God and other constructs

In January of this year, as I was packing to move, I made a call to one of my closest friends … a flare sent out for sympathy and solidarity,

The move was my fifth in four years, the pandemic was raging, and my younger brother was dying a dozen states away. I was flailing around, waking and weeping in the middle of the night amidst boxes full of stuff I couldn’t part with. Relics from fifty odd years of questionable choices.

A minute or two into the phone call, while trying to describe how distraught and unmoored I felt, she interrupted me and brushed aside my feelings like a summer fly, “moving a few blocks away doesn’t count,” she said.  This was the friend who knew me best in all my worst, and looking back now, I wonder if she was just trying to lighten the mood, a failed attempt to make me feel better.

But back then, her dismissive laughter was not at all what I was expecting. Or needing. It was jarring and disorienting. A painful reminder of how our friendship had been changing for quite some time.

It shook me.

The day after my brother died, I decided to confront her about the call. I was full to overflowing with emotional wreckage and needed her to hear me.  But she didn’t hear me, and used the conversation as an opportunity to list the many ways I had hurt her over the years.

If I’d known at the time that it would be the final blow to our friendship, I wonder if I would have made the call.

In the silent months since, I‘ve rifled through ten years of unsent emails and journal entries. Evidence to justify my anger and sadness, to fortify the narrative I’d been constructing from my memories, and to convince myself that it was all inevitable. The same documentation showed how my silence, my lack of courage to send those emails, bears some responsibility.

I’ve also spent a lot of time looking through old photos of us, wondering how in the world we let this happen.

I began writing this as a personal exploration about home, but it keeps circling back to her. Maybe because she used to feel like home. Welcoming, comfortable, the light always on. I can’t pinpoint a time when it all began to fall apart. When the little cracks and fissures first appeared.

Maybe as the years went by and physical distance made getting together more difficult, she needed me to be a less demanding friend. She inadvertently hinted as much once when she described what an easy visitor another friend of hers was. How she was the kind of friend that didn’t need to spend every minute together. I remember how my cheeks burned with embarrassment, knowing I was the difficult kind. 

She has a husband – her third - a solid partnership but not always an easy one, and how many intense relationships can one person manage? She has children, grandchildren, and sisters.  All requiring emotional presence.

I remember being so happy when she was finally emerging from the sadness of her second divorce. We had much more time for the exchanging of confidences, the hilarity, the long conversations traversing every inch of each other’s emotional terrain. But way too soon another man came along, and they moved away.

Through the years, we visited each other often, and I came to really love this husband. I miss them both. He’s Italian and a lot like the men I grew up around. Funny and charming, loud and belligerent. He loves her and accommodates the most difficult aspects of her, in homage to what’s lovable.

A few days ago, I learned that they’re moving to the east coast to be closer to her family. They’ll be leaving the house they renovated, re-designed, added to, and so carefully tended  over the past two decades. The place where I spent so much time with them. She’s leaving her studio, their gardens, neighbors and friends, their home.  This must be hard for her. And for him. 

The word home insinuates permanence and history. Safety. A landing or a return.  Warmth and beauty. The structure itself is irrelevant. Whether an apartment or house, a trailer or yurt. It’s what we infuse it with, and who we live with, that animates it and makes it so hard to leave. 

For me, home is longing, but a longing that is completely at odds with my restlessness and need for solitude.  It’s a concept that seems as out of reach as God or the strand of coral left on the horizon when the sun slips beneath it.

Inside the tiny house where I’ve lived for ten months now, I’m curled up in my chair, doing this, and watching giant evergreens across the road, waving their  heavy branches up and down like supplicants as they face strong winds out of the southwest. Behind them, the northern sky is colorless and flat. The power is out, which isn’t unusual here, so I’m wearing thick socks, fleece pants, a puffy coat and a wool hat. Surrounding me are bookshelves, and piles of books needing shelves. In my site line, perched on every surface and sill, are strategically placed rocks, plants and treasured gifts from my daughter and friends. My desk is a mess of notebooks and scraps of random musings and unfinished stories, chiding me to get to work.

A few blocks away is Lake Michigan, which in the past few days has gone from serene to insane and back again – crashing waves to quiet ripples of constantly shifting shades of blue.  And maybe that’s why this feels more like home than anywhere I’ve lived before. My moods made manifest. 

