Out of the Cube

Back home again

 

You can't go home again. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Amen to that. ~ Verna Wilder

I have a friend who confessed to me one day that she likes the smell of skunk. That was years ago, and after all these years, if a skunk passes through the neighborhood, I think of that friend and smile. I thought of her last month when I made my annual road trip to Indiana to visit with family. When I crossed the Wabash River, that old familiar Terre Haute smell rose up to greet me: burning tires, wet dead things, and moldering leaves - with an overlay of skunk.

I asked my father about that smell, and he said that no one knows what causes it, but the local government has been trying to do something about it for years. But here's the thing: Terre Haute has always smelled like that. I remember that smell from childhood visits there, and I'm 62. Do the math. When my sister Carolyn flew to Indiana in 2000, her first trip back there as an adult, I picked her up from the airport in Indianapolis, and as we got closer to Terre Haute, she rolled down the window, took a deep breath, and said, "Smell that, Verna! We're home!"

The three oldest of us kids were born in Terre Haute, but I was three when we moved to San Francisco, Carolyn  was a little over a year old, and Butch was a baby. We had four more siblings, all born in San Francisco, and all of us made our lives in California, raised kids there and got divorces there, and every time we'd visit family in Indiana, aunts and uncles would ask us when we were going to move back home.

We made a lot of summer road trips to Indiana when we were kids. All of Mother's family were there and Dad's sister Hazel, so we'd pile in the car and drive for 3 1/2 days across two mountains and one desert and acres of farmland - in summer heat - with no AC in the car. In those days, a rest stop had picnic tables and outhouses - and flies. We ate bologna sandwiches on white bread and drank Kool-Ade and begged for more ice.

After the novelty wore off (about the time we'd hit Sacramento), we spent the remaining three days trying to entertain ourselves, which I think we did very well, in spite of there being six or seven of us crammed into a car. I'm also sure that we must have driven Mother and Dad crazy asking if we were there yet. The oldest of us knew where we were because we could read, but even for the little kids, there were two sure clues that we were almost there:

1. We had been in the car so long we thought we lived there.
2. The air started to stink.

And sure enough, before you could say, "Are we there yet?" we'd be crossing the Wabash River and driving past the monument in front of the Vigo County Courthouse, a statue with a sign in front that read: Do not spit on monument.

I love living in Colorado. It smells good here, for one thing. And I love my family and those memories of childhood. I love it that I was born in a place that stinks, that is known for its stink, and I can't listen to Wabash Cannonball without seeing my childhood self in the back seat of a station wagon, hand out the window riding the rush of Terre Haute air. It makes me smile - and long for the scent of skunk.

One love, many days

We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden. ~ Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire 

When I step out to pick up the newspaper, the morning stillness is so profound that for a moment I imagine I have lost my hearing - until I take a deep breath and am relieved to hear myself inhale and exhale.

This quiet brings back a dream I didn't want to wake from, cups the dream in a palm as loving and protective as the palm a parent lays on a fevered brow, a dream about the first time I was really in love, grown-up love, and how that love changed, shaped, defined my life - 29 years ago.

I wonder sometimes what would have happened had I been able to pursue that love, but I didn't; I stayed married, tried to forget, moved on. And so did she. And then I let go of wondering. What could have happened is as ethereal as the dream I had this morning. In fact, what could have happened has no more substance than what did happen. Twenty-nine years later, it's all story: the love and the loving, the sorrow and the parting.

I've been going through my house again, letting go of physical things: books I haven't read and will never read, pens that don't write, spices and herbs years past their good-until date, a cache of dried rubber bands and a cluster of unlabeled keys. I want to get really good at this. I want to practice with the useless things until I can let go of the priceless: little bowls my daughters shaped in clay when they were five years old; my college textbooks with marginalia in my handwriting; my guitar now that arthritis won't allow me to play it and the 35-year-old song sheets that go with it.

When I woke this morning and went out to pick up the paper, I carried the dream - and the memory of love - with me, as weightless and precious as a fine silk scarf.

