandchildren were, and it was possible I’d move there too, at least for part of the year. Maybe if I did that, he could move then.
  Yes, he said, that would work, but he would not leave Dallas, though he wanted to, while I was still here. And his reason surprised me. It wasn’t because he needed me, but because I needed him. He didn’t want me to be by myself. He didn’t want to abandon me. He felt responsible for me.

  *

  Another left-over paragraph:

  I am nothing like Dolores was. My collection of what Dolores left behind is not the same the collection she kept while she was living. I used no manilla files. I stacked things in a showbox, and in a red department store gift box that once held a birthday present. I used an antique wooden box, Chinese, probably from the Horchow Collection; it was no deeper than two inches and had on its scarred brown top a plant and a bird, painted in gold, vaguely oriental. All of these boxes were stuffed. There isn’t any other discernible order to what I saved. Dolores labeled all her folders.

  Am I still grieving these many years later? Not for Dolores, as much as for what happened after, the errors in judgment, the confusion and dissolution. If that is grief at all. It may not be; it may be a confused grief. One way or another, it’s confusion.

  *

  Another:

  What is memory? Is it simply an internal state, the bringing to mind some moment from the past? In the Torah, an understanding of the Hebrew word zicharon suggests a different point of view. Memory seems to involve action as well. That was an insight provided by Rav Amnon Bazak, of Yeshivat Har Etzion, in the hills twelve miles south of Jerusalem. There is more to remembering, he wrote, than simply not forgetting. That to remember is also to pay special attention. When it says in Torah that God remembered Noah, using zicharon, the word for memory, this cannot mean that until then God had forgotten. Instead, it must mean that from that moment of zicharon a special providence came into play in Noah’s life, a divine guidance that was made manifest in action.

  This is wisdom from Gush Etzion, a place Jewish settlers were forced to abandon after the Arab riots in 1929, and in 1937, and again in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence. Remembering, the children of the founders resettled there after 1967.

  *

  Some notes from a paragraph about Dolores’s “conversion classes” at Temple Emanu-El; she left a thick manilla folder, labeled Judaism.

  I don’t remember, but according to the papers saved, I was alongside Dolores in class, at least sometimes. Classes were Wednesday, 8 until 10 pm, mid-September 1984 through March 1985. She kept the class list. I recognize four of the names: Ursula and Leonard Margolis, Lisa Umholtz and Lee Kleinman. Ursula, a blond Bavarian Len met on a ski trip in Germany, was in the Chavurah couples group Dolores and I joined later. Lisa Umholtz, a gynecologist, was best friends with Arlene, someone I dated the year I broke up with Debra. There is mystery about this list: Dolores isn’t on it. No Dolores Dyer, no Dolores and Mark Perkins. She put her Certificate of Conversion (“This is to certify that…”) in the same manilla folder, which certifies that Dolores “has completed a course of instruction in Judaism.” But the certificate is dated November 6, 1984, which was only six weeks into a class that lasted six months. Maybe Dolores got course credit without taking the course. I wasn’t her first Jewish husband. She may have received credit for time served.

  *

  Another paragraph from a page discarded –

  Dolores kept a 1996 letter from Temple Emanu-El, informing us that David Stern has accepted the appointment of Senior Rabbi. It’s of no interest, aside from the names in the left margin. I know many of them; and those I don’t know, I know of. Debra Robbins, one of the Rabbis. Stanley Rabin, First Vice-President. Vice-Presidents Beverly Bonnheim and Chuck Stein, members of my Chavurah. Treasurer Bernard Raden, who was senior partner at Vogel, my business’s accounting firm. Secretary Adeline Harrison, who was a city councilwoman chairing the committee meeting where I first met Dolores. Executive Director Rick Rosenberg, whose brother, John, was married to Carla Blomquist across the street from me on Guernsey. Trustees Philip Einsohn, Gloria Hoffman, Lee Kleinman, Leah Beth Kolni, Cary Schachter, Judy Schecter – I have a story or connection to every one of them. Past President Carmen Michael, who was on Dolores’s Ph.D. committee and disliked her thesis. I have the thinnest connection to this religious institution, and yet I could write a story about each of these names. It is the two truths. I will swear on the stand to disconnection; but, at the same time, I am in a web of connection, of incidents and personalities, and these names, among hundreds of others, testify to it.

  *

  July 11, 2023

  Dolores’s birthday – Patti’s and Bev’s as well. I’m in California, staying more than two weeks this time. Just me and Mika. I’ve spent every day working on the essay about my storage room and Dolores’s manilla folders, her Ziploc bags, what was saved in the bankers boxes and I’m now discarding.

  I’m finishing this latest draft today, if possible, and will stop. No more drafts of this for now. It will be what it will be. Badly in need of revision.

  Here’s another remnant removed from an earlier draft. I’ll copy others below it, no good reason why. The reason is that I wrote these paragraphs. I decided they didn’t belong even in a first draft, but do not want to part with them. Not yet.

  *

  There are medals made of metal and ribbons made of ribbon. I was never a schoolboy athlete, but I have a trophy from Orville Wright Junior High, which was called the Wright Record. It was awarded because I had the highest grades in my senior class. I also have a plastic golden trophy from a debating contest in junior high. I remember that debate. Proposed, there should be no difference between public and private morality. I hope I took the contra side, but can’t remember. Why do I hold on to these two trophies? Both are useless, although they are in the shape of vessels – not for shipping, but for drinking. As if the most appropriate reward for victory is something to drink out of. Better than a laurel wreath and longer lasting.

  Trophies are often in the shape of a cup. They are often called cups, like the Stanley Cup, America’s Cup, the Ryder Cup, or the World Cup. Sometimes the cup will have handles, which are stiff little wings. Sometimes the cup is passed from winner to winner, year after year. As if it wasn’t winner take all, but only a one-year rental. In other times, a trophy was as likely to be the severed ear of an opponent, or a scalp, or another body part. Proof positive of a win. One historian found no evidence of cups for trophies until the 17th century, when chalices or two-handled drinking cups were given to winners of sporting events. Other historians claim that silver trophy cups were awarded to the winners at the Olympic games in ancient Greece. And the word “trophy” does come from the Greek, from “tropaion,” after the verb meaning “to rout.” Some point to John Wesley, founder of the Methodist church in the 1700s. as the popularizer of trophy cups. At “love-feasts,” Wesley would pass a two-handled “loving cup” from person to person to share the drink. Since everyone at this event was a winner, the practice might have been a forerunner of the participation trophy. I read more of this speculation on the promotional websites of makers of trophies, silver spoons, and engagement rings.

  *

  I’m tired of positivity. Yes, it’s a successful strategy. It can win friends and influences neighbors. But what if your neighbors are a nuisance, as some often are? If there’s power in positive thinking, and there surely is, still, knowing in my bones that life is dark and there’s beauty in that darkness, that can also be a strong position. Sometimes the amount of sugar that I have to add to the lemon in order to make lemonade isn’t harmless. Sugar can be a poison, after all.

  Every utopian cause needs the useful idiots who subscribe to it.

  I’m not trying to lift myself up. I am treading water. Simply remaining in place is enough of a victory.

  What I ask from others is the courtesy to stop smiling at me.

  If the world is so full of so many good things that you think we should all be ask happy as kings, I have a question for you. Do you know any happy kings? Kings are uneasy. I’m with Shakespeare on this, not with Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest…

  What I see when I review the past is a record of losses. Some are painful. Lost lives, broken lives, my own and the lives of others as well. A thank you card I found a banker box in storage was from my niece Rhonda and her husband Richard. It’s a photo of the beautiful young couple. Inside the card, they thank Dolores and me for the crystal water glasses we must have given them for their wedding. But throwing this card away doesn’t mean discarding what happened ten years and two children later. My cousin Rhonda had an affair with the husband of Richard’s sister, breaking up two marriages. A few years after that, Richard committed suicide.

  *

  Did Dolores want someone to remember her name? There’s a song by that name from 2010, written and sung by Mitski. It starts like this:

  I gave too much of my heart tonight.
  Can you come to where I’m staying
  and make some extra love
  that I can save ‘til tomorrow’s show?
  ‘Cause I need somebody to remember my name,
  after all that I can do for them is done,
  I need someone to remember my name…

  Mitski continues. She sings that she needs something “bigger than the sky,” which may be just as problematic as the desire to be remembered. She also wonders how many stars must surround her in that sky before she can call it Heaven.

  *

  Milton wept for Lycidas, who “must not float upon his wat’ry bier/Unwept.” And then he hopes someone else will weep for him, when he’s in his “destined urn” as well.
  Pathetic, in a way.

  *

  From her first days of work, our nanny and housekeeper La Verne seemed at home in our household. I might be fooling myself. Perhaps inside she was seething, this heavy woman in her forties for whom a car repair was an unsolvable financial crisis. She cared for Ben and Eden, made delicious meals, and, less attentively, did the cleaning. Her father’s illness returned her to East Texas. As a goodbye present, we bought her a car. And Dolores wrote her a long goodbye. I found three xeroxes of it. An excerpt:

  “Dear La Verne,” she wrote. “Thank you for the warm, loving care you have given us for eleven years. You have held us, driven us, and listened to us; and, all the while, you have seen to it that there was food on our table and that our home was clean and running smoothly. We appreciate you. Most of all, we love you and will miss you very much. We wish you well in your new life and in all the years to come. Our love goes with you.”

  *

  Dolores saved the marketing material that came with a wicker crib that I also still have in the storage room. The crib is broken down into its parts: slatted sides, bottom boards, the two curved end pieces.

  Bullet points make the point that this crib is “handwoven wicker from selected wicker.” That’s an odd thing to say. Also, there are “no ends for baby to pry loose,” and the wicker has been “rubbed and burned many times, for lasting value.” Finally, “both ends convert to a Queen-size bed headboard.” That had never occurred to me. Nearly forty years after I bought this crib for Ben, I have a Queen-size bed with no headboard in my bedroom on Guernsey. I could take these ends out of the storage room and use them. That would truly be “lasting value.”

  *

  From the cards that Dolores saved in bundles with Ben’s “Baby Book”:

  “Only people who adopt can really appreciate the special joy….” This card was signed “Mr. and Mrs. Mathis,” which is what I always called Tommy and Thelma, who lived next door to my parents when I was a child. I had played some with their adopted son and probably dreamed some about their adopted daughter.