Perhaps back in January I simply needed to choose a different word, so my brother being alone on the boat he lived on and so loved at the end of his life, wouldn’t have seemed so wrong, and  moving would’ve felt less like an endless quest for home and more like an adventure or what lots of creatures do when the seasons change. 

Nest.

Den.

Hermitage.

I’ve moved to a hermitage in Northern Michigan, graciously rented to me by the owner who has entrusted me to live in it, love it, and tend to it, for as long as I’d like, in exchange for a modest sum of money each month.  A place where, hopefully, I’ll live happily (or at least interestingly) ever after.  For now.

Since moving here, I’ve painted and planted, and most recently decked my modest halls for the holidays. I have friends coming over for dinner this week, (if the power comes back on) and in a few days, I’ll ask my neighbors to watch over things while I visit family and friends in Detroit.  

When Hemingway was asked what the most difficult thing about writing was, he answered, “Finding the right word.”

It’s a constant struggle, to find that right word, and connect it to other right words in an order that will take a story, a letter, a poem or anything written, to its destination and provide a pleasant or at least entertaining ride for the reader.

Words are the main way we communicate, and by the very nature of their job - which is making a connection between one human’s consciousness and another’s - finding the exact right word is important and nearly impossible.  

Take the word pink.

If I mention in a sentence that something is pink, depending on who’s reading, the word will conjure up different images … the underside of clouds right before sunrise, tongues or intestines, fat bows on the bald heads of baby girls. My mother’s soft cardigan she sometimes wore when pruning roses.

And roses.

Or that pink baby doll dress I wore to a party in 1968, but more on that later.

And then there’s the sound.

Pink.

Rhymes with mink, ink, stink, link. The sound of a word can elicit a response as distinct as its meaning and has enough power to make or break the connection between other words.

To be certain that pink is even the right choice, and to convey exactly what kind of pink I mean, will require wandering away from the point, which, presuming there is one, will mean having to find the way back.  It’s a bit like stepping off the trail and bushwacking through an unfamiliar forest. There’s always the possibility of getting lost.

Recently, a gallery hosting an exhibit called Color, invited people to come and spend time with the art and then write something inspired by one of the pieces. Ekphrasis is the term used for this sort of exercise. The gallery offered no inducements like prizes or publication, no deadlines or pressure. It was simply a beckoning, a dare, so I thought, why not and went to look at the art.

And there it was. Calling to me. A 50x30 inch illustration titled ‘Pink’, depicting a mound of rocks. The ones at the base were large and arranged into cairn-like supports. On top of this base the rocks got progressively smaller and packed tightly together, forming the suggestion of an evergreen tree. The rocks had soft edges, and instead of being varying shades of gray as one might expect of rocks, all of them were pink with a dusting of white. (Think bubble gum right out of the wrapper. Or pink sweet tarts.)

There’s something irresistible about the piece. Color contradicting content. Heavy and light at the same time. Pink rocks. It’s almost subversive. And noteworthy in terms of my peculiar attraction to it, considering the prejudices I’ve always attached to Pink – its assumed femininity, and its suggested submissiveness that my Sicilian father spent years trying to bully me into.

A few weeks previous to visiting the gallery, I had come across a photo of myself, age 17, at a party, wearing a pink baby doll dress, much like the pink in the painting.  In the photo, my high school boyfriend’s arm is around me, and in his hand, a lit cigarette is dangling way too close to the taffeta covering my breasts.

I’m smiling, either unaware, or just not caring.

The dress, which fell mid-thigh and had a frilled bib that buttoned up from the waist was typical for the role my girlfriends and I were playing back then. While painting my lips a shiny pink and wearing the shortest skirts I could get away with leaving my house in, I was seducing boys while carefully policing my virginity. In the suburb where I grew up, staying a virgin until marriage was what good Catholic girls did. Not that I was particularly good, or Catholic. I had given up on the church at age 12, shortly after Vatican II robbed me of the fantasy of the God I’d grown up with.  I had believed literally in the stories of Adam and Eve, virgin births and flaming bushes and remember the humiliation I felt when the curtain was lifted and the mystery and incense evaporated. I was left facing my own gullibility and ugly felt banners.

Staying a virgin until marriage was not about God at all, but the fear of judgement by my peers, society at large, and the names I’d be called if I crossed that line. The reality was that my virginity was a technicality. All through high school I enjoyed a pretty good sex life.  I flirted and beckoned, teased my then boyfriend with possibility, allowing him to lay on top of me fully clothed, his hands roaming here and there, pantomiming sex until I had an orgasm, which came easily and quickly, the pink dress scrunched up to my waist, but with my underpants still on, my virginity intact, his frustration on going.

