Journeys

Love at the Edge of Loss

~ John ~ 5 Comments

I awoke this bright, sunny morning of my 58th birthday, feeling extraordinarily lucky and loved.  Facebook birthday greetings came chiming in. Beret brought me coffee, toast, brie, and the Times in bed.  The cat clamored for attention.  My daughter Paige WhatsApped from her Peace Corps posting in Panama.  I am warm, dry, safe, fed, loved.

Still, as I’ve contemplated the arrival of my birthday over the past week, and inevitably the year gone by, the song that’s been rattling around my heart is the Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris duet “If This Is Goodbye.”  Their album’s been in among the CDs in my car for about a month, and instead of getting progressively sick of it I’ve found myself obsessively homing in — until last week, driving home from a particularly exhausting divorce mediation, I had to pull over at the tourist lookout on the highway leading into my town, turn it up loud, and weep.  For basically no reason.

Or perhaps, for many reasons.  I’m coming to the end of the year of grieving my mother’s death – my siblings and I are going to Virginia next week to place her ashes.  Her last few days were spent in hospice in my house, after she’d announced her firm wish not to recover from her stroke.   And so, there was leave-taking before she went, and on another plane, there’s been more leave-taking since.

Then there’s what I do for a living.  The accumulated sorrow of mediating five to ten domestic relations cases a week does add up at times.

One can add the ignominy of our politics and culture, whose machines goad us to despise each others’ distended shadows, muffling our human cries, uttered just beyond view.

And finally, there is the suffering of the planet itself.  The new IPCC report on climate change brooks no poetry and accepts no apology.  It stands as a damnation of any of the puny works or professed values of the Boomer generation against the tidal judgment of the future.

What a depressing litany, right?   But when I think of these things, I actually don’t get sucked into sorrow.  When I wept on the highway, my deepest feeling was a pang of sweet appreciation.  Not that I lost my mother, but that I was with her at the end.  Not that there is marital carnage around me all the time, but that my own love, after 34 years, is still so tender.  Not that our democracy is so horribly imperiled, but that a surge of new voters could, just maybe, transform it.

After I developed epilepsy a few years ago, I came to manage the anxiety that my consciousness could be drastically altered at any moment, in the blink of an eye.  But it also taught me to live in the moment in a way no amount of philosophy could.  Beauty sprang out at me from ordinary places.  Now that my seizures are fully controlled, I still try to cultivate that awareness.  And at 58, living with an awareness of loss is easy to do.  Friends around me lose parents, partners, and – most excruciatingly – children; battle illness; endure separation; and go through all manner of other trials.  My birthday riches are sweetened by being at edge of — and surrounded by the brimming love attending — these other losses. They mirror our generation’s place in the world, and in history.

So here’s a duet from Mark and Emmylou.  I didn’t know until I sat down to write today that he composed it in memory of another bright fall morning – September 11.   Enjoy!

And, since Mark’s singing in particular is maddeningly indistinct in this version, here are the lyrics:

My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters
Sounding absurd
Whatever I try
But I love you
And that’s all that really matters
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Your bright shining sun
Would light up the way before me
You were the one
Made me feel I could fly
And I love you
Whatever is waiting for me
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Who knows how long we’ve got
Or what were made out of
Who knows if there’s a plan or not
There is our love
I know there is our love

My famous last words
Could never tell the story
Spinning unheard
In the dark of the sky
But I love you
And this is our glory
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

After Charlottesville

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I spent last Sunday reading condemnations of others’ racism after Charlottesville.  I read few investigations of self.

I’ve just returned from a road trip through Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – country I’ve traversed, and loved, for years.  Impassable red rock craters and spires.  Rigid fields of irrigated potatoes.  Windy plains evoking Mongolian steppes, dotted with antelope.

And every fifty miles or so, a town – sickening, dying, or dead.  I’ve watched these little towns over the years, stopped in their gas stations and eaten in their cafes.  I’ve seen how the movie house closed because it couldn’t afford a digital projector.  How the musty old hotel restaurant, where you could get a steak under the stare of a stuffed buffalo head, has become a Denny’s.  How a grocery store’s converted to an antique shop, as the keepsakes of a rural community bleed out through its last open orifice.  How the diner we used to stop at because of the row of pickups out front is now empty, its windows painted over with dust-covered bald eagles and American flags.  How it doesn’t take long, once the last business goes, for the buildings to bleach like bones.

Of course this is hardcore Trump country.  Businesses are festooned with “Make America Great” signs.  People’s country courtesy comes edged with resentment.  I’ve always been an outsider, and I’m still a customer.  But I’ve felt increasingly like an enemy.  This trip, a motorcyclist passing the other direction flipped us off – I guess just for our Colorado plates.