  “When you get a little bigger, come visit us,” Iris and Jud wrote to our newborn. Iris, a speech therapist, was one of Dolores’s friends. Jud was her husband’s nickname. The last name was Judson. He punched Iris some years later. After that, she returned to Alabama, and Jud moved to Los Angeles.

  May this is a format for wishes. I see it on card after card. “May this happy event continue to bring you even more happiness in the years to come,” my father wrote on his card. What event? I suppose it was our son’s “good fortune” to be adopted by me and Dolores. When I was in my twenties, my father told me he would never have had children if given the chance to make the decision again. Perhaps his opinion had changed. Or he was warmed by the fact that we had named Ben after my father’s father. That Ben Perkins, who smoked unfiltered Camels and drove a 1954 Ford when I knew him, said our family name was “something like Poorkin.” He had left the banks of the Dnieper River around 1900 to avoid conscription in the Tsar’s army and had earned a living in Chicago driving a cab. A card from my older cousin Bobbie included this note, “Welcome, little cousin, welcome. May all your dreams come true.” She signed it Bobbie, Paul and David. Paul and David are her two sons; the older one, David, from a marriage; the other one outside of marriage. After my mother’s death in 2018, I started calling Bobbi once a week, to help alleviate her loneliness. Many of our conversations are about her troubles with these adult sons, how one or the other won’t speak to her, who is drinking, or how both are waiting for her to die so they can sell her house in Los Angeles. Bobbie’s in her eighties. She became the black sheep in our family decades ago. She’s nutty, a talker who will barely pause for a breath. She’s a buyer of lottery tickets, a believer in nonsense, always at odds, bouncing between defiance and tears. No one else in the family will talk to her anymore, so I make it a habit to call once a week. Usually, when I’m in the car. When I get where I’m going I can tell her I have to stop. It’s an excuse, but she accepts it.

  *

  My notes from the boxes I have cleared out included a very lengthy section about various trips and travels. Some of it was used in an essay about Dolores, at least in the first draft, but much didn’t even make it that far. I wrote a note to myself to keep it all as a very roughest draft, maybe for future use, for a separate essay on traveling. That’s the kind of thinking that leads to hoarding. In any case, here’s some of those excluded travel notes:

  What ties these papers about faraway and not so faraway places together. Nothing much. They are reminders I suppose.
  Dolores saved an article someone gave her about the hill towns of Tuscany. It came with lots of underlining and “we stayed here, it was wonderful” comments about Monteriggioni and Montepulciano.
  Also, a handout with day hikes and backcountry hikes in Bryce Canyon.
  The American Automobile Association provided us a folded map of Spain, Portugal and North Africa, including Gibraltar, Andorra, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Madeira, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
  She kept a tourist brochure with tips on dining and lodging for Sundance in Utah, and the Official 1990 Visitor’s Guide to Santa Catalina Island, and a mint wrapper from the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver, and a business card from Tropical Inn at 812 Duval in Key West.

  A Quick Guide to London (Beefeater on its cover) from the British Tourist Authority was never thrown away. Neither was a flyer from The Old Miners’ Lodge in Park City, Utah, which came to us with a confirming note and a smiley face from Susan, “looking forward to your stay in the E.P. Ferry Room 8/21, 22, 23, departing on 8/24.”

  Dolores filed more than one folded map of Espana, with inset maps of all the major Spanish cities. Same with a city map of Paris, from the office du tourisme, and a separate city map of Madrid, and a map and three pages of home listings from Anchor Bay Realty in Gualala, California, a trip that must have provoked daydreams about a second home.

  I sat in the storeroom reviewing the itinerary from Rudy Steele Travel for our very first trip overseas with children. That was in 1993, when they were eight and six. We flew into Milan and took the train to Rome, stayed Sunday to Thursday, left by train for Florence, then took a rental car to Siena, Orvieto, Gubbio, and Ravena, before dropping the car in Venice and going by water taxi to the Hotel Marconi for three nights, and then the train from Venice back to Milan, and then home. Our lives were full of “and then, and then.” I only know this because the itineraries say so. The memory of most of these actual places is a blur. That first and only family trip to Italy in 1993? It comes into focus on stracciatella gelato in Piazza Navona, and on pigeons landing on Eden’s outstretched arms for photographs in Piazza San Marco, on squabbling children, and on that sharp moment that occurred on every family trip when I swore to myself I will never do it again.

  We returned to California often and pretended to be tourists there. Dolores saved a library of brochures for Lone Pine, including one with an alphabetical list of the movies that had been made there. Has there ever been a Jeopardy question about this? The answers go from Adventures of Haji Baba with John Derek to Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, Richard Widmark, and Harry Morgan. There are one hundred thirty-four films on the Lone Pine list. Plus, a dozen or so television series – Death Valley Days, Wagon Train, and so forth. In the same folder, self-guided tours of Inyo County, with a map of Mt. Whitney, and a “planning your visit” guide to Furnace Creek Ranch, where we had our own Death Valley days. The cover of the Fall-Winter 1993 Death Valley National Monument Visitor Guide has a photograph of the mud hills of Zabriskie Point. Some of the much-admired 1970 Antonioni film, an “overwhelming commercial failure” according to the internet, was shot there.

  Some of the materials were one-offs. They were like pages belonging in separate books and by different authors. A typed reminder from the Jefe de Reception that the fecha de salida seria hoy at Hotel Playa Blanca in Cancun, Quintana Roo. A brochure from the Chateau de Pommard in Burgundy. A stub from the Millenium Broadway, for our 4-night stay, four guests in one room. A detailed graphic with explanations of every image on The Sun Rock, which is the Aztec calendar. The business card of Hotel France Louvre, 40 rue de Rivoli, Paris 75004. A ticket stub from Mission San Juan Capistrano, visited on St Joseph’s Day, March 19, 1982. Another stub from Museo del Prado, 1994. The 1992 Carte Touristique in celebration of the 350th anniversary of Montreal. Stationery from St. Ermi’s Hotel on Caxton Street in London. A brochure from The Andrews Hotel, two blocks west of Union Square in San Francisco, close enough to walk to Sears Fine Food for Swedish pancakes and lingonberries. A postcard from The Inn of the Governors. That one I remember, from 1977. My first time in Santa Fe, where I went with Dolores as part of my work on a script series for public television. Even earlier evidence, a receipt from 1975 for Le Richelieu Motor Hotel in the French Quarter, $25 for the night. I think Dolores and I met my parents and my aunt Dottie in New Orleans, but so much of this is not remembered well, and would have been entirely forgotten except for Dolores’s unwillingness to throw things away. Mine, too. Also, a brochure for Yamashiro in Hollywood, where we took my parents to dinner in 1988 for one of their anniversaries. A brochure for Hotel Colon in Merida, Yucatan, which had tiled steam baths, in a city where a steamy rain fell every afternoon when Dolores and I were there in 1975, when we barely knew each other. That one does cause a sweet memory to rise to the surface, and off the surface, the steam of recollection.

  The oversized postcard from the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles showed the skeleton and tusks of an Imperial Mammoth retrieved from the La Brea Tar Pits. An undersized paper bag from Smithsonian Museum Shops contained a receipt, $.75. Must have been for a different postcard.

  There were tickets for admissions, all shapes and sizes: a green ticket smaller than a postage stamp for Empire State Observatories, with the self-advertising message souvenir of visit to the most famous building in the world. Most famous in the world? That could be true, although the Taj Mahal might be more famous, or one of the Great Pyramids, if the Pyramids are considered a building.

  Brochures for Hershey, Pennsylvania (The Sweetest Place on Earth), and Fallingwater, In Mill Run, PA.

  A white ticket with an image of the White House in blue; it has a stamp with Lloyd Bentsen’s signature on its Requested By line. And a souvenir ticket for a tour of the United States Capitol. Its rules on the back read in part: Standing or sitting in the doorways and aisles, smoking, applause, reading, taking notes, taking of photographs, and the wearing of hats by men are prohibited.

  A flyer bids us Welcome to Capilano Suspension Bridge & Park. I found a business card for the Mandarin Inn, at 34 Pell Street, specializing in Peking and Szechuan cuisine. A promotional brochure for The Supreme Court of the United States, and another called The Money Factory, from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This brochure could provide prep for the Jeopardy category Denominations and Their Presidents. It not only names whose face appears on the one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bill, but what would be found on the back of the bill as well. Here are the right “what is” questions, in order: the Great Seal of the United States, signing of the Declaration of Independent, the Lincoln Memorial, the U.S. Treasury Building, the White House (on the back of the twenty dollar bill, which has Andrew Jackson on its front), the U.S. Capital, and Independence Hall.

  Prepping for an appearance on Jeopardy could not have been the reason that Dolores put all of these items into her manilla folders. I really don’t know what the right question should be, to which any of this is the answer. Only Dolores could explain keeping a one-fold rack brochure that was produced by the Associazione Culturale “Il Mastrogiurato,” which tells the story of the Mastrogiurato and ceremonies related to his election at the Fair of Lanciano. I threw it and all of the above, or almost all, into the trash. Stamped Columbus Day, New York City, this brochure from the Associazione Culturale was in English, but the English of someone who is not a native speaker.

  *

  The Monarch Sun and Monarch Star were two of five “luxury ships” of the Holland America line. As advertised, they sailed the Seven Seas. The cruise Dolores and I took in 1977 on the Sun was only in the Caribbean. Scheduled for a week, with stops in San Juan and St. Thomas, it turned out to be longer after the Star broke down and floated into waters near Cuba, and the Sun was required to rescue its stranded passengers, who were complaining and cursing as they came aboard. As a result, those of us on the Sun were awarded the option at no extra charge to take the Star’s itinerary, with stops in Port-au-Prince, Cartagena, Aruba, Curacao, Caracas, Grenada, Martinique, and St. Maarten. Dolores and I were both on board with that. That explains her manilla folder with a road map for Aruba and a Grenada Visitors’ Guide. She also kept the complete Schedule of Shore Excursions.