Lilacs and leftovers

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd--and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
~ Walt Whitman

After a lovely long talk with Sandra over spaghetti and salad, I come home, settle myself on the patio, read the mail, page through The New Yorker until darkness takes over and I feel hungry again. I heat the leftover spaghetti and take it to the sofa where I can look out the open door; patio light illuminates new leaves not yet unfurled on the honey locust tree. With the first bite of pasta, I think I smell lilacs, and I look at the spaghetti, sniff the edge of the bowl, but no, the smell comes from outdoors (which is good; spaghetti that smells of lilacs is not good). I pause, holding the bowl, letting the fork rest, testing my sense of smell.

The smell of lilacs wafts and wanes. I turn my head, blind hungry for the scent, and close my eyes to better use my nose. That's when the wind lifts the window shades and my ears pick up the patter of rain, and rain returns as a garden scent, wet earth and dry cement, lilacs gone.

Sirens in the distance and a dog barks. I take the last bite of spaghetti from the sun-yellow bowl, nothing left to do but be.

Here today, gone with the laundry

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day. ~ John A. Wheeler

I flossed my laundry this afternoon. It wasn't intentional. Turns out I had left a container of floss in the pocket of my pajamas and forgot to take it out before I tossed everything into the washer, so when I was taking the dry clothes out of the dryer, a couple of funny little pieces of plastic came out, too, and I thought, "Huh," and then I came in the house, tossed the lot on the sofa, and started smoothing and folding. When I got the pajamas, it looked like something had completely unraveled, something blue and white in with the dark load, and again I thought, "Huh," and then I thought, "Looks familiar. I wonder what it is." Then I found the empty plastic floss container, and it wasn't one of those little ones from the dentist, either; it was a big one, the good kind of floss, like ribbon. Now it's gone.

Huh.

Step right up and place your bets

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. ~ Bernadette Devlin

Yesterday my daughter wrote an interesting - and very funny - post on The Wilder Zone about living with teenagers. What I especially appreciate about this post is seeing again what a wonderful mother she is. Like a lot of us, she's been through hell and back with her teenagers; at 14 she went through a period that I refer to as The Year the Aliens Took Over My Daughter's Body. Maybe she took those personal lessons into her own years of mothering teens; maybe she just has a knack for handling that particular kind of kid-energy. I know that she has a great sense of humor, and for all the difficult times she and her boys have been through together, they still trust her and talk to her and obviously love her.

It takes guts to be a parent these days, and trust me: It wasn't all that easy in the 70s when my girls were growing up. Scary stuff happens out there. A few years ago I was talking with my youngest grandson (son of my youngest daughter) about a TV program he saw about drugs in the schools (I think he brought the subject up), and I asked him if kids brought drugs to his school. He looked at me like I was crazy. "Grandma!" he said, "I'm only in third grade!" Well, yeah, but . . . . Now he's in middle school and his voice is still high and he still has little boy sweet cheeks and isn't embarrassed to be seen with his grandmother. But any day now (key up the theme from Jaws), the hormones will kick in and he'll be gone for awhile and when he returns, he'll be an adult, and if I'm lucky, we can be pals again.

I lost my two oldest grandsons to the Teen Pod People when they entered their teens. The oldest is all grown up now, but we haven't reconnected yet, not like when he was two years old and talked like Elmer Fudd. God, those were good years! He would call me from California and tell me what was going on in his life, like when he got to "dwive da boat at Didneylan." His brother, who is three years younger, hasn't emerged yet from The Pod identity, but when I see him, I sometimes see flashes of the very funny and very creative kid he used to be, the dramatic child who once threw himself on the floor and wrapped his arms around my legs as I was trying to get out the front door, screaming and sobbing, "Don't go! Don't go!" Now he's taller than me and has huge feet. I hope both of them come back. I like them.

