The Ways We Miss the Dead

I had a dream last night too muddled to recount. In it was a young man--the friend of one of my daughters. He was shot and killed at a party when they were in high school. In my dream he was playing the guitar and I was trying to explain to a friend that he was dead and had come back only for this one special evening. No matter how I tried, I could not make her understand.

Friday night I went to the mall to buy a purse and to have three dead watches checked out to see if batteries might revive them. One of the watches was my mother's. I had a snappy red leather band put on it along with the new battery, wondering if some day I might wear this watch, its pulse beating on my wrist now instead of my mother's and somehow this might make me feel her presence in my life in a physical way. While I waited for the work to be done on the watches, I walked through the mall and found myself in Sears, walking in the very same aisle I once walked regularly with my mother to get to Miracle Ear.

The other day I told a friend how my father often spoke in tired and true old sayings and how he didn't even have to deliver the whole saying because he'd said them so often that we kids knew what came next.  Up too late? "The early bird," he'd say. A friend got in trouble for running with the wild kids? "Birds of a feather," he'd say.

On Thursday night, my regular night out to hear music at a local bar with friends, the musicians played a song we'd never heard them play, Sweet and Shiny Eyes. Bonnie Rait recorded it and I think Willie Nelson put out a version too.

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
Drinking salted Margaritas with Fernando

Young and wild, we drove five hundred miles of Texas highway
To the Mexican border as the day was coming on
We crossed the Rio Grande river and we swore we'd have things our way
When we happened to walk into Nuevo Leon

Your sweet and shiny eyes are like the stars above Laredo
Like meat and potatoes to me
In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

In my sweet dreams we are in a bar, and it's my birthday
And we're having our picture taken with Fernando

The version I know best was sung to me live. The way I remember it, it was usually after dinner at my place. Dan would pull his guitar out of its case and carry it back to the table. We'd push our chairs far enough from each other so he'd have room to play.

In my sweet dreams I'm in a bar, there are people playing the guitar, and the dead are back for a visit, their eyes sweet and shiny. We know, just by being in their presence how lucky we are, and they know that they were lucky, in a way, to leave this life first because we were here to hold them, to mourn them, to keep them alive in our dreams, to tell their stories--and they can never do that for us.

Here's an essay about that by Donald Hall from the New Yorker.

Furries. Cat videos. Cartoons. Sex. Sweetness. Just your normal Saturday.

Here's how my Saturday went:

A walk in the fog on the beach. I text daughter M about the blurb my book has gotten in my college's alumnae magazine.

Some more texting ensues.

Later I send daughter C this.

This ensues.

What would I do without the daughters? Danger. Danger.

Monday Beach Report/Addendum to the Guy in the Party Hat Cod-Piece

Another Beach walk. Another bag of trash. To follow the thread of this post, you might want to read about the trash I found on Saturday. The comments on that post--on the blog, on Facebook, in person were far less cynical than my own take.

Okay.

So I had the almost-sex dream last night (scroll down to this morning's post) and then at noon I took a 20-minute walk and filled a grocery bag with trash. This is what I found (among other things).

Paper plate and Trojan wrapper

Ribbon

Okay. 

Hahahahah, Dan. What are you trying to tell me? 

Now excuse me, I think I have to go walk the beach looking for a party hat. Or something.

Oh, and while I do that, might I suggest that you all take a look at this New Yorker story  by David Gilbert. It's about love. It's about co-incidence. It's about risk.

Poetry Saves Me

Stay with me...wait for it...there's a donkey in the second poem below.

There's a neon sign in one of my favorite thrift stores--run by a Christian mission, I think, that proclaims "Jesus Saves." It's the thing in that store that I most want. But I'm pretty sure it's not for sale. Not to be sacrilegious  or anything--especially toward anyone who fervently believes, but despite the fact that I want that sign, it's poetry that so often saves me. 

Towards the end of my marriage, my husband would sometimes lie in bed reading the Bible or praying the rosary while I read Yeats. I wonder now if he was praying for the courage to tell me he had a new love, or for me to die, or for our love to rekindle, or maybe for God not to send him to hell for wanting a divorce. I don't know, but I was reading Yeats to read Yeats, and I guess, in a way, to save my soul. I frequently paged through the book to this:

863. When You are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,	5
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled	10
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Here's the poem that saves me today.
A poem by Jane Hirshfield from a recent New Yorker:

MY LIFE WAS THE SIZE OF MY LIFE

My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It rode elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depths of lives, too, is different.
There were times my life and I made jokes together.
There were times we made bread.
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off our clothes on our tongues from

That ending, right? I wondered if the New Yorker might have suffered a typo. But now after several reads, I think that that last line captures the typing through tears and typos joy of being alive, of deciding to live here in the moment with woes and dissatisfactions, knowing that my life is the size of my life, and passionately loving it. 

Which is not to say I'm not struggling.

Two Things that Made My Day/Happy Saturday to You

THIS ARTICLE in the New Yorker about the way a nursing home cares for elderly patients with dementia.

This poem by Jack Gilbert:

Older Women

Each farmer on the island conceals
his hive far up on the mountain,
knowing it will otherwise be plundered.
When they die, or can no longer make
the hard climb, the lost combs year
after year grow heavier with honey.
And the sweetness has more and more
acutely the taste of that wilderness.


And because the name of the nursing home mentioned in the New Yorker piece is Beatitudes, I'm going to toss this into your day, too. 

From the King James version of the Bible:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
    For they shall be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
    For they shall inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    For they shall be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
    For they shall obtain mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
    For they shall see God.
⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,
    For they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
    For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And because I've spent the last several months living with a person who is very hard of hearing, there's this:

Crazy Came Knocking and I Didn't Even Reach for the Handle on the Barcalounger

How do you know when when you've left Divorceville for good?