  No mementos came home from Haiti though, where a Haitian tour operator provided the shore excursion in Port-au-Prince. Dolores and I were led into a cathedral when a funeral was in process. We were ushered to the altar. The priest was preaching. A group of schoolgirls in plaid skirts and white blouses sat in the near pews.
  “This is a funeral,” our guide said. His voice was louder than the priest’s. “These are school children. The funeral is for their teacher.”
  Then he led us out, as the funeral continued.
  Our guide drove us “through the colorful winding streets” of a residential area, and up a mountain, for the panoramic view and the tour of the rum factory. When we had finished with the rum factory, a private car took me and Dolores down the mountain. It was a view described in our itinerary as “one of the most beautiful in the World”– to the west, the blue of Port-au-Prince bay and the whale-shaped Gonave island; to the north, the Matheux Range; to the south, the mountains of Morne La Selle; and to the east, the faraway Dominican border. Our car descended slowly. At the first switchback, a young child, eight or nine years old and wearing nothing but white underpants, ran along the passenger side of the car. He held his hand out to my closed window as he ran.
  “Give me something give me something,” he repeated, the rhythm of his pleas keeping up with us for a few seconds, until we gained speed.

  Dolores kept the passage ticket for our cruise in its yellow jacket. We had cabin 606, which was an outside stateroom with shower – double bed, vanity, double wardrobe. In the list of thirteen room cabin options, from deluxe apartments to inside double staterooms with upper and lower beds, our outside stateroom with shower was fifth from the bottom. Dolores also saved the daily Program of Activities. It was true as advertised, The Sun Never Sets on the Fun, though the Program was primarily a schedule of meals, starting with coffee and pastry, and then breakfast, then mid-morning bouillon, light lunch, then luncheon, then afternoon tea, and then cocktails, dinner, midnight buffet, and, finally, Eggs Benedict at three am, “for the late swingers.” We could dance or flee from the music of The Regency People, Koko and the Calypso Stars, the Betty De Que Duo, and the Al Kapp Duo. There were on-board stage shows and talent shows. Exercise classes, ping pong and shuffleboard, movies, bridge lessons, and a casino open from six in the evening until three in the morning. Giant Jackpot Bingo for $$$ prizes at 9:30 pm. The suggested dress for the evening: Jacket and tie for the Gentlemen. Mr. James Kirk was the excursion manager for the shore excursions. He was not Captain Kirk. The captain on the Sun, J.E. Markakis, was called Commander.

  We took a shipboard photo, too. In the photo, I am the twenty-five-year-old boy wearing a Cutty Sark t-shirt, with a woman who is much older. Dolores was forty-eight then. Most of the surrounding passengers were cruise regulars. Gay travel agents, and retired dentists from Miami with their wives. The servers waiting on us in the dining rooms and the on-board casino had seen everything before. Many of them came from Anatolia or the Maghreb and other places far more exotic than our Caribbean ports. All of them wore the loose white jackets that I associated with medicine or barbering.

  *

  Before any traveling, there’s always the planning. And before that, the dreaming. One of the manilla folders that Dolores left behind was stuffed with pages from travel magazines. It also had an “ideas” list. This list was three typed pages, single-spaced, and it covered all the continents as if we aspired to include every place on earth, from Kansas to Kamchatka, Lake Louise to Lake Como. Entries sometimes included the number of miles needed on American Airlines for tickets. Looking at the list, with my trash bag open on the floor of the storage room, it seems like it was listmaking for its own sake. It had an odor of compulsion. Why else include Kamchatka Peninsula, Boojum Expeditions, with its 800 number? Or Andy Drumm’s Tropical Ecological Adventures, out of Quito? One of the less likely entries was a trip I actually ended up making, three years after Dolores’s death. Or maybe four years after. Fly to Shanghai; Suzhou, the Venice of the East, a day trip by train from Shanghai; Hangzhou, resort by a lake; fly to Beijing, hire a car to the Great Wall. Some of that actually happened in 2000, though Hangzhou was replaced by Xian, in order to see the terra cotta warriors. And my trip began in Beijing instead of ending there. At the time, my surly children were sixteen and seventeen. A friend of my son’s came as well, as did that boy’s mother. I could just as easily have let my finger fall elsewhere on the list. On fourteen days in Turkey perhaps; or through the Copper Canyon via rail out of Chihuahua, followed by kayaking on the Sea of Cortez and a drive through Baja California.

  *

  After so much travel and so many years, all the roads have merged. It is no longer always clear where I have gone, when, or even if. So most of the paper records in storage had the quality of third party news, rather than of something I had personally experienced. And even her handwriting was no guarantee that what was written down had ever taken place. Did we stay in the Albergo Hotel in Firenze, or is this just information Dolores had gathered, although her note on the page Please reserve room or rooms with bathrooms for family of four, two adults, two children, at most reasonable price seems clear enough. Were we in Albergo Bosone in Gubbio with our family of four, with bath at most reasonable price? Her notes are full of costs and suggestions for trimming them. Digging through it was like doing archeology. Dolores had written down fax numbers.

  A hotel voucher for the Jeronimos Apartments, Calle De Moreto, Madrid, proves we were in Spain, party of four, in 1994. We went back in Madrid in 1996, before Dolores discovered that she was ill. We took a train leaving Atocha station and went south, passing fields of sunflowers on the way to Cordoba. From there, memory fails. How did we get to our next destination? Train? Car rental? On foot in Seville, Grenada, Portugal, and Gibraltar, and on a flight to Marrakesh.

  All this recounting is as thin as the paper that Dolores left behind. Keeping the receipt from a hotel or my mentioning where we went, what’s the difference? Both actions are the product of the same need. Both have the desperation of things slipping away. We are marketing our own lives when we save the marketing brochures from our travels, or the street map of Seville. Perhaps saving the street map or the train tickets is just laziness, because it’s work to throw things out. Better and easier to do what all of us are doing today, going paperless, even if the motivation is financial for the banks or the brokerages that ask us to do everything we can electronically. Their offer of electronic statements is an act of compassion. Only historians will be unhappy. But why would we think that most lives, our own life in particular, deserve a history?

  My adult son recalls a different itinerary in Spain, one that included Barcelona, which is somewhere I’m certain I’ve never been. We discussed it months after I had finished emptying out all of the banker boxes in the storage room.
  “We drove through Barcelona,” he told me.
  We were walking around the track at University Park. Ben is obese, and he has asked me to walk with him, to help him.
  “No, we didn’t.”
  “We did.”
  “It never happened.”
  I can’t lean on my memory, but I have logic on my side. No tourist would simply drive through Barcelona, when staying there would be one of the highlights of a trip.

  *

  Dolores wrote down hotel names and prices. I found a note on the MGM Marina Casino, a stopover on a drive from the pollution of Las Vegas to the pristine blue heavens of Southern Utah. We were on our way to Bryce and Zion in the 1970s. In Santa Fe, the Residence Inn, a studio with two queen beds and a kitchen in the room. We stayed there in early days with both children, in part because they served a free buffet in the late afternoon. There were plenty of notes on travel that we never did. One note on a page for a proposed visit to Orlando said go to Cape Canaveral, where the rockets take off. Comments about companion tickets and other deals from a magazine called Best Fares. For a trip to New York in 1992 to see the tall ships and celebrate the quincentennial of Columbus, an index card had the schedule for the fireworks. The Brooklyn Bridge will be closed, so it can be illuminated by lights.

  *

  On every family trip, one of our children would manage to get lost. Or, rather, Dolores and I had moments when we thought they were lost. Neither Ben or Eden ever thought so. When we visited Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece in Pennsylvania, our daughter disappeared. We thought she might have fallen into the water, but she was in one of the rooms, being watched by security. The moment when you realize a pre-teen child has wondered off comes with varying emotions, depending on the location. It fell far short of panic at Fallingwater. It had overtones of fear, but also notes of irritation. The resolution came quickly, and everyone involved spoke English. On the other hand, when our son failed to emerge from a trail on a hike we all took in Belize, I came closer to panic.

  Dolores’s manilla folder of our Belize trip had no direct reminders of this lost child episode, other than the brochure for Blue Hole National Park, which was described as a “popular recreational spot” where the Sibun River emerges from its subterranean journey into the base of a collapsed karst sinkhole. The park is also home to three of the five species of wild cats in Belize — jaguar, ocelot, and jaguarundi. Coral snakes and boa constrictors have been found there. What do I remember of it? No snakes, no ocelots. I have a mental image, fresh enough, but recalled from thirty years ago, of the four of us walking one of the trails. This trail is narrow enough to confine both of our children, but they are delighted in racing ahead of their parents. Dolores and I caught up with Eden, but when the trail ended at a parking lot at one of the exits, there was no sign of Ben. Had we passed him somehow? That seemed impossible. A park ranger at the exit understood our anguish if not our English. He went back down the trail to look. The waiting was an experience of eternity. And after what might actually have been no more than fifteen minutes, the ranger returned with Ben. Had the path forked? We got no explanation. Whatever had happened, from the ranger’s coolness I guessed it had happened many times before. This is something I’ve come to conclude about most upsetting situations. My circumstances are almost always common circumstances.

  Also from the Belize folder: A tear out from Architectural Digest about Blancaneaux Lodge, Francis Ford Coppola’s property in San Ignacio, in the Cayo District. Dolores kept the receipt from our stay. That’s how I know fifty years later we spent two nights at Blancaneaux in a double room with two beds. From there, a day trip to the border with Guatemala, where we saw on the Guatamala side souvenir stands and soldiers in fatigues carrying automatic rifles. Dolores kept a brochure from Rum Point Inn in Placencia, Belize, and a postcard from Placencia as well. At Rum Point Inn, three daily meals were included. We presented a voucher upon arrival. I know, because Dolores kept that as well. Another receipt from Rum Point showed our purchase of a snorkeling tour to Laughing Bird Caye. I threw it away, along with the rental car receipt and another rack brochure, this one for Pelican Beach Resort in Dangriga. Ditto, the tri-fold for Guanacaste National Park, with its ink drawing of a blue-crowned motmot on its cover. The Guanacaste is a tree. It’s a giant—well over one hundred feet tall, with a trunk six feet in diameter. I don’t remember if we got to that National Park, or if we ever saw a Guanacaste.

  *

  Every trip left its residue in one of Dolores’s manilla folders. Some of the associated memories were as atmospheric, and hazy, as the air in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. On a road map for Costa Rica that I unfolded, Dolores had written, “Nissan Sentra, $486, 11 days.” The map had a route traced in green marker. After renting a car in San Jose, we had driven northward. I remember passing Arenal, the volcano that emits small puffs far from the highway. Even though the Monteverde Cloud Forest was fewer than a hundred miles northwest of San Jose, the road was slow. It had collapsed in places. One of the holes we drove around was bigger than our rental car.