I have many friends who don't have children, and every now and then one of them will ask me what it's like to have kids, how it feels to look at my grown daughters and know that they are mine. Strange but they never really felt like "mine" in the sense that I had anything to do with their being the people they were and are. And sometimes when I am feeling particularly proud of them or impressed with who they are and what they know, I think, "Who ARE these women and how lucky am I to have them in my life!"

Sometimes they ask for my advice, and when they do, I am touched that they want it. I have a close relationship with both of them, in spite of what they had to put up with when their father and I divorced - and I came out - and I left to live with my lover. I think that being a parent of teens is like a training ground for them and for us, a time to learn how to let go, how to love through pain, how to persist in loving no matter what. Not everyone can do it; not every teen returns from The Pod; not every parent survives that particular alienation. But those of us who do endure are blessed with a love that has been tempered to last.

I sometimes think about parenthood: It's a crap shoot. When they're going through those hormone-crazed years, we don't know if they'll survive and we're pretty sure we won't. I'm glad my daughter has her sense of humor about teenagers. We could all use a lot more laughter. And I hold open the possibility that my oldest grandsons and I will become friends again, forge something new from the remains of the old. I'm willing to bet on that.

Spring comes lurching in

i thank You God for most this amazing / day:

Yesterday we basked in 75-degree weather; today, not having learned a darned thing about spring after living here for almost 25 years, I wore sandals to the office.

 

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

Bare branches of trees are coated with snow; new leaves are coated with snow; and still their spirits are green.

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

The sky darkened at about noon and the snow fell over everything, big fat flakes, the kind you want to tilt your head up to, open your mouth to.

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

This is springtime in the Rockies, or in my case, at the foot of the Rockies. This is the the kind of spring that makes tulips thrive and daffodils nod to life.

Tomorrow the snow will wane and by evening it could be balmy again. Maybe this is the last snow of the season. I could say to that.

The italicized lines above are the first stanza of one of my favorite poems by e.e. cummings.

A moment, a story

That story. ~ Ann Sexton

There's a theme that runs through our culture, showing up in movies and stories and other made-up things, that goes like this: A married couple is going through a rough time, maybe one or both are thinking of divorce, and then one of them almost dies in a car accident or becomes gravely ill and the other one realizes how much she/he really does care, and then there's there's the bedside tear-jerker drama with a great outpouring of love, regret, apology, renewed commitment—and they live happily ever after.

That story.

We walk the neighborhood on a cold January night, our clothes inadequate for the downpour, but a little  exercise wet is better than no exercise dry according to his cardiologist, which means—rain is no excuse. He is recovering from a heart attack and is six weeks away from having a stroke, but of course we don't know what's coming. Being struck by a car would have given us more advance notice for the way our marriage would end.

We didn’t hold hands that night. We were long past holding hands, long past my remembering if we ever had. We didn’t talk, either, so it isn’t conversation I remember from that night, it’s images—black and white and silent—as we moved through the downpour in the familiar neighborhood past the houses of our daughters’ friends, eaves dripping, water running in the gutters.

My jeans are soaked through by the time we get home, and I shiver from the cold. I step into the walk-in closet and strip off the wet clothes, my back to him. I hear him in the bedroom, but it is as if I am alone. I made the leap while he was in the hospital recovering from the heart attack. I made the leap as if it were simply one more step away, and it was, but I had also crossed over a chasm. Imagine an earthquake. A long crack opens in the ground beneath you and you step over it, and when you turn to look back, the crack has grown so wide you know you can’t return. That’s how it is for me.

I pull on a dry sweatshirt over goosebump flesh, step into sweatpants, hear him dump coins from his pockets into a tray on the chest of drawers, hear the click of his watch as he removes it from his wrist, the metal and leather sound of his belt. I keep my back to him even when I can tell by his silence that he is looking at me. I don't turn around until after he has left the room.

When the end finally comes and later you tell the story, it’s never really about what one person does to the other. And it’s rarely about drama, although it can come to that. It’s about slow disintegration, every day events that eat away at a structure you once thought was strong, the way cancer cells take over a healthy body: you don’t know you’re sick until it’s too late to do anything about it.