It would be a few more years until I would discover  that intercourse didn’t involve some out of this world experience beyond the orgasms I had been experiencing quite regularly. My disappointment was acute. The actual act I’d been saving myself for, proved, at first, to be either laughable or painful. I was fumbling around in the dark like an inexperienced actor auditioning for a role she didn’t understand.

Fast forward forty years to a porn convention in Hollywood Florida that the Detroit Free Press sent me to when I was a photographer there. Think auto show, but instead of cars, blow up dolls and robotic dildos. Instead of Bill Ford, Ron Jeremy.

I went with a younger male reporter. I thought I was an odd choice for this particular assignment but figured the editor saw me, a woman pushing sixty, as a means to prevent raised eyebrows. I was kind of annoyed by the presumptions, mine and theirs, but was more than happy to fly off to Florida in the middle of winter.

One of the exhibitors at the convention was Pink, a porn production company who’s after party was basically live porn.

I documented as much as I could within the confines of what can be published in a family newspaper while wearing my Press Pass which had my name, The Detroit Free Press, and Pussy Cash, emblazoned on it in shiny pink letters.

Fast forward once again to the immediate aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and the millions of women marching and wearing pink pussy hats in reaction to a misogynistic reality star being elected President. Perhaps this was the origin of a shift in my perceptions. One that I wasn’t fully conscious of and perhaps why I find myself wanting to spend 900.00 on a painting. That’s pink. I won’t be  hanging pink curtains anytime soon, but perhaps a sweater or some pink peonies for my garden.

Soft pink.

Today, after making my way through a tangled wood, I reached the shore of Lake Michigan. Before I could even register the endless blue in front of me, a raft of ducks scattered into the air as if on cue.

What had alerted them? My red jacket? My wispy hair reflecting sunlight? I had been walking quite gingerly.

As I watched the ducks disappear into the haze of the horizon, I wondered if I had caused the muons around them to wobble. That‘s a musing I couldn’t’ve entertained before a recent article in the NYTs alerted me to a physics discovery, that, according to the headline, “could upend the known laws of physics.” The story said that these laws were being challenged by muons, which according to the author are like electrons, but heavier. The muon itself isn’t news. It’s their behavior that is causing the ripples.  The muons wobble, which is not the way subatomic particles are supposed to act. Apparently.

The ‘known’ physics that these muons upended is not known to me, and according to an informal survey of friends, this not knowing is widespread.  I took Physics 101 in college, which I loved much more than my barely-passing grade suggested.  All I remember is viewing film after film of the glorious night sky, with Beethoven’s 6th Symphony booming in the background. During these classes, I fell in love with the heavens, but love isn’t always explicable and as much as I studied, the knowledge that my impassioned professor tried to impart was beyond my reach.  Whatever forces are keeping us and this fragile planet we live on suspended in space, remain as incomprehensible to me now as they were back then. Nevertheless, it was good to read about the wayward muon, confirming what I’ve always felt to be true – that humans, including scientists, are still light years away from any certainty about the origins of the universe, and how it all works.  Which means anything is possible.  

If I was a poet and were to write a poem in Marvin Bell’s honor, maybe I’d talk about the tire tracks in the snow this evening and how they reminded me of making chocolate cake. That sometimes when spreading white frosting over the layers, the cake crumbles into the confection and I don’t have enough frosting to cover it up. So I play with it and try to make it look deliberate, and in the process, it becomes something beautiful and I get lost in the black and white patterns like I nearly did in the woods while walking an old logging road, thinking of Marvin – his laughter and poetry, sweetness and art, and the whole delectable mess.

I hate campaign signs. The ones for Trump elicit feelings of disdain toward people I don’t even know. I judge and presume and sometimes even yell at them out loud because I’m alone in my car and it feels good. The signs for Biden make me feel slightly better, but also remind me that the bigger font should spell Warren, or Harris, or Clinton for that matter, which makes me a little crazy too.

I’ve always considered myself empathetic, able to put myself in other’s shoes, but these days, it’s love thy neighbor, but not the one with the Trump sign. I wish campaign signs were illegal. I don’t think they change minds. Not to mention the enormous waste. And speaking of enormous, this year, yard signs have metastasized into banners the size of billboards, visually screaming candidate’s names, stoking the rage of anyone driving by who disagrees, and ruining what should have been a nice drive to the apple orchard.