  I’ve read about Monteverde and its cloud forest. Quakers were the ones who had preserved the area. They had arrived in Costa Rica in the 1950s, looking for a country with a negligible military and no draft. When we decided to go forty years later, we were only looking for somewhere to take Ben and Eden during Spring Break. Nonetheless, on a handout from Hotel Montana in Monteverde, Ulises Rodrigues, Manager, and Wilberth Parajeles, Assistant, welcomed us cordially. “We do not consider you and your family or friends as a number,” they wrote. “For us, you are a very special person.” Dolores preserved the handout, and the flyer from the Jardin de las Mariposas in Monteverde, with its photographs of the blue morpho butterflies that were the size of Chinese fans. They had fluttered across our faces in a greenhouse and in the screened flyway. They were captives, and captivating.

  Dolores cared about a good night’s sleep, but is that the explanation for her decisions to keep so many hotel brochures? She even saved the pocket folder, with the brochure, stationery, maps and menus, from Si Como No, a hotel in Manual Antonio on the Pacific Coast. We stayed two nights there. As with so much of this, my memories are more like snapshots than footage, more isolated moments than coherent sequences. Si Como No was the dream of Jim Damalas, who checked us in and showed us to our room. He told Dolores that he had come to Costa Rica on a visit, just like us, but he was never leaving. Jim was a filmmaker of commercials in Southern California. I can google him. He has Greentique Hotels now, thirty years or so after we met. He was interviewed in 2014 for the Harvard Business School’s Creating Emerging Markets project. I can read the interview online.

  Dolores saved a business card from Restaurante Super Mariscos Sarchi Norte, Rigoberto Rodriguez Soto, Proprietario. I can google that, too. It’s still there, still simplemente deliciosio, though now it’s abierto todos los dias, whereas the back of the business card that has been sleeping in a manilla envelope these past thirty years in my storage room says Cerrado los Martes. I’ve kept this warning not to show up for mariscos on Tuesdays at Restaurante Super Mariscos for three decades. It has moved with me from one house to another. It has kept its secret company with me through marriage, widowhood, even during a brief remarriage, and now in the long aftermath of a divorce.
  Si como no?

  *

  I have a theory. After months of going through the cleaning out, this is the reason she kept the hotel brochures and travel agent itineraries, the ticket stubs and the receipts, the shore excursion guides, the tri-fold brochure for a hotel in Paris, street maps, and the open hours of museums. Dolores saved them not so she could remember, but so she would be remembered, if only for this moment. The menu from a restaurant in Montepulciano, the card from Blancaneaux Lodge – she collected it for the same reason I saved the bills from her illness or the pill bottles of her dilaudid and her darvocet.

  *

  “If I could live my life over.” Is there a fantasy more ordinary than this wish? It longs for the do-over of the things we bungled. It pleads for a repeat of the experiences we will never have again, at least not at the age we were when the experience was thrilling. Still, none of the folders of travel reminders had provoked me to wish for travel the same road again. Except one. Its ticket stubs and hotel receipts, rack brochure and roadmap were perfumed with that “wish you were here” scent that is so essential to destination marketing. This was the folder with an envelope from Lajitas On The Rio Grande, owned by the Mischer Corporation, Terlingua, Texas. Inside, a reservation confirmation, two adults two children.

  The Big Bend area is on the border between Texas and Mexico. My one trip there is the only one I have the impossible wish to experience again, just as it was. It happened in 1993. Yet another Spring Break. And no hint yet from our nine-year old son or seven-year-old daughter of the unpleasantness of the years ahead.

  I have the brochures and faded newspaper clippings that Dolores had saved. I need to discard them: the panoramic postcard from Prude Ranch in Fort Davis, where we stayed a night; a rack brochure for McDonald Observatory, with its dates and hours for Star Parties; a clipping about the sandhills in Monahans, where we stopped in our rental car on our way to Fort Davis, after a short Southwest flight from Love Field in Dallas to the Midland Odessa airport. I have daily trip plans written on index cards; a clipping about the Gage Hotel in Marathon, and information about the cottages in Big Bend – Dolores had noted “no rooms available,” which is why we stayed in Lajitas, the faux frontier development that belonged to Walter Mischer’s empire. I can skim before discarding a Texas Monthly feature on Big Bend and two articles on the National Park from The Dallas Morning News.

  An envelope stamped Official Business from the United States Department of the Interior was as stuffed as any suitcase. Dolores must have requested it. It had the official brochures on Big Bend National Park, Panther Path, and The Lost Mine Trail. Its catalog from the Natural History Association listed maps for sale; also, guidebooks about rivers and deserts, flora and fauna.
  No brochure from La Kiva, though, the restaurant I remember in Terlingua. It might have been in a ruined stone building. It definitely had a hole in its roof. The stars were not just big and bright, but visible inside the hole. Our children raced each other around the tables, and no one was bothered. La Kiva did no marketing, but it remains a best memory. As for my memory of La Kiva, it is fragmentary, barely temporal or spatial. It’s a name.

  All of these papers went into the trash. I need them gone, because it is bittersweet to be reminded and sad to really think about it.

  *

  In a small book called Travel Therapy, a claim is made that the meaning of family holidays has nothing to do with itineraries. It’s all about the opportunities, so it says, “to cement the bonds of affection between family members.” That does not ring very true for me. But then Travel Therapy is produced by Alain de Boton’s outfit, The School of Life, where the wisdoms in general are sweet and forgiving and probably wise.

  Despite our many trips together, togetherness was not our family’s strong suit. And a family holiday could feel more like a forced march. That may have been another reason the documentation was saved. From a distance of years, these trips seem to have been comfortable.

  Dolores, Ben, Eden and I took five trips together in 1996, which was her last year going anywhere. Five was two more than usual. It’s as if we knew that it would be the last of our traveling together, and we needed more chances “to cement the bonds of affection.” I say that, but isn’t clear what difference knowing would have made.

  In January we went out to Oceanside for my father’s eightieth birthday. Other than the dates Dolores wrote down on her Plan-A-Month calendar, that birthday trip is a blank. Nothing besides remains. I had twenty years of her calendars to throw away, including for 1996, so I can state with some certainty that events I’ve entirely forgotten must have occurred. The second week of March was also marked out on Dolores’s calendar for 1996. Her diagonal lines mean we were on vacation that week. Destination unknown. No departure time for March 6 and no arrival back time on March 12.

  The lines crossing from May 30 to June 18 on her calendar were easier to cross reference. They were for our big summer trip: Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and Morocco. Our itinerary has disappeared, but could go through the “travel reports” she saved. Prepared by Rudi Steele Travel, they had country-level boilerplate introductions. Countries are “sun-drenched,” and their cities are “picturesque.” Everywhere, the health advisories include “take a pair of comfortable walking shoes,” and, in Morocco, “stick to bottled or boiled drinks.” Country after country, the What to Buy sections repeat the same explanation of valued added tax. We did take some of the advice. After we returned home, an Arraiolos rug, which was What to Buy in Portugal, arrived via shipment. Also, a second rug, from Marrakesh. And we agreed with the wisdom that Gibraltar “merits at least a half-day’s visit.” The monkeys climbing on the walls there, which the report called Barbary apes, entertained our children far more than the Alhambra had. One of the travel reports, using an impersonal first-person plural, declared, “We think Spanish cooking is reason enough for a trip to Spain.” It also suggested not complaining about cigarette smoke. The Health Advisories for Morocco included advice not to swim in desert streams, because “they may contain bilharzia, a potentially fatal parasite.” The Morocco sections have more than their share of warnings. For example, under What to Buy, “Morocco appears to be filled with bargains, but look closely before buying. Good buys in wool carpets can be found, but most of what is sold is of poor quality.” This warning went on to suggest that the carpet-buying tourist “take a small tuft from the carpet and burn it with a match or lighter. If it smells like burning plastic, it’s acrylic fiber.” This is exceptionally rude advice. I certainly did not follow it while Dolores and I sat drinking glass after glass of green tea with one of the carpet salesmen in Marrakesh. Twenty-five years and two houses later, the rug from Marrakesh still looks good on my living room’s hardwood floor, in the house I bought after I remarried. It’s that broken second marriage that would more fairly fit the phrase “of poor quality” and “smells like burning plastic.”

  *

  What to Eat in Marrakesh? According to the travel report, Moroccan cuisine is one of the finest in the world, but, truth be told, the reports said the exact same thing of every country we visited. The Morocco report advised us not to be put off by bastille just because it contains pigeon. There was guidance that “meals are eaten with the right hand; don’t even pass food with the left hand,” which makes me wonder what Moroccans do with their left hands away from the table. The report says to “splurge one night for a feast at a deluxe restaurant,” and we did that. We were informed that “tradition holds that you should be seated on floor cushions,” and we were. Touajen, hout, mchoui, bastilla and djaja mahamari were mentioned. Mostly chicken and fish dishes, though mchoui is roast mutton. But there was no mention of sheep’s brains, which is what Dolores ordered the night we followed the instructions to “splurge one night for a feast.” Our “deluxe restaurant” was near the Djemaa el Fna, a Disneyland of snake charmers, musicians, and acrobats, with gas-lit stalls selling street food we avoided, and a powder to cure snoring, which I bought. I still have the powder, which looks more like a coarse pipe tobacco.

  After we came home from the trip, the pains in Dolores’s back began. We speculated about the causes. She found no relief in chiropractic treatments. And her abdomen hurt as well. Maybe it was something she had eaten. We thought it might have been the sheep’s brains.

  *

  Fourth trip of the year, October 1996, the long weekend in New York. Was Dolores preoccupied by back and stomach pains? If so, she hid it. But I found no ticket stubs or hotel invoices in a manilla folder. No business cards saved from a Manhattan restaurant. The trip was memorable though, because all four of us went to the Metropolitan Opera to hear Luciano Pavarotti in Andrea Chenier. It was the second week of his performances. The review for opening night in the Times on October 2 described a production that was “pretentious, ugly, and confused.” As for Pavarotti, “six decades have drained a lot of color from his voice.” Pavarotti was outed by the reviewer as a sixty-one-year old.