Maybe it's when there's absolutely nothing you miss about your ex anymore. Maybe it's when you read a fabulous short story about the break-up of a marriage and you think to yourself, wow, what an amazing story--I'm going to send it to my ex-husband--and then you stop yourself and say, nah...why would I want to waste an envelope and some cool stamps with pictures of bonsai trees on them to do something stupid and crazy like that.

Joshua Ferris's short story "The Fragments" in the April 29th issue of The New Yorker is a heartbreaking chronology of the disintegration of a marriage. The narrator's wife is a  busy New York attorney and, through a crossed-signals cellphone connection, he learns that she's cheating on him when he hears fragments of her conversation with another man. "That night, Katy came home later than usual. He feigned sleep. With the lights off, she tiptoed into the bedroom, making no effort to wake him. He wanted to give her an opportunity to say something, he wanted her to say something, but she slid in lightly and was soon asleep. What hurt more--her peaceful sleep or the silence that preceded it?"

 As the narrator stumbles through the ensuing days unable to confront his wife, unable to work, unable to call a friend, and unable to confront his distress, he takes in the fragments of other people's conversations. Through these disjointed eavesdroppings on the communications  of others, Ferris weaves a sort of surreal narrative for a narrator who's too flattened to think his own thoughts.

When Katy calls the narrator after staying out an entire night, he hangs up on her and then hauls himself up from the sofa. "He walked through the apartment. He'd done this two nights in a row. He was sick of doing it. Everything that was 'hers' hurt one way. Things that were 'theirs' hurt differently. The last thing he wanted to have to do was sort and divide it all."

In the end, the narrator goes to the window and calls to passersby to come up to the apartment and take whatever they want. Later, as Katy approaches the apartment building, "She recognized the polka-dot roller bag that the first man was pulling behind him. When she reached the landing, he was standing in the open doorway, going through their wedding album with another man."

Yes, that's how it is.

How it was.

While I never gave away The Someone's stuff, I might have if I'd thought of it. But when I packed up and moved out of the house he wanted to keep for himself and his new wife, I did take all the blank CDs and the Sharpies. Crazy, right?

The New Yorker has had a rather prominent role in my dating history. A while back while reading devotedly through the stack that inevitably accumulates, I ran across the issue in the photo above, complete with post-it note.  As I recall, my date agreed that he, too, would be carrying the current issue of the New Yorker--and, while I could be distinguished by my cowboy boots, he would be wearing a black leather jacket.

I was most entertained by the recent piece in the New Yorker about on-line dating. The subtitle, Sex, love and loneliness on the Internet encompasses the concerns I had about dating after my husband left me for another woman. Would I ever fall in love again? If I didn't, what about sex? Even in a troubled marriage sex is often a lot easier to find than when the marriage is history and you're 55. "All I want is dinner and sex--not necessarily in that order," I told my friends when I confessed that I'd been stalking men in cyberspace. As for the  loneliness?--you probably have no have no idea unless you've been there. If dogs were able to acquire language with thorough repetition and practice, mine would have become fluent long before I got back into the dating game.

The Internet and dating seemed to me to be an unseemly combo when I first considered it, but before I knew it I was scrolling through the possibilities on Match, Chemistry, and e-Harmony. You can read about how that went HERE if you didn't read it when it came out back in February. And take a look at the New Yorker article, too. One in six new marriages result from on-line match ups.  It must be the algorithms. Um.

....Don't know much about geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for....

But, to paraphrase Sam Cook it could be a wonderful world for a lot of people if those theories add up.

My Pinteresque Marriage

I just read John Lahr's piece on Harold Pinter and his play,"The Homecoming" in the Dec. 24th & 31st 2007 issue of The New Yorker. Okay, so I'm a little behind. It was the week I started grad school. Five months after Mr. Ex dumped me. And I wasn't reading much due to an inability to concentrate, an inability to comprehend a more than a sentence at a time, an inablity to breathe in and breathe out. Not a good state of being for a student in an MFA program in creative writing. Oh well. That was then.

I loved Harold Pinter. He, along with Edward Albee, were the playwrights of the moment when I began college in 1970. A word about the pre electronic-connectedness time warp of the era; it took time for what was new and hot and interesting to work its way from England to the American Midwest. Unlike the Beatles, Pinter didn't do the Ed Sullivan Show. (Pinter joke: And if he had, they probably would have edited out the pauses.) "The Homecoming's" New York debut occurred in 1967, and John Lahr, who was a schoolteacher then, writes, "I didn't quite know what I'd seen; I knew only that the play's spectacular combination of mystery and rigor had taught me something new about life, about language, about the nature of dramatic storytelling."

I'm sure I couldn't have put it that articulately, but I knew something was up. Pinter's plays frightened me--and they also made me laugh. But like the first director of "The Birthday Party," I wanted someone to explain to me what they were about. "The weasel under the china cabinet," I remember reading in some interview with Pinter back then. That made me laugh too. Lahr writes in the New Yorker that Pinter refused the director any explanation. But Lahr quotes something Pinter did write about his work, "We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility of verifying the past. I don't mean merely twenty years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What was the nature of what took place, what happened?" This is what Pinter's plays ask the reader/viewer to figure out.

And there are those famous pauses Pinter wrote into his scripts. "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," Pinter wrote. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place."

It's not that I didn't hear Mr. Ex's ruthless indifference. I just didn't want to. Anymore than I'd want to admit there was a weasel under my china cabinet.