I fear we’re losing our collective minds, and mother nature’s alarm bells are ringing on ears that are going deaf from all the noise.

Recently, I laid in bed listening over and over again to a tape of Melania Trump saying, “who the f..k cares about Christmas.” I was crying I was laughing so hard – an inappropriate response, sure, but I was tired and slap happy from Debate Week, which was also Raging Fires Out of Control Week, Greenland Ice Melt Week, and Conflict Escalating Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Week, all of it drowned out by Trump World.

The morning after the Melania tapes, I read about the president’s Covid diagnosis and wondered whether or not to believe it. After it became apparent that it was true, and then seeing his colorless face while he made comments from the hospital, I actually felt sorry for him, thinking that he was likely scared, staring down his own mortality. But that empathy didn’t last. His breathtaking self-centeredness a few short days later, when he ripped off his mask and walked into the White House disregarding everyone around him, followed by his increasingly divisive and outrageous rants, made it impossible for me to sustain it.  

This drama we’ve been living within for the last four years is exhausting, and as the election gets close, too many of us spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling through the news, fearing what might happen next.  If only this were fiction. The writers would be instructed to tone things down, that the story line is preposterous, the pace too frenetic, and the dialogue grating and repetitive.  Editors would point out that there is nothing redeeming about the main character, and direct them to give him at least an ounce of humanity – the ounce I thought I saw for a brief moment a few days ago.

I’m slightly embarrassed that I entertained the possibility of a humbling, a reckoning, possibly even redemption, when the reality of Trump is so obvious and consistent.

I wish that I could pull an all-nighter, binge on this god-awful series and get it over with.

This Happened

The other day I was staring at the detritus that had gathered at the eastern edge of a small lake; submerged lily pads, vines, stems, muck, the odd snail; when a commotion ensued – two dragon flies flailing around like they were drowning. One or both of them would stop every few seconds and then start up again. After a few minutes of this, the one closest to me managed to emerge and begin a slow crawl up the tree I was standing near.

Meanwhile the other one gave a couple more halfhearted flutters then stopped, laying inert on the surface.

 It didn’t look good. 

I focused all my attention on the dragonfly, trying to will it to move, hoping for a resurrection.

Or was I?

Here was a perfect specimen ready to take home with me. I reached into my backpack for the small collection box that I always carry and set it aside. I waited a few more minutes until I was sure, then coaxed the dead dragonfly to shore with a long stem of grass. When it was well within reach, I photographed it, picked it up by its tail and placed it in the box.

 I said, “goodbye and sorry about your friend” to the one who was still clinging to the tree, then continued on my walk.

After a mile or so, my attention having wandered far from the dragonflies, and feeling a bit thirsty, I went to get some water from my pack, and decided to take a look in the box. When I opened it, the dragonfly was clearly not dead, its long tail (which I later learned was its abdomen) was curling inward, and its tiny legs were moving. 

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” I said, or something along those lines and gingerly removed it from the box. I placed it on a small mound of light green moss, thinking that’s where I’d want to rest, and then waited. For what, I’m not sure. A sign of relief? Of gratitude?  But it didn’t move. I wondered whether or not I should take it back to the lake.  Maybe dragonflies hate moss or are allergic. What did I know?  And at that moment I felt such shame. What did I know, indeed. 

I worked my way to the shore of another little lake not too far from where I had originally found it,  and placed it on a long stem of grass which it immediately took hold of and began climbing. I felt a tiny bit better but kept thinking about the fact that dragonflies have existed for millions of years, (I did know that much). and that what I had witnessed was possibly a mating ritual, or a way to fool predators or predatees, or any number of possibilities. I knew absolutely nothing but had acted as if I did, and, in the process, may have ruined a couple of dragonflies’ perfectly nice day or even prevented some baby dragonflies from ever being born.

As I speculated as to whether or not the dragonflies would find each other again, I thought about the fact that I was one of millions of humans all over the planet messing with the rest of creation for most of my short time here, inadvertently wreaking havoc while keeping myself comfortable, entertained, and separate. Everyday there are more indications that mother nature is about done with the lot of us, and I can’t decide if this is comforting or terrifying.

After I returned to the trailhead, I drove back to my apartment and took off my waterproof hiking shoes. I emptied the contents of my extra light back pack, (including the water bottle that keeps beverages hot or cold), and googled dragonflies on a new laptop, searching for answers.