  None of that resonates. Instead, what remains are memories of the small lozenge of a screen on the back of the seat in front of me, and Dolores persuading two very reluctant children, who had already managed to sit through an opera, to go into a reception room after the performance and meet the star. I’m not sure now how she managed that. There was no line backstage, or wherever we went, and no formality. Pavarotti was a few feet in front us available for photographs. We pushed Ben forward, but Eden, only a month past her eleventh birthday, hung back.
  Pavarotti extended his arms toward her.
  “Come here, adorable,” he said.
  I have the proof on my desk that it happened: a snapshot in a wooden frame of this daughter who hasn’t spoken to me in nearly a decade and the son who would never go to opera again, and, in between them, Luciano Pavarotti in full makeup and costume. He does in fact look tired, six decades in. But then he had just been executed by guillotine a few minutes earlier on stage. In the photo, he’s the one not smiling. He looks almost sad, even prophetic.

  These children are a few breaths from their forties now. One, I haven’t seen or spoken to; and the other, a difficult adult – needing help, refusing help, unwilling to help himself. The phrase floats above my head with the obviousness of a thought bubble or a speech balloon in the comics: Why did it all go wrong?

  *

  One more trip in 1996, our last.

  We went to Santa Fe over Christmas in 1996. It’s something we had done many times. The routine was settled; flying in to Albuquerque, driving north on I-25 for an hour, passing the pueblos on either side. There was an era when we went every Christmas.

  When Dolores and I first started going to Santa Fe, we would stay at the Residence Inn, where there was free breakfast and a free snack in the late afternoon. Twenty years later, we were renting houses and taking our children to Café Pascual’s for breakfast and then “fine dining” in the evening. In Santa Fe, there wasn’t much that our two pre-teens enjoyed doing. They were sulky. We would march along the Audubon Trail until their resistance stiffened. The Georgia O’Keefe Museum certainly isn’t for everyone. Late December was the season of farolitos and the smell of pinon wood burning. We walked along Canyon Road on Christmas Eve. The galleries stayed open, and shop owners gave away cups of cider and sweets. It was charming, but not for kids squabbling or complaining to their parents. After an hour of putting up with each other, it became one of those “let’s not ever do this again” experiences. As it turned out, we didn’t.

  It snows in December in the Sangre de Cristo mountains above Santa Fe. We spent one of our days in the ski basin. Dolores didn’t ski, and the rest of us were only good enough for the bunny slope, but it was a beautiful place to be, near the tree line of an alpine forest. On the way to the basin, we stopped at Cottam’s on Hyde Park Road as we always did. It’s a place that sells cheap plastic sleds, and we usually bought one there, so we could take turns sliding around on the roadside hills. One of those throw-away sleds even made it back to Dallas. It’s not from 1996, but from some earlier December. Probably from years before, before I had money. However little it had cost, I must have thought it was worth shipping home. It’s hanging today on a hook in the storage room off the garage.

  What interests me most about the travel that we did in those twelve months of 1996 is how uniform it looks, as I look back. Oceanside, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, and Morocco, the Met in New York City, Cottam’s on a mountainside outside Santa Fe. All those different places were actually the same road, and at no time did I foresee the fork in the road ahead.

  *

  Was it a waste to have not used the waste basket sooner and more often? My energy is flagging. I have no promises to keep, but lots of keepsakes to discard. Tabletops of souvenirs, from trips that no one will be left to remember. And papers, tax records, work samples, clothes I haven’t work in decades, toys no one plays with, books read and unread on too many shelves.

  *

  Summer 2023

  As I worked on a first draft of an essay about Dolores, about illness, about memory, I used the notes I made on the things Dolores left behind that I was throwing away -– the papers, the receipts, the plans, the clothing, the costume jewelry, photographs, certificates, letters. I haven’t discarded all of it, but most of it. I also went through, noted, and trashed much of what I had kept from those months in 1997 when she was dying — the medical records that I kept in storage these past twenty-five years, the emails from Marshal Kragen’s colon cancer support group, the instructions Dolores wrote for Nick Glazbrook about shelf heights and forBob Hogue about paint colors for the remodeling of our house on Wenonah Drive. I made notes about the pill jars, the Darvocet and the Dilaudid, the get-well cards Dolores had received, and the bundles of sympathy cards that came after. It was all too much. Much of it simply did not fit into the narrative I am working on. The long, typed list of things for Ben and Eden to do in the summers after Dolores’s death, for example. I made my notes and trashed them. It wasn’t obvious whether these lists of activities, multiple pages, single-spaced, belonged to that same summer of 1997 or were meant for later. There were names and telephone numbers for drama classes, basketball camps, cooking classes, SAT test prep, driver’s ed, and other options. Was I trying to fill their time, before the school year began in August? Surely not in 1997. The blue skies were clear the summer of Dolores’s death, but those days are shrouded. I can’t recall much about them, nothing past the funeral. My lists must have been made for the summers that came after, for 1998 and 1999. These list belong in a different essay — maybe one about the anxieties of fatherhood. They won’t fit into even a rambling narrative about plastic tubs of clothing, trays of costume jewelry, cardboard boxes of Dolores’s keepsakes, and memories of her final illness.

  *

  The summer of 1998, I engaged in the planning of a military operation. It was Operation Fill The Time. I relied at first on the notes Dolores had made from prior summers, which she saved in one of her manilla folders, labeled Summer. Residential camps were not considered. They had been disasters in the past, the happy home of bullies and other tormentors. Ben and Eden hated camps. Nonetheless, Dolores had looked into many of them. I found contact numbers for Rockbrook in North Carolina and Camp Sabre in Springfield, Missouri. There was American Computer Experience, with a post office box in Atlanta. Corcordia Language Villages ran “cultural immersion programs” in ten languages, including Danish, which seemed like an odd choice, though maybe not in Moorhead, Minnesota, where the “village” was.

  In the end I decided to consider local options only. I looked into Total Image for Girls for my motherless daughter. Its brochure outlined eight areas that comprised the Total Image.
  Each area seemed to be comprised of a pair. Inner strength & personal power, skin care & make up, morals & responsibility, fitness & nutrition, etiquette & social graces, hair care & style, posture & movement, fashion & personal style. Since some of these pairs were far outside of my expertise, I proposed it to Eden. She was a total no, however, for the eight two-hour classes that were offered at a local country club. Eden did consent to Swim Team at the YMCA, which had the virtue of being five days a week, an hour a day, throughout both June and July. Dolores had a second Mead folder of possibilities, labeled Summer Ideas. Other ideas included Surely Shakespeare, ceramics, and oil painting for beginners.

  I found my handwritten notes. I had broken the summer of 1998 week by week potential activities: June 8 – 12 – Debate Camp, 9-4. June 15 – 19 – Surely Shakespeare, 1-5. June 22-26, Surely Shakespeare, 1-5. So it went, week after week until mid-August, when school would begin again. Aquatic Academy, violin, sailing class, teen theater, Tae Kwon Do, basketball camp, computers, painting and drawing.

  One of my handwritten sheets was titled Possibility. It had fifty-four items on it – U Too Can Cook, Bernina Sewing Centers, Gotta Dance, Le Petit Gourmet, Young Artists, Capricorn Horsemanship Day Camp, Conservatory Music. I know I’m not the only parent that has gone through this exercise, but single father, widower, with difficult children — I may have been one of the more desperate and determined. Whatever part of the economic pie is filled with activities for keeping children busy, it cannot be a small slice.

  I planned through the very last week of summer before school began again; for that week, August 10 -14, I wrote “Free Week.”

  Both children balked at their assignments. In the end, my twelve-year-old daughter tolerated the week of Debate Camp, followed by two weeks of Surely Shakespeare, followed by two weeks of both Creative Writing and YMCA Swim, followed by two weeks more of YMCA Swim, and thenshe just stayed home, which I labeled cooking and cleaning with Monica, who was my housekeeper at the time, and then Free Week.

  A 1998 schedule that broke the summer down by the day had a column on the left that started with Friday, May 22. It continued, day by day, with a daily sequence all the way through the end of August. One entry of interest, the entry for Sunday, June 14: “10:30/Unveiling Service.” That was the “reveal” of Dolores’s headstone at the cemetery on Howell Street, not too far from downtown. I had mail-ordered butterflies from a business in South Texas called Michael’s Fluttering Wings. They had arrived on time, flattened between triangles of paper that were no thicker than a coffee filter. Ben, Eden and I released them at the gravesite. The next day, Monday, June 15, Eden started Surely Shakespeare.

  *

  Life goes on, summers come again and again. I added to the Summer Ideas folder that Dolores started with new ideas I collected from newspaper inserts and supplements, direct mail and email. I found my list for 1999 in the folder. Six single- spaced pages, from Le Petit Gourmet Cooking School to The Making of A Champion Leadership Program. Other summers saw other possibilities, and some the old ideas scratched. Craft Guild of Dallas Craft Camp could be permanently dropped. Same for the Texas A&M Sea Camp in Galveston, DMA Sketching, and Becoming A Champion (which meant going to the Bluebonnet Ridge Ranch in Midlothian). Charmers (an etiquette course, “for girls and boys up to 14 years old”) never had a chance with Eden or Ben. But Overland Adventures was a winner, and my daughter went on this “go somewhere far away for two weeks hiking or biking” product for three straight years. She participated, in Vermont one year and in Hawaii another. Surely Shakespeare turned into a bad idea that had once not seemed so bad. For Ben, McCracken Basketball Camp at Huntington College in Indiana was the big winner. He went twice, and his outside shot improved significantly. He also took guitar lessons at Brook Mays. And there was driver’s ed, and then a summer job. My six pages were held together with a paper clip that had rusted; the clip stayed on after I tore the pages in half and stuffed them in the trash.

  Three years after Dolores’s death, I was still making lists, and adding volunteer opportunities. My daughter lasted a short time at Scottish Rite, an orthopedic hospital for children. Job possibilities – Blockbuster, Tower Records, Bagel Chain, local restaurants. My son worked at Bagel Chain and then at a grocery store. A catalog arrived in the mail for the National Outdoor Leadership School. Eventually, the possibilities were reduced, options discussed, and a new week-by-week schedule typed out.

