Some Days, 1969 – 2007

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 23^rd 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 25^th 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. 20^th 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 1^st 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 19^th 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 ([email protected])

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. 

*