Still, even after Charlottesville, I carry these people in my heart.

It goes deeper.  My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery.  Its people faced a terrifying future.  My great-aunt wrote, in a memoir depicting our family’s struggle out of that awful shadow: “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  My great-uncle beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man refused to call him “mister.”

Outwardly, I am none of these things.  A professional, progressive Boulderite, I harbor no ideologies of racial separation or superiority. I have no trouble condemning the KKK.  But we do not live in the world of Indiana Jones, where good guys punch out cartoon Nazis.  The racism we must confront is not merely the tiki-torch variety.  It’s our own in-group out-group hard wiring, overlaid with the history, power structures and acculturation of our regional, familial, and personal roots.  By this standard, of course Donald Trump is racist.  But so am I.  When I meet a person, among the first things I notice is their race.  Also, a quick flash of wariness.  It has always been there.

The great damage wrought by Bannon and Trump is that they align such deep-rooted racism with our often legitimate sense of economic loss and cultural fear, and meld them into tribal resentment.  People thus incited do not experience themselves as haters.  What they feel is allegiance and safety.  So they deny being – or at least feeling — racist.  But the hatred and violence engendered are no less real.

Humans as a species are universally vulnerable to race-baiting like Bannon’s.  Democracy’s defenders should condemn and confront it.  But we — especially people of privilege — should also be honest about ourselves.  The therapy for racism is not righteousness.  It is understanding: of other, of self.

One morning last week we set out before dawn on Highway 50.  The Great Basin opened up ahead, a carpet of black sage stopping at silhouetted cliffs, thrusting to indistinct peaks and ridgelines and tumbling bruises of cloud, dark grey, burgundy, pink — then suddenly breaking into orange fire.  What had been a wash of soulful gloom abruptly turned every color, green, yellow, lavender, each proclaiming its particular self.  Oncoming headlights faded to twinkles, like morning stars.  Mary Chapin Carpenter crooned:

Oh my darling, oh my love,
The things that we are made of.

Road Trip

~ John ~ Leave a comment

We spent this morning driving through northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin, on a college trip with Marcus.  I have always been a flyover guy when it came to this part of the country, so I’m a stranger to this landscape.  It’s beautiful, in a sorted sort of way.  Meted squares of coffee-colored soil, combed into straight rows of bright sleeping corn stubble.  All the rocks ploughed out long ago and stacked into piles at the corners.   Straight lines of alders, poplars, and bright yellow birches along the fencerows.  An occasional ancient spreading tree, standing alone.  White houses, red barns, and silver silos.  Weeds growing only where weeds may grow.  Straight ditchlines.   Streambanks allowed to meander, perhaps only because they were here first.  Ponds and lakes, ringed by cattails and hunting blinds.  Clumps of trees gathered at brief hills and narrow creek hollows, little patches of disorder that soon remember themselves and lapse back to prairie.  Dairy cattle.  A lone shepherding dog.  Geese.  Hawks.  Cranes.

The people, too, seem well-sorted.  Farming and railroad towns.  A matronly waitress in a sensible short haircut serves fried cheese curds to a rounded 60-year-old man clenching in his teeth an unlit cigar.  A nearby TV plays top-ten home fistfighting videos.   Just two blocks away is a college where the students stage a “Really Really Free Market” in their dorm, as an “alternative to capitalism.”  Recent campus graffiti, its wording judged to be racist and thus too inflammatory to print in the college newspaper, provokes this front page rejoinder: “Response to the blatant disregard for persons as illustrated by the hate crimes will be met in the best way [we] know how: with genuine, gritty, public, open and meaningful conversation about how to remind those around the campus and community that actions like this will not be tolerated.”   Back at our hotel this morning, an elderly man with bright blue eyes, suspenders and an oxygen tank eyes me silently in the lobby.  “College trip,” I hear him remark to his companion after we’ve walked past.  “Wanna know how I know?”  Yeah, I’ve got a fair guess as to how you know.

Still, my surface impressions are too easy.  Whenever I visit my cousins in West Texas, the land looks flat and empty from the state highway.  But when you’re in it, on foot, walking along the low caliche cliffs or under the pecan trees by the river, there are armadillos, rattlesnakes, wild turkeys, prehistoric gar that gaze at you from the green water.  Here, I can only imagine the wild private places I couldn’t see from today’s highway, the crazy volcanic hearts living inside those white houses and red barns, the terrifying wondrous thoughts leaking onto keyboards inside those brick dorms.   Marcus is hoping for a little wildness, after all.  In the 21st century, that’s an increasingly rare thing to find, and perhaps the upper Midwest is an odd place to look.   But landscapes and reputations can deceive, and I notice he’s getting to be a fair hunter.