  Among the brochures in the Summer Ideas folder, I found The Secrets To Success Study Skills Seminars. These “seminars” were offered at private school locations around the area. David R. McAtee II, Founder and President, explained in his Dear Parents letter that his mission was to provide students with the tools for academic success – not just the study skills, but also “the ability and confidence to apply these skills…” In his “About our founder” paragraphs, McAtee II wanted me to know that he was not only a former member of Honor Roll, a Student Body President, and Captain of both the Water Polo and Basketball teams, but also a litigation attorney with one of the largest of the downtown law firms. So his seminars were a side hustle. They were also a non-starter for Ben and Eden’s summer schedules.

  I no longer make plans for other people, and that’s a relief. And these lists, discarded, are as remote as antiquity, although no Rosetta stone is needed to decipher the anxiety and hopefulness that led to their creation.

  *

  In one of the boxes in storage I found a “General Principles” document. I had completely forgotten about this, and did not remember even after I found it. It was an appalling document, full of mechanical instructions for how to raise children – mostly, how to persuade the difficult child to comply with ordinary instructions and behave more appropriately. It’s true, Dolores and I had difficult children, and we were often at our wits’ ends. I really had no idea what I was doing, and still don’t, when it comes to raising children. But I would have thought Dolores would know better. Perhaps she didn’t.

  I took detailed notes on this document, much of which I had copied or xeroxed from elsewhere. Dolores participated – I saw her responses to some of the “exercises” – suggestions for the rewards we might offer for good behavior, for example. All of this might one day be used in some comic essay on the travails of fatherhood. But none of it seemed very comic, as I was reading through it and making notes.

  Where are these notes?

  Oops, deleted them entirely, by accident. What I wrote about these “General Principles” remains in a draft of the Dolores essay, unless I am wise enough to delete that, too.

  *

  Random excerpts, cut from the Dolores essay I’m working on:

  The half page from the Morning News that Dolores saved for its Ann Landers column also had a second article on it. “Booksellers turn a new page in competition.” Bookstores were going to have to complete, it said, with what the article called the Information Revolution. Amazon was never mentioned. The writer quoted Steve Potash, President of OverDrive Systems, whose Electronic Book Aisle site “seemed promising on the World Wide Web. ‘’

  *

  I wrote about Rachel Auerbach’s incredible essay about the Warsaw Ghetto – which came to me via a link from Tablet magazine. She had escaped the ghetto; the essay I received had been translated from Polish.

  She wrote how no one was spared, not even “the sweetest ones: the two-and three-year-olds who seemed like newly hatched chicks tottering about on their weak legs.” She recalled the older children as well, those “whose eyes were already veiled by the mists of their approaching ripeness. Boys who, in their games, were readying themselves for achievements yet to come. Girls who still nursed their dolls off in corners. Who wore ribbons in their hair; girls, like sparrows, leaping about in courtyards and on garden paths.”

  *

  I found a letter from a friend of Dolores’s, who described our marriage as “non-traditional.” Was that perhaps a point of pride for Dolores? Given how things have turned out, I’m not sure how healthy or unhealthy my rejection of tradition was for me:

  The letter from Roberta Nutt was in a Ziploc bag. Roberta had nominated Dolores for the Women’s Center of Dallas “Women Helping Women” award. Roberta enclosed her response to the Women’s Center’s request for comments and biographical data. On a post-it note: “Dolores, a copy of what I sent. Good luck! Roberta.” And on the enclosed copy of the filled-in form: “Personal life also demonstrates commitment to freedom of choices and growth for women. Changed own life from traditional housewife to practicing professional. Began second family in a nontraditional dual career marriage. Valuable role model to other women.” Dolores did not win.

  *

  Did the obituary that appeared in the Dallas Morning News actually get the date of death wrong? I wrote about that:

  The obituary appearing in The Dallas Morning News for Monday, July 14, 1997, was in error. I found three copies of the full newspaper in the storage room, with Dolores’s obituary as in the Metropolitan section, page 15A. The obituary reported that she had died Sunday, July 12, which was wrong. Death had occurred early in the morning of July 13, before it was light, though those first hours of July 12 might have been the more poetic timing. It would have been as if July 11, Dolores’s birthday, had been the tape she had needed to break to win the race. How did the paper get this wrong? Did I provide the wrong date to the Morning News? If it wasn’t just a typo, it shows how much confusion I must have been in.

  *

  The paragraph below belongs in an entirely different story. It’s about something that happened on the trip Ben and I took to California in 2021, after he said he wanted to see the redwoods. At the time, Ben was so overweight he could barely walk under the trees. We spent a lot of time inside, where he smoked marijuana. He had trouble sleeping, he had difficulty breathing. In any case, when I was cleaning out the storage room I found an envelope the Social Security Administration had sent me in 1997 the month after Dolores died, and it reminded me of a phone conversation I had in 2021, while Ben and I were in a hotel room at the Sir Francis Drake in San Francisco:

  An envelope from the Social Security Administration had arrived in August to notify me that I was entitled to a payment of $255.00 because of the death of Dolores Dyer. I found it in a banker box. The envelope was open, so I must have read it, or at least seen it in 1997. It informed me that I would be able to receive monthly widower’s benefits at age 60, or at age 50 if I was disabled at that age. But I was only forty-six that August. Over the following fourteen years, I forgot all about widower’s benefits. And so, when I did want to apply for social security at age 70, twenty-four years later, I was asked over the phone by Mrs. Broder in Alabama whether I was interested in my widower’s benefits now. She told me I was entitled to receive them for the past year, 2021, but those from the previous nine years of my eligibility were no longer available. By my forgetfulness, I had forfeited tens of thousands of dollars.

  *

  A memory of being in San Francisco with Ben. One morning walking by myself I lost my bearings. I had drawn a street map but the scale was wrong. Market Street appeared at the top of the map and again diagonally at the bottom. I had drawn crooked lines on straight-lined paper. It was map of confusion.

  Where was Ben? In our room at the Sir Francis Drake, using his small ceramic pipe, inhaling. At his weight, he was barely able to walk.

  *
  Also in storage:
  Index cards with lists of gifts each Ben and Eden, to cover the eight nights of the Hannukah holiday. Name blocks, bracelet, books, Prince of Persia, tapes, pencils, and figures. An unrelated card with the names of teachers, for school and Sunday school, because they were due end of year gifts.

  Dolores also kept the invitation she had a graphic designer create for my forty-fourth birthday, which was a surprise party at The Verandah Club. I saw her edits on the drafts of the copy, and her note about balloons and ribbons for the railings on the stairs that led up to the room upstairs where the party was held. Caesar salad, chicken, pasta, cheese and fruit, with quantities and costs; also, the names and addresses of everyone invited. Some of those names might as well have been picked from pages in the phone book. I’m no longer certain who they were.

  She saved my Thank you for driving this morning note. There was a second copy of the letter from Laverne, thanking us for buying her a car as a farewell gift.

  *

  Dolores paperclipped a newspaper article about Charlotte Taft to an invitation to Charlotte’s goodbye party in 1996. “Join us in wishing Charlotte & Shelley a fond farewell as they depart for their new life.” Charlotte had founded and directed the Routh Street Women’s Clinic, where abortions were performed. For twenty years, she was the most photogenic pro-choice spokesperson in Dallas, the most often quoted, the one interviewed on camera, the most articulate and presentable defender. But she also turned women away at Routh Street if she sensed that they were ambivalent; and so, finally, the clinic’s owner dismissed her. Charlotte bought land outside Santa Fe, and she and her partner Shelley were packing up to leave. Rumor had it that Charlotte was also an heiress.

  *

  I was married after Dolores. There have been girlfriends after that; there’s a girlfriend now, the same one for the past fifteen years. But no one other than Dolores actually shared my life. At this point I’m no longer looking for someone to.

  *

  Here’s a paragraph about Cuernavaca, written after a found one of my letters to Dolores, which she had saved. It’s 1977:

  That evening, I left for Mexico to attend a language school for a month, part of preparing for the project I was working on for KERA. The letter Dolores saved was from Rio Balsas No. 14, Col. Vista Hermosa, Cuernavaca, Morelos. I was in a language school five hours a day. There was a German, a Belgian, a Swede, several French Canadians, a professor from Ann Arbor and his wife, who taught geography, and “Jorge from Hollywood,” who had worked on the music for Godfather II. I mentioned ruins and caverns and reading a history of the conquest of Mexico by a man who fought alongside Hernan Cortes. I got sick after eating spareribs. I let Dolores know that I had walked to downtown Cuernavaca and bought an alarm clock at Woolworth’s for 144 pesos. The letter continued. It was more of the same, much of it foolish, all of it certainly immature. No idea how it sounded to a woman in her mid-forties, who had already raised a son – a son older than I was. She had completed a doctorate at the medical school, established a counseling practiced, served on city boards and committees. Didn’t seem to matter.

  *

  The notes I took were a kind of cataloguing. For example, naming names that I found in Dolores’s calendars and her DayMinders, none of which she ever threw out.

  Another stack of spiral notebooks. I was looking for a takeaway before trashing them. Reading the names in a DayMinder from March 1984: Lee Walker, Latha Rajagopolan, Nancy Tyler, Arlene Bogolowski, Sandra Killough, Betty Robason, Marj Schuchat, Amy Shook. These names, or some of them, I knew them, or had heard them spoken. They were her patients and on her schedule. Same with the places and events from side columns on other pages in other DayMinders. Women’s Center, Mental Health Association, Democratic Caucus, Mother’s Birthday, Unitarian Church, Women’s Issues Congress. I was looking for sustenance, but all of it conjured up the disappearing of space and time. This omelet of names and notes and events was not nourishing. It was an empty diet. Susan C, Jean Eckert, Gay Parrish, Sharon Cobler Watson, Janetta Walls, Betty Withers, Susan Abrahamson. The names are so specific. Forty years later they had become random, as if the somebodies in our lives could be anybody.

  *

  As I went through the boxes and the folders, I had thoughts that didn’t seem to belong in the essay I was drafting, but I liked what I had written, or I did at the time. Some examples:

  Transformation appeals to us, because the assumption is that the change will be for the better. The notion is common in children’s books. Illustrations will pair an acorn and a tree, or a caterpillar and a butterfly. It’s all about growth.