The only thing I know to do with memory is to make a myth of it, to tell stories, my stories. If he were still alive, he would tell a different story of that night we walked in the rain, if he even remembered it. It isn't that one of us is lying; it's just that even minutes after the event, all we have is story. Mine ends with that instant of feeling him watch me. After that, who knows? Maybe I went into the family room to watch TV with my daughters. Maybe he tuned into the police frequency on his ham radio.

Ultimately, it's the little things in our lives that are the most profound, that give us a reason to remember and to tell a story. My married years come back to me in images, the two of us doing that dance of denial, right through to the end.

The art of losing

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
~ from the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

After meeting Laurie and Shari for lunch today, Laurie and I walked to our cars, which were parked in the same block, hers closer than mine. We hugged goodbye, she got in her car, and I walked toward mine, keys ready in my hand. As she drove past me, she honked and waved and I raised my hand to wave at her - and stuck my car key up my nose.

Keys. The year of my divorce, when I was visiting a friend in Santa Cruz, California, I carried  my house key out to the jetty on Monterey Bay so I could throw the key into the waves, symbolically letting go of 18 years of married life and everything that key to a suburban house represented. I climbed the rocks of the jetty, said my little letting-go mantra, and flung the key as far as I could. It landed in the rocks of the jetty where it would probably take many high tides and lots of strong waves to help it release its grip on firm land.

I once lost a whole key ring with five house keys and one car key - to the car parked on the top level of the parking garage at San Jose State U - and a key to the locking car stereo cover, which had been very effective in keeping my music safe, but once I got into my car again meant that I had to listen to Pachelbel Canon with Ocean over and over until I could replace the key, remove the cover, retrieve the tape. I was staying with that same friend in Santa Cruz, job hunting at SJSU, and feeling displaced and unstrung.

In fact, I had not lost the key ring. I knew exactly where it was, more or less. It got flushed down the toilet of the ladies room at the faculty offices building, a powerful flush that took a heavy key ring weighted with seven keys right past the U-bend and out to wherever the toilet water flows. Lost? No. Irretrievable? Yes.

The plumber who answered my call for help  swore that the key ring had to be caught in the U-bend, could not have been washed down, not at that weight, and he took the toilet apart to prove it.  But I'm telling you, that flush had the power of a fire hose, practically leapt up and grabbed the keys out of my jacket pocket as my foot powered the flush, as I turned, jacket swinging, keys flinging themselves toward the upsurge of water, keys and flush throwing themselves at each other like horny teenagers hell-bent on playing Russian Roulette with sperm, egg, and spit.

Keys: Irretrievable as the plumber put toilet parts back together, shook his head, hitched up his toolbelt, and turned away from me as if I had insulted his knowledge of U-bend lore.

Lost: I left campus to call a locksmith and wait on the hot pavement of the parking garage roof for him to let me in to the only home I had at the moment in spite of having had five house keys on the irretrievable key ring now wending its way through city sewers, making a mad dash for the freedom of the sea. Then I finally got into my car again, Pachelbel Canon playing behind the locked stereo cover, and drove back to Santa Cruz.

Meanwhile, the portly plumber turns the water back on in the ladies room and the toilet bowl refills, water calm as a summer lake, deceptive as undertow on the San Francisco coast.

Jaws, meatloaf, midafternoon dream

The first time I had this recurring nightmare, I thought it was funny in a creepy sort of way - like in the first Jaws movie when Richard Dreyfus is leaning over the back of that little boat and suddenly the shark is halfway out of the water and you scream and then you laugh at yourself - like that.

The first time the dream jerked me awake and I gasped out loud in my dark bedroom and then laughed. The next time I had the dream, I just thought, "Hmmm," and let it go. The third time I wasn't laughing and I wasn't wondering. I woke to a shark in the bed, the marine version of the horse's head scene in The Godfather.