According to odonatologists, what I had witnessed could very well have been a female migrant hawker feigning death to escape the attention of a male, which made her relatable and me feeling a bit better about placing her on a stem of grass quite a distance from where I took her out of the water.

Once, when my daughter was six, she went on a field trip and told me that as the bus bounced along a dirt road, the teacher pointed out some green fields and told the class that it was alfalfa. After that, whenever we were driving, every green field was alfalfa, no matter if it was corn or soybeans or just plain grass. “Look, alfalfa!”, my daughter would say, as certain as certain can be. If I suggested otherwise, she’d insist and dig in as if she had planted the field herself.  She’s a woman now but when we’re together and driving past any green field, she or I will say, “look, alfalfa, laughing deep within the memories.

During the forced solitude of this pandemic, I’ve found myself alfalfasizing a lot. I’ll see a small raptor-like creature and say to myself, “oh, a kestrel.”

 I’ve seen one kestrel up close in my life - years ago, so I should know.

Calling something or someone by name is personal, and learning (or even faking) the names of the plants and animals I walk among everyday makes it harder to feel alone. Sandhill cranes, waxwings, northern flickers, and swifts. Knapweed, and goldenrod, clover, and astor. Field crickets, and grasshoppers that ping away from my foot falls, and the porcupine that climbs the nearest tree when it senses my presence. Earlier today I saw an eagle resting on air over a bluff above Lake Michigan. But was it an eagle? It was too far away to know for certain. Maybe it was a turkey vulture or a red-tailed hawk. I deemed it an eagle, and it probably was, because there’s one I see most mornings in the general vicinity. Nearby, a handful of crows that often harass him made a racket from the top of a cottonwood tree. They left him alone for the most part this morning, but they sure had a lot to say about one thing or another. 

In any case, because I’m learning names and habits, I feel a part of it all. There’s a stand of giant spruce trees I’ve christened the Grizzly’s because they’re large and imposing and cast deep shadows on the dirt road I sometimes walk at sunset.  A few miles from there, on a steep incline of dune grass, stands a goofy little cedar with a crown of disheveled boughs on an otherwise bare trunk. I’ve named it Obie, after the sweetest dog I ever loved.

In the woods or dunes, in some field or stream, I greet all that I’ve come to know or name and it works every time. Isolation becomes community and the mortality that seems to be hovering so close these days is no more threatening than the fallen beach tree blanketed with moss and sinking back into the earth that I often sit on mid-walk. I’d like to think that when we die, we become something else, like a dark-eyed junco flitting around, or a worm crawling through loamy earth, or just earth itself, laying about sprouting spores, witnessing the moon waxing and waning without worry –  about ticks, or rain, or the coming night, and not continually asking for signs and answers from the God I’d like to believe in.  

“How many more signs can one God provide?” I imagine her saying when I  take a closer look at something... a spider’s web, the strands heavy with tiny orbs of water, mirroring the trees it hangs between and backlit by a rising sun, still and forever moving through an endless sky.

I hope heaven is a lot like here, I guess, minus pandemics and borders ... with our souls bounding around unfettered, joining those we’ve loved and lost, who we’ll recognize, and rue the time we wasted worrying about when it all would end.

We’ll spy on the ones we’ve left behind and try to slip them some comfort in the coded ways of the departed. 

But, for now, my hope stays here wanting more of these days to worry, rage, or eat cake instead of the dinner I wish I was cooking for my daughter or some friends or my mother who left this earth years ago. 

I got an email from a friend this morning telling me this and that about his days and sleepless nights. At one point he described picking up his granddaughter from school. I think she’s 7 or thereabouts. How he stood outside in his mask, waiting for school to let out, and when it did and she spotted him she ran straight into his arms and gave him a big hug. The scene took me back to a time when my daughter would do that, whenever and wherever I’d pick her up… school, camp, a friend’s, and how light her love was then, weightless, and free.

Love gets heavier as we get older, weighted down by mismatched memories, unfulfilled expectations and our own self-consciousness. Whether it’s the love between friends or spouses, parents and children, as it gets older, it gets heavier, so we work harder at it, love the best we can and get dogs, because we miss the lightness.

Not that I’d want to go backwards. The complicated layers of the love between my daughter and I are rich and varied stretching deep into and out of time, back before either of us existed, and forth into forever. Our love is immutable and always changing – the way that I’m sometimes happy and sad in the very same moment.