  Then and now seems to suggest otherwise. It hints at decline, a worsening of the situation. And what about Before and after? Before and after is something different. It presumes improvement. The before/after trope is ever present as part of selling, because it’s persuasive. The customers who see themselves in Before can imagine themselves as After. A benefit is visualized. There’s a site online that offers 24,034 templates to help a marketer do just that. “Browse our free templates” at Canva.com, “for before and after designs you can easily customize and share.”

  *

  Some of these paragraphs seem like something I have written earlier, or copied down. I can’t tell, really. Didn’t I already write about my house being “domed”?

  Here’s the repeat, then:

  When you work at home, you discover that the soundtrack of your life, at least if you live in a neighborhood, is the gas engine of the leaf blower. It is every day, somewhere within hearing distance. Invisible, for the most part, somewhere on the other side of whatever fences are meant to make good neighbors, it is as intrusive as a knock on the door. People complain about unwanted phone calls. Before, on the phone in the kitchen, but now on a cell phone that is wherever you are. At least a cell phone can be turned off, or silenced. No such luck with the air of the neighborhood. My home would have to be a domed, like a stadium, to enclose a silence. The trees are lovely, but so many of them are deciduous. Would it be a fair trade off to remove them all and replace them with silence? You would have to replace all the grass as well, and any ground cover that required edging.

  *

  I wanted to comment about a letter from Esther Ho but couldn’t figure out where or how. This, too, is a paragraph that I think I’ve already shared, somewhere in the text above. If so, then here we go again:

  In a folder, another letter to Dolores from Kuala Lumpur that Esther Ho sent, with pictures of her daughter and recollections of our children. “We received your letter and pictures since last year. It is so great to hear from you again. Ben looks smart and handsome. Does he still refuse to go to bed now? Eden is just like a young pretty lady. I still can remember that when the first time she called me. It was in the old house. She stood helplessly inside the baby-court and said: Esther, hold me, Esther, hold me.”

  That was then. And now? One child is living an isolated life, watching YouTube videos, and playing video games in his condominium east of Central Expressway. The other is somewhere, out of touch. Whatever I had offered her, it couldn’t hold her.

  *

  And this:

  There are lessons that can only be learned through disappointment. Others can be summarized by a truth that may also be disappointing: I have no one to blame but myself, and I’m not to blame either.

  *

  At my age, the most disheartening comparisons I can make are between then and now. How things started and where they ended up. The warmth that existed when my children were little and the tumbling breakups in the years after, from the inevitable crack in the foundation after Dolores’s death to the widening fissures and then demolition. I don’t enjoy comparing the engagement of those earlier years to the silences and estrangement that followed.

  *

  Dolores’s manila folder labeled Jewish was the last one I went through. An envelope in it contained a Certificate of Conversion. This is to certify that, it stated, with an underlined blank space where Dolores Dyer was typed in. A letter from Dolores traced the steps that led to her decision to convert, which included being baptized at age six under the guidance of a Southern Baptist aunt and then her school years in a Catholic convent. Some of the details were new to me. Episcopal services came after the birth of her first son, then ten years of marriage to a second husband, who discouraged any interest in religion. Then me. She concluded by thanking the rabbi in charge for saying (“so kindly,” as she put it before quoting him), “If you want us, we want you.”

  Her conversion was dated November 6, 1984, five months after our son was born. Adopting Ben had been the event that precipitated her decision. Sharing children must have allowed her to see the two of us in a permanent family structure. Or, at least, the bricks were there, and converting was part of the mix in the mortar.

  *

  Dolores underlined Lilith in her notes on Judaism. Baby and mother surrounded by amulet, she wrote, to keep away Lilith, who steals babies.

  Some women demonize their first husbands, but Lilith is the prototype of the demonized first wife. Adam was her husband. She was created from the same clay, but only in folklore. She appears nowhere in Genesis. Lilith is a night demon. Her name was written on the incantation bowls that Jews buried under their houses during the Babylonian exile. Lilith needed to be warded off. She seduces husbands, or pretends to be them and seduces their wives. Later stories have her leaving the Garden of Eden and refusing to return, because she has no interest in obeying Adam. In the Alphabet of Ben Sira, tenth century, her position seems to be mainly about sexual positions; she doesn’t want to be a bottom, so she becomes a demon. And a thousand years later, after appearances in Goethe’s Faust and even in Victorian poetry, she reappears as a feminist heroine, her name on the masthead of a magazine that “charts Jewish women’s lives with exuberance, rigor, affection, subversion and style.” There’s a Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity, in Austin, which provides “financial assistance and emotional support for people who need abortions in Texas.”

  *

  Dolores converted. The process never seemed more formal than “If you want us, we want you.” But the study materials that she saved in her folder suggest otherwise, and they can have the last word on their way to the trash — the syllabus and pamphlets, and her notes and completed assignments.

  *

  And this, from 1997 – a scene, an anecdote – perhaps for use in a different story:

  By May, Dolores had been outfitted with a morphine pump, which she used to dispense her own medicine. She had the port in her chest as well, so I could inject Ativan into her in the evenings. It helped her sleep.

  I continued to go to my office downtown. On the Tuesday before Mother’s Day, I saw a mark on my Day Timer to be home at noon. So I went home. Dolores was sitting downstairs when I arrived. She wasn’t alone. She had arranged for a house call from Tina, the woman who did her nails, and the two of them were in the kitchen enjoying each other’s company. Dolores was dispensing advice. Tina asked me: “Are you ready for your pedicure?”
  “No,” I said, “Definitely not, not for me.”
  Dolores’s plan had been for the two of us to have pedicures together. I think she had intended it to be her Mother’s Day present from me. I’ve never had a pedicure. And why someone facing death would want the dead skin rubbed off the bottom of their feet or their toes painted, I don’t know. Dolores was in her house robe. It must have required some effort for her to have come downstairs on her own. She was smiling, but she did not look good. And now Tina was giving me the evil eye. She took Dolores’s hand.
  “Just you then,” she said.
  I do think about this. I am someone who says no far more easily than I should. I had no reason to refuse. I just didn’t want to. Or maybe, because it was a workday, I didn’t think I had time to. As if in the abundance of time I had, there was not enough to share with the little time Dolores had left.

  17 August 2023

  Ben has started to look for a job. Intermittently, half-heartedly. He’s out of money, and I’ve had to give him $12,000 so he can pay his bills for the next ninety days. I don’t expect a positive result from his search, because expectations have ever come true. Also, he doesn’t want to work. I may be supporting him financially for the rest of my life, and beyond. He will be himself. He will stay inside, by himself, in front of computer screens and televisions. With some push from me, Ben is filling out online applications, but he is getting no takers. To be fair, there isn’t much opportunity for a production artist with a high school education and no willingness to sell himself. He’s too overweight to do any work that might require him to stand on his feet. He shows no interest in trying anything new, or in training. I saw a notice online through LinkedIn or Google about a production job at Quad, which is a printing and marketing company. So I reached out to Jesse Williamson, who used to be the President at Williamson-Quad, after his printing company was purchased. Jesse was the first person who has offered to help. He doesn’t know Ben, but he tells me he’ll talk to someone at Quad, he’ll say Ben is his nephew or his godson. He then asks me how old Ben is, why he left SullivanPerkins, and how long has he been looking for a job. I don’t answer those questions entirely truthfully. I take a year off Ben’s age, modify how long he’s been looking for a job, and provide an answer that’s only half-true about SullivanPerkins.

  *

  Jesse’s warmth and generosity are touching. I tell Ben that he has a contact who may be able to help him gain at least an interview at Quad. The next day, Ben comes over to Guernsey mid-morning, which is unusual. He wants to tell me something. It’s not good news, he says. He has bought an at-home test for drug use and has tested positive for marijuana. He says he only smoked three weeks ago “at a friend’s.” But because of his fat, he says, the test is positive today, three weeks later. He has looked at the Quad application and seen that they will drug test the day a job is offered. “I can’t really take the test,” he says, “because I will fail.”

  All of this is so like Ben. If there’s any way he can find to fail, he finds it.

  *

  Jesse calls me again today. He says he’s passed the information on. He thinks Ben will at least get a call or an email.

  He also tells me he has an idea for a book about Epstein. I don’t quite hear him correctly.
  “Tell me again, a book about what?”
  “Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein.”
  His idea is, Jeffrey Epstein, the criminal, the sex trafficker, was cloned, and his clone who died in prison. The “real” Epstein is still out in the world with his billions.

  I try to say something back but can’t offer much other than, “That’s a strange story, probably it will be a major motion picture.”

  There’s no point in questioning how odd the world is anymore. The Epstein story is no stranger than my son’s fecklessness. Both are improbable.

  *

  August 31

  Ben takes me to the airport. My first flight is to Chicago, the start of my three-week trip to Greece and Israel, months in the planning. It’s odd to be in first class on a domestic flight, and also unnecessary.

  Gail has asked friends of hers in Jerusalem to host me for Rosh HaShanah dinner. I am embarrassed to contact them, but I will. Debra is scarcely interested in what I am doing. And here is Gail, wanting to take care of me, knowing I’ll be alone. And then there’s Jane, sending me emails to warn me about the fires in Athens. Debra hasn’t looked at my itinerary or bothered to even ask me for it. I deserve better from her, but no doubt she is convinced that she deserves better from me.

  From the airplane window, the checkboard of the earth, greens and darker greens, the thin lines of roads, divisions and separations.

  *

  I started to make notes on the trip after I arrived in Athens, but didn’t make it past the first day or two:

  September 1-2

  In Athens, on hot, sweaty walks. Athens is a surprisingly sexy city. At night, in rooftop restaurants, all of them offering a view of the illuminated Acropolis.

  September 3

  A dull day on board ship. Looking at the hundreds of people on board is like looking in the mirror, which can be very discouraging. Grey hair, misshapen bodies, aged skin, and country club prosperity.

  September 4

  To Kusadasi by 8 pm tonight. The tedium of being on a boat. I am paying for the privilege of having nothing to do and overeating.

  *

  From one of the Marginalian entries, in a passage about Viktor Frankel, this message appears among the paragraphs:

  Life is joy.
  Life is duty.
  Duty is joy.

  Maria Popova attributes this beautiful saying to Rabindranath Tagore.

  *

  September 22, 2023

  I’m back, after 21 days away. First Athens, then a Seabourn cruise, stopping at Kusadasi, inland to Ephesus, then Patmos, Rhodes, Kas again in Turkey, and Cyprus.