The dream: I am driving my silver Honda Civic through the maze of a suburban neighborhood in mid-afternoon, that time of day when the sunlight is flat and the shadow isn't yet creeping across the neatly mown lawns.The streets are empty - no birds or dogs or sleeping cats - just blank-eyed houses pretending they don't see me. I pull into the driveway of a ranch-style house with regulation green lawn and thin-trunked city-planted ash tree. I get out of my car, go up the walk to the cement slab of a front porch, place my hand on the warm knob, and enter the house.

It's quiet except for the ticking of clocks: a cuckoo on the living room wall, a grandfather in the family room, and an old-fashioned alarm clock on the kitchen counter. They tick and my heels click on the entryway tile. I enter the kitchen, take an apron off a hook, tie it around my waist, and move from refrigerator to counter to cupboards, assembling the ingredients for a perfect meatloaf. I slide it into the preheated oven, clean up the kitchen. When I take off my apron, there is not one dish in the sink, not one measuring cup on the counter or onion skin or crumb of bread: not one speck of one thing to indicate I had ever been in the kitchen - but for the smell of meatloaf browning in the oven in a spotless kitchen in a sunny suburban neighborhood.

And that's when I wake up screaming.

I haven't had this dream in a long time, haven't been a suburban housewife in almost 30 years, and still the flat light of mid-afternoon creeps me out. The labyrinthine streets of pastel-colored tract homes make me shudder. And even the sound of the word "meatloaf" or "apron" can trigger my gag reflex.

In her writing, Jean Houston makes a distinction between pathology and mythology. (I've written about this before.) We are a culture of pathologizers, oh-my-gosh-ers, nail biters and thumb suckers. My old nightmare could, I suppose, indicate some deep psychological illness, but damn it makes good story, and I figure that if I can mythologize my life in story, I must be OK.

As long as I don't - you know - wake up with the horse's head.

Note: No housewives were harmed in the writing of this story.

End of a marriage

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
~ T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

The rain came down like punishment that year, like righteous anger, like how-dare-you and you-brought-this-on-yourself. It slicked the sidewalks so I couldn’t get from my car to the front door without almost falling down, and one time I did fall, clutching a paper sack of groceries to my chest. Canned peas rolled all the way to the curb, the loaf of bread was smashed in the middle like a figure-eight, the white-wrapped package of ground beef landed in the mud, and the lid popped off the jamoca almond fudge ice cream.

The paper sack disintegrated, and my daughters came out in their shorts and flip-flops to help me gather the crunched and broken pieces of that night’s dinner and carry them into the house. We gave up and ordered pizza. After he moved out, I had vowed not to live by the old rules, the married rules, the eat-your-vegetables-or-no-dessert rules. Funny how you have to keep renewing the vows until the new way sticks.

In California the rain comes in off the Pacific, no quick storm passing through but a front that drenches everything. This one tore up the sky with wind and slashed at the trees with driving rain. I woke one morning to find the cork oak completely uprooted and sprawled on the front lawn like a dead body waiting for a chalk outline. Another night the wind split the pear tree right down the middle, neither half salvageable. I cried. I had planted that tree all by myself from a one-gallon can. I had torn a hole in the hard-clay earth with a 60-pound spike, worked the soil with mulch, cradled the root ball in my hands, and planted my tree while my husband sat inside and read Time magazine, asking me now and then how it was going, speaking from the screen door with the AC-ed living room behind him.

From a thin twig half my height, the tree grew to 15 feet, giving shade in the summer. I’d lie on a bench at night and look up through its leaves at the sky. When we think of symbols for a marriage, we think of a ring—a circle of love, diamonds that last forever. We don’t think about a suburban backyard that grew out of sweat and effort.

There is something very tender about lifting a new plant from its plastic container and setting it into the worked soil, something so full of hope about squatting on the grass to admire the start and imagine the result.  I say “result” because who could imagine the end? The end was a house with half the furniture gone and pizza for dinner, power going off in a storm, one tree split right down the middle, one person to mourn the loss.