  In Patmos, I saw the cave where St. John received the revelation and dictated it to his companion. And then to the monastery of St. John, which displays the skulls of St. Thomas and St. Ambrose; both of the yellowed skulls are held in jeweled metal bands.

  Finally, disembarking in Haifa, on a Sunday. Picked up at the port by my guide and driver, Adi. To Acco, Tzefad, and a first night in Israel at Mitzpe Hamayim, overlooking the Kinneret. Next step, Jerusalem on Monday. I’m staying first at the Mamilla, then the last three nights at the King David. I will be at the King David over Rosh HaShanah weekend. On the way to Jerusalem, Adi drove me to the Hula wildlife sanctuary. We went to Beit Shean, and on to the Jordan, where Joshua crossed and Jesus was baptized. A woman in her street clothes walked into the river, which is not much wider than a ditch, to baptize herself.

  Highlights of the trip? Friday night in Jerusalem, erev Rosh HaShanah, praying with Zvi Wolff, who was Gail’s teacher at Parnas the year she spent in Israel. I walked to the service from the King David. After, dinner at Zvi and Francie’s daughter’s home; it was just down the street, not far from the intersection of Efraim and Rehov Pierre Koenig. Zvi and Francie have a family of eighty – five daughters and two sons, then the husbands and wives, and the children, and the grandchildren.

  The next night, Saturday, I had another dinner invitation. This invitation froma couple I met on on the Seabourn cruise. Carol and Gary were coming for five weeks in Jerusalem, where one of their two sons lives with his wife and four children. I had told Carol I was from Los Angeles. She grew up there.
  “Where in Los Angeles?”
  She went to Venice High School. When I told her went to Westchester, she asked if I knew David Aftergood, whom I haven’t seen in fifty years. And did I know Libby Graff? Or the Klamans?

  Dinner was in Har Homa, a settlement, not far from Bethlehem. I took a taxi from the King David. The driver, an Arab, got on the phone with his brother, who wanted to discuss a legal problem. Later that night, I called the same driver to come get me. He had his daughter, a sleeping child, in the front seat with him.

  So much happened on this trip. A spiritual night walk in Jerusalem with Izchar, trips to the City of David with Asaph, out of the city to Beit Guvein, and to Hebron to see the Cave of the Patriarchs. At the Cave of the Patriarchs, I saw Esau’s tomb – or, the label that said so, which had a story from Talmud recounting Esau’s murder by one of the sons of Dan. Josef was my guide on my last Sunday; we went hiking in the Judean desert, to Wadi Qelt, where I was swimming in the cold spring pools. Israelis were on holiday that day. Josef also volunteered with me in a field for Leket Israel. We picked rutabagas, directed by our escort, Nehama – formerly Nancy, from Phoenix. Nehama made aliya fifteen years ago with her husband, but she has not yet become fluent in Hebrew. There is too much English in Israel to make immersion in Hebrew easy. In Jerusalem, I took three days of Hebrew lessons in the morning. My tutor, from Ulpan Or, took me on excursions – to Machane Yehuda market, to the Montefiori windmill, to the prison where the British executed Jewish “terrorists” in 1947.

  Shopping for souvenirs: a ceramic pomegranate (a rimon) at the Israeli National Museum in Jerusalem, inspecting the displays of the Dead Sea scrolls at the Shine of the Book, standing on the Mount of Olives with Asaph, refusing to go through the too narrow tunnels in the City of David, but at the Tomb of David with Izchar, and at the Kotel, and making it through the tunnels of the Western Wall.

  My last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights, I was at the Trieste in Tel Aviv. My room had a whirlpool bath, and a swing suspended by rope. Much of the day I was on my own. I visited the Carmel Market with Ori Dor, a guide who said he was also a singer songwriter. I went swimming in the Mediterranean. I walked through Jafo. I explored Neve Tsedek. I went down Rothschild Boulevard at night, debating whether to go to the Hebrew production of Leopoldstadt that was in performance at Habima, the national theater. I bought two Cuban cigars, which cost seventy dollars each. They were not confiscated from my carry-on bag when I went through security at JFK, after the long flight from Ben Gurion. What was taken away: the inexpensive small jar of lavender honey, which I had bought for Debra on Ermou Street the first day the trip, from a small shop in Athens.

  *

  Home now, and catching up on the emails I had no time to read while touring. On my last day in Tel Aviv, as I was on my way to the beach and wearing a swimsuit and a polo shirt and sneakers, a young man in a tallit stopped me as I walked down Shebazi.
  “Do you had a few minutes?” he asked.
  I thought, he must be Chabad, perhaps he wants me to put on tefillin, or do some other mitzvah that will hasten the Messiah, or the Messiah’s return. I had seen Schneerson’s image plastered all over Israel and labeled Moshiach.
  I tell him my Hebrew is elementary and ask him if he’s Chabad.
  “Chabad, no.”
  He asks if I’m a Jew.
  I am, so he brings me down a side street. It turns out I’m needed for a minyan in his small shul down the street. Shacharit prayers. I join the room, and when the count finally reaches ten, the service begins. It is a speed reading of prayers. My companion pushes his prayer book toward me and uses his finger to help me keep my place in the Hebrew.
  “Not much longer,” he says.
  “It’s okay,” I tell him in Hebrew. “I want to be here.”
  It is also one of the more affecting moments from my trip.
  I was needed.
  After, I went down to the beach and into the sea.

  *

  Reading this among the “catch-up” emails, from Jonathan Sacks: “If I were to sum up what faith asks us to be, I would say: a healing presence.”

  I thought often of Ben while I was in Israel. Especially when I was at prayer – thoughts of him, and my standing by him, trying indeed to be a healing presence, and how the burden of it is also one of my deepest sources of meaning.

  *

  I’m getting back to the writing I left for the three weeks I was away. I am reworking this journal and also recovering any unsettled poems I might find. I have thought about collecting this journal material into three sections:
  1973-1997
  1997-2007
  2008 – 2023

  It’s a division that makes sense, but not enough sense.

  *

  October 3, 2023

  To the dentist – Albus, of Kidwell and Albus. Derek, I think. I didn’t recognize my dental hygienist, although she has cleaned my teeth for years. She had her hair up, and she looked nothing like she does in one of the photos with her sons that I stare at while I’m in the dental chair. Very large photographs of her two boys. The oldest is in his thirties, the younger twenty-six or seven. They are smiling on her mousepad as well. My smile is not quite as healthy. I have two cavities and need more work, which has been scheduled.

  Yesterday, my “personal narrative” was due if I wanted it included in the Harvard Red Book that commemorates the 50th reunion of the class of 1974. Reunion is next May. I failed to provide the narrative. In part because I don’t know what to say. I sent a photo, though, and my contact information, without the requested contribution to cover the printing costs.

  Ben was to come over for our walk this evening, but he decided not to. So I took Mika out walking instead, north on Guernsey, east on Northwest Highway, and then south on Briarwood. She was pleasant company and appreciative.

  This evening I had Ben on my mind. That somehow led me (free association?) to look for Eden Henson online, to see what I might find. What I found was another GoFundMe, a new one, posted this past August. Under a picture of Eden (they, them) that was taken in the community garden at UNT, this is the narrative she supplied:

  “I will be unable to attend classes this fall semester. That means the loss of both my job and financial aid. I’m searching for jobs and speaking to the university about getting back into classes ASAP, but for now, there’s a financial gap til I can get funds coming in. I cannot get assistance through most programs. These funds will help me stave off eviction, utility shutoff, and loss of my Internet and cell phone access. You can also contact me for non-monetary ways to assist.”

  Her GoFundMe says that $1,200 has been raised of the $2,500 goal. She had one donation of $1,000; that one, anonymous, from a month ago.

  I sent the link to the site to Patti. I wanted someone to talk to, or to listen to, and at the moment I sense there is no one else. Debra? I want someone who might truly feel something; not what I feel, that isn’t possible, but something.

  *

  There’s only a moment left, then half a moment, and then half of that half, an infinity of halves that will never run out.

  *

  There is no clearer way to see the big picture than in miniature.

  *

  October 2023

  Ben has given up looking for work. It didn’t take long, or very much. Not everyone recovers from the loss of a job. Not everyone wants to. Ben, thirty-nine years old, has very little interest in pushing on himself.

  I don’t know how old my father was when he lost his job. I can’t ask him, he isn’t alive any more, and I don’t remember because I wasn’t that interested at the time. I was Harvard, my life was what interested me. What I do remember was coming home and hearing what had happened. My father was a rep – a manufacturer’s representative – for wholesale furniture. He called on furniture stores up the coast of California. His trunk was full of swatches and samples. His boss, Andy Sorenson, had an adult son, and he replaced my father with him, to rep the upholstered sofas that Sorenson manufactured in his East Los Angeles factory. I remember how strange my father looked that summer when I came home from Harvard. His hair was dyed. Not professionally, either. Instead of the grey that he had before I left for the semester, when I returned his hair was an odd brown. Not dark brown, but lighter, reddish brown. The color did not belong to the face underneath it.

  *

  I am picturing an author with a quill and ink pot, as he writes in longhand. He stares into the embers of the wood in the fireplace of his library. He has his pipe. Its bowl blackened with use. He doesn’t worry about mouth cancer, though. More likely, he contracted syphilis in his twenties. Her writes in the time he has. He ahead to insanity in his forties and to finding himself – if he even knows himself then – in an asylum. Two years later, he will be dead. This could be my story if I were writing in longhand, which I’m not. Instead, I am hearing the nearly inaudible tapping of fingertips on a keyboard and the hum of a hard drive as it performs whatever task of fetch or save that I command.

  *

  One message from all my rummaging in the storeroom:
  Things I have lived through did not happen as I remember them, or even when. Was Dolores’s breast cancer in 1987? Was that surprise party at the Verandah – I saw the invitations – not for my fortieth birthday? When exactly did Laverne return to Elkhart? The second takeaway, more resisted, was all the evidence of misunderstandings, a blindness of one kind or another. And I do not assume that my eyes have gained acuity over the years.

  A wave has broken over me. I am standing still, my back to the expanse of the ocean, my face toward the shore. What remains of the wave is running, flatter and shallower, toward the sand.

  ***